Writing

I’ve always been a good mimic in terms of writing—not in terms of anything else, it should be noted; I have never been able to convincingly act like anyone else, or sound like anyone else, or dress like anyone else, even if we define ‘anyone else’ as ‘normal people.’ But when it comes to writing I’ve always been able to absorb someone else’s style and them replicate it, if I want.

When I was younger I did this constantly, in part because I was still forming my own style and in part because when you’re young everything you read blows your mind and you can’t wait to use every trick you just learned, like immediately. I still do it today; a few years ago I was reading a lot of F. Scott Fitzgerald for a while and I wrote a short story that is basically a riff on Fitzgerald that goes on for 3,000 words or so. But it’s more controlled now, more purposeful.

Recently I was hosting a page on Facebook about writing and mentioned the concept of imitating writers as a learning tool, and got some pushback from writers who were very, very strongly against the practice. Their argument boiled down to ?you shouldn’t imitate others, but rather find your own voice.’ Which is true enough, but I think they missed the point: Imitating other writers is all about finding your own voice.

A Continuum

Writing isn’t something you invented yesterday, after all. You’re part of a continuum, a tradition that goes back a very long time, and all of us are building on what came before. It’s like when I play guitar: Every now and then I come up with a riff or three that are actually kind of tasty, and I think, hmmmn, I’m not terrible. And then I think, if this was 1963 I could be the greatest guitar player in the universe, because I have a basic grasp of the intervening 50 years of guitar music.

In other words, when a writer crafts a story that revolutionizes and excites and transforms (or merely entertains) it’s not something they did in isolation. They read novels and stories for years, digested them, processed them, and then used those absorbed tools and tricks to create something unique.

In order to get to that point where you’ve got a toolbox full of ideas and techniques you can use to make something wholly your own, you have to first acquire those tools. That starts with the basics and then moves on to increasingly esoteric and specific things that only you can use and appreciate. Imitating other writers gives you practice with their tools, which you then modify and make your own.

So, don’t hesitate to copy your favorites writers. Write entire novels in someone else’s style, why not. In the end it will help you find your own. You can also do it with fashion, which is why I’m going to be wearing nothing but white suits from now on.

Here’s a tragedy in one act: I wrote a novel a few years ago, a thriller with a bit of sci-fi seasoning in it. I told my agent the opening premise, and she immediately said something like ‘that might be good as long as the next words out of your mouth aren’t xxx’ where xxx was a plot twist that was 100% exactly what I’d just written.

There was what scientists call an awkward silence.

That’s always a sobering moment for a writer who often thinks they’re being clever. I was a bit dismayed, but I thought on it and realized that the plot twist was, in fact, a bit overused and obvious, and so I delicately chopped 54% of the novel out of the manuscript and set about re-writing the second half of the book with a different plot twist. Which wound up ruining everything and the book was and remains a disaster.

The lesson isn’t about the shopworn plot twist; you can sell a shopworn twist if you try. No, the lesson here is that writing to hit someone else’s target is usually a mistake.

You My People

That doesn’t mean my agent was wrong. My agent is less than enthusiastic about a lot of my work, which is perfectly natural, and she’s usually very smart about it. My agent is looking at my work as the person who will have to try and sell it, so naturally she has a different perspective on it. But what I’ve slowly come to realize is that there is very likely someone out there who would read that manuscript and be amazed by it. And that’s what it’s all about: Finding your People.

By and large, my agent is my People. When she dislikes something I’ve written, I usually end up realizing she was right about it. And often when she pushes back on a novel I want to go out on, it’s purely from a market point-of-view—she might admire it, but she doesn’t think she can sell it.

As a writer, you need objective opinions and feedback, of course, but you also have to know who you are as a writer and what you’re trying to accomplish, and stick to that. Instead of constantly revising and re-working your manuscript to match the last round of feedback, you need to find the people out there who will read your work and be instantly drawn to it. Those are your People. In other words, there’s an agent out there who will read your work and love it. There’s an editor out there who will read your book and decide that whatever the P&L says, they’re going to publish it. There are people out there who will love your work and want to put effort into getting it out there. All you have to do is find them.

How to find them is a whole other story involving tears, despair, and stolen diamonds. But I’ve said too much.

A lot of writing advice is centered on exercises, which I fully support. I’m a guy who naturally focuses on statistics; I keep track of how not just how many stories and novels I’ve written, but how many pages of material I’ve written over the years. Which is weird since I deprecate word counts so much, but the fact that I keep track of stats is just a tic of my strange brain, it doesn’t mean they’re all that useful.

So, I’m obsessed with how much I’ve written over the years, but that sometimes means getting locked into channels where you produce more. There’s a comfort zone for all writers, after all, and it’s not uncommon to find yourself writing the same sorts of stories or articles all the time—especially if you start getting paid for them. After all, if the world wants nothing more than to pay you for sasquatch erotica, you’re probably gonna write a lot of it.

But sometimes you need to break out a little simply to try something different and shake off the cobwebs, so the occasional writing exercise is usually invigorating and instructive. One trick I like to indulge in is simple but effective: I take something from my life and I write it from the opposite perspective.

