Time to Write

William Faulkner on how to be a good novelist

This is from the Paris Review Spring 1956 issue, an interview with William Faulkner:

INTERVIEWER

Is there any possible formula to follow in order to be a good novelist?

FAULKNER

Ninety-nine percent talent . . . ninety-nine percent discipline . . . ninety-nine percent work. He must never be satisfied with what he does. It never is as good as it can be done. Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.

 

Why write science fiction? (Ray Bradbury's answer)

This is from the Paris Review interview with Ray Bradbury:

"Science fiction is the fiction of ideas. Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves. Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

Imagine if sixty years ago, at the start of my writing career, I had thought to write a story about a woman who swallowed a pill and destroyed the Catholic Church, causing the advent of women’s liberation. That story probably would have been laughed at, but it was within the realm of the possible and would have made great science fiction. If I’d lived in the late eighteen hundreds I might have written a story predicting that strange vehicles would soon move across the landscape of the United States and would kill two million people in a period of seventy years. Science fiction is not just the art of the possible, but of the obvious. Once the automobile appeared you could have predicted that it would destroy as many people as it did."

INTERVIEWER :Does science fiction satisfy something that mainstream writing does not? 

"Yes, it does, because the mainstream hasn’t been paying attention to all the changes in our culture during the last fifty years. The major ideas of our time—developments in medicine, the importance of space exploration to advance our species—have been neglected. The critics are generally wrong, or they’re fifteen, twenty years late. It’s a great shame. They miss out on a lot. Why the fiction of ideas should be so neglected is beyond me. I can’t explain it, except in terms of intellectual snobbery." 

 

How to start writing a novel (well, how James Ellroy does it)

This is from an interview with crime writer James Ellroy in the Paris Review, 

"I begin by sitting in the dark. I used to sleep on the living-room couch. There was a while when that was the only place I felt safe. My couch is long because I’m tall, and it needs to be high backed, so I can curl into it. I lie there and things come to me, very slowly."

INTERVIEWER: What happens after the sitting-in-the-dark phase?

"I take notes: ideas, historical perspective, characters, point of view. Very quickly, much of the narrative coheres. When I have sufficient information—the key action, the love stories, the intrigue, the conclusion—I write out a synopsis in shorthand as fast as I can, for comprehension’s sake. With the new novel, Blood’s a Rover, this took me six days. It’s then, after I’ve got the prospectus, that I write the outline.

The first part of the outline is a descriptive summary of each character. Next I describe the design of the book in some detail. I state my intent at the outset. Then I go through the entire novel, outlining every chapter. The outline of Blood’s A Rover is nearly four hundred pages long. It took me eight months to write. I write in the present tense, even if the novel isn’t written in the present tense. It reads like stage directions in a screenplay. Everything I need to know is right there in front of me. It allows me to keep the whole story in my mind. I use this method for every book."

 

On not taking it all too seriously -- by woody allen

This is an excerpt of an interview the Paris Review did with Woody Allen:

"...I like to stay home and write. I’ve always felt that if they told me tomorrow I couldn’t make any more films, that they wouldn’t give me any more money, I would be happy writing for the theater; and if they wouldn’t produce my plays, I’d be happy just writing prose; and if they wouldn’t publish me, I’d still be happy writing and leaving it for future generations. Because if there’s anything of value there, it will live; and if there’s not, better it shouldn’t. That’s one of the nice things about writing, or any art; if the thing’s real, it just lives. All the attendant hoopla about it, the success over it or the critical rejection—none of that really matters. In the end, the thing will survive or not on its own merits. Not that immortality via art is any big deal. Truffaut died, and we all felt awful about it, and there were the appropriate eulogies, and his wonderful films live on. But it’s not much help to Truffaut. So you think to yourself, My work will live on. As I’ve said many times, rather than live on in the hearts and minds of my fellow man, I would rather live on in my apartment.

I find funny and silly the pompous kind of self-important talk about the artist who takes risks. Artistic risks are like show-business risks—laughable. Like casting against type, wow, what danger! Risks are where your life is on the line. The people who took risks against the Nazis or some of the Russian poets who stood up against the state—those people are courageous and brave, and that’s really an achievement. To be an artist is also an achievement, but you have to keep it in perspective. I’m not trying to undersell art. I think it’s valuable, but I think it’s overly revered. It is a valuable thing, but no more valuable than being a good schoolteacher, or being a good doctor."

