Category Archives: Writing

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.

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.

Daily Writing Tip 57 of 100, Obsessions

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 – Obsessions

Source – Writing Down the Bones – Freeing the Writer within by Natalie Goldberg

Every once in a while I make a list of my obsessions. Some obsessions change and there are always more. Some are thankfully forgotten.

Writers end up writing about their obsessions. Things that haunt them; things that they can’t forget; stories they carry in their bodies waiting to be released.

Making a list of my obsessions… that actually sounds like a pretty good idea. It will have to be kept private though. I don’t want anyone to think… I don’t want anyone to know how crazy I am.

You do write about your obsessions and you are afraid that you’re the only one with those obsessions. That never happens, though. It turns out there are not as many obsessions out there as you think they are. They are common and often banal.

Daily Writing Tip 56 of 100, Don’t Be a Chimp

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 Be a Chimp

Source – Gotham Writers Workshop: Writing Fiction: The Practical Guide From New York’s Acclaimed Writing School

“If I could have reached my rod I would have blown his guts out.”
—-The Big Kill, Mickey Spillane

So let’s see where we are in the creative process. Promising ideas + hard work = good fiction. Well, not quite. Something is still missing.

To tell a story effectively, you will need some mastery of craft. By craft we mean the time-tested practices that have proven helpful to the construction of good fiction.

Good writing comes down to craft far more than most people realize. True, anyone can write a story without training, which separates fiction writing from such activities as performing heart surgery or piloting a helicopter. But a working knowledge of craft is almost always necessary to make a story really good, worthy of being read by all those strangers. You could build a chair without any knowledge of woodworking because you have a good idea of what a chair is like. You would cut the wood and hammer the pieces together, and sure enough you would have a chair. But it would probably be wobbly, unsightly, and destined to break. It certainly wouldn’t sell. The same is true of fiction.

You should learn craft because it works. The “rules” of fiction craft weren’t created by any one person in particular. They simply emerged over time as guiding principles that made fiction writing stronger, in much the same way the mortise-and-tenon joint emerged as a good way to join parts of a chair.

When I read of learning craft I think of Malcolm Gladwell and his ten thousand hours. The idea is that it takes ten thousand hours of practice to get really good at something… and, conversely, if you spend ten thousand hours at something, you will get good at it.

I wish I could go back in time to when I was a teenager. I would tell me, “Write for two hours a night, most nights; three hundred days a year. In seventeen years, you will be a writer.”

If I had started at, let’s say, thirteen – I would have been a real writer by thirty. I could live with that.

But I didn’t know that at thirteen. Nobody told me about the ten thousand hours. Shame. So many years wasted.

Daily Writing Tip 55 of 100, Create Conflict

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 – Create Conflict

Source – How to Write a Short Story – The Ultimate Guide to Putting It All Together, In Your Head And On the Page, a Sparknotes book by John Vorwald and Ethan Wolff

Once you have a germ of an idea for your story, you’re ready to figure out what the conflict is. Conflict is the opposition of people or forces against one another. That opposition can take many forms in fiction: it can happen between people, over ideas or feelings, or from natural or manmade circumstances.

Conflict is essential to short stories because it will spawn your story’s central problem and provide obstacles for your character to overcome before resolving that problem. Conflict activates your characters and creates the tension that engages the reader. When you write a short story, you select and dramatize a defining moment or event in a character’s life. That event create change – change in the character, his or her circumstances, and/or his or her life. For that change to occur, your character will have to confront a problem or crisis.

Germ – Conflict – Characters…. that’s really all there is to a story. The rest is all gravy.

Daily Writing Tip 54 of 100, Understanding Metaphor

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 – Understanding Metaphor

Source – Writing Life Stories, How To Make Memories Into Memoirs, Ideas Into Essays, And Life Into Literature by Bill Roorbach

Let’s consider some of the many forms metaphor takes before we get back to writing.

Think, for example, about those troublesome analogies on the SAT. You know, X is to Y as XX is to YY.

Here, let’s do one. Fill in the blank: train is to track as airplane is to _____.

Most would say sky.

Each element of an analogy is called an analog. In the above example, train is the analog for airplane, track is the analog for sky. All are comparisons not using like or as, by the way, and certainly metaphorical. And in this example (as in most) magical. No, I mean it: magical.

Think of it: our minds easily and completely accept the idea that dense, heavy bars of extruded steel manufactured by humans are similar to – analogous to – the sky. Which is air.

