creative writing

The Power of Committing 15 Minutes a Day

Chuck Caruso Writing Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

Okay, if you read my earlier post about writing a novel this summer and decided you want to play along, you’ve probably started wondering how it’s possible that you can actually write a whole novel this summer. You want to believe, but somehow it still seems impossible that you could actually have completed a first draft of your magnum opus before Labor Day rolls around.

Well, I’m here to tell you that you can do it!

I’m not going to lie to you — this little summer project of ours will be a lot of work but maybe not in the ways you’re expecting. Getting this done mostly consists of deciding to do it and making a clear plan that will help you achieve your goal.

Let’s start with deciding to do it, making the commitment to write a novel. Right now, take out a note card or a piece of paper and write on it, “I promise to write for least 15 minutes a day, every day from now until my novel is finished.”

Yes, I really want you to physically write this down. Do it now. 

This is just one of many practices of “magical thinking” that I encourage you to employ. I’ll share a few more of these later on, but for now just post that written commitment on your fridge or your bathroom mirror. You want to see it every day!

Making a fifteen-minute a day commitment works. This works for writing but it also works for other things. In fact, this is how I learned to play the guitar. Granted, I’m not Richard Thompson or anything (insert the name of your own guitar god here). However, I can play well enough for campfires, house parties and the occasional wedding or funeral, which is pretty much what I wanted to accomplish.

The trick of course is that once you warm to your task, on a lot of days you won’t actually stop after fifteen minutes. When you’re on a roll, you won’t be able to stop. But to get there, you have to get into the writing habit. Habits both good and bad come from doing something every day. With even a very small time commitment, you can turn writing (or whatever) into a daily habit. It just becomes something that you do. So make that commitment now.

Once you’ve made your commitment to writing (in writing) and developed at plan of where and how to do your writing. Yes, doing your writing at the same time or times every day helps. I recommend for you to choose a time slot that allows for routine. Maybe you write during lunch break from work. Maybe you write after dinner and before you turn on the TV. Maybe you set the alarm for a half-hour earlier and write first thing in the morning while the first pot of coffee brews. Whatever time you pick, always have your tools at the ready and make sure that time remains sacred. Don’t let yourself get distracted with reading the morning news or browsing on Facebook or playing some game on your phone. I’ll admit that Wordfeud is my own addictive distraction, so I have to set my phone on silent and put it in the other room when I want to write. Whatever your own favorite distraction might be, you need to guard against it during your dedicated writing time. So, part of your commitment involves setting those other things aside while you concentrate on your writing.

Committed? Excellent. You’ve taken the first major step toward success.

Why Is TV So Bad for Writers?

Chuck Caruso Cultural Criticism, Film & Television, Writing Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

Like many other writers in the public eye, Stephen King has said in a bunch of interviews that he thinks watching television is one of the worst things a writer can spend his or her time doing. As far as I’ve seen he hasn’t spent a lot of time elaborating on why he feels this to be the case, but he makes the claim often. Maybe King doesn’t say more because it’s self-evident. He certainly seems to think so. Also, I admire the courage of a writer from the baby boomer generation for so vocally rejecting one of the defining appliances of his youth. For me, though, the best thing about King’s pronouncement is that I’ve started re-examining my own TV habits.

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I don’t think of myself as having a television problem, but I probably could, and probably should, cut back. I often watch for a couple hours in the evening. Yes, it’s mostly a waste of time. Not entirely because I sometimes write about television. Though I mostly enjoy watching sit-coms and I don’t know that I’ve ever written about those. The shows I tend to write about are ones that I watch more for analysis than for simple entertainment. Not that I don’t enjoy watching things like True Detective or The Killing. I do, and I recognize that Netflix and other streaming services are ushering in a new golden age of television where shows can become more novelistic as their stories arc over full seasons and beyond. But I’ve also watched a fair number of things that I didn’t enjoy for writing projects. The Following comes to mind. The Poe connection notwithstanding, I know wouldn’t have made it more than a few episodes into that one if I hadn’t accepted an assignment to write about it.

But the question still remains, why exactly is television so terrible for writers?

At the risk of rehashing a million arguments made in the 60’s and 70’s, I think I’ve got a few cogent arguments that will have aspiring writers turning off the tube. If you need more convincing, you can track down Jerry Mander’s 1978 classic Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. For my part, I’m not worried about how TV affects society as a whole or the mass of watchers as individuals. I’m just thinking about how it impacts those of us who write.

First, TV sucks down time we could better spend on other activities. Every hour you spend staring into colorful, dancing pixels is at least an hour you don’t spend writing. Of course you can’t write every hour of the day. Nobody does that and nobody expects you to. But if you haven’t gotten your writing in for the day for whatever reason, then what the hell are you doing sitting in front of the TV before bed? The other thing about time, which is always at a premium, is that when you’re not actively writing you need to be reading. One of the neglected secrets to success as a writer is spending as much time as possible reading the work of other writers. You’re learning more about your craft even when you’re just relaxing with a book. You’re hearing new ways to describe things. You’re observing different ways to tell a story. And most importantly, you’re exercising the verbal aptitude of your brain.

