When I began writing...

[Caged Maiden]

This thread is about those things I learned along the way, and I invite you to share your stories of overcoming the hard parts of writing. It was inspired by a three-hour phone conversation I had with one of my very best friends, the other night. We were talking about the future, and of course, when you talk about what you want to accomplish in the future, it's sort of common to reflect on where you were in the past. Here's the first one:

When I began writing, I saw these epic moments. A character confessed a secret she'd held onto for thirteen chapters. The king pulled a soldier aside and told him it was okay to fail, that it made a man stronger to know where he was weak. A mysterious woman dropped a baby off in the dead of night, and my MC was horrified to learn that her father, who had been gone a year, hadn't hurried home to his family...because he'd had a baby with a woman in a neighboring land.

Those moments were what I wrote for. I loved them and they had great depth and interesting situations. But...the things that connected those moments together were weak and awful. And not only that, but the way I presented the information to the reader was tired and "on the nose" (more about that later)

All of this came about because my friend is writing a story that involves a long journey. I told him I don't really write treks at all because when I was a new writer, I plain sucked at writing journeys. Basically the "scenes" fell into one of two categories. Either they took place "on the road" and I spent way too much time talking about things like the temperature, the trees, the wind, etc. and they were dull beyond dull. Or the scenes showed mundane aspects of travel (usually meals around a fire or tent-pitching, or other dismally hum-drum things) and whatever momentum I'd built up during the exciting scenes swiftly dissipated as I bored readers to tears with the monotony of life in the saddle.

Now, I know what you're probably thinking... Just make something interesting happen!

Well, yes. I abandoned that particular advice because it was just too hard to overcome my personal dearth of ideas for what could make a travel chapter interesting and in my head at the time it just felt too much like D&D "random encounters".

Anyways, what I told my friend is that this one small problem was actually a much larger one. I also had a terrible habit of meandering off subject in other ways. Characters getting dressed in the morning before they went to talk to their friend and get plot-pertinent information, for example. I NEVER got "in late, out early" but rather "got in way too early, sat around like a pathetic loser all day, and then stayed till bar close anyway, even though everyone else had left. Basically, I just went on and on, with no apparent direction for my scene.

So, that got us talking about what changed. See...the thing I've noticed since sharing some of my breakthroughs earlier this year, is that I KNEW it all back then. I knew I was supposed to show only important things. I knew I was supposed to have action, inner conflict, deep characters, realistic challenges and obstacles. The problem wasn't that I didn't understand the concept. Rather, I thought I understood it too well and was doing all the right things...and yet feedback suggested repeatedly that I needed "a little more of this, a little less of that, and maybe something interesting right here between these two scenes where the character is introspective."

I thought I WAS doing the right kind of pacing and the right kind of details. I felt like I could positively check off all the boxes. Yep, I have an interesting character. Sure do have a bit of foreshadowing, some symbolism, and some external conflicts with other characters. My character certainly is tormented by her internal conflicts...I mean, they're on just about every page!

But when I went through that breakthrough on the http://mythicscribes.com/forums/wri...w-can-get-any-worse.html?highlight=make+worse thread, I noticed something larger happening inside my writer brain. I asked for help here http://mythicscribes.com/forums/chit-chat/16362-commiserate-me.html?highlight=make+worse and sort of shared my confusion.

Well...this whole road I've been traveling this last year has felt much less like a brisk jog, and much more like a hamster in a wheel. I poured tons of energy into this quest for "what I'm doing wrong" and it took exponentially more effort that it has in the past to reach that next level of understanding.

What I realized recently is that while I may have been fulfilling my goals in theory, in application I was missing the mark pretty consistently. Only, I didn't understand why. I'm still writing the same, as in, the stories are the same themes, the characters are the same type of tortured souls...but the one thing that's really changed (hopefully irreversibly) is how I tackle a scene.

In the first draft, I found I used sentences like, "She had become the girl's adoptive mother in more ways than one..." Plainly, I was writing statements that were "on the nose" rather than SHOWING the same thing in a more tangible and pertinent way. In a way that had a more personal meaning to a reader, and in a way that made the scenes feel real and alive, and sort of unexpected in some cases.

Now when I tackle a scene, I come up with 2-3 goals. If I want to show that the MC feels like a mother to the girl, I pick a conflict that feels like a parent-child conflict, and then I let them yell at each other for a few paragraphs, or use a gesture or gift as an olive branch after a disagreement. I specifically hone in on the things that identify the relationship and define the dynamic between the two, keeping in mind that my ultimate goal is to present the relationship as a parent-child relationship, rather than, say, a friendship. But I avoid flat-out SAYING it for the reader's benefit. Sure, I can SAY it, too, if I want to, but SHOWING it is much more effective. So, this isn't about SHOW vs. TELL, at it's core. It's about scenes-writing goals.

When I wanted to show the reader the building my MC bought, it would have been dreadfully dull to just have her walk around and look at things and assess her new property. So, I sort of stumbled unwittingly into a scenario in which she's looking at the building with the guy who sold it to her, and he sort of hints that she might want to install a secret exit...you know, in case she needs to make a fast getaway. Which started a conversation about why he thought she was in imminent danger. Which was really a million times more interesting than the other option.

Anyways, my point is that a few years ago, I probably would have written the other scene, with the static descriptions and tried to make them "interesting" with language and beautiful descriptions to hold them up. But what really holds those scenes up is that something important is happening there. And those things need to be engaging enough that the reader will ask questions. Why does he know she's in danger, when she hasn't informed the reader about it? Does he know something she doesn't? And when she ASKS him that question, I let his answer sort of lead to another question, and then another...until the scene feels complete, hopefully with the reader wondering a whole lot of things and having a few answers, too.

