WriterInside.com Blog

As you can see, WriterInside.com has undergone a major facelift. I decided that it would be infinitely easier to keep the website updated if I installed WordPress, so we’ll see how it goes.

In other news, as I’ve mentioned before, it’s been a while since I’ve worked on the first draft of my novel, and lately, I’ve been feeling a strong urge to get back to my story. I owe it to my characters to finish this, and if I’m ever able to free up enough time, I plan on attacking the rest of the story full force.

Fiction is a funny thing. Even though the characters aren’t real, they still call to me sometimes. They cry out for attention, and I yearn for the day when I can give it to them.

Let me know how it’s going with you guys!

I just sat down to work on my first draft (something I should be doing right now), and I ran a word count. Turns out I just passed 50,000 words yesterday, and I’m guessing I’ve got about 30,000 left to go.

I’m still trying to figure out how to get from where I am to where I need to be for the ending, and . . . wouldn’t you know it . . . I think I just figured it out as I was typing this sentence.

Inspiration comes at the oddest times. I’d better write this down before I lose it!

Author Hilary Mantel discusses her method for writing a novel. This is one of the best summaries for the writing method that I’ve ever seen.

Obviously, we all have our own methods of writing and staying organized, but even if you’ve figured out your own method, this short article is still worth a read.

I read an article once about teaching children how to play golf. One section of the article in particular (forgive me, I don’t recall where exactly I read this) stressed the importance of finishing every single putt.Too many instructors drop a handful of golf balls in front of the student and tell him or her to start aiming for a particular hole on the practice green. So the student fires off five to ten putts, and if they’re lucky, maybe one or two of them go in the hole. The author stated that this is a horrible way to teach, because it teaches the student that a missed putt has no consequences. If you didn’t like a particular putt, it’s okay, because you’ve got five more golf balls sitting by your foot, waiting to be putted. If a student is trained in this manner, then he’s going to be very disappointed when he reaches his first green in a real game and misses his first putt. His first instinct is going to be to drop another ball and try again, because he hasn’t learned to finish what he started.

You don’t have to be too astute to see where I’m going with this. In a writer’s life, we need to approach our ‘training’ in the same manner. And keep in mind that I have a very broad sense of the word training in mind here. I’m not talking about journal entries and practice exercises; I’m talking about everything you write. Even when we’re working on something that we hope to publish someday, we are still training. We learn something about writing from every story, article, essay, or book we write.

With this definition of training in mind, we need to apply the putting principle to our writing. Have you started something you no longer like or no longer have a taste for? Have you gotten halfway into a novel just to discover that you no longer like the story or the characters? It doesn’t matter. Finish the hole! Destructive habits are infinitely easier to start than constructive habits, so we should all be vigilant about keep destructive habits at bay.

But what if the story really isn’t any good? Are you wasting your time? Absolutely not! And there are numerous reasons for this:

1. By finishing what you start, you’re building constructive habits. Constructive habits are invaluable to a writer. Building constructive habits will be infinitely more valuable to you than any time you may have lost finishing a story that wasn’t necessarily fit for publishing.
2. Just the act of finishing something does wonders for a beginning writer’s motivation. This is especially true if you’ve never finished anything before. I used to have the destructive habit of starting stories without finishing them, and it wasn’t until I finally finished my first story that I truly started believing in myself as a writer. After all, the writer who never finishes anything will never publish anything . . . and that’s a fact.
3. Finishing a bad rough draft is never a waste of time, because a rough draft by definition is supposed to be bad! Even Hemingway compared rough drafts to fecal matter, and if Hemingway felt that way about his first drafts, then I’d say you were probably safe feeling the same way about yours. If your first draft is rubbish, which it probably will be, you can make it better in the second draft. And by the time you’ve worked through three or four drafts, you just might have yourself a masterpiece!

The reason for this particular blog is that I’m currently in the middle of a first draft for a novel for which I’ve started to lose interest. I’ve got other ideas brewing in my head that are sure to knock my current manuscript out of the water, so it’s a constant temptation to trash what I’ve started and move on.

But I didn’t get 160 pages into a draft just to see it tossed aside. The story I’m writing right now has been bouncing around in my head for a few years, and it’s not going to let me loose until I get it all on paper.

Plus, when I think about the lesson of the student golfer, I’m reminded that it would be very destructive for me as a writer if I didn’t finish this hole, especially when I’m at a point in my writing career (if it could be called a career yet) where I haven’t finished anything longer than twenty pages. This manuscript is crucial for me. Even if it never gets published, I will learn so much more from it if I finish it and fail than I would if I just threw it away.

After all, unless your motives for writing are purely monetary in nature, it’s really impossible to “finish and fail.” The very act of finishing something is in and of itself a major victory that no number of rejection letters will ever nullify.

The student golfer learns nothing from a missed putt if he follows it up with another dropped ball. But more than that, he misses out on the satisfaction of a finished hole. Even if it takes a couple putts to get the ball where it needs to be, there is still a great sense of satisfaction when it drops in the hole.

I recently found myself stuck in the middle of a first draft manuscript for a novel, so I decided to take a break from it. Some things needed to be changed in some of the early chapters of the manuscript, and these changes were going to affect the entire course of the narrative, but I just didn’t have the energy to go back and make those changes, so I just gave up for a while. I thought that maybe if I just let it rest for a little while, perhaps I could revive it later on.

Turns out that was a bad idea.

One year later–this was just a few weeks ago–I finally took my laptop to Starbucks again and started reading through the manuscript. All the enthusiasm I used to have for the story came washing over me again, and I couldn’t wait to get moving with it. I was 40,000 words into the first draft, and my fingers were itching to do some typing.

But when I finished reading the first draft, I was still stuck. I sat there with my fingers hovering over the keyboard, and I couldn’t find the words to type. The temptation to throw it all away and start over with something new was almost unbearable, and I realized that I was in the exact same position that I was in when I left the manuscript a year before.

I had expected a little time and distance to solve all my story problems for me, but a year of rest brought me no closer to solving my problems. My problem wasn’t that my story needed a while to rest. The problem was with the story itself.

I read over the last scene I had written and discovered that it was wretched. It lacked a lot of the enthusiasm and fervor of the rest of the manuscript. So I scrapped it. I only ended up deleting three or four pages of work, but it turned out that that’s exactly what I needed to do. The story was still in a bit of a funk, even after deleting those pages, but the act of deleting got me caught up in the story again. The next big event in the story’s plot was looming in the seemingly distant future, but when I got stuck, I decided to make that big event happen sooner.

And it worked! I discovered that I was dragging out the story too much, and it was causing me to become bored with it. And if I’M bored with it, imagine how my readers would feel! All I had to do was pick up the pace a little bit, and now I’m on a roll again.

Are there still problems with the earlier sections of my manuscript? Sure!

Am I worried about it? Not one bit! I’ll worry about that when I’m done with the first draft.

My point is this . . . Don’t get caught up with what you’ve already written until you get your first draft out of the way. Resist the urge to go back to earlier chapters and edit. Even if there are large changes that need to be made, simply make a note of it in a separate document and get on with your story. Tackle that first draft with every ounce of energy you’ve got! Your first draft doesn’t have to be good; it just has to BE!!! No one is going to read your first draft but you!

So if you’re stuck, get over it! Pick up the pace, kill one of your characters, cause something drastic to happen, ANYTHING to keep you writing! If it turns out horrible, it doesn’t matter! You can fix it later. Just get that first draft finished no matter the cost! You’ll thank yourself later!