The Warm-Up: Planning Your Writing the Day Before

Like exercise (theoretically), writing needs to happen daily. One way to facilitate the process is by planning the next scene and how you'll write it. Hemingway used to stop writing before he finished a scene, some say before he finished a sentence. Another approach is to scan what you're planning to write next, consider how you'll approach it, and make notes on what you'll say and how you'll say it. Then when you return to the work, you have something to start with, like warm-ups before exercise or preheating the oven so that it's ready to bake when you're ready to cook. Preparing what you want to work on and how you'll approach it greatly eases the transition into your writing time and speeds the effort.

"The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that everyday when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck," from, Ernest Hemingway on Writing.

To put today's musing into action, check out the writing tip at the top of the list and let me know how it goes.

Who Are You: Editing for Voice

One of the hardest parts of novel writing, especially in a first draft, is voice. Two or more characters often sound similar, either because their personalities aren't fully developed, or because the writer doesn't know them well enough. It can happen even after a plot treatment and character sketches. If so, there are things you can do to bring out a character's true self. Begin by asking what the character really wants and why. Then ask whom this desire affects, where and when in the story it should appear, and how—in what form—with dialogue, an event, both? Then drill down with your questions until you can't ask anything more without repeating prior answers. Problems with similar voices can mean too many characters, in which case, you can consider combining several into a composite. This makes a tighter and more dramatic plot. Problems with voice usually arise about one-quarter of the way into a finished work. When in doubt, ask a trusted reader to review your writing, but keep control over your work. Peter Selgin, award-winning novelist and author of By Cunning & Craft, says that when someone offers a critique saying that more of something is needed, it usually indicates another problem, often that there should be less. Character is a good example of that.

To put today's musing into action, check out the writing tip at the top of the list and let me know how it goes.

Tell Me a Story, but Tell it Well

As part of a writing-improvement campaign, I've been reading authors from around the globe, including major prize winners. I've been surprised by two things — unimpressive writing and the lack of compelling stories. It probably doesn't help that I'm reading these at six-thirty in the morning, but I've read other work at that hour and been riveted. I was surprised by the importance of these two basic elements of writing — style and story — but maybe I shouldn't be. What would we do without salt and sugar? The culprit in these works was a certain distance in the writing that translated into a distance between the work and me as the reader. In cases where the work was compelling, I didn't just read the words, I felt what they were saying — big difference.

John Gardner, in The Art of Fiction, comments on what makes fiction art. "Fiction seeks out truth. Granted, it seeks a poetic kind of truth, universals not easily translatable into moral codes. But part of our interest as we read is in learning how the world works; how the conflicts we share with the writer and all other human beings can be resolved, if at all, what values we can affirm and, in general, what the moral risks are." What's compelling about Gardiner's observation is that he validates the writer's daily struggle to make good fiction with eloquence and the appropriate zeal.

Fleshing Out the Bones

Maybe you've never thought of editing as adding or reworking detail, but under the headings of revision and rewriting (both part of editing) comes the concept that some aspect of the story isn't working because something is missing. Flannery O'Connor felt the same, especially about the strangely vivid people in her stories. "I can't allow any of my characters … to stop in some halfway position," she said. And she didn't. Her characters were fleshed out to the point where readers are often uncomfortable with them, but they're three dimensional and memorable, not clichés or caricatures.

Why do we do all this fixing? To make the work better, and to make the images we've created come alive. "Fiction is supposed to represent life," O'Connor maintained. "And the fiction writer has to use as many aspects of life as are necessary to make his total picture convincing." To achieve this end, perseverance is required. O'Connor felt that way even after working for months and still having to throw everything away. "I don't think any of that was time wasted," she said, believing that "something goes on that makes it easier when [the writing] does come well." And that's the sense of satisfaction and the purpose—for the writing to come well.

To put today's musing into action, check out the writing tip at the top of the list at the bottom of the blog, and let us know how it goes.

Fractal Thinking: The Writer’s Thought Process

Do you see something of interest in the world around you and replicate it in your imagination so that you can analyze it? If so, don’t worry. You’re probably just a writer at heart—or maybe a mathematician. The other day I was waiting for the morning train, drinking coffee, finishing a chapter of John Gardner’s book The Art of Fiction and listening to a new commuting buddy talk about her interest in literature. As my new associate was talking, I was thinking how much she reminded me of a writing friend and mentor. Then I began musing how much she might be like my other friend or different, about her perspective on life, her longtime interest in literature and how that might inform her thoughts—and the list goes on. Everyone multitasks and multi-thinks, but writers tend to observe something, replicate it in their imaginations and analyze it all in rapid succession. It reminded me of an episode of Nova on fractals, irregular geometric shapes that can be split into parts, each of which is a smaller, albeit uneven copy of the whole. Writers think like this all the time but in a certain context—as fodder for their work. Understanding events, people and human nature, and assimilating this understanding for later use, are part of a continual and often subconscious effort. It revives the argument for always carrying paper and a pen, since electronic stuff doesn’t always accommodate the “jot” of jotting things down. You never know when some revelation might enrich a story or character. It really is all fodder ...

Check out the tip at the bottom of the page, and let us know how it goes.

The Way Life Works: Theme in Writing

What if the common effort to recapture youth isn’t as much about wanting to be young again (okay, sometimes it is), but about going back to that fork in the time-space continuum where development was arrested by vivcus interruptus to recapture the essence of ourselves so that we could enlarge on it?

Want to know what made me consider that highly philosophical question? It was this line from Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto: “Everything that Mr. Hosokawa had ever known or suspected about the way life worked had been proved to him to be incorrect these past months.” Patchett goes on to say what Hosokawa had thought before being taken captive by terrorists, and how those perceptions proved deceptive. My musing on a longstanding belief about life came from that one line. Patchett’s sentence is a great example of a thematic statement that doesn’t stand out as one, but still prompted me to think thematically about life.

Theme isn’t an easy concept to deal with, so I’ll defer to Donald Maass in Writing the Breakout Novel, in the chapter on premise, where he says that fiction expresses “… our greatest purposes and our deepest desires. They are us. That is the reason we identify with them.” The best treatment of a writer’s premise or theme doesn’t stand out like a road sign, but rises to the surface like champagne bubbles — something to think about while revising …

Seeing Around Corners: The Bend in the Road Perspective

Sometimes you don't know your character's next move or your plot's next turn until you arrive at that moment in the story. Of course, sometimes you don't know until after, but we'll save that observation for another time. Have you ever walked a familiar path, thinking, I know the turn is here somewhere — I've been down this way before? The spot may be overgrown or hidden by a trick of the light, but for whatever reason you can't see the place until you're on it. So, too, with stories. Despite plot treatments and character studies, despite planning and research, sometimes it's impossible to see how to direct the story or depict a character until you're in the moment. It's the organic nature of storytelling. Since you last traveled your story, weeds have grown in the text or your mental landscape has changed. But don't despair; it happens to everyone, especially if you're a writer who takes the road less traveled. "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference," from "The Road Not Taken," by Robert Frost.

To find that bend in the road and not lose your way, check out the writing tip at the top of the list — and let me know how it goes.

Editor and Writer Launches New Website

Forgive me for doing a bit of shamless promoting, but here goes ...

Award-winning writer and editor Adele Annesi is launching a new website, AdeleAnnesi, on the theme of place as inspiration to complement her Word for Words and Writing Linx blogs for editors and writers. Pass the new venue along to your writers’ group, and visit the site to leave a comment on the Contact Me page — it would be great to hear from you.