What’s On Offer Okay, I'll admit it, I do read the manual when I buy a new gadget.
So when I became a writer, yep, you guessed it, I read writing manuals - dozens of them and all kinds. Still do, most likely always will.
In these posts, I'll share the gems I've uncovered; the key ideas with the packing removed, and how those ideas have worked for me.
Now and again there'll be other stuff too, stuff that strikes me as relevent and worth kicking around.
Oh, and there's one other thing I should tell you.
You and I both get that writing is a serious undertaking, and that what writers do matters big time.
But I've learned that even when dealing with serious stuff it helps to have a laugh now and again.
So, here we go...
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Have you ever looked back to when you first began to write seriously? Do you think that back then, your writing flowed onto the page more effortlessly than it does now?
Many writers do feel that. Some put it down to the notion that they’re running out of ideas, and find it quite distressing.
It’s not that. And if you’re feeling like that, then here’s a practical explanation and a simple solution.
First the explanation.
Back in the days when I was a corporate executive with a multinational, (Yeah, I know, but don’t hold it against me), I learned about a model for how we become skilled at any activity.
There are four stages:
1. Unconscious Incompetence. This is when we don’t know what we don’t know.
2. Conscious Incompetence. We do know what we don’t know.
3. Conscious Competence. We know what we need to know and can apply it when we think about it.
4. Unconscious Competence. We have become so skilled we can do it without even thinking about it.
Driving a car is a good example. The first time, you probably didn’t even know exactly what the pedals were for. Then you began to learn. Then you got it and could drive quite well, as long as you thought about it. Finally, you can drive, have a conversation and eat a burger all at the same time. Easy as! That’s the four stages.
When I first started, I was unconsciously incompetent. I wasn’t thinking about correct attributions, and have I addressed all the senses and is there rising tension, and are my characters speaking with their own voices, and the million other cats a writer has to herd to produce a novel. I didn’t know about the need for these things; I was simply telling a story.
But now I’ve become at least consciously competent and have all this other stuff to worry about. And it can get in the way of the creative story telling.
Now the solution; or at least, what works for me.
I treat the telling of the story and the preparation of a manuscript as two entirely separate processes.
When I’m writing the first draft, I am purely telling my story. This is the part I love most. It’s the best fun there is. Well, the best fun you can have sitting in front of a computer, anyway. I’m caught up in the emotions, trials and tribulations of my characters, laughing and crying with them.
Then, when the story is told. I take off my story teller’s hat and put on my writer’s hat. And this is when I think about all the stuff I’ve learned over years of writing. This phase covers everything from minor fixes to major surgery. I usually find I have to do this over and over again at least half a dozen or more times.
But the key thing here is that when I’m writing a first draft, I give myself permission to ignore everything I’ve learned about writing, so I can just enjoy the incredible thrill of story telling. Kind of a reward first situation.
After that’s done, I insist of myself that I remember and apply everything I’ve learned about writing. It’s an entirely different way of thinking from when I’m first drafting, (story telling).
Some of the great writers are at the last stage, unconscious competence; they can create and manage all the other stuff simultaneously without even thinking about it. Sigh…
But in the meantime, this is what works, at least for this mere mortal.
Every writer I’ve asked, whether published or on the journey to publication, has admitted – okay, sometimes only after a wine or two – that having readers enjoy their writing is a major part of why they write. It’s definitely true for me. You too, I expect.
There was one man who, over dinner at a writer’s festival, claimed a tad pompously that he wrote for the intellectual challenge. Another diner, a well known author I might add, leaned across the table and, with an almost angelic smile, asked, “Then why don’t you simply do the Times Cross Word Puzzle? It’s far more challenging, doesn’t take so long, and it’s still putting words on paper.”
My first thought was, “Damn, what a superbly ego puncturing riposte. Wish I’d thought of it.” Second thought was that even if I had thought of it, I wouldn’t have had the nerve to say it.
My point is that we do want to be read and we do want our writing to be appreciated.
To achieve that, it’s helpful to think about the process the way businesses think about customer service. Companies spend fortunes on surveys of various kinds to figure out what their customers’ want.
