Getting Started—Keeping Going: Finding Time and the Words to Write

by Darlene Ryan

More winners! Congratulations to Susan E. who wins The Writers' Book of Matches and a Laura Secord frosted mint chocolate bar. And congrats as well to David Cranmer winner of copies of Twilight Falls, The Watchman, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and a Laura Secord dark chocolate almond bar. Please send your snail mail address to me at darlene at darleneryan.com (change the "at" to @ of course)

Thank you everyone for joining us this weekend.

When I wrote my first book the munchkin was a baby, her father was working out of town, and I had to walk everywhere. Up hill. In waist high snow. In my bare feet.

Okay, so maybe I’m exaggerating a little. My point is I didn’t have a lot of time—or a lot of adult company which probably explains why,for a short time, Luis on Sesame Street started looking pretty darn cute. But I finished the book and it was published. I was tired all the time. I was either with the munchkin, doing laundry, or writing. But I finished the book and it was published. The key for me was setting a goal and working toward it every day.

I wanted to write that book more than I wanted to do just about anything else. More than I wanted to watch Law & Order—and I have a deep and abiding adoration for Jesse L. Martin—more than I wanted sleep. Every day I did something that got me a little closer to that goal. I wrote at least a page, even if I was sitting at the computer literally holding my eyelids up with one hand and typing with the other. I checked out publishers’ websites and prowled the bookstores and the library for books similar to mine, while the munchkin sat in her stroller and tried to launch her teddy bear over the shelves like some furry Evel Knievel.

If you have little people in your life—or maybe it’s aging parents—grab every chance you have to write. Carry a small notebook and pencil and scribble down ideas, lines of dialogue, scene descriptions everything, as soon as you think of it. Because with little people clamouring for your attention ideas disappear faster than Cheerios®. When you have more time, expand your ideas, write those scenes—either when everyone’s gone to bed or before they get up. I found that if you wait until you have time you’ll never get that book written.

Take a hard look at your week. Spouses and kids can bake potatoes, steam veggies and sprinkle some cheese over it all for a great supper giving you half an hour to write. You won’t really pine away to nothing if you don’t see the delectable Wolf and the next episode of American Gladiators. (Does anyone know if he has a poster, by the way?) And be honest: how much time do you really spend checking email? A few minutes here, a few minutes there can add up to enough time to write a page or maybe two. And in a year that’s an entire book.

But what happens if you find the time to write, but you can’t find the words? What do you do when you’re stuck. Call it writer’s block. Call it fear of failing or fear of succeeding. Doesn’t matter. You’re frozen in front of the keyboard. Now what?

Having a detailed outline is one way to keep from feeling stuck when you’re writing. But not everyone likes to use an outline and even those of us who do, can write ourselves into a hole.

The best way I know to get unstuck is to write myself out of the hole, after all, I wrote myself in. I know some writers who can think themselves unstuck. I have to do it with words. Sometimes lots of words. Most of what I write under those circumstances I don’t use. That’s not the point. If it’s your writing time you write. Even if everything you create is dreck. Pretty soon it won’t be. (And if it is, there’s always editing. See yesterday's post.) I keep writing, no matter how awful what I’m writing seems, until I figure out what my problem is and how to fix it. At one time or another I’ve used all of the following to get myself unstuck:

1. Decide what the next logical thing to happen should be and write the opposite.

2. Reveal a deep, dark secret about a character.

3. Change the point of view character. Or change POV all together—from third person to first, or from close third to omniscient third.

4. Put two characters together who have no connection and have them fight, share information, or get lusty.

5. Turn the main character’s best friend into her enemy.

6. Turn the main character’s enemy into a friend.

7. Kill someone—the main character’s source of information, his best friend, his mother.

And if none of these ideas work for you, there’s always chocolate. Just keep writing. Probably the best writing advice I ever heard came from Billy Crystal’s character in Throw Momma From the Train: A writer writes.

There are two giveaways today. One for inspiration and one for entertainment.

To inspire you: The Writers’ Book of Matches—1001 writing prompts and a Laura Secord frosted mint chocolate bar.

To entertain you: Twilight Falls by Lynn Viehl, The Watchman by Robert Crais, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson and a Laura Secord dark chocolate almond bar

(Disclaimer: Lynn Viehl is a writing friend. Lynn gave me an advance copy of Twilight Falls. It's terrific. If I had problems with the book I'd say so. I received an advance copy of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo from the publisher. I couldn't put it down. Again, if I didn't like the book, no matter where it came from, I'd say so.)

