There Are Three Rules For Writing A Novel

 There are three rules for writing the novel. “Unfortunately, no one knows what they are." --Somerset Maugham (famous old writer guy)

 

Unfortunately.

 

But today I think that there is only one rule for writing a novel. Fortunately, I know what it is.

 

In your face, Somerset.

 

When I start writing, as a discovery writer, it’s like looking at a mountain from a distance and imagining myself climbing that mountain. From a distance, it looks challenging but I can see myself doing it. I’ve done it before. From far off it doesn’t look that hard, actually.

 

So-o-o-o easy to fool yourself. You can do it without even trying.

 

So I actually sit down to write and I get to the base of the mountain. Everything changes. Once I get up close, the landscape becomes something very different. It’s wilderness. Confusing. Confounding.  Hard. The imagined stroll becomes a marathon, a long-distance climb through all kinds of terrain, with bad weather and darkness and somewhat disturbing sounds all around.

 

But also exhilarating—all of it. Breathtaking views, beautiful sunsets, and the wonderous terrain of the great outdoors.

 

You can’t get to the good times if you don’t struggle. It’s true when you’re trying to become good at almost anything. It’s true in writing. So here is my one rule in writing, the only one you need. KEEP WRITING. If you expected some fancy and wise secret, sorry. It’s the simple and hard truth. The people who finish a novel do not let themselves not finish. They keep writing, knowing they’ll have the chance to rewrite.

 

 

One rule. Finish that first draft. Know it will likely suck. Permit yourself to write a not great first draft so you can write a better second draft and maybe a third or even a fourth. I generally write four drafts before I’m done. The first is always the hardest. KEEP WRITING.

 

Good luck.

How Do You Stand Out As A Writer? How Does Your Fiction Stand Out? It's Easier Than You Think.

  

We don't know where we come from and we don't know where we're going to. While we're here we try to have a good time. Generally, with mixed results. We try to help others have a good time unless we're selfish jerks. Generally, with mixed results. Still, it makes for a pretty good story.

 

You can tell this story in a million different ways. It can be long. It can be short. It can be realistic. It can be fantasy or scifi or horror or comedy or whatever you want.

 

Here’s what you need to do: be fascinated by humans and their stories and the human condition. Communicate that fascination to your reader on the pages you write. Keep trying to do this in your particular way. That’s what you have. Especially now with AI and all the many books out there.

 

 Only you can be you. Be you. 

 

You’ll write your best writing if you allow yourself to be yourself when you write. It’s not just your voice. It’s how you see the world. It’s how you live in it and express how you see and live in the world. For me it’s through fiction. If, like me, you like to make up crazy worlds and characters and some pretty incredible, possibly odd, stories. Do that. If it’s realistic or horrific or futuristic, do that. Don’t handcuff yourself. Write what keeps you excited.

 

Write you.

Show Don't Tell /Nonsense

 What's it mean?

What does my sheepdog mean when he puts his head in my lap and stares up at me? He might mean he loves me—really, really, really. He might mean he wants me to pet him. Please. Please. Please. He might mean that he’s feeling a little low and he would like to be told how good he is, preferably for the rest of his waking life. Good dog. Good dog. Good dog. Maybe he means something else I haven’t thought about. He could, for all I know, be telling me that he’s sorry for eating my tennis shoe, which by the way wasn’t nearly as good as he thought it would be. Do I always have to buy Converse?

SHOW DON’T TELL. Yes, but

 Some gestures aren’t clear. They need context to make showing them add to the story. And sometimes they need more than that. Sometimes it’s more important to tell and violate the rule (this one is definitely made to be broken on numerous occasions) and be more specific. Expressing with precision the experience of the character—how they’re affected by what’s happening or how they affect another and the way it fits with the rest of the story—is vital. The reader has to be in on what’s going on in order to share the character’s experience. Show. Tell. It doesn’t matter how you do that. It just matters that you do

Write A Good Story and They Will Come

 Write A Good Story And They Will Come

 

In Austin, Texas, it gets hot in the summer. You can fry an egg on the pavement. You can cook a whole five-course meal. If you stand in one place too long, you start smoking. 

How do you get that heat in writing? Everything has to be working in your writing and that includes the oft maligned element, plot or story. 

