Guest Blogger: My Sheepdog "On Having An Author For A Companion."

 GUEST BLOGGER: MY SHEEPDOG “On Having an author for a Companion”

 

Brian, the writer, is at it again. Sitting there. Looking at the computer. Staring out the window. Looking at the computer. He doesn’t even see anything when he looks out the window. There are some perfectly good birds out there that certainly need chasing. Not to mention one of those mangy little squirrels hopping around the yard with impudence. He doesn’t even notice them. He doesn’t hear anything either. There’s a German Shepard barking from up the road, a woman yelling at her daughter, a motorcycle backfiring. I would love to bark at these sounds, let them and the world know I’m on duty, but he’d get all upset because he’s BUSY. Right, BUSY. Busy making things up.

Nevertheless, I understand dreams. I have them myself. I dream of the old days. Once my ancestors took care of the sheep and fought  wolves, the kind with sharp teeth and claws. There weren’t many sheep lost when a sheepdog was around. We were made for it. 

I can see that Brian is made for what he does. In the end, doing what you’re made for doing leads to happiness. Not every day. Not every moment. But enough. Certainly this was once true of my ancestors. We gathered the sheep together and watched over even the weakest and in the end we did what we were made to do and it made us happy. If I could write, that’s what I would write about. And the taste of fried chicken and the fat on a steak. Chasing squirrels. 

Still, sometimes I dream of sheep. I dream I’m in a grassy meadow, a full moon above me and bright twinkling stars in a black sky, and somewhere far off a wolf howls. My sheep begin to shiver and make frightened sounds and I rise from where I lay and walk among them and I say, “Everything is all right. It's all right. I will protect you.” And I feel them calm, feel the calm spread just as the fear was spreading seconds before. Is this what it’s like of him, I wonder? He sits at his desk and he makes things up and things come to him from places he can't name and it makes him happy.

Brian here: Writing is fun. Don't forget the joy. Allow yourself the joy.

 

Shameless self-promotion…. Book 11 in the Strangely Scary Funny series comes out on Saturday, Feb 22. It’s called The Librarian and the Goddess. Here’s an amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Librarian-Goddess-Supernatural-Suspense-Strangely-ebook/dp/B0DPJMD7K6/?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=ZZZbH&content-id=amzn1.sym.bc3ba8d1-5076-4ab7-9ba8-a5c6211e002d&pf_rd_p=bc3ba8d1-5076-4ab7-9ba8-a5c6211e002d&pf_rd_r=133-3852978-2801016&pd_rd_wg=nAV3L&pd_rd_r=1db1fcba-e0c0-4521-933a-267f38e8d436&ref_=aufs_ap_sc_dsk

 

Also, special deal: I have a new box-set of the first four novels in the series out. To promote I’m making it 0.99 cents for three days starting Feb. 28. https://www.amazon.com/Librarian-Supernatural-Horror-Comedy-Strangely-ebook/dp/B0DVRT6LKK?ref_=ast_author_dp_rw&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.7EAQLCrPFCK_H6Mx9VeE7zR9_xFUH68u9GBiWF6aUHavuLiQxT7pUauTA3nywsCNkPr54lOtzpP1nvCnBAxYVNKKi1LDfyMrEaMLFy-0Rgin5zn391SLPOStepk2uavIv_y4DxGapHSsxBwQKwODnWHrZpaU_UROzgHX4Ttalnw9_dfTYCbCC7uFivwKdZ7BfF1lqlVvWXPGbZKdBH25V_m0VgOqbfwNtQfXQ0HW4TY.0TKKRGH9LyJMHNQ7doQzwHAqBQ6SMTutZAlQFG5E3jA&dib_tag=AUTHOR

 

The box-set is on audible, too, but, alas, not for 0.99.