If you'd like a chance to win one of these two giveaways, make a comment on this workshop (or just say “Hello” in comments) before eight PM eastern time today, August 3, 2008. The munchkin—who like Elliot Ness cannot be bribed—will draw two names from everyone who comments. The draw is open to anyone, anywhere, even if you’ve won something here before. Good luck.

For a list of more workshops to inspire you visit: Paperback Writer

Following the Maybes

Elizabeth Zelvin

I don’t write about writing as frequently as my blog sisters on Poe’s Deadly Daughters. Maybe that’s because my method doesn’t bear too much analysis. In the division between outliners and into-the-mist writers (or seat-of-the-pantsers, as some call them), I fall definitely—or mistily—into the category of those who don’t or can’t outline. Picking my way through a mist, with light shining only a little way ahead and no idea what lies beyond that bit of illumination, is an excellent description of how I write a novel. As I’ve said before, writing short—a poem, a story, a song, a blog post, or a letter to an online therapy client—is a whole lot easier than writing in the mist.

In a recent online discussion about how people write, I was interested to learn that for some writers, outlining means not a sheaf of pages that look like a Power Point presentation, but a collection of little notes. Using index cards or Post-its, they write signposts along the path of the story. For example: “The power fails, lights go out, covering up second murder.” “Journalist wrote a story about the developers.” “Protag and friends search boyfriend’s room for victim’s notebook.” “Roommate is bulimic, hears murderer while in bathroom throwing up.”

“Ohhh,” I said. “Is that outlining? I do that—or something very like it.” My examples are in fact notes from a manuscript later in my series. All of them were written during the writing of the first draft—not before, but during the process, as they occurred to me. Some of the events mentioned made it into the draft, others did not. The story took itself in different directions. But that’s exactly what these little-note outliners say happens to their stories. The outline is not inflexible, and it can’t be allowed to trammel the creative process. On the other hand, it is much harder to write not knowing what’s going to happen next, no less in the end, from moment to moment the whole length of 250 pages.

So what’s the difference between outlining and what I do? Is there a difference? For one thing, these notes by no means tell the story. They cover only those flashes in the midst that happen to catch my inner eye. When I think of a mist with headlights trying to break through and mysterious happenings hidden behind its veil, I think of a drive my husband and I once took along the Blue Ridge Parkway on a day so foggy that the Blue Ridge was invisible. It was very quiet, the damp air a heavy blanket muffling sound and movement. Once or twice we spotted a deer cropping grass by the roadside, undisturbed by the beam of our headlights glancing off it.

The note taking is like that. If the headlights fall to the left, I see a deer—make a note. There may be a bear to the right that I never see. Sometimes the note-thoughts come to me as I write, sometimes as I lie in bed thinking of yesterday’s writing and of today’s to come. Sometimes not just plot ideas but lines of dialogue and even occasional descriptive passages bubble up while I’m out running. That’s why I carry a lightweight digital recorder. I get it down before I can forget it and make the note when I get back to my pen and my Post-its.

But here’s the biggest difference. To me, “outline” means “commitment.” If I say I’m an outliner, I must have sticky notes, and each note must represent a bit of the story that I am committed to tell, even if the rule is that it’s okay to change my mind later. Every single one of my notes (including the true versions of the examples above) start with “Maybe.” “Maybe the power fails…” “Maybe the journalist wrote a story…” “Maybe the roommate is bulimic…” I’m not committed. But I don’t want to throw away what may turn out to be perfectly good plot points, certainly not just because of my lousy aging memory. Writing it down is like taking a quick photo of that deer at the edge of the mist. I’ve got it, and if I want to, I’ll use it later—maybe.

Getting Started

by Darlene Ryan

In general, writers fall into one of two groups; those who outline and those who don’t. I’m an outliner. When I start writing I already know a lot what’s going to happen in the story. Writers who don’t work from an outline--seat-of-the-pants writers--just start writing and discover the story as they go.

I outline because I’ve learned the hard way that if I try to wing it, I’ll never get to the end of the story. It’s why I have to follow a map when I’m traveling, so I can actually get to Montreal or Boston, instead of ending up at the Museum of SPAM* in some town I’ve never heard of. The one time I wrote a book without an outline I ended up with a story I couldn’t sell and no clue how to fix it. Every writer learns—through trial and error and a few melt-downs in front of the computer—what works best for her. (Or him.)

