writing craft

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.”

abbemar_1327517970_charlesdickens2

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

ibmselectric

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.

Poe’s Advice for Writers

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

Along with Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe did more than any other American to shape the modern short story. If you read other stories or novels from that era (even ones by famous and highly regarded authors), you very quickly start to notice a pervasive lack of narrative focus. That’s because for the most part people were still fumbling around with form, trying to figure out the shape of short fiction. As a consequence, stories and novels from the earlier part of the 19th century tend to wander this way and that, including lots of more or less interesting passages that ultimately seem to contribute very little to whatever might be the main point of the piece. In fact, sometimes you can’t even tell what that main point is supposed to be.

250px-Edgar_Allan_Poe_2

Against this meandering compositional approach, Poe argued that fiction should always strive for “unity of effect.” He said that an author’s job was to hone their writing craft to the point where they could consistently and completely dictate the reader’s experience of the work. In order to do this, you need to pick a point and stick to it. Poe didn’t necessarily weigh in on whether authors needed to outline. In fact, outlining doesn’t seem to have been a very common practice in the era. But Poe did say that an author should imaginatively figure out the entire plot (all the way to the end of the narrative) before trying to write anything down. This clearly puts Poe into the “plotter” camp.

In a famous exchange of letters in which the two authors discussed craft, Poe and Charles Dickens agreed about the advantages offered by this strategy of figuring out the end of a story before writing the beginning. They specifically cited William Godwin’s influential novel Caleb Williams (1794) — something of an early legal thriller — as a work that benefitted from being carefully plotted. Godwin supposedly knew how he wanted his book to end and he worked backward from the denouement, inventing scenes and situations that would logically lead him (and his readers) to arrive at the desired conclusion. Poe also liked this approach because he thought it helped the author create a sense of narrative inevitability. The reader feels like everything that happened in the story makes sense and also that it couldn’t have happened any other way. The beauty of this is how it ensures you never break your reader’s suspension of disbelief. Even if your stories have supernatural happenings (as a number of Poe’s do), the world of your fiction needs to feel completely and seamlessly realistic. The mark of narrative truth, as Poe well knew, is perfect internal consistency.

For Poe, a well-written story should not only perfectly embody the author’s intention, but during “the hour of perusal” the author could control “the very soul of the reader.” Poe’s emphasis on “the hour of perusal” indicates his strong preference for short stories, which he called tales. While he read and reviewed a lot of novels during his life (and even penned one himself), Poe thought novels suffered from the fact that readers can’t typically read them in one sitting. The problem here is that all the normal distractions of everyday life prevent a reader from getting lost in the novel and staying completely under the narrative spell until it’s finished. For Poe, when the spell is broken, so is the work’s “unity of effect.” Thus, with a novel the reader can’t reliably take in the fullness of the author’s intention.

This doesn’t mean you can’t write novels.

Like I said, Poe recognized the commercial advantages of the form and tried his hand at one. But it does mean, in order to follow Poe’s writing advice, you need to make sure every element of a story or novel needs to drive toward that “unity of effect.” If something doesn’t advance the plot or serve to reveal character, then you need to edit it out. Yes, Poe’s own writing can seem ornate at times. He consciously cultivated a lush, Gothic style that would evoke the dark and mysterious settings that heightened the reader’s sense of horror. But these prose stylings work because they help Poe create his desired effect. When you look past the long, rambling sentences, and the self-consciously erudite vocabulary, you can still see how Poe stays focused on telling every story in the shortest and sharpest way possible. He believed in keeping things narratively lean.

If you want to follow Poe’s lead, then every sentence, every word, needs to be there for a reason.

Furthermore, when you get to the punchline, you’re done. Poe never lingers after his work has arrived at its narrative denouement. Get in, say what you need to say, and get out.

To be clear, Poe was adamantly opposed to setting any arbitrary or external limits on fiction. This got him into some trouble with his peers, who found many of Poe’s chosen subjects distasteful and much of his writing vulgar. But Poe fearlessly championed the idea of Art for Art’s Sake. An artist needs the absolute freedom to express whatever comes out of them, with no fear and no limits. This radical stance is clearly part of why Poe has remained such an influential artist around the world. We’re lucky these days that it’s perfectly acceptable to write about madness, torture, incest, violent death, or whatever you need to say. You can conjure up and express just about any nightmare scenario you imagine. But this is also a reminder that as artists we need to continue taking risks, continue challenging our readers. In this sense, I think dangerous and transgressive writers like Chuck Palahniuk and Cormac McCarthy and James Ellroy perfectly channel Poe’s defiant spirit.

