 Photo by jking89
Should you write when you don’t want to?
Everyone’s heard the advice to write every day. I’ve even repeated it to writers myself, but I’m wondering if it’s really good advice after all.
Most writers start out writing because they enjoy it. They do it just simply because they can and because it gives them a sense of satisfaction and fulfilment. It’s why I started writing, and why my exercise books in school consisted of several taped together by the end of term, whilst most people were struggling to get half way through their first. I just loved to write and wrote at every opportunity.
Back then I had no notion of writing for money, or writing to please someone else. It was just something I did, and if it pleased me it was good enough.
Because I had so much enjoyment in my writing, I wrote on most days. But I never felt bad or guilty for the days when I didn’t. I never once got anxious that if I missed a day or two, or even a week or two, I’d struggle to get back into it or have to relearn some writing skills.
If you don’t write everyday, unwritten crap doesn’t build up in your head. You don’t have to get all that garbage down on the page before you can writing the good stuff again. Once you can write well, you can write well at any time no matter how long you stay away from it.
You might get rusty. You might find your ideas don’t flow quite as smoothly or as fast as they did when you were writing every day. But you won’t necessarily have to write rubbish before you get to the good stuff.
The biggest danger in not writing every day, especially if writing isn’t your living, is that it’s harder to start again after a break.
Being such creatures of habit, if we allow the writing habit to get broken then that precious half hour we’ve got into the habit of stealing from each day will become elusive again. If you’ve missed two weeks of writing, it’s only too easy to let yourself believe another day won’t hurt.
That’s the biggest danger in not writing everyday. Losing the habit. Not losing the ability to write.
So, should you write everyday?
I’m no longer going to say yes. I’m going to say, if you like. If you want to minimise the danger of writing becoming something you used to do but no longer find time for.
But also if you still find it enjoyable to write every day.
If it’s become a chore, if you no longer enjoy it, then give it a miss. Walk away from it. Do something else for as long as it takes.
Writing is hard enough without making it a punishment.
 Sometimes you just can’t see the wood for the trees.
Story beginnings seem to be the most treeful area of writing. Ideas are there, but elusive. You grab hold of one and write, and within a minute or two another crops up. Do you abandon the first to jot down the second and risk losing track of idea no. 1, or do you plod on and let idea no 2 slip into oblivion?
Worse, you get caught up in the inner debate between the two ideas and find you’ve lost both of them.
Over the years I’ve found the best way of holding onto ideas is through brainstorming with clusters. It’s not foolproof, and some of the things that occur to me as I’m writing still get away, particularly the ideas that relate to story structure. Still, since I’ve been using the cluster method of developing stories I find I’m holding onto more of my thoughts than I did before.
Here’s how it works for me.
My central idea goes in the middle. It might be a character, a theme I want to explore, an event – whatever it is that sparks the chain of muse pitches that I need to get hold of.
From this central idea I jot down anything and everything my trusty muse throws at me. Some of it is good, some of it is relevant, and some is just plain crazy. It all goes down, and sometimes it’s the crazies that spark off the neatest twists when I refer back to the clusters during the actual writing.
Once I have a few ideas jotted down I don’t need to juggle so many balls in my mind. I can let go of ideas knowing they’re caught in the net and can’t get away.
Sometimes a starting point suggests itself. Other times a definite structure emerges.
And now and then I realise a story is going nowhere before I’ve spent hours writing, and can ditch it and move on.
Best of all, very often I’ll get a whole new story idea from one or more of my cluster branches – and again, the crazies are a fertile breeding place.
Brainstorming, mindmapping, clustering – whatever you want to call it – isn’t new. In fact there is so much written about it that it’s in danger of becoming overworked and through that losing it’s value. People who’ve never tried it dismiss it just because it seems to smack them in the face at every corner.
But it’s good.
It’s liberating.
It’s productive and inspiring.
Whether you use a pen and paper or go the high-tech route and download some software, once you get into the habit of exploring ideas through clustering you won’t want to go back.
I use both paper and software, but the thing I really like about clustering on the computer is the way I can move ideas around the map. By making the map look different, and seeing my clusters of ideas juxtaposed against different ideas gives a whole new perspective that often is enough to make a breakthrough when I’m stuck.
 Photo by Lori Ann http://mamawit.wordpress.com/ I’ve just read a post on Holly Lisle’s Talysmana site regarding first drafts and the writing process, which has sparked off a few thoughts of my own.
One of the hardest things in writing, or learning to write, is learning to accept that what comes out of your imagination, your pen or your keyboard first time round isn’t necessarily anything remotely like what it will be when you decide it’s finished.
You have to push on through the muddles, accept the changes in direction and bear the confusion with stoic determination. You have to trust that the changes you make to a first draft are going to result in a better story.
