Writing into the Dark Read online

  Contents

  Introduction

  1. Some Background

  2. The Critical Voice Problem

  3. The Joy of Uncertainty

  4. What Do You Need to Get Started?

  5. How to Get Started

  6. Some Process Hints

  7. Unstuck in Time

  8. The Hint of Cycling

  9. Helpful Hint #2

  10. Helpful Hint #3

  About the Author

  WMG Writer’s Guides

  Copyright Information

  For all the brave writers out there writing stories into the dark.

  Have fun.

  INTRODUCTION

  In almost 150 novels now in both indie and traditional, I have written into the dark on some, done outlines on others, and even did a 135-page “fully realized” outline on one poor novel.

  There are as many ways to outline a novel as there are writers. Plus, there are about a million books out there giving you the secret to outlining. In some of the online workshops I help with at WMG Publishing, I even taught a few ways to outline.

  But there are very few articles and books on how to just type in the first word and head off into the dark writing a novel with no plan, no character sketch, nothing but pure exploration.

  That’s what writing into the dark is all about. Pure exploration of a story.

  In this book, I hope to help you learn how to have the courage and the ability to just tell a story from your creative side.

  SO WHAT EXACTLY IS WRITING INTO THE DARK?

  Some call it “writing by the seat of your pants.” There are other terms for it that are so stupid, I can’t bring myself to even type the names of them.

  Basically, writing into the dark means that you decide to write a story without an outline.

  Now most short story writers do this automatically. But faced with a novel, the same writer who just had a blast going off into the dark on a short story will freeze down like shallow lake in the Midwest in the dead of winter.

  Critical voice takes over the writer’s mind, and all the stuff the writer was taught by people who have never written a novel comes roaring in.

  In fact, most of us in our early years of writing take all our information and learning from very, very unqualified people.

  English teachers in high school may know how to put a sentence together in some grammatically correct fashion, but they have zero, or less than zero, idea how to create a story from nothing.

  We are taught how to tear stories apart under the guise of learning, but that’s like handing some kid a hammer and telling him to tear down a house. Then when the house is in rubble, you turn to the kid and say, “Now, build a wonderful new home with fine craftsmanship there.”

  The kid might have been fine at tearing a house apart, but tearing a house down teaches little of the creative process, the building process.

  So teachers tear apart a book, then make students outline the book. What that does is make the writer of the book look damn smart, actually. Students come away from the process thinking, “Wow, how did the writer know to put all that foreshadowing in chapter six for what’s going to happen in chapter ten?”

  So then, later, when the writer is facing a novel, the writer thinks all that idiocy taught in school is going to help the writer with the task of writing. Nope.

  In fact, most of that learning from school will hurt the creative writer.

  But off the writer goes, spending time and energy outlining and working on the outline and making sure the outline is perfect before ever writing word one. And all that is done from the critical voice, from the voice of a teacher who wouldn’t have been able to write a novel on the threat of death.

  It is any wonder so many early outlined novels fail, and fail big time?

  And actually, most outlined novels never get written. I’ll talk about why later in the book.

  CRITICAL VOICE VERSUS CREATIVE VOICE

  A great deal has been said about critical voice versus creative voice in writing, or in any art, for that matter. Great art is rarely, if ever, created from a critical perspective. Art is never done purposely.

  Great art comes from the creative side of our brains. I like to think of the creative part living in the back of our brains. The front part of our brains, the critical part, is what takes in all the information. The creative part has a large filter and only takes in the knowledge it wants and uses.

  The creative side of our minds has been trained since we were born, and story has been trained into that creative side since we were first read to by our parents. The creative side loves story.

  For most writers, the difficulty comes when trying to get past the critical side of our brains and write from the creative side only. Outlining comes from the critical side by the very nature of outlining.

  So the critical side of our minds outlines a book, then we wonder why the creative side often doesn’t want to follow the outline. The creative side knows story, knows what needs to be in a story.

  So all the way through this book, I’m going to be talking about how to access the creative side, how to trust that part of your mind to create stories, and how to kill the fear that the critical voice will use to try to stop you.

  Much, much more on this topic coming up.

  WHY WRITE INTO THE DARK?

  The first answer to that question is easy. Writing into the dark imitates the reading process for the writer.

  All writers are readers. And as readers, we love it when a writer takes us along for the ride in a good novel.

  So when writing into the dark, that same feeling of reading is in the writing process. Our conscious mind is just along for the ride. The creative side is making up a story and entertaining us as we type.

