Tips for Dealing with Distractions

When you're writing a first draft, a very important thing to do is tell the red pen inside your head to shut up. You do not need to be fixing typos at this point. That will slow you down, distract you. Did Frodo stop to sweep cobwebs out of Shelob’s lair on the way into Mordor? No. He knew his goal: get to Mount Doom.

Of course, there were also plenty of distractions that got poor Frodo distracted against his will. That’s the way life works sometimes. We can be as single-minded and determined as we like, but distractions will come up. Here are a few bits advice about how to deal with them.

• Good life rule: people are important. Especially people close to you, like your friends and family. Remember that guy in high school who ditched all his friends because he started dating his first girlfriend? Don’t be that guy with your novel. Be realistic in what you can accomplish without becoming an anti-social jerk.

• When people find out you’re writing a novel, they are going to ask you, “So, what’s it about?” I never have an answer for this one. Summaries, for me, come after I’m done. If you want to avoid answering this one 700 times, only tell a few people what you’re doing. That takes some of the pressure off anyway.

• Don’t beat yourself up if circumstances come up that make you put your writing on hold for a little while. A new baby, a move, a funeral, a summer full of activities and weddings and graduations…those things happen. If you can write a little bit even in busy times, that’s great. If not, just promise yourself you’ll go back to writing later…and actually follow through.

• It’s probably not a good idea to let someone read your novel before it’s done. The exception might be if you just want a yes or no answer to something like, “Is this interesting?” But, often, people want to give advice on how to improve. That’s a super important part of the editing process…but you’re not there yet.

• Writer’s block: This one cannot be shoved aside in just a sentence or two, because there are so many reason that writing might grind to a sudden halt. Lucky for you, I've already written a post about it. And another one. And I'll probably write several more in the future.

•  For many people, it helps to set aside a consistent time to write. Schedule it into your life. Maybe that’s unrealistic for you. But give it a try. And turn off your phone, for goodness sake. And social media. Checking Facebook every five minutes doesn't help with your word count.

•  Reward little victories. Celebrate every chapter, even if you don’t know how you could possibly write another one. With each sentence you type, you are getting closer to a goal that most people abandon somewhere before page five. 
   

Writing is hard work, and can be frustrating, time-consuming, and exhausting.

Maybe it shouldn’t be that way. Maybe writing should be…well…fun. When you loved to do something as a kid, you didn’t have to force yourself to do it. Writing can be like that. It won’t always be. But if you can get back to the place where it feels like snapping one Lego brick on top of another, slowly creating a more complex masterpiece, then do it.

Tune out the internal voices that say you’ll never be good enough for this. Don’t worry about what other people will think. It’s not the time for that, not yet, and maybe not ever.

Just write because you love it. Try things. Take a break from your novel and write something just for the fun of it. Re-read something that turned out just the way you wanted it to. Remember that you’re telling a story, and remind yourself why you want to tell it.

Writer's Block: Strategies to Beat It

Maybe you had a very clear vision for the first few chapters of your novel, and you zipped through those, typing so fast that your fingers blurred on the keyboard. Or maybe you started with the ending, scrawling out a climax of epic proportions, and getting the characters exactly where they needed to be.

Problem is, what do you do with the rest of the story?

This is a difficulty that doesn’t just apply to the non-planners among us. Even faithful outliners may realize that they have a gap in their carefully-constructed plan that they don’t know what to do with, or that can’t be fixed by what they have as a placeholder right now.

When that happens, I say, go back to elementary school.

Before deciding that I am completely unqualified to be writing this blog post, hear me out. I know an elementary school teacher who explained to me once the methods she uses to engage students in reading. “We have them make predictions and connections,” she said. “Sometimes it even helps them to show events in a visual way.”

She spread out a series of charts and diagrams and organizational maps in front of her. Normally, I flee at the sight of anything that looks remotely structured. When I saw those charts, though, something in my brain clicked. These activities help kids because they take them outside of the narrative structure and help them see the big picture. What if the same thing would work for writers?

