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.

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