Writing into the Dark Read online

  You must be aware that this stopping point in a book is part of the process and you can’t let the critical voice in the door to kill it.

  There are no easy solutions.

  And sucking it up is not an easy solution.

  Just keep writing, shove the critical voice down into the corner again, believe there will be value in your work, and stay inside the character’s heads and keep writing.

  Do not let yourself make any stupid promises to yourself. You are still writing the book, period.

  Don’t get sloppy because the writing suddenly got difficult.

  Just stay with the characters and stay in their heads and write the next sentence.

  Trust your process.

  Eventually, the excitement will return and you’ll find the end and be very glad you kept going.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  UNSTUCK IN TIME

  There is one critical element in learning how to be a creative writer and writing into the dark with larger projects. And this one element sounds simple, but is extremely difficult to take in and learn for almost all early writers.

  That’s right. You are going to think you know this, but you won’t apply it.

  You must learn how to be unstuck in time in your book.

  Let me see if I can explain this critical element to learning how to write into the dark.

  And in all creative fiction writing, for that matter.

  And then in the next chapter, I’ll use this very idea to show you how to drive your writing forward.

  READERS READ FROM FRONT TO BACK

  That’s an obvious point, isn’t it?

  We readers all pick up a book, start on page one, and read to the end of the book and put the book down because the story is over.

  There is a straight line through the book. Front to back.

  Reading is a very lineal process.

  And we are all readers.

  So when we come to writing, we have the experience as readers. After all, we’ve read thousands and thousands of books, haven’t we? We believe that from front to back must also be the experience of the writing process.

  We believe, without ever questioning, that we must write the book just as the readers will read it.

  So as beginning writers—and I was no exception to this rule early on—we try to write novels from the first word to the last word.

  We believe, and are taught by people who don’t know any better, that the writing process is a lineal process from word one to the last word.

  This false thinking is what leads to the driving need for outlining.

  This false thinking is what leads to the driving need for rewriting by beginning writers. Their critical voice cannot let them believe it is possible to write a book from word one to the end without mistakes.

  Why is that belief there?

  Because, as readers, when we picked up a book we loved, we read from word one, and we all thought the author was so smart as to put all that nifty stuff in, and clues, and foreshadowing, and no character got lost, and wow it all came together in this nifty climax at the end.

  Wow, that writer was really smart.

  So as early writers, we think, “I’m not that smart. I don’t know story that well, or plot, or any of that other stuff English teachers teach, so I have to rewrite to put all that in.”

  Then, of course, to rewrite, we go back to the beginning and start through the book again like a reader.

  Front to back.

  The reading process is a lineal process.

  The truth is that the creative process is far, far, far from lineal.

  In fact, when looked at in a hard light, the creative process is a jumbled mess.

  REMEMBER YOU ARE WRITING YOUR ONLY DRAFT OF THE BOOK

  That is critical to remember and keep firmly in mind before I go any farther. More than likely you dismissed that in an early chapter, but right now is when this becomes a critical point.

  You must fix everything as you go because there will be no second chance, no second draft, no rewrite.

  So with that firmly in mind, you are typing along and you realize you forgot some important detail, or forgot to dress a character, or forgot to plant a gun.

  If there will be no rewrite, what do you do?

  You fix it right at the moment you think of it.

  You go up out of the lineal line of your book, float over that lineal line like a creative ghost. And then go back in the lineal timeline of your book and fix the problem.

  Then fix the problem all the way through to where you left off and go from there again.

  All problems your creative voice thinks of MUST BE FIXED AT ONCE. You are writing in creative voice. Stay in creative voice and fix the issues the creative voice comes up with instantly.

  If you write some dumb note to fix it later, or think it will be fixed in second draft, you undermine all the wonderful stuff your creative voice is doing.

  Your creative voice, at that moment, thought of that need to fix a problem.

  Fix it. Honor your creative voice.

  If you don’t you almost kill the creative voice right there and you let in the critical voice.

  When the creative voice knows the critical voice will mess up something, it’s like a little kid. It will just say “What’s the point?”

  And stop.

  So get unstuck in the timeline of your book and be willing to jump around at will to do what the creative voice wants you to do.

  WRITE AHEAD, WRITE IN PIECES, CONSTANTLY LOOP

  There are so many ways that long-term professional writers do this unstuck-in-time creative process.

  Some, such as my wife, often write a project in pieces. She’s writing into the dark, no idea where she is going, and she listens to her creative voice.

  If her creative voice wants her to write a scene, she writes it. And often she’ll have parts of a book, all written out of order, and when her creative voice tells her, she prints them all out and puts it all together on the floor.

