The best was easy: “Learn to type.”

My mother was the first to give me that particular bit of writing advice, though I’ve seen it since coming from a variety of authors, including Ursula le Guin and Isaac Asimov. But Mom was the one who made me take the secretarial typing class in high school (which you had to type 55 words per minute to pass) instead of the college student class (which you only had to be able to type 20 words per minute to pass). Mom, I owe you.

There are a bunch of reasons that still make this good advice, though there are writers who prefer a pen or pencil and paper for their first drafts. If it really is part of your process to slow things down and handwrite, stick to it. For the rest of us, though, there are two advantages, the first being the obvious speed of production gained by being able to touch-type at 55+ words per minute (after 40 years of practice, I think I’m a lot faster than 55 wpm, but I haven’t done a typing test in a very long time).

The other advantage of touch typing is less obvious and has to do with ergonomics and the long run. I have a good friend who essentially wore her neck out by spending thirty years looking from fingers/keyboard up at the computer screen and back down to keyboard, over and over, every few minutes. The doctor said it was like bending a spoon back and forth, over and over – eventually, the metal weakens and gives. Not something I ever want to have to worry about on such a personal basis.

(One can, of course, use dictation software to avoid the whole problem…but I also know someone who, having blown out her wrists typing 16 hours a day on a non-ergonomic keyboard, proceeded to blow out her vocal chords, i.e., gave herself semi-permanent laryngitis, by overusing dictation software. Possible the second bit of Really Good Writing advice should be “Don’t work 16 hour days on a regular basis.”)

The worst advice was a lot harder to pin down. The first thing that came to mind was “Learn your craft by writing short stories; don’t even think of trying a novel until you’re selling reliably as a short fiction writer.” The second one was “Get up half an hour earlier to write.”

The first one was demonstrably bad advice for me: I am a natural novelist, who wrote and sold five entire novels before finally managing to sell a short story. There are natural short fiction writers for whom the opposite is true.

Of course, when that advice was given to me, there was still a lively short story market in the SF/F field, and there were even still places you could sell literary/mainstream fiction for actual money (as opposed to being paid in copies of the magazine). Then the short fiction market pretty much vanished. The Internet is bringing it back a bit, but since I do very few short stories, I’m not that conversant with what markets are available for short story writers.

Still, whatever market is or isn’t out there, it remains true that a good X will sell sooner than a lousy Y, where X is whatever length comes naturally and Y is whatever doesn’t. And you are much more likely to do a better job on what comes naturally than on something that’s hard. Of course, if you are a genius brimming with talent, you may write a brilliant X, while your Y is merely good; the brilliant X is still likely to sell faster than the merely good Y, but the good Y is going to be far enough beyond the usual slush pile content that you’ll have a decent shot at selling it. Being a genius is, however, something that few of us can judge for ourselves, so it’s best not to count on it.

Getting up half an hour early to “squeeze in” writing time is something that sounds good in theory, but I don’t know anyone it actually works for. Staying up half an hour longer never seems to be recommended, but it does work for some folks I know…provided they have time to catch up on their missing sleep periodically.

Because the big problem with taking half an hour out of your sleep time is that if you short yourself on sleep for very long, your brain starts to crinkle up and shut down. And the first thing to go seems to be one’s creative juice.

All of the folks I know who make “stay up half an hour longer” work are people who do not have to get up and go to work in the morning, so they can sleep in an extra half hour or hour (and sleeping in is a lot more attractive than going to bed early, for most of us). To make “Get up half an hour early” work in the long run, one would also have to go to bed half an hour earlier, so as not to incur a growing sleep deficit, and nobody I know wants to do that.

You may have noticed that both my best and worst advice don’t have much to do with choosing the words one puts on paper. Anyone who’s been reading this blog for a while knows how I feel about all the writing “rules” that are out there (hint: not positive), but in my experience, the absolute worst advice is aimed at the process itself. Because once you get the words down on paper (or in pixels), you can fix them if you’ve messed something up, but if you mess up the process, you may very well never get the words down in the first place.

That said, nearly every writer does some prewriting, even the serious seat-of-the-pants types, even if it’s mainly in their heads. There are basic decisions to be made about intended length, starting point, viewpoint character, place and time, even “I am writing a novel” vs. “I am writing a screenplay.” How much prewriting any given writer does … well, that depends.

And what it depends on is the purpose the prewriting serves for that particular author.

Prewriting can serve to clarify a story in the writer’s mind. It can prime the pump, increasing the writer’s interest, enthusiasm, and general idea-pressure so that the story will start off with a rush of writing. It can clear away the false starts. It can help determine a direction or a theme or a structure for the story. It can improve the writing flow for the rest of the book. It can help avoid wrong turns and “stuck” places and problems, making both the writing and the revision process easier and smoother.