So, to conclude this "blast from the past" topic: Look for goals when you're writing a scene, and then cut things that don't support those goals, and make sure that what you're writing supports those goals. If you're trying to do too much in a particular scene, it gets watered down very fast and the reader's eyes glaze over. Each scene will require its own ratio of dialogue, description, personal reflection, internal thoughts, etc. but for those things that directly support your goals, veer away from "on the nose" tells, or statements like, "...saddest she'd ever felt" and other similar phrasing that doesn't give specificity to the scene. Also avoid meandering into unimportant territory in too much detail.

I was terribly guilty of not focusing on my goals, and my scenes suffered for it. Sometimes, it was because I didn't KNOW my goals, and was just writing whatever I thought was interesting (and it wasn't), and other times it was because I was just trying to do too much. I'd use a single scene to reveal a secret, foreshadow something that would happen six chapters later, begin a new mystery or question (or sometimes several), show a character's internal conflict that was already mentioned last chapter and the one before that, and describe some scene-setting things that weren't pertinent. Too much going on means a reader misses things, or gets confused, or just loses interest because they can't discern what's important.

By limiting your goals in a scene, you can spend more time on creating a really engrossing exchange, or a moving experience, or an emotional reaction from the reader that couldn't have been so fully realized if you were instead drawing focus to too many things at once.

So that's my most recent realization as I continue to rewrite an old novel from 2008. I've come a long way since then and the things I'm learning today are consistently hard-won battles. Like I said, I knew the concepts back then and had embraced them, but I still didn't have the whole picture until just recently.

 

[Heliotrope]

Oh man I feel like you are writing this directly at me lol! Focussing in on goals is a major problem for me.

 

[Caged Maiden]

When I began writing, I thought an outline was the thing you do for a research paper, where Roman numerals and cascading letters meant something vital and led to order and success. I often forced myself to writing these devastatingly shallow "outlines" and watched in horror as they degraded into random sentences that piled up like cars on the curbs when Albuquerque's hills are icy and the town's TWO snow plows are engaged elsewhere. It was a mess. Complete chaos. No order. No control. A wreck in the making.

I worked for a decade, still forcing myself to write those shitty little outlines, though I never used them or looked at them once they were done. No, instead, once the "outlining" was complete, I'd start writing random brainstorms on blank pages, and I'd use all sorts of symbols to denote how well I liked a particular idea. Smilies, asterisks...boxes around an idea meant I was DEFINITELY using it.

And then I'd write. The whole book. First line to last, I'd pants everything, occasionally opening my brainstorm pages to pull ideas from those initial moments of inspiration.

And then I read about outlines. I bought a book on Amazon I think it was this one, though mine has a different cover Outlining Your Novel: Map Your Way to Success: K. M. Weiland: 8601200456202: Amazon.com: Books

One thing really struck me, like a punch to the face. In the book (still not sure this is the right one, sorry), I learned that an outline can take many forms. It can be chapter summaries (which I now do). It can be note cards that you write significant scenes on and then shuffle around to place them in logical order. It can also be an exploratory first draft that will then serve as the skeleton for a rewrite. Whoa!!! What?

That's me! I have to pants stuff. I just HAVE to. I mean, I sometimes have a direction for where I want things to go, but I'm an exploratory writer, and that first rough draft is actually...wait for it...MY OUTLINE! Who knew?

I was so overjoyed when I heard this. For years, I'd been doing what I thought was right, when the "right" way was in fact the one that worked for me and got the results I wanted.

I don't believe there's a right or wrong way to do things. Not as a writer, certainly. Perhaps in some things...like where safety is concerned (but we're very rarely putting ourselves or others in harms way...except perhaps for carpal tunnel or neck pain from poor posture). There is no right or wrong way to outline, or to write a sentence, or to write a story...but there is a right way to learn, I've discovered. For me, specifically, the wrong way to learn was by forcing myself to do things, even when I found them continually frustrating and confusing. For me, the right way to learn was talking to other writers, sometimes for many hours over weeks or months, or even years, and trying different things until I found some small amount of success.

There is nothing "right" about forcing yourself to do something that's really uncomfortable and halts your progress for an extended period of time. Basically, I'm not saying give up if something doesn't work the first few times, but if you really gave something an honest attempt a few times and you are getting discouraged...try something else. Ask around. Find some trusted friends here on our friendly and open forum, and have some conversations. You might just find the right person to convey the information in a new way, and suddenly that technique that had you baffled will be clear as day. And you'll be able to do it. Or you might find that someone's suggestion opens a door you didn't know existed, as I did when I discovered it was perfectly acceptable to use a first draft as an extended outline that would then be used for a rewrite. I mean...it probably isn't the most efficient way to write, but I turned out one full 100k word novel a year for ten years that way, and it wasn't something I was doing full-time, just as a hobby. So, sure, I don't have a stack of finished novels, but I DO have a bunch of fantastic outlines!

Anyways, in conclusion, sometimes you can be doing something for years, thinking you're doing the right thing...working toward your goal. And then some new bit of information comes along and suddenly you realize there's an even "righter" way out there, and you can't believe you didn't know it existed in the first place.

I had to mop my floor after we spilled chocolate milk all over the kitchen this evening. I remember the day I learned how to mop. I was 19 and working at Mc Donald's. It was my turn to "mop us out", and the shift manager stared at me with a horrified expression on her face while I wrung out the mop and used the damp ropy bits to moisten the floor and scrub away our footprints as we locked up for the night.

"What are you doing?" she asked, none to kindly.

I stood there, quiet. Not quite sure what she was asking.

She took the mop from my hands and dunked it in the bucket. After, she swung it up in a sopping wet arc, spraying the floor with what looked like gallons of water. I was sort of scared.

She proceeded to push the puddle around for a minute or two, and then she wrung the mop and dried the floor. And repeated this a few times.

I learned that night that pushing a damp bit of cotton rope around isn't the same thing as actually cleaning a floor. I also learned that the standards in "the south" were somewhat more clearly defined than the housekeeping my mother taught to me. And I have been drenching my floors ever since, loving the fresh Pine-sol scent and the immaculate shine of no footprints.