  Some writers I know have a scene appear to them, they write it, then loop back and write toward the scene.

  I constantly loop back every 500 words or so, and I’ll talk more about that process, called cycling, next chapter.

  Remember, the key is that you (as a writer) are unstuck in the timeline of your book.

  That’s right. Let me free you up right here.

  There is no rule that says you must write your book like a reader is going to read it.

  None.

  Get unstuck in time.

  BUT SOMETIMES STRAIGHT THROUGH IS THE BEST WAY

  I tend to build most of my books from front to back. But if you diagramed out how my eye actually works, what I actually typed, as I write a book that feels like it is lineal, you will discover my writing is far, far from lineal.

  I will write a few hundred words, loop back, fill in some other stuff, take out some other words, write forward from the place where I lifted out of the timeline, then loop around again and do it all again.

  It feels to me at times like I am starting at the beginning and moving toward the end. But in all honesty, it’s more like digging a tunnel through a mountain.

  I dig for a little bit, go back, take out the dirt, shape the tunnel a little, dig a little farther, go back, take out the dirt, shape some more, dig some more, and so on.

  Eventually I find the end of the tunnel and when I look back I have created a wonderful, smooth-sided tunnel. And that’s what the readers think when they walk through the tunnel from one end to the other.

  But sure not what the process was.

  The belief that we MUST write a book straight through is what grinds writers down.

  And what makes many writers believe in all the people who say we must outline.

  Logical, actually.

  If you believe, deep down, that the only real way to write a book is from word one to the end, then outlining is more than likely something you are going to have to do.

  And plan f
or a short career.

  For all of us, the reader must experience our book in a lineal fashion. And we are all readers. So this drive to write from front to back is strong.

  But even if you start with word one on a novel and write lineal forward, kill your fear of jumping out of the book and be like a floating god over the characters and the path of the book and let your subconscious have that freedom.

  When you can write in any fashion you want, you are not roped into traveling from word one to the last word in the writing process.

  And that gives your creative voice the freedom to build that lineal process for the reader in any way it wants.

  WRITE THE NEXT SENTENCE

  That’s advice I gave to help you through the rough points, the stuck points.

  A key point to remember is that “next sentence” does not have to be the very next sentence the READER is going to read. It just needs to be the next sentence you are going to type.

  The next sentence could be the start of the next chapter.

  Or you could cycle back and write some extra description at the start of chapter two as the next sentence.

  It all makes your book longer, it all pushes the book forward.

  Sometimes the next sentence when you are stuck will be the next sentence the reader will read.

  But often it won’t be.

  And it sure doesn’t have to be to help you keep going.

  UNSTUCK IN THE TIMELINE OF YOUR STORY

  Again, this is the most critical point about writing into the dark, or even becoming a full-time professional storyteller.

  You must realize you are the writer of your book, not the reader of your book.

  You are unstuck in time in your own book.

  In other words, you can jump around in your manuscript at will.

  Creative minds do not tend to work in a straight line.

  And as a writer, you don’t need to.

  All that matters is that the reader experiences your story in a straight line from word one to the end.

  But no one cares if you write it that way.

  And chances are, you won’t.

  Or shouldn’t.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE HINT OF CYCLING

  Very little that is created is created lineally.

  But in writing, our audience experiences a very clear order to a book. And if that order isn’t clear, they leave the book.

  So it is logical that new writers come at writing thinking they must create the book just as a reader experiences the work.

  But thankfully, it doesn’t work that way, as I talked about in the last chapter.

  Or, at least, it doesn’t have to.

  MODERN COMPUTER AGE

  The modern computer age has been both a blessing and a curse for writers. In the days of typewriters, or writing by hand, rewriting was a chore, to say the least, so professional writers quickly learned to not do much rewriting. Especially the top storytellers who were working for a certain amount per word.

  They didn’t get paid for rewriting. Only finished product.

  The focus was to get it correct the first time through.

  That should still be your focus, even though rewriting is easy in this new computer world, and myths of modern publishing expect it.

  But back before the computers of the last 25-plus years, making a mistake and fixing it on a typed page was a pain. I know I personally went through bottles of Wite-Out because of my spelling and bad typing.

  And the rule of thumb when submitting a manuscript to an editor was no more than ten corrections on a page. If you had more than ten, you had to retype it. And trust me, ten fixed mistakes on a manuscript page looked awful, so I retyped at five mistakes.

  And I was a horrid typist. I hated typing, especially retyping.

  So my two-finger hunt-and-peck method was slow. Very slow.

