Time to Write

Stuck on the story of your novel or screenplay? Play possible futures.

If you have the start of a story but things have ground to a halt and you're not sure where to take your protagonist next, try playing a game I call Possible Futures. 

Think of three very different paths your protagonist might take. Project each one forward one or two big steps.

For instance, let's see I've set up a story opening in which Ian, my protagonist, is a widower nearing retirement age. He hasn't managed to save much money and his pension plan just collapsed. I have a sympathetic character and a situation to which (unfortunately) a lot of people can relate. But where to go with the story?

Scenario One: When he's approached by a younger friend who says there's a way Ian could earn $50,000 for one week of work, Ian knows it  has to be something fishy. But he needs the money and decides it would be foolish not to at least hear what it's all about.

Scenario Two: Looking for an inexpensive way to have an evening out leads him to a senior citizens' social club where he turns out to be one of the very few men among a lot of widows. One quickly falls for him. She's rich and nice and would love to marry him. It would mean a comfortable retirement. He likes her but he doesn't really love her…does that still matter?

Scenario Three: Desperate for money, Ian signs up to be a subject of medical trials. When one of them goes terribly wrong due to negligence by the pharmaceuticals company, he has only one year to live. They offer him ten million dollars to shut up. He can have a dream life and money to leave to the grandchildren of his struggling son and daughter in law,  but it will mean being complicit in the coverup of the company's practices which may go on to hurt others.  

You can use the same strategy further along in the story. Let's say that you decided that Ian should go ahead and marry the widow--after all he does like her and has no intention of cheating her; he will be a good companion. But then…then we can think of three more options for what happens next:

1. She dies and he realises the rich thing was all an act. She had nothing but debts for which he is now responsible.

2. He meets another woman, and this time it IS love. But now he's spoken for…

3. He does marry her but the more he begins to actually love her the more suspicious she gets that he was after her money.

If you pay attention you'll get the sense that one of the options you generate is more right for you or your understanding of the character than the others. 

(There are some writers who have tips for you on how to create great characters and plots. Who are they? Well, they include Dostoyevsky, Dumas, and Dickens. Also Calvino, Carver, and Cather. Their advice and how to apply it to your project are in my newest book, Your Creative Writing Masterclass. It's published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon or your other favorite bookseller.)

 

 

Writing a novel...the same one four times: Jane Hamilton explains

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If you’re struggling as you write your novel and you assume “real” writers have it much easier, Jane Hamilton, author of “The Book of Ruth,” is evidence that it ain’t necessarily so. She told a symposium recently that it took four complete versions of “Map of the World” before she got it right.

She said “Sometimes I can’t do the next thing until I finish the bad thing.”

She also revealed that conditions were far from ideal when she started writing. She was sharing a computer with her husband and bringing up young children. She said, “My early novels were fuelled with pure rage.”

 Her books are about relationships, and she started her talk by quoting this wonderful passage from an essay by Willa Cather on Katherine Mansfield: “One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them.”

 If we keep that in mind, we’ll never run out of stories!

 Source: Salsburypost.com http://www.salisburypost.com/Entertainment/040112-book-hamilton-qanda-qcd

(Mark Twain has advice for you about writing. So do Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Anton Chekhov, and Jane Austen. You'll find it in "Your Creative Writing Masterclass," published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon and other booksellers now.)

52 Tips to Writing Success - 3: decide what you want it to be!

This is the third in a series of tips regarding small changes you can make, one per week, to write better, write faster, and have more confidence about your writing. If you implement all or most of these, by a year from now you may have transformed your writing practice.

3: At the start of a project (or now, if you’re already into it) get a notebook and jot down what you hope it will be when you’re done. An easy way to do it is to write the review that you hope you will get. About once a week or once every two weeks for bigger projects, review your notes—are you staying on track? If not, what could you do to bring it back? If you find this too distracting while you’re writing the first draft, do it when it’s time to write the second.

(If you want to see the other tips from this series so far, click on the Category "52 Tips" to the right. And if you want to get some great methods for being more creative, get my book, "Creativity Now!" published by Pearson and available from Amazon and other book sellers.)

