Monthly Archives: April 2016

Daily Writing Tip 63 of 100, Don’t Make Excuses

Posted on by Bill Chance

For one hundred days, I’m going to post a writing tip each day. I have a whole bookshelf full of writing books and I want to do some reading and increased studying of this valuable resource. This will help me keep track of anything I’ve learned, and help motivate me to keep going. If anyone has a favorite tip of their own to add, contact me. I’d love to put it up here.

Today’s tip – Don’t Make Excuses

Source – The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes by Jack Bickham

If you are serious about the craft of fiction, you must never make excuses for yourself. You simply cannot allow yourself to:

  • Say you’re too tired.
  • Postpone work until “later.”
  • Fail to work because you’re too busy right now.
  • Wait for inspiration
  • Plan to get right at it “tomorrow.”
  • Give up because (editors) (agents) (readers) (critics) are unfair. (Fill in as many as you want.)
  • Tell yourself you’re too old (or too young) to start.
  • Blame others in your family for your lack of free time.
  • Say your job is too demanding to allow you any other activity.
  • Tell yourself that your story idea isn’t good enough.

Or any of a host of other excuses you may dream up for yourself.

No. Let’s get this straight right away: Writers write; everyone else makes excuses.

Jeebus… I think I’ve used all of these excuses in a single day.

Daily Writing Tip 62 of 100, Conflict: Coming Soon To a Scene Near You

Posted on by Bill Chance

For one hundred days, I’m going to post a writing tip each day. I have a whole bookshelf full of writing books and I want to do some reading and increased studying of this valuable resource. This will help me keep track of anything I’ve learned, and help motivate me to keep going. If anyone has a favorite tip of their own to add, contact me. I’d love to put it up here.

Today’s tip – Conflict: Coming Soon To a Scene Near You

Source Beginnings, Middles & Ends, by Nancy Kress

The point to remember about conflict is that it arises because something is not going as expected. Your readers should suspect that as early as your first few paragraphs.

Calling for conflict in the opening few paragraphs of a story doesn’t mean that your first sentence must feature a body hurtling past a sixth-story window (although it might).

Yeah… that’s the ticket. A body hurtling past a window. Better get writing.

Daily Writing Tip 61 of 100, Final Words On Creating Realistic Characters

Posted on by Bill Chance

For one hundred days, I’m going to post a writing tip each day. I have a whole bookshelf full of writing books and I want to do some reading and increased studying of this valuable resource. This will help me keep track of anything I’ve learned, and help motivate me to keep going. If anyone has a favorite tip of their own to add, contact me. I’d love to put it up here.

Today’s tip – Final Words On Creating Realistic Characters

Source – Mastering Point of View by Sherry Szeman

Liking your characters, allowing them to live their own lives, endowing them with good and bad characteristics, the skillful use of unreliable narrators – these are all valuable tools for creating realistic characters in any point of view. Observing human nature and becoming conscious of the techniques other skillful writers use will also help you develop your own characters, especially if you become aware of the techniques authors use in different points of view.

Tip

If your readers talk about your characters as if they were real people, e.g., Asking things like, why on earth that doesn’t Bill leave Marion? Then that’s an indication that you’ve created realistic, round characters who have psychological depth and complexity.

Yes… I think it’s very important that you like your characters. If you don’t like them it’s very hard to make them round, full, and complete.

But just because you like your characters… especially because you like them – it doesn’t mean you should be afraid to kill them. Go ahead, kill the hell out of them… kill them in some particularly horrific way.

Have some fun.

Daily Writing Tip 60 of 100, The First Draft As Generation

Posted on by Bill Chance

For one hundred days, I’m going to post a writing tip each day. I have a whole bookshelf full of writing books and I want to do some reading and increased studying of this valuable resource. This will help me keep track of anything I’ve learned, and help motivate me to keep going. If anyone has a favorite tip of their own to add, contact me. I’d love to put it up here.

