Things I wished I known About writing when I Started

Photo © damedeeso | Deposit Photos

This week, our air quality zoomed up to Code Deep Maroon in the Washington DC area. I think they had to make up a new color because the Canadian wildfires made the air quality so bad. We’re hundreds of miles from Canada, so it’s pretty amazing that it looks like the worst days of brush fires when I was in Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, construction crews are demolishing the other side of the street. Despite all the noise, I’m finding it interesting to watch the process of what they’re doing. They jackhammered the sidewalk. Then a bulldozer carved it all up into chunks of big rock, and a backhoe dumped it into a dump truck. Now a stream roller is flattening it out. I believe they will be adjusting the grade of the street on my side, which would be a welcome thing; when it snows, cars get stuck on the hill.

Onward to the topic:

This topic was inspired by a craft fest workshop by Kevin J. Anderson at the upcoming Superstars (they listed a schedule pretty early, so this may not be locked in). One of the challenges is that it’s hard finding craft information beyond what I’ll call Beginner-Advanced.

Never settle for a lower standard.

This can come across multiple ways, and has for me. The first was submitting to non-paying magazines. It was common knowledge that you should do that to build credits, but no professional writer would have said it. That may have originated with non-paying magazines who wanted any submissions and novice writers who shared it.

This lower standard played on my subconscious: My critical voice whispered in my ear, “You’re not good enough to get paid for your writing.”

That’s pretty deeply ingrained in the writing culture. Some magazines portray getting paid as if it were vulgar and you should suffer for the art. Others state they are doing you a “favor” by listing your biography and website link, or simply by publishing you. My own family thought the only way I could ever get paid for writing was to become a Hollywood screenwriter or a journalist, neither of which I liked. Indie opened the doors, but with that standard so ingrained, writers will happily fork out several grand for developmental editing on a first book, then pay for ads when the book doesn’t sell…instead of working on a new book and hitting a new skill to learn.

But the other problem I’ve run into—I discovered it reading The Fifth Discipline. Companies will set a standard, such as delivery time. For whatever reason, they can’t make the delivery metrics. Instead of identifying why, they lower their standard by expanding the time. Because they haven’t fixed the original problem, they continue to fall behind on the delivery schedule, and reduce their standards again until it becomes a crisis that they lose business.

I did this with novels. Ever since I wrote my first novel, which was still during traditional publishing days, I ran into problems with getting to the required 90K. I’d end up settling for short stories and at one point despaired that I would ever write novel-length fiction. I sought craft books to explain the problem, but by then, they were focusing on getting a new writer to finish their first novel, and baby step problems.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I didn’t like the idea of settling for short stories. If I wrote a short story, it should be because I wanted to, not because it was second best.  However, the desire to solve the problem led me to do a lot of dumb things. I wasted money on ineffective writing classes without screening them. This was how I discovered that all the fixation on plot-plot-plot that is prevalent among the beginner-advanced writers hurt my writing. On one story that ran too short, I added more and more plot, and it became a convoluted mess.

With indie, I kept circling back to novellas, since they were returning in popularity; in fact, other writers said, “Write novellas instead.” But it still felt like lowering my standard. Superhero Portal got to 50K (where I’m comfortable with being novel length; I don’t need 90K), but I’m still working on the skill. I’d like to land on it consistently because I wanted that book to be a novel, not because I accidentally got there. But I’m also still trying to understand the cause.

Be willing to walk away from any class

With the internet, anyone can teach writing classes, including people who have little writing experience. Sometimes it’s easy to determine if a course isn’t going to be useful; a community organization offered a course on the history of Washington DC for writers, but sample chapters of the instructor’s books showed that he wasn’t good at getting it into the story.  Someone else might offer a 2-hour course on writing a novel; that’s such a broad topic that it’s probably only for someone thinking of starting their first novel.

Others…not so obvious. The higher the price and the longer the course, the more information is needed. I signed up briefly for a community that had writing courses and came recommended by someone. Their material said it would include advanced courses and master classes. So I thought I’d give it a try. Once I got inside and saw what was offered, I determined that their definition of advanced was not the same as mine. With only basic material available, anything above it looks advanced. It was what I’d call beginner-advanced (they were calling it mid-level, so you can see how confusing the definitions can become). I asked for a refund and walked away.

