Archive for the 'writing process' category

terry brooks on writing

Dec 09 2011 Published by under book review, reading, Uncategorized, writing process

Why didn’t someone tell me Terry Brooks wrote a book on writing? Just starting to read it, but it looks promising (and way more fun than that Norman Mailer book on writing).

Here’s a little tidbit:

The writer Walter Mosley wrote a few years ago in an article that appeared in the New York Times that writing is gathering smoke— the smoke of dreams, of ideas, of the imagination. We collect that smoke and try to make something out of it. It doesn’t happen all at once, but only over time and never on a determinable schedule. We visit our hazy treasure every day in order not to lose sight of it, not to let it evaporate from neglect. At some point in our tending and examination, something substantial will come alive.

Brooks, Terry; Sometimes the Magic Works: Lessons from a Writing Life.
Westminster, MD, USA: Ballantine Books, 2003. p 7.

“Gathering smoke” is just what I feel like I’m doing today.

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ok cupid’s wisdom for writers

Dec 01 2011 Published by under life, motivation, productivity, sending out your work, Uncategorized, writing process

I just read this post by Georgina Bruce, an up-and-coming writer I admire, and it made me think of this research done by the online dating service OK Cupid on “The Mathematics of Beauty.”

Bruce said this about an experience she had with a bad review of her writing:

I once read a review about one of my stories that was so scathing, so unkind, that it stopped me writing for months. It made me frightened to write anything else, scared that more scorn and bile would be poured over my creations, terrified that this person might be right. In retrospect, it’s easy to see that this critic had some kind of personal axe to grind, but at the time, I was deeply affected.

I had a similar experience, in a fiction writing workshop waaaaay back when I was an undergraduate, which was very damaging and hurtful. It stopped me in my tracks for a long time. (It is probably not a coincidence that I switched genres to poetry and have only switched back to fiction in the past five or so years.)

Typically, we get advice from other writers that haters gonna hate, and to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, etc., etc., but that’s hard to do in practice.

Enter OK Cupid and their research on beauty, hotness, and number of times you get asked out. Their findings indicate:

  • that the more men as a group disagree about a woman’s looks, the more they end up liking her
  • guys tend to ignore girls who are merely cute
  • and, in fact, having some men think she’s ugly actually works in a woman’s favor

I highly recommend reading the article, because how they reached those conclusions is fascinating, but let’s assume for the moment that this is an accurate assessment of reality.

Now for the magic: let’s replace a few key words, shall we?

  • The more critics as a group disagree about a writer’s ability, the more they end up liking her work
  • critics tend to ignore writers who are merely competent
  • and, in fact, having some critics think she’s a terrible writer actually works in a writer’s favor

This kind of boils down to the homegrown wisdom that if you aren’t pissing off a few people, you probably aren’t doing your job as a writer. This may be especially true in speculative fiction, where so many people arrive with so many different expectations of the genre.

What do you think?

 

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instant writing workshop fix: odyssey podcasts

Jun 28 2011 Published by under workshops, writing process

I’ve been listening lately to a number of these Odyssey podcasts, which are recorded snippets of craft lectures from the Odyssey workshops by various instructors. My personal favorite so far is Carrie Vaughn‘s talk on “setting goals and building a writing career,” which is all about understanding the things you can control vs. the things you can’t control, and focusing your time and energy on the things you can control. She also explains the differences between goals (which again, are things you can control, e.g.: “I will send out a short story each week for the next eight weeks,” or “I will complete a first draft of the novel by Dec. 1″) and milestones (“I will have a short story published in one of the big three speculative fiction magazines”). If you focus on the goals, the milestones will tend to take care of themselves.

Anyway, go take a listen, it’s well worth it.

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getting into the flow state 101

Mar 04 2011 Published by under book review, procrastination, productivity, Uncategorized, writing process

I’m reading Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (the back cover advises that’s pronounced “chick-SENT-me-high”) and am so far (about halfway through) finding it really useful.

The flow state is all about being highly focused and engaged in an activity, and though a few people never achieve that state, most do, at least from time to time.

He uses the example of skiing down a mountainside on a tough run, in which any loss of focus on that immediate task at hand will result in a faceplant. You aren’t thinking about your tax returns in that moment; you are fully engaged. And even though people aren’t necessarily happy or unhappy while they are in the flow state, they are likely to be happier afterward, recalling that state.

Turns out there are some keys to getting into this flow state. You are more likely to experience “flow” with tasks that

  • have clear goals
  • provide relevant feedback
  • offer challenges in balance with your skills (ideally matching high-level challenges to high-level skills)

Those three things together tend to give you opportunities for complete focus.

If I’m reading Csikszentmihalyi right, you can also sort of prime the pump by engaging in short, flow-inducing activities throughout the day to help you reset, refresh, and re-engage. Here’s an example: Teoria.com offers this ear-training musical intervals tutorial. I’ve been visiting it at least once a day to give myself a break and change of pace, and it does help me recharge my mental batteries, because it’s so different from the work I’m doing on the job.

It also meets the three criteria: clear goals (name the correct intervals when you hear them), relevant feedback (it tells you as you go whether you’ve gotten the correct answer), and challenges in balance with my skills (a music major would probably need to find a more difficult task, and someone with no musical training would need something more basic).

Very helpful. Now on to the next challenge: figuring out how to get into the flow state more in my writing. The challenges I see there are 1) setting the right goals and 2) bringing in the right feedback quickly enough. Both are tricky.

Setting the right goals requires careful consideration of what you’re trying to accomplish and what is likely to encourage you. Target word counts per day aren’t usually good goals for me, because they quickly turn something I love to do into drudgery, but oddly, setting a goal of writing a scene a day feels different to me. What works best so far is setting ridiculously easy daily goals that help me keep my momentum going: writing for 15 minutes, say, or just opening the Word file of the current project and looking at it.

Relevant feedback is even more tricky, because to get relevant feedback as you’re writing, you can’t rely on external sources (workshops, other readers). I think instead you have to develop a special quality of attention.

It’s the same quality of attention that William Stafford was talking about in “Interviewing Tracker Dog: a fantasy before the daily craft lecture at any writers’ conference” (from Crossing Unmarked Snow: Further Views on the Writer’s Vocation – HIGHLY recommended). If you can find a recording of him reading it, even better; he embodies the process of seeking and paying attention that writers do in a simple, brilliant, and poignant way.

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three books to help you revise your novel

Jul 08 2010 Published by under book review, revision, writing process

I’m deep in the throes of revising the current novel manuscript, and it’s going well (yay!), partly because I’ve found a book with a novel revision process that seems to work well for me. The book in question is The Weekend Novelist Rewrites the Novel: A Step-by-Step Guide to Perfecting Your Work by Robert J. Ray.

What’s working for me: Ray lays out an actual step-by-step process to complete a novel revision, and has a raft of tools to help the struggling writer think about the structure of the novel-in-progress, as well as the characters and their arcs within the larger story. He focuses on revising subplots, which I’m finding immensely helpful, because it’s the subplots that give a book texture and make it seem like a whole, three-dimensional world. Continue Reading »

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