If your writing seems to be moving in slow-motion, read this!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Robert Louis Stevenson offered that advice. It's good to remember on those days, weeks, or months when you feel frustrated.

Maybe the words--or at least the right words--aren't coming fast enough.

Maybe agents or publishers are making you wait forever to hear whether they are interested.

Maybe that self-published book of yours doesn't seem to be catching fire despite the fact that you're working hard to market it.

Stay with it. Looking forward, everything seems slow. Looking back, it seems as though it all went by in an instant.

Set yourself a schedule that's ambitious but realistic and stick with it.

On days you begin to doubt whether you're on the right track, keep going.

If that keeps up too long, take a little break, but schedule the resumption of your writing on your calendar. 

Even if the "planting" doesn't pay off in a trip up the best-seller list you may find that you've gained in ways you never imagined.

(If you'd like to learn to write from the best, get a copy of my new book, "Your Creative Writing Masterclass." It features writing advice from more than 100 classic and modern writers, plus my guidance on how to apply that advice to you want to write. It's published by Nicholas Brealey and you can get it from Amazon or your other favorite book seller.)

 

Could you use the Agile Publishing Model to self-publish your ebook?

At Digital Book World Dominique Raccah, chief executive and publisher of Sourcebooks announced that they will be using that they call the Agile Publishing Model. It involves building audience participation before the writing and publication of a new book, a system O'Reilly Media has employed already.

What does this look like in practice? This is my interpretation of how you could use it when self-publishing an ebook:

1. Start a website that relates to the book. If it's a non-fiction book it's easy to decide on the topic. If it's a novel, what aspect do you think people would find most interesting and likely to make them buy the book?

This is not always obvious. For instance, a mystery set in a ski resort will not necessarily appeal more to skiers than others. In fact, sometimes people who know a lot about a topic don't read fiction about it because they know so many authors get things wrong. And people who will eagerly read non-fiction may not read fiction at all. 

Here's a tip: find a successful book similar to yours in a significant way. Look at the author's website, the comments and reviews people have left on Amazon and YouTube, and use Google to track down articles about them, fan sites, etc. You'll get lots of clues about where this author's fans hang out. Go there. Be unobtrusive at first, and then start posting but not about your book. Without spamming or forcing it, let people know you have a blog or site they might find of interest (and make sure it is interesting, of course).

The sooner you do this, the better. This model works only if you start early. 

2. Involve your followers in the writing of the book. For instance, invite their questions. If a lot of people have the same question, that's a great indicator that you should be answering it in your book or featuring the topic in some way. 

3. Let your followers read chapters as you go along. Be clear that these are early drafts and you welcome input. Pay attention to what makes sense, ignore what doesn't. But start with an open mind. If you find that the book you want to write isn't the same one people want to read, adjust accordingly.

In works of fiction, pay attention to feedback like "I got mixed up between Brian and Bruce," or "It' wasn't clear to me whether Samantha knew about John's previous marriage or not." If the reader is supposed to know that, maybe you need to state it more clearly.

4. Let followers vote. Ask them to help you pick the best title, the best cover image, the best copy for the back cover. You can get a lot of useful information. Again, it helps if you are able to put aside your ego. If 80 of a hundred people voting clearly prefer one cover over the other you'd be silly not to listen, even if you like the other one better.

5.Tell about the steps of the publishing process, including a bit of gossip here and there (naturally, nothing that will upset your publisher). Your followers will feel like insiders and at the same time will know when the expect the book.

6. In the book, acknowledge by name any followers whose comments have been helpful. It's a nice thing to do, plus people buy more copies of a book when their name is in it.

7. Have an online launch party. Invite your followers and ask them to invite their friends as well. Do something special, maybe a live video feed from an actual party, or set up a webinar in which people can ask you questions. Give away prizes including copies of your book. 

8. Keep your followers involved after the book is published. Blog about your experiences--did you have a signing and 100 people turned up? Great, tell us about it. Did you have a signing and nobody turned up? Not so great for you, but possibliy a more entertaining story. Put reviews on the site and invite your followers to do their own reviews on YouTube and post links to those (or embed them) on your site. Give a prize for the best review every month (not the most fawning but the most entetaining). 