Story isn’t easy. People realize it’s hard to use language well. hard to develop character, create an interesting setting, etc.. But story /plot doesn’t really get its due. It lives in the worst fictional neighborhood and isn’t invited to the fictional elements’ parties. Its job is undesirable. Too many writers think of it as an afterthought.

Story is, in fact, seriously undervalued, particularly in MFA programs (at least that was my experience when I got my MFA). A lot of writers who write beautifully fail miserably because they have no story to tell or what faint story they do have to tell isn’t told well. They expect readers to read their work because they write pretty sentences.

I’m here to tell you—pretty sentences aren’t enough ( even though I love good sentences). The truth is most readers will forgive some language issues if you can tell a good story but if you have no story, great language isn’t going to keep them reading. They get bored.

 

Ideally you write well AND tell a good story, but story is as important as writing well. And forget that crap about writing what you know. What you need to do is write about what you can imagine. You don’t have to know your story when you start a first draft but by the time you write THE END you should have a pretty good idea of the major moves in your plot. Discover in your first draft those major moves and what happens in between them isn't so hard to fill in when you write your second.

 

Good luck and Write well.

Write Better, Write Faster, With This One Hack

Write Better, Write Faster, With This One Hack

 

Here’s a hack to help you write faster and better in first draft. This maybe particularly helpful for discovery writers though outliners can use it too. The thing is when we start a chapter we are most vulnerable to doubting our ability to write the chapter. This may lead to procrastination, which can lead to all kinds of bad habits. Scrolling, raiding the fridge with abandon , too much coffee, watching bad streaming series, anything but writing.

 

 

So, to get you started. Don’t just discovery write the chapter. Discovery write a little summary of the chapter before you write the actual chapter.. 

 

Write a paragraph or two or three and maybe some dialogue in the tone of the chapter around the characters you think might be in the chapter and what they’re doing. Write whatever comes into your head. 

 

Revise as you write it. Try to get down what you want to happen in the chapter. Write some dialogue if it comes to you (it often does to me when I’m trying to write this). 

 

YOU CANNOT SPEND LONG ON THIS. 

Ten or fifteen minutes. No more. Do it right after you’ve finished the last chapter.

 

You’re really focusing on what happens in the chapter so this is mostly plot. However, if you’re going to bring in a new character you can add a bit of description of the character. 

 

Write any notes to yourself that might help. For example, “the character is angry in this chapter. Make sure you show the anger build as the chapter goes along.”

 

Remember, this is for your eyes only. You’re writing this to yourself. You and you.

 

You’ll be surprised how this helps you write a better and faster chapter.

WRITING IN THE ZONE—HOW TO GET THERE.

I believe a lot of elements of writing can be taught. An inexperienced writer who finds the right teacher, right for him or her I mean, can learn a lot about things like characterization, plot, setting, novel landscape, pacing, even to a certain extent paragraphing and sentences. Putting it all together in a unique and powerful way, though, is something the writer has to learn to do himself/herself. And so the reason writing programs give a lot of people MFAs who never publish or who publish very little. I got an MFA after teaching myself writing by reading (to me  the single most important thing besides writing itself a writer can do to improve) and writing. Did the MFA help my writing? Yes. Is getting an MFA for everybody? No. Some it won’t help. Some don’t need it. 

When I was learning the martial art Taekwondo I realized the importance of breaking down moves. We’d work on part of a kick and then another part and then another part. It would take a long time to put it all together and be able to do a kick right and then even longer to be able to use the kick in combination with other movements. It would take still longer to be effective sparring with the kick and other movements. Some people never could get there. They knew what they should do but they couldn’t make their bodies do it. Or they couldn’t let their bodies do it. Some people could do it fairly well. Only a few were really good.


Writing is even more difficult. Still, I think most writing’s moves can be analyzed  by isolating each aspect of writing and then improving them. Do this work with intension and find your way and you will write some good work.

Are there some parts of writing that can’t be taught? Sure. The writer’s unique way of looking at the world. The writer’s style, too, can’t really be taught though it can be developed. The writer’s particular feel for language is, I think, like personality. And there’s that one very magical part to writing (like with Taekwondo); everything has to work together when you've drafted and revised your work. The writer has to write with intension without thinking about what they're doing.

That’s the place a writer needs to get. A kind of forgetting. When athletes talk about being in the zone that’s what they're talking about. That's the secret. You have to learn everything you can about writing and then forget it when you get lost in the writing.

