Not Knowing How

One of my best friends is in need of some writing advice. She says: “I have vague ideas, or scenes, or a few lines of dialogue about a given idea, which I try to make notes of as they come. But I don’t know how or have the words to actually write it or string some words together.”

This bothers her a lot, and it’s not a problem I’ve personally experienced, so I don’t know what kind of advice to give her. Pat, could you possibly do a post on this sometime?

As always, it depends on what the basis of the problem really is. In this particular situation, I see a couple of possibilities. The three most likely are that it’s a story-development problem, it’s a perfectionism problem, or it’s a process problem. (Or a combination of all three, but that doesn’t really change the advice, it just means the advice has to cover all three things.)

Story development problem. For most writers I know, stories start with vague ideas, scenes, a character or two, or a few lines of dialogue. To get them to  the stage of actually being stories takes a) time and b) work. The ideas, characters, setting, even whole scenes, are seeds that need time and encouragement to sprout and grow into stories.

Story development is one of the areas that is hardest to describe, because the specifics tend to be different for different writers. For most beginners, it takes time and poking at whatever pieces they have. I’d suggest keeping an idea scrapbook – a notebook with two lines of dialog, a cool phrase, a neat description, whatever – not trying to connect or finish anything, just grab them. Once a week or once a month or so, read over the whole thing and see if any of the ideas collide into something more coherent. (It is entirely possible – normal, even – to have a line in the idea scrapbook that seemed perfectly wonderful when you wrote it, but two weeks later seems meaningless – “Hero needs a kneeble.” Then, six months or a year later, you see a painting of a harbor in a museum, and find yourself wondering whether a kneeble is a fish, or maybe a kind of boat. Then that collides with the video about the elephant sanctuary that occupies an isolated island, and you suddenly have a story about a protagonist who is a game warden for such a sanctuary, patrolling in a kneeble-boat to defeat ivory poachers.)

Also, keep coming back to the idea-seeds. This is a bit tricky, because seeds in general do not grow well if you keep digging them up to see if they’re sprouting. But seeds need fertilizer and watering – and for idea-seeds, attention is the most common water-and-fertilizer. How that attention is applied depends on the writer – some get the best results from repeatedly asking where this situation/character/setting/problem might be going next, or how the characters got into this mess, or even what is actually going on – why they’re arguing, fighting, crying, running away…  Other writers get more mileage from looking at what appeals to them about the scene/character/setting – the emotional factor that made them want to write it down in the first place. Whatever you do, check in every so often.

Perfectionism. A lot of would-be writers have somehow got the idea that their first draft needs to be perfect straight out of the gate (or get horribly discouraged by looking at a dreadful-seeming draft and thinking of how much work it will take to get it to halfway decent). Others are convinced that if it isn’t perfect (or close to) from the get-go, it never will be perfect. All of this assumes that perfection is both desirable and possible.

A more insidious possibility is that the writer has a shimmering mental image of their highly-desirable story in their head, and cannot figure out how to get it onto a blank sheet of paper/screen. This is unsurprising, as writing is not photography, and even if it were, the mind is not a camera. Also, words-on-paper are an incomplete and not-totally-accurate form of telepathy. To put it another way, no matter how well you write, it will never be that shimmering ideal story that’s in your head. Your first draft won’t even come close.

But your first draft is not your only chance to “get it right” or “make it perfect.” Yes, you want it to be good, because that will make revising it easier, but I have never known any writer – not even one – who didn’t revise their first draft, often multiple times. It is hard to accept that your story won’t ever be perfect, but knowing that you can go over it again (and again) can make it easier to put up with an obviously flawed first draft. Also, writing improves with practice. Getting more practice is a Good Thing … to a point. You get to decide that point for yourself. Some writers take ten or twenty years between novels in a quest for perfection. If you’re happy with that kind of output, fine. Most of us don’t have the time, patience, or outside income to allow for that, and if you’re in the “most” category, it’s better to realize it sooner rather than later.

An insistence on getting it “right the first time” ups the mental stakes to a point that causes some writers to freeze up and/or reject outright whatever they put down that “isn’t good enough.” Ultimately, the solution is to recognize the futility of perfectionism, but in the meantime, another approach is to lower the mental stakes. By this I mean writing out the ideas in some form that is deliberately not intended to be the ultimate story that one is going to submit or publish. Write the story as a fairy tale (begin “Once upon a time, there lived…). Write out the story ideas as emails to your muse. Write the letters that one character would send to a distant friend or relative over the course of the story. Write the story ideas as a “Dick and Jane” type first-reader, using short sentences and short words. (Bilbo was a hobbit. A hobbit is short. A hobbit has big feet.) Choose whatever format is familiar and comfortable and not what you want the story to look like eventually, thus allowing you to get the key parts down without interference from the voice saying “It isn’t good enough” – because it isn’t supposed to be good enough. It’s practice.

Process problem. First-time writers make a lot of assumptions about the writing process, and one of the more common ones is that the “right way” to write a novel is to outline it, then write the first draft in order from beginning to end. This is not a problem if one happens to be a writer who works that way, but if one is a pantser, doing an outline can kill all desire to write the story before it has even been begun. Similarly, beginning at the beginning and working straight through to the end is likely to be counter-productive if one happens to be the sort of writer who does best by skipping around, or by working backward, or by piling up a huge pile of bits and pieces and only then organizing them. A burst writer can make themselves crazy, thinking that they should be able to write a steady 7,000 words per day because it happened once, while a writer who works best by the hour can go equally nuts trying to stick to the same word count for their daily one-hour session.

The only advice for this one is to make clear that There Is No One True Way, that all of the methods (and more) that I just described work for some writers but not others, and that the only way to find one’s preferred method is to experiment.