Doing one thing at a time

Points of Departure is now for sale!

As you can see, we have made the leap to a new host for the web site. There are still a few problems shaking out, so new posts may suffer from odd timing for a few weeks, but I am hopeful that everything will be sorted out soon. Next comes the web site redesign.

As I mentioned ages ago before the move, writing generally requires doing many things at the same time. Still, there are times when any writer may decide to focus on one particular aspect of writing above all the others. Maybe they want to learn a new technique, like writing flashbacks or doing stream-of-consciousness. Other times, they’re trying to correct a problem with their process, as when they decide their Internal Editor’s constant criticism is slowing down their production. Still other times, the writer has a known weakness in one particular area (dialog, action, characterization, description…) that they have determined needs bringing up to the same level as the rest of their skills.

There are two main ways to approach this problem, each of which has advantages and disadvantages. First, you can find or come up with specific exercises that give you focused practice doing whatever-it-is: write three pages in nothing but dialog; or write a car chase, a brawl in a bar, and a battle scene, one after another; or fill three pages every morning as fast as possible without stopping or editing. Second, you can deliberately select a writing project that will force you to address the thing you want to work on a lot more frequently than whatever you normally write.

One advantage of finding or coming up with exercises is that they are focused, frequently extremely focused. For instance, I’ve seen quite a few dialog exercises that want the writer to write two or three pages of talking heads – nothing but dialog and the occasional speech tag. This provides lots of practice with the problem area in a relatively short time. And that’s the other advantage of exercises: they are generally short, usually no more than three pages (and sometimes only a paragraph). As a result, the author can tackle the same problem from three or four different angles over a couple of days, writing two pages of dialog between an old woman and a young boy, then two pages between a medieval king and his squire, then three pages of random strangers in a bar talking, then a romantic dinner conversation, and so on. It’s very difficult to find a piece of pay copy that will allow one to cover that much variety in a couple of days, unless you’re the sort of burst writer who can put in 16 hours a day for a week and end up with 40,000 good words at the end of it.

The main disadvantage of exercises, in my experience, is that they are focused. That is, they can help one figure out how to produce a particular kind of thing, but they don’t necessarily help with integrating that thing into all the other things that need to be there in the finished piece. Consequently, there is sometimes a tendency for new writers who’ve done a lot of exercises to simply string them together: first, there’s a lump of narrative characterization, then there’s two pages of dialog with maybe a couple of speech tags, then there’s another lump of description, then a bit of action. It reads like driving over a corduroy road, even when each bit is, taken alone, well done.

One way to fix this problem (which is for some their regular working method) is layering: starting with one very specific thing (often dialog) and then making additional passes to add description, body language, internal dialog, action, and so on. This can work quite well if one has a good idea of how many additional layers are needed and what they are; it doesn’t even matter if one misses something, as long as it isn’t the same thing missing in every scene. Few writers are as conscious and analytical as is needed to make this work as their standard process, but it can be really useful in itself as an exercise for integrating all the various things that need to be in a scene.

Unfortunately, there are some things for which writing a two-page exercise is not much help. Macro-level stuff like pacing, character growth, and plot is hard to address outside of an actual story. And sometimes the problem with one’s dialog or action or description turns out not to be with doing the thing itself – the writer has no trouble doing a page of realistic-sounding dialog or a lovely paragraph of description – but with integrating it into the rest of the story.

For this kind of thing, the second method (come up with a project that requires you to do lots of whatever-it-is) is the most logical approach. It’s on-the-job training, and it can be extremely effective. It’s ideal for those of us who are chronically impatient to get down to the real work. One can learn any writing skill one needs to know by using it, with the added bonus of ending up (theoretically) with a saleable story at the end. And one can also be pretty sure that one will be able to integrate that skill in future works, because that’s how one learned to do it in the first place.

The first catch is that working this way does not guarantee that one will end up with a saleable finished product. Most writers are perfectly OK with writing a two-page exercise that they know isn’t ever going to be anything but an exercise. They’re a lot less OK with writing a twenty page short story or a 300-page novel that turns out to be seriously flawed, even if improves a specific skill. And if the writer’s problem is with something at the macro level, it is entirely possible that writing one novel isn’t going to teach them enough to get that skill up to an acceptable level.

Which is the other catch: writing a whole novel, or even a couple of short stories, usually takes a lot longer than doing a couple of focused exercises. Novels not only take a lot of time, they involve a lot of different skills, and it is easy for the writer to get distracted. The story that was planned as a way to learn to really dig into characterization and growth slips gradually into the kind of action-adventure that the writer is already familiar with and comfortable doing (or vice versa). Furthermore, because there are a lot of different skills in play, the writer doesn’t get as much practice at any one of them, so the learning curve seems a lot longer and more time-consuming than it ought to be.

A mixed approach seems to work best for most writers, especially at the start of their careers, but it really, really depends on temperament and personal style. I loathe most writing exercises, and for the first twenty years of my career I didn’t use them at all because “write a scene that meets these requirements” was something that I felt I could just as well do in pay copy. It worked for me…but looking back, I’d have gotten a handle on some things a lot faster if I’d had the patience to do a few of those annoying exercises.