Sometimes, even the most basic skills, things you've thought you were doing right for years, can bite you in the butt. New information, seeing someone else's methods, having a conversation...it can all lead to new skills, new applications of skills, and a greater understanding of how we use our own methods and when we can improve upon them.

Don't be afraid to call your tried and true methods out into the light from time to time, and just assess whether they're doing the job you need them to be doing. And if they're leaving footprints on the floor, despite your best attempt to do what you thought was "right"...well, try something new today. And tomorrow. Try something new regularly, when you find that you don't feel like you're quite as effective as you want to be. Don't do what I did and keep making the same horrible outlines for a decade because you didn't know a better way existed.

 

[Chessie]

Libbie Hawker's Take Off Your Pants is a terrific outlining book. In it, she makes the clear distinction between outlining and plotting being two separate things. For a long time, I confused the two and I do believe that's why I never followed through with my outlines and just pantsed anyway. That book plus several others have really helped me figure out the whole goals thing...which I super suffer from as well. To give you an example of how I figure out my character goals using her book, I'll provide an example from my NaNo story:

1. main character: Ludmila, an alchemist at a magical college
2. external goal...what is it???
3. End: Takes back control of her life by forfeiting all to be with Sergei (her husband from a past life)

*Flaw: allows others to treat her like a posession.

So we want her external goal to be related to her flaw and also be plot related. Since this is a romance plot, her external goal needs to be something that puts her in contact with the hero. I went through several options (and I don't really care sharing this because I don't think anyone here is going to read it lol). Ludmila is an alchemist, so her goal is to develop a potion that will cure an outbreak in a nearby village. This goal places her in direct contact with the hero, and thus their romance begins. But the goal is also something that needs to have a steep price. What if she doesn't succeed at creating the right potion? Many more people could lose their lives...including her and those she loves.

Creating a cure would make her somewhat of a hero. It would bring her respect and honor. It would help free her from the people holding her prisoner (her father and fiance). If she doesn't achieve this goal, then not only would more people die and the outbreak would spread, but she wouldn't have done something big in order to assert her individuality, her freedom in essence. And it's related to the romance plot because she must work with the hero in order to develop this potion the right way (he has insight on how to do this). Anyway, that's how I go about it but it does take me a while to figure out the goals sometimes. On other occasions, I know what the character wants right away. It depends on the story.

I highly recommend Libbie Hawker's book to those that are curious. She has some really helpful books for writers.

 

[FifthView]

Basically the "scenes" fell into one of two categories. Either they took place "on the road" and I spent way too much time talking about things like the temperature, the trees, the wind, etc. and they were dull beyond dull. Or the scenes showed mundane aspects of travel (usually meals around a fire or tent-pitching, or other dismally hum-drum things) and whatever momentum I'd built up during the exciting scenes swiftly dissipated as I bored readers to tears with the monotony of life in the saddle.

I NEVER got "in late, out early" but rather "got in way too early, sat around like a pathetic loser all day, and then stayed till bar close anyway, even though everyone else had left. Basically, I just went on and on, with no apparent direction for my scene.

Also avoid meandering into unimportant territory in too much detail.

I was terribly guilty of not focusing on my goals, and my scenes suffered for it. Sometimes, it was because I didn't KNOW my goals, and was just writing whatever I thought was interesting (and it wasn't), and other times it was because I was just trying to do too much.

I believe you.

Your mission, Caged Maiden, should you choose to accept it...

...is to apply your learning to the comments you write here.

One of my guiding principles for scenes, or call it the meta-goal, is to "write around" whatever it is I'm wanting to do/show.

I suppose this is like the antithesis of "on the nose." I do believe that showing rather than telling is a shorthand way of describing this process; but there's a lot of baggage behind that idea of showing, and focusing on Show! can actually be a problem for me. One can approach "Show!" in a way that is too close to being "on the nose." If focusing on showing too much, then showing can become merely another way of telling—for me at least. I.e., I find that I'm just trying to tell in a clever way, and the end result doesn't feel organic.

Basically, I'd tie my approach to the idea that "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." Characters act with clear and present goals and motivations and they themselves do not see the full consequences and do not have a precise understanding of how their present actions fit into the whole plot/narrative/story. The plot is happening while the characters are busy being busy. I want the readers to be engaged in each scene for its own sake, so each scene needs to have its own arc and significance, in itself.

So when designing a scene, I want to avoid both, meandering insignificance and on-the-nose painting by numbers.

Edit: I suppose I skipped over the "what I've learned" bit. In a nutshell, I've learned that I have to love each scene. Scenes are not merely stepping stones, merely mechanical steps in creating a plot. In a way, each scene needs to be a mini-story. But in order to allow this organic creation, I have to let go a little bit of the overall plot, the overall story, while developing those scenes. I have to commit to each step.

 

[DragonOfTheAerie]

Hey! Don't bring up scene structure! I already know my WIP is crap!

Kidding. Sort of.



But to the point. What has my learning process been like? Writing crap, mostly. I've written lots of garbage. I'm probably still doing it...better garbage, maybe, but still garbage. You all seem to have books and workshops and outlining methods and all I have ever done it sit down and write. Write crap until my creativity itself bleeds.

A quick summary...

I haven't been around as long as a lot of you have, so i still have a bunch to learn, presumably. I wrote my first book at 12. That bad boy was 79,000 words...if I remember right. It took nine months to write. And it was a fiasco. Countless times I went back and rewrote entire chapters, changed the direction of the plot, cut out characters and spliced them in. But I doubt I would have learned so much if it had been smoother. Then, at 13, I rewrote it. Completely. The plot and many of the characters were completely different, and I doubt i kept a word of the original. Heck, it wasn't a rewrite, it was a whole new book. 88,000 words. Six months to write it.

They were both, as you can imagine, complete crap. Well, not complete. I kept the main characters and some of the central concepts for my current WIP, which bears the name Oozing, Festering Mess of Unsolvable Problems in my Notes app and is currently on hiatus until i finish at least three more unrelated novels. Probably a lot more than three.

I learned everything I know from writing horridly bad stuff. Failure has been my mentor. Instead of focusing on writing better I focus on writing more.

