Genius writing advice, or why my friend B is brilliant

Text conversation:

Me: This page is very white and blank. *glares at it*

B: Quick! Type your favorite word on it.

Me: *does*

B: See?  You can't glare at your favorite word.

And she's right.  And the page isn't blank anymore.  And I can probably just do a "Find/Delete" on all instances of "defenestration" before I call this manuscript done.

The no-longer-blank page now has 200 words it didn't have 20 minutes ago.  Only one of them refers to throwing someone out of a window.

I want to be a writer when I grow up.

I said this to myself when I was about eight.  I remember it really clearly because we learned to write haiku in third grade and I had so much fun playing around with the syllables, even though I'm sure my attempts were pretty terrible.

My eight-year-old self has her wish, but there are a few things I wish I could tell her at the moment of that revelation, just to prepare her:

Dear Small Self,

Writers spend a lot of time not writing, or at least not writing books.  Some of it is related to writing books, though.  There are edits and outlines and synopses, where you write the whole book in five pages before you write it in four hundred.  Yeah, I know.  You still have to do it.  There's something called social media for making friends and getting people to learn your name, and you'll find out all about that when the Internet becomes a Thing You Can Play With.  Right now it's just something computer people have.

You'll also spend a lot of time not writing books because, again, someone invented this Internet thing.  There will be strange, amazing, as-yet-unheard-of entities called Twitter and Wikipedia.  Please, don't let these take up too many hours.  That also goes for a thing called an iPad and its very reason for existing, Angry Birds.  It's coming.  Prepare yourself.  (But if you're curious, you're actually pretty good at it.)

Small Self, I have to tell you you're not quite done with the magic of bath crayons.  Oh, you'll find more fun things to play with in the next few years, like skip-its and Dungeons & Dragons and boys, but, in the end...bath crayons.  You'll need them because your best, most creative ideas will come in the shower, and you'll work your way out of that seemingly impenetrable plot tangle while you have suds in your eyes.  Your friends will come over, have a glass of wine, and emerge from the bathroom asking, "Why do your tiles say, 'Speakers = Eggs'?" 

You'll have to answer them.  That, though, is good practice for talking about your work, which you will do with friends, critique partners, agents, editors, the cute tattooed guy who works at your local bookstore.  And I want you to remember that, in big and small ways, these people have your back.  They want to read, sell, and promote your book.  They want you to succeed.  Give them the satisfaction of doing just that.

And, on that note, treasure every hour you get to write.  There'll be times when you can't (see above) and times when it's hard and times when it's easy.  Value them all.  Small Self, you get what you want, and nothing will make you happier.  Trust me on this one. 

Don't write someone else's book.

No, this isn't a post about plagiarism, although that's an interesting subject.  This is about an obvious writing lesson I really had to learn the hard way.

Writers are told to read widely in their chosen genre/age group/subject matter etc, so we know what's out there, what's been done.  I touched on this briefly in an earlier post, but that can be a double-edged sword for people, like me, who tend to accidentally pick up on style and let that color whatever I'm writing.  I know enough now to steer clear of things where that's a risk.

Unfortunately, for a long time that didn't stop me from doing it intentionally.  I have this project I've been working on for...a long time.  I've redrafted and reinvented this thing more times than I can count.  I'm determined to make 2012 the year I'm happy with it.  And for years (not kidding, years) I've told myself that it's a specific kind of book and so it needs to have a specific kind of voice.  I've fought with my protagonist, my supporting cast, my villains.  I've been thisclose to throwing my computer out the window and abandoning the idea completely, but I can't because I love it too much.

2011 was a busy year.  I wrote a different book, did several rounds of edits, found an agent, edited some more, CODA went on submission--and that's just the stuff related to that one book.  I have a Real Life that demands attention, too, just like everyone else.

I was tired of fighting Secret Project.  For a while at the end of last year, the temptation was again there to abandon it, but fuck that.  In one of those moments of bizarre lucidity that only come from some form of exhaustion, I finally saw that there's a different way to stop fighting.  I can just write like me, and let the damn story be told the way I want it to, the way the characters have demanded from the start.  Yeah, there are some rules that I need to adhere to, like not swearing up a storm in a MG manuscript, but I'm allowed to use my voice.  I don't need to use the voices of the writers whose ranks I hope to join with this book.  I'm allowed my style, my fun.

And it will be better because of that.

I'm wide awake now, and I don't think it's the 4,876 cans of diet coke.

Smashing glass

Oh, how I wish I could remember where I read this, because it's maybe the best practical, really specific writing advice I've ever read.  If anyone out there knows where this came from, PLEASE tell me.  If by some miracle of the interwebz the person who wrote it sees this, please let me know.  I want to credit you, and possibly kiss you if you're into that kind of thing.

