Time to Write

More on How to Finish What You Write

A reader wrote me an email saying that really wants to write a book and has started several--but he never finishes any, mostly because as soon as he starts, he has another idea that seems better. Here's the advice I gave him--maybe it will help you as well:

Make a list of the ideas you are considering. Pick the three that you think are the best.

A week later, look at the three (and only the three-not the ones you didn't choose). Pick the two that you think are the best.

If you have anybody you think has good judgment about the type of book you are thinking of doing, ask them which of the two they would find most interesting. Giving them a choice like this means they have to think about it, they can't just say, "Yes, I like that idea." If they say they like both, say if they had to choose one, which would it be? If you can do this with three or four people, so much the better. You don't need to tell them the whole idea, just summarize it in a few lines.

Taking your own intuition into account, as well as the opinions of these people, pick the one you are going to do. Make a commitment to yourself and maybe to others that you are going to finish this project.

Then write that book. When new ideas come up--and they will---just jot them down and put them in a box or folder. Even if one of them seems obviously better, stick to the one you started to do.

As you continue to work on that book remind yourself this is a learning experience. You will learn a lot more from finishing one project than from only starting three.

I don't know whether you've read my newest book, "Your Writing Coach," but you might find it helpful--it talks in more detail about motivation, persistence, etc.

Good luck and send me an email when you've finished that book so I can congratulate you!

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Make a Writing Contract With Yourself

Recently the Mind Tools newsletter ran an article on how to get the best out of people who work for you, using performance agreements. You may not having anybody working for you but you can use the same method to help you get your own work done. The steps of the process:

1: Clearly identify your goals and what you will do to reach it. Put this in writing.

2: Build in milestones and, when possible, attach dates to them, to help yourself notice if you get off track. If you do miss a milestone, figure out why and what corrective action you might need to take to make sure you don’t miss the next ones.

3: Schedule regular times when you will check your progress. Put them into your calendar at the start of the project.

4: Build in rewards and penalties attached to the milestones.

5. Sign and date this agreement with yourself to remind yourself to take it seriously.

It can help to involve someone else in making sure that you stay on target—maybe find a friend who is willing to do this with their goals, and agree to check in with each other once a week to report progress.

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Reaching Your Writing Goals When Resolutions Have Failed

This is the time when many people who made New Year's resolutions start to falter. If you've set a writing goal and have not kept up with it, here's a simple switch that can get you back on track:

Don't say, "This is the YEAR that I (write my novel, publish my memoirs, sell articles to magazines, etc.)

Instead, say, "This is the DAY that I (write one page of my novel, take notes for my memoirs, come up with three ideas for articles I could write, etc.)

Keep your focus on what you can do today, and pretty soon all those todays will add up to a magnificent year.

PS: Attention Writing Conference Planners: If you're booking speakers for 2008 conferences or events, keep me in mind. I deliver high-content, entertaining, interactive programs. I'm based in the UK but travel to the US several times a year, and may be able to coordinate that with your schedule. Email me at [email protected].

This Writer Uses Audio Bait...

Scott Sigler is a good example of a writer who has turned new media to his advantage. He writes sci-fi novels and then records them on audio and distributes them free as weekly, serialized podcasts.

He told MacFormat magazine, “My novels were rejected by dozens of publishers, but once I used the web and got the online community behind me, I got a five-book deal with Crown Publishing and [his novel] ‘Infected’ was later optioned for a movie.”

You can sign up for his free podcasts at his website, www.scottsigler.com. Even if you’re not interested in sci-fi, it’s worth having a look to see how well (and successfully) he’s doing self-marketing.

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The Strangest Pen in the World (Sunday Oddity)

This isn't April 1st, so I have to assume this is a real news item:

"London, January 15 (ANI): Consumer electronics company Philips has developed a pen that can help reveal a writers true emotional state during writing.

Sensors in the pen help perform this task by detecting physiological factors like heartbeat, blood pressure, skin temperature, and finger pressure.

A small actuator has been installed in the pen, which can change the properties of the line it traces out by switching inks and modifying the shape of the writing tip.

The writers emotional state is then determined by a built-in chip, which changes the colour and quality of the trace accordingly.

“Signatures are currently always the same, yet some documents will be signed with enthusiasm, others possibly with hesitation. Having a recording of this could be useful for historical reasons,” New Scientist magazine quoted Philips as saying.

Just in case, a writer does not want his/her true feelings expressed, an on-off switch on the pen may be used to inactivate this function."

Look Who's Writing for the Internet

I received a message from the Writers Guild today, saying they have concluded an independent agreement with a company called Media Rights Capital. What’s interesting is what’s revealed about some of the activity going with original content for the web. Here’s part of the statement:

“Though not a household name, MRC is an independent film, television, and digital studio with backing from significant institutional investors, including Goldman Sachs and AT&T. Most importantly, they have over a dozen original made-for-the-Internet properties with many more to come. This is a significant signing in that it hails the paradigm shift to original content for new media, produced and distributed under a WGA contract without the involvement of a major studio or network.