Luckily for us, much of that work has already been done. We know that, most of all, readers want to be entertained and diverted. They want their fiction to be doorways to other places more interesting than their own, and into the lives of other people more interesting than they believe themselves too be.
Readers want satisfying endings, to see good prevail over evil, to see justice done, to see evil doers get their comeuppance; to learn that things worked out okay in the end for characters they care about.
Readers want to feel powerful emotions that they may rarely if ever feel in real life.
For us writers, that means powerful, memorable characters, and plots that excite, or enrage, or delight our readers; that make them care, really care.
Achieving all that is akin to juggling several chain saws while balancing on a one legged chair. It can be done, but it takes skill and practice, a lot of skill and practice.
The thing is it’s all learnable.
The starting point is to remember that, while we do the act of writing to satisfy our own powerful needs, what we write has to be aimed four square at meeting those customer needs.
To be successful we have to be as customer focused as any salesman when we’re on the job.
As the legendary Science Fiction writer Robert Heinlein once said, “Always remember, you’re competing for Joe’s beer money. And Joe loves his beer.”
In India, it used to be said that even if a person of a particular caste move a thousand miles from his or her home, other people – complete strangers – would instantly be able to tell which caste that person belonged to from his or her mannerisms and speech.
Even today in England, class often becomes obvious as soon as someone speaks.
What we say, and how we say it, tells a lot about who and what we are.
This is a fantastic leg up for fiction writers. If we’re careful about the words we put in our characters’ mouths, we can tell the reader much about the character without resorting to the dreaded ‘Laundry List’ description. Better than that even, we can leave it to the reader’s imagination to fill in the information.
In this was, our dialogue can do double duty. It can move the story forward as it’s supposed to, and it can help describe the character. Especially with a few mannerisms thrown in.
Here are some examples.
Suppose my hero is looking for a young woman and he has her picture. He asks a number of people about her. Here are the various characters’ responses.
Example 1
“Oh, my dear,” she said, putting a hand on my arm. “I can quite see why you would want to find her, but… I can’t help wondering what your interest might be exactly.”
Example 2
“Nice looking pair. Tell you what. I’ll help you if you give us ‘er number when you find her, yeah?”
Example 3
“Now, let me see.” He studied the picture intently. “Caucasian, I would say. And I would estimate she is in the order of five feet five, perhaps five feet six and…” He paused and slowly rubbed his chin. “Yes, one hundred and forty pounds, give or take. No.. no, I’m positive no one of that description has been in the office recently.”
If the image of a type of person came into your mind as you read each of the examples, then that was your imagination picking up on clues and suggestions, and filling in the blanks.
As I said, this can be a powerful tool for fiction writers. But there are a couple of traps to watch for.
If you use a device to imply an accent, as I did in example 2 by writing ‘ ‘er’ instead of ‘her’, then you must do it extremely sparingly. Just the barest suggestion now and again is quite enough to get the message to the reader. Any more than that and you run the risk of either throwing your readers out of the dreamlike state we want them to be in, or it becomes just plain difficult to read. Usually both.
Another benefit of developing this skill is that when you have a conversation going on involving more than two people, you don’t have to use attributions, i.e. Jane said, or Jim said, so much. You’ll still need them occasionally, but much of the time your readers will know who’s speaking simply from the way the character speaks.
Of course, once we’ve given a character a certain voice, we must be consistent throughout the story.
A useful way of practising this, say while waiting at the doctor or at the bus stop, is to imagine a simple scenario, as I have done, and imagine how different folk might respond.
Give it a try. And let your characters describe themselves.
Most writers I’ve spoken with found, ooh, a good squillion things about starting their first novel that daunted them, in some cases almost to the point of never actually starting. That just about sums up how I felt as well.
One of the more hand wringing ones was how to manage the steady build up of information; about characters, plot, settings, back stories and so on.
Sure, I read all about the 5 X 3 cards, but the idea just didn’t work for me. First, because bending over arranging cards on the floor to figure out where I was just seemed like hard work. And second, because in this technology age, there just had to be a better way.