Writing advice you might not like (from Michael Frayn)

Should you pigeon-hole yourself? Novelist and playwright Michael Frayn says yes, if you want to be successful. This is an excerpt of an interview with him in The Paris Review:

"Let me say for a start that I don’t think it is a very good idea to write different sorts of things. If I were to give serious practical advice to a young writer about how to succeed I would say, Write the same book, or the same play, over and over again, just very slightly different, so that people get used to it. It takes some time, but if you do it often enough, finally people will get the hang of it, and get familiar with it, and they’ll like it. Then you go on producing a consistent product and you’ll have a market for it. Because the consumer of books or plays, including myself, very reasonably wants to know or have some idea in advance what the book or the play is going to be like. It is the same as buying breakfast cereal: if you buy a packet of cornflakes, you want to be sure it will contain cornflakes and not muesli. It is very irritating if the packet doesn’t contain what you expected it to contain. Similarly it is a reasonable demand from the theatergoer or novel reader that he should get a constant product, which is identified by the author’s brand name.

If I could have done this, I would have. But I don’t have much control over what I produce. All I can do is to write the stories that come to me. And what a story is, is in part the way of telling it. A story is not an event in the outside world—it consists in the telling. It is only when you think that you have found a way of telling the story that you can start writing it. Different stories naturally suggest different ways of telling them. If I had been better organized as a writer, I would have gone beyond the stories’ dictates and imposed my own central imprint on everything."

Actually, even though it goes against our creative instincts, I agree with his advice from a career standpoint. Once you've established yourself in one genre, you can fight to expand your reach--and it will be a fight, but it's possible. Some authors handle this by using different pen names. Graham Greene did it by labeling some of his novels "entertainments" to distinguish them from the books he considered more serious. 

 

How to use scenario planning in your writing

GBN is a think tank located in California with the specialty of scenario-planning. They consider several ways that an industry or a government or any component of society might develop. The emphasis is on "several" because nobody can predict the future with any accuracy. A smart government, company or individual is prepared for a variety of possible futures. 

For instance, GBN came up with four possible futures for how technology impacts international development (this is from a report they did for the Rockefeller Foundation--if you're a science fiction writer this might be inspirational):

LOCK STEP: A world of tighter top-down government control, with limited innovation and growing citizen pushback.

CLEVER TOGETHER: A world in which highly coordinated and successful strategies emerge for addressing both urgent and entrenched worldwide issues.

HACK ATTACK: An economically unstable and shock-prone world in which governments weaken, criminals thrive, and dangerous innovations emerge.

SMART SCRAMBLE: A economically depressed world in which individuals and communities develop localized, makeshift solutions to a growing set of problems.

This isn't just for science fiction writers, anybody can use this method to explore a story before deciding which way to go. Often we start with a general idea and lock in too early. By deciding to explore at least 3 or 4 possible directions for our story we may come up with something more interesting.

For instance, let's say that I start with the idea of a revenge story. A man's son is killed by a hit-and-run driver and he plots to get revenge. One direction is that he kills the driver.

What alternative scenarios come to mind for after he's done it? 

* Maybe he feels good about it and decides to right other wrongs by becoming a vigilante in other cases

* Maybe he feels guilty and seeks redemption

* Maybe he finds out that there was a mistake--the man he killed wasn't the driver, he was taking the rap for someone else

One way to explore this is with a kind of mind map in which each branch represents a possible development and then each of those branches out in further options, so that you end up with a large number of possibilities.

This is especially good for writers (like me) who love characters and dialogue and find plotting more challenging. We tend to lock into a story too quickly sometimes because we're itching to get to the part we enjoy more. By doing that, we may miss some great story opportunities--and scenario planning offers us a useful tool.

(For lots of practical advice on how to create great stories and characters, see my book, "Your Writing Coach," available from Amazon and other online and offline booksellers.)

Stop! Pause... Think... Relax... (Why your head is too fat)

Writers need to feed their brains, but could it be that the obesity epidemic also applies to our heads?

The New York Times reports that we may be stopping ourselves from processing and remembering information if we don't take some time away from constant stimulation. The article by Matt Richtel, says:

“Almost certainly, downtime lets the brain go over experiences it’s had, solidify them and turn them into permanent long-term memories,” said Loren Frank, assistant professor in the department of physiology at the university, where he specializes in learning and memory. He said he believed that when the brain was constantly stimulated, “you prevent this learning process.”

 Activities like exercising, taking a walk, or waiting for a bus or train used to give us time to think about nothing in particular. Now it's rare to see someone doing any of these without listening to music, texting, phoning, playing a game on their phone, or some combination of those.

 One person they interviewed who found himself constantly checking his phone made a very astute observation. "It's become a demand," he said. "Not a demand of my customer, but a demand of my head."