But prewriting will do none of these things automatically. There are a million-plus websites that talk about prewriting, and most of them talk about techniques like brainstorming, mind-mapping, character and setting creation, choosing a theme, etc. What they don’t talk about is why bother…and/or why not to bother, and that makes all the difference.

One of the websites I looked at broke down the prewriting process into steps. Steps #2, 3, and 4 were, respectively, “pick an audience,” “decide on a theme,” and “draw a map.” There’s nothing wrong with doing any of those things as a part of prewriting…if they happen to serve the writer’s purpose in doing prewriting.

I expect my prewriting to clarify the story, and then to improve my writing flow and help me avoid wrong turns. Picking an audience does nothing to help me with that (or perhaps it is more correct to say that I have no need to pick any audience other than myself). Deciding on a theme is, I have found, monumentally counter-productive for me; far from improving my writing flow, it tends to impede it.

Maps – OK, I do maps…but not always. It depends on whether I think I’m going to need one in order to keep straight where everything is and what all the place-names I’m throwing off go with. I find it a lot easier to glance at a map to see where Puerto del Oeste or Dangil is than to look up a description on a list, especially since the map tells me at a glance where it is compared to everything else, while the description is likely to only mention a couple of key locations that it’s north or east or south of. And I won’t necessarily need a map if I’m telling a story set entirely on one farm, or even in a city. I might want a floor plan showing which bedrooms each of my sixteen characters is in, but then again, it might not be important.

The point is that this sort of checklist doesn’t address my real question, which is “What do I need to know now, in order to make this story easier to write later?” If my main purpose in prewriting were to increase my enthusiasm and idea-pressure, what I’d need to do in those early stages would be different, depending on what sorts of things I thought were likely to get me pumped up about writing this particular story. (And even then, different things work for different writers. I get pumped up by talking about the story to lots of people; some of my friends get pumped up by not talking about it, so that the urge to get the story out is dammed up and gets stronger and stronger until they have to start writing.)

What I do for prewriting varies from book to book, and experience indicates that what is effective as prewriting varies from writer to writer. Among the things that can be helpful, depending, are: Drawing maps and floor plans. Making lists of characters, what they do for a living, and how they relate to other characters. Making a list of possible names of characters (so that when you suddenly need a name for the palace guard or cabby, you have a bunch of pre-generated names to pick from that all “sound right” for whatever world/country/culture you’re setting things in). Plot outlines, ranging in detail from the two-paragraph cover-letter summary to the thirty-to-fifty-page treatment. Brainstorming. Mind-mapping. Writing down bits and pieces of scenes. Drawing up a timeline. Research reading (especially if you’re doing a historical or semi-historical setting, but often useful even if you’re making everything up from scratch).

Some writers experiment a lot as part of their prewriting – trying out different viewpoints and viewpoint characters, or different possible openings, or different styles or voices. Basic decisions can also happen at this point, like whether it’s going to be a short story, novella, or novel; coming up with a theme; deciding on a structure or form; or deciding where the story begins and whether that’s also where the writing opens (or whether the writing opens somewhere else, and the beginning of the story comes later or as a flashback). You can decide whether there’s a McGuffin and what it is, or what level the main plot is going to be on (action, emotion, mental, spiritual).

Some of these things can be left to be determined when the need for them crops up during the actual writing; some will be inherent in whatever story idea the writer is starting with. For instance, Talking to Dragons started with the sentence “Mother taught me to be polite to dragons.” I didn’t have to decide what point of view to use or who the viewpoint character would be; I knew from that sentence that it was first person, and while I still had a lot of things to find out about the viewpoint character, I had his voice and a few key facts right there.

Nothing that is decided during prewriting is irrevokable. This puts a lot of people off the whole idea – why bother doing all that work, if you’re not going to stick to it? It depends, again, on why you’re doing it. For me, if I try out six wrong decisions during the prewriting stage, I’ve just saved myself months of going down blind alleys during the writing phase later on, so it’s worth it.

It doesn’t take much thought to realize that anyone who is writing a story set in a time/place/culture that they actually live in (and are therefore very familiar with) is not going to have to make up nearly as much as a writer who’s setting a story in a totally imaginary secondary world. There’s always some necessary research (it’s not what you don’t know that trips you up; it’s what you think you know that ain’t so), but mostly, the contemporary-real-world writer has to make up the specific circumstances and details of their characters’ lives and history. If they need an important historical figure to be a character’s influence or role model, they have an encyclopedia’s worth of folks to draw on, from thousands of years, countries, and cultures.

