Category Archives: The Writing Process

I was part way into the book ad things seemed to be going well. The story was coming together. My protagonist was active. He was in a tree and I kept throwing rocks at him. Somewhere, somehow, he had to muster the strength that would make him stop being on the defensive and get on the offensive.

Then my protagonist and I hit the proverbial brick wall. Ouch! All the momentum I had, the three thousand plus words I wrote every day stopped. My brain became a repository of mush, not great ideas. My energy was but a whisper of a breeze unable to flutter a tiny leaf.

I had to figure this out.

What had I done to prepare?

I had done some planning. I knew the character, the climax, the villain and where I wanted the story to be by the end.
Distractions were minimal. I had the hours I needed every day to write.
My chair was comfortable. (sounds lame I know but those Excuse Gremlins can be weird at times)

The problem: the momentum was gone.

I was still certain I had a good story and I wanted to write it, but what was wrong?

I was a few chapters in so I did a chapter by chapter outline. The progression seemed logical enough. But, I found a niggle, the tiniest one. Why would my character have acted this way? Actually, the question needed to be reframed: what motivated him to do this? He is trying to tell me something, something I hadn’t realized in my initial thoughts about him.

It was time to re-examine my protagonist, to ask him more questions, to delve deeper into his background and the society in which he lived. It was then that I discovered that his father had instilled in him values I hadn’t been fully aware of. From those values came his struggle. What he had grown up to believe wasn’t holding true. So, now he had conflict and I the writer, had theme.

I went back over those first chapters, re-examined them in the context of the theme, his inner struggle and discovered that although I had an okay plot, the protagonist’s struggle wasn’t being reflected in some scenes and it didn’t serve to motivate him to act or not act in situations.

Aha! moment in hand, I rewrote those scens, thought through the novel once more.

The take away? My writing momentum stopped because I didn’t have enough knowledge about my protagonist to proceed. For me, knowing what’s at stake, what my character’s inner conflict is, what motivates him at the core, drives my story telling. Knowing this speaks to theme and helps create a stronger villain. In other words, the rocks I’m throwing up the tree are a lot bigger and hurt a lot more. Knowing the character’s inner conflict also helps create better secondary characters: some who enable, others who derail, and others who hold the mirror of truth.

With deeper understanding and greater potential for conflict realized, my writing momentum returned.

My advice:

1)When momentum lags, re-examine your protagonist and maybe the villain too. Find what excites and moves them and most importantly, what their deepest conflicts and influences are.

2) Determine what your story is about (aka the theme). If you know that, then your characters are the instruments to explore that theme with all its inherent conflicts and consequences. If you’re having trouble figuring out your theme, then re-examine key characters deeper still.

If you’re having trouble maintaining your momentum, stop wrting and take a moment to think about what motivates the protagonist and what his inner conflicts are. Look at theme too for understanding that will keep the story from being derailed as all scenes and characters will somehow speak to it. And, you never know, maybe your subconscious was trying to tell you something about another story problem which you aren’t yet consciously aware of. Stopping, and taking a bit of time to reflect, will not only help you to regain your momentum, but to also keep it.

Some Thoughts on Writing and Art

August 7, 2017

fictorians

Craft & Skills The Writing Process No Comments

Guest post by by Brent Nichols

I’ve been writing for a long time, and I’ve got the knack of it now. I can get word onto the page, and they tend to be reasonably good words, too. Writing isn’t a problem for me these days.

No, the problem isn’t the writing. It’s the NOT writing. The problem is all those zero-word days when all that lovely momentum I’ve built up just disappears, and the reproachful pale rectangle of a blank page stares at me from my computer screen until I can’t face it anymore and I go and do something else.

And when it happens, I never seem to know what to do about it. How to push through. How to reclaim my momentum.

Recently, though, I found some new insight, and it didn’t come to me through writing. I’ve been dabbling in art. I’ve been drawing and painting, and almost every sketch and doodle has me thinking, not about art, but about writing.

I’ve played around with art before, over the years. I’ve bought sketchbooks, made half-hearted attempts to draw, grown discouraged, and moved on. Then, last December, I decided to give art another shot. I promised myself I’d do a sketch a day through 2017. To my surprise I’ve actually made the promise stick. It’s well into July as I write this, and I’m going strong.

Some of my sketches make me cringe, but that’s okay. If there’s one thing writing has taught me it’s that the only way to make good art is to make bad art, over and over, as you learn.

