Time to Write

How to get better at writing descriptions (advanced - 3 of 3)

An advanced method of getting better at writing descriptions is to choose an author you admire and study how they do it. I call this an advanced form because the goal is not to imitate what they do, but to absorb it. That will happen over time and your brain will transform what you learn into your own style of description, not just an imitation of someone else's style.

Let's look at an example. This is an early paragraph from Hilary Mantel's novel, "A Change of Climate." Ten-year-old Kit has just walked into the kitchen to find a woman named Joan cutting her wrists over the sink:

"The woman allowed herself to be led to a chair at the kitchen table. Kit pulled a clean tea-towel out of a drawer and wrapped it around Joan's wrist. The towel was a checked one, red and white; Joan's reluctant blood seeped black against the cloth. Her cuts were light, early, indecisive: the practice cuts. 'Just wiggle your fingers,' Kit said. 'make sure you haven't done any damage.' The woman looked down at her hand in dry-eyed dread, while the child scrambled on a stool and brought down a box from a cupboard."

I like the simplicity of her descriptions. "Reluctant" blood already tells us the cuts are not deep, and that's confirmed by the trio of adjectives: "light, early, indecisive." "Dry-eyed dread" tells us that the woman is going through the motions, she's not hysterical.

Also notice the lack of descriptions of the girl. What we know is that she is handing this situation very calmly and maturely. That makes us wonder who she is and why she's so capable--we want to continue reading to find out, which is the goal of all writing, to make the reader keep reading.

To be aware of an author's descriptive techniques you really have to read a book at least twice, once for enjoyment, the second time to be aware of how she creates the effects she employs. 

 

How to get better at writing descriptions (part 2 of 3)

In the previous post I suggested spending one minute several times a day to jot down what you see and hear and any feelings these prompt. This helps us to be more aware.

The next step is coming up with ways to describe what we see, hear and feel. We can do this by straightforward description or similes or metaphors

Here's a key part of the process: don't be afraid to be crappy. It's a step on the road to being good. 

Take your notes from one of your one-minute sessions and turn a few of the sights and sounds and feelings into fuller descriptions. Again, don't try to make them good yet, just get a few down. Here are some examples to describe the unseen singing bird I mentioned:

 * a ruthlessly cheerful bird 

* a bird calling a mate that's obviously busy elsewhere

* a singing sentinel 

* singing like a freelance greeter

* like a party guest too loud for the room

* makes me yearn for a slingshot (bird lovers: not really, this is fiction!)

See, some of those are awful. That's good!

I think the best way to lose your self-consciousness about descriptions is to write loads of them and not berate yourself for the bad ones.

We've been doing this as an exercise, but you can do the same when you're writing a description in your short story or novel. Just close your eyes, imagine what you--or your character--would see, hear, smell and taste. Open your eyes and jot down as many as you can. Then decide which would be most useful to describe for the reader, generate several options for each, and pick the best ones.

In the next post we'll look at an advanced exercise that will help you develop your style.

(For more writing tips, get my book, "Your Writing Coach," published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon and other online and offline booksellers.)

 

How to get better at writing descriptions (part one of three)

I confess: after years of writing scripts, my ability to write good descriptions has diminished. As scriptwriters all we have to do is write, "Interior. Fancy restaurant - Day, and the set designer takes care of everything else. Obviously that's not good enough when writing prose. So how can we improve our ability to write descriptions?

One good strategy is the Concentrated Attention Span Exercise. It takes only one minute but it's good to do it several times a day:

Wherever you are, take one minute to jot down everything you SEE, HEAR, SMELL, TASTE and FEEL. Seeing and hearing are obvious. What I mean by "feel" simply is what feelings do any of these sights and sounds prompt in you?

Don't worry about making this readable by anybody but you. You're not writing to be read, these are notes and in fact the notes are not as important as what you'll gain simply by doing this. 

I'm sitting in my home office at the moment. What I HEAR includes: a bird singing, the rush of traffic on Gower Street, a clock ticking, a horn beeping, my ears ringing, my own breathing, brakes, an ambulance siren… (for this one it can help to close your eyes).

 These are not good descriptions yet--we're just on step one: making a habit of being aware of what's around us that we might choose to describe.

 In the next post we'll look at how to go from awareness to description.

(Find more writing tips galore in my book, "Your Writing Coach," available from Amazon and other online and offline booksellers.)

