Category Archives: Writing

Lazette Gifford had a post last week about reading nonfiction. That’s something I rarely used to do–not because I hated it or found it boring, but just because I like fiction better and given limited reading time, I’d rather read novels.

But she’s right that you get more depth, and run across different ideas, when you read widely rather than to look up specific bits of information for specific projects. At least I do. (Plus, you can read what you want rather than get annoyed at the tedium of scouring books in an attempt to find some tidbit that no one has apparently bothered writing down.)

(This is going to sound stupid, but one of the things that got me reading more nonfiction was the realization that I didn’t have to read the whole book (since I didn’t read the whole books in college, this should have occurred to me a lot sooner). This is why there’s hardly any nonfiction books on my list of books I’ve read–that only lists books I’ve finished. I’ve got stacks of books where I’ve read just a few chapters.)

So what does this have to do with writing? We’ve all heard “write what you know” a million times. It’s right up there with “show don’t tell” on the list of advice given to beginning writers that is often painfully misinterpreted. If we all wrote only what we knew, the speculative fiction genre would be pretty empty, and there’d be a ridiculous glut of novels about struggling writers. Boring.

The second half of that really should be “learn what you don’t”. That’s where research comes in, whether you’re looking up something for a specific project or just exploring. Being a reporter was really useful for this, actually. I could have learned the same things without that job, but it’s much easier to get it by osmosis. (Someday I’ll write the story based on the village administrator’s line, “You really open a can of worms when you start talking sidewalks.”)

At my current job the things I run across don’t tend to be quite as useful for fiction. But we’ve got a library, where I often take time at lunch to read bits of National Geographic, the Smithsonian, New Scientist, Science News, Scientific American, and whatever else catches my eye (plus the Harvard Business Review and Publisher’s Weekly).

Right now I’m reading a chapter about Teotihuacan in a book on prehistoric Mesoamerica that I picked up at the Field Museum in June. What are you reading?

Last week Edmund Schubert discussed whether it’s better for new writers to start out with short stories or with novels. While I agree with his answer–it doesn’t matter–I sometimes wish I’d started out with short stories.

Of course I couldn’t have started with stories, because at the time I read mostly novels, didn’t like short stories much, and all my ideas were for novels. (And when I was an absolute beginner, I didn’t want to “write”, I wanted to write “this one book.”) So I didn’t have a lot of choice, and I don’t regret diving into novels first at all.

But in the past year or so that I’ve been writing more short stories, it feels like I’m improving faster. [1] Short stories are, well, short: I can write a lot of them in the time a novel takes me. I can experiment with different genres, characters, settings more frequently. My critique group can read and comment on the whole thing in one session. I can spend less time fixing the plot and more time fixing everything else.

At the very least I’ve had a lot more practice writing endings.

What did you other writers start out with?

[1] Not that I have a twin locked up in the basement writing novels, so there’s no control group.

I’ve seen people say that writers shouldn’t blog about writing, because a) it’s boring to people who aren’t writers and b) if you’re unpublished/new no one cares what you think or should trust your advice.

On the other hand, half of the reason for blogging about writing is because putting my thoughts into a coherent order helps me understand things better, just like writing papers for school did a surprisingly long time ago. Writing up something makes me think about it more.

And let’s face it, I’m not going to write little essays if I’m the only one who reads them. (Ok, putting them on my blog still doesn’t mean anyone but me reads them. But some of you do!) It’s the same reason I want to blog about content strategy on a more work-related blog if I can carve the time into my schedule.

I do feel weird doing craft posts, even though I should do them to make myself think about stuff. I’m happy to babble about process until blood comes out your ears, but there’s a fine line between discussing craft and giving advice, and I try to avoid giving advice because most of my writing friends who read my blog are farther along the skill ladder than I am. That said, I’ve got a list of topics to work through in the next couple months.

This post was inspired by Janice Hardy’s post Why Blogging about Writing Can Help Writers Improve.

(My first one ever.)

My flash story “The Demon’s Tomb” will be appearing in The Crimson Pact: Volume 2, an e-anthology out later this month (don’t worry, I’ll remind you).

Here’s the trailer for the story, thanks to Justin Swapp:

I enjoyed reading the demon-packed Volume 1, so I’m thrilled that my story will be included in the next volume.

This is the first story I’ve written for a specific anthology theme, but it won’t be the last. It was too much fun coming up with an idea that fit both the anthology and the world of a novel I’ve been working on.

Meanwhile, I’m off to Gen Con tonight, for a weekend full of writing discussion. And I mean full; I didn’t leave myself room for lunch or some dinners in my planned schedule. It’ll be hard to choose what to skip.

I thought I’d already written a post on procrastination this year, but I couldn’t find it. I must have decided to put it off until later. 

Last week, someone–please speak up if it was you–pointed to this post on the science behind willpower.

It discusses the concept that willpower is like a muscle: if you exercise it frequently, it will get stronger, and if you overdo it in any one session, it’ll be weaker for a time until it recovers.

