how to write

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.

To Be, You Have to Do

Chuck Caruso Writing Tags: , , Leave a comment

There’s a well-worn story about a famous writer who was asked to teach a creative writing class. On the first day, she asked her students, “Who in here wants to be a writer?”

Not surprisingly, every hand in the room went up.

After a moment’s pause, the author asked her class, “So, who in here wants to write?”

The students glanced around at each other with nervous smiles, perhaps feeling like they had already answered this question or wondering about the fading mental capabilities of this famous author, who was aging after all.

Finally, one brave soul ventured to say, “Didn’t you just ask us that?”

But then the famous writer smiled, because here was her first lesson to the class.

She said, “No, there is a world of difference between wanting to BE something and wanting to DO something. You can’t BE unless you want to DO.”

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Certainly, this same principle applies to most professions, but it’s an especially important lesson to learn about romantic figures like authors and musicians and movie stars. You can’t BE the thing unless you DO the thing.

That means getting out of your own way and letting the words fill page after page. And doing it as much as possible. Look at Charles Dickens in the above photo. He wrote so much he didn’t even put down his pen for this photo shoot. While the photographer futzed around with all his new fangled equipment, Dickens kept working!

One of my writing heroes, Ray Bradbury summed up his own method with the phrase, “Vomit in the morning, and clean up at noon.” By that he meant that you can’t allow your internal editor to stop you from writing. When you’re writing a new draft, you need to compose at full tilt.  Even if you think the sentences are choppy of the wordings aren’t quite right, just go as fast as you can and get it all written down. The “cleaning up at noon” part is when you come back and do editing. You can fix any of those problems later when you come back to the piece. Initially, your goal is just to get it down on paper, or in some word processing document.

Personally, I favor Scrivener for longer projects. The learning curve can feel steep, but they offer a free 30-day trial. Developed by and for writers (as opposed to most word processing software), Scrivener remains very affordable at just forty-five bucks with free upgrades, and it does all the things I want a program to do. Mostly, it gets out of my way.

Of course, by now some of you are thinking this is all well and good but worrying about so-called “writer’s block” and wondering what you’re supposed to do about that.

Well, it turns out that most successful writers don’t believe in writer’s block; they can’t afford to. Besides, they’re too busy writing. Craig Johnson, author of the Walt Longmire mysteries set in rural Wyoming (the books upon which the TV series is based), lives on a working cattle ranch. He’s up before dawn doing the ranch work all morning and into the afternoon. When his physical labor wraps up in the afternoon, he turns his attention to his writing and he never has writer’s block because he looks at writing like the rest of his work. He says, “Writing is work.  It’s just like digging a ditch. Have you ever heard of someone having digger’s block?  You know, I really want to dig today but I’m just not feeling the ditch.” We laugh because it’s ridiculous. You don’t have to be in the right mood to dig a ditch. You just need a shovel.

Which brings us to tools.  Make sure you can use your tools effectively and that you have everything you need, including a place to sit down and do your work uninterrupted.  I don’t currently have a home office that’s dedicated to my writing — the place is too small for that, so I sit at the kitchen table or work in my recliner. But, that said, I’ve also spent a lot of my writing career working in cafes. If you find the right place, you can sit there all day for the price of a cup of coffee and maybe a cookie. I’m not your nutritionist, I’m your writing coach, so you need to know what is healthiest for you, but I personally find an indulgence can at least initially prove enough of a reward to get you to sit down and I write.

The point is that you need to find what works for you, but I find that if you visit the same library or coffee shop day after day, the people who work there will come to expect you and that’s helpful because it’s an external commitment. The buddy system works well too. Pick a writing partner and keep after each other to maintain a good work ethic. We’ll do as much support as we can in this class, but we also want to get habits in place that will last beyond the end of the quarter, so think long-term.

You’ll also want to think about whether you like to work in longhand in a spiral notebook or on legal pads and if you like to use a pencil or a cheap ballpoint or a fancy fountain pen. Or maybe you’ll find that you want to work on a laptop and just pour through the words as quickly as possible. Personally, I go back and forth. If I need to write a fast draft of something, I’ll use my computer because I can type much faster than I can write by hand. I can also type comfortably for much longer because after an hour or two of writing in longhand I start to get writer’s cramp (and that’s a real thing, unlike “writer’s block”). Depending on the piece, I may choose to write by hand to deliberately slow myself down. A lot of my academic writing comes out in longhand at first. That’s because I need to really think through every word and every sentence. Sure, it’s a slower, more introspective process, but that’s the point. I find going slower makes my voice more sophisticated and my vocabulary more elevated.