All my books begin with a what-if. In the case of Responsible, my latest young adult novel, the what-if was, What if you did the right thing and it messed up your life? I started thinking about this person who had tried to do the right thing and Kevin Frasier began to take shape. He was HHHtall and needed a haircut. His mother was dead. He was a mediocre student who didn’t really fit in anywhere.

Some writers create pages of background for every major character in a book. Not me. What I need to figure out before I start writing is who the person is—what does he need, what does he want? Kevin wasn’t a jock, a brainiac or into drama. He was a bully by default.

Once I knew Kevin I could work out the rest of the story. At this point in the outlining process I know where the story starts and how I want things to end. And I usually have a couple of what I call “crisis points” figured out for the middle. I start with the first scene, work toward the last scene and keep asking, Now what? Having those crisis points figured out for the middle makes it easier to work my way through the giant black hole between the beginning and the end of the book. After I’ve figured out the main story points, I go back and think about the other characters in the story.

I write down everything that occurs to me as I’m outlining--lines of dialogue, even an entire scene—but for the most part the outline lacks all the details that make a good story. Here is how a scene from Responsible was described in the outline. Just two sentences: Kevin sticks a dead mouse in Erin’s locker. Erin confronts Nick and stuffs the dead mouse in his pocket.

Here’s the same scene from the finished manuscript:

I slid the burger box out of my pack.

There was a mouse inside, gray and black with a long hairless tail and blood, dried brown on its neck. I looked at it, curled in the bottom of its Styrofoam coffin and I thought, I could just shut Erin’s locker and tell Nick I hadn’t been able to pop the lock after all. No. No. I could tell him the janitor had been doing the floors and I couldn’t even get to her locker.

I looked down at the grungy gray and yellow tiles. Nick wouldn’t believe that. No one would believe that.

I could just shut the locker, throw the box in the garbage and go home. Of course I’d never be able to come to school or go anywhere else ever again. I’d heard rumors about what Nick did to guys who went up against him. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t get a mouse like this stuck in my locker. I’d probably be the mouse, curled up in a ball with blood on the side of my head. It was me or her. What the hell else could I do?

I hauled my sweatshirt down over my fingers again and picked up the mouse. I thought it would have been stiff, but it was as floppy as a stuffed toy. I set it on Erin’s math book, right at the front of her locker so she’d at least see it first thing. That way she wouldn’t be feeling around for her books and get a handful of dead rodent instead. She was going to freak no matter what.

I felt like the mouse was looking at me, sitting there on the middle of the locker shelf. A cold shiver rolled from my shoulders all the way down my back. “Sorry,” I whispered as I closed the locker door. I wasn’t sure if the sorry was for the poor dead mouse, or for Erin.

I couldn’t get going in the morning so by the time I got to school it was almost first bell. Nick was standing at the bottom of the main stairs with Zach and Brendan and some geeky kid from grade nine who talked way too much. I thought his name was Oliver. I knew Nick was just hanging there waiting to see what happened when Erin opened her locker.

I walked over to them. I just wanted to go to my locker or homeroom, but it would have looked weird if I had. I didn’t look down the hall. We’d know soon enough when Erin opened her locker.

Nick was going on about video games and playing Doom Master. He thought he was hot stuff because he’d gotten to level six in the game. I’d gotten as far as level fourteen. That wasn’t something I’d ever told him, though.

I didn’t see Erin until she was right behind Nick. “Uh, Nick,” Zach said, pointing. I looked around. It seemed like half the school was hanging around, watching. I wondered if Nick had put the word out.

Erin was holding the mouse up by its tail with her bare hand. If she was scared I couldn’t tell. In fact, she was sort of smirking. “Geez, Nick,” she said. “I thought you could come up with something better than a dead mouse.”

Then she reached over and stuffed the mouse in the pocket of Nick’s Zipperhead tee shirt. “Here you go,” she said, giving the pocket a pat. Yeah, she was definitely smirking.

Nick jerked. He grabbed the mouse out of his pocket and hurled it down the hall. It landed with a splat by the water fountain. He wiped his hand on his jeans. He was breathing hard and there was sweat on his forehead. Erin wasn’t afraid of a dead mouse but Nick sure as hell was.

How long an outline ends up, depends on the book. I’ve written outlines as short as two pages and as long as eighteen. I keep going until I know the story. And by that time I’m usually getting itchy to write the book. For me, this is part of the creative process. There are a zillion decisions to make writing a book. I like to get a lot of them out of the way before I start writing.

• There really is a Museum of SPAM. It’s in Austin, Minnesota.