 I think that's a key point--we may feel that others demand that be contactable 24/7, but do they really? Or does it just make us feel more important to think so? Would we be any less successful if we just took a walk, noticed the trees and the other people passing by, or let our minds wander where they will? I wish I had time to ponder that, but it's been almost two minutes since I checked my email.

 

Why every writer needs a story (in addition to the one they're telling)

More and more businesses are recognizing the importance of having an appealing story. On his Influential Marketing Blog, Rohit Bhargava looked at the ways the website Gilt.com has become successful (it offers luxury goods at a discount). One element they highlighted is that Gilt.com actually has a section of each product page called "Backstory." Here's what iMediaConnection said about this:

 "Every product sold on Gilt.com has a backstory which is almost as important as the product itself. Why? Because when it comes to many luxury products, there is an inherent need from the customers to have a shareable story that they can tell to others along with the products they purchase. It is not about buying a blender. It is about buying a blender from a Belgian company that has been making them since 1930, and that you cannot find in any retail store near you."

It can be very useful for writers to have their owns stories--personal ones, I mean, that will help the media pigeon-hole you.

Yes, that's right--I'm suggesting you cooperate in having the media put you into a box. If you don't, they won't bother with you and your work will not get the attention it deserves.

Here are some examples:

J. K. Rowling - single mother struggling to get her book written early mornings in a cafe with her pram next to her. Before "Harry Potter" really took off and became the story itself, this was a hook that appealed to the media.

Carl Hiaasen - reporter who puts his eco-values into hilarious crime novels--all set in Florida, the state whose destruction he laments.

 Jackie Collins - glamourous writer who lives the trashy Hollywood lifestyle she writes about.

 Notice that these are all (more or less) true stories. It's not about faking something--you'll be found out and be discredited (which can also become a story and some people come back from that one, too). But ideally it's about looking carefully at your background and experience and teasing out the elements that make a good authentic story.

 My example: the story behind a lot of my goal-related activities, like the Writing Breakthrough Strategy Program (see www.jurgenwolff.com), stem from the fact that some years ago my house burned down and shortly thereafter I landed in the hospital with a potentially life-threatening condition (blood clot). That caused me to reassess my life and make some big changes. It also led me to do that reassessment every couple of years without needing a catastrophe to prod me, and to helping others decide what's really important to them and going for it. (I haven't really used that story much in my marketing--like many writers, I'm shy about trading on stuff like that...but we have to get over it!).

 If your story is directly relevant to what you've written, so much the better--for instance, my friend Janice Day wrote a book called "Getting It Off My Chest" about how her experience of breast cancer led her to change her life. 

 If you don't have a story, you can create one--again, authentically, not by pretending something's happened that didn't. For instance, somebody was the first person to Twitter an entire novel, sentence by sentence--that became the story. 

 Right about now you may be thinking, "Wait a minute, shouldn't the real story be the merits of the book? Shouldn't good writing get attention without the need for stunts or stories about the author's life?"

 I agree, and when you find a door to that world, let me know and I'll join you. For now, we're stuck in the real world. Here, a story draws attention to your writing--and THEN it can rise or fall based on the reactions of people who read it. 

 So....what's YOUR story?

(PS: I'm writing this on Christmas Day...do you think maybe Christianity has lasted this long because--whether or not you believe it to be literally true--it has a great story?)

 

A different way for writers to look at "what if"

In SciFi magazine, the writers of "Cowboys & Aliens," Alex Kurtzman and Robero Orci, said this about the structure of their film:

 "There were several times during shooting that it occurred to us that if we didn't have a story that could continue without the aliens landing, we didn't really have a story. So this movie should be able to continue without the sci-fi interrupting it. You can't just rely on the sci-fi to save you from the fact that you couldn't figure out what the story should have been, had this other thing not interfered."

I think that's a great point in terms of adding depth to a story. Most films start with some situation that is interrupted by something unexpected--the protagonist finds out he's terminally ill, or her child is kidnapped, or they witness a crime, or even just that Crazy Uncle Eddie comes to live with them.

The standard "what if" question is what if one of these things happened?

The different "what if" is what if these things hadn't happened? What if these characters' lives had continued the way they were going?

If there was something going on before that interruption, that is then affected by the new development, it will feel less like the people were just waiting for something dramatic to happen.

For instance, I'm in the very early stages of a project in which the protagonist undergoes some major physical and mental changes. What was happening before that was that his family life was falling apart. He was so involved in his work that his marriage was faltering and he was distant with his teen-age son. Now I'm also thinking through what would have happened in his work life and his relationship with his business partner. Knowing what would have happened should make what does happen more authentic as well.

