HEY FICTION WRITERS, 3 SIMPLE TIPS TO WRITE FASTER

 HEY NOVELISTS, THREE SIMPLE TIPS TO WRITE FASTER

If you’re like me, you fool yourself more than you fool anyone else. You tell yourself, if you realize you’re gaining a few pounds, that the piece of cake you’re having for dessert really isn’t that many calories when you know it’s as loaded as Elon Musk. I’m just saying. Most of us are not completely honest with ourselves. If you’re a writer, you might fool yourself about how many words you write every day.

FIRST SIMPLE TIP: Keep track of how many words you write every day. I write down how many I do each session and total them up at the end of the day. It keeps me honest. If you’re like me, you’ll get competitive with yourself. You’ll write more by trying to make the number higher than the day before.

Set goals for how many words you want to write every day. REALISTIC GOALS. If you don’t make it, don’t be too hard on yourself. Just having a goal will help you get words on paper. That’s the main thing.

Focus. You can write for an hour and give into the wandering mind syndrome that all imaginative people (kind of need this to be a writer) have or the desire to surf the web or any other distraction you can come up with or you can stay focused. Guess which one will get more words on the page? I’m going to guess that you can guess, but I’ll tell you from experience that the difference in word count is probably much larger than you think. If you can focus and get in the flow, you can really get a lot done in an hour. I’ve done 1500-2000 words on occasion by getting to the flow point. Extra tip: write down the amount of time you write, actually write, to be aware of the true time you're spending each day writing.

Follow these three tips and you’ll definitely write faster.

Novelists Don't Have to Outline. Really.

 YOU HAVE TO OUTLINE TO BE A TOP WRITER. THERE IS NO OTHER WAY. ONLY PEOPLE WHO OUTLINE WILL HAVE A CHANCE TO BE A TOP WRITER. I have only one thing to say to this statement, which I have heard several writing gurus make. BULL CRAP. Stephen King (not an out-liner at all) would be surprised to hear he is not a top writer. Quentin Tarantino, ditto. George RR Martin, Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman, and many, many more don’t outline.

If you try outlining and you can’t do it, do not despair or think you’re a failure and will never be a good writer because you can’t. Some writers do outline and they do it well. Some discover their story as they write it. They learn who their characters are and their characters help them find the story that needs to be told. They do what works for them.

Experiment. Find what works for you.

 

More personally:

I had a cousin once who had six toes. It didn’t make her clairvoyant. She and I were backstroking across Lake Okoboji when she said, “You’re going to write a book someday and it will be the craziest damn book anyone has ever read.” She died in a swimming accident later that year. That’s how I know she wasn’t clairvoyant.

Wait. If Yvonne wasn’t clairvoyant, how did she know I’d write a crazy damn book? Because even though the most recent novel (out today), The Librarian and the Monster, is the sixth in the series, I think of all these books (including the ones still to be written) as one book. Each of the novels has a story unique to that novel, but there is another story that stretches over all the novels and the series won’t end until that story ends.

What if my cousin was clairvoyant? If she was, that meant she knew she would die in a swimming accident. It also meant she knew her boyfriend, who she was deeply in love with, was cheating on her with her best friend, a friend she’d known since the first grade and also loved. Which meant she didn’t confront them because she wanted to get every minute of that love she could, so she probably knew they were about to come clean and tell her the truth the very day she drown swimming in Lake Okoboji.

Her story, it seems, is a horror—love story.

And that’s how I write. I discover this and I discover that as I write and then I go back and put in the parts I need to make it the best story I can in the next draft.

Find what works for you. 

Below is a link to my novel should you feel inclined to take a look.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CT4NL78Q/ref=mes-dp?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=dOcHT&content-id=amzn1.sym.07f68587-1ea8-46cf-8c0c-8374d8d96b4a&pf_rd_p=07f68587-1ea8-46cf-8c0c-8374d8d96b4a&pf_rd_r=2ZFWDSYETWAFTX3ZF551&pd_rd_wg=8g4da&pd_rd_r=3d1ee4b6-3b0e-4fec-be30-48395762e3fb

Thanks for reading,

Brian

The Absolute Best Way To Fail At Writing A Novel

 

THE ABSOLUTE BEST WAY TO FAIL AT WRITING A NOVEL

Let me begin with the #1MOST MOST EFFECTIVE WAY YOU CAN USE TO FAIL AT WRITING YOUR NOVEL. There are other important ones. This is #1 though. Others will only hamper you from completing your novel unless there are too many of them, in which case they will sink you faster than a tsunami. It’s like fighting pygmies. Sure, you can probably take on one or two, but you get a dozen of the little buggers attacking you and you’re dead meat. So a lot of bad habits will, I have to say, make it difficult for you to be successful.