  Later on in this book, I’ll also talk about the many problems that stop outline writers. One major factor is boredom.

  Imagine if every novel you picked up had a detailed outline of the entire plot, including the ending, right at the start. Would you read the novel after reading the outline?

  Chances are, no. What would be the point? You already know the journey the writer is going to take you on.

  So as a writer, why do an outline and then have to spend all that time creating a book you already know?

  “Boring” doesn’t begin to describe it.

  And as I said, I wrote a lot of media tie-in books from outlines. My rule during those days was to write the outline, get it approved by Paramount or some other license holder, then never look at the outline and just write the book.

  My memory is so bad that after seven to ten months from the time I wrote the outline to the time I got the contract and wrote the book, I had no memory of the book I had outlined at all. None.

  And if the title hadn’t been on the contract, I wouldn’t have remembered that either.

  So I never looked at the outline. Never. I just typed in the title and wrote off into the dark. That kept the book fresh and alive for me.

  And no editor or license holder ever noticed the book was different from the outline they approved. Not once.

  The key is to make a novel fresh to the reader. If the writer is bored or feeling like the book is “work” to write, you can bet that feeling is coming through the words to the reader.

  Here is one more reason for writing into the dark: If you have no idea where the book is going, the reader sure won’t either.

  NO RIGHT WAY

  Please remember, as I work through this book, that there is no right way of writing any particular book.

  Or only one way for a writer to always work.

  There are as many ways to write a book as there are writers.

  Writing into the dark is just another option
.

  In the Thriller Online Workshop that I offer through WMG Publishing, numbers of writers mention to me each time that class is offered that they are surprised that I suggest character sketches and outlines.

  And that I suggest taking another thriller writer’s novel apart and outlining it to study.

  There are some books, some projects, that would be better served with outlining.

  No book is the same, no process is the same.

  And I have to admit right here, in the introduction, that I outline in my own way, every book I write.

  When I have a chapter finished, I jot down who the viewpoint characters are, what they are wearing, what happened in the chapter.

  So as I go along, I outline each book as I write it.

  I never outline ahead of the writing, but after the writing is done. That keeps the creative side of my brain in control of the writing.

  And the real reason I do that is to keep track of what I have already done. And what a character is wearing. And so on.

  It also helps my creative mind see the patterns in the book as I write.

  So I write into the dark with most novels these days.

  But I outline as I go, after I have written a chapter.

  That’s just my way. Use it if you want.

  Now onward into how to get over the fear and critical voice problems that come with typing in a title and just writing a novel into the dark.

  CHAPTER ONE

  SOME BACKGROUND

  The reason there are very few articles or books about writing into the dark is because the process gets such horrid bad press. Just the idea of writing without planning ahead on a project as long as a novel makes most English professors shudder and shake their head and turn away in disgust.

  And beginning writers mostly just can’t imagine doing that. It just seems impossible.

  Yet, many long-term professional writers write this way. And many of the books those same English professors study were written completely into the dark.

  So why do all of us, as we are growing up, buy into the idea that novels must be outlined to the last little detail to work?

  First, the problem comes from the fact that we all started out as readers.

  To readers, writers know it all. They know enough to make that plot twist work, that foreshadowing inserted at just the right place, the gun planted when it needs to be planted to be fired later, and so on.

  To readers, writers are really smart to be able to do all that.

  Then we get into school and all the English teachers build on that belief system by taking apart books and talking about the deep meaning and what the writer was doing. And that makes writers seem even smarter and the process of writing a novel even more daunting.

  So the desire to outline is logical, totally logical, after all that.

  In fact, it seems like outlining is the only way to do a complex novel.

  But interestingly enough, that very process of outlining often kills the very complex structure the writer is hoping to achieve.

  A HUMBLING EXPERIENCE

  Two of the most humbling experiences in my life occurred the two times I went into a graduate-level English class at a university as a professional writer. (Do not do this if you can avoid it.)

  The first time, the English professor, doing his job, had the students read and discuss two of my short stories BEFORE I GOT THERE.

  So two of my stories were deconstructed by fifteen graduate English department students.

  So I arrived, talked some about what it was like to be a freelance fiction writer, and then the professor turned the discussion to my two stories they had read. And I started to get questions about how did I know to put in the second hidden meaning of the story, or the foreshadowing of an upcoming event, or…or…or…

  They all knew far, far more about those two stories than I did.

  Honestly, I could barely remember the stories, and I had no idea I had even put in all that extra stuff they were all so impressed by.