9. Get their input on what you should write next--hook them early so they'll stay with you.

10. If your book has timely content, update it as often as necessary. With e-books this is simple and costs nothing or very little. Let your followers know that you're keeping up to date and ask them for input on what changes you should make. 

Have I done all these? Nope. But writing this has given me some good ideas...

(You can also get loads of good ideas for inexpensive and innovative ways to market yourself or your work, in my book, "Do Something Different," published by Virgin Books.)

If you had only 2 years to live, would you write? (She did...)

Pat Gaffney always dreamed of writing, but didn't start until she was diagnosed with breast cancer. In the shadow of that diagnosis, she decided to dedicate what she thought would be her final two years to writing. Fortunately she's still with us and that decision led to (so far) twelve historical romances and five contemporary women's fiction titles. Her books have been best-sellers and won awards. Here her short (2 minute) account of what happened:

(Want to learn from the best  authors of all time--Twain, Chekhov, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jane Austen? Their advice to writers makes up the core of 'Your Creative Writing Masterclass,' my newest book from Nicholas Brealey Publishing. You can get it now from Amazon or your other favorite book seller.)

Why your book will never be finished

It used to be that when your novel or non-fiction book was published you wouldn't have a chance to change anything unless the publisher decided to issue another edition. Of course they don't really like to do that until the first edition is close to selling out, so usually this is a matter of at least a couple of years.

That's all changing with the advent of ebooks. Nicholas Carr recently wrote about this on the Wall Street Journal Books site. He published a book of essays using the Kindle Direct Publishing service.

He writes, "Then I got the urge to tweak a couple of sentences in one of the essays. I made the edits on my computer and sent the revised file back to Amazon. The company quickly swapped out the old version for the new one."

He points out, "The endless malleability of digital writing promises to overturn a whole lot of our assumptions about publishing."

It's good for updating books about things that change rapidly, and in fiction for correcting the mistakes that sharp-eyed readers are wont to notice and point out to you, often gleefully. 

It's hard to tell the effect it will have on perfectionists who previously avoided finishing their books. Will they now finish them but make changes every ten mintutes, or will the knowledge that they COULD make changes if necessary reduce their need to actually do it?  It could go either way.

At any rate, it's one many changes we're going to adjust to as the nature of publishing continue to change at rapid pace. 

 

Do you make this mistake in the opening pages of your book or script?

An article in the New Yorker (Dec. 5, 2011) quotes writer-director Michel Hazanavicius, whose movie The Artist is a hot prospect for an Oscar for Best Picture. This is what he says about the first part of a movie:

 “You have fifteen minutes to tell the audience, ‘These are the rules.’ Jurassic Park teaches us to expect a T. rex, but if a T. rex comes thirty minutes into When Harry Met Sally you won’t believe it.”

I think this applies equally to novels—you have about fifteen to twenty pages to orient people to the world you are creating. If there’s something about it that is different from what we might expect based on those pages, you should at least foreshadow it.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have surprises—quite the contrary. But they have to be plausible in the context you have established. 

This includes the characters you have created. If they act out of character, we expect to find out what causes the change. In many action pictures, it’s a threat to someone they love. In comedies it might be getting drunk. In horror pictures it could be a demon that takes up residence inside them.  By the way, the argument that many people are inconsistent, while true, isn’t a good defense—we expect people in films to act with more consistency than in life.

This is a good first thing to check when you’re writing your second draft—if something occurred to you as you were writing the later sections that significantly changes the nature of the story or the character go back and adjust.

(There are many more writing tips in the book, "Your Writing Coach," available now from Amazon as a paperback and in the Kindle store.)

How do writers know when their book or script is done?

A question that I hear a lot from writers is, “How do I know when my story or my novel or my screenplay is finished?” That’s why I was interested to read an article called, “Is It Finished?” in the current issue of Artists and Illustrators magazine.

The article is written by painting tutor Sian Dudley, and it’s about knowing when a painting is done. She writes, “With no obvious rules to follow, it’s no wonder that students find it so difficult to know when to stop.”

And I bet you thought this is only a writer’s affliction.

I think what Dudley recommends for artists applies equally to writers. Here are her methods, along with some ideas from me :

Step back!