The Hero’s Journey

We’re all the hero of our own story, after all; there’s a tendency to always remember things in a way that is self-flattering or that at least serves your personal narrative. And hey, I support that. My own self-mythologizing is how I keep my sanity, because if I admitted to myself how much of a shambolic jackass I’ve been in my life there would be emotional repercussions no one is prepared for.

That’s why writing something from someone else’s perspective can be a rich writing experience. Take a moment—it doesn’t have to be a negative one; it could be your wedding day or the day you wrestled a bear and saved the lives of six cub scouts—and write it up as a story, but tell it from someone else’s perspective. Maybe the POV is the police officer who arrested you for public urination. Maybe it’s the person whose house you TP’d on Mischief Night when you were 15. Maybe just the person who sat next to you on the bus yesterday. Tell the same story you experienced by imagine it from another person’s perspective.

Simple … but effective. Being able to see the many sides of an experience is a powerful tool for a writer.

Of course, for some reason when I imagine my experiences from other POVs I am always wearing a tuxedo and a monocle. Strange how that happens.

I recently started a new novel. I start lots of novels, and I write a fair number of them, too; over the last two years I finished five novels and Writing Without Rules. I’ve always written first drafts quickly, and I firmly believe in staying busy. I don’t like to sit and wait for inspiration, I like to force inspiration by working constantly and challenging myself to take a lukewarm first few thousands words and transform it into a great story by sheer force of will.

It doesn’t always work.

So, a new novel. It’s an idea I’ve been kicking around in the back of my head for a while, and I started trying to make it work a few months ago. The first six or seven tries went nowhere. The narrative just petered out each time, losing momentum and that sense of excitement that you feel when you’re onto something. And then I finally figured out the problem: My narrator was intimately involved with the secrets of the story. I needed an Outsider.

Your Ways Confuse and Alarm Me

The Outsider is a character who isn’t in on everything—a Stranger in a Strange Land. The function of the Outsider, at their most basic level, is to have things explained to them. A great example of an Outsider is the companions on Doctor Who. The time-traveling Doctor always has one or two humans around for the ride as he battles aliens and solves timey-wimey puzzles, and their main function is to be confused and alarmed so the Doctor has a reason to explain to them—and the audience—what’s going on.

The Outsider functions as an audience surrogate. I realized in my new novel that having my first-person narrator be aware of the secrets was problematic, and that I was dancing around trying to hold off on revelations which just made things weird. By changing my narrator to someone brought in from the outside, I have a lot more control over how those secrets are revealed.

It seems obvious in retrospect, but as writers it’s so easy to get locked into an initial concept. You have that first idea and it just seems so obvious, so perfect. And six months later when you can’t get it started you’re blind to the fact that one vital aspect of the concept is simply wrong.

Things are going well right now for the book. Will it turn out great? Who knows. All I know for now is that by bringing in an Outsider the story is moving again, because I can control exactly what the reader knows without having to resort to amnesia or sociopathy or possibly having things dropped on my narrator’s head at crucial moments.

Freelance writing is a tough go sometimes. Anyone who’s ever daydreamed of leaving their Day Job (or, who knows, their whole life, family, and social circle) behind in order to become a “digital nomad” of some sort knows that just getting things off the ground can be an intimidating experience. And it doesn’t help that most established freelance writers (my ears are burning) find it impossible to explain clearly how in the world they got established in the first place. My own career trajectory is kind of blurry, to be honest; it’s literally

1. Decide to go freelance

2. Apply for every job available

3. ???

4. Profit!

One thing I’ve noticed a lot of new freelance writers doing is jumping on forums and applying for jobs by saying that they can write “anything.” I remember doing that myself in the early going, having such confidence in my abilities and being so certain that this would somehow be persuasive to potential clients.

It’s not. Don’t do it.

Specify

It’s probably true. You probably can write anything—I know I can. Give me a clear enough brief and some decent guidelines and I can replicate voice, emulate style, and crank out whatever writing you need. Heck, in college I got into trouble because I imitated the style of academic writers too closely after reading their books; I was called in to a conference with a teacher who couldn’t believe I hadn’t plagiarized the words, once.

But being able to write anything doesn’t mean you should.

First of all, it’s a weak marketing technique. The word ‘anything’ is so non-specific as to be meaningless, and sounds like empty bragging. There’s simply no reason to believe you if you can’t even be specific about the things you’re good at doing.

Second, it’s bound to get you into work you don’t want to do. Now, if you need to make a living it’s easy to get into the mindset of taking on any kind of work, but writing isn’t a mindless activity that you can grind through. Even crap writing for money requires some engagement and mental work, and that means if your work is boring or involves a subject you don’t really enjoy, it’s going to be tedious. And that can affect everything from the quality of your work to your enjoyment of life.

Instead of telling people you can write ‘anything,’ it’s better to think about what you want to write about and focus there—with the caveat that if you need to make some money there’s nothing wrong with tossing that advice out the window and getting down to business.

Wait, I think I just remembered what Step 3 was supposed to be: Day drinking. And plenty of it.

One of the most difficult things about being a writer is figuring out whether you’re getting better at it or not. While there are moments where your own progress is clear and obvious, more often you’re totally not sure if something you wrote today is better than something you wrote five years ago.

