How to Write Something New

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There would appear to be three major 'versus' debates going on in publishing these days. You've got Self-publishing versus Traditional Models, there's Work for Free versus Alternate Income Stream, and Pants versus Plotting. I'm not going into the first two, but the third is one with which I've wrestled for some time.

The key pros and cons of Pants versus Plotting are quite straightforward. Writing by the seat of your pants lets you enjoy the creative process, going where the story takes you, and essentially 'making it up as you go along', but you can end up with dozens of dead ends, characters you don't even need, or endings that just flat out don't work because they don't make sense when compared to the beginning.

By contrast, plotting allows you to map out the work before you start, so you never sit down to write without knowing where the story is going, and you can work out story kinks before you even finish the book/story - it's much easier to rearrange elements in an outline than it is in the finished piece. Unfortunately, it can feel restrictive, and remove some of the 'surprises' that pop up when you're pantsing.

For most of my works, I've used a combination of the two. I've known the major points of the beginning, middle and end, and my writing process has been simply joining the dots, making it up as I go along to get from A to B. It lets me keep an ending in mind, but gives me enough freedom to give my imagination room to gambol about.

I came across Story Engineering by Larry Brooks and while it's a fascinating book with a lot going for it, I got sucked into the mindset of "You must outline to the very last detail", and it completely derailed my creativity. I wrote The Necromancer's Apprentice using his method, but I only started to enjoy it when I'd finished my first draft, and went back to insert scenes that I felt would give the story life. I've got another novella I want to write, and I've fully outlined it, but I find I can't start it - weirdly enough, I know what needs to happen where, but I don't know where to start, and I have that ever present worry that I can't do the outline justice.

A while ago, I wrote a post on The Magic of 500, and I decided to revisit it to see if it would help. For a long time, I've been using the 750words.com website, and I suddenly realised that while I've thought I don't have much time to write, I've been putting in 15-20 minutes every day to write 750 words of crap. I worked out that by writing 750 words a day, a 30k word novella could be written in just forty days. So I could use those twenty minutes to do something productive, leaving my longer bouts of time free to edit The Necromancer's Apprentice. Interesting...

I wrote a Friday flash a couple of weeks ago called Contagion, and I had a few calls to turn it into a novella. I dashed out an idea for the beginning, middle and end, and just started writing. Earlier today it passed the 6.5k mark. It's going to need a lot of editing but the important thing is that I'm writing again. Aside from Friday flashes, I haven't written anything new in a long time.

So long may it continue...

Writing with Evernote

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Ask any writer what they use to write and you'll probably get as many answers as you do writers. Scrivener, yWriter, notebook and pen, napkin and pen, chalkboard, typewriter, Write or Die, Word...there are a dizzying array of programs or implements available to any writer, and it's usually pretty much a case of trial and error to find out what works for you. For example, I often write story outlines by hand in a notebook, and then write out a loose skeleton in Notepad on my laptop, which is fleshed out into a story in Word. I'm also experimenting with Scrivener's trial version for my next project to see if that's any better/different. So far I like it, but that's another post for another time.

But if you asked me how I wrote my most recent Friday Flash, a horror monologue entitled Regular Guy, I'd tell you very simply that I used Evernote. I've mentioned Evernote in passing before, but if you've never used it, it's an app that allows you to record notes etc. in separate notebooks according to their contents. I have it on my phone and my laptop, so if I'm lying in bed and get a story idea, I can type it into a new note in the Fiction notebook I've set up. When I'm next on my laptop, I open Evernote, it syncs with my account, and the story idea note that I saved is accessible from my laptop. I copy and paste the content into Word and away I go.

I use Evernote for all sorts. I've got a notebook containing ideas and half-written blog posts, another for fiction ideas, another for book ideas (that's also where I work through the ideas for works in progress), and I've got another one for things that occur to me related to my PhD (you'd be amazed how often random things pop into my head at the most inopportune moments). I used to type memos into my phone but that entailed copy-pasting the contents and emailing them to myself. Evernote makes it so much easier.

What's more notable is the fact that I wrote the whole of Regular Guy in Evernote at about 2am while I was in bed. I didn't need to get up to switch on my laptop, by which point the idea might have become muddy, or evaporated altogether. I didn't have to fumble around in the dark for a notebook and a pen that actually works. Plus I type a lot faster than I write by hand, even on a smartphone, and it's a lot easier for me to get the idea down, ready to be polished properly next time I'm on the computer.

However you do it, once you find a method that works for you, then great. But how about you? What tools do you use to write?