What I hadn’t thought about much until this weekend (when I was complaining to one of my exceedingly patient friends about the amount of backstory I feel it necessary to invent for The New Thing before I can actually sit down and start writing it) was that how much backstory one needs, in how much detail, is also a function of the type of story one is telling.

There’s an old saying that there are only two stories: a person leaves home, or a stranger comes to town. Regardless of how useful this is to think about as far as plots are concerned, it turns out to be a very important distinction (for me, anyway) when it comes to how much background/culture/backstory I have to know (and, if I’m not using a real or close-to-historical setting, make up) before I start writing.

Here’s why: A character who’s at home when a stranger comes to town is familiar with the status quo; the character has a life that’s steeped in the customs, culture, and history of the place they live. They usually take it all for granted, which means they don’t think directly about it much, yet this affects nearly everything they do, the way they think, the attitudes they have toward themselves and other people, and so on.

A character who leaves home is not moving through familiar territory. They’re off balance. Anything and everything, from social skills to architecture to fashion, can be different from what they’re used to. The character has to find out about customs, culture, history, etc. as they go along, and so does the reader…and the writer. Which means that the writer has more room to make up background as things go along and the character tries to make sense of this strange new world by connecting it with his/her familiar past.

In thinking about it, four of my first five novels have protagonists who are, one way or another, on a journey away from home. The fifth is dual-viewpoint, and one of the two POV characters is out running around away from everyone else. I didn’t start writing about people who stayed home until I started writing books based more closely on real history (specifically Snow White and Rose Red, which is set very firmly in Elizabethan England in 1582-3).

Looking at a number of my favorite long-running series, a lot of them begin with characters who are away from home – on a mission to another planet, stationed at a faraway outpost, discovered to have a talent and swept away from wherever they’ve lived so far. Once the writer has a few books under his/her belt – and has built up a lot of background in the process – they start showing the characters “at home,” writing prequels, or “historical” background novels, or finally allowing their main character to settle down and start having local adventures. In the few exceptions I can think of, either a) the series is strongly based in real-life history in some way, b) the characters think they understand their world but very quickly turn out to be wrong, or c) the author spent years working up background and backstory information before ever sitting down to write.

All of this is particularly relevant because the currently planned Work-in-Development involves a main character who is, so far as I’ve currently planned, not going anywhere. I’ve been complaining for months about how I keep trying to start writing and end up discovering that I need to make up more background before I can…and now I have some glimmer of understanding why.

The coming-of-age journey has been a staple of SF/F since its very early days. I’ve always more or less just accepted it – long before TV and Star Trek, science fiction was supposed to be about exploring strange new worlds, seeking out new life and new civilizations, and boldly going where no man has gone before. It still is; I’d just never before thought about the advantages that gives to the writer in quite these terms.

As a slight aside, this is one of the main reasons why beginning writers are so often urged NOT to write in first person: because many find it extra-difficult to get into someone else’s head when they’re writing “I” and for so many years “I” has meant them, the author, and not some totally different character. More on this in a minute.

Characters can be unlike their authors in a whole variety of ways, from relatively minor aspects of physical appearance (height, hair length, eye color), to their personality, to the moral and political views they hold, to more substantial things like race, ethnicity, age, gender, sexual orientation, cultural background, etc. And the first step toward writing somebody different is to notice that they are.

This may sound obvious, but it always surprises me how often people attribute their own life experience to characters without thinking. I ran across a twenty-something writer whose sixty-ish hero made a comment that as a teenager, he’d gotten an eyebrow piercing to freak out his parents. I could only shake my head. Any guy who grew up in 1960s suburbia did not get an eyebrow piercing or a tattoo; if he wanted to rebel, all he did was grow his hair to chin length. Shoulder length or longer, if he really wanted to freak out the grownups.

Even the little things like height and hair length affect your character’s actions. The greater the differences between the writer and the character, the more aware the writer has to be of how the differences affect everything else in the character’s life. Really big differences (like race or a significant difference in age or ability) often require research, even if the writer is working in a completely imaginary world with a made-up history and culture.

What with all those problems, it almost seems as if it would be easier for authors to write about people who are exactly like themselves. Unfortunately, most of us find it far more interesting to write about folks who are different from us (and besides, most of the authors I know have fairly ordinary lives, no matter what all those intriguing author bios say, which means that writing about somebody different makes for a much more interesting story).

So how do you write about somebody different?

It starts by thinking about him/her, and noticing the differences. All the differences, not just the large ones, because not only do all of the differences make a difference, they all interact and affect one another. A 6’7” teenaged boy is probably going to attract interest from the school basketball coach, whether he’s into sports or not; a 6’7” senior citizen is not (though basketball may have been his sport when he was young).