Just as you get a better impression of a painting as whole by stepping back, it helps to step back from your manuscript. Give it the distance of time rather from the distance of time. Put it away for a couple of weeks, minimum.

During that time get busy working on something else so you’re not obsessing over the project. If you clear your mind and then go back to the project it’s likely you’ll notice what still needs to be done.

Be honest, be patient

Dudley writes, “It is easy to fall into the trap of seeing what we think we have painted, rather than what we have painted, simply because we are so focused on what we are trying to achieve.” Substitute the word “written” for “painted” and the statement is equally true.

She suggest looking at your painting without the temptation of paints and brushes being at hand. Similarly, print out your manuscript away  and take it away from the computer; in fact, out of your home or office to a location you don’t associate with writing at all. Physical distance also helps you be more objective.

Change your view

Maybe you identify strongly with your protagonist. Now pick one of the other major characters and read through the manuscript seeing only the things this person sees. Have you done justice to this character’s perspective? Have you made him or her behave a certain way because you needed the plot to move in that direction rather than being guided by what this person logically would do? If so, you’re not finished.

Assess your progress

Think back to the hopes you had for this story when you started. What effect did you want it to have on the reader or viewer? Did you want your protagonist to change? Did you want your reader or viewer to be surprised by some of the twists of the story, without the events being implausible?

I recommend writing these things down at the start and going back to them when you’re not sure what else needs to be done. Naturally a finished or  nearly-finished project seldom lives up to the high hopes we had for it as the beginning but perhaps we can get it one step nearer.

That’s not to say the story or the characters should necessarily be the same as you imagined at the start. One of the joys of writing is discovering things you didn’t know about this world you are creating, and following those discoveries to see where they go. That takes me to the next point:

Forget references

For artists, references are photos or sketches made out on location, to refer to when they paint that scene in their studios.

For writers I’d say forget research once you have absorbed it, at least until you’ve written a first draft.  Usually you’re not trying to tell a story accurate in every detail; you’re trying to tell a story that’s true in spirit. By all means go back over it when you’ve done a first draft and correct errors but don’t feel constrained by knowing too much about how things really were. If we want total reality, we can look out our window. When we pick up a book or go to the movies, we’re looking for enhanced reality.

Avoid overworking

By overworking, she means painting some sections over and over to try to make them better. Often it makes things worse. Sometimes it’s the opposite: one bit of the painting does gets better when seen in isolation but no longer fit into the overall image as well.

The same can happen if you keep rewriting one scene. Step back and see where the problem really is. Odds are it may be that you haven’t set up this scene properly or are having characters serve your plot rather than behaving according to their own values.

Ask opinions

Dudley says you should ask someone who is brutally honest what they think of your work. I’d go for honest, forget the brutally. Listen, evaluate, and act on what makes sense to you. A lot of people will tell you how they’d write it if it was their story not how to do a better version of your story. Don’t argue, just listen, nod and say “That’s interesting, let me think about that.”

(There’s lot more useful information on writing and rewriting in Your Writing Coach and you can get it from Amazon now, or from your other favorite book seller.)

 

 

John Steinbeck's advice on writing (via Elmore Leonard) - less hooptedoodle

In Elmore Leonard's guidelines for writers, he quotes a character in John Steinbeck's "Sweet Thursday." If you've read much Steinbeck (that's him on the left) you'll agree this character probably reflects the author's view:

He says: ''I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks. . . . figure out what the guy's thinking from what he says. I like some description but not too much of that. . . . Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. . . . Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That's nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don't have to read it. I don't want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.''

Great advice. I've seen a lot of writing that is mainly hooptedoodle.

Usually it comes from newer writers who forget that their main mission is to tell a story.

They think they have to impress the reader with the quality of their writing. Often they equate high quality with obscure words, flowery descriptions, or bizarre turns of phrase.

It's something to keep in mind when you get to the point of starting your second draft. Maybe you could put a little sticky note on your computer: "Cut the hooptedoodle."

(We have almost no hooptedoodle in the online Writing Breakthrough Strategy program. What we do have is friendly guidance from me and the other participants, bi-weekly group calls, lots of resources. It starts again in mid-January but sign up now for the early bird bonuses. More info at: http://www.WritingBreakthroughStrategy.com.)