Steal A Trick From Hollywood To Plan Your Next Novel

by Brian on February 17, 2012

in Craft

The early planning stages of any long writing project are usually when you feel the most wobbly about the whole thing. Novels, of course, but even novellas and novelettes can feel like going off-path into the deep unknown. Sure, you can wing it, or feel your way blind the whole time, but most people seem to prefer having the security of some kind of guide.

This is why the process of outlining exists. To give you a map to follow, a blueprint to show you how to build the thing.

Except I hate outlines. A tool of the devil. I concede their usefulness as a sales aid, but still: If the most buttoned-down middle managers of the world’s dullest corporation got together in a beige boardroom around an unvarnished table to come up with the least inspiring tool to sell to writers, it would be the outline.

The Problem With Outlines

Two big ones, as I see it:

(1) They’re so dismally reductionist. I can speak only for myself, but I’ve never worked up an outline that didn’t make everything sound completely stupid and trivial. I’m left feeling like, Ugh … who would ever want to read THIS? Which has an incredibly dispiriting effect right out of the gate.

(2) Outlining doesn’t work the way your brain does. Outlining is a linear process. Yes, so is prose, ultimately, with one word, one sentence, one paragraph after another. But that’s imposing order on the chaos of raw ideas, and a project’s idea phase is anything but linear. The creative brain rebels against behaving in a linear fashion. It’ll fall in line you force it, but it would much rather run and jump and play. Those puppy and kitten videos that get a jillion hits on YouTube? That’s your brain on creativity.

If an outline is a map, the order seems backwards. How can you effectively map a territory before you’ve even been there? At least that’s the thinking behind the school of thought that a better time to work up an outline is after you’ve done the first draft, and know what you have to work with.

Until then, are you entirely on your own? Not if you don’t want to be. Not if you go Hollywood, with a modified version of a technique used for decades in shooting movies:

Storyboarding.

Of Course, This May Cost You $3.49 For 500 At Staples

I’m sure at some point you’ve seen behind-the-scenes footage of filmmakers consulting storyboards. They’re like comic book panels that show how scenes and sequences unfold visually. They don’t have to be pretty, or great art. All they need to do is succinctly get an idea across.

The writer’s equivalent? No, I’m not suggesting you draw your novel. A few words or lines on a notecard should do it.

That’s right. Notecards. Totally low tech, totally hands-on. You’re gonna get dirty on this.

The method is simple. Whenever you know an element of your storyline, you jot it on a notecard. A scene, a plot point, a revelation, a character entrance … whatever it is, it gets its own notecard.

In my experience, this makes a much better fit with the random access way most writers come to know and discover their own work. At first, we only know fragments. We envision scenes without necessarily knowing how they’re linked, or what order they occur in. We see characters doing things, without knowing when or where. We may know the end, but not what will be going on halfway there. Research may suggest specific events without providing a context for them.

That’s okay. The notecards don’t care. You’ll work it out in time. The notecards just give you targets to steer toward. Beyond that, how you use them is up to you:

  • Spread them out on the floor or table, or pin them to a corkboard, to give you a growing overview of your timeline.
  • Reorder them as needed to take things that aren’t fixed in time and try them in different sequences to see what feels right.
  • Color-code them to denote character points-of-view, subplots, etc.
  • Use the backs of the cards to capture finer details: snatches of dialogue, descriptive lines, reminders to yourself, and anything else you want to remember.
  • Divide them into two groups: definite inclusions and maybe inclusions.

Whatever fits your way of working. Whatever helps, and keeps things growing, unfolding, moving forward.

Finally, credit where credit is due. I didn’t make this method up, but instead got it from friend and colleague John Skipp. It really did revolutionize the way I approached planning the novel I’m currently working on, and earned a permanent place in the toolbox.

[Photo by Sebastian Bassi]

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How Better Happens

by Brian on February 9, 2012

in Inspiration

[Cross-post with Storytellers Unplugged]

This is for the ones who despair. This is for the ones gripped by the feeling that it will never get better. That they will never get better.

I promise you this much: It can. And you might. That’s the best guarantee you’re going to get. Can and might. There’s only one certain guarantee, and that’s how to make sure that it doesn’t and you never do:

Quit. Whatever you’re doing, just stop right now. I mean it. Put down the pen, close the Word file, toss the notebook in the trash, click that folder full of story files and half-formed dreams and punch the Delete key like you mean it.

There, now. Just relax. Breathe. Doesn’t that feel better?

If it does, if it genuinely does, then go ahead and empty the trash, real or virtual, stop reading right now, and go about the rest of your day, the rest of your life. You’ve just been spared years of toil, doubt, and heartache.