Maybe a year ago I was mooching around online, link hopping through various blogs and writing sites.  I came across a thing on backstory that has stuck with me since and which I'm conscious of every time I sit down with my beloved Scrivener.

I'm haunted by the dreaded infodump, where you cram a whole book's worth of worldbuilding into a few clumsy pages of narrative, but it's hard to think of how to avoid it.  This thing I read (WILD paraphrasing to follow) said to picture my backstory as a sheet of glass.  It's the window into the world I'm creating.  Now, take that sheet of glass and smash it over my manuscript.  Let shards litter the pages from beginning to end.  Break up any big chunks that remain.

I became so enamored with this way of looking at it while writing CODA that on many occasions, a close friend would gchat me to ask how things were going and I'd say, "Oh, you know, just smashing the glass."  Code for, "Please, writing gods, do not let me shove the CODA-verse down readers' throats in undigestible lumps."

I hope I haven't.  I hope I never do, in any world I create.

To add my own thoughts to this, sometimes the glass will be stained, a prism of color.  Sometimes it'll have ripples, or bubbles, or be thicker at the bottom than the top.  (A phenomenon that occurs in very, very old windows, from back when glassmaking techniques were different.  This may be getting too technical.  I'm nothing if not skilled at stretching a metaphor far beyond reasonable limits.)  Anyway, it's my world.  Its backstory will be uniquely my own, with idiosyncrasies only I could come up with.

Just smash it up.  And if I can't, if there's a place where it's truly necessary to have a big, unbroken sheet, Windex the hell out of it.

Books I'm reading...or not.

I'm sure I'm not the only one out there who needs to steer clear of certain kinds of book while writing.  During the CODA process, I had to give up sci-fi completely, and even a lot of other kinds of fiction written by people whose style stuck in my head too easily.  I wound up reading a lot of non-fiction, especially biographies and travel memoirs, and re-reading a lot of Terry Pratchett.  (I love the Discworld books, but the style was never going to infect me.  I'm totally incapable of bringing that level of funny.)  I celebrated finishing CODA by reading John M. Cusick's excellent GIRL PARTS.*

Now, I'm writing two books at the same time.  One is a kind of companion novel to CODA, so all of the above still applies.  The other one means that I can't re-read any of the fantasy series I love so much.  Including Narnia and Harry Potter.  My soul is crying.  If that's not incentive to finish the book, I don't know what is.

What I am/have been reading recently:  A lot of contemporary YA, in particular John Green's amazing THE FAULT IN OUR STARS. (I don't really need to link that, do I?  You all have a copy?  Good.)  Also, all the Bill Bryson travel memoirs I haven't read yet (there aren't many on that list), THE MASTER AND MARGARITA again to see if I understand more of what the hell is going on the second time around, and a few reference books on plot and style I dip in and out of.

It's important to know and ready widely in your genre, but equally important to let yourself fall behind on that reading while you write.  You know, YOUR book.  The one that's nothing like anyone else's.  You can always catch up.

Mostly, though, I'm writing another book I want to read.

*And with a bottle of Bombay Sapphire.  The author made up a drinking game for me based on the book.  HA!

Writing what you know is crap

I find myself with a little writing-related time on my hands while Second Novel brews in my head and Weird Novel is beginning to make its first tentative steps out into the wide, scary world of queries, so I thought I'd blog about part of the writing process today.  The title really says it all, but it's worth saying twice: writing what you know is crap.  The (many) of you (us) out there who write speculative fiction, sci-fi, and fantasy prove that.  We've never been on a spaceship, had magical powers, been a vampire/werewolf/vegetable lamb (my personal favorite mythological creature/supernatural being of your choice.

So, here's the thing.  Don't write what you know, write what you can extrapolate.  For all the wide range of human emotions and experiences, the nuts and bolts of those things don't change that much.  Guilt is guilt, whether it's over breaking that jug your mother was fond of or crashing that spaceship prototype into the Ocean of Storms.  You know what your first kiss felt like, so when you write about it, it doesn't matter whether the other participant in your fictional game of tonsil-hockey is a cute guy in your protag's drama club or a demon from the depths of hell (but he's TRYING to be a better person, Mom, honest!)

Sit down at your keyboard, think back to a time when you felt the *thing* you want your protagonist to feel.  That's where it starts.  Subjects and settings...that's all research, and we've never lived in a better time for having access to information.  You're (probably) writing because you want whoever reads your work to be emotionally affected, invested, to cry when your protag does, laugh when they do, cheer when something great happens.  That's what has to be real, that's what you have to know.  You already do-you've been navigating the world through a haze of emotions Spock would disapprove of since you could walk.  Write from the heart.  You know that.