Planning, a necessary evil

I just read the Forbes study rating the healthiest states in the US and was pleased to find my home state solidly in 37th place.  Go Tarheels!  Incidentally, if I were to rate my productivity from the past 50 weeks (roughly) since I began working on my novel, this past week would figure in at about 37th place.  That’s 37 with 1 being the most productive and 50 being the week I vegged out on the couch and watched back-to-back BBC Life and Ray Mears episodes.  This week wasn’t  as bad as that, but what did I actually do?

I planned.  There comes a time in every writing project when you have to back off from creating and do a little tidying.  For me that meant going back to my chapter outline and cleaning it up a bit.  I’d written a rough and unfinished outline several weeks back, but had abandoned it because I feared (and rightly so, as it turned out) that it would stopper the flow of ideas and words that were pouring out of me.  At the time the story was coming easily too me then and, knowing how quickly the winds of inspiration change, I prefered to let down my sails, cut off my planning engine, and let those winds push me along.  Sure enough, the winds did change and this week my engine seems to be out of gas.

It’s not that making a chapter outline isn’t important.  It is.  Some people say they can write a story, script or novel without a clear plan and maybe they can.  But in my experience, even if I think I have an idea of where my story is going but I don’t actually sit down and plan it all out in detail, I will write myself into a dead-end.   Discouraged and full of self-doubt, I don’t have the confidence to retrace my steps and begin again, this time with a plan.  That’s how so many projects never get finished.

Planning my chapter outline this week was hard going, and not entirely owing to the frustration of improving the logistics of my plot.  There were some details which I had to mull over and rework until I felt like they advanced the overall plot.   But the most frustrating part about planning is, without a doubt, having to take time off from actual writing, which can and does disrupt the flow of ideas.

How to get back into writing the story once you’ve taken off a week to plan it?  That’s my task this weekend and one that hasn’t produced much fruit yet.  Instead I’m left looking at my plan and listening to the familiar voice of my inner critic who’s whispering, “Do you really think you can do all that?”

On Finishing

I’m celebrating a milestone in my young writing life.  After three years of writing fiction, I did something today I’ve never done before.  I finished a short story.

I don’t know much about the psychology of persevering through a project — I only know it stinks when you’re working at it, but feels oh so good once it’s completed.  Kind of like exercise.  And I don’t have a ton of advice for motivating writers to finish their projects.  I’m learning myself!  Though, I will say, I’m sure there’s a healthy amount of hard work involved with just the tiniest bit of luck.

I guess what I did this time that was different from others was that I wrote, kept writing and didn’t go back and scuba-edit everything I wrote as I wrote it.  Which means, my next task is rewriting.  But there’s something to separating out the writing stage from the rewriting… if only a psychological something.  You feel accomplished when you finish; you feel discouraged when you murder every sentence baby before it’s even born.

So  I’m  properly chuffed.

I began working at 9:45 am and finished at 4:05 and celebrated with a brain-exploding run.  It was a long haul of self-doubt, with my inner editor telling me to take a break after every sentence.  But I didn’t!  How many great stories have been lost because their authors took a break and never had the courage to come back?

It’s a rough story and will need a ton of rewriting, but today I persevered and I finished it.  Hurray!

“Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
E.L. Doctorow

Daily writing habits

Every considered stopping your day’s writing just when it’s getting good?  If you’re like me, stingy for each rare day of free-flowing writing and wanting to squeeze the most out of them when they come, the thought has probably never crossed your mind.

Starting the day’s writing can sometimes be the most rigorous part of a writer’s day.  Every writer has his own way of coping.  For all you NaNoWriMo folks out there, as well as the less-daring writers like myself, here’s a tip from a fairly successful writer.

Hemingway reportedly wrote 500-1000 words each day and stopped when he was going good.  That way he could pick up where he left off the next day.  Sometimes, he’d stop mid-sentence so that he’d have at least one-half of a sentence to write the next day.

How’s that for forethought?  How often do we just rush through an inspired days work until we’ve depleated the well of ideas?  Then what’s left for the next day’s writing?

