Sometimes, you just have to take a step back.

When you’re working on a story or novel, the plot can overwhelm you. You have this grand vision, but you have no idea what to write next. Your characters won’t come alive on the page, and everything you try to write feels flat and lifeless. You lack inspiration. You feel frustrated. You have writer’s block.

How do you get past it?

Step away from the keyboard. It’s no use sitting there trying to force the issue. Give your hindbrain permission to work on the problem, and then go and do something else. Take a walk. Read a book. Go swimming. Watch a trashy movie. Distract your attention away from the project you’re working on, and let your unconsciousness stew over it.

Sometimes, that’s all we need: a distraction.

I’m in the early stages of a novel, and earlier this evening I found myself stuck. I wasn’t sure where the next chapter would go, or which character it would follow. After an hour or so of sitting at the keyboard getting nowhere, I took myself off into the living room and watched I, Robot on E4. No, it’s not the best movie ever made; but what it did was distract my conscious mind from fruitlessly worrying at the problem. I had a notebook with me, and as I watched the film, ideas kept popping into my head. I had stepped out of my own way. With my attention on the big screen, my imagination had the freedom to run riot — and by the time the film finished, I found I’d written outlines for the next five chapters.

So, next time you’re stuck with a story that just won’t gel, take a bath; go for a walk; or take a long drive in the country. Swim a few lengths of your local pool. Do something that relaxes you. Take your mind off your troubles, and the solution to your story may just pop into your head.

One of the worst things about writing for a living is the waiting.

You finish writing a story and you send it off to an editor — and then you have to sit and wait for a response. Sometimes you have to wait a few hours; sometimes a few weeks, or even a few months.

Such delays can be interminable. You are bursting for people to be able to read this great story you wrote. You become impatient. You catch yourself refreshing your inbox over and over again in the hope of an email…

Now, thanks to my friend Emma, I’ve discovered an Inuit word that neatly sums up this particular form of impatience: Iktsuarpok.

Iktsuarpok is the Inuit word for the feeling of anticipation you get when expecting a visitor, which causes you to keep going outside to see if you can see them approaching.

Apply that definition to emails instead of visitors, and you have a condition suffered from by many writers.

Please welcome back Stuart Clark, with a guest post about how much description to put into your story, and how much to leave out…

Blankety Blank (or Why Less Is More)
By Stuart Clark

When I was a kid, there was a show on television called Blankety Blank (here in the USA I understand it was called The Match Game). The basic premise was this, contestants were given a sentence and then asked to fill in a blanked out word to create a phrase or expression. Seated across from them were six celebrities of the day who were charged with the same task but also with the task of trying to match whatever word the contestant came up with. If they matched, the contestant got a point.
Continue reading “Less is more”

New writers are often given the following piece of advice: “Write what you know”. In other words, concentrate on the things you’ve observed and the things you understand about the world around you. If you’re a former journalist wanting to write a mystery, make your main character a journalist; if you’re a coal miner, write about the dangers and camaraderie of life down the pit.

Such first-hand experience can add verisimilitude to your fiction; but what happens if you’re trying to write genre fiction? What if you’re trying to write about a future society so far removed in time that they barely remember the present day? What if you’re trying to write about a supernatural horror preying on a group of cave divers, or a lone warrior on a quest across a mythic fantasy kingdom? In science fiction, fantasy and horror, characters are routinely put in situations in which it would be impossible for the writer to gain any direct experience. How then can you convincingly fill in these scenes using only your imagination?

Continue reading “3 Ways to Breathe Life Into Your Fiction”

According to Isaac Newton’s laws of motion, it takes more energy to start an object moving than it takes to keep that object going once underway. If you’re like me, you’ll know that writing a novel can be a bit like that. The first page is always the hardest to write.  It takes a real effort to take all the infinite possibilities of a blank white page and collapse them down into a string of opening sentences. But without that first page, you can’t go on to write the rest of the book. You need to start moving before you can build up momentum.

Thankfully, there is a trick you can use, and it’s this: just start writing. It doesn’t matter if the first sentence you write isn’t a classic. It doesn’t matter if the whole first page sucks. Just get your fingers on the keyboard and start typing. Accept before you start that you’re going to write the worst opening scene you’ve ever seen.

But therein lies the trick. That awful first scene will get you moving. It may be clumsy and unsubtle but like a solid rocket booster, it’ll blast you off the launch pad; and once you’ve written it, you’re underway. You can move on to the next scene, and the one after that. You’ve overcome the inertia holding you down, and you’re writing.

Don’t worry about looking back and tidying up those opening sentences. The important thing is to keep going. There’ll be plenty of time to come back and edit once you’ve finished the first draft. Write first, edit later. Those rough words have served their purpose, by propelling you into the story. Now it’s up to you to keep up that momentum, and keep writing until you reach the end.

Unless you’re fortunate enough to be independently wealthy, you’re probably going to have to get some form of day job to support your writing efforts. But what kind of job best suits a writer, and how do you balance its demands with the demands of your creative life?

