General

Whenever you go looking for writing advice, you’ll hear the phrase butt in chair a lot. Basically it’s an admonition/reminder that you can’t write a novel or a story if you don’t, you know, write. So you have to actually sit down with your butt in a chair and type or scribble, or nothing gets done.

This is true, and it’s decent advice as far as things go. But there’s another aspect or dimension to any writing advice. You have to ask yourself, what does “writing” look like?

It Looks Like a Lot of Work, is What It Looks Like

Because writing isn’t just tapping at a keyboard.

Now, I’ve literally written every single day of my life since I was about twelve years old. That’s a lot of days, and a lot of writing (though I should note that many, many writers started writing as kids and have written every day since, so this doesn’t make me special), and most of that involved typing or writing longhand to some degree. But there are other things that may not look like writing but which definitely are writing. For example:

• Thinking. Thinking is writing, so sitting in a comfortable chair staring into space counts. As long as you’re actually thinking and not just daydreaming about shaving your cats and dressing them in tiny suits.
• Reading. Everyone tells you to read widely in order to become a better writer, so reading counts. So does watching and listening, as long as you take some time at some point to process the things you consume and consider what they can teach you.
• Talking. Talking about your work—or someone else’s work—is also writing. The concepts you are exposed to in conversation about the craft or business of writing are just as vital as anything else.
• Revision. This might seem obvious, but some writers consider revision to be treading water—you’re not creating anything new, so it’s just busywork. But revision is often just as creative as a first draft.
• Drinking. Just kidding. Or am I? Deranging your thoughts and experiencing a chemically-altered perspective can be part of the creative process. Or so I tell myself at 3AM when one more shot of whiskey seems like a terrible, awesome idea.

Writing int his context is sort of like expenses that you claim on your taxes: Just about anything can count. If it somehow, in some way, worms its way into your creative process at some point it counts as writing.

So “butt in chair” and similar advice doesn’t have to be taken literally. As long as you’re working on your writing in some sense, you’re doing the work, even if you didn’t type anything.

Now I have to go pitch a book about why Day Drinking is a great way to write a novel.

I’m currently reading a novel that’s pretty well done in many ways, but the author has one terrible habit that really annoys the crap out of me: By the Way Writing.

BTW Writing is when you shoehorn facts into the prose when information suddenly becomes necessary for the reader to know. It’s a form of exposition that gives exposition a bad name. Here’s a made-up example:

Jim turned the corner and stopped dead, uncertain if he should keep going or turn back. Up ahead was his old friend Tanner, who would almost certainly demand money, probably framed as a mysterious debt suddenly remembered and now long over due (Jim hated to loan money because of his deadbeat father, who had steadily drained the family bank accounts with constant small loans begged from his mother).

The BTW part is that last sentence; BTW Writing almost always occurs at the end of a paragraph or longer section within one, and often though not always within parentheses. It’s a clunker of an expo drop, and I call it “By the Way” due to the awkward way it’s just shoved in there, because the writer suddenly remembered that they hadn’t communicated that information before. Realizing it was important for context or character development, they just toss it in. It’s literally like saying “By the way, this is why he’s like that.”

Ban the BTW

This is shitty writing for many reasons, but it’s fairly common to see it creep into your first drafts because often when you’re working on a story you do suddenly realize you either forgot to include a detail earlier, or you suddenly realize there’s a detail to include in the first place. I do a lot of first-draft BTW writing myself. It’s often easier to just drop a loaded parens into your paragraph than it is to stop dead and search back to find the right place to bring it up earlier.

The key though is to go back and fix that. Find your BTW bombs and defuse them, sprinkling that information earlier in the draft in a more elegant way.

Like a lot of bad writing habits, this one can be subtle and tough to spot. Sometimes reading your work out loud can help, because BTW lines tend to stop the flow like a truck crashing into a building, and you can feel that when you read it out loud, because you literally have to stop and shift mental gears when you hit one.

By the way, there should be a joke here at the end, but I can’t think of one.

The first time I wrote a story, I was probably eight or nine years old. It was a school assignment that, bizarrely, involved bookbinding; our assignment was to write a story, lay out signatures, create hardback covers, and bind it all into a book by hand. I have no idea why someone thought this was a useful skill for kids in Jersey City, New Jersey to have—but it was fun. I wrote a story about how the planet Earth was created by aliens who had this huge pill, like a Tylenol rapid-release capsule, they launched into space.