I’m working on a short story today — I’m starting it, rather — and I’ve decided to  try out Hemingway’s method.  If nothing else, I’ll have half a sentence written day and the assurance that I’ll at least write half a sentence tomorrow.

Finding Story Ideas #2 Tips

How do you practice coming up with ideas for fiction?  Here are two tips I’ve learned over the years, which have helped me in my practice.

1)      Be Aware:  Imagine you’re brain’s a Brita-filter.  Every second of every day, our brains process stimuli which we receive from our environment:  the natural world, the people we meet, the media, all of that is part of our environment.  As writers and storytellers, we have all the information we need for coming up with great stories.  It’s just a matter of seeing them.

That squished snail you just stepped on, for example.  The way the grass looked this morning with fog laced through its blades.  The person you just walked past that was in hysterics for having stepped on the snail.  Who among us is completely aware of every little thing that happens to or around us on any given day?  No one.   But maybe we should.

By paying a bit more attention to the world around us,  not only will we feel more alert and tuned-in to this beautiful world, we’ll see something worth writing down.

2)      Ask Questions:  Go through life asking the question “What if?”  “What if there were creatures from another planet?” H.G. Wells might have asked.  “How would they react to humans?  What would they look like?”  See how one question leads to another? And this trick doesn’t just work for fantasy or sci-fi.  Consider Jane Austen:  “What if a snobbish land-owning gentleman fell for a feisty, dowerless girl?” In fiction, anything can happen.  Prod your imagination awake by asking it questions.  Begin by asking, “What if?” and see where it takes you.

As an exercise, think about one thing that happened to you during your day.  It can be anything:  a scene from your day, like a meeting or a coffee break, something someone said, that car that nearly ran you over as you were trying to cross the street, anything.  What “What-if” scenario can you imagine coming from that event?

Here’s an example:  you overhear a snippet of an argument between a man and a woman.  All you catch is the man saying, “What do you mean you forgot to get the dried blood?!”  You know he was probably referring to compost fertilizer, but what if he wasn’t?

But the scenarios don’t have to be that ripe for the pickin’.  With a little bit of prodding, you can turn anything into a story.

Just start asking the questions and let the story unravel from there.

Eileen Hughes goes into more detail about finding story ideas using these two simple ideas.  http://hubpages.com/hub/Tips-for-finding-ideas-to-write-a-story

How do writers come up with ideas?

This year I’m taking a creative writing class titled “Researching and Writing a Novel.”  Sounded like exactly the good kick-in-the-pants I needed.

Our class spent first two weeks coming up with ideas for our novels.  Some people had already written the first couple chapters of their novels.  Other’s had a fairly well formed idea that just needed a little deep tissue massage to work out the kinks, and still other hadn’t a clue. I was nervous enough about my own abilities to come up with good story ideas back in the spring when I signed up for the class, so I spent most of my summer researching and working on one.  In the end, one session of in-class work-shopping was enough to tell me that my brilliant idea was not as brilliant as I’d thought.

Scrapping an entire summer’s worth of work, I went back to the drawing boards and spent the next two weeks coming up with a better idea.

In six years of writing, what I’ve found about this tormenting stage of the writing process–coming up with ideas –is that it doesn’t have to be… tormenting, that is.  With a little practice, it can become second nature.

Let me explain. Although I ended up rejecting that idea (putting it away in a drawer, actually – good ideas are still good even if they don’t suit at the time of their conception), I found that that summer had put me in planning mode.  Like a young basketball player who practices dribbling every day until it becomes as natural as walking (and from there he can add tricks and speed and what have you), actively practicing coming up with ideas, even ones that end up in drawers, trains the brain to recognize good ideas even you’re not aware that you’re searching for them.

So lesson #1:  Practice.  And practice a lot.  Get in the habit of looking at the world through a story-teller’s lenses.  Consider news stories, personal experiences, and observations of the world and prod them like a biologist would an amoeba.  Look at them from every angle and ask what-if questions until you have a story.  And if you can think of no story worth telling about that particular amoeba, move on to the next one.

In my next entry, I’ll be going into a bit more detail about ways we practice coming up with ideas.