A couple of weeks ago I came across a couple of giant sketchbooks in my garage. They were nestled in the bottom of a box I hadn’t opened since I got married. I don’t know how long it’s been since I bought them, but it’s been more than ten years. And in all those years, I have not made a single mark in either sketchbook.

Not one line.

Today I decided to change that. There’s something intimidating about the sheer size of those enormous pages. It was a chance to make bad art on a dreadful scale. I know my skill as an artist, and while I’m a bit better than I was six months ago, I’m only too aware of my limitations. I knew how this picture would turn out.

But I kept thinking about the useless blankness of all those pages. The blankness had to go. I wouldn’t have a masterpiece when I was done. But it would be … not nothing.

I did a preliminary sketch, and then I set to work with ink and brush. And I made a mess. Parts of the picture worked, but overall it was blotchy and sloppy and deeply unimpressive.

No, I won’t be posting it here.

When it was done, I knew a bit more about how to use ink and brush. In fact, considering how little experience I have with the medium, I actually learned quite a lot. And my giant sketchbook, hoarded for so many years, finally contains a picture.

Not a great picture. Not even a good picture. But not nothing.

That’s how you write a brilliant story, one that will touch people, one they’ll talk about years after they read it. You write a page. If you can’t write a brilliant page, write a terrible one. And then another, and then another. Page after page, until one day you realize you’re writing something that’s actually pretty good. You face the blank page every day, and you refuse to settle for nothing.

And that’s how you get your momentum back. By refusing to settle for nothing.

Your challenges will evolve, but they certainly won’t go away. Today, for instance, I’m avoiding the next scene in my novel. I don’t know how to get it right, so I’m painting pictures in old sketchbooks and writing blog posts for the Fictorians.

My writing, unlike my art, is deeply important to me. I can’t just shrug and tell myself that whatever I put on the page is fine because I’m learning. This is my profession now, and it’s the only thing I really care about. I really don’t want to screw up this next page. I don’t want to learn that I can’t get it right.

But right now that page is blank. It has no value, and it hasn’t taught me a thing.

It’s nothing. And I’m going to change that.

Brent Nichols is the author of the Aurora-nominated novel STARS LIKE COLD FIRE and the sequel, LIGHT OF A DISTANT SUN. He self-publishes tales of science fiction adventure under the pen name Jake Elwood. He’s also a cover designer, making book covers from stock art. Eventually he’s going to do his own painted covers, but he’s not there yet. You can find his books on Amazon, and you can view his cover designs at CoolSeriesCovers.com.

The Mighty Mo – How to Keep on Keeping On

August 4, 2017

Sean Golden

Day Jobs Finish It! Making Progress as a Writer Rewriting Sean Golden Self-Motivation The Writing Process Work-Life Balance Write Whenever You Can No Comments

I hear a lot of people talk about writer’s block. I also see a lot of commentary about loss of motivation and life interfering with writing.

While I can’t honestly say I’ve ever experienced anything that feels to me like “writer’s block” I will admit to periods of motivational doldrums, and life most certainly can get in the way of writing. But to be a writer is to write. So, when motivation is low, or even non-existent, how can you get it back?

My lowest point as a writer came over a year ago, when I was trying to complete the final book in my War Chronicles trilogy. At the same time I was trying to get my new home built, and had just started a new job, which meant spending a good bit of my “free” time learning new skills and techniques so that I could do my day job well enough to keep my day job.

In the middle of that stress and uncertainty, I was forced to admit that my ending was not working out as I wanted, and that I was going to miss several self-imposed deadlines for completing the series. I began to dread the prospect of even returning to the story and ripping apart what I had spent months working on, just to have to rebuild it again.

So, how did I get my momentum back?

If you are looking for some sort of magic bullet, or some “weird trick” that will turn your creative juices back on, I’m sorry to say that you won’t find it in this article. For me the solution was the oldest maxim in writing. “Apply butt to chair, and pen to paper.” Or more accurately in today’s world, “fingers to keyboard.”

Or to put it plainly, I sat at my desk and wrote. Even when I knew what I was writing was terrible, I wrote. I told myself that even if only five percent of my writing was worth keeping, that was still five percent more than I did by moping and trolling social media sites.