Write Faster and Better Doing This One Thing

 Writing in the Zone

One of THE most important things that will make your writing successful is learning to focus on writing in such a way that you are WRITING IN THE ZONE. When you are writing in the zone you aren't thinking about writing you're just writing. When you're doing this, you're making all the right moves intuitively. You're focused. You're getting down a lot of words because you're in the zone, in the flow, and they are the right words. They're building your story, they're developing your characters, your setting, your voice, your voices. DO this one thing and your writing will improve exponentially. 

FOCUS. 

When you write only write. No phone. No looking things up. No talking. No. No. No. Only one yes--write.  You do what you have to do to get in the state. (I get up at about the same time in the early morning, get my OJ and a cup of coffee, and sit down in the same place and take a few deep breaths and I'm off and running). Get in the state and write. Do not let anything interrupt you. Go with the flow. You can't be stopped.  

You'll be surprised at how much more you will get done and how much better you'll write with a consistent focus in your writing sessions. Good luck. 

Brian

Writers, Do Not Give Up

 Do Not Give Up

 

There’s a point in a first draft when everything feels wrong to me. The landscape looks wrong; nothing is where it’s supposed to be. The words I’ve written are not right and so I can’t see the words I want to write to move ahead. Everything was clear just a few days ago. Now it’s all a mess. One big mess.

It would be easy to quit. It would be easy to say it’s all wrong. I could delete. I could start over with a clean page. So full of possibilities, so neat. Or I could just go back to page one and rewrite even though I’m on page sixty. I could do that.

 

Don’t.

 

A novel, like life, is messy. A first draft is really messy. You have to push on. Do not abandon ship. Don’t. Get a draft down. It’s essential.

 

Remember, low expectations for your first draft. It’s the beginning, not the end. You’ll revise and edit. Allow yourself to write some crappy work in order to get to the good stuff.

E.L. Doctorow described writing a novel as being like traveling across the country on a dark highway. The car's headlights allow you to see a few feet ahead. That’s all you need to drive through the dark. Faith is a big part of writing a novel. (Also, it’s kind of a big part of driving a car in the dark but don’t think about that, especially when you’re driving).

 

Keep the faith.

 

When Your Characters Take The Wheel, LET THEM

  

 

Most writers feel this, I think. I certainly have. I want to feel it. I strive to feel it. I’m talking about when your characters seem to take over and make things happen. Maybe it is just finding the place, the altered state, which allows you to access that part of the brain that makes intuitive leaps. I try to get to this place every time I write. 

 

Your characters and their story become real in that moment.

Sometimes your characters take you places you hadn’t thought of or intended to go and these places are the right places for your story. Some of the truest writing comes from these moments because it’s coming from inside the world of the characters and story. You aren’t forcing it. You aren’t designing it. The characters seem to be real and you’re just trying to keep up and write down what happens to them and how they think and feel.

Of course sometimes you have to force your story. Sometimes you have to work things out and plan a scene and re-imagine something that’s happened that seems wrong. You have to strategically plan a plot. 

 

But what is better is you are in that altered state (I get to this by writing every day at the same time, rereading the last chapter I wrote the day before, writing in the same place, really trying to focus on writing and ignoring all the distractions I try to create for myself to pull me away from writing). It’s often when you’re writing WITHOUT THINKING that the characters seem to take over and you write some of your best scenes. 

 

Happy Writing…

BE BOLD : WRITE THAT FIRST DRAFT WITH GUSTO

 Be Bold

I’m a discovery writer. I’m working on a new draft now, and I’m struggling some days. When you first start a new draft, it’s all possibility. It’s great because you can go anywhere. But after thirty pages it’s not so great. Why? Because you can go anywhere.

All the possibilities, all the choices—that’s what a first draft is full of. It seems like every few pages you come to some new crossroads. Decision time. If you think about it too much, you’ll freeze at those places. Going down one road always means you won’t be going down another. What interesting things might you have come to if you had gone down the other? Sounds a little like life, doesn’t it? I mean even if you Boldy go where no one or not many have gone before, even if you choose that less-travelled road, you still can’t help thinking, what if I had gone the other way?

