Time to Write

What Garrison Keillor says about rewriting

What Garrison Keillor has learned about rewriting

In an interview on the tompeters.com site, Garrison Keillor said this about what he’s learned about writing and rewriting:

“When you're young, you're so fond of what you have created, because it takes a lot of effort to extrude this onto the page or onto the screen. You're very fond of it, even if it's wounded and you're barely alive, you still have affection for it.

But as you get older, you learn how to throw it out without much thought, without much pity. You look at a piece that you've written, and you take those first three paragraphs, and you dump them. You just rip them out. Usually, that's the part that needs to be thrown out, the big windup, the big introduction. The first page almost always can go. You learn to do that without regret. I edit myself much more quickly and mercilessly now than I ever could have 20, 30 years ago.”

Here’s what he said about openings (he’s talking about a live presentation but I think it applies to the first paragraph or two of anything you write as well):

“I think anybody in the business knows that the first sentence out of your mouth, the first minute you have in front of an audience is crucial, absolutely crucial. The audience is going to give you the benefit of the doubt for at least a minute or two. So don't waste that.”

(Tips about capturing your readers' attention and other ways to make your writing compelling are in my book, "Your Writing Coach," published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon and other online and offline retailers. You may also want to check out my newest book, "Creativity Now!" which features 25 ways to get into a more creative state and 25 ways to generate ideas.)

What does it take to thrive as a writer?

In an interview at the innovation tools site, Daniel Pink, author of “Drive: the Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us,” says this about the future of work:

 

“It's non-routine. That is, you can't reduce it to script, a formula, an algorithm or a series of steps that lead to a correct answer. It's multi-disciplinary. It involves elements of design, empathy, and symphonic thinking. It's self-directed rather than "managed." And it's animated by a sense of purpose.”

 

What does it take to thrive in this kind of atmosphere? Pink says, “At the heart is a sense of intrinsic motivation - doing something not for the extrinsic rewards it brings, but for the inherent satisfaction of the task itself. Beyond that, it demands a sense of autonomy and self-direction as well as a yearning to get better at something that matters - all of which are pointed toward a cause larger than one's self."

Writers should do rather well in the future then--to have endurance in the face of rejection, we've already developed most of these qualities!

(But we do need inspiration from time to time, and that's why I produce my free monthly Brainstorm & Focus e-bulletin. You can get it by sending an email request to [email protected])

 

How to be creative - with a "Fedex" day

Are you having trouble finding time for your writing or other creative project? Would you like to gain some momentum? Try a method inspired by Australian software company Atlassian.

Four times a year they give their employees 24 hours to go and work on anything they want and report on what they did the next day. The “FedEx” label comes because they have to deliver something overnight. Pink says, “It turns out that those one-day bursts of intense, undiluted autonomy have produced more innovation and creativity than just about anything else the company has done.”

You can do this on your own, of course. Set aside a day and it may be useful to go to a different site or at the very least to cut off all outside communication so you can really focus. Make a commitment to report your results to a colleague (ideally, find someone who will do the same thing and report to each other). What will your FedEx breakthrough be?

(If you need support in working on a goal you'd like to achieve, check out my 60-day Breakthrough Strategy program. It includes weekly lessons, teleconferences, and support from me and the other participants. Check it out at www.jurgenwolff.com).

No excuses Monday 6: "I DON'T KNOW MY CHARACTERS WELL ENOUGH!"

You want to write a novel or a screenplay and you know the basic story, but the characters aren't coming alive. You don't know them well enough yet. What to do?

How do you get to know people in your real life? How do you know whether someone is generous or mean or decisive or timid?

By what they do. We judge people and really get to know them not so much by what they say but by their actions.

Someone may tell me, "Jim is a really nice guy," but if I have a coffee with Jim and I see that he's rude to the waitress, I think, "Hmm, Jim is a nice guy when it suits him but not when he has nothing to gain."

So here's the solution to not knowing your characters well enough: watch them in actlon.

Imagine your character in an interesting situation of some kind.

Let’s say, for instance, she’s driving and she sees an accident up ahead and there’s nobody else there. Would she stop and try to help, or would she get on the phone and call for help but drive by, or would she do nothing to help because she doesn’t want to get involved? 

Let your intuition tell you what she'd do. Your subconscious mind already knows--and now your conscious mind will, too.

It doesn’t matter that this scene is not in your story. Do that with a bunch of situations, eventually including ones you know will come up in your story.

Make notes. Jot down what you imagine the character saying and doing.

You can do the same for situations that involve two or more of your characters.

Pretty soon you'll find yourself writing scenes as though the characters are dictating them to you.