Is it working? Hell if I know! But I have never bothered with learning structure or technique, or at least I haven't been able to make much of it when i've tried. I have a natural gag reflex at structure and standardization. I've come to the conclusion in the past few months is that the only way to really grow is to fail. A lot. Write anything and everything. Write and make an utter mess with your words. Like my dog getting diarrhea all over the walls in the hallway. Yeah. Like that. (It happened.)

I think my least productive years have been the past two. I regret them now, honestly. I spent them all trying to surmount that formidable beast that is the WIP i mentioned above, wallowing in broken-off pieces of highly polished but useless beginnings instead of throwing down sludge like a maniac and putting it to the grindstone. The problem was that I was trying to produce good writing. And, well, what very little I did manage to produce, didn't teach me much. I would be a much better writer now if I had spent that time writing lots and lots of rubbish. I wanted to write it NOW and I wanted it to be GOOD and now i've realized it's not going to be either but it will come to flower someday and i'm happier than I've ever been.

Can I draw a comparison? I've been learning to draw and an easy mistake to make is to be too careful with your lines. Your pencil strokes become tight and cramped because you're worried you'll make a mistake, and as a result you end up erasing and redrawing the same lines over and over. The solution is to be bold and flamboyant. Make long, careless, sweeping strokes and try to twist them into a form. Don't confine yourself. Be wild and sketchy. The result will look untamed, but it will be better.

Please remember: There are always erasers.

All the time I've spent writing has taught me that aiming for quality is often useless. I write a good first chapter and never get any farther because nothing I write is good enough. But when I aim for quantity, I can get past that. And I write good stuff in the process I never would have uncovered by looking for it. Really, the only way for me to write anything good is to not try. If I start caring, the evil little voices in my head shut me down. Every time.

I'm now writing a book that is...probably somewhere in between the garbage i think it is and the masterpiece i wish it was. Posting my word counts in Writer's Work is keeping me motivated. No matter what the quality, 40,000 words is something.

 

[Caged Maiden]

When I began writing, I looked for the amazing things. Magical spells that would wow. Land features that were grand. Cities that had gardens and palaces and temples. My first novel was about a magic student that lived in a time when magic was being eradicated by those in power...and behind those in power, a necromancer was raising an undead army (that included the resurrected bones of long-dead dragons). Oh yeah, I had it all. And I was only writing for myself, so I guess it didn't do me too much harm.

But as I was looking for those awesome elements, I missed so many small moments. And that was really a shame.

I've already mentioned the book, Writing 21st Century Fiction, by Donald Maass. It was one of the things that lead to my current state of awareness. I only read a few chapters, actually. I'm sort of saving the rest for the moment when I've totally cleared this level. HA!

Anyway, in the book, Mr. Maass asked me to be brave and write with honesty. And that was really hard for me. You see, when you're looking for magnificence and epicness, sometimes the small things slip by. Small things that can be very moving and impactful. Not even like grains of sand that tip a scale eventually...but in a more creative and less proverbial way. I recently shared a video on my personal Facebook feed, about Yellowstone. It's called something like, "How wolves change rivers."

Basically (and I don't want to debate whether it's real or not, because there has been some heated debate about whether it's scientifically proven or whether disbelievers' opinions also make sense), in the video, it talks about how wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone after many years of being gone. It was a small group, I think 12 individuals at first. This pack was alone in a park where the deer and elk populations were very high. Long story sort of short, the wolves harvested animals from the population, but that wasn't what created the change. It wasn't that there was an actual decline in population (because even several wolf packs wouldn't have made a dent in the overpopulation...because human hunters have taken many times more animals than the wolves did). Instead, it was the presence of the wolves that changed the park and moved the river. Basically, the wolves took up a territory on the low ground, where the hunting was good, and the deer scattered to the higher ground, avoiding the river and the plains where they were easier targets for the predators.

When the deer stopped grazing on everything green in sight down there, the plants grew back. The trees grew back. Roots stopped soil erosion, and shade once again hung over the water. That attracted beavers, who like trees. And they dammed the river in places. And the new trees also brought songbirds back to the park, by the thousands. And the pools the beavers created allowed fish populations to soar (and indeed fishers who enjoy those waters claim the fishing has never been better)!

And the thing that made it all happen, all that healing to an over-grazed and eroding land...was that a pack of wolves turned it into their home.

The smallest things have ripple effects, sometimes. Ones you cannot fathom when you begin a story, sometimes. At least, that's how it went for me.

Again, not me saying what's right or wrong, just sharing my personal experience. Recently, I threw magnificence out the window, and I started looking at the honesty of what I write. I began writing what I know. I chucked epicness and embraced reality. And by that I don't mean that I traded in fiction for non-fiction, or that I stopped writing about magic and dragons and decided to instead focus my attention on only what exists in the real world. So far from it, really.

What I did was strip it all back to who I am. What I do. How I think. Even the really shameful and embarrassing bits. Especially those.

It wasn't easy. In fact, if you think writing made-up stuff is hard...try writing something really raw, like your worst memory, or the real way your dad made you feel when you were too young to tell him to eat a turd and die (I don't have a bad relationship with my dad, btw). It's really hard. It means coming to grips with your shame, guilt, self-loathing, and everything else that we sum up when we talk about "emotional baggage". We all have it. Some of us don't think about it, like ever, and for some of us, it's hard to leave the house sometimes because the weight of it is so burdensome.

I didn't do it alone, either. I have a friend who took my hand and helped me take my first steps into the dark hallway that exhibited portraits of myself in some of the ugliest representations and poses I could imagine. Sometimes she literally had to strong-arm me into moving forward. It made me sort of sick at times. I felt like if I kept going, I'd one day cross a line and turn from "honest" into "nutty as squirrel shit". I felt the more authentic I was to my real inner person, the more I might alienate the people who read my work--my writing group, critique friends, and recently, my mother.