So, I wrote. And wrote. At a friend’s suggestion, I wrote a short story set in my fantasy world with entirely different characters, set hundreds of years in the past, and let that story flow. Doing so gave me some insights into the history of my world, and helped me work out the motivations and goals of the main antagonist, which got me interested in my unfinished trilogy again.

Then I sat down and reread the first two books, and all the third up to where it began to lose steam, and by the time I got to that point, a new and better ending had emerged, like Athena from Zeus’s forehead, fully formed and ready to be put onto paper.

And that finally restored my enthusiasm for the story, and I was able to get back into the groove of writing until I finished and published the final book.

It may be that the lull in motivation I encountered is what others call “writer’s block”. I never felt blocked, I just felt out of steam, stuck in neutral, all fueled up, but with no roadmap to follow. Once I finally got that roadmap into my head, writing was easy and fun again.

And that’s what it’s all supposed to be about, isn’t it? Writing should be fun. When it isn’t fun, it’s hard work, and when it’s hard work, it’s easy to find reasons to avoid it. So, when I have lost the fun, I try to find a way to get the fun back, because then writing is easy.

The Author’s Law of Momentum

August 3, 2017

Guy Anthony De Marco

Guy Anthony De Marco Self-Motivation The Writing Process No Comments

Welcome to Thursday, August third. Today happens to be the birthday of my youngest daughter, Wiggle Pickle, and it’s also National Watermelon Day.

Have you ever had someone toss you a watermelon? The big ones are tough to catch because they can slip out of your hands due to momentum. Similarly, finishing a writing project and holding a copy in your hand is always a good feeling that’s tough to hang on to when you have to figure out what to write next, but what about the momentum of that event?

Newton’s Second Law loosely says that the rate of change of momentum is directly proportional to the forces applied in the direction of those forces. The same can be applied to your writing. Once you have something released on the market, it’s time to decide on what to do next to keep that momentum going.

You can decide to take a break and relax, perhaps do some marketing to sell a few more copies. This means your new book may have some outside forces nudging it along, but soon enough those sales will drop. Less force means less momentum, and it begins to decline. Think of it as a form of friction. After people either buy your book or they see your advertisement and decide that book is not for them, they begin to tune it out as background clutter.

What can you do? Remember Newton, of course!

Now is the time to start working on your next project, just after you’ve completed one. More books with your name means more books have the potential to hit it big. NY Times Bestselling author Kevin J. Anderson calls it the popcorn theory of success. More popcorn kernels in the fire means more opportunities for one to pop.

The more books with your name on the cover means more chances for a reader to discover they love your work. The best chance to sell another book is when a reader finishes a satisfying novel and is ready for another one. Those forces help to push your work forward. More forces mean more momentum.

Each book is a stepping stone to your writing world. If you only write one and spend your days flogging it, after a while people will almost look at you like you’re a spammer. Same thing, day after day after month after year. If you started working on the next book, after a year you’d have at least one close to finished. Some folks can have four quality books or more. Author Chris Fox has a video series where he is writing a science fiction trilogy in exactly twelve weeks. You get to see weekly updates. Last year he wrote a novel in 21 days, then turned around and pulled in a six-digit income by December 31st. All of this was documented on ChrisFoxWrites.com and his YouTube channel.

Sure, perhaps you can’t write a book that fast. The good news is you don’t need to. You just need to keep that momentum going by working on it. If it takes you four months to bash out a first draft, you’re that much closer to releasing the next novel instead of starting four months from now.

It’s your decision how you want your momentum to go. Down from lack of energy and force behind your work, or up from little nudges every day. Eventually the momentum will build to the point where you can earn a following of true fans who will buy your next book sight unseen because they know you produce quality work.

Don’t let us down!

About the Author:

Guy Anthony De Marco is a disabled US Navy veteran speculative fiction author; a Graphic Novel Bram Stoker Award^®nominee; winner of the HWA Silver Hammer Award; a prolific short story and flash fiction crafter; a novelist; an invisible man with superhero powers; a game writer (Sojourner Tales modules, Interface Zero 2.0 core team, third-party D&D modules); and a coffee addict. One of these is false.

A writer since 1977, Guy is a member of the following organizations: SFWA, WWA, SFPA, IAMTW, ASCAP, RMFW, NCW, HWA. He hopes to collect the rest of the letters of the alphabet one day. Additional information can be found at Wikipedia and GuyAnthonyDeMarco.com.