(There are more tips about developing your characters in my book, "Your Writing Coach," from Amazon or your other favorite online or offline retailer. A great way to continue is to be inspired by my free monthly Brainstorm creativity and productivity e-bulletin--just send an email request to [email protected]. And if you want more support than that, check out the two versions of my online coaching program (one group, one one-to-one)--details at jurgenwolff.com.)

Finding time to write

Writing on his blog at the Financial Times site, Tim Harford, author of “The Undercover Economist,” gave five tips for writing non-fiction. I think the most important one for anybody who has other commitments is:

 

“Keep the momentum going. At the moment, having done much of my research, I’m trying to do 300 words every day as a minimum. This low target means that no matter what other commitments I have, I have no excuse not to skim through what I wrote yesterday and add to it. This keeps morale high. It also means that when I can devote a full day to writing, I don’t have to spend hours reminding myself what I was thinking.”

 

This goes along with another one: “Write quickly but expect to do lots of rewriting.”

 

If you’ve mean meaning to write or started and have lost momentum, schedule the time when you can do that fast 300 words a day (or, before that, during the planning stage, at least 15 minutes for brainstorming, mind-mapping, etc.). Here are some options:

 

·      Get up 30 - 45 minutes a day earlier

·      Use 30 minutes of your lunch hour

·      Stay up 30 - 45 minutes later

·      Dedicate half a day each weekend

(There are lots of tips in my "Time Management for Writers and Other Creative People" ebook, which you will find at www.timetowrite.com/ebookone.html for instant download so you can start saving time for your writing right now!)

Finding your writing niche - what to write about

This morning I ran across an article giving tips for “Plotting the Category Christian Romance Novel” and it reminded me that there are all kinds of niches within publishing that you are never even aware of if you’re not in their target groups. (I wonder whether there are agnostic or atheist romance novels…actually, even Ayn Rand used romance elements in the novels she used to get her philosophy across, so I guess there are.)

 

Once in a while a book from one of these categories—like vampire romance—breaks into the mainstream, but most of the time they stay hidden to the majority of readers. That doesn’t mean there isn’t big money potential in them, however. Some of these titles sell in much bigger numbers than generic fiction.

 

It’s also a great advantage for the writer to be able to find his or her “tribe” online. What are the niches you fit into? Perhaps you've written non-fiction in those categories, but have you considered crafting fiction around them as well?

(Whatever kind of writing you want to do, you'll find practical information and friendly support in my book, "Your Writing Coach," published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon and other online and offline retailers.)

The long "overnight success" of the writer of the film, "Precious"

Geoffrey Fletcher, who adapted the novel "Precious" for the screen, told Vanity Fair about his slow rise to the top:

"I was always writing scripts, and I had made several shorts, before and after film school. But I worked a variety of temp positions over the years. I came close to having a short made into a feature film by John Singleton in 1996, and when it fell through, I sensed there was the possibility of an abyss to come, which there was."
 
How long was the abyss?

"About 11 years. In 2007, I was teaching directing and screenwriting at Columbia and N.Y.U., and I had the chance to meet Lee (Daniels). I showed him the short from 1996, Magic Markers, which drew on French new wave films and films from the Italian neorealist movement, and included dream sequences that translated well to the fantasy sequences in [Precious]. I was so excited about this project that I gave Lee the first 15 pages for free, and it happened from there."

 Fletcher adds, "But looking at those years now, to call it an abyss would be a disservice. All the years of struggling and knocking on doors, I wouldn’t trade it; it enabled me to be a better writer, and to identify with different characters more. And I never stopped writing. It provided a sense of hope, warded off the despair. I was doing all of the kinds of mental acrobatics you do to get through. But looking back, I do see more clearly that it was invaluable."

Of course, looking back on those years from a position of success is easier than looking forward not knowing if and when the success will come.

By the way, it must have been in Sapphire's contract with the film company  to make everybody say, "Based on the novel 'Push' by Sapphire" every time they mention the film--I've never heard of that before but good for her!

(It's vital to have support during those long waits for success--that's one reason I developed the Breakthrough Strategy Program. Get details of how it can help you move toward your goals, at www.jurgenwolff.com)

Can Twitter and Facebook help you be more creative?

The conventional wisdom is that Twitter, Facebook and others of their ilk are distractions and time-wasters. Writing in Wired, Brendan Koerner takes the opposite view:

"Regularly stepping back from the project at hand can be essential to success. And social networks are particularly well suited to stoking the creative mind...A random scrap of information can trigger just the right conceptual collision. It’s hard to know which scrap might do the trick, but that’s the beauty of social networks — they constantly produce potential sparks, for free."

Actually, I agree with that, but with the proviso that we set a time limit on such random wandering--otherwise it's all too easy to "wake up" an hour or two later.