Then you think hard about all the ways in which those differences, and the interaction of those differences, might affect that character’s life experiences and about how they would react to both their past experiences and to the ones they’re going to have in your story. Not how you would react, because for you, suddenly being a different height, age, sex, race, etc. would be a change. For your character, it’s how things are in their life, and the difference that makes in their life experience ripples through everything else. 

From the character’s goals, motivations, and aspirations, to their reactions to other characters, to their speech patterns, anything can be different from your personal baseline, and all of those will be affected by their life experiences, which in turn will be affected by their physical, mental, and personality differences from the writer, so all of it has to be at least looked at and decided about. Even small things make for differences in behavior. The character who’s shorter than I am will have a step-stool handy for getting to the top shelf and use it without thinking; the one who’s a lot taller than me will see things on the top shelf and reach them easily, but might miss important clues that are lower down, and may have trouble banging into low doorways, slanted ceilings, etc.

It’s also important, especially with secondary and minor characters, to think at least briefly about your own reaction to them, where and how that reaction relies on stereotypes, and how you can change things up. Perhaps your first impulse is to make that minor bartender character a middle-aged, beer-bellied, balding dispenser of wise advice; if you stop to think about it, you can instead make the bartender a young woman working her way through college or a middle-aged character actor doing research for a part. It can help to remember that everyone has his or her own story…or it can be a distraction, depending on the writer.

Integrating all this into actually writing the character is another matter. For me, writing characters is a kind of cross between method acting and playing “let’s pretend” from when I was five. There’s always a little part of my brain that’s trying to pretend to be the character, warts and all. There’s another, more analytical part that’s always checking the character’s actions and dialog and reminding myself “This isn’t me here, is it? This is Jennie, or George, or Herman.” It can feel more than a little odd because in some scenes I have to stop every couple of lines to check on a different character’s actions/reactions. And then I do it all again during the revisions.

Some writers find it easiest to learn how to write different characters by writing someone who is very different from themselves right off the bat, because it’s easier for them to spot the places where they get off track. The big difference between them and the character makes it obvious when they slip and start writing their own reactions and opinions, rather than the character’s. For other writers, it’s easier to keep their characters consistent if they start with something closer to autobiographical and work up to the seriously-different characters in small steps. Some writers have to lay everything out in advance; others immerse themselves in research and reading and then wing it.

The exact process by which you get into your characters’ heads isn’t terribly important; as usual, every writer does it a bit differently, and whatever works for you is what you should do (though be aware that it may take a few tries to figure out what that is).

I’m not talking about writing specifics like dialog or characterization or syntax. I’m talking about process.

Let me explain.

Back when, I learned very quickly that if I took the attitude “I’ll fix it in the rewrite,” and simply plowed ahead as fast as I could without paying attention to the quality of my writing, my writing got sloppier and sloppier, until I wasn’t writing a first draft or even a zeroth draft, I was writing some semi-coherent notes that were hardly worth the time and energy spent on them. So I spent a lot of time learning not to get too far ahead of myself, and making it a habit to pay as much attention to how I was writing at any given moment as I paid to what I was writing.

Not that I give my Internal Editor free rein; far from it. But I found that some things were a lot easier to get right the first time than to hunt through the manuscript and fix later – things like unnecessary dialog tags, wordy or unclear sentences, descriptions that didn’t quite say what I wanted them to say.

Somewhere in the intervening thirty years, this way of working has…stopped working so well. Looking at it carefully, the problem appears to be that I got better at writing.

That sounds very odd, so let me unpack it a bit. The kinds of things I had to pay attention to, early on, were early-stage mistakes. As I got better at writing, getting those things right became a habit, and eventually almost automatic. Oh, my crit group still has to whop me upside the head every once in a while to remind me not to over/under-write, but it usually only takes one whop because it’s so obvious that all some has to do is say, “now, in this conversation here – ” and I interrupt with “Oh, rats, I did that thing again, didn’t I?” I also got enormously better at revising unsatisfactory stuff.

The combination means that slowly the kinds of things I need to pay attention to while writing changed. They got tinier and pickier on the sentence-by-sentence level, and larger and more sweeping on the structure level. A whole batch of new, not-possible-to-consider-until-a-draft-is-finished things cropped up in terms of plot flow and pacing and complications and balance, and I was still trying to get them right on the very first try.

The upshot is that, for quite a while now, there hasn’t been nearly as much payoff in paying attention to how I’m writing while I’m doing the writing. The things I most need to pay attention to have changed. I’m more interested in complicated plots and structures that require a lot of tinkering with after the first draft is done, because it’s impossible to tell on the first time through the manuscript what sorts of backfill will be needed and which scenes need to be added or deleted.