For example, here’s one study described in the article: 

Researchers gave three groups of people plates of chocolate cake and radishes. One group was told they could only eat the radishes, another group could only eat the cake, and the third group could eat either. Later, the groups were given an solvable task. The radish group gave up in half the time as the other two groups–in avoiding the cake, they’d worn out their stay-on-task muscle.

This sounds related to the idea that it takes three weeks to form a habit. Are you actually forming a habit of writing for 15 minutes at 7 am every day, or are you strengthening your willpower so you can force yourself to get up and write every day?

It also strikes me as a great excuse. It took willpower for me to get up and write blog posts this morning, and I’ll need more to get a scene written this evening. If I spend the afternoon avoiding chocolate, I won’t have enough self-control left over to make myself sit down and write. Remember the radish people!

I’m going to Gen Con the first week of August. Not for the gaming parts, since I’m not a gamer, but for the Writers’ Symposium, which has approximately a gazillion panels and readings and stuff.

I don’t even remember what panels I signed up to attend (and I still think the signing up in advance thing is weird, but reading through the huge list of possibilities was fun), except for the Read & Critique on Friday evening. I’m not yet trembling in terror at the idea, but if you’ve ever heard me up in front of a group–yeah. I will be. But 3-5 minutes *probably* won’t kill me.

Anyone else going? (Hi Kelly and Jaleigh.)

When working on a big project, is it better to focus on how much you’ve accomplished, or how much you have left to do? I recently ran across an interesting blog post about finishing things. In How to Become a Great Finisher the writer reports on studies by Minjung Koo and Ayelet Fishbach that compared to-date thinking (I’ve already written 10 chapters) with to-go thinking (I still have to write another 10 chapters).

The blogger, Heidi Grant Halvorson, says

Koo and Fishbach’s studies consistently show that when we are pursuing a goal and consider how far we’ve already come, we feel a premature sense of accomplishment and begin to slack off. For instance, in one study, college students studying for an exam in an important course were significantly more motivated to study after being told that they had 52% of the material left to cover, compared to being told that they had already completed 48%.

and

If, instead, we focus on how far we have left to go (to-go thinking), motivation is not only sustained, it’s heightened. Fundamentally, this has to do with the way our brains are wired. To-go thinking helps us tune in to the presence of a discrepancy between where we are now and where we want to be. When the human brain detects a discrepancy, it reacts by throwing resources at it: attention, effort, deeper processing of information, and willpower.

I tend to look ahead at how much I have left to do. I think it works, especially since I make schedules, but sometimes my brain reacts by throwing panic and terror at me, which isn’t the desired outcome.

This post doesn’t mention whether they’ve studied a time element. For me there’s a difference in motivational power between “I wrote half a chapter yesterday” and “I wrote half a chapter last month.” Or between “I have two chapters to revise tomorrow” and “I have two chapters to revise this week”.

What about you?

In Sunday’s #storycraft chat we talked a bit about what happens when your characters refuse to do something. For me this is my brain’s way of saying, “Hey, you screwed up back there.” (Since I don’t feel that my characters are talking to me, it’s more a sense that they wouldn’t do something than them actually saying “No, I won’t go to the rodeo, are you crazy?”)

During the chat I commented that “if the character ‘doesn’t want’ to do something, then I either have the wrong plot or the wrong character.” Someone responded that people have to do things they don’t want all the time, to get what they do want.

Well, yes. Characters should have to do things they don’t want to. Otherwise where would the fun be? There just has to be a reason for them to do it. [1]

If my character is “refusing” to go to the rodeo–if it feels wrong when I try to write it–then I haven’t given her a good enough reason in the story to go. If I change the plot so that she’s already discovered that the evil wizard turned her daughter into one of the pigs that’s going to be used in the pig roping contest, or if I change her so that she’s not deathly allergic to horses, just terrified because one nearly trampled her when she was a kid, she’d be willing to go. (Of course, if she’s deathly allergic and has to rescue her daughter, then she’s in for a challenge.)

[1] Can anyone think of a good story where the protagonist doesn’t have to do anything they don’t want to? I’m coming up blank, but I don’t want to say there aren’t any.

Futurismic recently posted an article listing some emergency writing motivation techniques. The items towards the end of the list tend to work better for me than the ones at the beginning (“visualize a result you like” would lead to a nice daydream about everyone loving my awesome story, but wouldn’t help me finish it). 

The ones on there that work best for me are working on a different project (this is one reason I like to have more than one thing going at once, in different stages of production–if I really don’t feel like writing thing 1, I can revise thing 2) and focusing on one task at a time. This is not contradictory. Sometimes I have so many things on my to do list that I want to do them all at once. I end up making a shorter list of the top priorities (on my awesome whiteboard) and tackling them one at a time. The shorter list makes it easier to focus and actually get something done other than making lists.

External motivation is awesome, but very few people want to give me deadlines right now. Write or Die is too easy to ignore (or type gibberish) and I’m not setting it to kamikaze mode. Watching a computer program delete my words would not help my productivity. It is a nice way to get myself started, though.

What are your favorite techniques for getting work done when you don’t feel like it?