Public Shaming, Productivity and the Importance of Having a Plan
It’s January and I’m flailing. Having decided to write that novel, I moved straight from my “I am the arrow that springs from the bow,” phase right on into, “oh my God I don’t know how to do this I’m such a failure,” with no intermediate stages. Awesome.
Oh God! I fail at that too? *sob*
Writing, however, is a very private thing. Without a proper plan, one could procrastinate for years at it without anyone really knowing. You know, any hypothetical person. Cough, cough.
But in the last year of blogging I’ve learned something about myself and my motivations. Am I a self-motivated person? Why yes, I am. Thank you for asking. Every day my Self motivates me to lay in bed, watch internet porn and eat bags of cheese shreds. I’ve learned that I need an extrinsic motivation for doing things (thanks public school! You and your little happy elf stamps!). And I’ve found that there is no better motivation than public shame.
The very act of announcing, in public, that I am going to do a thing, is enough to trigger off a shame spiral strong enough to make me actually do the thing I said I was going to do. Sweet! But first I need a proper plan. I know I can’t ‘pants’ my way out of this one. It’ll all end in twenty thousand words worth of bitter fail-tears.
So Audience (Litience? Readience?), I’m asking a favour. Wait! It’s easy. It doesn’t involve your ass, or getting off of it. Just this: Many of you are writers, so what plan do/did you use when finally sitting down to write that novel? And of course, keep theoretically existing out there, somewhere, to shame me into working.
And for now, I’m off to the Library to see what books can tell me about starting that novel.
Two things I’m going to recommend to you. And I wish I could say they’ve made me a successful author, but no–however, they have helped me get moving, and keep moving.
The first is Jim Butcher’s Writing School. Despite the name, it’s free. It’s basically the entirety of Jim Butcher’s advice on writing, which he posted online at http://jimbutcher.livejournal.com/. Bad news: It’s in reverse order. Good news: If you like, I can email you a file in which I painstakingly placed each lesson/piece of advice on writing commercial fiction into one document. It covers things like getting started, plotting, etc.
The second is Scrivener. Now available for Windows as well as the original Mac program. It only costs about $40 US, and while I haven’t finished my book, I’ve done more since starting to use Scrivener than I had done in ten years before that. It really is that helpful: it allows you to do nearly 100% of the work of plotting, note-taking, character sketching, etc. in one file. I love it. There is a free, fully-functioning demo available. Find it at http://literatureandlatte.com/
Other than that… best of luck. I, for one, am out here, and willing to read anything you want to show us and give input if requested, silent support if needed.
Thanks! I’ve heard good things about Scrivener, I’m kind of ashamed to admit that I’ve been writing with Word Starter – the free word processor that comes on PCs. It’s not even Word proper. I’ll check out Jim Butcher’s website too. And thanks for the support.
I’ve finished two novels. The hardest part–hard as in jumping into ice cold water– is getting that first chapter down. I can’t do a first draft of a chapter on a computer. That damn blank screen intimidates me. Get a big yellow legal pad and a pen that flows smootly (I like gel pens), get as far from a screen or the human voice as possible and just start writing anything that comes to mind. If nothing comes to mind, write about that.
You’ll eventually get so bored writing about writing about being bored that you’ll start making up stories to keep from going nuts. Don’t be afraid to write crap stories about parakeet plots to take over the Superbowl. You can change it all later. Be playful.
Nobody ever writes a novel. You write a scene or a chapter. You finish it. Then another. Then another. Take things in bite-sized chunks. It’s less intimidating. Hemingway wrote only a few hundred words a day.
Plot? I’ve learned two things about plotting: (a) your protagonist has to want something really badly and (b) fiction is driven by bad, bad decisions that get the protagonist into deep trouble. Hey, Eleanor, want to spend the summer in Hill House? It’s the gateway to Hell. Sure! I’m so damned lonely, I’ll do anything to meet somebody!
Pressure? Find a massive, non-fiction book on the most painfully boring subject you can find. Every day you don’t work on your novel, you must read at least 30 pages. Aloud. Commit to that.
If that isn’t enough pressure, commit to doing your reading in public, say, at a bus station. Get a copy of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness or a massive history of the theology of the Reformation or Ancient Roman septic systems with tons of footnotes (you must read them all) and start today.
Maybe I still have a copy of the Income Tax Act. Wow, that is eye-searingly boring.
That and the legal pads will give me flashbacks to Law School. I think I need to take the chunk approach to scenes, but I need to drop them into some kind of form. Maybe that comes later? Ack! First I need to decide which thing to write. Just pick one and go?
“Many of you are writers, so what plan do/did you use when finally sitting down to write that novel?”
I’ve tried to pants novels, but they end up spiralling into a boring mess with the main characters waiting for the Next Big Thing to happen. Maybe with a little practice I could do it, but for now I need a hand-holding.
When I tackle a novel, I do an outline in Scrivener. Each folder is a chapter, and each text file in the folder is a scene. Scrivener is great, because you can write on the ‘back’ of the folder or scene to tell you what goes on within it. So you make your Chapter One folder (or, because you can tell Scrivener to automate the naming of your chapters, call the folder something more useful to you such as ‘Hero introduction’), make the scenes within it, name them, and then write what they’re about.
Here is where I deviate from the norm. One sentiment I share with people who dislike outlines is that they can strip the creative process from the actual writing part. It’s no fun (for me) to write a scene where I have planned every dialogue nugget, every movement. When I come to detail a scene, I don’t write a script; I write instructions you’d give an improv team. “Larry and Susie go to a restaurant, where Larry discovers Susie is pregnant. Larry storms out”. The scene’s outline will dictate who’s in the scene, where they are, the main conflict, and the result of the conflict — and that’s it! When the outline is finished, I then sit my backside down and write the damn thing, taking the improv notes and giving them to the characters, working out the speech, actions and specifics as I go.
Of course, your characters run the risk of going off the rails of the outline; this is FINE! Let them go. Don’t railroad your characters on a plot they don’t want to be in. Save the outline in a spare location, then make a new one for where they’re going and try it.
But don’t forget to write. Writers often get into planning, researching, and talking about their novels. It makes us feel like we’re making progress with out writing, when in fact we’re not! To be a writer, you gotta write. Yes, you might want a plan. Sure, you need to research if you can feasibly fll the Atlantic Ocean with chocolate. But never let them substitute putting fingers on keyboard (pen?) and taking your muse for a walk!
That’s two votes for Scrivener. And outlining. I’m afeared! I’m just not sure where I want my stories to go. I think the improv type outline is good. I don’t want to pre-write the whole thing. And I’m not afraid to add and rearrange later. My fear is that I’ll just write pages and pages of wandering crap… 0.o
I’m a planner and like other suggestions Scrivener is a great tool. I can plan each scene (generally just a sentence or so) all in one package.
Noted! I keep intending to download the free trial…tomorrow definitely.