But writing a novel is all about choices and many of those choices, in a first draft, are intuitive. If you’re a discovery writer like me  I’d argue you have to be bold. It’s the only way you can get through a first draft. JUST KEEP WRITING. Use your process. Don’t worry too much.

 

However, there is a way writing differs from life. You can revise. You don’t get that in real life. If there’s a big problem in your writing, you can rework it For example, let’s say your plot takes a wrong turn. Let’s say you find out on page 199 that, in fact, the butler really did do it. You can reverse engineer your work so that it looks like the butler did it all along. You go back and change what you need to change so it will lead to the butler doing it.

So that makes the fact that you need to be bold with your choices even more important. You need to push on in a first draft. You need to find connections in your story. You need to find moments that illuminate character or plot or setting. 

 

Go at a first draft like you’re jumping off a cliff and believe in the seemingly impossible—you will sew your parachute on the way down.

P.S. If you're interested in reading my work or are already reading my series STRANGELY SCARY FUNNY book 10 in that series, a humorous supernatural suspense comedy horror, comes out on Saturday Dec 14. Almost Armageddon in book 10—a week away. Many strange and scary and funny things are happening.

Thanks for reading. Write on. 

Brian

I LOVE TO WRITE FICTION

I'm thinking about football because I'm a fan.

Football players wreck their bodies and put them through incredible punishment for what? They usually begin playing as children and those with talent are encouraged early. By middle—school they’re playing on a team. Most of them, if they don’t get hurt, play in high school. But only a few will get scholarships to play in college and only a very few will get scholarships at major universities. Out of those, a tiny fraction will make it to the pros.

The chances, I’m told, of playing pro football are one in a million. And those few who make it will play for an average of three years. Almost all players will be finished as a player by the time they’re in their early thirties. (Thank the gods, authors, because we can write until we take our final breaths).

So what about this? Why do they do it? For some there’s the possibility of the escape from poverty, the lure of girls, the chance for fame and riches. Everyone has a mix of motives for pursuing something that takes singular dedication and sacrifice. But I think most of them do it for one main reason, and it’s the same reason writers write and actors act and painters paint. Love. How many people love what they do? A big part of who we are is what we do, and yet most people don’t love what they do. It’s worth a lot of struggle and heartache and pain, physical or otherwise, to find the thing you love to do and do it

I make a pretty good living off writing fiction, thanks the success of my series Strangely Scary Funny. Nine books and counting. Soon to be ten. But I've written a lot of things that made me no money or very little money. I kept writing. Because, to paraphrase, Ted Lasso's Dani Rojas, WRTING IS LIFE and also WRITING IS DEATH and also WRITING IS JUST WRITING but mostly WRITING IS LIFE.

Or so I think today.

You Can't Trust Real Life

It's Called Fiction For A Reason

“But that really happened,” the writer says. “That’s exactly the way it really happened.”

He’s saying this in response to criticism from his critique group that the scene doesn’t seem real.

“It is real,” he says as if he’s throwing down a royal flush. “That scene is as real as it gets.”

Au contraire. The scene maybe true in the sense it happened, but story requires more and less that the literal truth because, again, it's fiction, a creation.

 

I think this is one of the big mistakes of beginning writers. Often times faithfully rendering something that really happened in life will lead the writer down the wrong path. Either he’ll put in the wrong details or too many details or the whole scene will not fit with the rest of the novel. 

You can’t trust real life when it comes to fiction. (Of course you can't trust real life when it comes to real life sometimes but that's for another blog).

 

Of course you use your life and things that have happened to you and things you’ve felt in your fiction (we need to do this), but you always have to remember that you’re writing a story. You're controlling what happens, how much to tell and show about what happens, and you're trying to do it in an interesting way.  You have to carefully pick and choose details that serve the character and story. You can’t be true to real life and do that. You have to be true to your story. 

 

Disclaimer:  the opinions of this author do not reflect the opinions of this author in either the future or the past. 

 

Thank you for reading.