Writing At The Speed Of Life

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Or how to write fast and as well as you can at your stage (whichever that is.)

First – stop fighting the words.
Yes, yes, the words are important – eventually – but for now, stop fighting them.  Tell yourself before this is sent in, it will be read three or four more times, and you’ll catch that – then.   If you can’t remember an exact word, or if you know you’re repeating a word, let it go.  At this stage the lightening bug is as good as the lightening bolt, metaphorically speaking.  It’s easier to think ONLY words and get really good once you have the basic structure/scenes/characters down.

Second – Stop fighting the story.
Okay, for instance in A Few Good Men I realized with ages where they were, the ick factor for a particular event was THROUGH the roof.  (No, can’t explain.  Just trust me.  Yes, it made the victims more sympathetic, but, as a parent, it set off ALL sorts of alarms.  I couldn’t take it. ) So I aged everyone concerned four years.  Two problems.  First, my arithmetic sucks when I’m mid book.  Second, “Curse you search replace.”  So it made it to betas with screwed up numbers.  Sigh.  I’ll fix it on next pass, before editor sees it.  No big.  Allow for that.  Don’t drive yourself nuts.  Your first pass is not your last.

Third – if story changes mid stream, make notes, do not go back and change.  Say halfway through the book you realize your narrator is the murderer and you did not foreshadow.  Make notes at that point “First chapter, make sure he says…” Etc.  save it for revision.  When I started out and was still learning plotting, I often ended up with a beginning for one novel, a middle for another, and an end for yet another.  BUT that was still fixable in revision.  You just go back and make all the “pointers” match.  I use sticky notes for these, so often my desk looks like a porcupine at the end of the novel.  (And btw, these days novels don’t end up tri-partite often.  First novel that wasn’t that way was Draw One in the Dark.)

Fourth – don’t think of this as “your one and only” If you do that, then you want to make it perfect.  It will never be perfect.  The closest you’ll come to perfection will be your aggregate work, not each of them.  Make each as good as you can, but give yourself three revisions tops, then one after betaing.  If you do more than that, you’ll start introducing as many issues as you fix.  TRUST me.  If you think “But this is my one and only” think… if RAH had only written For Us The Living and tried to make it the BEST thing ever.  (Gags.)  And I’ll point out he got stuck trying to publish that for like… ten years.   Or if Pratchett had ONLY ever written The Carpet People and devoted himself to fixing it, forever.  Or if I had only written Glass Pedestal (cold dead hands, children, and not even then, as I’ll HAUNT anyone who publishes it.)  I came darn near only writing the pre-minoan thing — eighth novel — once I hit that.  It ate years of my life.  In retrospect… it couldn’t have been made publishable with what I knew at the time, which brings us to fifth

Fifth – sometimes you have to admit, to quote my son’s post on G-d and pantsing that you can write a kidney stone that even you can’t pass.  I.e. you’re creating a novel you can’t write yet.  This is good – you’re reaching, learning, stretching – but sometimes (not every time.  Then you have to just wonder if you’re a trifler with novels) – you have to wonder if you lack the… practice to write that.  Mirrorplay – the minoan thing – was that way for me.  I had no clue how to plot even one novel, and here I was trying to do an epic SERIES.  Now?  Now I can go back and do it, with multiple, fully realized characters.  I finished it, at the time, mind.  I just recognized it wasn’t very good, so it’s sat for near on twenty years.  Now it’s waiting for a time to go back and fix.  IF I’d insisted on just rewriting it till it was good, I’d never have done that learning.  (It’s different, trust me.  You learn different things from different novels.)  I have at least one ex-writers-group member who last I heard HAD spent the last twenty years rewriting her novel…  Not only doesn’t she have the knowledge to recast it, but by now it probably needs recasting.  No, seriously.  It will be soup.  Also, what if the reason it didn’t sell was not that it is badly done, but that the premise has one of the ick factors YOU are blind to?  (But the rest of the world isn’t?)  There are tons of this, but to give one that a friend told me about from when she was in RWA and her Critique Partner was obsessed with sweaty, unwashed for weeks men and couldn’t understand that other women would go “EWWWW”.
If that’s what’s keeping your book from selling (or doing well in the new market) you’ll NEVER know it.  Move on.  Grow up.  Eventually you’ll come back to it, and weirdly unless it’s a true fetish, ten years down the road you might go “WHY did I think that was cool/cute/whatever.”  Kind of likne in art, when you stick, you go away and work on another piece, then come back to that one.

Six – consider short stories.  Yes, they’re a completely different art form.  But it will teach you beginnings, hooks, how to introduce a character, etc. with MUCH less investment than a novel.  Try it on weekends, or some day when you’re not doing novel work.  Train yourself in writing those fast and under the principle “It doesn’t have to be perfect, it has to be good.”  Sometimes they become novels.  Deal.  And hey, you can use them as loss leaders, once you’re ready to get that novel out.

