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.

HOW TO STAY ALIVE AS A WRITER: DO THIS ONE THING

 HOW TO STAY ALIVE AS A WRITER: DO THIS ONE THING

Scheherazade knew the secrets of storytelling that kept her alive for a thousand and one nights. Not bad for a storyteller. For any author wishing to weave tales as captivating as hers you’ve got to do this one thing.( I do not mean you don’t have to do many other things. Interesting characters, good use of language, fascinating setting and so on are needed.) BUT you need to do this one thing or those other important things won’t matter.

So, here was Scheherazade’s story:

King Shahryar, after being betrayed by his first wife, begins marrying a new woman each day and executing her the next morning. Talk about your terrible break-up leading to disfunction. Scheherazade, the vizier's daughter, volunteers to marry the king. On their wedding night, she begins telling him a fascinating story but doesn't finish it, promising to continue the next night.

The king, curious to hear the end of the tale, postpones her execution. Scheherazade continues this pattern for 1,001 nights, telling interconnected stories and always leaving them unfinished at dawn. Her stories are so captivating that the king keeps sparing her life to hear more.

Over time, Scheherazade's wisdom, creativity, and storytelling prowess cause the king to fall in love with her. He eventually abandons his cruel practice and makes her his queen. 

How do you get people to read your work? You make the king HAVE TO know what happens next.

SUSPENSE IS HOW YOU DO IT. SUSPENSE at the sentence level. SUSPENSE at the chapter level. SUSPENSE at the entire story of your novel.  SUSPENSE at the entire story of your series if you’re writing a series.

I’ll go into more detail at a later date but let me just make it simple. YOU SET UP THE READER. YOU MAKE HIM/HER/THEM want questions answered and then you make them wait for those questions to be answered. In-between you give them little progressive steps toward an answer.

For example:

I wake up and my dog is missing.

(The steps in-between are the discovery by me of what has happened to my dog and ultimately who is responsible.)

END: I learn my neighbor three blocks over has my dog. My neighbor refuses to admit it is my dog.

P.S. This is not the end of the story. Or maybe it is. Up to you. Me, I’d want the next part of the story to be me deciding what to do about the situation and then doing it…

It’s that simple. Make the reader have to turn the page.

Three Tips For Discovery Writers. The Third One Is A Secret Weapon.

 

THREE TIPS &DISCOVERY WRITERS’ SECRET WEAPON

Disclaimer: This is just my way of approaching novel writing. Use what helps you and discard the rest. That’s my advice for all writing advice. I am a discovery writer and what I’m giving you are my top tips for my process of discovery. What do I discover as I write? Pretty much everything. I usually just have an idea of who my main character is, and what he or she wants and what might get in the way. I have hardly any details of the character, setting, or plot. My style is my style, but the tone might not even be clear at the beginning.

Three Important Tips

1. Write your first draft quickly. Try to get a draft done in a month or less. Preferably less. Understand that you won’t be writing out everything. If you get on a roll, write the whole scene or scenes of a chapter. If not, just try to explain what happens. So your first draft may only be 20K or 30K However it will be from beginning to end. You will be working on the big three of writing: character, setting and plot. You won’t be working on the important use of language much in this draft. That comes in revision. Be easy on yourself in order to get this rough draft on the page. As I’ve said before, LOW EXPECTATIONS. It is very helpful to have low expectations in this case though, of course, best not to embrace this as a strategy for other aspects of your life.

TIPS TWO AND THREE HAVE TO DO WITH REVISION.

2. Remember that what you have is a draft you wrote in a month. Be prepared to make whatever changes are necessary. You will make mistakes in a discovery draft. You’ll sometimes even realize you have to add more characters or take them out. You have a draft on paper and now you have something to work with, but you have to be realistic; it’s a beginning, not an end.

 

3. TIP number 3 has to do with a specific aspect of number 2 and it’s your secret weapon. Be prepared to reverse engineer on draft 2. In fact, plan for it. Once you get the characters and setting right and improve the language a bit, you’ll need to go through for plot. You discovered your story in your original draft. Most likely, your story will need to be reworked. HERE, SPECIFICALLY, IS HOW YOU DO THAT. You look for places in the manuscript that are exciting and interesting but maybe need to be moved to a later point in the story so that you can build some steps to them for the reader. Let’s say you have a character do something important in the last third of your novel, but it feels abrupt. You look for aspects of the character that make the reader understand her more, give motivation, and you go back through the manuscript and you create opportunities that show the character developing bit by bit so that their act feels authentic. For example, in draft 1, your character turns out to have strong feelings for her next-door-neighbor. This could be a significant sub-plot, but you didn’t realize the feelings until the end of draft 1. Now you go through the whole manuscript and look for ways to build, little by little, a progression that makes the reader see the evolution of the character’s feelings. You know the destination of this aspect of the plot. Show the reader how the character gets there. Do this with all aspects of your novel. Secret weapon.