This deal began as an effort to get Family Guy's Seth MacFarlane and his writers a WGA contract on fifty webisodes which are being produced for Google. It quickly developed into a negotiation with MRC that would cover all of its Internet content (including projects with Larry David, Gordon Ramsay, and Second City), as well as a full slate of independently financed feature films and television series.”

It suggests that a lot of big players are getting interested—which means we should be, too.

(My book, "Your Writing Coach," includes a chapter on writing for the new media. It's published by Nicholas Brealey Publishing and available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other outlets. You can also get tips and techniques for being more creative and productive by signing up for our free monthly Brainstorm ebulletin by request to [email protected])

Need Ideas for Stories or Plots? Try a Metaphor!

Sometimes writers tell me that they want to write a script that explores an important but familiar theme and want to know what they can do to make it appealing to the marketplace. One solution is to create a metaphor for the theme and build your script (or novel) around it.

For instance, the theme of E.T. is love and friendship. The thematic elements could all have been done in a much more conventional way—for instance, the boy could have befriended another kid, maybe a foreigner, who moves into the neighborhood. For the danger element, maybe this kid’s father is trying to kidnap him to take him away from the mother, who gained sole custody. That could have been an excellent film, but would it have had the same success? Probably not.

One master of this technique was Rod Serling, with the old “Twilight Zone.” They used sci-fi metaphors for many important themes such as racism, the pressure to conform, and the concept of beauty and ugliness. If you want to explore this, get a DVD of the original “Twilight Zone” episodes—they’re still brilliant.

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Do You Get the Winter Creative Blues?

I love living in London, but I always find the grey winters a challenge. Like a lot of people, I suffer from the winter blues, now known more formally as Seasonal Affective Disorder. If you feel depressed and low-energy during these short days, maybe you do as well. Here are the solutions I'm trying:

1) A SAD Lamp. This is a high-intensity light that you keep near you (you don't look directly into it) for 30-90 minutes in the morning. The idea is simulating the kind of light that you'd get in the summer affects your brain chemistry in a positive manner.

2) St. John's Wort supplement. This is very popular, especially in Germany, as an anti-depressant, and is available over the counter from health food stores and drug stores/chemists.

3) Vitamin D supplement. Your body makes Vitamin D when exposed to sunshine, but many doctors believe that it's beneficial to take a supplement during the winter months.

(Disclaimer: I'm not a doctor and you should consult your own before making any decisions about supplements to take.)

4) Exercise. Even light exercise (no pun intended...) has been shown to help people suffering from depression. Of course it's hard to motivate yourself when you're low energy, so if you can't manage a visit to the gym, at least take a walk.

5) On days when you feel like doing nothing creative...do at least a little. That alone can lift your spirits.

Good luck--and remember, Spring is on the way!

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Advice I'd Never Give You About Writing a Novel

I ran across some unusual and, to me, kind of shocking advice about writing novels the other day. It was offered by Megan Davidson, Staff Editor at SterlingHouse, which is a vanity press about which there are several warnings on the internet. But the legitimacy of the company is not the point of this post; rather, I'm referring to the fact that she is strongly telling novelists NOT to write cinematically. Here is part of what she says:

"What is Cinematic Writing and What are its Hallmarks? The cinematic point of view is an attempt to mimic the point of view of a camera, as well as the general style of a movie, in written form. Such a POV is usually not well suited to a novel, as it adds a great deal of distance between the reader and the characters, and draws attention to the fact that writing is an artifice. These factors inhibit the writer’s ability to create three-dimensional characters capable of influencing the events of the plot. We strongly do not recommend the cinematic POV for the beginning novelist. Fortunately, it has a number of specific hallmarks, which are really filming techniques, adapted to writing; these can be easily recognized and avoided. The result of the following techniques is to give POV to the eye of an invisible camera, not to a character or narrator.

1. Zooms – Cinematic writers might “zoom in” on some detail, such as a character’s face, to describe it intensely for no apparent reason. “The lines on her face tightened as her lips inched upward into a smile.” [JW: of course I agree that nothing in your novel should be there for no apparent reason, but sometimes there is a very good reason for "zooming in."]

2. Pull backs – In this, the opposite of a zoom, the POV seems to draw back from a scene to reveal a foreground, a middle ground and a background. “The old man stood by a hut, surrounded by brush and weeds, with tall pines rising in the background. The Rocky Mountains loomed in the distance.” [JW: Yes, not a thrilling example, but surely there are times when it makes sense to put your character's position in the setting into perspective?]

3. Pans – POV might pan across a scene as a movie camera would, from left to right or top to bottom, as the camera records the setting. “The waterfall began at the top of a high cliff. The splashing water hit a large boulder about halfway down the precipice, then plunged into a pool at the base of the cliff.” [JW: Again, not great writing but I don't see anything wrong with the principle when setting a scene.]

