Write the crap.

It is a sobering fact that a successful author with a few novels to their name will have probably written several million words of original fiction by then. This is an uncomfortable fact that new writers have to both ignore and respect. Including me.

When you do get the writing bug and want to create The Next Great Novel, many new writers launch into it with a vague idea and just spew out a cascade words of undirected fiction. This is how NaNoWriMo is intended to work and some people create best like that, but there is a much older technique, too. And that is to write less than novel-length stories. Lots of them. Your first half-dozen might tap out at a few hundred words, but with even this little practice you will get better at creating bigger ideas. Before long two thousand words feels like not enough. Given enough time, ten thousand words will sometimes not be enough room.

However, it is still a god-awful big leap to go from a ten thousand word story into a sixty thousand word novel.

And I still cannot resist editing as I write, which makes my own raw output considerably slower than it could be.

So what do I do?

Well, I started paying attention to some of the more sober advice about writing. They usually all descend into: write. Write lots. And then write some more. No, still more. When you reach at least a million words of finished work, throw it all away and keep going. This is the writer’s version of an old programming mantra: “Be prepared to throw the first one away.”

Another way of putting it is that anyone has to practice a new task before they get better at it. Our brains don’t come with much pre-wiring. Unlike most mammals which can figure out how to walk in a few days, we need about a year. Any task needs practice. Although I did woodwork in high school, I’m still pretty crap at it. I still usually fail to cut wood square and easily strip screw heads. But I know it’s just a matter of practice. Likewise, I’ve picked up a few random phrases in Korean, but if I want to speak the language, I have to learn it properly.

Writing is the same. “Waiting for the muse” is a furphy.

Similarly trying to produce Great Writing means you first have to produce Good Writing. And that means you have to first produce Okay Writing. And that means you have to first produce Crap Writing.

So I’m trying to just write potential scenes for one or more of my Works-in-Progress. It doesn’t matter how well they all meet up. There will be conflicting storylines. That’s okay. Once I have a body that tells a more-or-less complete story, I can clean it all up into a coherent work. But there needs to be the writing to edit first.

After all, you can’t edit an empty page.

 

The ups and downs of writing.

There is a phrase: “juggling precious eggs in variable gravity”. It has generally been ascribed to a character in a story co-written by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, but Googling has so far failed to confirm this. Nevertheless, it is a useful phrase. It reminds me of writing.

There is so much to keep active when writing fiction, especially a longer piece, such a novel. Amongst the various eggs to be juggled are where the story is going, how the characters are developing and describing where they are. If you’re a writer, this should not be news. It’s not easy, either.

The internal editor will not be silenced

I am thinking that that is actually a good thing. For me.

When an aspiring writing makes friends with other writers, there is going to be a comparison of writing styles. It is inevitable. It will happen sooner or later, so don’t be surprised when it does. I mean, why have you joined a writing group? Invariably the reason given is to learn from other writers.

And not just writing style, but also writing practices. By that I mean what happens between discovering an idea to begin a story and deciding that it’s finished. Mostly. Well, for this week at least.