I’m on a productivity message board, and one of the topics that frequently comes up is “How do you store your ideas?”  Everyone pops up with Evernote or OneNote.  Someone says they put them on a task list like Omni Focus.

Me?

I don’t save them.

It’s always quite shocking to the others.  They all say the same thing: They don’t get many ideas, so they have to save ALL of them.  Because they are all important.

I understand that.  I was there on my first novel.  I had this great idea for a mystery, start writing it…and then I got stuck.

I couldn’t figure out why I was stuck, so I figured that the problem was in the beginning and I began to rewrite the story.  Got stuck in the same place.  Somewhere in the back of my mind, a little voice kept saying that I should toss the story and start a different one.

But I didn’t have any other ideas.

Or, actually, I didn’t know how to come up with more ideas on demand.

When cowriter and I were close to breaking up, we were talking about a next project and got into a big disagreement about ideas.  I was coming up with some, and he kept shooting them down, saying “That won’t sell.”  Since we hadn’t written anything, how would he know?

But that’s the nature of the elusive idea to those who struggle to come up with them.  Everything–their entire success–rests on that idea.  The idea is what will make the book get published (not the story, the craft skills…right).

In the early days of the internet, there was a guy who was trying to either copyright or trademark several of his ideas for novels.  He thought it was inspired to do this, like no one else had every thought of doing this for an idea before.  The ideas were quoted…and well, they weren’t that good.  They were the low-hanging fruit ideas.  You know, the one where you write it, and as you finish the book, you pick up a book at the bookstore and it’s the same story!

But coming up with them is a skill that we’re really not taught.  Once you go out of the flights of fantasy as childhood, that ability seems to disappear, possibly because it’s not something that can be measured or graded.  But it is a skill that can be learned.

Dean Wesley Smith and Joanna Penn both have posts up today on ideas.

I grew up in Los Angeles, and just devoured any books on Hollywood.  It was fascinating to read the behind the scenes of how John Chambers put the makeup on the actors for The Planet of the Apes.  I read Daily Variety every day at the college library, and the local gossip columns published in the newspapers.  The internet’s largely made some of it go away, but we had columns where people could write in and ask, “What happened to X?” and find out.

So I gravitated into what I’m working on now, a mystery set in Hollywood in 1947.  If you didn’t catch that, it was right after World War II, so I got veterans in there, too.  I’m mostly research fashion of the times, types of cars, popular colors.  I’ve had to do geography as well, since I only saw the mountains.  I didn’t know what they were called.  😦

And I still remember my high school short story about a serial killer who picked his victims by random choice.  Needless to say, that didn’t win any prizes.

“Write what you know” is one of those first “rules” that writers are taught when they think about writing a novel.  And everyone scratches their head and tries to figure out what it means.

But it’s also a piece of advice that I think has been way oversimplified. I’ve wondered if it originally came from a pro writer and somehow got dumbed down over time.

I gravitated to the serial killer story because it was the idea (and this will date me, but the year that story popped up was when the Hillside Strangler in the news).   You get this idea, you write the idea as is and the idea is the story.  BIG myth.

Also a relative who shall be nameless suggested the random choice with pure INTP logic.

Okay, yeah.

Many people–not just writers–view ideas as rare and precious.  So you get one, you write it.  Even if it is way, way, way out your experience.

Like the writer who knew nothing at all about medicine and had to do research into how surgery was done for a book.  She was scandalized at the thought of a best selling writer saying he didn’t do a lot of research.  But maybe, maybe, she should have picked a different direction for the story that didn’t involve researching surgery.

One she was more familiar with.

That’s where write what you know comes into play.

It’s not about making your character head of HR because you’re head of HR.  It’s about finding an expertise that you already have because you’re interested in the topic.

Tamara Pierce said that she grew up reading about the knights in England.  Her books are about knights and people who live in the times of knights.

Michael Connelly was a crime reporter (and has a non-fiction book on those days).  He writes about a police detective who solves crimes in L.A.