The other rather annoying change is that, due to the aforementioned complicated plots and structures, I need more pre-planning. My outlines are still all wrong, but they’re wrong in different ways from the way they used to be wrong. The characters are more likely to do what I thought they were going to do, but their reasons for doing it aren’t what I thought they would be, and this leads to needing more scenes on one side of the plot and fewer scenes on the other.

I’ve known since very early on that every book was at least slightly different in terms of the process it needed. Talking to Dragons and Sorcery and Cecelia were totally unplanned, sit-down-and-make-it-up stories; Snow White and Rose Red was much more constrained than usual both by the actual history I was playing off and by the fairy tale I was retelling; Mairelon the Magician had all sorts of charts of different characters’ relationships and position in the plot. Even so, I didn’t expect the particular change in process that’s crept up on me, especially since it’s a general change that appears to apply on a fundamental level to everything I write.

At least, it does right now. Ask me again in thirty years, and we’ll see how much else has changed.

Which leads me to the rather obvious conclusion that most people aren’t great cooks.

Because following recipes will get you a decent meal if you’re not trying anything too complicated, but it won’t get you a great meal except by pure luck. Fancy or complicated recipes, in my experience, often take several tries to get right even when you think you’re following the directions perfectly (my first try at puff pastry came out as quarter-inch-high hockey pucks).

Furthermore, you won’t get the best possible results by following a recipe exactly, because there are too many variables: how fresh the ingredients are, for instance, or how dry or humid the day is, or whether your oven temperature is accurate. A great cook has to adjust everything on the fly, from cooking time and temperature to whether to add an extra pinch of spice (or an extra tablespoon).

Old recipes assume the cook knows this (and really old recipes assumed that nobody had standardized measuring tools anyway), so they call for “butter the size of an egg” and “a pinch of salt.” These days, though, a lot of us have learned to follow modern recipes that specify everything from three cups of flour down to an eighth of a teaspoon of ginger, and we’re not comfortable unless we have something exact to follow.

Which is fine if all one wants to do is have a decent meal, but not the best idea if one wants a great one. All the really good cooks I know use recipes – if they use them at all – as a sort of starting guideline, adding and subtracting ingredients according to their own taste, experience, and inspiration.

Writing is like that.

There are certainly formulas for different sorts of fiction, and if one has a reasonably good grasp of grammar and syntax, one can produce a fairly readable story by following them. If that is all one does, though, it shows. (Although these days “fairly readable” is really not enough, if publication is your goal.) Great writers – if they bother with a formula at all – adjust it on the fly, adding and subtracting things until the end result is something beyond formulaic. Hamlet is more than a revenge tragedy; Henry V is more than a docudrama.

How you get to that point…well, different people use different routes. You can learn to cook by starting with recipes and trying a lot of similar ones, paying close attention to the similarities and differences and how they affect the outcome, or you can take a class, or you can hunt up some of the historical cookbooks and try out the recipes that aren’t so exact, or you can just throw different things in a pot every night and see what happens. You can learn to write by closely imitating your favorite writers, or by trying out several different plotting and development systems, or by taking a class, or by just sitting down and trying different things until they begin to come together.

Both cooks and writers need certain basic skills – chopping and dicing and mixing and so on for cooks, plotting and dialog and characterization and so on for writers – but again, how and when one learns them is up to the individual cook or writer. You may want to practice one specific thing for a couple of hours and then file the pages of dialog or freeze the chopped carrots; or you may do your practicing on the pay copy.

The one thing that isn’t optional in either case, though, is practice. You can learn a lot about cooking and ingredients and so on by reading cookbooks and watching cooking shows, but if that’s all you do, you aren’t a cook…and you won’t ever become one until you put on the apron and get in the kitchen and spend some time chopping and dicing and sautéing and baking. And there will be disasters (see hockey puck reference above).

You can learn a lot about writing by reading how-to books and blogs and analyzing other people’s work, but if that’s all you do, you’re not a writer. You need actual, on-the-ground experience to get good at it, and getting that experience takes time and effort, and there will be disasters. Some of the things you try won’t work the first time, or the second, or the eighth. Some of the things you are quite sure will never work turn out to be brilliant. You will hardly ever be able to tell in advance which is going to be which.

Cooks have to actually cook; writers have to actually write. Thinking, reading, or talking about it isn’t enough.

This comes as a great shock to some people, though anyone who’s actually thought much about it can surely see that there are plenty of achievements beyond “I can write well enough to get professionally published.” Still, even if you know intellectually that publishing your first novel isn’t the end of working hard, it’s usually a goal that the writer has been working toward for a long time, and one would really like to bask in the glory of reaching the top of the first ladder for a bit before taking that deep breath and starting to climb the next one.