Seven – Keep writing.  If you keep writing your quota (mine is 5k words.  Other people are saner) a day, you WILL improve and gain experience.  At least, if you’re also reading and studying how people do things.

Now, stop reading the blog and go write

— wait, leave me a comment, first, so I know you read it AND got it ;)  NOW go write.

38 thoughts on “Writing At The Speed Of Life”

  1. Hi Sarah,

    As always another great post. Thanks for mentioning the wierd habit of repeating the same word, over and over again. See, I just did it! :)

    Okay, back to writing…

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  5. The very best writers, I think, keep struggling. Shakespeare in his later years was doing plays like “King Lear” which were flawed just because he was reaching even beyond his grasp.
    Ik factor. A few days ago I tried to read Katherine Hepburn’s book about the making of “The African Queen,” one of the great fun movies, and I just had to put it down. P. 44 it was so hot and everybody was sweating. P. 45 we went to church with the locals and eveybody was sweating and eveybody stank. P. 46 Bogie didn’t sweat or stink so much, I think it was because he was sick and drank like a fish. P. 47 Did I mention everybody sweated, I sweated, and we all stank? Dear lord, mention it once, Kate, then an occasional person mopping himself with a scarf.

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  7. I believed you years ago, even before I read you . . .

    But then, I need constant reminders. I’m a bit toddler-like that way.

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  10. Well, if you insist, I’ll go sic the stupid bombs on the giant scorpions.Maybe this time they’ll remember how to explode.

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  11. Oh, we get it, all right. Why does it take so long to learn this technique? Get the story down on the page first, worry about the fine points of plot and craft LATER.

    One trick I learned that helps me, is that on my second go-through (and sometimes on my first) I spot places that need additions or changes. I change the font color to red, so that the next time I review, I know what I need and where the change belongs. I do this even if it’s missing research, and so far it’s worked like a charm.

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    1. Deb.

      One of my tricks is the five asterisk mark. I use it to mark places that need fixing, and put a note after it explaining why.

      And then I used search to find it. I’ve found this works better than coloured text, you can’t search for the colour red [GRIN].

      BTW, I want to blow up both Amazon and Smashwords. They are both slow as molasses in January today on uploads.

      Wayne

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      1. Any hot keyed combination of a “phrase” unlikely to be inadvertent, eg, ***** or ????? or !!!!! (okay, that last one might occur in the natural course of writing, but if it does you ought have your prose in purple) ought suffice as a cue, especially if consistently applied. You might even resort to WORD:warm as a cue to find the precise term you want that is generally synonymous with warm — and then search for any WORD: occurrence with your thesauri at hand. The key is to not allow the writing brain to run off and play when it ought be comprosing, yet still facillitate your post-writing review & repair of specific problems.

        Or you can just employ four-letter terms that are inappropriate for your opus, a trick which has a peculiarly pleasant benefit of allowing you to simultaneously cuss and search. You could even assign a specific mnemonic purpose to each scatological term, so that FU** means “a word with the same general meaning as” warm, but SH** might equate to “problematic plot point, insert foreshadowing” and DA** identifies “a point where I need to check the science and determine just when the orbit of Pluto crosses that of Neptune, else My Very Educated Mother is gonna be serving something other than Nine Pickles.”

        This also allows you to sit at table of an evening and announce “I finished the story today; tomorrow I will review all the FU** words and, if things go well, the SH** spots, and then I’ll see what I can do about the DA** problems.”

        yeah, I’m one of those folks who employed cuss words for my monthly password change, ensuring that whenever I forgot the most recent password the vocabulary for the potentials was uppermost in mind.

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          1. Always nice to know not everybody shrugs such off as bad typing (and Lord knows, I’ve perpetrated my share and more of typos.)

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            1. No. I THOUGHT it was intentional. It’s a WONDERFUL word. Are you sure your subconscious didn’t meant it? I absolutely love it as a word for what I do. It makes it sound SO grand.

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              1. Oh, you DID mean it. I MUST get caffeine before reading comments. I was afraid SOMEONE thought I was picking on typos. (Good heavens. ME? The Queen of Typoery?)
                Yes, it’s brilliant. And now I get coffee, then I finish the overdue First Blood (Muketerambo. No, really.) And then I clean house with emphasis on cat boxes (my life is SOOOO exciting.)

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        1. Hey, what ever works for you.

          As long as the writer is consistent on their editing marks, anything that is searchable will work.

          Which brings us to the SEARCH functions in various word processor packages. Pages has a wonderful ‘search’ function. The ‘replace’ function sucks. LibreOffice has a great ‘replace’ function, the ‘search’ function sucks. from what I remember from when I last used Microsoft Office it was about the same as LibreOffice.

          Comments?

          Wayne

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          1. Well, since I’ve made Word kneel to me and call me Queen, I’m a bit more used to it than other things. I found its Search to be more useful than Pages’ version (much to my vast annoyance!), and the Replace likewise. But I may tend to search on odd things, like simple HTML markup, formatting (changing underline to italics), font/style swapping, hyphens/en-dashes/em-dashes, or non-breaking spaces.

