In the comments on the last post, S.A. Cox said “Historically, however, with both writing and teaching, one of the main keys to my development has been trusting my instincts about what is working and what isn’t, and then working like a dog at what isn’t.”
My experience with trusting my instincts has been good; maybe I’ll have more to say about that some other time. What I really wanted to talk about here was the “working like a dog at what isn’t working” part.
The first step is diagnosis, which can be either instinct or a well-trained Internal Editor. Back when I wrote my first novel, I knew there was something wrong with the way I was telling it, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I had, at this point, never read any how-to-write books, nor taken any writing classes beyond high school English, so I had no vocabulary for what the problem might be, but I thought it had something to do with the way my different characters saw various things. So I decided that in my next book, I would stick to just one character’s head, and see what happened.
What happened was one of the more difficult writing experiences in my career. Learning to write from a single character viewpoint, instead of the sloppy omniscient I’d been using, was really hard. I kept running into things that would be SO much easier to explain if I just did a little bit from someone else’s viewpoint…but I’m stubborn, and by the time I was five or six chapters in, it would have been obviously wrong to use anything but the tight-third-person viewpoint I’d started with. So I stuck with it, and in the end I decided it was one of the more rewarding things I’d ever done, as well as the hardest.
Which is why I started deliberately choosing different things – different basic writing techniques — to work on in each book. For my first five or six books, it’s easy to spot, because I was deliberately using different viewpoints and viewpoint structures (tight-third person, first person, alternating, multiple). After that, it gets harder to see from outside, and eventually I stopped trying to pick a specific technique for each book and just went to “do something stretchy” as a goal.
But the general idea has stood me very much in good stead, and here’s why: in writing, you yourself are the only person who can really push you to improve significantly. A good editor can help, but editors work on a book-by-book basis. Their job is to make your current book as good as it can possibly be…which is a subtly different thing from making you as good a writer as you can possibly be. There’s a lot of overlap, especially early in one’s career, but ultimately, it’s up to you to keep pushing.
I’ve always admired your willingness to venture into unsafe territory. It’s a good policy to adopt. It’s not just frightening (what if I can’t get this to work) but also annoying when you have to learn to write all over – my insticts are off, my process is broken, my writing speed is glacial, and very little of the tips and tricks I’ve picked up work anymore.
AMong other things, this is a book where the setting is tremendously important. The land – or rather guardian spirits tied to particular places – *is* a character, and without description there is no story. I can’t do the usual layering thing where I sketch out dialogue and stage directions in first draft. And because it’s alternate history I keep having to run to the library to acquire the knowledge I then need to twist sideways to fit into my alt-20th Century-with-Faerie.
But it’s great fun whenever it is working.
I entered my current novel with an idea to get descriptive. I battled for a while with telling the story while being the descriptive and in the first draft I’ve decided to just get the story down (the easy part) then work like a dog understanding good story-integrated description.
Alex – Is it a technique problem – how to write description (without slowing down the story) – or is it the more fundamental problem of what to describe? Also, if you’re used to writing strongly plot-driven things, you may need to do a different kind of story in order to really get some practice in on description. Or perhaps a different sort of viewpoint character – one who really notices and thinks about his/her surroundings. It depends on what you are trying to do (as always).
Of course when I say the “easy part” for the story that’s relative, because as I said in my comment to the last post the first draft is hard in comparison to getting the outline done.
It’s that I don’t read description when I read books, so when I write I focus on the story, but sometimes it almost comes out as a movie script.
Or I spend a lot of time inside the MC’s head with their thoughts and emotions, which is what really interests me so I pay no attention to the surroundings.
Description tends to pull me out of the story as I write it, but when I focus on the description I’m able to integrate it well, so it’s not a technique thing – it’s more an inability to focus on the two things at the same time. 😉
Alex – It sound like a process thing, to me. I know a couple of writers who start with talking heads and then layer on everything else – thoughts, actions, emotions, description – sometimes very mechanically, one thing at a time, sometimes pretty much all at once in a second pass. It can be part of the difference between underwriting and overwriting – but it’s not really a problem as long as you’re aware of it and can put in the missing bits in the second or third draft.
It also depends on your viewpoit character. My latest book has a narrator who is very internally oriented, which is aggravated by the fact that she’s writing a memoir. So she doesn’t provide a lot of physical description, and some readers really dislike that. There isn’t much I can do about it, though; not without totally changing who she is and how she speaks. Sometimes, you just have to live with that.
Alex, one thing that has helped me is to think of items and settings to have agenda, to make sure they don’t just exist, stand, or are passively manipulated. ‘The mountains rose from the plain’ beats ‘there were big mountains’ every day.