Taming Inspiration

- by ria, on Wednesday, 8th December 2010, 6:36pm

I was reading an article about creating articles recently, where the writer said he can only write when he’s inspired. He gets an idea and if he doesn’t go with it straight away it fizzles and he stops working on it. He said he’s so driven by this wave of inspiration that if he stops in the middle, he can’t continue when he gets back to it because the inspiration is gone.

I completely understand where he is coming from, but I don’t agree with him. I used to be like him, waiting for inspiration and once it hit, sitting down for a 7 /8 / 12 hour stretch to try to get the whole story (or drawing, it used happen a lot with drawings) done before I had to stop working on it for the night. Usually if I didn’t get the piece finished by then, it never got finished. I get the impression a lot of young writers work this way.

The bad news: it doesn’t work. If you want to write a novel, you have to be able to take the inspiration and tame it so that you can use it whenever you need it. You must be able to draw that creative / excited energy out for the entire length of writing the novel, which could be a year or more. Any published author will tell you that writing a novel takes persistence and a strict schedule more than inspiration. That flash of brilliance is just enough to get you started, it’s up to you to take up the idea and carry it through to completion.

‘But how do I do that?’ you ask. Self-discipline, a good writing schedule and deep understanding of your story and characters helps. Really, you are the only one who can answer the question. I guess you need to ask yourself how much your story means to you, how strong is your desire to finish it. For me, I want to be a writer. I’ve wanted it for a long, long time. That need to be published is what keeps me going; you have to figure out what drives you, and use that to push yourself along when the inspiration wears off.

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category: thoughts, writing

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Novel DNA

- by ria, on Wednesday, 4th August 2010, 6:39pm

It seems the world does not want this post getting out, but I promised it last week, and I’m not going to stall any longer. I have a cold and my brain isn’t working quite as well as it should, but I’m not going to let that stop me. Still, I may come back and edit this post some time when I’m feeling a little more myself. Anyway, on with the post.

This information has been cut from two posts already. I kept thinking it would fit with other topics, but it is so important it needs its own post. It fits in with the kind of post-theme I’ve got going on at the moment of outlines and ideas and inspiration.

Before you start a novel, (or mid-way through, or at the end (not advisable – if you do it at the end you will have lots of rewrites)) you need to figure out what drives your plot.  I gathered this information from a lot of agent (as in literary agent) blogs I read, where they try to give us baby writers advice about what makes a story.

What forms the soul of a novel?

To answer that, you need to ask a bunch of questions:

-what is your main character’s goal
-what prevents him reaching it, i.e. conflict
-how does he choose to overcome that conflict
-what are the stakes of his actions, both personal and public (why should he bother trying to achieve his goal)
-what consequences arise from the choices he makes

That’s it. Answer those questions and you have a fully formed novel-soul. The answers to these questions are your novel’s DNA. They are the most essential things to a good story.

Goals

Your character’s goal is what propels him forward. Things like staying alive, saving his village, rescuing the princess. It is the one thing he works towards for the whole novel. It is the force pulling him onwards through the story.

Conflict

Conflict is anything that gets in the way of your character’s goal. It could be something external, the antagonist who wants the opposite of what he does, the demon threatening his village, the dragon guarding the princess. Conflict can also be internal: maybe he doesn’t see himself worthy to achieve his goals.  He doesn’t see himself as a hero and he struggles against his own thoughts and emotions, which try to turn him away from his goals. Add conflict in where ever you can. It makes things interesting. But bear in mind that goal vs. conflict is the most boring thing in the world if there are no consequences involved (I’ll get to that in a bit).

Stakes

If the goal is what moves the story forward, the stakes are what powers that movement. (That was a bad example – shush, my brain isn’t working.) The stakes are what motivates your character to go out and achieve his goals. It’s all fine and dandy to make your MC (main character) go out and slay the dragon, but he’d better have a powerful reason for doing so. No rational person faces a dragon just because.

If he doesn’t kill it, the dragon will eat his mother / burn down his village / kill him. To make things really interesting, there have to be stakes that matter only to your character, as well. He’s lost faith in himself as a warrior. If he doesn’t kill this dragon to prove to himself that he is still brave and strong, he will never be able to look anyone in the eye again. That’s very simplistic, but I hope you get the idea.

Choices

You character must decide how to overcome the conflict that prevents him reaching his goals. He must be proactive about this. There is nothing worse than when someone else comes in and forces him down one path or the other. He must be responsible for whatever happens because of his actions. This makes things dramatic, especially if his choices are hard dilemmas. He must choose the better of two bad options. And things must happen in the world because of the choices he makes.

Consequences

All decisions have consequences. There’s nothing worse than reading a story where nothing changes. Your character defeats a dragon, the consequences are many injuries, a free princess and a new sense of self for your hero. He had learned something about himself. Half way though the story, he didn’t think he could do it. He doubted himself so badly that he let the dragon destroy his village. His mother got eaten. But now all that doesn’t seem so bad, because he has made sure it can never happen again.

I personally love heartbreaking consequences. Someone dies, someone has a revelation about their actions, the world changes irrevocably. Heartbreaking doesn’t mean it has to be bad. It could be wonderful. I find sappy romance movies where the lovers finally admit their love for each other heartbreaking.

So that’s it. The five things that lie at the heart of every novel. The things you absolutely must pin down before you start working on your plot. The things that will keep you writing and keep your story moving forward.