Elizabeth Moon was a Marine (ooh-rah).  She writes about characters who in some form of military, whether in fantasy or science fiction.

Makes the research a lot easier, too.  It’s one of the reasons I’m doing a Hollywood mystery.  But no serial killers are involved.

This week, there’s been a lot of discussion about writers essentially trying to take short cuts.  Sort of like the person who is always jumping from one thing to another, hoping to get rich quick.

Except it’s choosing the right genres, getting books out so fast they hire ghost writers to keep up with, making the right contact.  I just unfriended a writer on Facebook because all her posts turned into “I write all types of genres in fiction and scripts. Please give me the name of an agent who represents everything!”

We get fooled by the media who says “overnight success” for a new writer and leaves out the part that he or she wrote books for ten years.

Or reading Writer’s Digest and articles like “10 Things That Keep You From Being Published.”  The writer then proceeds to list trivial things that fall more in copy editing.  Makes it sound like you follow the checklist and the agent or editor will move your story to the top of the pile and buy it.

It doesn’t happen like that so the writer either blames publishing for not recognizing them or try to find a way to stick the foot in the door.

Like two other writers I knew.  Neither were particularly interested in improving their craft–you know, that part that makes readers want to buy the book.  With one, I co-wrote with him, and there was huge disconnect to the fact that if a reader is going to plunk down $$ and the cost of their time, the book has be pretty good.

No, it was about networking to find the right agent and getting the book in front of him.  It was–and I’m not making this up–figuring out the publishers’ secret to what made a best selling book.  I remember going to a writer’s conference with him.  We chatted with an agent for fifteen minutes.  She liked us.  She enjoyed talking to us.  And she still rejected the book.

And rightly so.  I look back on my writing then, which is now fifteen years ago (yikes!), and there was still a LOT more to learn.

The other writer didn’t want to learn at all.  Hated his day job.  Wanted to write full time to get out of his job.  Wanted people to tell him his stories were good.  Thought all he needed to do was produce as much as possible and marketing would magically get people to buy the books.

Somewhere in there, the reader got left out.  Or maybe seen as the person who goes to the huckster who comes into town and convinces everyone to buy his snake oil.

One of the problems is that there’s a huge learning curve, like that wall in American Ninja Warriors.  It’s hard to get up it, especially in the beginning.  You send out stories, get form rejections.  No idea why the stories are being rejected.  Everyone starts thinking it was this typo on page 10 or the editor wouldn’t recognize anything good.

It can take a long time to get over the top of that Ninja Wall (and if you’ve even seen the show, most people never got past it).  Learning is always a choice.  Checking off boxes is also a choice.

But both with different results.

There’s a phrase I keep seeing over and over again, and it’s one I really hate because of the implied put down.

Worse, I don’t think writers realize it is a put down.

The phrase is…

“Aspiring author.”

It means longs for, desires to be, aims for.

Yet, if you write, you’re already a writer.  So this is somehow managing to say that even if you write you’re not really a writer.  I just saw it on an article about a writer who wrote two books and was called aspiring.

Just walking away and trying not to cringe.  As Bob Meyer said to me, there are so many people ready to put you down.  There’s no need to do it to yourself.

I just finished a Harry Bosch book.  I really like most of his books, and especially how he describes Los Angeles.

And there’s a probably a writer out there reading it, but not enjoying the book….instead  searching for faults.

When I first got online, I was influenced by all the writers around me.  We all read books to see what NOT to do.  Particularly, we all read each sentence and picked at them.  That writer did too much showing and not enough telling.  This writer made a grammatical mistake.  That kind of stuff.

One day, I felt discouraged as a reader because all the books I was getting were terrible!

It was so bad I thought writing had gone downhill from when I was growing up.

So was out wandering around at work and someone had left a few copies of Mack Bolan or Nick Carter books.  These were men’s fiction, with a lot of action.  I’d read a number of them (yeah, I had a weird childhood.  Other girls read romances, and I read science fiction and action fiction).

