Writing

Like a lot of people who grow up to make their living by writing words, I began writing as a kid; I wrote my first story when I was probably eight years old or so, prompted by a classroom assignment. When I started reading books (The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia, most notably) that sealed the deal — I wanted to write stories, and that was all I wanted to do.

Yes, I was an extremely cool kid. Who needs money, athletic ability, or dashing good looks when you can write a story?

Anyways, as a kid I wrote via instinct, blatant plagiarism, and wild abandon. I never worried about whether my work was original, or whether it followed some set of rules about fiction. I just made shit up and had fun doing it. And to a large extent I’ve continued that tradition as an adult. Sure, I am more conscious of what’s happening in popular writing right now, and I avoid the level of outright idea theft I once engaged in, but I’ve never understood why so many aspiring writers pause to ask permission about their ideas.

Mother May I

You see a lot of this on writer’s forums and in-person at conferences and such, questions that begin with “Can I …” and end with some writing technique or decision. Some common ones are “Can I use real locations as settings?” or “Can I use different POVs in one story?” or “Can I have a lot of characters in a relative short story?” Sometimes, of course, the question is formatted differently; asking “How many characters can I have in a 10,000 word story?” is pretty much the same question.

The answer to all these questions, of course, is sure! If you can pull it off.

The frightening thing about writing is that it’s wholly creative. You start with nothing and you make a story out of thin air, characters, setting, conflict, plot — all out of thin air. That’s also the great thing about it, but it can be intimidating; rules give us structure, they put bumpers on the sides so you can’t jump the lane and crash.

Don’t ask permission. Go ahead and crash. If you try to write a story and fail, so what? You start over. You try to figure out why it didn’t work. You hone and revise and tinker. Asking other writers whether or not you’re allowed to do something will just get you a wide range of answers, because writers each have their own limitations, their own private rules with no guarantees that they will map well to your own inclinations. Trust me; just by going ahead and writing whatever terrible trash you’ve got in mind, you’ll figure out what works and what doesn’t, which is way more important than what’s allowed.

Except when it comes to pantslessness. Trust me when I say asking whether you’re allowed to take off your pants is not only polite, it’s often quite advisable.

Has this ever happened to you:

You’re writing a novel, and things are going well. You’re halfway, or two-thirds, or one-fifth of the way through and you like everything you’ve done so far.

And then you hit a wall.

You end a chapter, and you have no idea where the story goes next. Everything is going according to plan, but your next steps suddenly don’t seem right. You’re still excited about the premise and the characters and all the rest, but you’re not excited about what comes next — or even sure what that should be. So you pause. You back away from the keyboard and you leave the story in suspended animation, hanging fire in-between the bits you thought were pretty great and the bits you haven’t written yet.

And then you wait.

The Hardest Part

When you’re plantsing a novel and inspiration runs dry, the best thing to do is just walk away. Leave off, go do something else, and treat finishing that story similarly to the way Douglas Adams had Arthur Dent learn to fly by throwing himself at the ground and missing: Don’t try to finish it.

This can be difficult, especially if you’re like me and can’t stand unfinished business. I have a mania for completing projects, and leaving a novel half finished for days or weeks or months is difficult. But necessary, because the worst thing you can ever do with a story is force it. If you aren’t inspired by the next plot point, hang back and wait until it comes. Otherwise you’re just grinding.

Of course, this presupposes that you’ve got the space to hang back. If you’re under contract or writing this book to literally pay the rent, you might have to grind, and the story will probably be fine, just not as great as it could have been.

Of course, when you’re old and busted like me, this also means you come across a 40,000 word half-novel you stopped writing 5 years ago and then completely forgot about, so you write a 350-word ending and call it a novella and go to bed.

I’ve always been a champion procrastinator. It’s a shame cycle: I put off doing things, even things I ostensibly enjoy, until I suddenly wake up in the middle of the night with a vision of my own impending mortality, and then you’ll find me sweating freely at 3AM as I work doggedly at four or five projects simultaneously.

Is almost everything I do driven by fear of death? You betcha. Except whiskey. I drink that for the love.

Of course, a lot of these unfinished projects are novels and short stories and weird metafictional thingies that I started working on in 1989 and now exist as 60,000 separate files in various word processor file formats.