But if it doesn’t feel better, if in fact it feels kind of awful, then you’d better fish those temporary discards out of the trash before something bad happens. Clutch them to your breast and promise to never treat them — or, more importantly, what they represent — with that kind of disrespect again.

Respect is important, because there’s work to do.

The Agony And The Ecstasy. Mostly Agony.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been digging among my roots. I’ve just finished prepping my first two novels for new editions. Both predate my migration to word processing, so I’m working with files generated by OCR scans of the original books. You have to proofread these things. Carefully. Sometimes OCR software has a whacky sense of humor about what it thinks it sees.

I’ve had no need to look at either of these novels for more than twenty years. Now that I have, I can honestly say I would’ve been happy to let them sit another twenty, if only to spare myself the daily torture.

I thought these novels were awesome at the time. And they still have their moments.

But now they’re like that TV show you used to love as a kid. You know the one I mean. The one you were absolutely nuts for, that you couldn’t get enough of. The one you’d run miles to get home in time to watch.

The most merciful thing you can do is never watch it again, ever. It never holds up. Better to leave it alone and let the sepia-toned memories remain intact.

Here’s how I described my reaction to this process the other day, in a new Afterword to one of the novels:

“Here and there are bits that make me glad I wrote them, that wouldn’t look or feel out of place in later work, but mostly I just groan a lot and want to bang my head against the desk, unable to believe that this was the published draft.”

Which sounds polite for general company, but really, it’s more like this prayer:

“Please, oh Odin, god of battle and poetry, please make it stop! And if you can’t make it stop, make it better. And if you can’t make it better, please send your ravens to pluck out my eyes.”

Yeah, that bad. To me they are.

There are a lot of things about these formative works that should console me: That agents thought they were worth representing. That publishers thought they were worth publishing. That reviewers said good things about them. That there are readers who remember them fondly, maybe even loved them the way I did, and that even now there are publishers who want to bring them back into print.

While I’m enormously grateful for all that, I can’t say there’s much consolation in it.

But then there’s this. This summation of the gulf between then and now, of all that’s come in the interim, and all that’s still to come. This may be the finest thing you could ever say about yourself when comparing where you began with where you are today:

I would never write that now. It would never even occur to me. Or if it did, I wouldn’t write it in remotely the same way.

It’s so clear: Things got better. I got better. Mostly as a consequence of not stopping. Not stopping, and an unrelieved sense of dissatisfaction.

Through The Looking Glass

Pure serendipity. The other day, not even knowing what I’ve been up to lately, my longtime friend Clark Perry cued me into the quote below. Clark is one of the few spawning salmon who made it all the way upstream, past a million belly-up floaters who gave out, to get hired writing for TV.

We were there at the very beginning, for each other’s origin stories. We saw each other through years of the exact process that Ira Glass, host and producer of Public Radio International’s This American Life, describes in this clip from 2009:

“…all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there’s this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase. They quit.

“Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you’re just starting out or you’re still in this phase, you gotta know that it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work … It’s only by going through a volume of work that you’ll close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions …

“It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You just gotta fight your way through.”

Except there’s one thing Glass doesn’t address here: Okay, so how do you fight your way through?

The Good Fight

People analogize the creative process and the crucible of improvement in different ways. Me, I like finding the parallels with, appropriately enough, fight training. It resonates.

If you’ve never done any fight training, just know this much: The bag work, the mitt work, kicking pads and drilling your footwork and head movement … it’s all just theory. True practice comes when you take what you think you know and match it against something that hits back. And when you start sparring, it’s a humbling, humiliating experience.

How did this guy just hit me six times and I couldn’t do anything about it? What openings did he see that I wasn’t even aware of? That I couldn’t see on him?

Simple. Once he (or she) was where you are now. He was the one getting hit six times. She was once the one without the experience to spot the openings.

It’s nothing personal, this pounding you’re taking. Or if it is, it’s personal in a good way. You and your sparring partner are actually there to teach each other. True, it’s a hard way to learn. It’s also the only way.

Your partner got through it by doing what you have to now: find something to love about the process. Something you love more than you dislike the discomfort. Something that never gets old, that keeps the experience alive and fresh for you. Something that keeps luring you back from the pits of discouragement.

You get through it by learning to live for the little victories. Maybe next week you only get hit four times in a row. Or she swings and you’re no longer there. Or you nail him with a sweet counter.

And so it is with writing, with every other creative endeavor.

Everything you think you know from books, from blogs, from classes … it’s all just theory. Everything you work up behind closed doors and leave there in the dark, that’s theory too, just another kind … still something you haven’t yet put to the test.