I recommend setting a specific outcome. For instance, at the moment I'm trying to come up with some fresh ideas for promoting a new project that relates to fitness and health. I might set myself this outcome: "In the next 30 minutes, brainstorm as many ways as possible to promote this project, using Google images as the stimulus."

I would then set a timer, go to Google.com/images and type in a random word (maybe taken from a magazine) and brainstorm; if that word and its images don't yield anything, or anything further, then I do it again with the next word. You could also use Twitter posts, Facebook entries, photo sharing sites and anything else as a source of prompts--just keep your mind on the task.

If you do this, remember--no judging! Evaluation of the ideas will be a separate session.

Give it a try and let me know how you get on.

(Another way to be more creative is to check out the tips in my free monthly Brainstorm ebulletin. Just send an email request to [email protected])

Finally some good news re book piracy

Book Business Extra reports:

"Six global publishers—Bedford, Freeman and Worth Publishing Group, a subsidiary of Macmillan; Cengage Learning; Elsevier; John Wiley & Sons; The McGraw-Hill Companies; and Pearson Education—have obtained an injunction against Swiss-based file-sharing site Rapidshare.com. The judgment, handed down by a German court in Hamburg, ordered Rapidshare to implement measures to prevent illegal file-sharing of 148 copyright-protected works cited in a lawsuit filed Feb. 4 by the publishers.

The publishers in this case alleged that Rapidshare, which collects monthly fees from many of its users, encourages (through a variety of reward programs), facilitates and profits from the unauthorized uploading of content. The court ruled that Rapidshare must monitor its site to ensure copyrighted material is not being uploaded and to prevent unauthorized access to the material by its users. The company will be subject to substantial fines for noncompliance, according to a statement released by Wiley."

Rapidshare has been the main mechanism by which my books have been pirated, and I've seen hundreds of other books listed there illegally. My guess is that their next move will be to some country where it's harder to enforce such rulings, but we'll see. For the moment, it's a rare victory.

A most unusual writing partner

On the Inside Higher Ed blog, Peg Boyle Single pays a touching tribute to a most unusual writing partner, her (late) dog, Felix. Here's an excerpt:

"For 16 years he was my writing partner. When I didn’t want to get out of bed to face writing my dissertation, grants, articles, or, most recently, book, he gave me a reason to get out of bed. After a walk filled with squirrel chasing or romps in the deep Vermont snow, my lethargy was replaced by readiness, at least most of the time. The long hour-length walks that morphed into short hour-length walks gave me the time do to prewriting and framing in my mind. Since I had written the day before, the thoughts were still fresh. When I was getting sucked into writing binges and hypomania, a nudge on the leg by a cold, wet nose got me to take the regular breaks that I would have otherwise skipped, and so he helped to make my writing routine sustainable."

Proof that collaborators come in all shapes and sizes!

(Want to find a collaborator who doesn't have a wet nose? Find tips in my book, "Your Writing Coach," published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon and other online and offline retailers.)

No excuses Monday 5: "I'M TOO OLD/YOUNG TO START WRITING!"

I could give you a list of very old and very young people who have been successful writers, but you probably would say, “Yeah, but that’s just them, that’s not me.”

Instead, let me quote something Dear Abby said to a man who wrote to her saying he’d always wanted to be a doctor but had to go to work at a young age to support his family. Now he had the time and money to go to medical school, but, he said, “I’m already 50, so in seven years, when I’d finish, I’d be 57.”

Her answer was: “If you don’t go to medical school, how old will you be in seven years?”

The solution: If you want to write, write. In fact, do what you really want to do in all parts of your life. If you're not doing that, what are you waiting for?

In terms of writing, nobody cares how old you are, they only care whether your story is interesting.

If it is, you can be 10 or 100. 

Furthermore, being at any extreme of age will give your publisher a hook to help sell the book—so what you think of as a disadvantage may turn out to be an advantage.

Start now. You're not getting any younger.

(For support, join my 60-day Breakthrough Strategy Program, either the group version or the one-to-one. You'll find details at www.jurgenwolff.com.)

Why did Tim Burton's parents wall him in? (Well, it paid off...)

I met Tim Burton years ago when a friend who worked at Disney at the time and I pitched him an idea for a Halloween-themed script (this was pre-"Nightmare Before Christmas"). It never happened, one of the handful of near-misses that I still think about once in a while. He was extremely shy and polite--you could easily tell there was a lot more going in inside than outside. The Independent quotes him about his sense of isolation as a child and some rather strange experiences:

"Growing up, I had these two windows in my room, nice windows that looked out on to the lawn, and for some reason my parents walled them up and gave me this little slit window that I had to climb up on a desk to see out of. I never did ask them why. But my parents are dead now, so I guess the question will remain unanswered as to why they sealed me in a room."