Part time

You may consider part time work, in order to have as much free time as possible to devote to your next novel. But can you afford to work part time, or do you have a mortgage and four kids to support?

Freelance

You may decide to try working freelance, but beware: finding clients and completing projects will eat into your free time and, if you’re not careful, you may find yourself working longer hours than you would in an office.

Full time

A full time job will probably pay better than part time or freelance, and it’ll come with better benefits, such as health insurance and a pension. The regular salary will pay your bills and mean you won’t have to rely on your writing in order to make money, thereby taking some of the pressure off and giving you time to rewrite and edit your stories until you’re 100% happy with the, rather than rushing them out of the door because you’re desperate for whatever income they can generate. On the downside, long hours and a daily commute leave little time for actual writing, and if you want to start racking up serious word counts you may have to give up little luxuries such as watching TV and sleeping.

Level of engagement

Do you take a repetitive manual job that bores the pants off you, giving you time to think about your writing; or one that challenges you but leaves you too exhausted to pick up a pen in the evenings? Somehow, you need to find a balance. A boring job quickly becomes soul destroying, whereas a demanding job will drain your energy and creativity.

Some dos and don’ts

Assuming you find the right day job for your needs, you’re still going to have to find ways to juggle its demands with your desire to write. To help you, I present this list of dos and don’ts:

• Don’t write at work unless you’re really sure you can get away with it. And if you do, don’t use the PC on your office desk. Don’t leave any traces of your extra-curricular activity. Getting paid while you write may seem like a win-win situation, but its hard to mask the drop in productivity and concentration that will result; and if you get caught printing out your 400 page opus on the company’s printer, you’re going to find yourself in a whole heap of trouble.

• Do keep the story ticking over in the back of your mind. Think about it on the bus, or while you’re waiting for the photocopier. Let your unconcious mind pick away at the plot while your conscious mind gets on with putting bread on the table. Many writers will tell you that they have their best ideas while busy doing other things.

• Do keep a notebook handy. Keep one in your pocket or bag. If you have a sudden flash of inspiration, you can jot it down. If you hear a snatch of dialogue on the Tube, or want to record the way the sun shines in through the office window, you can scribble it down in note form and write it up properly in your lunch break.

• Don’t try to do too much. Accept the fact that you’ll be tired when you come home from work. Make sure you factor in some relaxation time, or you’re going to get too tired and your writing and work will both end up suffering. Not to mention your health.

• Do make time to write. In a previous post, I discussed my top 3 ways to make the most of your free time in order to increase the time you have available for writing. If you’d like to read the post (and I think you should), the link is here.

• Do keep plugging away. Stick to it and you’ll get there eventually. If you have a dream, work hard at it each and every day. Take small, positive steps. Don’t end up as one of those people who look back in later life and wish they’d tried harder.

The WordPunk website asks genre writers and editors which technologies they use in their day to day writing and/or editing lives. My personal response (quoted in the article) is as follows:

“At university, I used a secondhand manual typewriter. This was the early nineties. I used to balance the machine on the end of my bed, by the window overlooking the river, and sit cross-legged, battering out essays and stories. It was a beast. It weighed a tonne and the clatter of its keys could be heard throughout the house.

“These days, I use MS Word 2007. I use it in page view, so it feels like I’m typing on pieces of A4. I can’t write in Outline or Draft view. They just feel wrong. It’s almost as if I need that primal connection between keys and paper, even if it is only an illusion on a screen.

“I also tend to write stories straight through, from beginning to end, rather than jump around within the narrative. This could be a hangover from writing on a manual typewriter, where there was no choice but to write stories in sequence.

“The advantage Word has over a manual typewriter is the ability to edit on-the-fly. But this can be something of a mixed blessing, as it can lead me to spend all my time tinkering with one sentence instead of pressing ahead with the rest of the story.

“I have looked at other programs, but Word seems to suit me. I am comfortable with it. I write everything in either Times New Roman or Courier New, and so there aren’t too many distracting settings with which to play.”

Read the full article here.

At around 4.30pm this afternoon, The Recollection‘s word count total cruised past that of my first novel, Silversands, to make this new novel the longest single work I have yet written – and there’s still at least another 30k to go.

A few days ago, I made the following comment on Twitter:

Just as you climb a mountain one step at a time, you have to keep putting one word after another if you want to write a book.

Now author Colin Harvey has used it as the jumping off point to discuss his method for staying focussed while working on a novel.

A novel is like a picture made up of 100,000 pixels, with each representing a pixel. Miss out a thousand words, and you have a picture with a hole in its whole … When you feel that awful sense that you’re going to fall and/or fail, stare hard at the detail and fill those pixels in.

Read Colin’s full article here.

I often listen to music while working on stories and novels. Listening to music can mask distracting noises from the outside world. It can also help propel the rythmn of a piece of writing. But the music has to be carefully chosen.

Continue reading “Do You Listen To Music While You Write?”