What I remember from my early days of writing was the sense of limitless possibility. Every book I read offered something I could steal and try out for myself. Every idea I had seemed incredibly new and original (spoiler: they weren’t, but they felt that way). Every time I sat down to work on an idea, I had this rush of exploratory joy—I was venturing into fresh snow every single time, and it was mine to mark up and shape.

These days? Much of that thrill is gone. And that’s something all creators have to deal with.

Three Chords and a Beat

I wasn’t really aware of this curse of experience until I began learning how to play guitar a few years back. I’d always wanted to play, and finally learning how was a lot of fun—and in those early days when every new chord or bit of music theory knowledge was a revelation, I felt like every song I put together was a major creative breakthrough. Looking back, those songs are terrible—but at the time I had that sense of excitement that I once had with writing. It made me realize how I’d lost some of that in recent years with my writing work.

Don’t get me wrong—I still feel vital and creative. I still get excited about writing something new and I still push myself to experiment and try new techniques. But the excitement is tempered by the knowledge that what I produce probably isn’t going to be a world-shattering new idea. I’ve been at this too long. I know my own limitations too well, and I am much more familiar with the body of work produced over the centuries, so I can no longer fool myself that I’m doing anything seismically new.

That’s the curse of experience: The knowledge that you’re not as smart as you once thought you were.

Still, we beat on. Knowing your limitations doesn’t mean you don’t still have a fire in the belly for creating something awesome. It just means you don’t fool yourself quite so much. There’s a sadness in that, but also power. It’s like my knowledge of the capabilities of my liver: Limiting, sure, but also kind of comforting to know where your line is.

There’s a persistent myth that your first effort on a manuscript will be terrible. That a good book or story requires dozens of revision cycles, endless routing through beta readers, and wordsmithing until it’s almost unrecognizable when compared to the first draft.

This is what scientists call horseshit.

Hole in One

Some stories require that kind of massive effort, it’s true. And some writers like to work like that, which is fine. But neither of those facts means that your story isn’t actually kind of great in its initial draft form. There’s a sort of understandable instinct to distrust things that seem too easy, and when you bang out 80,000 words in 3 months and actually love everything you did, it’s natural enough to feel like you must be missing something.

But, hey, it happens, so why not to you? In other words, don’t start tearing your first draft apart and jump into a heavy revision just because. Consider the possibility that your first draft is actually great, and maybe all you need is a polish?

Of course, I say this as a writer who tends to be very satisfied with my first drafts, or, you know, completely unsatisfied. In other words, I either like my first draft enough to polish it and do something with it, or I despise it and want to bury it in the back yard and never admit it existed. For me, personally, there’s nothing in-between.

But assuming your first draft is trash just … well, just because all first drafts must be trash? That’s crazy. In fact, I’d encourage the opposite: Assume your first draft is fire, and then try to find reasons why it isn’t. Because I firmly believe most first drafts are actually pretty good, and most revision is kind of unnecessary in the sense that it doesn’t actually improve things, just re-arranges them.

Of course, what do I know. I’m sitting here wearing a cardboard box as pants as I write this.

Let us pause for a moment and consider the joy and genius of the Unreliable Narrator, a literary trick that offers a way to forgive a multitude of sins. Plot makes no sense? Character inconsistent? He’s unreliable, natch!

I kid, of course (mostly). The Unreliable Narrator is a super weapon when writing a story, because when handled well it offers the chance to truly surprise and shock your readers. Handling it well isn’t always easy, though, especially when you’ve got a first-person narrator. Making a first-person POV unreliable is so challenging some newbie writers wonder out loud if it’s even possible, and you’re forced to direct their attention to The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Fight Club with a sad shake of the head.

Writing an unreliable first-person narrator is challenging, but it’s not that hard. You just have to remember George Costanza’s advice to Jerry on the subject of lying: It’s not a lie if you believe it’s true.

This is Fine

The key to an unreliable narrator is that they have to be simultaneously aware of their own chicanery and yet unaware of it. If you think about it, we’ve all elided a few white lies or poor decisions from our personal recollections, we’ve all convinced ourselves that something was fine when it clearly wasn’t. Whether it was a relative benign self-deception like convincing yourself a certain job was okay even when it was stressing you out or something meatier like telling yourself that a romance was fine even though you were miserable, we’ve all lied to ourselves. On some level we know we’re lying, but it’s not always a conscious level.