He also says, "In movies you kind of work out your issues, but then you realise that those kind of traumatic issues stay with you forever so somehow they kind of keep recurring. No matter how hard I try to get them out of my head, they sort of stay there."

Probably that explains why he was drawn to his latest project, "Alice in Wonderland." He says, ""All these kinds of stories, whether it be The Wizard of Oz or Alice in Wonderland, are an internal journey. I think that's a fairly universal concept. These characters represent things inside the human psyche. I think that's what every child does. You try to work out problems as you go along. Same thing as an adult. Some people get therapy, some people get to make movies."

And some write.

My big fat Greek book

Today I got two copies of the Greek edition of my book, "Focus: the power of targeted thinking." Of course I can't read a word of it (other than my name) but it's still cool to think that somewhere in another part of the world somebody is reading my book and, I hope, getting some benefit from it.

It's the kind of thing that keeps you going in the face of that uphill battle of being a writer. (Just to bring a splash of cold water into the proceedings, the American publisher hasn't even bothered to put the US edition on the American Amazon site and greeted with a yawn my offer to help promote it  over there.)

However, there are also Dutch, Korean, Vietnamese, French and Portuguese editions in the works and that cheers me up.

Every writer's dirty little secret?

I find that artists often think very much like writers so it's interesting to hear their perceptions. Artists & Illustrators magazine recently featured the thoughts of painter Shani Rhys James, MBE. Here are couple of tidbits:

"My career started at 37, when my kids when to school. When you are younger, you tend to destroy more but when you are older you can walk off, have a cup of tea and come back."

I think this goes with getting to appreciate as you get older that not many things are black and white/ totally right or totally wrong/ totally good or totally bad.  I find it easier now to accept that some projects don’t work, some don’t work right now, and some will work only if I find a way to combine them with something else.

"As an artist you can look at things quite cooly. When something tragic happens, there is an element in you that always sees life as potential for a series of paintings. My father, for example, shot himself three years ago. I howled and cried but at the same time you're intrigued by the horror of it. It's awful but I thought it would be a wonderful beginning to a story."

I’m embarrassed to admit it but that’s happened to me, too—not my father shooting himself, fortunately, but some terrible events where a little segment of my brain was observing and taking notes while the rest was in pain.

Maybe this is every writer’s dirty little secret.

(The psychological aspects of the writer's life, including the 7 fears of writing and how to overcome them, are in my book, "Your Writing Coach," published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon and other online and offline retailers.)

She's not a thief, she's intertextual (the modern art of plagiarism)

Germany’s teen novelist Helene Hegemann’s story of sex and drugs in Berlin was a big hit, with 100,000 in print and a shower of critics’ praise. However, it turns out some of it is lifted from a novel called “Strobo,” which was based on the blog of the of a writer who prefers to remain anonymous so he won’t lose his job. That novel has sold only about 100 copies. 

So far, not so unusual. Every couple of years we hear a case of high-level plagiarism. 

Here’s the formula: 

“It was a research error.” 

Then some more examples are found, so next we get:

“I mixed up my notes.”

Then some more thievery is exposed. 

Next stop: breakdown and rehab.

And then comes the next book, which benefits from all the publicity that came with the exposure of the plagiarism in the first one.

What’s unusual this time is that, according to a story in the Independent, Miss Hegemann isn’t denying anything: “Interviewed last week about the charges, Ms Hegemann's defence was simply ‘I cannot understand what all the fuss is about.’ 

While she acknowledges that she used numerous ‘sources’ for her book, she also claims that she is a member of a different generation of writers which is used to adapting and using the abundance of information available online for its own creative purposes. 

‘I remember sentences my friends tell me just as much as I take on the ideas of the Slovenian critical theorist Slavoj Zizek,’ she told Der Spiegel, which described her as a ‘know-all’. ‘I went everywhere I could find inspiration,’ she said about her book, and added: ‘There is no such thing as originality anyway, there is just authenticity.’”

Gosh, now I see I was wrong to blame the person who tried to steal my wallet a few years ago. She was just from a generation that is inspired by the abundance of money available in other people’s pockets. I was a source, not a victim.

As I said, the next step usually is that more examples of plagiarism are found. Miss H and her publishers have anticipated this by declaring, “this novel follows the aesthetic principle of intertextuality and may contain further excerpts.” They admitted she had taken 20 excerpts from the other book word for word, and there are at least another 20 passages ‘inspired’ in the same way. The fourth edition of her book will include a list of her “sources.”

Personally, I think Miss H is wasting her time with books. Her explanations suggest she's ready for a career in politics.