 

Good advice for pitching--and for life

When I lived in Hollywood I used to attend courses at the Sherwood Oaks Experimental College. I just ran into a blog post on Gideon's Screenwriting Tips in which the College's founder, Gary Shusett, shares some tips for pitching. The one that I think is perhaps most important--and least intuitive:

"The goal is to have the person you are pitching to ask questions and do most of the talking after your first 20-second to 2-minute pitch."

I say this is not intuitive because usually you think that a pitch is about you selling someone on your idea. In fact, the goal is to make them believe it's now not your idea but yours AND theirs. Usually you will be pitching to someone who has to, in turn, sell the idea to someone else. This is true for producers, editors, and others.  Only when they have bought into it will they get excited about it and promote it. 

If they offer a suggestion of an element to incorporate into your project, don't reject it even if your brain is screaming 'no, no, no!" (Well, not unless it's TOTALLY insane, which does sometimes happen.)

Instead, embrace it if you like it, embrace it if it's neutral (makes the story neither better nor worse), and if you think it probably won't work, say "that's an interesting alternative." Don't panic. Between this first discussion and the finished project so many things will change that this early suggestion probably will fall by the wayside anyway. 

In my title I said this is good advice for life as well. I used to think it's all about impressing other people with your talent or your achievements. The older I get, the more I realize it's about collaboration--not necessarily formal, but in terms of paying attention to and linking with what people want and what they feel, and finding common ground when possible. That requires listening as well as talking.

(PS: that's why your comments are always welcome.)

 

What part of your writing to cut (& what not to write in the first place)

On her blog, successful Young Adult author Kiersten White ("Paranormalcy") offers several tips on pacing. One is:

"Cut out the first chapter… The first chapter of the first draft is for the writer, not the reader. You're figuring out the voice and setting up the world/character for yourself. Most of the time (at least this was true with many of my early books) the story doesn't really start until chapter two."

I think that applies to many screenplays,too--cut out the first ten pages or so. Of course you may not be able to cut out 100% of the first chapter or section--sometimes it contains some elements that you reader will need in order to understand what's going on. However, it's not unusual to be able to cut 75%.

Important: don't try to do this right off the bat. Go ahead and write that "getting settled in" first chapter, it's a useful part of the process for you. Just know that you can go back later, after you've finished your first draft, and cut it drastically.

 However, there are some openings that it's good to avoid from the start. Find a fresher way to start the story even if you end up cutting some of it later.  Here's one example of what NOT to write that I've seen in many novels and screenplays: the protagonist is asleep. The alarm goes off. He punches the "snooze" button. The alarm goes off again. He groans and gets out of bed. Montage of him showering, shaving, looking into his fridge and realising the only thing in there is a jar of mustard and a week-old pot of something that's turning green. Sometimes the montage includes his boring trip to work on a packed train or in a carpool.

BORING! If we need to understand that this character is caught up in a boring routine, go ahead but not in a way that bores us because we've seen it a thousand times before. 

(For more ideas on how to write powerfully, get my book "Your Writing Coach," published by Nicholas Brealey and available now from Amazon and other online and offline booksellers.)

Creativity can come from pain

National Public Radio's Julie Burstein has interviewed creative people for the last ten years. She's collected some of the most interesting stories in a new book, "Spark: How Creativity Works." An article at phillyburbs.com reports on a talk Burstein gave about creativity:

Burstein emphasizes that the painful moments "often spark creativity," and that we must "stop, look and remember" that which hurts us most. While many frequently look away and shrug off pain, the truly gifted artists embrace pain.

Burstein told the stories of painter Bill Viola, who nearly drowned as a teenager and went on to create water imagery, as well as novelist Richard Ford's dyslexia that forced him to ardently study and analyze compositions, creating the foundation for his writing.

She also spoke of painter Chuck Close's prosopagnosia - an inability to recognize human faces - that drove him to creating a method for "breaking down" faces into components. He now uses that technique to create astonishing 8-foot-tall facial portraits.

In each case, the artist persevered through the pain, and the act of mastering that pain led to success. Burstein shared that we must not "back away from a challenge - drive into it" if you want to tap into your own creative genius.

"Use tension and pain to drive and perfect."

It reminds me of the sign-off Don Sherwood, a radio announcer I used to listen to when I was a kid, always used: "Out of the mud grows a lotus."

This sounds romantic but of course when you're in the middle of the pain it's anything but romantic.

I compare it to a recent physiotherapy massage session I had for a problem with my shoulder. The pain was excruciating and the impulse was to tighten every possible muscle to fight it--but, ironically, the release comes when you are able to relax. 