However, for now, we’ll focus on the number 1 way to fail at writing a novel. What is it? First, a few examples of someone using this method to fail effectively: Say you are a would-be writer. You’re at a party. You have a job, but it’s not something you’re excited about. What you’re excited about is writing. You confess, more than once, that you’ve always wanted to write a novel. But there’s a problem. Things keep getting in the way. You don’t have time. Not enough hours in a day, weeks in a year, that sort of thing. Some people you say this to are sympathetic. Some are understanding. Maybe one or two give you judgey looks, but that’s just one or two.

At first.

You go on to tell the people at this party that the distractions are too numerous. Your fantasy football teams, your Facebook page, your house cleaning, your trips, your new passion for cooking, your old passion for surfing the net, your Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, subscriptions, your friends, your enemies. Who has time to write?

Not you.

Then there is the more sympathetic case. You work 50 hours a week at a taxing job; you have a family, a spouse, kids, parents. You are tired when you get home from work and just want to veg out in front of the TV. There really is no time. You certainly have good reasons not to write. That’s pretty much all that can be said to someone in this position. It’s really not your fault. You have to really want to write to use the tiny amount of free time you have on writing. So that’s what it comes down to. If you really want to write, then you will need to use that tiny amount of free time to write. If you do, you will make progress. It will be slow, but slow still gets you there, eventually. Nothing gets you nowhere.

The number one way to fail at writing a novel is not to write. Sometimes we overlook the obvious. If you want to fail at writing, don’t write. If you want to give yourself a chance, you know what you have to do.

WRITERS, Knowing When Something Is Wrong Actually Means You're Doing Something Right

 

Knowing When Something Is Wrong Actually Means You’re Doing Something Right

We all want our writing to be great and we all think at one time or another it is. We’re positive it’s destined for the bestseller list or a literary award and a call from movie people wanting to turn it into a blockbuster film after paying us a small fortune for the opportunity.

Alas, if it’s a first draft and if you’re a new writer, you’re suffering from a common writer affliction, “manuscript hallucination”. Rarely does any writer write something really good on the first draft, let alone someone who is new to writing. The new writer suffering from manuscript hallucination often doesn’t know he or she or they are not seeing clearly. That’s because the new writer can’t tell the difference between good and bad writing.

And this is one of the keys. Good writers still write a lot of crap. But they are good writers because they can see the difference between their good writing and their crap writing and they revise in a way that improves the writing. I’m not just talking about prose here, but also characterization, setting, and plot.

If you are a new writer, just being aware of this common writer pitfall will help you move on to the next stage of your development. Every writer who admits having this hallucination and gives themselves a bit of time and several revisions will improve their writing, regardless of where they start. A lot of writing is a skill, which means it can be learned. Sure, talent and luck play into it, but those are mostly out of our control. Work to discover what you do well and what you do poorly and learn the difference and you will be on your way.

Where Do You Get Your Ideas? If you write it they (words) will come...

 What’s the most frequently asked questions of writers by would-be writers? Ready? Here it is. Where do you get your ideas? I’ve been on a lot of writer panels at book festivals and conferences and when writers are talking craft, it’s the one that comes up again and again.

I get it. You sit down to write and nothing comes to mind and you sit and sit and stare out the window and decide the house needs to be cleaned (which can be a plus in terms of housekeeping but not helpful with writing). You can’t get started. You just don’t seem to have anything to write about. You become discouraged.

You’ll hear smart answers from writers about where they get their ideas—like “I go to the idea store” or “I’m a member of the idea of the month club and they send me an idea each month”. That kind of thing. And the reason for these ridiculous answers is, as I’ve said many times, writers have no idea where their ideas come from.

So let’s just get that out there. WE DO NOT KNOW.

So how can we help you who think you have no ideas? One way is to tell you we are all in the same scary boat. At first it might seem impossible it is going to take us anywhere at all. We are going to sink to the bottom of the sea. We are doomed.

Here is my advice. Put marks on a page. The only way to get it moving is to get it moving. Easy for you to say, you say. Right. Easy to say. Hard to do. You have to allow yourself and expect that some of what you write will be pure crap (that you will make less and less crappy as you revise until it is not crap).