See you next week.

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category: pre-production, writing

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Writing is a Series of Questions

- by ria, on Thursday, 22nd July 2010, 5:33pm

Writing is not so much a series of questions, as it is the answers to those questions. I find all my difficulties can by written away if I just ask the right question and find the answer to it. Questions solve all sorts of nasty problems like:
What’s happening now?
What needs to happen next?
Why is my character doing this?

If I get stuck, I’ll open notepad, stick a question at the top and spend a while figuring out an answer to it. I find it helps me think. I can stare out the window puzzling over my problem all day, but I find I get things done much faster if I jot my thoughts down.

Questions even help with the niggly things like, ‘is it farther or further?’ Or more to the point, ‘if I replace farther with “more far” will the sentence still make sense?’

I’m always asking myself questions like that, and I find the answers are what is getting my novel written.

Just a quick post this week. I’m busy with work (paying work, not novel work). I should have something longer next week. And sorry, I’m posting this late (Wednesday is posting day). Hopefully work things with be a bit calmer next week.

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category: writing

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The Outline

- by ria, on Wednesday, 14th July 2010, 2:12pm
Disclaimer

I should mention that this blog is for me as much as it is for anyone else. When I start on my second novel, I want to have all this info in one place where I can refer to it with little hassle. So, this post is targeted at me (and people who write in a fashion similar to the way I do).

The Outline

For me, every story has to start with an outline. Be that one paragraph or 16 pages, it doesn’t matter. I won’t get anywhere without one. Well, I might get the first scene done, but once I get past that I’ll have no idea where to go next.

Every novel starts with an idea. It might be a character, a location, a particular scene, a line of dialogue. Or, if you are lucky, it might be a whole plot, complete with characters and settings. I doubt that, but you never know. So, you have your idea, your small nugget of creative gold, but you need to do something with it, make something out of it. That’s where your outline comes in.

The outline is where you take that small idea and work on it until it becomes something worthy of a novel. Let’s say your idea was a location: an old shack on the side of a lake, a hermit’s workshop, an eccentric place filled with old bits of metal, wood, dried food, all sorts of survivalist gear. Before you even start work on your outline you might want to figure out who lives here and why. Then you come up with some event that will launch the plot.

Creating your Outline

Now you start writing.
“Scene 1: a strange something washes up on shore.”
Go into some detail, not too much – just enough to get your creative juices going.  You are not writing the actual novel here, you are just giving yourself hints, or signposts for when you get lost during draft 1.

Carry on with the outline, going from scene 1 to scene n. Don’t worry about chapters or novel structure or anything like that. (Not sure how good this advice is – I don’t have enough experience to test it. When I was outlining my current novel, I did include chapters, but I reorganised everything in draft 2. It went from 16 chapters to 36.) If you do want to include chapters, leave them as broad as possible. Have them as a sort of high-level outline.

Stop. Think about your Idea

Outline done, you get to start writing, right? No. Stop. Once your outline is done, take a few days and think about your story. Think about characters and settings. Can you improve the plot? Can you see weak areas where plot holes may develop? This part is important. If you can catch the plot holes now, you can save yourself work later on. Do bear in mind that this outline isn’t the be-all and end-all of your novel. It’s a helpful map for the first draft. The more precise it is, the better off you will be.

I want to note here, that working over the idea in your head after you have done your outline is especially important if you went with the first idea that came to you. It might have seemed fantastic at the moment of inspiration, but there are most definitely ways to improve it. I studied graphic design, and one of my lecturers constantly repeated his maxim: throw out the first few sketches you work on. It’s the same here. The first idea you come up with is just your brain getting warmed up. You can come up with something way better.

Having said that, you do have the next draft to fix problems / plot holes that crop up. Your outline doesn’t have to be perfect. 50% of your novel will probably change as you go along anyway. And for those of you who think you know everything about your world and characters and plot, an outline is still handy for keeping things straight in your mind. 100,000 words from now you might not remember what went through your head day one.

Outline not only for Plot

In the outline, be sure to expand on themes and emotions. Note where you want the tense scenes to go. Focus on your character’s reaction to events (this point is still big in my mind after the last post). Figure out how characters interact with each other. I’m sure I’m missing a bunch of important stuff, it’s been ages since I did an outline.

For those of you curious, the outline to my current novel was 16 pages. I had about a paragraph for each scene and there were something like 80 scenes in the whole thing. I didn’t stop to think about my idea after I’d written the outline, I just blundered ahead into draft 1. Look where that got me. I had to rewrite 80% of draft 1. I’ll not be doing that again. In contrast to that, the novella I wrote before that (30,000 words), had a one paragraph outline. So it’s variable.

Anyway, getting back to the point: think about your idea after you create your outline. Is there enough tension? Is your idea original and interesting? Do you like your characters? Will you still like them 100,000 words from now? That is very important. I’ve read dozens of blog and forum posts where writers have grown to hate their characters and they stop working on their book because of that. Feel free to make as many changes to your outline as you want. The goal here is to have the best idea you can come up with.
(There will be a post about coming up with ideas in a few weeks. (I do like to give myself a challenge, don’t I.))

Disclaimer 2

I use ‘he’ when referring to your character because my main character is male. My next novel has a female protagonist (two of them, actually) and then, when I refer to your character in this blog, it will be ‘she.’

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category: pre-production, writing

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