  But now the fixes are easy.

  And that causes the problem of too much rewriting.

  But it also allows professional writers a wonderful tool that many, many of us have adopted. The tool is called cycling.

  Now to understand this tool and use it correctly, you have to be completely unstuck in the timeline of your manuscript. Timeline of the manuscript is page one, followed by page two, and so on until the end of the book.

  Those page numbers should mean nothing to you until the end of the book, and even the order of the chapters should mean little to you.

  In creative mode, nothing is set in stone.

  You are not locked into the moment you are typing. You can go anywhere in the story and type at any point in the manuscript.

  CYCLING

  I thought for the longest time that I was the only one who had picked this up. That’s my ego for you. The more I talked with other professional writers, the more I realized that in one form or another, all of us did this.

  Let me explain what I do, so you get a clear picture of what I am calling cycling and find a form of it that will work for you.

  I start into what I think is the opening of a story or novel. I climb inside a character’s head and get the emotions of the character about the setting around the character, and I type for two or three pages.

  500 to 700 words or so.

  And I come to a halt.

  Every time, without fail. This is now a dug-in habit.

  I instantly jump out of the timeline of the story and cycle back to the first word and start through the story again.

  Sometimes I add in stuff, sometimes I take out, sometimes I just reread, scanning forward, fixing any mistakes I see.

  (Remember, this will be the only draft I will do.)

  So when I get back to the white space, I have some speed up and I power onward, usually another 500 or so words until I stop.

  Then I cycle back again to the beginning and do the same thing, run through it all until I get back to the white space with momentum and power forward again for another 500 or 700 words.

  Then I cycle back about 700 to 1,000 words and do it again.

  So if you were tracking how I write a story or novel, you would see me go 500 words forward, back, power to the white spot again, more forward, then back.

  I am completely unstuck from the timeline of the novel.

  Sometimes, when I get a nifty thought, I type it and then write forward until I get there.

  But almost always I cycle back, all in creative voice, never once judging the work, just working to make it clearer, make the character better, the setting richer, and so on and so on.

  I could never do this with a typewriter.

  Only the last 25 years or so since I got my first computer have I been able to do this.

  HOW CYCLING HELPS WRITING INTO THE DARK

  When you have no idea where you are going with a story, momentum is often the key to it all.

  I have great momentum for about 500 words, about two manuscript pages. Then I run into that “What happens next?” question.

  So by cycling back, I am putting the character and the events solidly in my mind by going over them again. And when I hit the white space where I stopped, I have momentum to drive the story forward.

  By going back and coming forward again, my creative voice knows what’s going to happen next.

  When I am really, really stuck, I often will cycle back a full chapter or so and take a run at the stuck spot, spending 15 minutes or so going over what I have done, touching it, getting my creative voice back into where it was going.

  More often than not, that solves being very stuck.

  Think of this as the white spaces being small hills and I need to get a run at each hill. And think of being very stuck as a larger hill, and I need to back up farther to get more speed at the larger hill.

  FIXING MISTAKES

  Cycling, knowing you will be done when you hit the end, makes you fix any problem or mistake instantly, the moment you see or discover the problem.

  So say a character says something to another character and your creative
voice goes, “Damn it, that wasn’t set up.”

  You instantly pop out of the timeline and go back and set it up and then work toward the white space again.

  You need to have a character wearing something different for a plot reason that came up in chapter four, you instantly go back and fix what the character is wearing, moving forward again through the manuscript until you get to the white space to make sure all the details match.

  You need to look up a detail, you stop, look it up, put it in, cycle back and run at the white space again to make sure the detail is correct.

  DOESN’T CYCLING TAKES MORE TIME?

  Seriously, I get this question a lot and I imagine some of you reading this are thinking it.

  But no, this takes far, far less time to get a story right the first time through then to try to fix it later. And that goes for putting silly brackets around something you have to research later.

  Get it right and be done and move on to a new story.

  By having that attitude, you power up your creative voice to get it right the first time.

  You don’t write sloppy.

  You don’t write for a second draft.

  Now are some of my first runs through 500 words sloppy? I don’t honestly know. I suppose so because I am not paying any attention, and I know I will cover those 500 words to clean them up at least twice more, if not more than twice, in very short order.

  But to be honest, I don’t notice or care. My subconscious knows this will be the only time through and I’m known for moderately clean manuscripts. Not perfect. No manuscript is perfect.

  But I’m fairly clean.

  So how much time does this take me?

  I tend to think I write (that’s finished, after cycling) about 1,000 or so words per hour, typing with three fingers and taking five and ten minute breaks every hour or so.