Sometimes I’ll sell a story that I wrote a very long time ago (I have a tendency to continue submitting stories well past the point where a sane person might think the story’s simply not that great) and re-read it and think, gosh, that is a pretty good story. I’ll see all sorts of things I’d forgotten I’d done in it, and it will seem to me that my more recent work is simply not as complex or as interesting.

Getting better as a writer is tough to gauge because it’s all so subjective, of course, but you can detect progress by measuring your writing marginal gains.

It’s the Little Things

The theory of marginal gains has its roots in cycling; the idea is that small improvements in a process can ripple out to measurable improvements in an already-efficient system. For cyclists, the idea was that improving one aspect of their training or equipment could result in a 1% or 2% increase in their overall speed on the course. Those gains are marginal—but in a competitive scenario they can be decisive.

You can do the same thing, mostly, in your writing. You might not ever find a web site that will analyze your novel or story and give you a hard number on its quality, but you can work on the individual components of your writing and get feedback from people. Write a dialog exchange, or a description. Write out a plot synopsis, or an internal monologue, or a stream-of-consciousness section. Something short and discrete that you can show to folks and get simple feedback on. Chances are if you start to get better and better feedback on, say your dialog, the stories you’re writing will be improving too.

The improvement might be marginal. But it all contributes to the whole.

Marginal gains can be invisible, of course. If you write a story today that is 1% better in some sense than a story you wrote last month, the difference might not be immediately obvious. But it’s there, and those 1% improvement add up like fractional pennies from the Office Space scheme.

Man, creativity can be cruel, as any writer who’s ever been asked to explain their WIP knows. Somehow ideas and concepts—whole universes!—that exist in pristine, complex brilliance in your brain and on the page turn to sand running through your increasingly sweaty fingers when you try to explain them.

All writers know how it is. Whether it’s at a party or convention or something and someone is actually interested in your work and asks you about your book, or you’re trying to write the dreaded one-page synopsis for your agent or your own marketing. You start laying it out, and about one minute in you realize you’re in your own personal Asian land war as you struggle to sell your ideas. You can tell your audience is increasingly dubious as you backtrack to explain details you forgot and fail to get the expected awed reaction when you drop your plot twists and world-building brilliancies.

Eventually, you trail off and mutter something like ?well, it is a work in progress’ and go off to find the bar.

This is why you need to always have an elevator pitch for your novel. Because having it will give you confidence.

The Power That Preserves

Nothing kills an exciting idea for a story than an underwhelming or sarcastic reaction before it’s fully developed. If you tell someone you respect about your novel and their reaction is to shit all over it, it’s difficult to get back to that excited space where you were clicking along, building a world.

On the other hand, if you can succinctly explain your WIP with a confident, polished presentation, your chances of getting a positive reaction go up, you’ll feel better about the whole thing, and that creates a feedback loop that drives you finish it. That’s why you should start thinking about your pitch before you’ve even finished the book. Because people will ask you about it, and if you can wow them with a great pitch, it juices the whole endeavor with positive energy.

Don’t underestimate the power of confidence. Fiction is the art of selling ideas. When you boil a lot of fiction down, it’s kind of silly—dramatic twists, strange made-up cultures, dialog that no one would ever actually speak. What makes it work is the confidence that talent offers. Confidence is the backbone of great writing—so getting confident about your WIP is key to finishing it in style. So be ready to sell that idea.

Or, to run away the moment anyone brings up your WIP. That might not build confidence, but at least you’re cultivate an air of mystery.

Every writer knows that one of the core components of a story is some kind of conflict. Your protagonist has to want something, and some array of forces has to stand between them and their goal. Sometimes it’s I want to destroy the One Ring but all these Nazgûl and Orcs are in the way, sometimes it’s I love this person but they’re married, but the general idea is that life is disappointment and there’s your story.

That’s what I would define as Macro Conflict. It’s big enough to hang your story off of, and it’s broad enough to invite all sorts of interpretation and give the writer (i.e., you) plenty of room to work in.

Sometimes, coming up with a story and a Macro Conflict is easy. You wake up, and the story is in your head, complete and ready to go—you just need to know how to get in there. How to find your way into the story in the first place. This is where Micro Conflict can be useful.

Go Small

Getting started can be a challenge, because we often see novels and other stories in terms of the big picture, the big twists or the overall atmosphere you want to create. Sometimes finding the right way to just begin is difficult and you wind up writing several iterations of the beginning. One approach is to take your main character and give them a Micro Conflict. That’s pretty much what it sounds like: A short-term goal, with short-term barriers.

It’s an easy way to get things moving. It doesn’t have to have anything to do with the overall plot—just take your main character(s) and give them a goal, something to strive for. It can be very simple and very basic, it can be representative of their usual adventures or something you never return to. Just give them a goal and put some barriers between them and it. It’s that simple—like plotting a novel writ small. You get to explore your universe and characters, tell a self-contained story, and boom—you’re in your novel.

Or you could write 50,000 words describing your main character’s morning routine, including 15,000 words in which they stare at themselves in the mirror. Your call.