What The Guns of Retribution taught me

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Here I am with my final post about The Guns of Retribution, ahead of its paperback release on Saturday. When I asked for questions, John Wiswell asked "if writing it has taught you something, that'd be good to share."

Well, you know something? Writing it DID change something for me. I've already touched on my writing process a tad, but I thought I would expand slightly on how I stopped being a pantser, and started looking at plotting instead.

Pants vs plot seems to be the kind of either/or debate that just won't go away. It's like choosing between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, between Macs and PCs, or between pirates and ninjas. A while back, I would have said there was no way you could ever find any middle ground - you're either one, or the other. The Guns of Retribution changed that.

Pre-Guns, I was very much a pantser. When I wrote the first draft of my Fowlis Westerby novel, I made it up as I went along. I vaguely had the ending in mind, but there was no definite sense of a plan. Characters spouted dialogue and made decisions on the spur of the moment, and it was all very exciting. The First Tale was much the same - considering it was a web serial, I didn't really know where it was going until episode fifteen. Then Grey O'Donnell breezed into my life and made me think about things differently. I began his story and suddenly I had a bulletpoint list of plot points I wanted to include. I knew the beginning, middle and end, and while I didn't have a detailed synopsis, I knew enough to make up the bits in between.

I always thought plotting seemed too regimented, or rigid. How could you have fun following your characters' carefree flights of fancy if you already knew what they'd do next? It seemed a little too much "writing by numbers" and I worried that plotting in advance would leave the resulting story feeling a little formulaic. On the other hand, the problem with pantsing is you can end up writing yourself into dead ends, following the exploits of entirely the wrong character, or wasting time wandering through a plot that you ultimately can't conclude. But friends, there is a middle way.

I've seen some outlines that run to several pages, and some which almost seem like novels in themselves. Likewise I've seen simple lists that state the content of the beginning, the middle and the end. I don't have the patience for long outlines, and short lists don't quite do it for me, so I ended up with a list that simply stated what the point of each scene was going to be. For example, the first scene is set during a train robbery, so the first point was "Train robbery". Fairly self-explanatory, really. Thing is, while I knew roughly what was going to happen next, I didn't know how it was going to happen, and this is where the pantsing came into its own. Knowing what the next scene will be focusses your mind onto only those possibilities that make sense in the context of the next scene. It's liberating in the sense that you're still making it up as you go along, but it stops you wandering too far from the path since you know what your destination will be.

Since then, I've read James Scott Bell's Plot & Structure and Larry Brooks' Story Engineering and both of them make an excellent case for using outlines. I'm certainly making another bulletpoint list while I outline the sequel to The Guns of Retribution (mostly using the 'cause and effect' train of thought - that the 'cause' scene has to come before the 'effect' scene in order to produce a logical narrative) but I'll be leaving myself enough wiggle room so I can discover the characters as I go along.

The Guns of Retribution is currently available for Kindle (here for US and here for UK), and the paperback comes out on Saturday!

Other posts about The Guns of Retribution;
Historical Fiction
Writing Process
Characters

My Writing Process

Tweet As I said in my post about writing historical fiction, a few people asked me questions on Twitter about The Guns of Retribution. As it comes out in paperback on Saturday, I thought I'd answer a few more.

Writer Emma Kerry asked me about my writing process, and how the story grew, so I thought I'd tackle that today.

I started off with my protagonist, Grey O'Donnell, and my villain, Jasper Roberts, at the same time. I think you can't really know your protagonist until you know the antagonist so it made it easier to develop them simultaneously. They share a dark past and the hatred between the pair of them fuels the events of the book so I'm not sure I could have written one first, and then the other. In the first draft, Grey was actually an outlaw, and his companions Billy Cole and Mahko comprised his gang. I let Grey tell his story, but he kept doing nice things for people. I wasn't completely sure that people would "buy" the idea of a well-mannered and thoughtful outlaw. It's not entirely far-fetched (Robin Hood, anyone?) but it just didn't sit right with me. I did what any self-respecting writer does when their characters won't do what they're supposed to and I switched from first person point of view to third.

It didn't work. Apparently the idea of a nice outlaw didn't sit right with Grey either. Partway through writing, he asked me, ever so nicely of course, if I could change his profession. According to him, he was actually a bounty hunter, and Mahko and Billy were not gang members, but rather his friends. As it happened, I'd already written a murder in the Old West in my Dead Man's Hand trilogy, and so it came to pass that Grey ended up as the bounty hunter pursuing this particular murderer. As Grey was so involved with the decision, I switched it back to first person to let him tell the story his way. It always pays to keep your protagonist happy.