I worried what people would think of me. Waited for the moment someone picked a thought I'd assigned to my character, and said I had gone too far and that the character was a sociopath (or something else I'd take personally about the thoughts that were actually close or identical to mine), and I'd internalize that comment and concoct a whole new set of worries with which to plague my already anxious mind. I thought I'd feel like a freak for using myself in some small places to amplify the troubled mind of my suffering character.

Here's the deal: No one ever commented about how clever the temple with the amazing garden was. How much they loved the idea of the gods being "on call" and ready to communicate with a kneeling follower, and actually take that person's consciousness into a spirit world, where they would be able to communicate with a god or goddess, and even touch them. Nope. No one cared. They just buzzed by almost every one of my clever ideas and magnificent places. But when I wrote a couple twisted jokes into a dialogue, people told me they were amused by the scene. And when I let a few of my own twisted thoughts flicker inside my MC's head...I got compliments. Genuine ones. And the encouragement was to "do more of this" which always leaves you feeling good.

The thing is, it's the small things that I'm allowing to grow. Here and there. One detail at a time. And now when I try to increase the impact of a scene or a chapter, I immediately go to those small things, and forgo the large movements. I've discovered that writing a great story is more about sleight of hand than it is flashes of light and clouds of smoke, and elephants disappearing on a stage. My writing has much greater and deeper impact when it's more believable, closer to home, and slightly uncomfortable.

This has been a really hard lesson to learn, but the results are hard to argue with. Is it what every reader wants? No. Absolutely not. And I don't always want to read it, either. But as a writer, this shift in focus has opened a door for me, personally, to use my strengths in a whole new way, without being beholden to a method of writing that only employed those skills that for me are very weak.

Find the things you're good at, and push the limits. Of course it's always great to overcome your weaknesses, but when you can start getting great positive feedback consistently on your stories, it can in turn motivate you to push through the rougher times, when you're taxing yourself to create things that are mostly imaginary or completely invented. Or so I've found, at least.

Best wishes! Be brave!

 

[skip.knox]

First of all, a big thank you to Caged Maiden for her thoughtful and thought-provoking posts, of which this thread is but one instance.

Caged Maiden invites us to talk about how we overcame the hard parts of writing. What cheek! The hard parts are still there. They leer at me from every page, especially the blank ones. But I'll share some thoughts and you folks can decide if they're relevant or helpful.

I really did overcome one difficulty: starting. I did this on my own, but my wife and a dead editor provided critical push
I've been writing all my life, but erratically and not seriously. I did, however, submit a short story to the magazine Fantasy and Science Fiction back in the mid-1970s. It was rejected, but I did get a hand-written rejection note from the editor (I think it was H.L. Gold, but I'm not where I can dig out the note right now), and he did say to try again. Meanwhile, I went to grad school, became a historian, raised a family. I wrote tons of history, and made notes and erratic attempts at story telling.

In the mid-90s I got my Core Idea, for Altearth, and the erratic writing increasingly became about that. Then came the catalyst. One day, quite out of the blue, that rejection letter appeared on my desk at home. My wife, Debra, had found it in some papers. And there was that sentence. To keep trying. And something, almost audibly, went *click*.

I think it helped that I had been making electronic music and publishing it on mp3.com (remember that?). And that book self-publishing was becoming a thing. I don't recall thinking about those things. All I remember was the click. From that point on, I got serious. I shifted from writing stuff about Altearth to telling Altearth stories. That was the key.

Since then, everything else has been details. Devilish, soul-crushing details.

 

[Chessie]

I would say character arc/growth is the biggest focus for me in story now. Before...I was all over the place. I've been writing stories since childhood. Up until age 17, I wrote whatever I wanted. Most of my stories were dark with lots of death and mystery. I explored ideas more than anything. After the frustration of not getting published (because I thought I was the shizz), I gave up writing for most of my 20s.

I didn't pick writing back up until I married, and then I just focused on writing for fun. The focus grew each year, and as others can probably attest to this we're always focusing on something new for each story. We learn during the writing of a book and then transfer those lessons to the next book. Characterization, plot structure, outlining, scene structure, antagonists, whatever and etc. My goals are to always get better. Never stop learning. I'm always reading craft books and learning from other authors. Other authors, the ones who are actually making a living from writing fiction, are the best sources of information, I have found. They are eager and willing to share what has worked or not worked for them in relation to craft and publishing. Big name authors and editors aren't always going to have information on the nitty gritty. Authors who are closer to what I aspire to do with my career have been invaluable and the biggest advice I've religiously gotten from them is to work on my craft and let that be the main thing I do. So it has been.

 

[Heliotrope]

Oh my gosh FV, words out of my mouth literally. Everything you said is so true to me as well. The idea of writing 'around' the idea is spot on (lol, the irony.)

And YES! I also have to love each scene. Each scene needs to be it's own 'story' in a sense. It needs to have a hook, a goal, a climax, and a conclusion which leads into the next scene. Any scene that feels like it is there for 'filler' or simply to connect two scenes together needs to be cut or rewritten so it has significance.

Which brings me to my thing I learned, which is "tension on every page." When I learned that from Donald Maas it was like lightning in my brain. Tension on every page.

A regular novel has about 300 words per page. In order for each scene, each moment, each bit of dialogue to feel relevant there needs to be tension on every page. That means that every 300 words something needs to happen.

This does NOT mean 'conflict' on every page. This does not mean fist fights or car chases or attacks by dragons.

What it DOES mean is that every 300 words there should be a twist in the plot, or new information revealed, or a new conflict introduced, or the stakes raised, or a new question raised... Something to keep the reader reading.

This also means something as simple as just framing paragraphs differently. Examples include:

1) Starting each paragraph with a hook. So instead of Mr. Jones was yelling at Kade when I got to school. You would start with As soon as I got to school I knew I it was a bad idea.

It's this idea of leaning forward, raising questions in the reader's brain... Why? Why was it a bad idea?

Frame your sentences in ways that make the reader ask questions.

2) Ending each paragraph with a new hook. I like to think of this as having a "but" on every page. I walked along the street to buy some candy from the story..... but....