True practice comes from putting it out in the world, daring to risk the vulnerability that goes with this. Feedback readers, critique groups, submissions. Especially submissions. That’s when the ordeal begins. That’s when you have to find the thing you love enough to keep you going despite the rejections, the cheap shots, the indifference, and the clear-eyed recognition of the gap between your work and your ambitions.

That’s when you have to learn to live for the little victories. Do you know how many successful writers have had their day made, their week made, when a rejection came with a personalized note of encouragement from the editor? All of them.

That’s how better happens. By increments and milestones and thinking in timeframes that most people don’t have the patience or guts for.

So put in the time. Take the hits. Keep going.

It does get better. And so will you.

[Photo by Eric Langley]

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Rock Your Writing This Year With The 30-Things Challenge

by Brian on February 2, 2012

in Productivity

We’re a month into 2012 and I’m coming out of January with the kind of momentum I haven’t felt in years. I hope you can say the same. A number of projects have either wrapped up or are heading that way, while others continue to gel, unfold, and germinate. It’s a good feeling, one I would like to sustain.

But you can’t count on this just happening on its own. I’ve made that mistake before, and have the moss-scars to prove it.

No, this is going to take a new level of attention to detail.

Since We Can’t Really Count On The World Ending This Year

Last time we touched on the fulcrum nature of January — how it was named for the Roman god Janus, whose two faces look both forward and behind, to the past and the future. Along with this went with a look back at the five most useful books I read last year.

And now for the year-to-come.

One of the books in that quintet was No B.S. TIme Management For Entrepreneurs, by Dan Kennedy, which I read in early December. Sometimes we encounter the right ideas at just the right time, and the following is one of them. It seems to have a particular resonance for the beginning of a year, when thoughts naturally turn to matters of change and continuity.

Near the end of the book, Kennedy discusses the principle of massive action: making not just one or two changes, but many changes, putting into motion a lot of acts, large and small, whose effects can tally up to much more than the sum of the parts.

Here’s one quick example Kennedy provides:

“I once had a dentist call me, after having gone home from my weekend seminar, and tell me: ‘I’ve made a list of 300 things to change in the practice.’ Every week he did ten of them. After 30 weeks he had done everything on that list, big and small. And, without a penny increase in advertising, without a dollar’s difference in marketing, in the same office, with (almost) the same staff, his practice had more than quadrupled in volume. … When I tell the story, the usual, predictable reaction is astonishment and dismay — ‘Three hundred changes? I’d never get 300 things done.’”

OK, So Pick Your Own Number

First the obvious: A dental practice has a great deal more complexity and variables than a writing career, let alone a writing sideline.

Still. Consider. How much farther along with your writing, or any other creative endeavor, would you be by next New Year’s Eve if you looked for a certain number of things to do, or do better, or eliminate doing, and then made dead sure that you followed up and did those things?

Say, 30 things. Or 20 things. Or even just 10 well-chosen things.

The holes in your game. The things that don’t feel as immediately rewarding. The stuff that may not be much fun at all. Bad habits, sloppy habits. The things you find easy to put off to tomorrow, and the tomorrow after that. Maybe even a few things you’ve never even considered until you sat down and started brainstorming.

Here’s my list. Most of it, anyway. 20 things are for public perusal, while the other 10 are for more private contemplation. But 20 are more than enough to convey the general idea. Big broad things, picky little niggly things, they’re all fair game:

  1. Refine and keep to a locked-in schedule of block time that will enable me to get the most important tasks done early in the day.
  2. Commit to writing a minimum of 1000 words/day, 6 days/week, all projects combined. (Exception: when revisions take precedence.)
  3. Watch semi-colon usage; never use when a  period will do just as well.
  4. Ration use of ellipses, since I can really, you know … overdo them…
  5. Mightily resist the urge to put something in pop culture catchphrase terms. These age badly. (Exception: if I’m deliberately trying to evoke a specific time.)
  6. Respond to all blog comments within 24 hours.
  7. Respond to all reader e-mail within 48 hours.
  8. Commit to posting here once/week. (Yes, I hear that mocking laughter.)
  9. Commit to updating my web site a minimum of every 2 weeks.
  10. Always be doing something to warrant an update in the first place.
  11. Produce more audio stories like “Extract” — maybe 3/year.
  12. Continue to fight the good fight against my counterproductive tendency toward first-draft perfectionism.
  13. Review, process, and convert one book/month until my entire backlist is converted to e-book formats.
  14. Create an Amazon author page.
  15. Network and make at least 5 contacts/week: editors, publishers, etc. Track these.
  16. Never finish a project without having another cued up, ready to start.
  17. Follow up on/look into further opportunities I’ve had for guest blog posts.
  18. Keep the current novel-in-progress as the first priority, and do at least as much work on it per week as other, shorter works.
  19. Balance my reading list each month so I’m always getting an optimal mix of fiction, research, education, and inspiration.
  20. Figure out some way to harmoniously integrate an at-a-glance box into my web site, gathering links to the news posts on all active projects.