And it’s not cheating when you change the beginning to match the ending. It’s okay to rewrite whole sections, delete others, change character names, swap locations, switch themes or whatever else occurs to you as you’re writing.
I’ve been a creative writing tutor for a few years now. I use the word ‘cheating’ deliberately, because so often I’ve had students cast me scandalised glances when I tell them it is perfectly okay to go back and add a few lines in chapter two when they think of a cool twist in chapter 15 that needs some foreshadowing. It really is as though I’ve suggested they cheat during an important exam.
First drafts are meant to be torn apart. Stories grow in much the same way as patchwork quilts. You have a load of little bits and pieces of material (in stories called scenes or ideas) and as you assemble the finished piece you rearrange, discard, add, match colours and shades, experiment with stitch styles and thread colours (in stories called narrative voices) and finally find a combination of all the above that pleases you.
You have to go through the experimentation and shuffling, the mixing and matching, the discards and the additions. There’s no other way to do it. If you don’t try the pink floral up against the purple stripes you might miss a wonderful and startling combination that delights and surprises.
It’s not cheating to shuffle the pieces around to work out which looks best.
But here’s the thing. In order to have pieces to shuffle about, you’ve got to write them first. Only then can you start the final assembly process that builds a story. And that’s what’s so hard about first drafts. It’s too easy to fall into the trap of believing that because it’s written, it’s got to stay as it is.
Wrong. It’s just another piece of the patchwork. If it clashes then change, revise, rewrite or delete it.
That’s what first drafts are for.
 http://www.flickr.com/photos/roomiccube/ / CC BY 2.0 Effective writing demands the use of all five senses: seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, tasting – but it also demands something else: the ability to see beyond the usual, to find the extraordinary in the commonplace, to get beneath the surface of the everyday and discover the wealth of treasure that lurks just out of the reach of what’s normal.
Everyday we’re bombarded by sounds, sights, smells, shapes and other snapshots of real life as lived by everyone around us. Most of the time we block them out, not out of wilful ignorance, but out of necessity. If every sense was fully receptive all the time we’d be overwhelmed in a matter of minutes.
Imagine trying to notice and make sense of all the snatches of conversation heard while walking along a busy street. Impossible. Couple that with the sounds of motor engines, the call of the pigeons, the scrape of shoes on concrete, a police siren in the distance, the rattle of a charity collector’s box, the aroma of the fish and chip shop or a burst of coffee outside the cafe, the sudden sharp yell of a frustrated child or the shrieks of excited teenagers.
The trick is to be selective in what you notice and focus on just that one thing for a moment.
It’s not very often, for instance, that we’re treated to the pleasure of real silence and very often what we image to be silence really isn’t. Sit very still and listen. Can you really hear nothing at all? In the house, is the clock ticking, is the central heating humming, does the occasional car go past outside the window, are the birds singing?
Right now, although I’m sitting alone at my computer as I write this, the sounds I can hear become almost a cacophony when I pause to really listen.
I hear birds, not singing but squawking, there’s the hum of the computer and the tap of the keys as I type, the wind blows the fly screen against the door, knocking, the cat claws the furniture in the next room and my own voice calls sharply for her to stop, I move slightly and my clothes rustle as the chair gives a little squeak. I clearly hear the clicking of the mouse wheel as I scroll up and down the page.
Isolating sounds, listening for them one by one and giving each a name, is good training for the creative mind. It teaches you to home in on the small things, to pause and realise the breadth and depth of the normal.
All too often the little things escape us, but it’s the little things that build into big things. Words build into sentences, into paragraphs and pages, to chapters and whole books. But without the words, one by one, there is nothing.
Learning to home in on the moment and stay there for a little while builds on the subconscious store of remembered senses.
Then, when your character is alone in her house and feeling lonely or scared, anxious or happy, your subconscious will throw you the senses, the tiny sounds so easily missed or overlooked, that will heighten the characters’ sense of aloneness, or whatever else she’s feeling, and draw it sharp and real for your readers.
But before you can home in on these tiny sensations and sounds in writing, you need to have experienced them in real life.
Following on from the ‘secretive’ post, I did a little hard thinking and decided I needed to get myself out of that kind mindset.
I suppose we all have crises of confidence at some point. Maybe it’s the time of year, maybe it’s the fact that there seems to be so little freelance writing work that actually pays worth a damn, coupled with the depressing news generally on the publishing front.
It’s easy to start thinking ‘why bother’ and ‘one more day off won’t make any difference’.
So I took a couple or three days off. Nursed and nurtured the sulks that a client who’d promised fresh work in the new year still hasn’t come up with anything, and depressed myself further looking over the job bidding sites. (Don’t do it, it’ll make you cry.)
Then I decided that this behaviour just won’t do and set about turning myself around.
First Step
- Revisit my motivations and reasons for wanting to write.