Today’s tip – The First Draft As Generation

Source – The Passionate, Accurate Story by Carol Bly

Some writing classes start, using pure critiquing – a mixed bag at best – helping one another organize even before the author has discovered the true heart of the story. In the first draft, the author should still be brooding, maundering around the material – treating it like a hypothetical first draft. It is a great mistake at that point to start applying writing skills or anything like.

Again and again and again I come across the same advice for writing first drafts. The advice is to turn off the inner editor and freely write whatever comes to mind. Only then, later, through the process of editing, this is shaped into something useful.

It’s really hard to do. Our entire lives we have had editors hovering over us critiquing what we do, critiquing what we think, critiquing… Everything.

These voices are always there – welling up from our subconscious – harping on us. Getting them to shut up is almost impossible… like nailing jello to a tree.

Daily Writing Tip 59 of 100, Beginning the Story Before the Beginning

Posted on by Bill Chance

For one hundred days, I’m going to post a writing tip each day. I have a whole bookshelf full of writing books and I want to do some reading and increased studying of this valuable resource. This will help me keep track of anything I’ve learned, and help motivate me to keep going. If anyone has a favorite tip of their own to add, contact me. I’d love to put it up here.

Today’s tip – Beginning the Story Before the Beginning

Source – How to Write a Damn Good Novel by James N Frey

Where, then, do you start your narrative of consequential events involving worthy human characters? Usually, you begin just before the beginning.

This is not as contradictory as it sounds. If you look at a man’s life in its entirety, there will be high spots and low spots, good times and bad. You will select from that life one particular story to tell, say the time your subject got fired from Bromberg & Bromberg and went into business for himself. You choose this story to tell because it is, in your opinion, potentially the most dramatic, exciting, and fresh.

Where exactly would you begin to relate your narrative of events? The best place would probably be just before the firing. The firing itself marks the beginning of the story. But we can’t understand the impact of the firing unless we understand what the character’s situation was before he was fired. Is the firing a good thing or a bad thing for him? If it’s a horrible job and the character should leave it, the firing is a relief. If he needs the job desperately and the firing represents impending ruin, you have a totally different situation. Events can only be understood within the context of the character’s situation at the time the event occurs; therefore it’s important to the reader to know the status quo situation, which is the state of things at a particular time.

Despite the title of the book this is particularly good advice for Short Story Writers and it is stated in a particularly good way, “Begin right before the beginning.”

No backstory, no flashback, no prologue, no nuttin’ – find the upsetting incident and go back a few beats and start typing.

Easy peasy.

All They Did Was Persist

Posted on by Bill Chance

“Shit, money, and the World, the three American truths, powering the American mobility, claimed the Slothrops, clasped them for good to the country’s fate. But they did not prosper… about all they did was persist”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge Dallas, Texas

Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge
Dallas, Texas

Daily Writing Tip 58 of 100, The Distrust of Technique

Posted on by Bill Chance

For one hundred days, I’m going to post a writing tip each day. I have a whole bookshelf full of writing books and I want to do some reading and increased studying of this valuable resource. This will help me keep track of anything I’ve learned, and help motivate me to keep going. If anyone has a favorite tip of their own to add, contact me. I’d love to put it up here.

Today’s tip – The Distrust of Technique

Source – The Writing of Fiction by Edith Wharton

The distrust of technique and the fear of being unoriginal-both symptoms of a certain lack of creative abundance-are in truth leading to pure anarchy in fiction, and one is almost tempted to say that in certain schools formlessness is now regarded as the first condition of form.

I’m not sure if I think “pure anarchy” is the biggest problem in fiction right now (unless you consider teenaged vampires and the like “pure anarchy”) but the advice is good, nevertheless.

What I think she is saying is that originality for its own sake is never a good idea and that some sort of form is necessary if you want to connect with the reader.

On the other hand, if you have come up with your own unique form – and you have thought it out and have an idea, a point, and a clue…. Then go for it.