But I’ve also not always done that. One time, I signed up for a class on the old Forward Motion site. The class was called “Pantser-Friendly Outlining.” From the sound of it, I figured it might help me solve the problems of getting to a novel-length so I signed up (this was at a point where I was firefighting writing skills, which was not a good practice).

The class was four weeks and had about twenty writers who all gleefully declared, “This is fun!” and “This is easy.” I stared at the instructions and tried to force-fit how I wrote into them. It was very painful; it felt like fingernails on a chalkboard. The instructor was immediately frustrated with me because I wasn’t comprehending what she thought was something easy.

I nearly quit after that first painful session. But I felt like I’d already signed up for the class; I needed to take all the lessons. So I went back for all three weeks, and history repeated itself. The other writers, still amazed I wasn’t comprehending something so easy, explained it to me like I was stupid. Fingernails on a chalkboard all the way through.  A few weeks after, I looked at what I created with those lessons, and I didn’t understand how I did anything in the class at all!

When I first found Dean Wesley Smith’s classes—and for pantsers!—I was about to take yet another course (I think it was Beginner-Basic on description). I looked at the first lesson, decided it wasn’t worth my time, and walked away. I do feel a little guilty about spending the money; if it’s over $50, I think a long time before considering taking it. If it’s $20, I’ll grab it and hope for the best (as I write this, I just purchased a lecture packet from Margie Lawson on endings. Though the packets focus on revision, they scratch my intellection itch with power words and rhetorical devices).

I also discovered that as high input, I will collect classes; intellection will take them when it feels the need; and Learner (#6) will also take as much as it needs to learn. I was feeling guilty because I wasn’t always finishing Dean Wesley Smith’s workshops (in many cases, repeat information; in others, he went off the topic I wanted to learn).

If the class is not working, or it’s repetitive, you can stop. There’s no point in fingernails on the chalkboard.

Finally…

Stand up for your writing process

This has been one of the hardest things for me to learn. Everyone’s writing process is unique to them. There will be some things that work well for them, and other things that don’t work at all.

But it’s treated as a one size fits all (which means “without modification”), both on the outlining side and on the pantsing side.

I was on message boards for many years, and enjoyed it then later hated it. The writers pressured me and other pantsers to outline. At one point, I succumbed, figuring everyone else must know better and not trusting my writing process. I felt very frustrated by it at the time and thought it was like throwing paint at the wall. That was how I landed in the “Pantser-Friendly Outlining” class and tried The Marshall Plan for Novel Writing.

I’ve also been lectured by pantsers because my writing process didn’t exactly fit that dogma. In that case, I changed my process for two reasons:

1. I kept getting stuck and doing redrafts of scenes. For the beginning of the story, it was often multiple redrafts of the same few scenes. It was frustrating because I felt like something was missing and I didn’t know what it was. The dogma was to “trust your subconscious” and “write the next word.” The second part of that advice resulted in the redrafts (it was apparent this was a direct cause once I changed my process a little). The change? Using Plottr to type out ideas about where the scene might go, regardless of if I used any. I was lectured because I “wasn’t trusting my subconscious.”

2. I don’t always think of things in order. Details are sometimes hard for me to get into the story on the first typing and have to evolve; also, when they get added may depend on another scene six chapters in.  Cycling is a great tool for this but also carries a surprising amount of opinion about what’s “right” attached to it. In Superhero Vs. Superhero, I got to an action scene and only then did I know what setting details I needed in the first chapter. I had to make multiple cycling passes through the first chapter, layering in the details as they evolved in the later chapter. Then I repeated it for another action scene that followed because my creative side said, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?” Everything affects all the scenes in between, so I was doing many passes as my brain pinballed around. The dogma? That cycling is only the last 400 words. I thought I’d gotten away from “This Is The Only Way To Do This” when I left the message boards.

This time, as opposed to when I was on the message boards, I didn’t question what I was doing. My creative side was singing with joy because it was having so much fun being in control of where it wanted to go in the story, not because of a random writing rule.

But it’s hard. When you are lectured by someone, it’s easy to start second-guessing yourself. So it’s important to not only stand up for your writing process, but also to not get in the way of yourself when it needs adjustments.

Okay, those are the things I wished I knew about writing. What are yours?