- I love writing. From coming up with ideas (sometimes the hardest part for me), to researching my subject, to the physical act of typing and watching the words mount up on the page.
- I love working for myself. Yes it’s hard to prioritise and harder still to make family understand that the length of time I spend buried in the computer is actually me at work.
Second Step
- Plan specifically what I can do right now, today, to help me land writing assignments in the future.
- To that end I started designing and writing a new, more professional-looking and focussed personal website which advertises and promotes my freelance and ‘work for hire’ writing, and nothing else.
Third Step
- Look in new places for writing work to seek out new clients.
- Contact old clients and say hello. (It’s just a note, but it’ll remind them I’m alive and you never know, maybe they need some writing done).
- Find an advertised assignment that I can complete and apply for it. Anything within reason will do, just to feel I’m being proactive. I don’t have to accept the work if I change my mind later on.
- Seek out new print magazines and come up with at least two ideas for ones I’m attracted to.
So far I have done all of the above bar the last step which I’m still working on.
Results are promising.
After only two days I have offers of work. Maybe they’re not the most lucrative writing jobs in the world, but these missions, should I choose to accept them, will keep me writing, keep the ideas flowing and the skills honed, and remind me on a daily basis that I’m a writer and people pay me to write.
If you’re feeling demotivated, give it a try. Maybe you’ll get some work, or maybe you’ll luck out this time, but one thing’s for sure. DOING something, WRITING something, CREATING something is the best cure for a crisis of confidence and the sense of demotivation it brings.
Fund-raisers are calling for urgent short story submissions to help raise money for disaster-stricken Haiti.
Out of the submissions, one hundred pieces of fiction will be chosen to appear in an e-book, proceeds of which will go to the Red Cross.
The Red Cross is just one of a number of charities and humanitarian organisations mobilising a vast aid effort to reach the thousands of injured, hungry and thirsty survivors of the 7.0-magnitude earthquake to hit Haiti on 12 January.
100 Stories for Haiti is the brainchild of author Greg McQueen. On the morning of January 19, Greg posted a video on his blog saying: “Dear Twitterverse, I can’t keep watching this on the news or trending on Twitter without doing something. I woke up this morning with the idea that together we could make an e-book and donate all the profits to the Red Cross.”
Within hours news had spread throughout microblogging website Twitter and story submissions began arriving. Nick Harkaway, author of The Gone Away World, will be submitting a new story for the book as well as writing the introduction. Lorraine Mace, the co-author of the ABC Checklist for Writers, and award-winning environmental journalist Sarah Lewis-Hammond are volunteering their time to help with the editorial process.
100 Stories for Haiti needs short story submissions, editors, sub-editors and volunteers.
If you want to send a short story, please follow these guidelines:
No more than 1,000 words
No stories containing graphic violence, death or destruction
Send all stories in the body text of an email to 100storiesforhaiti@gmail.com. Stories sent as attachments will not be opened.
Stories must be received by Monday 25 January 2010
Notes for editors
Greg McQueen is a UK author living in Aarhus, Denmark with his wife and three year old daughter. He writes mostly for teens and is the son of Geoff McQueen, creator of The Bill.
Greg’s video can be found here http://www.ireallyshouldbewriting.net/100-stories-for-haiti/
Story submissions and volunteers email: 100storiesforhaiti@gmail.com
The book will be sold on www.smashwords.com. Founder and CEO Mark Coker will be waiving the normal 15% commission.
100 Stories for Haiti will be published in mid-February
Contact details
Greg McQueen
gregmcqueen@gmail.com
+45 31 71 77 41
We’ve all heard the saying about a picture being worth a thousand words, but I wonder how true that is. I’ve been thinking about the opposite just lately – that’s to say, not pictures being worth the words, but pictures that are created by the words.
And I’ve also been asking myself, who paints the word pictures? Is it the writer, or the reader? And should the writer try to influence the pictures that their words create in the imaginations of the readers?
The Concept of Beauty
We all have different ideas about what is beautiful and what’s ugly. Sure, there are conventionally acceptable standards, particularly in assessing whether or not people are beautiful, but when it comes right down to the particular there is always a certain something that’s hard to define that determines whether or not we find someone or something attractive.
When writing, it’s best to leave the definition of beauty either up to the reader or to the other characters. For instance, if I describe a young woman with long blonde hair, big blue eyes and a full mouth, and then tell readers she’s beautiful, they may not agree that what I’ve described is beautiful. But they would readily accept that another of my characters finds her beautiful even if they don’t personally. If I want my readers to accept that a character is beautiful because her/his beauty is central to the story, I’d try to avoid giving actual descriptions beyond the most vague. That way the reader paints their own picture and so can’t argue with the suggestion that the character is beautiful.
It’s a subtle difference, but letting readers paint their own pictures as much as possible makes for much deeper reader interaction with the story.