When my goal is to sound smart, I write in longhand. I also like the idea of having a built-in editing process when I transfer longhand manuscripts into the computer.  But for magazine articles, conference talks, blog posts like this one, and most of my genre fiction, I tend to write drafts on a laptop. When I type, my voice comes out more rapid-fire, punchier, more off the cuff. That tone creates a more readable, more commercial style of writing. If you’re setting out to write a best seller, I’d say you probably want to type. That said, James Patterson writes by hand on legal tablets.

You’ll have to find what works best for you and stick with it.  Experiment with different tools and different places to see what makes you the most productive. But whether you’re using a MacBook Pro or a Bic ballpoint and a spiral notebook, make the commitment to start your writing habit today. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

How to Write a Novel this Summer

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

First Rule: Write Every Day

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You will write! You will write every day from now until your novel is done with no exceptions. No waiting until you feel in the mood. No day dreaming. No wishing you knew what to write about. None of that.

We don’t have time for excuses. We’re too busy writing!!

Now, we’re not actually going to start in on drafting the novel itself for two weeks. We need to spend some time outlining, planning scenes, and making some central decisions about point of view, style, target audience, etc. But while we’re doing all that preparatory work, we also need to be working out and getting ourselves into fighting shape so that we’re ready to do the hard work of writing a novel.

Let’s talk for a minute about why this commitment to writing every single day is so essential.

When iconic science fiction author Ray Bradbury decided he wanted to make his career as a writer, he committed to producing a new short story each week by writing every day. He reasoned that not all of his stories would be works of genius but that if he continued to produce 52 new stories a year, he would steadily improve his craft and increase his chances of writing and publishing great work. His method worked!

Probably the greatest and most prolific commercial writer of our era, Stephen King also writes every day. Still! He’s so successful that you’d think he could take a day off here and there, but he doesn’t. He writes on weekends. He writes on family vacations. He writes on holidays. He even writes on his birthday. Why? Because he’s a writer, and writers write. He also knows that writing is like going to the gym. Once you start giving yourself permission to take days off, it’s just a matter of time before you’re never going to the gym while finding plenty of time to eat cookies from a box while you watch daytime TV.

So, our first order of business commitment to writing every day.

To get your daily writing habit firmly into place, I’m going to ask you to commit to writing at least 1000 words a day, every day. I guarantee that once you’re used to it, this level of output isn’t really that much. In fact, you’ll get to a place where you can do this much daily writing in a just an hour or two,

That said, if you haven’t been writing much (or at all), if you’re starting from scratch, you might want to start by making yourself write just 500 words a day at first. Then you can steadily build up. However, by the end of the first two weeks, you need to be writing at least 1000 words a day. If you have the time and energy, you can even stretch beyond this minimum to produce 1500-2000 words a day, but don’t try to do this right away. Most writers exhaust themselves if they write much more than 2000-3000 words a day, and you want to set a pace you can maintain. No matter how much you write in any single day, writing a novel is a marathon and not a sprint.

First off, the thing to do is make sure you’re actually writing and working pretty much as fast as you can during your designated writing time each day. To get yourself going while you’re re-reading and outlining your “model novel,” I’d recommending using “writing prompts” if you tend to waste time wondering what to write about. There are plenty of blogs and websites that offer dozens (or hundreds) of writing prompts.

Here are a few writing prompt sites that I’ve found particularly useful:

Writer’s Digest: Creative Writing Prompts (Links to an external site.)

ThinkWritten: 365 Creative Writing Prompts (Links to an external site.)

The Writer: Writing Prompts (Links to an external site.)

As far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t really matter what you choose to write about while you’re getting your writing muscles into shape. If some of these prompts feel too flat-footed, get creative with them. Even a simple reversal can help get your creativity flowing. If the prompt tells you to write about how you feel when experiencing unrequited love and you don’t feel inspired by that prompt, then write about how you feel when somebody loves you and you don’t return their unwanted affections.

Pro Tip: Either way this prompt works as a good one because it naturally forces you to write about characters and conflict. You’re going to find that those two elements are absolutely indispensable when writing publishable, commercial fiction: character and conflict. In fact, I make sure to include them in the very first sentence of any piece I write.

But developing good writing habits and increasing your output is our first order of business.