            There are times I really wish Word weren’t the most powerful word-processor I know of, for what I do. *sigh*

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  12. Did NaNoWriMo for the 3rd time. Finished 50k+ for the 2nd time.
    I can TELL this one is much-o better-o. (It still lacks plot, pacing & characterization, not to mention a finish.) BUT I did it. And the next one will be better yet. Now, off to the Magic Elf Box to find out What Happens Next! :-)

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  13. I think of it as “in the Zone”. It’s a mental state, a sort of fugue, and when it’s working the process is not only easy, it’s exhilarating. Not better than sex, no, but a strong contender for second place. The words just arrive from some other dimension, flow through the fingers, and appear on the screen. For me, a chapter is 3500 +/- 500 words (that’s a target, not an absolute), and when I’m in the Zone a chapter an hour is no real problem.

    Most of what Sarah describes is, for me, avoidance of things that break the trance once established. Most forms of editing will do that, as will letting yourself be balked by details — what the f* was that minor character’s name? How long ago was sunrise? Do magic fish have purple fins or blue? Stopping to figure that out or look it up dissipates the energy, and at best it has to be re-established; at worst that writing session is over at that point.

    It’s apparently something that can be learned, and I haven’t done that yet, which is why my progress is so slow overall. When I’m able I get a lot done. It’s just that establishing the Zone is sometimes hard when Reality™&copy:(Reg. US Pat. Off.) intrudes. It’s also a good reason for outlining at some level, even just a mental review — “Let’s see. Chapter XIV; Joel meets Agnes, Chauncey catches the Magic Fish, the Zagobertian spaceship lands in Times Square and sends out for pizza, and Agnes has to cut her date short to deliver it, which makes Joel mad enough to decide to poison the anchovies. Right, got that in mind; start in the pizza parlor, where Weasel is arguing with Chauncey about whether fish is a valid topping. OK, fingers, do your thing…”

    Regards,
    Ric

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    2. Not that I care much on terminology, but I’ve heard what you call the “Zone” also referred to as the Alpha State. From what I understand it is a bit of self hypnosis which allows one to enter a very deep trance like state and exert a very strong focus on specific tasks.
      I use this all the time for the day job (working in photoshop). To help my focus I now often listen to music, which seems to help me concentrate, especially on work I don’t particularly love (hey, its a job). I haven’t quite got to point where I can write with music, but I can see the day will come.
      Outlines definitely help me stay in the zone. Curiously, for some reason writing an outline has a zone of its own, albeit of a different flavor/variety than regular writing. I have no idea why except perhaps that it is a slightly different type of creativity.

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      1. Interesting. This probably explains why I need “the right music” for the novel and this might not have anything to do with my PERSONAL tastes. And absolutely correct on that “different zone for outlines.” Different zone for shorts, too, if anyone is interested.

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        1. Absolutely understand what you mean about “the right music”

          The current novel needs country and western. I don’t like much country and western but that’s what the novel needs. At least there is a character in the book that fits with that. Sometimes I need to listen to music that has no apparent connection to the book at all, but it “fits.” Last novel was Boston. I played one Boston song so many times I actually had to put it in the book.

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          1. Darkship ONLY works with Buddy Holly in the background, and let me tell you if this is going to be a long series, I’m going to need a time machine to go back and get more music from the man. A Few Good Men insisted on Adelle. This is beyond weird for that book. Then the refinishing mysteries, heaven help me, stick me with… Madonna. Sigh

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        2. I’m glad I’m not the only one. I find myself constantly switching my music around to better match my mood, or the mood I want in a story. For a more spiritual/thoughtful tone I choose the Indigo Girls, for high school love story its The Academy Is, “Fast Times at Barrington High”, etc etc. My iPod has some 700 cds on it, and I take it every where I work. I don’t know that my choices would work for anyone else, but they help me just fine.

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          1. I wish it made that much sense. Seriously. A novel just started requires an album I last had heard in 1980. I had to order it. My family loves “guessing” what I’m writing based on the music, and my husband teases me about each CD as it arrives in the mail.

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            1. Hum. I’m not allowed to write to music. My family doesn’t get along with my taste .

              However I often write to the sound of my son screaming imprecations at the Toronto Maple Leafs as they loose yet another hockey game.

              Wayne

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              1. Headphones! I often have instrumentals (or some J-pop) going on Shuffle in iTunes, with headphones, to block out the kid playing her games or doing homework, or the spouse griping at something in EverQuest.

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  14. Read it, and got it. ;) This is one I think I’ll need to print out and hang up by my desk. Thank you. :)

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  16. Well I tried your speed writing technique last night. 1:30 am sounded like a good time. ;-) Actually I woke up from a dream of flying in a plane, and suddenly I knew it was the beginning of a story. Not noticing my many typos late at night appears to be rather easy. We’ll see how it goes after I finish it up. Thanks for the advice.

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