Whatever you’re writing, make sure to be as brutally honest as you can.

images-137

The Two Keys to Writing Successful Commercial Fiction

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

Lately I’ve been reading a lot of author interviews with best-sellers like James Patterson and Stephen King. And the two things that keep coming up from these writers is that if you want to succeed as a writer, one who can actually quit his day job eventually, then you need to have an incredible work ethic and you need to write things that people will actually want to read.

On the face of it, doing just those two things can sound so easy, but it’s sort of like saying that if you want to stay strong and healthy you have to eat right and get regular exercise. Everybody knows that already, but it’s still a constant battle to learn the lesson and make it stick. So many people have a hard time taking care of their health because we’re constantly surrounded by all these distractions and temptations. It’s way too easy to grab lunch at a fast food joint, or add pop and a bag of chips to your lunch. And why not have a cookie for dessert while you’re at it, right? Then instead of wanting to hit the gym and work off those calories, you feel like taking a nap or heading out for happy hour with friends. Before you know it you find that another day, another week, another month has gone and you’re even heavier and more tired and more out of shape than before.

It’s all about habits, energy, and focus.

So, the first thing is you have to write every day. Yes, seven days a week and 365 days a year. It’s what Patterson does. It’s what Stephen King has been doing for forty years. So, if you don’t believe it’s as simple as that or don’t think being prolific is the key, just look at the number of books those guys have written over the past few decades. It’s insane, but it’s also totally possible if you commit to it and get your work done. That probably means getting up early so you can get your work in before you have to show up at the office or the shop or wherever you work. And when you’re working you need to stay focused on your projects. You can’t let yourself get distracted by social media or checking your email or reading the news. You need to get your writing done. As you start to work on your daily habit, it’s also very beneficial to set a word count total for each day. If you can only swing a half-hour a day to begin with, then maybe you keep things modest at 500 words. If you can do an hour or more, then you should be writing at least 1000 words a day. In fact, writing a 1000 words a day is probably the optimal place to start. On the one hand, it’s a manageable block of writing both in terms of output and fleshing out a single scene. On the other hand, it’s going to feel like a bit of a stretch when you’re first getting started with your daily writing. It will build your writing muscles and improve your creative stamina.

Once you can do 1000 words a day without too much work, then you know you can set longer term goals. For example, you can think seriously about writing a novel. The average popular novel is 60,000-80,000 words. If you’re routinely writing 1000 words a day then you can feel confident that you’ll be able to crank out a first draft in just two or three months. If you have an outline. Otherwise, you’re going to have to reverse outline the first draft and see if the overall story arc works. Save yourself the extra work. And save your beta readers the grief of fumbling for the words to explain why your novel doesn’t quite hand together. Do an outline first. Not only that, but share the outline with a few trusted fellow writers or avid readers and see what they think of the storyline. Yes, this can feel like you’re spoiling the surprise, but there’s no way around this process. Besides, with all the novels and movies that have been written, do you really think that you’re going to come up with something that’s so revolutionary that your readers haven’t seen a variation on it before? Seriously? I mean, there’s a reason that somebody was able to write a massive scholarly tome about the seven plots that comprise the entire history of world literature. Humans are storytellers and we love telling variations on the same stories over and over again.

The second thing is writing accessible prose. If you want to publish commercial fiction, if you want to break out on the best seller list and actually make better than hobby money from your writing, then you absolutely have to write things that people want to read. It’s not about pandering or aiming at the lowest common denominator. Yes, these books are maybe not “high literature.” They’re beach books or airport books or grocery store books or whatever you want to call them. But what’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with providing people with books they actually enjoy reading? Doesn’t every author want to capture a reader’s attention, fire her imagination, hold her in suspense, make her miss her bus stop or stay up past her bedtime so she can read just one more chapter? To do this, you have to focus first and foremost on readability. You can’t get all fancy and erudite. You can’t be worried about impressing readers with your massive intelligence or your impressive education or your giant vocabulary. Save the big fancy words for when you want to beat your family at Scrabble. You have to tell a story that people want to hear and you have to do it in language that comes alive but that is also simple enough that the reader forgets about the author and the book. The reader has to fall into the world of the novel so that the pages turn themselves. Get rid of anything that gets in the way of that magical experience of the outside world melting away while the reader is lost in your book. Those are the books that people love. They’re the books that people tell their friends about. And they’re the books that make people eager to find more by that author. In one of his interviews, Patterson says books like this, truly engaging page-turners, are rarer than most authors realize.

As someone who starts reading way more books than he actually finishes, I think Patterson is absolutely right.

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.