 My guess is that in many cases of writer's block, thinking about this would be a help.

 (If you're interested in screenwriting, have a look at my other blog, at www.ScreenWritingSuccess.com)

 

The fictional best seller

Have you seen the TV series, Castle? It's a pleasant ABC detective show in which a mystery writer teams up with a real detective and solves cases. Somebody had the bright idea of publishing mystery novels under the name of the fictional character, Richard Castle. 

The first one, "Naked Heat," sold more than 200,000 and got onto the New York Times best-seller list. The new one, "Heat Wave" (do you detect a pattern here?) looks like it will better those numbers. 

I don't know the moral of the story for us writers. Maybe it's to get your own TV series or ghost for a character who does. Hmm, maybe the Simon Cowell Mysteries (the main one is what does he do with all that money?).

(To get tips on writing your own book, get mine: Your Writing Coach, published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon and other online and offline booksellers. Why not ask your favorite local bookshop to order it for you?)

Hockney shows you how to keep your artistic spirit alive

One of the reasons that David Hockney has kept the attention of the art world is that he's open to trying new things.

 For a while, he experimented with Polaroid pictures taking advantage of the fact that for a short time after the picture came out of the camera you could squish and squash it to distort the image.

 Now the 73-year-old has been using his iPhone and an app called Brushes to create original artwork. 

 The New York Review of Books reported in 2009, "Over the past six months, Hockney has fashioned literally hundreds, probably over a thousand, such images, often sending out four or five a day to a group of about a dozen friends, and not really caring what happens to them after that."

 It quoted Hockney talking about this new medium: "It’s always there in my pocket, there’s no thrashing about, scrambling for the right color. One can set to work immediately, there’s this wonderful impromptu quality, this freshness, to the activity; and when it’s over, best of all, there’s no mess, no clean-up. You just turn off the machine. Or, even better, you hit Send, and your little cohort of friends around the world gets to experience a similar immediacy. There’s something, finally, very intimate about the whole process."

 If you happen to be in Paris at the moment you can see an exhibition of some of these works on 40 screens--20 iPhones and 20 iPads at the Berge-St. Laurent Foundation. 

 More importantly, I think this demonstrates an open mindedness that keeps an artist young in spirit. ...What new idea or method can you play with to create your creativity?

(Want to be more creative? Get my book, "Creativity Now!"--it includes 75 specific methods plus 25 great case studies. You can get it as Amazon or your other favorite bookseller.)

 

Don't let your Inner Critic stop your flow (useful method)

Andy Shack had a useful tip on his blog a little while ago, aimed at writers whose inner critic interrupts their creative flow with demands that they fix any problems in their prose RIGHT NOW! 

The tip is to use a symbol like the hash tag or, since I don't have that one on my keyboard, the percentage sign: % to mark the spot you need to come back to when it's time to edit.

 For instance, if I'm writing something set in 1985 and have someone listening to the radio, instead of stopping to research what the hit songs were that year, I might write, "% was playing on the radio when Marcus came in."

When I'm ready to start going over it, I can use the "find" function in Word to locate all the % symbols and do whatever's necessary. 

 Simple and useful!

(There are a lot of useful tips in my book, "Your Writing Coach," published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon and other online and offline booksellers. See our site: www.YourWritingCoach.com)

What stands in the way of your goals--and how to overcome it

In the New York Times "money" section, Carl Richards wrote an article suggesting four ways to stop "gorging on gratification"--that is, spending money impulsively. We can apply these principles to anything that gets in the way of what we want to achieve. The goal could be following a diet, seeing a writing project through to completion, or--of course--spending. Here are the four ways and some ideas about how we could apply them in other contexts.

"1) Mandatory holding pattern. Before you buy something, stop. Add it to a list and let it sit for three days. Then, revisit the list."

We can use this whenever we are thinking of departing from what we have planned. Whenever possible put some time between the temptation and the the decision of whether or not to yield to it. It may not be three days--for instance, if you're on a diet and are tempted to order dessert, give it ten minutes before you decide. By the way, I use this strategy with book-buying--instead of ordering something from Amazon right away, I put it on my wish list and wait at least a few days before placing the order (and often I'll realize I don't really need that book). 

"2) Multi-week buying fast." The idea is to see how long you can go without spending any money beyond necessities.