 Photo by The Marmot
I read something, somewhere, about the need to define yourself as a writer both inwardly, in your own mind, and outwardly, when talking to other people about what you do.
I used to think that was probably right. Note the ‘probably’. I’m not so sure anymore.
If you tell people you’re a writer, the next question you have to answer is ‘what do you write?’, followed quickly by ‘will I have heard of you?’.
Unless both answers are in the extreme positive, in that you’ve carved out a well-defined niche for yourself along the lines of Bill Bryson or Lee Childs, say, or you can tell them you’re regularly published – like on a weekly or monthly basis – in a national publication that everyone and his dog has heard of, my thoughts now on the subject are that a little secretiveness is probably best.
There’s that probably again.
Truth is, I alternate between two extremes on this issue. One day I feel that telling everyone is the way to go, and the next I’m convinced it’s best to shutup about it. Unless you enjoy endlessly justifying what you do and why you do it, and are willing to put up with the ‘oooh get you’ looks.
Today I’m having a ‘shutup’ day.
Tomorrow I’ll probably be back shouting from the rooftops. (Are cliches allowed in blogposts? Who cares, seeing as today I’m keeping silent about writing I don’t need to worry about whether or not I’m being original.)
The Pale Ones are now in Scrivener and I’m faced with the task of organising the scenes and getting to grips with the story again.
Since the end of nano I’ve done very little fiction writing. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I picked up quite a bit more ‘work for hire’ than I normally do and that kept me busy with nonfiction.
But the Pale Ones are nagging. They want their story told and I want to tell it. So I need to get back on track and figure out where we go from here.
Scrivener does make the task of importing a WIP easy. Previously I was using yWriter, and while it’s a great writing tool, it doesn’t quite do what I want or present the work in the way I want it. So the first task was to get the POs out of yWriter and into Scrivener. Simplicity itself. Both programmes behaved perfectly. YWriter exported neatly into .rtf, and Scrivener picked it up effortlessly when asked to do so.
I ended up with a very long single file in Scrivener, which seeing as I’m working in scenes, was no good at all. Scrivener promises that breaking up long files is a simple matter, and it is. Just put the curser in the file where you want to the break and tell Scrivener to make the break. Everything before the break is put into into its own little scene section, and everything beyond the break stays together in the long file. You can select text at the beginning of the break to use as the scene title which makes later identification much easier. In a matter of minutes I’d run through the whole 60k odd word count and recreated the scene sections.
My next task is to organise my Scrivener index cards on the corkboard. I have scenes out of sequence, scenes I no longer need because of changes further on in the story, and scenes which, frankly, just aren’t doing the job they were supposed to do.
I’ve got to pin down my ‘sentence lites’, (Think Sideways jargon), or should that be ’sentences lite?’ and relearn/rethink my story arc. I’ve been away from the story for long enough to have forgotten a lot of what I’ve written which is both good and bad. Good because I can read it back with a fresher eye, and bad because it feels jut a bit like someone else’s story and I’m half afraid that when I try to get reacquainted with it I won’t like it anymore.
Hopefully Scrivener is going to make my task easier. Apart from the normal frustrations of learning a new programme, (and an irrational fear that by clicking buttons and experimenting I’m going to break either my story or Scrivener) my first few days with it have only made me more glad to have it.
Sometimes it feels like writing is more of a curse than a blessing.
Not that writing really is a curse, of course, but sometimes it feels like it.
You know what I mean. You get up in the morning and know you need to write something, but it all seems like too much trouble and the little thought sneaks in – maybe you won’t bother today.
Then you remember that writing’s your job. Doesn’t matter whether you want to do it or not, if it’s your job it’s got to be done. Like any other job.
Here’s the thing. There’s a very seductive aura that hovers around ‘writing’. Around ‘being a writer’. Any kind of writer, whether it’s fiction in the form of short stories, novels or novellas, whether it’s nonfiction in the form of news stories, features, travel articles – whatever. The idea that you get paid for your words (and by implication the notion that your thoughts are loftier than the next person who doesn’t get paid for them) somehow lends ‘the writer’ an importance that I’m not sure they deserve.
But it’s the arts, isn’t it? Like musicians, painters, sculptors, designers of all kinds and people who ‘create’. There’s magic in creation, and even more magic in getting money in return for what you create. Money equates with success. You don’t get money for it? You haven’t reached success yet.
Trouble is, when you do get some money for it it’s not long before you start wanting more money for the same thing, and then success recedes again until you’ve achieved that little bit extra.
That’s the point where the curse aspect starts creeping in. What used to be fun becomes work. And actually, it can be pretty boring work. And repetitive. And mind-bendingly hard at times too.
Writing is no walk in the park. So why do it?
I don’t have the answer.
All I can say is, in the words of one of my favourite fictional characters, we do it because, ‘it’s what we do.’
And because, having written, it’s just the best feeling in the world.
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