I hope you are not in pain of any kind---physical or emotional. But if you are, perhaps it's worth taking a moment to think about what creative benefit it might hold, even if that's the last thing that's on your mind at the moment. 

When in pain of any kind it helps to have support. People are the best, but books can help, too. A few of my favorites that I return to when I'm low: The Art of Possibility by Benjamin Zander, The Courage to Create by Rollo May, and No More Second-Hand Art by Peter London.

 

Writing focus: how to get it, lose it, and get it back

Even though I wrote a book on focus ("Focus: how to use the power of targeted thinking to get more done," Pearson Publishing), from time to time I lose my own focus. It's a natural consequence of being interested in a lot of things, and I have a hunch it has happened to you as well---or will.

In business and military parlance one version of this is "mission creep"--you start out wanting to achieve one thing, one mission, and gradually you add more and more and before you know it, you're all over the place. 

For the past few weeks I've had the feeling I'm not really moving forward very quickly on anything so I stopped and took stock and made a list of everything I was trying to get done.

The list is far too long. The result is that although I was making some progress on most things, there were so many that it didn't feel like there was much movement on any one thing.

The solution is to set priorities. Again. Unfortunately this is not something we do once and it's set forever. Focus is a process and it's a normal part of that process to go off course. The important thing is to become aware of losing focus and doing whatever is necessary to regain it. For us creative types that means putting aside some things we would like to do. As somebody pointed out, you can do everything--just not all at once.

 If your writing focus has gotten blurry, too, feel free to join me: stop, take stock, prioritise, and get back to work!

(You can get "Focus: use the power of targeted thinking to get more done" from Amazon and other online and offline retailers now.)

 

How to get more self-discipline about your writing (or anything else)

In Scientific American Dan Ariely wrote about how self-control works. He starts by pointing out, "If you think about the environment we live in, you will notice how it is essentially designed to challenge every grain of our self-control. Businesses have the means and motivation to get us to do things NOW, not later. Krispy Kreme wants us to buy a dozen doughnuts while they are hot; Best Buy wants us to buy a television before we leave the store today; even our physicians want us to hurry up and schedule our annual checkup."

Unfortunately nobody is urging us to take time out to be creative, because there's not a lot of money in that. Other than gyms, nobody is urging us to get fit. There's not much profit margin in selling fruit and vegetables, compared to the profit to be made by selling fried sugar things, so guess what we get pressured to eat.

What seems to work, Ariely says, is having a strategy to stop you from acting on impulses that keep you from doing what's best for you. He doesn't go into detail (in fact, the article feels like he stopped halfway through writing it), but my interpretation is that we could apply this in three ways:

1) If we know the kinds of things that usually distract us from doing what would be most beneficial or satisfying, figure out how to avoid them. For instance, if we know that during a writing session we'll be tempted to check email, we could go out of wifi range, or turn off the router, etc.

2) When we can't avoid the temptations, have a strategy for dealing with them effectively. For instance, if we are expecting a truly important email for which an immediate response is required, we could plan to check email every hour, but set a timer to make sure we don't jump the gun and that we don't spend more than five minutes on it. Or if we know usually we give in when people ask us to do them a favour, we can plan always to respond with "Let me take a look at my schedule and get back to you on that." That interruption may be enough for us not to give a knee-jerk OK.

3) If we know the kinds of things that incline us to do the beneficial behaviour, we can add weight to them so they outweigh the negative temptations (this is the "nudge" principle). Just as adverts for non-beneficial things are all over, we can create equivalents for the things that would be good or satisfying--e.g., by putting up Post-It Notes all over, sending ourselves email reminders, putting the items on our calendars, etc. Another example would be putting a note around the TV remote control that says "Or would it be more satisfying to spend this time writing?"

(If you like this tip, I think you'll get a lot out of my book, "Focus: use the power of targeted thinking to get more done." It's published by Pearson and you can get it from Amazon or other booksellers.)

Screenwriters - keep your moral to yourself!

In a review of the film "Everything Must Go" on the IFC website, Matt Singer says:

"There are some exchanges in "Everything Must Go" that are big and dramatic in a way that feels more like beats from a screenwriting manual than conversations pulled from real life; we definitely didn't need to hear Nick scream "I'm no different than any of you, I just don't hide in my house!" to his neighbors, for example."

I haven't seen the film yet, but this observation points to a common problem. Afraid that you, the audience, won't get the point, too often filmmakers throw it in your face.

It's much more enjoyable when we figure it out ourselves. 