The 'but' is another way of leaning forward into the next paragraph.

Making this a goal every 300 words, I think, has improved my storytelling imensly. It's my strategy for staying focussed, keeping the story moving forward, only focussing on the relevant points etc...

 

[Heliotrope]

And I'm totally with Maiden on the 'being brave' stuff.

It hit me one day when I had bad post partum anxiety and I had a terrible thought about something happening to my daughter that made me literally sick. And I couldn't turn the thought off. It was so grotesque and raw and real and vivid and horrifying I debated turning myself into children's services because obviously I was a nut job.

But then I realized... I'm not the only one.

Someone wrote about Liam Neeson losing his daughter to a kidnapper who was going to sell her into the sex trade, and they had to keep going with that though to it's logical conclusion. Then they made a movie about it.

Stephen King had to think about a demented clown killing people. And write a book about all the gory details.

So I realized that people who are brave can face those terrible parts of themselves and use it to write good stories.

I'm not a nut job. I have a vivid imagination and that is okay.

Useful, actually.

If I'm brave enough to share it.

 

[Heliotrope]

And... sorry, last thing... I'm all out of thanks, but thanks Caged Maiden, for sharing all these wonderful insights with us. These are truly valuable and I know I'll be meditating on them all day now.

 

[Caged Maiden]

When I began writing, I didn't understand the first thing about story structure. I already mentioned that my outlines were useless, and that I had a hard time keeping scenes pertinent, but it went further than that.

Some folks follow a scene-sequel tactic to map their way through a story. Others plot their novel according to a three-act structure and follow pretty close to the expected ratios of the three acts. What I did when I began writing is I wrote beginning to end and whatever occurred to me made its way into the story, independent of any style, template, or format.

When I look back at what I learned in school, perhaps it was a tad imbalanced. I went to a school for gifted education. The whole curriculum was focused on creative thinking, problem-solving, and collaboration. My English classes were excellent for how well they covered grammar, spelling, vocabulary, and reading comprehension, but I don't think we ever really learned about writing stories. At least not in the sort of critical way that higher education does.

We read a lot of books, and we talked about the deeper meaning of books like "Where the Red Fern Grows" and "The Rats of NIMH". We answered a bunch of readying-comprehension questions and I always excelled at those, and the grammar and punctuation portions of my classes. For every weakness I showed in math, I had a strength in English. But I never learned how to write a story. Or, at least not one that mattered.

We experimented with poetry and journalism. Later, in high school, when I took Shakespeare, we analyzed the deeper meanings of the plays and sonnets, and we dissected the language. But creating work of our own simply didn't take precedence. We were always reading someone, always looking for meaning in stories from the past.

It wasn't until the last few years that I got a tenuous grasp on what story structure means. How to explain tension and style and tone. I mean...I've been able to appreciate it for decades, but translating that understanding into practical application as a writer was actually really difficult. I think part of the problem is simply how I'm wired.

When I was in high school, I sort of didn't care. About anything. I had a rough freshman year, where making new friends was really hard, and I sort of became really quiet and shut down. My sophomore year, I was tired of being quiet, and I got loud. Really loud. I partied and rebelled, and my friends I brought home became increasingly unsavory. I skipped school and hung out with people ten years older than me, and generally decided that school was a place to socialize and have fun, and learn only what I wanted to. I carried "A"s in my favorite classes like World History and Art, and I failed Geometry. But after the angsty year passed, I had more problems than just a wardrobe in monochrome black and fifteen holes in my ears. I had a low GPA (after scoring a whopping 1.6 one semester) and I had to rebuild from there. I took easy classes and dropped hard one, attempting to raise my GPA to a respectable level. Of course, I took every weighted class I could (Art, Government, Sociology, and English), but I also had to get math and science credits in to graduate, which meant that I had to take Geometry a second time, and I had to find some science credits without ever braving Chemistry, which I knew I'd fail.

I took Earth Science. And got a C-

The reason for the low grade is I think directly correlated to the fundamental problem I've had with writing, those early years. In Earth Science, we had two main things that compromised our final grade. The final test, and a creative project and report that included visual aids. The final test was simple: identify an assortment of stones. But the problem I had was that nothing ever looked the same to me. Sure, some were easy, like mica, rose quartz, obsidian, etc. but others were really difficult because the way I translate what i'm seeing is tricky. If you show me a square rock that's gray and call it slate, and then show me a round black one called shale...and then on the final test the black square and the round gray one...I get all messed up and can't tell one from the other. Identifying things when certain variables change, is really tricky for me (more about this later).

Similarly, I did really poorly on the art project. Mainly, the research papers were weakly written, and the art projects (though I'm a great artist) didn't "follow instructions". You see...when I was in art class, my teacher asked us to draw still life of fruit and junk on a desk. It sort of killed my soul a little to do it, so I went to her desk and told her I didn't want to draw random junk. I wanted to draw a peacock. So...being a supportive art teacher, she gave me a library pass and told me to go get a book to draw peacocks from. And my painting was amazing and was on the wall for the rest of the year...right in the middle of a row of paintings of still life. She encouraged me to think outside the box, just as my previous gifted school had done. But Earth Science wasn't a creative class...it was a set of rigid guidelines targeted at kids like me, who needed a credit in science to graduate, and the teacher was used to unruly students who didn't like to follow rules. So, when I made my creative projects, bending the rules everywhere they existed...I was penalized, rather than celebrated. So, I got a C- in a remedial science class, and regretted not just taking Chemistry, which I felt I probably could have done just as well.

How this related to writing (until just recently) is that I didn't really like rules. Why use a three-act structure, when it can feel confining? Why outline when it's uncomfortable? Why anything?!? Why not just write to amuse myself and let that be enough, like it was in art class?

Heliotrope (bless her patient heart) was the one who helped me really understand why a story structure is critical. Not because every story needs to fit the mold to the letter, but because when you begin with a structure, you can follow the rules and THEN choose when to break them gloriously. But I had to understand first what I was trying to accomplish.