Some folks, though, never seem to switch ladders. This is fine if you’re perfectly happy sitting at the top of the fan-and-unpublished-writers ladder while ignoring the professionally-published-writing-career ladder, but if you actually want a professional-publication-career, you have to work just as hard at climbing that ladder as you worked at climbing the first one.

Climbing that professional-career ladder takes more work, and different kinds of work, than the first. Most ambitious new professionals realize they’re going to need to do publicity work, and that in this day and age, that will mean having some sort of Internet presence (whether that’s heavily weighted toward social media like Facebook, Twitter, Livejournal, and the like, or whether it involves lots of guest blogging and activity on other people’s sites). There are lots of other things that the Internet makes easier, from ordering publicity bookmarks and postcards to doing specialized “pump up the buzz” contests and promotions. Lots of other things.

Unfortunately, there’s no reliable way of telling what things will actually have an impact on sales, and it’s far too easy to get so caught up in planning and executing one’s publicity campaign that one forgets (or can’t squeeze out the time for) writing the next book. (I’ve seen more than one instance where someone has spent so much time promoting their great new novel online that they haven’t had time to finish the thing. Do not make this mistake.)

The other difficulty is that having produced one publishable novel does not mean that the writer can stop worrying about the skill and craft part of writing and concentrate on their production-and-publicity responsibilities. No, it means that one has to do all the publicity and administration and production stuff (like revisions and copyedit and page proofs) while also writing the next book and trying to get better as a writer.

And it turns out that improving one’s craft does not just happen. You don’t improve your tennis backhand or your golf swing by whacking a huge bunch of balls at random for an hour a day. You improve by deciding to aim for a certain spot or location, hitting one ball, checking to see how you did, and then making an adjustment before you hit the next ball…and hitting a huge bunch of balls that way. Or by having an expert watch you hit one ball and then tell you how to correct your stance and your swing before you hit the next.

In other words, you get better by consciously and deliberately working at getting better. There are various ways to do this – working at exercises or prompts allows some writers to concentrate on specific problem areas, while other folks prefer to shoot for incremental overall improvement in their pay copy. Reading how-to-write books and blogs, or playing writing games with friends, or taking classes works for others. Critique groups are popular and helpful for a lot of folks. Studying other people’s work comes highly recommended (some advocate studying the classics, or the acknowledged “top hundred” works in one’s chosen genre; others advocate just as strongly studying the worst writing, because it’s often much easier to see what the writer is doing wrong).

I get a fair amount of mileage out of figuring out which areas and skills I need to improve, and then working out some way to improve them on my own – the figuring out and working out are important parts of my improvement process, just as much as actually doing whatever work I’ve decided to do. Other people like a more formal or more structured approach. The main thing is to do it – to work deliberately and consciously on improving one’s writing skills.

Because you never run out of room for improvement.

“No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” – Helmuth von Moltke

“A writer should always reserve the right to have a better idea.” – Lois McMaster Bujold

Prewriting notes – whether they’re about plot, background, or characters – are the writer’s battle plan, and therefore exceedingly important. Lots has been written about this aspect of writing, but there are really only two things that are absolutely vital to remember:

1. Every writer handles prewriting differently, and
2. Nothing is ever written in stone until the book is actually in print.

If you look at those two things long enough, you start asking yourself “Well, then, why bother planning at all, if there’s no right way to do it and if it’s not going to stay the same anyway?” All I can say is that, of all the authors I know well enough to have some idea of their work processes, only one or two do no pre-planning at all, and even they at least think about their stories a little before they sit down and write. Empirical evidence indicates that for most writers, planning works.

There are actually a bunch of other things that you may find useful to remember about planning, but they’re not things that everybody needs to remember. I really need to remember to spend enough time on the background and worldbuilding; I don’t seem to be able to get started until I have a solid feel for the world and its culture and history, as well as the more immediate background of the characters (i.e., how they heck did they get into the situation they’re in at the start of the story, and where do they think they’re going from here?). It’s a bit like looking at a chess problem – you know that there have been a bunch of moves made to get the pieces into this position, and before you decide what the next move is, you want to understand how they all got to this point.

But that’s me. I know writers who really need most of those pre-book moves to be unknown or undecided. They tend to be folks who have trouble changing their minds about “what happened” once they’ve made it up, and they need to leave lots of room for the pre-book events to change, in case they get to the middle of the story and discover that they need the bad guy to have stolen the crown jewels ten years ago, instead of having kidnapped the diplomat’s daughter (or vice versa, or in addition to).