By the way, in my experience often it's not the writer who puts these lines in. Usually it's somebody else later in the process--the director, a producer, a studio executive. Somebody who gets the point but is sure that they are smarter than the audience, who need to have it pointed out to them. 

Actually, the audience is pretty smart. The ones who care about what point a movie might be making will think about it and probably will get it. The ones who just want to sit back and let a movie wash over them won't feel it's a better experience for being hit over the head with them message.

There's a kind of exception to this, which is that it can be useful to hint at the theme very early on.  The example I always use in workshops come from the movie "Tootsie," in which the protagonist's best friend says, "Instead of being Michael Dorsey the best actor, or Michael Dorsey the best waiter, why don't you just try being Michael Dorsey?" Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman) says, "I don't even know who that is." That's the theme of the film--finding your true self. But this early in the movie that's not obvious and those lines seem like just another bit of dialogue. However, they've planted a seed.

Going back to the 'in your face' lines, if they're in the original script, usually they pop up in the first draft. That's where we need to find them and eliminate them.

(There's lots more on my screenwriting blog: http:www.screenwritingsuccess.com.)

 

Do deadlines hurt or help?

In the documentary "Under the Great Northern Lights," Jack White of the band White Stripes says, "That was our thing: whether we like it or not, write some songs and record them. Force yourself to work. Book only four or five days in a studio and force yourself to record an album in that time. Deadlines make you creative."

How about you? Do you see deadlines as helpful or hurtful? 

Do you find that when there are no deadlines you tend to drift and things take longer to get done? 

If so, might it be a good idea to start setting up some deadlines for yourself if nobody else is doing it for you? The biggest challenge with these is that in the back of our minds we know that it's only a "pretend" deadline, so it's easy to ignore. 

There are at least two solutions. One is playful--you compete with yourself to get the thing done and maybe you promise yourself a prize of some kind if you meet the deadline.

If you know that probably won't work for you, empower somebody else to be the judge. For instance, if the prize is buying yourself a book you've wanted, buy it but give it to a friend to hold. If you meet your deadline you get the book; if not, they keep it if they like it or they give it to a charity shop. 

(for more tips on motivation and using your time effectively, get my book "Focus: use the power of targeted thinking to get more done," published by Pearson and available from Amazon and other online and offline retailers.)

 

How writers can get lucky

I read the other day the remarkable story of how "Lord of the Flies," William Golding's first novel, came to be published. Let's look at this in terms of "there's good news and there's bad news."

Bad news: It had been rejected 20 times before it landed at Faber and Faber. They rejected it, too.

Good news: One of the editors needed something to read on the train on his journey home and grabbed the manuscript off the 'reject' pile. When he read it he saw potential. He worked with the author, and the book was published in 1954.

Bad news: The hardcover got mixed reviews and was only modestly successful in terms of sales (less than 3000 in the U.S. before it went out of print).

Good news: The paperback edition came out and sales picked up, especially among young people.

More good news: Teachers started assigning the book and it became a best seller.

More good news: A movie version was made (twice) and there are stage productions as well. The book is now considered a modern classic and continues to sell well.

More good news: In 1983 Golding received the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1988 he was knighted.

Do you  notice a pattern? At the start it's bad news--quite a lot of it--punctuated with some good news. As the process moves on, it's a lot of good news, punctuated with much less bad.

That's the secret of how to get lucky. Hang in there through the bad news, which may well predominate at first. Keep going. Golding didn't stop after 10 or 15 or 20 rejections. He kept submitting his manuscript. By the way, he was 43 at the time, so he also didn't give in to any thoughts that this might be too late to start a career as a novelist. He also listened to the useful input from his editors and rewrote the manuscript.Despite the unpromising sales at first, he continued to write other novels, including "The Inheritors," "Pincher Martin," and "Free Fall."

To adapt another useful bit of advice, "When you're going through bad luck...keep going."

(It also helps to have good advice, of course, and you'll find a lot of that in my book, "Your Writing Coach," published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon and other online and offline book sellers.)

Time to write: Move on and keep going

We’ve all had rejections, it comes with the territory. Remembering and reliving rejection kills energy. If you revisit it every time you start to write, it’ll drain the creative life right out of you. 

 If you find yourself thinking about the people who rejected something you wrote, you have some alternatives about how you frame it:

1. That idiot! He passed on something good. Serves him right.
2. That poor guy. He made a poor decision and he’ll have to live with it.
3.  He was right. It wasn’t ready. I’ve learned from it and I’ve improved.

