Category: Writing Advice – Craft & Process

My goal for 2019 is to spend 1,460 hours working on first draft material, spread across my fiction, my PhD, and some projected non-fiction features I’m looking at for the blog. This largely equates to twenty-eight hours of drafting every week, or approximately 4 hours a day. If I’m right in my estimates, this should be good for about 700,000 to 800,000 words over the course of the year, but I’m utterly unconcerned with the word count produced. My sole determinant of success in 2019 is pure hours spent with my but in the chair and my internet blocker turned on so I’m focused on drafting new words. This is a pretty big departure for me–like most writers, I’ve tended to forward plan based around word count. My goals around this time of year would be focused on the number of words produced, or the number of things finished. I want to write 2,000 words a day, or I’d like

With the Warhol Sleeping draft in the bag, I get to start a new project this week. It’s not a NaNoWriMo project, despite being started on November 1, because my current process is spectacularly ill-suited to doing NaNo. In fact, it’s one of those batshit crazy approaches that works for me in my current situation, but would make me shake my head if someone suggested it in a writing class. Basically, I’m trying to stay ahead of my anxiety and tendency to fret by treating drafting as a game of three card monte: three projects, three hours of writing time each day, and a timer that reminds me to swap between them at the end of every hour. The whole thing is focused on short, sustained bursts of focus on multiple projects, rather than three hours of trying to batter my head against a single book. No word count goals, just a specific amount of time staying focused on each

EVIL ROBOT MONKEY is a short story by Mary Robinette Kowal, available for free on her website (in html, PDF, and audio) and included in her short collection, Word Puppets. It’s a little over 900 words long (or 6 minutes of audio); a complete story in a single scene, and it’s one of the best pieces of fiction I’ve ever come across for explain the way story beats works.  The premise of this story is simple: uplifted monkey wants to sculpt clay as a escape from his not-so-pleasant existence; circumstances conspire to keep him from doing this. That’s the guiding macro-structure, but it’s the individual beats that give the piece an incredible amount of nuance for its word-count. FOUR BEAT PATTERN There’s a lot of argument about what gets classified as a beat in a story, but for my purposes I’m looking at a specific pattern: we get a clash when two characters wants are in conflict, they each deploy a

Conversations about narrative structure often focus their attention on the macro level: here is the three act structure; here is what needs to happen at the midpoint; here is how you nail the ending. Rarely do they spend a lot of time looking at the microstructure of individual scenes, beyond some very perfunctory (albeit important) advice about making sure each involves conflict and changes/advances the overall story. Which is a pity,  because understanding the microstructure of a scene is a surprisingly useful thing to have in your toolkit as a writer, particularly when you’re trying to resolve particularly thorny narrative problems. It’s one thing to say that a scene is built around two characters coming into conflict, and another to see how writers use that to generate specific effect Shawn Coyne gives a neat outline of beats within a scene in The Story Grid; Robin Law’s Beating the Story offers some useful frameworks when he breaks stories (and scenes) into alternating patterns

Some days it sucks you in, the magic of this writing gig, even when you sit and work in a place patently unsuited to magic. Right now, I’m in the small food court underneath the Queens Plaza mall. It’s not yet ten o’clock and the vendors are still warming up for the day. The girl behind the Red Rooster counter looks bored when I order a coke. The woman at the noodle stand isn’t even at her counter. The whole room is an oval, vendors arrayed around the edge, brightly lit to encourage a swift move through as you circle, looking for something to eat. There’s two young people the next table over, engaged in an animated discussion about language and syllables and people who do not articulate well. They war Doc Martins, hoodies, glasses. Backpacks in army camouflage colours, trading laughter in a way that makes me wonder if they’re flirting. Or, perhaps, not-yet-flirting, just the nervous feeling-out process

I’m bedding in some new routines at the moment, trying to figure out ways to work smarter rather than harder. This is a response to the way current life-events are affecting my perspective around my projects, asking me to redefine what can be construed as a success outcome for a project or “a good day’s progress” when I’m writing. This is always a danger when part of your income is predicated on freelance, contract, or irregular income: as you look to the future and see lean weeks on the horizon, it’s tempting to start thinking bigger, doing more, and figuring you can work faster. I can often tell when I’m tipping into outright anxiety because I start planning huge projects that are designed to fit around my already packed-out schedule. I’ve felt myself doing it over the last couple of weeks. Little whispers like it’s time to start blogging daily again and hey, lets try and write a six-part novella

The interesting thing about writing is the sheer amount of craft that goes into a single moment. Stories tend to climax when a major character makes an important decision – Luke Skywalker turns off his targeting computer and uses the force, or Katniss Everdeen refuses to play by the rules of the Hunger Game and refuses to kill the final competitor – and everything else in the story tends to focus on making that decision as meaningful as possible. Character arcs, themes and conflict. Narrative voice and carefully developed metaphors. All just an elaborate construction to contextualise a single difficult decision and imbue it with meaning. We aren’t built to make hard decisions. Even something as simple as “I should start getting some exercise,” is met with considerable resistance as we delay and make excuses. Watching fictional characters make those hard decisions is a promise that one day, if it really mattered, we could overcome that resistance and make the

I’ve spent a large chunk of my life teaching principles from E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel: the differences between flat and round characters; “the king died, and then the queen died” is a story, but “the king died, then the queen died of grief” is a plot. I never had to read the book, because those lessons are part of the fabric of writing now. They were referenced by mentors, reinforced with examples, used to mark out the lines between good writing and bad. I had what I needed, so why go looking for the original? I had a copy if I needed it – often more than one – but there was other stuff to read that advanced his original points. Forster wrote his speeches in 1927, and the ideas had been hashed out (I didn’t even have Forster’s name right, half the time, referring to him as EM Forrester for much of the last decade). Academia doesn’t

If there’s a pattern in my writing routine that remains unassailable, it’s this: Thursdays are the hardest days of the week. It’s rare that I get a day where writing is the sole thing I’m doing – there is always thesis work, and meetings, things that need doing for GenreCon and spending time with my girlfriend – but Thursdays are inevitably the day where the balance tips towards not-writing. It’s the day I spend six hours at work, the evening in which I will go game with my friends, and it’s often the evening where my girlfriend and I will abscond to the local sushi place for pre-game dinner. On Thursdays, I get stuff written before work. Yesterday, I managed about two thousand words, which is a pretty fucking efficient day given there was only about two hours of writing time before I had to jump on a train. It just felt like a failure, in many respects, because the

New writers are often told to ignore the market and focus on writing what they love. It’s solid enough advice, for what it’s worth, but I think there’s a flipside to that. At some point, no matter what the project, you need to figure out how to love what you’re writing. There are probably writers out there who can write a whole novel without coming to loathe or fear the manuscript, but I do not come across them all that often. What’s far more common are the conversations where doubt has seeped in, or an idea that was once exciting and shiny has grown worn down with use and the realities of sitting there and putting words on the page. Ideas move away from their Platonic ideal as you write them, because execution is harder than imagining. The set up of the first act is significantly more exciting than the delivering on that promise in the second and resolving it