  And the reason I couldn’t remember is that my subconscious, my creative brain, put all that in. My critical, conscious brain had nothing at all to do with it.

  I had just let my creative brain tell a story.

  Nothing more.

  The problem was that for weeks after that first time into that class, I couldn’t get all that crap back out of my head. I found myself wondering about second meanings, about subplots, about foreshadowing—all those other English-class terms. Froze me down completely until I got past it.

  Let me be clear here. My critical brain is not smart enough to put all that stuff in. Luckily for me, my creative brain seems to be smart enough if I get my critical brain out of the way and let it.

  But getting that stupid critical brain out of the way is the key problem.

  BREAKING OUT OF THE TAUGHT PROBLEM

  All of us go into writing novels with all that training of thinking we need to know all that stuff about subplots, foreshadowing, sub-meanings, and so on. Thinking about it, I find it amazing that with the training we get, any novel gets written at all.

  Or that any writer even gets started writing.

  And outlining seems to be the logical process when faced with all that. In fact, outlining would be the only way to let the critical brain even pretend to be smart.

  When I started writing solidly, novels seemed flat impossible. I could manage a short story in an afternoon, but anything beyond that was a concrete wall of paralyzing fear.

  So how did I break out of the problem of everything I had been taught?

  I used to own a bookstore. One fine slow afternoon, I was sitting in the front room of my bookstore and I looked around at all the books in the room. And I had a realization that in hindsight sounds damn silly.

  I realized that people, regular people, wrote all those books.

  And what all those regular people did was just sit down and tell a story.

  They were entertainers.

  That simple.

  It was no magic process that only really special English-department-anointed people could do. And if all those regular people with all those books covering the walls of my bookstore could do it, then I could do it as well.

  So I looked at how I felt writing short stories.

  At that point I just wrote a story and stopped when the story was over. Nothing more fancy. I figured I could do that with a novel as well.

  So after that realization, over the next few years I started five or six novels and got stuck at the one-third point where I could no longer fight the critical voice into submission. I had no tools to fight the critical voice at that point in time, to be honest.

  So two years after that realization, mad at myself for not finishing a novel and for making novels into something “important” instead of just fun, entertaining stories, I sat down at my trusty typewriter and thought only about writing ten pages a day.

  I had no outline, nothing. My focus was on finishing ten pages.

  Period.

  Thirty days later I had finished an 80,000-word novel.

  My first written novel.

  The next day, I started into a second novel, doing ten pages a day again.

  I powered my way through the need, the belief, the fear of doing a novel the way it “should” be done.

  And never ever had that fear again. I had other fears, sure, but not that one.

  Every long-term novel writer has some story of getting past the need for major outlines, for major planning. A lot of younger professionals are still banging out outlines and following them.

  Again, no right way.

  But eventually, if you are going to be around for a long time and writing, you need to feed the reader part of your brain and just write for fun.

  Otherwise, knowing the ending of a novel, having it all figured out ahead of time, is just too dull and boring and way too much work.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE CRITICAL VOICE PROBLEM

  Let me give you a se
cret about writing.

  Ready?

  The only purpose of the critical voice in creative writing is to stop you.

  That’s the secret, and when you finally take that secret in, you will be on the way to really getting to your real writing ability.

  Critical voice in humans is there to protect us.

  In writing, it wants to stop you from making a fool of yourself, or from putting out a bad product. (Thus the intense desire to keep rewriting over and over.)

  When your critical voice completely succeeds, you are no longer writing and sending out anything for others to read. After all, if someone else reads what you have written, it might be dangerous.

  Made-up danger, of course, but to the writer letting the critical voice win, writing feels like very real danger.

  In real life outside of writing, your critical voice is a protective mechanism.

  In the late 1960s, I found myself standing on the top of a rock cliff near Sun Valley, Idaho, with two other skiers. We were looking at jumping off the cliff and there was a cameraman off to one side to take pictures.

  My critical voice was screaming that we needed to check under the snow at the bottom for big rocks.

  One of the other guys was suggesting the same thing.

  Fear and critical voice had stopped us cold.

  The third guy just shouted to the photographer to see if he was ready, then the guy backed up ten steps and skated at the cliff and went off into the air, ski tips down, arms spread, flying like a bird, laughing all the way.

  The picture of him in the air off that cliff was in Ski Magazine. And he didn’t hurt himself.

  I skied around. So did the other guy.

  The one guy in the picture went on to make a living in Hot Dogging, soon called Freestyle Skiing. He was fearless.