4. Cuts – Scenes shift abruptly from one to the next, without transitions, or bridges, which help readers comprehend a new setting. Cutting to scenes works in a movie, where visual images provide a continuum, but not in a novel. " [JW: In some of best thrillers I've read, the authors use this technique to great effect.]

She goes on for a while more. Of course everybody is entitled to an opinion, but I can't help worrying about the beginning writers who will--in MY opinion, anyway--be misled by this kind of advice.

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The Future of the Westerner

In an interview in the Denver Post, Diana Ossana, who with Larry McMurtry adapted "Brokeback Mountain" and more recently the TV mini-series "Comanche Moon," was asked about the future of the Westerner as a character in fiction. Here's what she said:

"The Westerner will always be with us, in one form or another, since it's such a vital part of America's history. The notion of an adventurous loner, free of restriction, a risk-taker, someone who lives by the seat of his pants, so to speak, is integral to the romantic notion, right or wrong, of what it means to be a man in this country that it continues to exist in both literature and film: war stories; spy stories; stories about space and astronauts; even historical works, as in Ridley Scott's "Gladiator," or the neurotic criminals in "The Sopranos." And even the couple in "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" — a sort of contemporary version of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." . . . The Westerner will never disappear entirely from our consciousness."

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Writing Slow or Blocked? Check When You're Ringing Your Bell

In an interview with Chet Holmes, writer and teacher Paul Scheele mentions a demonstration he does in his workshops. He sends a couple of people out of the room and the rest of the group decides on a simple task they want each of the people to perform (for example, going to the flip chart and writing something on it). When the first person comes in, Scheele rings a bell every time the person does something wrong. The result is that the person freezes and gets into a highly-anxious state and often never figures out what he’s supposed to do. With the second person, he rings the bell when the person does something right, and the result usually is that she figures out the desired behaviour and does so without any anxiety.

Regarding your writing, when are you ringing your own bell?

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J. J. Abrams Explains the Mystery Box (Sunday Entertaining Viewing: 18 mins.)

On the TED site, writer/director/producer J. J. Abrams, the creator of “Alias,” “Lost,” and the upcoming “Cloverfield” feature film, talks about the mystery box. It’s a funny, entertaining examination of the role of mystery and possibility in the creative process.

Among other things he talks about withholding information from the audience, which (in my opinion) “Lost” practices to a fault… He includes clips from “Lost,” “Jaws,” and “Mission Impossible III,” to illustrate his points.

Watch it by clicking here.

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The Only Right Writing Style

In his company’s newsletter, Gregg Thompson, President of Bluepoint Leadership Development, writes about what needs to change for someone who wants to be a better leader, but it struck me that some of his points apply equally well to anyone who wants to be a better writer. Here's one:

“Be distinctively you. What would you get if you could put all of the leadership qualities of Bill Gates, Gandhi, Mother Theresa, George Washington, Jack Welch and Winston Churchill into one individual? Probably a bland, non-descript person indistinguishable in the crowd. These men and women made a difference because they had the courage to be themselves. Have you forgotten who you really are? What excites you these days? What are your passions? Your obsessions? Where do you want to make your mark? When you are at your best, what are you doing? Maybe it’s time to figure out what is most important to you, tell everyone around you, and let this fuel your leadership.”

If you make the last phrase “fuel your writing,” that also makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?

His whole article is here (you may need to scroll down that page a bit to get to it).

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New Media Writing: A Story Two Minutes Long and 120 Minutes Wide

Here is a link to a video of Bob Greenberg, founder of the ad agency R/GA, talking about creativity. What I find interesting in this brief clip is his reference to the idea of a story that is two minutes long and 120 minutes wide.

What he means is that an ad might be two minutes long but linked to two hours' worth of content. The same may apply to lots of different kinds of content.

He also refers to the fact that very few people understand both storytelling and the new technology--the implication is that if you can handle both, you have a bright future.

Show or Tell--Don't Show AND Tell (says Jesse James)

I recently saw the “Jesse James” film starring Brad Pitt. It looks fantastic and Pitt, Casey Affleck and all the others do a terrific job. So why is the movie so annoying? It’s the voice-over. Leaving aside its pretentious tone, half the time it’s telling us things we are seeing on the screen.

I know the picture has a lot of fans and there are aspects of it I really liked, but that voice-over drove me nuts and several friends said it really bothered them, too.

The moral of the story isn’t that you shouldn’t use voice-overs but that if you do use them, they should add something that the viewer can’t get from what's on the screen.

Also, consider the fact that we like to figure things out, so telling us everything isn’t necessarily a good idea. For a brilliant example of leaving things for the audience to fill in themselves, see the film “Savages.” It’s a bit grim but beautifully written and for days afterward leaves you thinking about what wasn’t spelled out.

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