One odd tactic that actually works is to decide for how many hours or days you’re going to let yourself wallow in self-pity or anger or resentment or depression. “Today is Monday, let’s see…I’m going to let myself be in this crappy mood until noon Thursday. Then I’m going to put it behind me and move on.”

 When Thursday noon rolls around, let those emotions go. What you’re writing right now may or may not get rejected. This is not the time to worry about that. This is the time to get down the first draft, then to get some useful feedback, then to do the second and third draft and however many more it takes.

 Don’t let resentment or fear of rejection slow you down. Full speed ahead!

(My book on time management is full of useful techniques. It's called "Focus: use the power of targeted thinking to get more done." It's published by Pearson and you can get it now from Amazon and other online and offline book sellers.)

 

Writers and others: stop preparing!

Here are some useful thoughts from Steven Pressfield's book "Do the Work," which (for now) is free from Amazon as a Kindle book:

"Don’t prepare. Begin.

Remember, our enemy is not lack of preparation; it’s not the difficulty of the project, or the state of the marketplace or the emptiness of our bank account.

The enemy is our chattering brain, which, if we give it so much as a nanosecond, will start producing excuses, alibis, transparent self-justifications and a million reasons why we can’t/shouldn’t/won’t do what we know we need to do.

Start before you’re ready.

Good things happen when we start before we’re ready. For one thing, we show huevos. Our blood heats up. Courage begets more courage. The gods, witnessing our boldness, look on in approval.

You’re allowed to read three books on your subject. No more.

Research can become Resistance. We want to work, not prepare to work.

The creative act is primitive. Its principles are of birth and genesis.

...If you and I want to do great stuff, we can’t let ourselves work small. A home run swing that results in a strikeout is better than a successful bunt or even a line-drive single.

Start playing from power. We can always dial it back later. If we don’t swing for the seats from the start, we’ll never be able to drive a fastball into the upper deck."

Great advice for people--like me--who love the planning phase. I can do mind maps, goal charts, task lists until the cows come home. A little of that is great. Too much of that becomes part of what Pressfield calls The Resistance. Time to start, ready or not!

(Over the years I've learned a lot about how to be more focused and productive and it's all in "Focus: use the power of targeted thinking to get more done," published by Pearson and available from Amazon and other booksellers.)

What writers can learn from the TV "rescue" reality shows

There's a trend at the moment for what I call "rescue" television shows. These are programs in which an expert tries to rescue a failing business of some kind. These have included restaurants, hotels, even charity shops.

What's interesting--and useful to writers--is the dramatic structure underlying these shows. Here are the three acts:

I: The protagonist (expert) meets the person whose business is in trouble. There's always a lot at stake financially and emotionally: the owner has mortgaged his house to keep the business running, or the business is on the verge of bankruptcy, or it's a family business and if it goes under, the owner will have let down his family. The "hero" commits to helping the business owner.

II. The struggle. The expert has great ideas but the owner resists. The owner follows some of the advice but fails to take some crucial steps. The expert gets frustrated and is tempted to give up. The owner agrees to give the new methods a try. Finally they schedule a make-or-break event. For a restaurant, it might be an evening when important people show up to try the new menu. For a hotel, it might be a visit from one of the agencies that rate establishments with stars. 

III. The event is a success. The hotel gets its stars, the restaurant satisfies its important diners. The owner is grateful, the business has been saved, the expert is a hero once more. Hugs and smiles all around.

Do you think it's an accident that this plot repeats time and time again? Of course not. The producers look for owners who are temperamental (or willing to follow orders, which might include cueing them to object to the expert's opinions at first). 

Editing takes care of the rest. What you see didn't necessarily happen in the order you see it, some of it may be re-created if they didn't catch it on camera the first time, and juxtaposing certain elements creates an impression that may not match what really happened.

What it proves is that the old stories still work when they're put into a new context.

When a hot new reality show comes along, take a moment to analyse what story pattern they're using to appeal to the emotions of the public. These are the same patterns that can give your novel or screenplay emotional power.

 (For help writing your book, see "Your Writing Coach," published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon and other booksellers.)

 

"Poke the box" (the first Domino Project book)

In yesterday's post you found out about Seth Godin's new approach to publishing (although he didn't reveal everything--I believe one feature will be that the first people who are interested and commit to spreading the word get the books either free or at a greatly reduced rate). Anyway, here's a brief video in which he talks about the first Domino book, "Poke the Box":

Poke The Box from Seth Godin on Vimeo.

ps: the book I wrote to help people who have the desire to be more creative and to turn their ideas into reality is "Creativity Now!" and it's published by Pearson and available from Amazon and other booksellers.