However you choose your topic, just make sure you’re writing every single day!! No days off. And don’t fall into the trap of thinking you can skip Saturday and just write 2000 words on Sunday. It’s not the same thing. Writing needs to be a constant in your life.

Besides, if you skip Saturday and “make up” the lost word count on Sunday, what’s to keep you from thinking you can skip the whole weekend and write 3000 words on Monday? Next thing you know, you’re neglecting your work all week and trying to churn out 7000 words every Friday when you don’t have discipline and stamina to write even 1000 words.

So, if you’re going to do this thing — and you’ve all signed up for this class because you want to quit thinking about someday and finally write that novel already — you need to commit to writing every day.

Repeat after me: “I will write every day!”

Once you’ve made that promise to me, to your peers (it’s good to have a writing buddy or two who will hold you directly accountable), and most importantly made that promise to yourself, you’re ready to start thinking about the organizational strategies you need to employ to make sure you have a full draft by the end of summer. More about those soon.

In the meantime, start writing every day.

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.

On Writing the Bradbury Way

Chuck Caruso Writing Tags: , , Leave a comment

While attending school in Los Angeles some years ago, I was blessed with the amazing opportunity to spend an entire afternoon with one of my writer heroes, Ray Bradbury, author of The Illustrated Man, The Martian Chronicles, Dandelion Wine, and Fahrenheit 451.  If you don’t know Bradbury’s work, you’re really missing out.  I would suggest that immediately upon reading this post you rush out and buy at least two of the books I named – you won’t be sorry.  You may also want to pick up a copy of his book Zen and the Art of Writing, which contains some of the writing advice I’ll be discussing here (and much more).  Along with Stephen King’s On Writing, Bradbury’s book is one of the best books about writing that I know.  Both of these prolific authors have a knack for stoking the fires of inspiration when your passion for the work has been reduced to smoldering embers.  So if you need a serious kick in the pants to get you back into your home office (or wherever you write), you need look no further than these two.  In the meantime, I’ll do what I can here to get you past that slow patch, or what sometimes gets referred to as the dreaded “writer’s block.”

After showing me and my friend Zac around his office, pointing out memorabilia and knick-knacks from all aspects of his amazing writing career, Bradbury sat us down in his writing space and waved his hands significantly over the IBM Selectric II typewriter that had served as his workhorse through many books and countless short stories.  He told us he’d never used a computer and didn’t imagine he ever would.  His typewriter did the job for him because he knew the one essential secret to being a successful writer.  We scooted forward to the edge of our chairs, eager to hear the secret.  Here’s what he told us:  “Vomit in the morning and clean up at noon.”

There’s a bit more to it than that, obviously, but basically this means that when you sit down to write you need to get out of your own way and let the writing flow out of you as quickly and as naturally as it can.  Don’t worry if it’s not perfect.  Hell, don’t even worry if it’s coherent.  Yeah, it might suck.  It might be embarrassing stuff you don’t want your Aunt Ethel to read.  It might not be something you can ever sell to a publisher.  That doesn’t matter.  You can’t worry about any of those things when you’re in the creative mode.  Just write.  Vomit the words out on to the page (or the screen).  Later you can go back and clean it up, re-crafting into whatever your conscious mind thinks it ought to be.  But when you’re in the mode of drafting something for the first time, you need to get out of your own way and let the magic happen.

Stephen J. Cannell, another hugely successful author best known for his creation of The Rockford Files and many other TV detective series, puts it this way, “Writer’s block comes from the desire to be perfect.”  It’s another angle at the same central principle.  Creativity happens best when you just let it happen.  At its best, writing is more play than work.

When Bradbury started his career and hit upon his vomit method, his goal was to write a short story a week.  He figured that if he wrote 52 stories a year, at least a few of them would have to be good.  No kidding.  He turned out to be Ray Bradbury, one of the best and most respected science fiction writers of the twentieth-century.  But when he started, he was just a kid with thick glasses, unruly hair, and a big dream.  Putting himself in the chair and making himself vomit words on the page over and over again is what made his dreams come true.

This is the method.  Bradbury gave it to me and Zac, and we’ve followed it as our holy gospel ever since.  Now I’m passing it on to you.

Follow this advice and you’ll never go wrong.  Vomit in the morning and clean up at noon.

As a footnote to this story, I’d like to add that a few years later, shortly after my first professional sale to a national magazine, I got a postcard in the mail from Ray.  It said simply, “Congratulations!  You’re on your way.”  God bless you, Mr. Bradbury.