Exactly what you have to do for prewriting, and how much, depends on how you think and how you write. Some people can figure this out by thinking about what works for them with other things, like cooking or learning to ski or building/making a new house or a new dress. For the rest of us, there’s trial and error.

You might need to work out who the characters are (or could be), and what their agendas and plans are, while leaving the plot strictly alone. Or you might need to work out the worldbuilding first, or a lot of the key events in the plot. Or you might need to do a massive plot tree, where you sketch out as many different ways the plot could go as you can think of, starting with “hero runs away to sea; gets berth as cabin boy, or doesn’t get berth, or is taken on as assistant by cook/sailmaker/?, or is mugged before he ever reaches docks…”

A couple of my friends do “zeroth drafts,” or what one of them refers to as “pseudocode” – a 100 to 150 page “draft” of what will eventually become a 400-page novel, which they later revise into a real first draft by adding scenes and incidents to explain plot twists or change the level of tension when it’s been too high or too low for too long. Often, adding these scenes alters the whole course of the rest of the book, which brings me to that second point.

However carefully you plan during your prewriting, it is never sacred and unchangeable. This is obvious, if you think about it a little. When you’re prewriting, you’re making stuff up – collecting materials (characters, plot turns, background), some of which you’ll use in the actual story draft. When you’re writing a zeroth or first draft, you’re making stuff up – only this time, it’s the specifics of exactly what was said, by whom, in what tone of voice, or exactly what was done, by whom, in what manner, and with what consequences. In other words, your brain is in making-stuff-up mode in both cases. So it’s not surprising for a writer to suddenly have a cool new idea in the middle of the draft that unfortunately means you have to change the plot, characters, or background in major ways. In fact, it’s more than unsurprising; it’s downright common.

Unfortunately, there seem to be a fair few writers out there who were scarred by their middle-school writing classes, and who think that once they have written an outline, they must stick to it. But if you’ve just had a really cool new idea that is going to make the story you’re writing even more interesting…why not use it? A more interesting, more effective, more surprising story is usually more desirable than the less interesting, etc., one.

Whatever the writer decides during any stage of the writing process, including prewriting, is subject to change without notice at any subsequent stage, right up until the book is published. Of course, it gets harder and more expensive to make major changes when the book is in production, but it’s still possible right up through the page proofs. If there’s a particularly egregious error, you can sometimes even talk the publisher into fixing it for the paperback version (e-books, of course, are a whole lot easier to fix at pretty much every stage of the game).

This does not mean things have to change in mid-story in order for it to be any good, nor does it mean that what changes must be large and significant. It depends on the writer. If you’re the sort who puts a lot of thought into your battle plan…er, outline and prewriting, the new ideas that you have while working on the first draft or revisions may be small tweaks that leave the main plot/characters/etc. mostly intact. If you’re the sort whose prewriting consists entirely of something like “I think I’ll write a book about a pirate,” and then you make it up as you go along, well, it’s much less likely that you’ll come up with something that changes your prewriting (though it’s possible, as when the book turns out to be about the pirate’s robot servant, or the noblewoman he captured, instead of about the pirate you started with).

One of the not-so-much categories comes in the form “If you (the writer) do X, the reader will also do X.” For instance, if the writer likes/dislikes the characters, the reader will dislike the characters. If the writer loses track of the plot, the reader will lose track of the plot. If the writer is having fun, the reader will have fun.

The trouble with this kind of pronouncement is that it confuses product with process. On the most basic level, there’s the matter of time. Most writers spend months or years producing a manuscript; most readers buzz through the same manuscript in days or hours. It’s relatively easy to remember the key hint or the bit of foreshadowing in Chapter Two if you read it within the last day; it’s not so simply if you wrote that bit two or three months ago. It’s even worse if you wrote it four months ago in Chapter Ten, moved it to Chapter Eight a month later, deleted it entirely when the front end of the story got reshuffled a week after that, then changed your mind and decided it needed to go in somewhere and tried it in three or four places before settling on Chapter Two as the right spot (for now) a month ago.

By the same token, the writer has to live with the characters – and their quirks – a lot longer than the readers do. The protagonist who was charming and fascinating at the start of the series can start to feel old and stale after the writer has lived with him/her for four or five years…but the readers, who’ve only had four or five weeks of the character over those same four or five years, frequently still find the character fresh and appealing.

In other words, what works in fiction that is read over a relatively short period – say a week – does not necessarily have the same effect when it is spread over months or years. What works for the reader may well not work in the same way for the writer.