Good luck with your own list. And see you for the followup in, oh, 10 or 11 months.

[Photo by bicameral]

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The 5 Most Useful Books I Read In 2011

by Brian on January 11, 2012

in The Good Stuff

January is the time to limber up your neck and swivel your head, looking both backward and forward. It wasn’t for no reason that the Romans named it for Janus, the god with two faces, who could manage this bi-directional perspective without risking whiplash.

Today’s post and the next will follow Janus’ example, and it seems only fitting to start by looking backward.

These aren’t necessarily my favorite books that I read last year, although in some cases they are. They don’t have to be about writing per se — only one qualifies on that count. Rather, these are the ones that had the most direct benefits to my life and work as an indivisible whole, and how one meshes with the other. The ones that inspired, that got me to think, that got me to reassess, that got me to take action. The ones that did the best job of leaving me better off for having read them.

May one or more do the same for you in the next twelve months. Click the cover image to teleport to the book’s Amazon page. And if you have any of your own to add, by all means, please share. There’s always more room on the reading list for 2012.

The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield

Over at Steven Pressfield’s blog, in terms of coming from the warrior-poet ethos, he makes me feel like an ROTC cadet standing next to a Green Beret. I think that’s why I was almost frightened of reading this, but it actually had the effect of humanizing him. Nobody, it seems, is immune from emotional and psychological blocks that get in the way of doing the work, and Pressfield has a particularly eloquent understanding of this, which he calls Resistance.

Three main sections: defining Resistance, combatting it, going beyond it. Pressfield proceeds through each with a series of mostly short, sharp observations that read like self-contained meditations. The effect is not unlike the Tao Te Ching, or similar tomes that pack an immense amount of wisdom into a minimum of space.

This is one of those books you can pick up, open anywhere, and derive some immediate good. For the rest of your life.

The 4-Hour Body, by Timothy Ferriss

To my way of thinking, a creator who doesn’t have physical goals in addition to his or her creative projects is neglecting the very vehicle these works need to come to fruition. Which goes back to the heart of the warrior-poet ethos: the development of mind, body, and spirit as one.

Tim Ferriss is the ultimate break-it-down, see-how-it-works, test-for-erroneous-assumptions, put-it-back-together-with-just-the-essential-parts guy. This exhaustively researched and field-tested doorstop of a book serves up dozens of self-contained DIY projects in the areas of fat loss, muscle gain, better sleep, boosting strength/speed/endurance, injury rehab and pre-hab, and much more. Oh yeah, and something about a 15-minute female orgasm. Yeehah.

No exaggeration … there’s enough here to keep you in the ascendant for years.

No B.S. Time Management For Entrepreneurs, by Dan Kennedy

Although a bit technologically dated — in Kennedy’s world, the fax machine still reigns — and there’s a goodly amount of chest-thumping over how successful he is, this is still one of the best books of its type that I’ve read.

For me, one of its strengths is that it spends only a token amount of time coming from the assumption that the reader is but one cog in a company office environment, as many such books do. Instead, the main focus is on the solitary self-starter, the — as the title makes obvious — entrepreneur. And what is a working writer if not a creative entrepreneur?

There are lots of good strategies, tactics, and other ideas here, some of which you’ve no doubt seen and heard before. Some, though, I hadn’t, and everything’s wrapped up in the kind of hard-nosed pragmatism, and thoughts on one’s mental game, that should leave you setting the standards you want to live up to.

The Power of Full Engagement, by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz

Then there’s the school of thought maintaing that if you manage your energies right, time takes care of itself. Energy types are fourfold here: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. Sound familiar?

Loehr and Schwartz come into this after a long history of helping athletes perform their best, and make the eye-opening statement, “The performance demands that most people face in their everyday work environments dwarf those of any professional athletes we have ever trained.” One of their keys to getting a handle on this is developing a greater awareness of your natural rhythms, both circadian (24-hour cycles) and ultradian (90- to 120-minute cycles within the day). Thus, you can better optimize periods of expenditure and renewal, stress and recovery, etc.

Loads of insight and actionable stuff here, augmented with numerous case studies, including that of a writer “facing a highly challenging book deadline that he wasn’t sure he could meet.”

In Praise Of Slowness, by Carl Honoré

“There is more to life than increasing its speed,” said Gandhi.