That said, here are some fourth grade tools adapted for use by the big kids.

Timeline: This is a popular get-to-know-you activity, along with a family tree, probably because they look good on bulletin boards. Both are also great for helping you understand your main character better—your protagonist’s family and the events of his or her life, even before the story starts, are going to have an incredible amount of impact on your story. Alternately, a timeline can be useful to plan the fictional history of a fantasy or science fiction world. Think about how much our nation’s past influences what matters to us now. It will be the same with your fictional world.

Venn Diagram: There may be other ways to use this, but the single most useful on for me has been a Venn Diagram answering the following question: “How is this story similar to and different from my own life?” Drawing those two overlapping circles has shown me that my protagonist is basically me in a different time period, helped me understand that I was working through my own sense of grief and loneliness in one story, and given me ideas for how I should change the setting of a fantasy so it reflects a different set of values than contemporary America. A self-aware writer is a better writer, and sometimes activities like this can help us connect things that we wouldn’t have otherwise.

Five Mountain-Climbing Strategies

You’re trekking up a steep, snow-covered mountain, and your only goal is to get to the summit (although getting down alive might be nice too). This is something you’ve been working toward for a long time. All of your friends are cheering you on from the bottom of the mountain, although you can’t hear them anymore.

In fact, because of the wind, you can’t hear much of anything. You can no longer feel any major part of your body, and you’re so tired you ache. It’s getting hard to breathe, and your movements slow. Just when you think you can’t take another step, you see something jutting out of the snow in front of you.

A slide.

That’s right. One of those colorful plastic tubes, like at McDonalds playplaces. Only this slide is a monster, wrapping its way all the way down the mountain. It’s also got built-in heating jets, and shoots you down to a spa/massage parlor at the bottom of the mountain.

You have a choice. Are you going to take the slide, or keep climbing up the mountain?

Sabbath Reflections: What Biggest Loser Taught Me About Writing

This week, I was watching the most recent episode of Biggest Loser with my family (I think watching other people suffer makes me feel better about dragging myself to work out twice a week). At one point, both trainers were dealing with a problem contestant.

You know, the person with the attitude who flat-out refuses to do what they’re told. The one who’s always whining that they can’t do it when people twice their age are in the background, turning their complaints into sweat by gritting their teeth and working harder.

People like that annoy me. I rolled my eyes as I listened to them give excuses and said something like, “Okay, there comes a certain point where this is a character issue. The people complaining aren’t the ones who are the most physically weak. They just decide to stop working. Anyone can follow orders and keep going when they don’t feel like it.”

Then, later, I realized that I try the Biggest-Loser-wimp line all the time when it comes to writing. “I don’t feel like it. I’m too tired to write today – maybe tomorrow. This project is too frustrating to continue, because I know I’ll just have to rewrite the first five chapters anyway.”

Writing and Building Snowmen

I used to have a really funny intro for this post.

Yep. It was all about how my ulterior motive for writing this was that I wanted it to snow. I also explained the magical charm needed to bend weather to your whims around Christmastime.

But then yesterday it snowed. So there went my intro. On the positive side, the snow put me in the mood for the actual topic of this post: how writing fiction is exactly like building a snowman.

Okay, maybe not exactly. But there are similarities. If you’re skeptical about associating snowman building and good writing, I have three words for you: Calvin and Hobbes.

National Starting a Novel Month

PROMINENT AND OBNOXIOUS DISCLAIMER: I am not against the National Novel Writing Month project. I think it’s awesome. I think it’s exactly what a lot of people need to motivate them. I think that it results in great writing, a greener environment, and puppies, rainbows, hearts, and unicorns. Nothing but love for NaNoWriMo.

That said, I have declared this November National There’s-No-Way-On-Earth-I’m-Writing-A-Novel Month. This is mostly because of my lack of faith in my ability to balance an intense writing project with my junior year of college, which would be something like trying to juggle flamethrowers and chainsaws at the same time.

But I am starting a novel. And, unless I find that the plot is totally unredeemable, I will finish it.