What’s crazy about this is that I love writing. It’s the one thing I will always choose to do, one of the few things I’m just as enthused about, if not more so, than when I was a kid. And yet the main thing I procrastinate about is writing.

Who Will Finish All These Novels?

One reason for this that most writers will understand is simple: Creating a story can be damned intimidating. You look back at what you wrote last year and the process is mysterious, the inspirations opaque, the tricky bits impenetrable. How many of you have ever re-read something you wrote a few years ago and discovered you don’t recognize it, it’s like it was written by a stranger. That’s happened to me, and it can make starting something new kind of scary. After all, you can’t repeat a trick you didn’t understand in the first place.

What makes it harder, often, is the sense of heavy lifting that some aspects of a story can inspire. There are always bits of a story you’re excited to write, and bits you’re not so excited to write but need to be in there anyway. Often a story will begin with a burst of enthusiasm and then you run into a less-exciting bit and your brain issues a stop work order.

In those moments, a good way to deal with it is to skip those parts.

Skip It

There’s a tendency to think you have to follow rules when you write–but your process is your process.

Ian Fleming, who wrote the James Bond novels, had a remarkable process: He would write the story, the entire plot, without bothering with much detail. The end result was a skeleton of a book, but it had all the plot twists, dialogue, and characters. Then he would go back and revise, adding in the sumptuous details of Bond’s globe-trotting life.

In other words, Fleming skipped stuff he either wasn’t interested in or found challenging at that stage of the project. Then he went back and did the same.

You can skip anything. Skip the boring parts, the exposition and necessary mundane sequences that are required but unexciting. Skip the explanations and just keep moving; you can go back and explain (or figure out) what it all means in revision. Skip the details like Ian Fleming. Skip the dialogue! Why not. Any time you pause and think you’d rather not write this next bit … don’t. Put in a marker, move on to something you do want to write, and enjoy yourself.

Of course, you can go too far with this. Decades ago I skipped wearing pants, and look where I am today.

No one ever said writing novels was easy. Except me, several times, but I almost certainly drinking when I said that and not thinking clearly.

Let me start over: Writing novels isn’t easy, and sometimes the hardest part is starting. If you’ve got several dozen files on your hard drive named some variation of GENIUS_NOVEL_D1, GENIUS_NOVEL_D1_2, GENIUS_NOVEL_D1_3 and so on, you know of which I speak.

For me, approaching novels in the same way each time is sometimes part of the problem. After all, if something works, why change it? If you’ve written several novels before simply by starting at the beginning, or by outlining for weeks before writing a word, or, I don’t know, sacrificing a chicken and praying to dank gods, then you could make worse decisions than to try that successful approach again.

But if it stops working, sometimes it helps to try something different in terms of approach. After all, what have you got to lose? In this scenario you’re already failing to write that novel.

Five Easy Chapters

Sometimes the secret to writing a novel is getting past the vast void of blankness that faces you when you start. If you’ve tried a few times to get Chapter One going and have nothing but discarded drafts to show for it, try one of these approaches.

In Media Res: Skip the boring parts and jump right to the part of the story you’re most excited to write. Sometimes what slows you down is doing all the ‘eat your vegetables’ writing right away. Dive into dessert first. You can always go back and eat that broccoli later.

The Lecture Approach: Exposition can be deadly, but can also be cut out later—if you’re having trouble getting started, start explaining the universe, characters, et al., as a way of jump-starting the story. Don’t worry about style or narrative, just tell it like you’re explaining it to an insurance adjuster.

The Alternative POV: Just because you have a POV main character doesn’t mean they have to be the first Voice your reader encounters. Maybe you’re having trouble hooking into your main character’s tone or style. Work on someone else for a bit, see what happens.

The Unrelated Incident: A great way to make a splash and write a fun, energetic Chapter 1 is to ignore your plot entirely and write a self-contained story that sets the table and introduces everything and everybody—because it’s unrelated, it allows total freedom. It can also be deleted later if it helps you get going–or be adapted into something else.