How do you get better at writing fiction fast? You identify your strengths and weaknesses.

  

How do you get better at writing fiction fast? You identify your strengths and weaknesses.

 

Let’s say you’ve been writing a little while. You’ve figured some things out. You understand the basics. However, you feel like your writing isn’t what you want it to be. You can’t seem to push it forward. Let me give you some advice that might help.

 

Recently, I was listening to a famous football coach talk about how teams build an identity; it made me think about writing. Coaches obsess over figuring out what the identity of their team is. They want to lean into their strengths and protect their weaknesses. Eventually, they want to find an identity and use it to put themselves in a position to be successful. 

 

Take a simple example; say you’re great at dialogue.

You might be the kind of writer whose characters just start talking in your head. You hear their rhythms, their half-finished sentences, their awkward pauses. You know how two people can say “I’m fine” five different ways and mean five different things. On the page, your dialogue crackles. Beta readers say, “I love listening to your characters talk,” or “I flew through that scene because the conversation felt so real.” Nice things like that.

 

That’s me. I love dialogue. I can do all kinds of things with dialogue.

 

If you recognize that you’re good at dialogue you might:

• Use more dialogue-driven scenes rather than long internal monologues.
• Let conflict unfold through conversation instead of exposition.
• Trim narration and allow characters’ words to reveal tension, backstory, and desire.
• Create suspense through certain conversations.

 

 

Suddenly, your strength isn’t just “something you happen to be good at.” It’s an engine that drives your storytelling. You make intentional choices that help you use dialogue to propel your story forward, develop character, setting, plot. 

 

If you identify you’re good at description or humor or tense situations that create suspense or whatever, you can intentionally put more of what you’re good at in your novel. You can use what you do best to write better stories.

 

Then there’s the other side. What do you do poorly? Maybe you struggle with pacing or description. You keep trying to get better, of course. But understanding what doesn’t come as easily for you (and most likely you don’t enjoy as much) will help you. Also, understanding you struggle with some aspect of writing might help you understand how to improve it. For example: DESCRPITION.

 

You know the room your character walks into. You can see it clearly in your head: the crooked blinds, the ugly carpet, the stack of dishes in the sink. But on the page, you write:

She walked into the kitchen and sat down. You aren’t present in the imaginary room you imagined.

SO, no sensory detail, no sense of place. The scene could be set anywhere, and your reader feels it. They’re not grounded. They feel like they’re floating in white space, listening to voices with no bodies in a room with no walls.

 

So you pay attention to this and you make sure they’re grounded. You do it even if you can’t make it really strong. You don’t try to write long, flowery descriptive passages. Instead, you focus on short, precise, functional details.

• That way, you’re not ignoring a weakness; you’re containing it. You do enough to keep readers grounded without repeatedly shining a spotlight on an area where you’re less confident.

This is the heart of writer identity: you don’t pretend you can do everything equally well. You build around what you do best, and you design strategies to keep your weaknesses from derailing the work.

Learning your identity as a writer might mean realizing:

• You write tight, clear prose but struggle with complex plots.
• You’re great at internal monologue but shy away from action scenes.
• You have a gift for worldbuilding but your characters feel thin.
• You’re strong on structure and theme but your line-level writing is flat.

None of these are fatal flaws. 

Lean into strengths

• Become someone who writes character-driven stories, or twisty plots, or atmospheric settings.
• Choose projects that suit your natural tendencies instead of always fighting against them. Certain genres favor fast-moving narratives with sharp dialogue. Others favor long descriptive scenes.
• Train your weaknesses—strategically
• Study authors who do well what you struggle with and imitate small pieces.
• Ask readers for specific feedback: “Did you feel like you were in the room?” “Did the scene feel slow?” “Could you picture this character?”
• Design around your blind spots
• If pacing is hard, outline more deliberately.
• If endings are hard, sketch them early and write toward them.
• If description is weak, make a checklist for revision: “Can I see the room? Hear anything? Smell anything?”

 

The point isn’t to lock yourself in a box and say, “I am only this kind of writer.” The point is understanding your weaknesses and strengths can be a superpower when you’re writing, especially in revision.

 

When a team can identify strengths and weaknesses they know which situations favor them and which don’t. They’re still imperfect, but they know who they are, and that makes them more equipped to handle various aspects of a game.

 

When you identify your strengths and weaknesses you will become a better writer.