If you find it too hard to go cold turkey in giving up the things that stand in the way of your progress, try a one-day procrastination fast. For instance, decide that for one day you will do your daily tasks in exactly the order of priority. Then go for one day a week. Then two days a week, and so on, until you're doing this every day.

"3) Tracking your spending."

 This works just as well for time as for money. When you see in harsh numbers how many hours you spend watching TV or on Facebook, it's easier to change.

"4) A price tag on your goals."

Figure out how many hours a day or week it will take you to do whatever your goal is--for instance, an hour a day of writing, or an hour a day of exercise. Before committing to a goal, decide whether or not it's worth that investment. If it is, then decide how you are going to "finance" it--that is, what you're doing now that you'll stop doing in order to find the time it requires. Also figure out any other costs, whether it's money or energy that's required.

(Reaching your goals is a process you can learn. Get help setting and achieving your goal with my Writing Breakthrough Strategy program--it includes weekly lessons, bi-weekly group phone calls, videos, audios, and much more. You'll find the details at www.jurgenwolff.com.- although many of the participants are writers, the process will work for you regardless of the type of goal you want to reach.)

How you can escape from the giant hairball

One of my favorite creativity books is "Orbiting the Giant Hairball" by the late Gordon MacKenzie. Here are some of his thoughts from a 1997 interview with Fast Company (a giant hairball is how he saw big corporations):

 "What does it take to be an orbiter?

You have to find your creative genius in such a way that you still have a relationship with concrete, established norms but are not bound by them. In the Humor Workshop, we had 12 people -- with 12 projects and 12 bosses at any one time. In addition to taking assignments, we studied Hallmark's card line for gaps and came up with original product categories -- like holiday yard signs, which became a strong seller.

Where do you begin to find this originality?

By knowing yourself. I know that's not the answer people want to hear -- because that's not easy to do. But that is the answer.

What is the biggest obstacle to creativity?

Attachment to outcome. As soon as you become attached to a specific outcome, you feel compelled to control and manipulate what you're doing. And in the process you shut yourself off to other possibilities."

Last year designer Scott Hull distilled the book down to its core advice on his Visual Ambassador blog. Here are four of the lessons he discerned:

 * Throughout our entire education and work careers, authority figures have worked to suppress our uniqueness and creativity. No authority figure will ever bless your own particular genius. Give up waiting for that to happen. Reject the status quo, embrace your creativity, be your own authority figure.

 * Allow yourself to play and to fly off on tangents. Every tangent won’t pay off, but tangents are the only place where the creativity and innovation happen.

 •Reject the busy man syndrome that measures importance and takes pride in how busy you can keep yourself. Reject seeking the stamp of approval you think you’ll achieve from your bosses and peers by being heroically overworked. Instead employ your skills to master your job and get it done faster and easier. Faster and smarter, not longer and harder.

 * Have the courage to challenge boundaries and at the same time (and deeply intertwined with) have the courage to admit to idiocy, impasse and the need for help."

 If you're ensnared in a giant hairball--whether corporate or one of your own making--this is a good time to plan to reach escape velocity! You can do it with my Writing Breakthrough Strategy Program--see www.jurgenwolff.com.

 

Is there an ad in your book's future?

The Wall Street Journal reports: "As e-books proliferate, advertisers are experimenting with ways to pitch to consumers while they read, a trend that could change the publishing business but faces opposition from some traditionalists. Marketers are exploring a variety of formats, including sponsorships that give readers free books. Videos, graphics or text with an advertiser's message that appear when a person first starts a book or along the border of the digital pages are also in the works. Ads can be targeted based on the book's content and the demographic and profile information of the reader."

This is slightly worrying. I can imagine reading a Sherlock Holmes e-book and being interrupted by a video of an actor playing Sherlock offering to sell me a brain-training DVD.

Too far-fetched?

Maybe.

So far, they are experimenting with an introduction and closing page, each with an ad; inserting ads between chapters (I'm starting to get depressed...) and targeted ads (Kafka readers might be offered a good deal on Prozac...). 

The article says many author contracts stipulate that the author must approve any ads. Might be worth making sure that's in your contract.

The factor that works against such ads being included is that most books don't sell enough copies to interest an advertiser. However, a publisher might agree to include an ad across a whole bunch of titles and build up the numbers that way. 

For authors, it's something to keep an eye on so it doesn't sneak up on us. It may be inevitable, but I think we need to fight to keep it from disrupting the reading experience; otherwise it'll go the way of American television, where you can barely blink before there's another ad break. 

(For more information on what you need to know about writing and marketing your book, see my book, "Your Writing Coach," published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon and other online and offline booksellers.)