The James Bond Approach: James Bond movies start with an exciting action sequence that often has nothing to do with the main story. Why not do the same? Chapter 1 shouldn’t be a dull simmer of introductory information, it should be a story unto itself. Introduce your characters and universe by creating an awesome mini-adventure that stands alone as an exciting story even if it also ties into the greater plot later.

There’s no guarantee any of these approaches will cure your novel, of course, but there’s plenty more where these came from. Get creative! That’s what you do! Creativity isn’t just about story and characters. You can be creative in your process as well. Just like I get creative when all I’ve got left in the bar is vermouth, Blue Curacao, and Frangelico.

The Writing Life is often presented in pretty rosy terms: You get to be creative and curious! You get to work in your pajamas¹! You get to transform your functional alcoholism into a marketing brand²!

But as anyone who has actually tried to make a go of this writing thing as a profession knows, there are downsides. So, so many downsides. There are bad reviews and unsatisfying freelance projects³, writer’s block and failed novels, low sales and bad experiences with publishers, the discovery that the world at large is much less interested in reading books than you assumed and the discovery that this is because most of the world is actually Slender Men in human disguise⁴.

Every writer has a few bad days in their career. It’s easy to love some aspects of writing. It’s easy to love the creative rush when you have a great idea or put THE END on a manuscript you know is strong. It’s easy to love great reviews, or invitations to speak at events.

The trick is to love the downsides as much as the easy-to-love stuff, because it’s all writing⁵.

Embrace the Suck

There’s a positive core at the center of every terrible thing about writing:

Negative feedback. No one likes hearing all the many ways their writing sucks. We’ve all had that moment of finishing a story that is very dear to us, or a freelance assignment we’re incredibly proud of, only to have a Beta Reader or critic tear it to pieces or the client send it back with reams of edit notes. It’s not fun, but love the way criticism like that improves your work. Because nine times out of ten, when you assess the work in light of the critique, you realize they have a point, and the story or piece gets better⁶.

Failed Deals. One of the most heartbreaking things is getting close with a deal to publish or sell your work and watching it fall apart. It never fails to be demoralizing; there’s just nothing worse than imagining yourself richer and better-known than you already are and then having to re-calibrate back down to current levels. But every time this happens I walk away a little smarter about the business side of publishing. Which doesn’t replace the money or fame, but at least makes me feel a little better⁷.

Failed Novels. I’ve had plenty of story ideas that start off buzzing with energy and then slowly turn into overcooked potatoes⁸. And it’s painful every time, even when I’m able to salvage a novella or short story from the mess. But at the same time, I always have a long list of ideas I haven’t had a chance to write yet, so a filed novel offers me an opportunity to write the next thing, which just might be amazing. Or more potatoes.

Downsides are everywhere, and sometimes you string together a bunch of downsides in a row and it’s depressing. But learning to see and appreciate the upsides to the downsides is a skill that will serve you well in this business.

I’ve written before about how realism doesn’t guarantee your writing is good; in other words, just because you’re writing about something that actually happened doesn’t mean the end result will be persuasive. You can base stories and plot twists on actual events that you actually witnessed and still get pushback from readers and editors who just don’t buy what you’re selling.

When this happens, there’s a tendency to outrage because it actually happened. How can someone tell you that plot twist doesn’t work when it actually worked in the real world? I understand, and have experienced, that precise flavor of outrage, but it does you no good. Arguing about it does you no good. You just have to write better.

Reality <> Good Writin’

Just because something actually happened doesn’t mean you get to ignore the usual rules of storytelling, after all, and one of those rules is this: If your reader doesn’t get something in your story, it’s your fault. If something doesn’t seem realistic or plausible in your story, even if it’s based on a real event, you have to go back and revise it until you’ve sold it properly. Getting defensive just because you’re working from memory is no excuse.

The craziest part of this, of course, is the fact that sometimes the more you deviate from the reality of the event, the more readily your reader accepts the scenario. It can be super counter-intuitive, and occasionally frustrating. And while one reader who doesn’t get what you’re doing can be an outlier, if all of your readers complain about the same thing you have to stop assuming the reality basis of the bit will sell itself, and start looking into doing a better job of selling.

This is complicated when you base your stories off of hair-raising moments you experience after drinking two bottles of ripple and eating $50 worth of Taco Bell. Those visions are vivid.