My Best Writing Advice

 My Best Writing Advice

 

Don’t take anyone’s advice about writing as gospel. There is no gospel for writers. What there is some general advice that novice writers, especially, can use to improve their writing. Even if you’ve been writing a long time, you should, and I do, keep looking for advice from other writers. But once you’ve got the basics and the advanced basics down, you’ll be looking for more specific advice because that’s what you need. Advice that helps you, the unique you, that writes the books you truly want to write.

Why? All writers are unique. Writing is one of the most personal, idiosyncratic activities around. What works for one writer might take the life out of another writer’s writing or at least lead them to do things that weaken some aspect of their writing.

Each writer has to find his or her way and take what he or she can from every source and leave the rest. It’s hard but finding your own way requires going the wrong way a lot.

So should you take my advice about writing to not take anyone’s advice about writing?

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.