That’s how an unreliable narrator works. They keep all their self-knowledge buried so they can believe their own lies. And convincing themselves that what they’re thinking—essentially, what they’re saying to the reader—is the key. Your narrator has to believe what they’re thinking. And you know exactly how to do that, because you’ve done it yourself. Don’t deny it. Denying the obvious is a dick move.

Of course, before figuring out how to make an unreliable narrator work, ask yourself if your story is well served by having one in the first place. Just because you can do something cool doesn’t mean it will work, and making your narrator an unreliable jerk only makes sense if it serves your story.

Plot twist: I’ve never seen an episode of Seinfeld.

When you’re a creative person it’s easy to become embittered and combative towards critics, amateur and professional alike. While it’s never a good idea to confront people in public and demand satisfaction over a bad review, it’s also very difficult to not occasionally have the urge to do just that. You pour your heart and soul and skill into a story and then someone dismisses it with a one-star review that doesn’t even have any words, and you want to go burn down someone’s house. Preferably the critic’s, but any house, really, will do.

On the one hand, criticism is a necessity. And learning to deal with negative opinions and assessments of your work is a necessary skill for any writer. On the other hand, every writer should also be a critic, because that’s a big part of honing your skills.

Everything Sucks

Writers are always advised to read widely and deeply in order to become better writers. You can absorb a lot of techniques, ideas, and inspiration from reading other people’s books or watching TV shows, films, and plays. And a lot of that happens without any overt effort on your part—you read a great book, you walk away with a subconsciously stored set of new ideas.

Even better, though, is to understand why something worked in a story you didn’t write. Why can this writer get away with so many flashbacks? How come this movie’s use of a voice over worked so well? Why did this book start off so exciting and then get progressively more boring as you read? Why did that character’s dialog make you laugh even when it wasn’t supposed to?

Instead of walking away from other work with a vague sense of whether it was good or not, thinking about it consciously and trying to trace the why is where you’ll be able to fully control the techniques you acquire as you grow as a writer. That means becoming a critic, and thinking critically both while you’re reading/watching and after.

Whether you want to start writing up your critical assessments and making enemies is entirely up to you.

One of the first and most useful pieces of advice writers receive is “read widely.” This is great advice for many obvious reasons, of course, and likely the most important advice you’ll put into practice. You simply can’t overestimate how much you’ll learn about writing simply by absorbing other people’s work—not to mention the inspirations you’ll get and, put simply, the ideas you’ll be able to steal.

For a lot of folks, though, reading widely translates too narrowly, and they wind up simply reading every single new book that comes out in their lane. In other words, SFF writers read all the new SFF, romance writers read all the new romance. Reading widely should include books outside your genre and comfort zone—but it should also include older books beyond the staples.

Evergreen Lessons

The power of The New is immense. Anything older than a few decades—outside of cultural touchstones like Star Wars or Lord of the Rings—is often considered a little corny and dull by current standards. And in some ways this is true: Watch an old movie from the 1940s and it feels all wrong. The pacing is weird, the dialog sounds stilted, the sets and costumes aren’t simply old-fashioned, they’re almost bizarre to the modern sensibility. It’s easy to decide that old stuff is so alien to the modern generation it’s useless; after you don’t want to learn how to write to an audience long dead.

It’s a little different in novels, though. Sure, the language and conventions are often old-fashioned, and techniques that were amazingly new in the 19^th century are now simply fundamentals. But you can learn a lot from reading old novels. If nothing else, you can learn what’s been constant. And that’s powerful—what hasn’t changed? What is so fundamental to the form that it’s essentially unchanged since the first novels were published? What about Don Quixote still feels fresh and modern to you, and why do you think that is?

If nothing else, you’ll get a wider view of why modern novels employ the techniques and approaches that they do. You might just pick up a few master-level tricks, since you’ll be reading books that have withstood the test of time, unlike, you know, 90% of all the books out on the shelves right now.

Bottom line: You can learn from any book. But the narrower your lane is, the less effective your reading will be in terms of improving and strengthening your own work. Plus, it’s kind of fascinating to discover how similar olden times often were to our own. Sure, they didn’t have Netflix, but you might be interested to know that alcohol has always been a thing. I sure was. It made me feel like I was part of something larger than myself.