Hope this helps. Write on, Writers.

Brian

Another Way To Fail At Writing A Novel

Another Way To Fail At Writing A Novel

Another surefire way to fail at writing a novel is to convince yourself that your first draft must be perfect. Agonize over every sentence, every word choice, every comma. Rewrite each paragraph a dozen times before moving on to the next one. If a scene isn’t flawless, delete the whole thing and start over. After all, if your first draft isn’t a masterpiece, what’s the point?

While you’re at it, make sure to compare your fledgling work-in-progress to the polished, published novels of your favorite authors. Clearly, if your rough draft doesn’t measure up to their final versions of novels you love, you must be a talentless hack. Might as well give up now and save yourself the embarrassment of finishing a subpar book.

Oh, and don’t even think about asking for feedback or support. Writing is a solitary endeavor, and if you can’t do it all on your own, you’re obviously not cut out for this. Critique groups? Beta readers? Writing communities? Pshaw! Those are for people who actually stand a chance of succeeding. You’re here to fail, remember?

Lastly, if by some miracle you do manage to complete a first draft, be sure to stuff it in a drawer and never look at it again. Revisions are for the weak. If your book isn’t perfect the first time around, it never will be. Better to let it molder in obscurity than to put in the hard work of polishing it up.

There you have it, folks.

OR you could follow this one simple piece of advice: I RECOMMEND LOW EXPECTATIONS. Know that your first draft will suck, like almost everyone else’s does, and write it anyway. Get it on paper. Then revise and revise until you make it the best you can and let it go and move on to the next project.

How To Fail At Writing A Novel: Write Without Passion

 HOW TO FAIL AT WRITING A NOVEL

WRITE WITHOUT PASSION: a sure way to fail as a novelist

 

If you want to ensure your novel falls flat and fails to captivate readers, one surefire approach is to write without an ounce of passion. Passion is the secret sauce that transforms a mediocre story into a page-turner, but if your goal is to fail spectacularly, it's best to steer clear of it entirely.

 

When you sit down to write, convince yourself that "pretty good" is good enough. Embrace mediocrity. Resist the urge to really try to give your characters passion for what they’re doing. After all, who needs to strive for excellence when you can settle for average? For example, instead of crafting a gripping opening line that hooks readers, opt for something bland like, "It was a day like any other." Or, when describing your protagonist, forget vivid details and unique quirks in favor of generic traits like  “she’s nice" or "she’s smart."

 

As you progress through your story, make a conscious effort to avoid anything that might make your pages come alive. Steer clear of exciting twists, intriguing characters, or profound revelations about relationships or personal growth. 

 

If a character's backstory threatens to add depth and complexity to your narrative, quickly gloss over it or, better yet, omit it entirely. For instance, if your main character has a dark secret from their past, don't explore how it shapes their actions and motivations. Instead, pretend it never happened and keep your story as one-dimensional as possible.

 

Most importantly, if you truly want to fail as a writer, do not care about your characters. Treat them as mere puppets, devoid of emotions, desires, or yearning. When you're indifferent to your characters' fates, it will be impossible for readers to form any attachment to them. Why should they invest in a story when even the author doesn't seem to care.

Above all—whatever genre you write in and whether your style is playful or serious—you’ve got to fail to make a connection with your reader if you want to fail. Don’t try. Don’t consider that every page needs to be compelling. Just write without passion and remain apathetic toward your characters. Create forgettable moments. That’s the way to failure.

 

My last seven novels are part of a series of humorous supernatural horror/urban fantasy novels. The series is titled Strangely Scary Funny and they’re my most popular series by far. These books, by nature,  are lighter than fiction that demands more serious exploration of certain themes. But I still do my best to give my main characters desire for some goal important to the story and events and other characters who get in the way of this desire. I set up important situations, in other words. I make something happen on each page that involves the reader in whatever my characters are struggling with. You do not have to write “deep” “serious” fiction to approach your writing with passion. But, of course, if you do have passion, just be aware that your chances of failure decrease significantly.