Writing

As you might suspect from a blog tied to a book called Writing Without Rules, I generally don’t believe there is any “correct” way to write. You Do You tends to be my reaction to people’s declarations of process, writer’s block cures, or systems for developing characters or plots. All that matters is that you get words on the page or screen, and that you’re excited about those words. However you get there is immaterial.

I do, however, have opinions based on my own experience. It’s important to note that these are just opinions, personal expressions of personal experience filtered through my own preconceptions and assumptions. Still, it’s useful to see how other people do it. Sometimes finding out that another writer does things the same way you do is heartening. Sometimes seeing another process or an alternative view of the business or craft of writing fiction and/or non-fiction suddenly prompts you to change your approach.

For example: Concurrent projects. Some writers fixate on a single project. They devote themselves to it, doing research, planning and plotting, then writing and re-writing, revising and excising until they’re satisfied. They work in a linear fashion.

Not me. I usually have several projects going at once, usually a few novels, a short story, and any number of other things. And that’s not even counting the freelance work and promotional blogging that I do. What can I say—I think there are distinct advantages to spinning plates.

WIPs All the Way Down

I just completed two novels that I was working on concurrently, and I have a third novel begun while those two were in process, plus a monthly short story, another one-shot short story set in one of my established universes, and two other ideas that will either be novels or … something else, who knows. And I recently stumbled onto another short story that I’d half completed and then forgot about, so I jumped in to finish that.

I like having all these projects going for three main reasons:

1. Variety. If i get bogged down in one story, uncertain how to proceed, I can just jump over to another one. And while I’m working on the second, I’m subconsciously recharging my batteries for the first. Plus, I get to indulge two genres at once, if I want.
2. Confirmation. Ideas are funny—they jump into your brain electric and buzzing with potential. Then some of them die off, withering away, while others just get stronger and brighter. Working on a bunch of different things means that if one withers away and goes nowhere it’s not nearly as devastating as it otherwise would be.
3. Preservation. For me, ideas don’t last too long unless they’re developed. A concept that seemed ingenious last month might turn into ash if I don’t hang some words on it.

I don’t divide my time and attention equally. One project can rise up and claim all of my attention for a time, especially if it’s near the end. I don’t have any rules about this. I just work on whatever I want to, regardless of what else is on my dance card. Including this blog.

As a writer, I like to finish things—more than finish them, I like to whip things into marketable shape. On the one hand the psychology of this is obvious; as I’m fond of saying, you sell exactly zero of the books and stories you don’t finish. My legacy on this world is going to be my writing, so the more of it I can publish and get seen, the better.

On the other hand my obsession with finishing things and extracting some sort of publishable value from my writing goes beyond simply practicality, and I’m not sure where it’s rooted in my life. All I know is, once a work gets to a certain bulk, I’m determined to make the effort of writing it worthwhile by finishing it and then polishing it into something that might, conceivably, get published.

One side effect of this obsession is an eagerness to try new techniques or crazy ideas. I get super excited with experiments that might lead to stronger material—experiments that go beyond polish and revision. One example is when I Frankensteined two failed novels together to make one great novel (something I discuss in detail in Writing Without Rules). Another is something I just mentioned on Twitter last week: Boiling a novel down to a short story.

The Great Compression

I’ve been planning to submit a story to an anthology, but wasn’t sure whether I wanted to write a fresh story to match the theme or see if I had something already in the can that would work. I realized that a novel I completed last year was actually a perfect fit, theme-wise. The only problem? The antho had a word count limit of 6,000 words and the novel was 63K+.

This novel has a long history. It started off as a short story I wrote in the early 1990s; I really liked it but could never sell it anywhere, and so a few years ago I started trying to work it into different formats, eventually ending up with an unsatisfactory novel last year. I still thought it had great potential, so the story was still alive in my head, but it wasn’t right.

The idea of trying to cut 90% of the story? Exciting. Like, thrilling. I love stuff like that, extreme challenges. Could I excise most of the novel and still have the core of it?

It was dismaying easy, actually. Dismaying, because it implies that 90% of that novel was just bullshit I poured in there to bulk it up, something I expressly advise people not to do. My only defense is that I didn’t bulk it up on purpose. And I like a lot of the writing I deleted. In practical terms, one reason the story was easy to compress is the structure I used in the novel—it has three timelines, so step one was simply to choose the timeline in which the main, core story occurred, and then delete the others. Just like that, 50% of the words were gone.

Next, I compressed characters. In a novel you can be subtle and granular with your characters. In a short story every character has to be essential. So I eliminated characters whose roles could be passed on to other people. That took care of another chunk of words.

All of this work took me: One day. And I had a story that was still coherent at about 9,000 words. The rest was shaving and shaping, and I really like the story I ended up with at 6K.

Is there a lesson here? The only lesson, I think, is that it’s worth it to push yourself, to try crazy things, to go beyond NaNoWriMo and see what you’re capable of. I can’t swear I’ll sell this story to this anthology or anywhere else. But it was fun to do this, and ultimately successful.

For my next trick, I’m going to try compressing an entire weekend’s worth of drinking into one night. I may not survive. You may not survive. But someone’s got to try, dammit.

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.