Welcome to HOW TO WRITE, my new blog on the art and craft of writing! I ask the ‘what is it’ question right away because writing as a craft—whether fiction or nonfiction, book-length works or short articles—is on the one hand obvious (you put words down in order) and on the other hand mysterious (which words, which order, and how do you hunt for them?).
And I am going to start this blog with something of a heresy.
Not because I like being contrary for its own sake, but because after all the writing I’ve done in my lifetime, I believe the evidence shows it to be true. So here goes: Writing is not really about getting words down on paper. Professional writing is about thinking, and the most important ‘writing’ is what goes on in your head. If you want to do better work, build your confidence, and use your time most wisely, it pays to stop thinking in terms of words-on-paper, daily word counts, and ‘having something to edit’.
Don’t get me wrong: you will of course edit. As a serious writer, you’ll edit and revise till the cows come home (that’s another topic for another blog post). But surely you would rather edit quality work than ill-considered, hastily-flung-down work. It’s so much more satisfying, and it saves a lot of time.
In fact, if you do the requisite ‘writing in your head’ before you seriously start committing words to the screen or paper, you’ll find those words will come more easily. You’ll have less of ‘writer’s block’ until such time as you have to do more thinking. I find, especially for book-length projects, that I have bouts of thinking followed by spurts of writing and then more thinking as I refine and enlarge my understanding of the project.
And that’s another thing: You’re not going to have a full grasp of your project right at the start (unless it’s a poem or a song lyric, but they are different beasts altogether). What you tend to start out with is a premise (in the case of fiction) or a general topic area and perhaps a framework (in the case of non-fiction). So for instance you know that you’ve got a lady investigator who does archaeology and she uses her access to dig sites to uncover mysteries. Perhaps your premise is a bit more specific, and you already know something about what the dig-site is hiding and who wants to keep it that way. But notice: that’s not a plot. It also says nothing about the characters’ frailties and strengths, and it tells you nothing about character motivation. We don’t know anything about the teaching or moral of the story (if any). As a writer you always start somewhere, and usually it’s bare-bones stuff, because it takes a lot of thinking to work out who is doing what and why.
A premise is not a story, and it’s important to recognize the difference between the two. A premise can come to you like inspiration, in a flash, and immediately set your writer’s heart on fire. I love exciting premises. I love a premise that’s so intriguing, I’ve just got to write the novel or the non-fiction, even though that’s going to require a lot of brain-scratching, can-I-do-this puzzling-out of the story. The premise is what sets you out on your writing journey. The story is the adventure you go on, and there will be times when it feels like an uphill climb, and you’ve got to sit down and catch your breath.
To return to my initial point about what writing is, I hope it’s clearer now that writing is not about banging on the keyboard just to say ‘I’ve done 2000 words today’. The most important writing you will ever do is in your head. You must understand something about your characters or subjects and the journey you want them to go on—it will be your journey, too (all good books are journeys for the reader and writer alike). This being the case, it may help you—in fact I strongly advise it—to go for a walk and do your book-thinking there.
Don’t take a friend along (unless it’s your dog, of course). You need to be able to focus completely on your story’s questions, you need to think about the lives of your characters (so as to invent or explore them), and you need to work out the development of the plot. You need to do this with the least possible distraction, which includes distractions that you provide for yourself (snacking from the fridge, looking at YouTube, painting your nails, whatever). You need to feel the freedom to speak out loud to yourself, to help keep that focus and as a stimulus to those creative juices. The sheer act of moving while you think, with that lovely unselfconscious ease that walking gives us, will loosen you up and get your brain in gear at the same time.
If you bring your phone, the only talking you should do on it is into the microphone. Or bring a small portable dictaphone. Talk your book into existence, if need be. Yes, it’s a labour of sorts to type up your dictation later, but doing so has two benefits. In the first place, you may notice that any dialogue you create while dictating seems more natural and right than what you might have produced while sitting and typing. Secondly, thoughts you captured somewhat imperfectly on the walk can be refined now, as you hear them a second time. You can edit even as you get your thoughts into type.
Writing is thinking first. Lines of type come later. When we focus more on the thinking than the words we see on paper, the more we unburden ourselves as writers while being honest about the work that really needs to be done. I would rather have a first or second draft that looks a lot like my final draft than have a botched early effort that is dispiriting. Actually producing a manuscript, good, bad or indifferent, takes time and effort. I think most writers would rather put that time and effort into a better conceptualization, a better mental grasp of what their story is and how it should unfold. You don’t have to know all of it before you start the actual physical writing, as I’ve said. But you’re better off if you see that thoughts must lead the words you put down, not the other way around.
And when you really do understand what you want to say and how, the physical act of writing can feel exactly like ‘taking dictation’ from yourself. That’s when your fingers can fly.
Thanks for reading, and be sure to check out my next post: Unsticking Writer’s Block.