In fact, this idea of verbal aptitude brings us to the second major problem with television for writers. As its name implies, TV is a visual medium. It’s audial too, but the primary way it works is by riveting the attention of our eyes. It shows us moving pictures. US television broadcasts at a rate of 24 frames per second. If, like they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, then that’s 24,000 words per second. That’s a full-length novel’s worth of description every three to four seconds. Processing all that information should be exhausting, but it’s not. Instead it teaches our brains to become lazy, at least in terms of our verbalization of things. The part of us that works to put into words everything we see and experience just can’t keep up with 24,000 words a second. No way, no how. So instead we shut down that part of ourselves. We stop exercising our verbal aptitude so that we can just let the pretty pictures wash over us. That means, TV shuts down the inner writer dwelling in each of us. That thought alone should terrifying enough to make you keep your television in a locked cabinet.

Third, TV is an anti-literacy machine. Okay, that sounds hyperbolic, but you don’t have to believe me. Test it out on yourself. Give up television for just one week and devote those hours to reading instead. You don’t have to read anything in particular, but maybe pick two or three novels of those novels you’ve been meaning to read but haven’t gotten around to. The typical American watches about five hours of TV a day. That’s 35 hours of reading during your one week experiment. So, if you honestly convert your television hours straight over to reading hours, you’ll probably read a few books over the course of the next week. You’ll certainly get through one or two even if you’re a slow reader. But this experiment isn’t even about the missing time you’ll rediscover. It’s about the shift in your thinking. Your brain will feel different after a week of reading a few books instead of watching TV. Your verbal aptitude will be heightened. When you walk around in the world, you’ll find yourself internally describing things in words. You’ll find yourself making different observations, connecting ideas in different ways, being more literate. You’ll also be inspired to buy a couple more books to replenish the ones you finished reading last week, and that promotes literate culture even beyond the limits of your own skull. As will the increased writing you do.

And that’s why television is so deadly for writers. It wastes your time. It reduces your verbal aptitude. And it alienates you from your own literacy. Thanks to public schools, most Americans can read. So we’re not actually illiterate, but when we don’t read or have no interest in reading, we become aliterate. When that happens, book culture stagnates and dies. Some people might think the endangered state of book culture doesn’t affect them. It does. Deeply. But that’s an argument for another time.

If you’re a writer or want to be one, then you already know what sort of world you want. One with books, and more of them.

So, I think I’ll give it a try. Starting now, I’m committing to one full week of reading instead of watching TV.

If you decide to join me and do this too, stop back by and let me know how it goes.

How to Jump Start Your Writing

Chuck Caruso Writing Tags: , , , Leave a comment

I recently taught a two-hour session on how to jump start your writing.  In preparing for this, I put together a one-page handout of all the best writing advice I know in a collection of bullet points under the acronym WRITE.  (Yeah, I know it’s corny.)

In any case, I thought  others might find this list helpful, so here it is.

If you use it, great!  We need better writing in the world.  If you share it, just give me credit.  Thanks!

How to Get It Done: WRITE

By Chuck Caruso

“W” is for Writing

  • “Vomit in the morning and clean up at noon.” –Ray Bradbury
  • Find the tools and the location that work best for you so you can focus on being productive.  Consider longhand versus typing and home versus writing in cafes — your tone and style will change with each of these.
  • Start with action and always use action to reveal character.
  • Show; don’t tell!  If you have to give background information, at least hide your exposition in action scenes.

“R” is for Reading and Research

  • Read a lot!  You need to see how other people do it in order to get the voices going inside your own head and practice verbalizing.
  • Read broadly but make sure at least some of your reading is in the genre and sub-genre you want to write.
  • Pick apart books you like to see how they work.  Then steal their plotting structures, character development tricks, and pacing devices.  No, don’t plagiarize, but borrow the tools that work.
  • Readers keep turning pages for three reasons:
  1. Human interest.  Because they like the characters.
  2. Suspense.  Because they want to find out what happens next.
  3. Puzzles.  Because they want to know the solution.
  • Most successful novels combine only two of the above elements, using on as primary and another as secondary.  Don’t mess with the mix during your novel or your story will seem to sag in the middle and the reader will lose interest.

“I” is for Ideas

  • Develop your ideas on paper.  Thinking about your ideas is valuable, but at the end of the day it doesn’t count.  Get a notebook and start jotting things down.
  • Outline!  Make a list of chapters and write down the two or three things that need to happen in each chapter to advance your plot.
  • Remember that you need to know how the story ends before you start writing it.  Otherwise you can’t plant clues or build up to the finish.

“T” is for Tenacity

  • To make yourself write, commit to writing for at least 15 minutes every day.  Of course you’ll need to do more in the long run, but this will help you build the habit.
  • Don’t believe in writer’s block.
  • Once you start, don’t circle back and revise until you have a full draft.  Most unfinished novels die at about page 50.  An outline and good writing habits will help you push past this common breaking point.
  • You can’t finish your novel if you’re not getting your butt into the chair and doing it.
  • Don’t give up!

“E” is for Editing

  • Once you finish your first draft, let it sit for a while.  In the meantime, start outlining and doing character sketches for your next novel.
  • After a few weeks or a month, go back and clean up your draft.  When you’ve gotten rid of the typos and the “embarrassing” missteps, have a trusted friend or two read it for you and give you feedback.
  • Listen to your readers and don’t defend yourself.  If you have to explain what you meant to do, then you didn’t do it well enough.  Take note of what you need to change to make things clearer for the reader when you’re not there to explain it.