Maybe I read this at the perfect time, but it really struck a chord. Honoré addresses the deleterious effects on mind, body, business, and society of trying to live and accomplish everything at mad velocity, and how this can actually be counterproductive to real-world effectiveness. He also looks at various global movements that have sprung up in opposition to the cult of speed for speed’s sake, and presents case studies of people who decided to dial it back a few notches and are living more satisfying lives for it.

It’s important to note what this book isn’t: a call to Luddism. Rather, it advocates a better, well-reasoned balance between slo-mo and turbo. Read it, and it will compel you to examine how you pace yourself and why. Just don’t speed-read it.

Bonus Round: Born To Run, by Christopher McDougall

If you read a book and derive just one amazing thing from it, was it worth it? Absolutely!

In truth, there’s probably little actionable stuff that most writers can glean from a book on ultra-long-distance running. And I already covered that One Amazing Thing from this one, in this post on chia seeds. But Born To Run is such an amazing, inspiring book (that can deliver a few lessons on larger-than-life characters) that I’d feel I was cheating you if I didn’t give it one more plug.

[Janus photo by Thierry Ehrmann]

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A Fine Line Between Polish And Overkill: The First-Draft-To-Last Postscript

January 5, 2012

And you thought it was all over, along with Christmas, New Year’s, and Festivus’ dreaded “Airing of Grievances.” As the four-part “From The First Draft To The Last” series was winding to a close, reader Turenn, whose request kicked it all off in the first place, came back with a follow-up: “Is there another danger, [...]

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From The First Draft To The Last, Part 4

December 21, 2011

As we finally bring this behemoth in for a landing, I’m reminded of the old saying: “Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.” What started as a request for a single post turned into … well, you can see how things mushroomed. Thanks again to Turenn for suggesting the topic. Be [...]

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From The First Draft To The Last, Part 3

December 13, 2011

Our journey until now… In Part 1, we started big and clumsy, with birthing a misshapen blob of story and getting its core parts in order. Part 2 covered the administrative tasks of internal logic, and the art of language and rhythm. Now we get into the skills that you can spend a lifetime refining. [...]

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From The First Draft To The Last, Part 2

December 7, 2011

First the bad news: If you thought we were going to be able to wind up this reader-request post today, it looks like we were both mistaken. The good news? Well, I should hope that the prospect of a Part 3 doesn’t make you peevish. To recap, Part 1 looked at the process of simply [...]

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From The First Draft To The Last, Part 1

December 1, 2011

And so it came to pass, this past Thanksgiving Day, that reader Turenn asked, “How about a post explaining what you do between your first draft of a story and your last? I would find it helpful, and I think a lot of other writers would, too.” How about two posts, then? Because (A) I [...]

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Bring The Lightning, With The Food Of The Gods You Probably Thought Was A Joke

November 22, 2011

Imagine, for a minute, that you’re in the middle of an expedition through some of the most remote and unforgiving country on the planet. Specifically, the Copper Canyons in Mexico’s Sierra Madre mountains. By late afternoon, under a pulverizing sun, you’re done in. You’re toast. Hungry, thirsty, barely able to put one foot in front [...]

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Go Farther, Faster, By Limiting Your View To Three Steps Ahead

November 12, 2011

[Cross-post with Storytellers Unplugged] “Begin with the end in mind…” Sound advice, that. Sound strategy. The rationale being that if you don’t know where you’re going, how in the name of Zeus can you be sure you’ll actually get there? Where, exactly? The end of an as-yet-unfinished novel comes to mind, for starters, but that’s [...]

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A Better Way Of Managing Your Author Website

November 7, 2011

From homicidal urges to gratitude — what a difference a month or two can make. Awhile back, this blog was hacked, defaced, and generally uglifed. My fault, most likely. I hadn’t updated the foundational software, WordPress, since I’d first installed it a year-and-a-half ago. This was just begging for trouble. There was probably a security [...]

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8 Ways To Be (Artistically) Out Of Step With The Times

October 9, 2011

[Cross-post with Storytellers Unplugged] There are a lot of places where I and everything else in sight don’t make for a comfortable fit. Where the drummer has one rhythm going and my feet twitch to some other cadence entirely. Most people will eventually cop to the same. Once we drop our pretenses, we’re all a [...]

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To Be, Or Not To Be, A Writer Of Short Fiction

September 16, 2011

It’s one of the more common dilemmas that beginning writers seem to wrestle with. I’ve heard the question enough: Should I work on short stories, or should I just jump headfirst into a novel? When it’s phrased like this, it implies that short fiction isn’t the endgame. If it were, there’s no quandary. Nobody sweats [...]

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