Conversely, what works for the writer (or what the writer thinks is working) may not work for a reader who hasn’t been steeped in the story for weeks and months. Things a writer thinks are blindingly obvious (because he/she has been pondering the character’s motivation or the series of plot twists) may be totally opaque to most readers because the writer forgot (or didn’t think it necessary) to put it on the page. Things a writer thinks are just the right level of incluing may strike the reader as being beaten about the head and shoulders with hints (because the hints that the writer put in weeks apart, the reader is running across within minutes of each other).

Which brings me to the second part of the product-process confusion: the writer and the reader are not looking at the same thing. The reader has a finished product; the writer is working with an unfinished product, right up to the very end.

A story that’s in process is frequently very different from the final version. Not only does it change, it keeps on changing. As a result, the writer’s relationship to the story is very different from even the most dedicated and fanatical reader’s relationship to the story. The reader is looking at a porcelain teacup, finished and glazed. The writer is looking, at various times, at a lump of clay, a lopsided bowl that has to be squished down and reshaped, a mug-like cylinder that’s closer but still too tall, an unfinished cup that still needs to be fired and painted and glazed but that’s at least the right shape, and, eventually, the finished teacup…which may be a lovely and pleasing teacup, but which is nothing at all like the water pitcher the writer had in mind when she sat down with that lump of clay at the beginning of the process.

For writers, it’s as much about the journey as it is about the end result.

A lot of people have particular trouble with plot. I think there are a variety of reasons for that, but most of them start with the notion that there is One True Way to come up with and develop one. There also seems to be a serious lack of understanding of what a plot is, at least in some cases.

A setting is not a plot. An idea is not a plot, nor is a character (or set of characters). Matching up a character and a setting does not automatically produce a plot, though for some writers getting the match-up right is a first and necessary step that can trigger a cascade of useful ideas.

Yet time after time, when I ask a would-be writer what the plot is, I get a description of a character or a situation. These things can lead to plots, but that’s not what they are.

A plot, by my definition, is a sequence of events, nearly always tied together by causality, that involve characters and take place in a setting. I prefer the sort that have a problem to solve and some sort of resolution or closure at the end.

This is why so many writing-advice types claim that in order to write a satisfactory plot, the writer must know how the story is going to end. But actually, one doesn’t always need to know exactly how the characters will solve the central story-problem; for many writers, it is often enough just to know what the problem is, at least during the early chapters. However, if one doesn’t have a resolution in mind, one does have to keep alert so as to avoid writing oneself into a corner.

How a particular writer goes about plotting a book depends on two things: first, what bits of story-idea they’re starting with, and second, the writer’s personal preferences – whether she is usually most interested in the spiritual journey of the characters, or in displaying their competence at puzzle-solving, for instance.

Stories can and do start with any of the usual story-bits – plot, theme, idea, setting, character, even bits of description or dialog. Some of these require more development and decision-making than others; if the writer begins with a situation involving a couple of characters, it’s usually easier to figure out what problems these people will be having than it is if one begins with a general theme. If one begins with an idea and setting, but no characters, it can take a while to figure out who the players will be, what they want and need, and how their wants and needs will drive the idea to a conclusion. And so on.

This is where the writer’s personal preferences come in. Some writers like to surprise themselves, and for them, too much planning can kill a story stone dead. In extreme cases, all they can have to begin with are characters and a setting; they have to develop everything else as they write, including the central story-problem and especially the eventual resolution. (This working method sounds terribly, terribly tempting to those of us who need to do a certain amount of work before we ever sit down to type “Chapter One.” Going straight to the fun stuff and letting the characters develop it all sounds SO much nicer than working up a plot outline. If it’s not your method, though, it seldom is as easy as that.)

At the other extreme are the writers who need a detailed, step-by-step plan to follow – something that gives them a clear framework within which they can let their backbrain loose to be as wildly creative as it can within those strict limits. And strung out between those two extremes are the rest of us.

Personal preferences also influence where a writer goes to look for a plot. One of the most common ways is to examine the characters, looking at what each of them wants and needs, and at the internal and external obstacles preventing them from getting those things. Some writers make a list of things they want in the story, which can range from “bandit raid” to “heroine jilts hero at ball” to “use vines as metaphor” to “include family – little sister?” to “giant explosions!” Some look at what’s going on in their story-world – the politics, the natural disasters, the culture clashes – find something they’re interested in examining, and put together a plot by looking at ways of examining it.

All this sounds very general…and it is. There’s really no way I can think of to explain plot-construction that isn’t either very general principles, or else so tied to a specific story that it isn’t likely to be helpful to anyone but the author of that story. It’s always a balance between what the author finds interesting to write about and what is available from the story elements the author has. It’s kind of hard to write a comedy-of-manners if your idea is to have your character cast away alone on a desert island for 90% of the story.