I love this idea – the concept of all writing as metaphor. It’s true, it really is, and makes things so much simpler. Think of how useless school is. Think of all the times you had to write down the definition of metaphor… of all the times you had to pick out the metaphor in some hoary old chestnut of a text snippet… of all the times you had to write down the difference between a simile and a metaphor.

All that sucks the magic out of writing and reading. There is so much magic sucking going on in school.

It’s no surprise that nobody reads anymore.

Daily Writing Tip 53 of 100, Working Habits

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 – Working Habits

Source – The Basic Formulas Of Fiction by Foster-Harris

What you have to do is something probably far different from anything you ever did in school. You have to realize that your mind is like a mirror with two surfaces: a shiny, reflecting, front surface, and a dark surface deep down behind

You have been taught to use mainly the bright, shallow, front surface. Do you remember how many times you memorized in school what you thought would be asked in the examinations, remembered it just long enough to get it down on the examination paper, and then, an hour later, could not recall anything that you wrote? Well, that which worked was your intellect, your surface mind. But what you have to do in writing is evoke images from deep down in the dark surface of your subconscious. You know, like in the trick mirrors in which strange images will appear if you breathe upon them just right?

This book was written in 1944 and is geared to someone writing for pulps, I guess (not that there is anything wrong with that) – and Foster-Harris (his first name does not appear in the book) comes across as dated and shopworn. But I suspect that there is a lot of truth here – basic and useful. Sometimes all that dated means is that it is a foundation, rather than a flourish.

And we all need a strong foundation.

Daily Writing Tip 52 of 100, You Will Never Fool Anyone Else If You Can’t Fool Yourself

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 – You Will Never Fool Anyone Else If You Can’t Fool Yourself

Source – Narrative Design by Madison Smartt Bell

Ultimately you have to believe. If it is not real for you, you cannot talk about it persuasively. Because the writing of fiction is all about producing an illusion, it’s all-important that you believe in the illusion absolutely. You will never fool anyone else if you can’t fool yourself.

All the rest is craftsmanship.

Narrative Design is an interesting book. First of all it is a Textbook – a more formal tome designed to be used in a classroom setting to teach people how to write fiction.

I have bad memories of trying to learn to write in school. Bad enough to make me a chemist rather than a writer and bad enough that it took me twenty five years to write anything fictional after I graduated.

It also talks a lot about fiction workshops and about the Iowa Model of fiction workshops.

I’m not convinced that does any good at all.

Daily Writing Tip 51 of 100, Misfits Don’t Fall in Love

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 – Misfits Don’t Fall in Love

Source – Burning Down the House, Essays on Fiction by Charles Baxter

The distrust that many Americans harbor for any community except the family has helped to make us a nation of politically misallied misfits. Misfits don’t want to join political parties or fall in love. They want to light out for the territories, proclaim their belief in purity, acquire some firepower, and stay clean. They think of themselves as heroic. The quest is secondary and often incoherent and unintelligible. It is undertaken in the condition of cheerfulness – think of the recent crazy-rictus candidacies of Ross Perot or Steve Forbes. Cheerfulness, as Robert Bly has argued, is a deeply Puritan emotion, frozen and static, as opposed to joy, which is transfigurative. America, as visitors never tire of pointing out, is full of vaguely sinister cheerfulness. Your murderer smiles at you when they shoot you. Robert DeNiro caught this quality in his performance in Taxi Driver. The crazier Travis Bickle gets the more he grins.

I don’t think this is a writing tip as much as it is an example of how a writer can look at characters in a complex, unique, and multi-dimensional way. I think there should be at least one Misfit in every story – actually, I think every character should be a Misfit in their own idiosyncratic way.

Oh, and this is interesting in how it illuminates our present political predicament. Today, Ross Perot or Steve Forbes would be considered the sane candidate. I think I would be less afraid of Travis Bickle than I am of Donald Trump.

Daily Writing Tip 50 of 100, When Time Stops

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 – When Time Stops

Source – Writing in Flow by Susan K Perry

You may find that time becomes essentially irrelevant. When the writing session is over, you may find yourself astonished at how much time has actually gone by. Numerous writers said this is exactly what happens to them.
…
Flow’s timelessness, for some of us, is the best part of the experience, highly valued for its own sake. It feels incredible.

That feeling of timelessness is why we do… anything, really. I’ve never had a feeling of timelessness in the hours spent making sure my TPS reports have proper cover sheets.

The opposite side of this timelessness is how exhausted you can feel when it is over. But it is a kind of good exhaustion – earned exhaustion – spent.