I looked at most of the available writing software packages. Some are very good overall, though the better ones tend to be expensive. But none of them handled this issue particularly well, as far as I could see.
Until I started using mind maps. I’d always used them in the corporate world. I’m sure you know what they are: you put a circle in the middle and then link it to surrounding, what are called, ‘nodes’, as you think of new ideas.
Here’s a simple example of a mind map in which I’ve started listing characters. The breakthrough for me was when mind mapping software started having the ability to hyperlink a node to any other kind of document. It could be a word doc, a web page, or even another mind map. I just love this feature.
Using this example, I might link the Murderer node to another mind map called ‘Murderer’, i.e. that would be the word in the centre circle. On this new mind map I start building up nodes as I think of, or discover, usable facts about my murderer.
On this second level mind map, I would have nodes like, ‘Background’ linked to a word doc describing his life so far, a node called psychology that might hyperlink to a web page with good stuff about the psychology of serial killers, a node called ‘Appearance’ hyperlinking to a doc listing his physical characteristics, and so on. Anything to do with the murderer is either a node on the Murderer mind map or has a node pointing to it.
So, I end up with layers of mind maps all logically linked in a highly visual way that allows me to click through to quickly and logically get to information I need.
When I think of a possible new idea, I just add it as a node on the relevent mind map, and then link the node to related information as I find it.
As long as you keep everything, (the files that is), in the same folder, the relationships, (hyperinks), are always maintained.
I’ve tried different mind mapping software and the one I like – in part because it is open source, (free), is called, who’d have guessed? – Freemind. You can download it here.
Give the idea a try. Experiment to find a model that suits your own style.
And let me know if it works for you.
I’m going to start with what was a biggy for me in the early days. I read that if you started with a plot and built characters to suit, the effect would be contrived. Scary word!
But if the thing was to start with the characters did that mean that I had to do what Stephen King describes in his part memoir, part how-to book “On Writing”, which, BTW, is definitely worth reading. He sets up highly developed characters in a situation and let events unfold. That might be fine for the odd genius like King, but I was dead certain I couldn’t do that.
I read that if I planned my book scene by scene it would lose its spontaneity – always assuming it had any in the first place.
But Ayn Rand in her terrific book “The Art of Writing” points out that you wouldn’t build a house without a detailed plan. Fair, I thought, enough!
Confused yet? I sure was.
Over the years, I’ve learned that the answer lies somewhere in the middle.
The great screen writer, Charles McKee, (“Story” Methuen, 1999), puts it this way: “We cannot ask which is more important, structure or character, because structure is character; character is structure. They’re the same.”
Sounds impressive, but what does it mean?
I take it to mean that we should develop both in the planning stage, always with an eye to internal consistency. In one sense, when developing a plot, we can have practically anything happen. But in reality the major factors limiting what can happen are the traits, beliefs, values and backgrounds of our characters.
And stories, first and foremost, are about people.
For those reasons, my first big process is developing character back stories. I’m not that interested as to whether her eyes are blue or green, but I really want to know that when she was twelve, her little brother drowned while in her care, and now she has phobia about water and avoids responsibility. That’s what I focus on.
Mind you, if my story is about a lost Egyptian manuscript, there’s a good chance I’ll need an archeologist, so to that extent, much about my character is dictated by the needs of the plot.And if my heroine has to dive into a subterranean pool to survive, then so much the better.
Internal consistency is essential. My characters do reflect the needs of the plot, and I think purists who doesn’t accept the idea are unrealistic. But, and this really is vital, our characters must behave in character.
Let me put it this way. What a character does will always be a function of the needs of the story I want to tell, but what a character does must also be wholly consistent with the kind of person I’ve created.
What works for me is to develop my characters almost in parallel with the plot, well before I start writing the first draft. So, when I do get to type ‘Chapter 1′, I have a very good idea of what my people are going to do, why they’re going to do it, and in what order.
And, anyway, as Ayn Rand and others have pointed out, there’s nothing to stop us from changing the plan as we go along.
That’s part of the fun…
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