It took weeks of communicating before her words broke through my hopelessly rebellious art class mentality. But finally, the light dawned. I've still struggled with some of the concepts, even after months of really applying myself, but I'm loads further than I ever was before.

No, it isn't imperative to follow a story structure word for word, but if you can really grasp the concept of it, it can free up your creativity in the right way. With a guide rope to catch you if you fall, you can take risks, push your limits, try something you've never done before.

 

[Caged Maiden]

Yeah, sorry, I realized you guys were responding...and I passed out without posting that last one last night. So...it looks like I just talked over you all.

I'm glad my musing is perhaps a tiny bit helpful. I know I'm long-winded and sometimes take my time getting to a point, but I'm trying to share more than the stock advice that's thrown around every day on writing forums. If hearing my thought process allows the information to sink in to one person who has struggled with the same challenges I have (and hasn't been able to grasp these concepts for the same reasons they were so hard for me to understand) then I'm glad I'm talking and folks are listening, I suppose.

The thing is, a lot of advice is stated over and over, and while I get it, and got it then, there was a definite disparity between basic comprehension and the sort of ownership I now feel. Anyways, this is just a place for me to share some experiences, on the off chance I might bring greater understanding to some small facet of writing life. Again, I'm no expert, but I do meet a lot of newer writers, and pretty much everyone's dealing with the same things, and some of us learn things differently. Some of the things I found most challenging are easy to a lot of writers, but they caused me problems for years and I very nearly quit permanently over those issues I couldn't seem to overcome.

So anyways, I'm going to keep writing posts beginning with "when I began writing" and I hope this thread continues to engage people. I work for "thanks" really.

 

[Tom]

Thank you for making this thread, Maiden. At this point in my writing life, I've come so far from where I started, but I still have a very long ways to go. This is a good place to stop and look back over my progress before I continue on, to appreciate the distances I've covered on my journey.

When I began writing, I didn't know what kind of story I wanted to tell. I didn't know what rang true for me--what about the stories I read that touched on the deepest, rawest points of my imagination and clung there stubbornly. I didn't know what mattered to me. So when I began writing, I copied other people's styles and borrowed the themes they had used. I had yet to find a voice of my own--and to use that voice to express my own thoughts. It took years to find the themes I wanted to write about. It took a lot of nights spent wondering what I believed in, deep down, and how that influenced the themes and characters and plots I chose to write about. My early writing was flat. It lacked depth and passion. It was rife with overused storylines and character archetypes. As time went by and I continued to write, I found what mattered to me, and used it to create the fundamental core that would give life to all my writing.

When I began writing, my characters were not people. They looked like people and talked like people and acted like people, but they weren't. They had no souls. I didn't know how to write the intricacies of emotion and thought that other people wove into their characters' narratives, so I left them out. Any attempts I made to give my characters an inner life fell flat. Nothing they did resonated with me--they had no loves or hates, no passions or fears or struggles or...well, anything. Gradually, over the years, I learned to write with an ear to emotion and to listen to what my characters were telling me about themselves. I started to see their personalities and develop that sense of personhood that they had been lacking.

When I began writing, I didn't know how to create a coherent plot. I wrote so many beginnings that lacked middles or ends, simply because I hadn't started with an endgame in mind. This was partially because I didn't know what kind of story I wanted to tell, but also because I was too impatient. When I got an idea for a new project, I didn't take any time to sit down and think of the possible outcomes that could result from it. I wrote down the beginning right away, and because I didn't explore it beyond its shallowest realization, it died. I have a lot of dead projects.

Recently, I've been reviving some of them. Now that I know how to structure a plot and plan effectively, I can take the old, dead ideas and give them new life. My NaNo 2016 project, Southerner, is one of those ideas. Yes, I have been working on it consistently for years. But also yes, it was dead. For a while it was even undead--that one horrible month where I decided to completely rewrite it from three different third-person perspectives comes to mind. But it's very much alive now. I've been bringing it back to life little by little, with plot notes and extensive worldbuilding, and this November I think it's finally come time to finish it.

When I began writing, I never thought I'd get this far. I'm amazed by the progress I've made (and also slightly horrified by where I started from).

 

[Darkfantasy]

I am just beginning writing and it is so much harder than it looks. But character growth is something I have tried to focus on, and when exploring a theme I try to present both sides. The good and bad. There is SO much to think about

 

[Caged Maiden]

Ah yes, Tom, voice is upcoming on this thread, but it's such a raw wound, I wanted to get some others out of the way first

When I began writing, dialogue was an object. It had a design and a purpose, and sometimes I even used it creatively...rather like I used an oven mitt last night to hot glue a mini Deadpool's cardboard shoulders onto the red suit, using my husband's hand in the oven mitt to create the right rounded shape. Yeah...just like that.

Mostly, my dialogue existed with a single purpose. It got information to a reader. Two characters talked about the history of the world. Or where they were going and what they anticipated doing once they got there. Or they talked about another person and raised some suspicions that maybe that dude was kinda shady and they ought to investigate...

It was all totally lame. My dialogue was simply me telling a reader what I thought they needed to know, and it didn't do any jobs well, not even the one I originally intended.

My main problems with dialogue were:

The characters all sounded the same
The dialogue was stiff and uninteresting
There was no life or realism

Now...you'd think I'd have been aware of these material defects (ha, real estate terms for writing...told you my brain is wired weird). But I not only didn't see the problems, I was SURE I was doing my best and when my critique partners made comments about these things, I wasn't sure where the problem was, exactly. What did they mean that all the people sound the same? That woman clearly uses bigger words than that guy! Isn't that how we differentiate that she's high-born and he's not? OMG. So embarrassing to admit these things.

Anyways, so my characters all sounded the same because a few words difference between how characters talk just isn't cutting the mustard.