I learn what I’m writing by writing. It’s the only way I know how to do it. I might begin with an idea or a character or simply a line of prose. There are many ways to begin. Just get some words on the page and then try to build on those words. Push forward. Write ten or fifteen pages. Keep writing if it seems you might have something that you can keep pushing forward. If you can’t, maybe set it aside and try writing something else. HOWEVER, be aware this is a first draft and so by nature probably, for most of us, pretty bad with a few shining moments.

If you write it, they will come. MORE WORDS and MORE WORDS… Maybe it will be a character or maybe you’ll have an interaction between characters or some cool setting detail or an interesting story idea. Something will click in those pages. Keep writing and pushing forward using whatever is clicking to keep you going.

You figure out what your story is, who your characters are, what the setting is, as you go along.

And then, when it’s time, you revise, and that’s when it all starts to come together. Most often, when would-be writers want to know about ideas, what they really mean is where does the writer get the STORY that will be told? For most writers, the story has to be built brick by brick, whether the writer does this in outline or rough draft.

The only way I know how to write my story is to write my story. Write it and more words will come.

How do you write a lot? Here’s the secret: you write a lot. I know. Insightful. If you spend more time writing, more words find their way to the page. But here’s the tricky part. You probably think you spend more time writing than you do because you find distractions. I know. I do it too. But if you say you write two hours every day but what you really do is write for thirty minutes and then do some research, have a snack, surf some sites because you need to know everything about Easter Island after seeing some pictures on another site, for thirty minutes and then write a little more and have some ideas that drive you back to the internet to search for... well... you’re not sure. Then the phone rings. Then you check your email. 

You tell yourself you wrote over two hours and only got 1000 words done, but really you wrote about 45 minutes. A thousand words in 45 minutes is pretty good. 1000 words for two hours isn’t horrible, but it’s not great. Honestly, if I write for two hours, really write, my word count always makes a significant jump sometime in the second hour when I get the FLOW. When you get the FLOW, you know it. You are lost in the scene. You are living it. Words are jumping from your fingers onto the page so fast your fingers don’t even touch the keyboard. 

So here’s my advice. Write down how much you write WHEN YOU WRITE. If for any reason, good or bad, you STOP, you don’t count that time. Just record the actual time you’re putting words on paper. If nothing else, you’ll realize you probably write faster than you think. Maybe, though, it will help you really focus. An hour of real writing is worth several hours of writing a little here and there. And I’ll say, for me, sprints don’t work. They do get you to focus on writing (that part is good) so if that’s what you need to get there, do what you need to do. But the problem is that it’s hard to get to into the FLOW in fifteen minutes. Then you break it to take a break. So when you come back, you’re starting over. It works too much against reaching the state of FLOW 

Write when you write. Try to work your way into the flow. That’s how you get a lot of words on a page.

Or so I think today.

Brian

Do This If You Struggle When You’re a Discovery Writer (Panser)

 Do This If You Struggle When You’re a Discovery Writer (Panser) 

 

It’s scary writing a first draft. You don’t know where you’re going. How can you keep going? What happens if you can’t come up with anything? What happens if you wonder so far off from where you should go you become lost, too lost to ever recover? What happens if you write yourself into a corner? 

 

Here’s what you do. I’ve read many authors who do various versions of this. You can’t outline the whole novel. You just don’t work that way. But can you outline a scene? Think only of scenes; often scenes are whole chapters, but sometimes they might just be part of a chapter. Doesn’t matter.

 

I can’t outline, but I can outline a scene that builds on a previous scene. What I try to do in the outline is to number the main points of a scene, whether this has to do with action or conversation or reflection. Whatever the main points are. Then I write that scene. I can write it because I’ve already seen it in my mind through the outline. It’s made all the difference. How does the scene begin? How does it end? What are a few points in-between? This will allow for spontaneity and inspiration while at the same time helping you plan in a way that will make you more confident.

This outlining, scene by scene, gives you a roadmap, allowing you to stay on track and not get lost or stalled. And you can always go back and add more detailed notes or expand the outline later when the story is further along and you realize you need more to your paragraph-outline.

So, if you're a panser who wants to bring more structure and planning to your literary efforts, try outlining a scene. You'll still maintain the freedom to discover the story as you write, while having a sense of what’s just ahead.