I snatched those books up, looking forward to proving my point that writing had gone downhill.

Instead, I could see how the writing of books had evolved over time.  The problem wasn’t the books.

It was how I was reading them.

I made a decision then and there to read the next book without picking apart.  Just try to enjoy it.

That book was The Di Vinci Code.  That’s one of the books the writers on message boards really hate.  It was a runaway success and sold millions and millions of copies.  So the writers read it, pick at the sentences, and wonder how a book with so many “flaws” can be a best seller.

Also implying that the readers are stupid because they don’t see the flaws.

The readers don’t care.  As long as the story gives them whatever they’re looking for, that’s enough.  Doesn’t have to be perfect.  Perfect is boring anyway, and a book isn’t an English assignment, waiting to be graded.

I’ve been spending some time trying to clean out my digital ‘closet,’ in addition to the real closet.  I’m shocked at how many files I’ve accumulated, and moreover, how many files I downloaded and then never paid attention to again.

It’s all clutter that wears on me, so I’ve been zapping it into the recycle bin as I find it.

But it’s amazing the amount of information that is available to us.  We can go online and look up Eddie Mannix (a fixer for MGM in the 1940s) and even post something that we know for everyone else to read.

Which is also a problem.

There’s so much information available that we have to sharpen our critical thinking skills.  They’re more natural for me as an INTP, where logic is the first place I head, but even it’s hard for me.  It’s easy to get taken in, especially when the other person is saying what we want to hear.

When I was on writing message boards, this type of attitude ran rampant.  People actively said, “I can learn something from other beginners,” and dissed best-selling writers as not knowing what they were doing.

The result is not questioning enough of the right things, which I see everywhere.

The messages coming at us are so powerful that people actually question what should be common sense.  

It seems worse for writers.  They want validation or to have a best seller so they can quit the day job.

So it’s easy to listen to the emotional messages from people who are good at selling, but not skilled as writers.

Some examples:

Description is boring.  Get rid of it all.  It’s not important.

I’ve hard variations of this one in many places.   Common sense should be to head to a best seller like Michael Connelly and see if he’s left off the description.  BTW, he has wonderful descriptions of Los Angeles, all told from the opinion of Harry Bosch.  Michael Connelly has also got something 20+ books.

What’s bad is that when writers flock to other writers and get critiques, the comments are generally that their description is boring.  It probably is because they just tossed in obligatory description without a thought about what they could do with the characterization.  So everyone says get rid of it, not fix it.

I interact with a traditionally published mid-list writer.  She advises writers to keep the description to a minimum—and no one questions this (except me).  It all fits into the narrative that description is boring, not that it needs to be done well.

And that writer has a series set in a place I went frequently when I was growing up.  You wouldn’t know the place from any other generic place.  No description of it.  Kind of sad.

You must outline.  Pantsing doesn’t work.

Yeah, I had to get this one in here.  It is a hobby horse for me because I ran into so much of it.  The group think veers to outlining and pressures everyone to conform.

What’s bad is no one checks out the source of this particular piece of advice.  It nearly always comes from two sources: Other beginning writers recommending it to each other and developmental editors.

Other beginning writers haven’t worked out their process yet.  And they’re giving advice on how to write a book.  Hmm.

Developmental editors are likely to see only the messed up stories of first time writers who are still learning craft and attribute it incorrectly to not outlining.

Race through the first draft and don’t look back.  You can fix everything on the revision.

Honestly, this one really needs a critical thinking Gibbs head slap.  Think about this:

You write the story and do it stream of consciousness.  Just leave out all the punctuation.

Now you come to the revision and you now have to spend a lot of time fixing that–and chances are it will never be right.

If we don’t have enough time in the first place, why do it in such a way that it takes even more time?

It’s terribly easy to go on auto-pilot, especially with all the digital clutter of the world.  Critical thinking is also a difficult skill to master, not only because it rewires our brain…but because there are so many things that keep challenging it.