As for the stiff and uninteresting dialogue...well that one was harder to overcome because I was using dialogue as a specific tool. See, I didn't have a creative use for it. I was either using words spoken in conversation to convey information to the reader, or to move a scene along in a believable way. For instance, you can't simply have a character come home to find his wife cheating on him with another fellow, and he slaps her and then they stand around staring at each other and internally monologuing about what a bitch she is, and then he says, "I'm leaving you," and walks out. I mean...dialogue is HOW plot works and unfolds sometimes. So I was using dialogue as a logical tool in cases like the above, to move the scene from beginning (where he might have walked in on her and had a verbal reaction), to end (where he says one last hurtful or pained statement, and then things change forever). The dialogue was utilitarian and functioned as an information dispensary, but it didn't have much else going for it. Which leads into my next point...

Life and realism are terms that have many meanings, even when applied to this single topic. One of the hardest parts of writing good dialogue is that it is elusive and dwells in a tiny little crevice between utilitarian hum-drum dialogue, and wacky wording that makes readers cringe because it's so outlandish. When we talk about making dialogue "real" what we're actually saying is "real-feeling". Actual real dialogue is rarely interesting. Some of us are slow, others very fast. Some of us use big words and others don't. Some people can clearly communicate how they feel, and others struggle to make their feelings clear. I've learned a lot about dialogue by relating to my husband, actually, because he processes things and talks so differently. I've had to shut up and listen more than I'm comfortable, because where I'm a raging torrent of words when speaking, he's concise and thoughtful. See, I rarely think of what I'm going to say when my mouth opens. I just trust that my feelings and opinions flow out in perfect form, and my husband doesn't do that. He seriously considers things before speaking. Outlandish indeed! So why not play with how people are different?

The sum of several experiences led to me taking more notice of why my dialogue all sounded horrible, and slowly I made progress. My personal belief (at this point...but it'll probably change) is that it's all going to sound somewhat like me in a way, and I'm not going to be able to completely overcome that. But, by making some characters more thoughtful and others more "speak first, then think" I'm at least doing a few things differently. I also add speech patterns to certain characters, and others have foul mouths. Some use analogies and metaphors a lot, while others are clipped or brash most of the time, and when they aren't, the other characters react and listen.

Little steps. It takes a whole lot of little steps to make a change to something as big as "my dialogue sucks".

So, whatever weaknesses exist in my dialogue now, at least it's better than it was, and people seem to appreciate the timing, subject matter, and characteristics of my dialogue a whole lot more. It's still something I'm working on, but I've found that the best thing I can do is write a first draft of a scene however I envision it, with whatever dialogue pops into my head, and then rake that shit over with a fine comb until all the erroneous words are gone and the point is pretty amplified from its original incarnation. Sometimes all I do is take the clean dialogue lines and cut and paste them around for an hour, to magnify the back and forth, present the information in a new way, or just create a different feel for the scene. Sometimes there's just a sort of seesaw motion going on between two characters, and while it's good, I want to try to see if I can make it better. I move things, shift words, and try to implant other meanings into a particular line. I allow characters to have knee-jerk reactions, or misunderstandings in scenes that were perfectly acceptable as calm moments. And all I can say (because remember, there's no right or wrong way) is that I'm now getting comments like, "Your dialogue is really strong in this scene, and I loved the humor." When...I can honestly say that in the previous five years, I've never heard a comment coming close to expressing the same sentiment.

Punch your dialogue in the face when it sucks. You might even feel better.

 

[Heliotrope]

Yeah, your dialogue is the bomb.

My dialogue is super utilitarian and hate it. It is by far still my biggest weakness. My strategy for dialogue is "use absolutely as little as necessarily possibly to get the point across." lol. I hate it that much.

 

[Heliotrope]

Yeah, when I first started I just assumed that the reader would love my main character because they were the main character. Aren't you always supposed to love and identify with the main character just because that is who they are? lol.

No.

The answer is no.

I learned after a while that the main character has to earn the reader's love. They have to be (as Fifth View always likes to remind me) either sympathetic, motivated, or clever. Characters who are altruistic, funny, clever, in love, or in other ways 'admirable' will earn your reader's heart and then the reader will want to follow them. But, you have to consciously do this. You can't just assume the reader will love your character just because you do.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Dialogue is an interesting beast. In screenwriting almost everything is dialogue so it's hard to hide, but at the same time, in the long run you have the cushion of it being intended for an actor to really perfect. When you get into a ms that is 140k words, yikes! Checking the dialogue is a monster. Like CM, I don't think we can 100% divest ourselves of our own voice when writing dialogue... maybe a character here or there, but if you've got 20 speaking parts, the options get slim, LOL.

When at my screenwriting zenith I Think I had a pretty good handle on different voices, but now? with so many more lines? Over so many more pages? So many more characters? Damn, it's hard to tell. I like the dialogue, and I know there are some differences, but I know them... does anybody else?

The funniest "voice" thing I ever had told to me was when taking a course online with UCLA's screenwriting and we had a text meeting with the whole class and the prof Scott Myers, who wrote K-9 and Trojan War, and he was actually trying to break into producing at the time... Anyhow, I rarely had bad comments about my dialogue, but one gal who I'd chatted with often during the class, mentioned that all the characters sound kind of the same, and they sound just like me... note, we only conversed via text. At which point I had to laugh, because in truth, it wasn't the characters sounding so much like me, as I was sounding like them in word choice and sentence patterns. In my normal formal written word, or how I actually speak? Nope, fairly different from the characters. That was an interesting realization on my part, how my characters were influencing how I communicated in real life.

Now I still notice this, I will slip into character voice on these boards now and again, sometimes I delete, sometimes I modify, but it always give me a chuckle.

Scrivener Note, I have discovered a horribly tedious but effective way to separate character dialogues in Scrivener so that I can finally read them all together in one section, which will help keep consistency. That is, assuming I have the patience to really get it all done.

Yeah, your dialogue is the bomb.

My dialogue is super utilitarian and hate it. It is by far still my biggest weakness. My strategy for dialogue is "use absolutely as little as necessarily possibly to get the point across." lol. I hate it that much.