As for my writing process, it was a little haphazard, if I'm honest. I'd never really used outlines or writing plans at all before - I was always very much a pantser. However, I didn't want to write myself into any dead ends and as I had an idea of the ending before I began, I wrote a rough list of bullet points for the major scenes. I simply made up the bits in between as I went along. It's quite a flexible method - you have the security of knowing what's going to happen and when, but you still get to explore various possibilities along the way. I'd already immersed myself in Western novels and films, but to add to the experience, I listened to the 3:10 to Yuma soundtrack while writing, which gave me a wonderful backdrop to the story.

One other thing that helped immensely was the 750words.com site. I made sure I wrote a portion of the story every day, so even if I only wrote 750 words, I'd be 750 words further into the story than I would have been otherwise. I'm quite competitive so I used that to my advantage, and seeing that row of ticked boxes every day spurred me on to keep writing. I did have the problem that I didn't actually want to finish it, a problem I wrote about in April,  but I put my fears aside and wrote the ending.

I edited the first draft quite extensively, and I also used beta readers once I had a draft I was happy with. I can't thank Rob Diaz, Jen Brubacher, Sam Adamson and Adam Byatt enough for their input - thankfully, no one had an issue with any of the sections I didn't want to part with, and I agreed with everyone's comments! Extra thanks go to Carrie Clevenger for talking over plot points with me when I got stuck.

Tomorrow, I'll be discussing character creation!

If any of these has whetted your appetite, The Guns of Retribution is available for Kindle (here for US and here for UK) for either $1.85 or £1.14, although the price will be going up soon! You can also preorder the paperback ahead of its release on Saturday.

Also, feel free to sign up for my newsletter if you'd like to be kept up to date with blog posts and releases!

One Million is a Good Motivator

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Just before New Year, I had one of "those" conversations on Twitter which led to the formation of an idea, and the proposal of a challenge. Brian Knight, otherwise known as @TheNewAuthor, challenged me to write one million words by the end of 2011. For the mathematical fetishists among you, that works out at 83,334 words per month, 19,230 words per week, or 2740 words per day. Ouch.

It's now 16th February, and I've written a grand total of 81,274 words. That's more than I would have imagined I would have written by this point in the year, although I'm still off the target by some margin (over 48,000 words - some margin, I think you'll agree). Even more annoyingly, that would be a decent-sized novel if I'd stuck to writing just plain fiction to eat up the word count, but I didn't. Rather, that figure is made up of;

• blog posts (here, for Fuel Your Writing, Write Anything and Icy's Cultural Carnival)
• Friday flashes
• my writing journal
• work on forthcoming Tales from Vertigo City serials
• short stories
• my current WIP, a Western novella named The Guns of Retribution, and
• stream of consciousness brainstorming sessions in which I work out plot points by writing around them

Who would have thought I'd write so much? I certainly didn't. OK, so it's not as much as I would have liked to have written at this point, but having a goal like "write one million words in 365 days" is one hell of a motivator.

Speaking of which...

Someone asked me the other day what motivates me. I was somewhat flummoxed as I've never really considered myself to be a motivated person (I don't even list it as one of those generic, catch-all buzzwords you find on CVs). I just do what I do because I want to do it - I've never stopped to analyse the reasoning behind it. I guess "It seemed like a good idea at the time" or "I'm getting paid to do it" is my usual rationale. However, in the case of writing, this line of reasoning falls flat.

In putting pen to paper, I guess my biggest motivation is the act itself. I enjoy writing, and I enjoy telling stories - I always have done. It doesn't occur to me NOT to write. So why wouldn't I want to do something that I enjoy? Of course, one might ask, if one were so inclined, why I then feel compelled to share them with the world, and I, being cheeky, would no doubt reply "Because I can". In all seriousness, I put my stories up here, or submit them to anthologies, or make them available as ebooks because I want to other people to enjoy them. I know how mundane and dull existence can be, and if I can lift someone out of that for a while, even a few minutes, then I consider that a job well done. Besides, humans rationalise their world through stories, be it our personal narratives in the form of our memories, or how we connect facts in order to communicate events to one another. Sharing fictional stories is a nice way to connnect with fellow humans.

When it comes to a solitary pursuit such as writing, you need some kind of emotional motivation. Sure, the fear of missing a deadline can spur you on as you slap down sentence after sentence, and I'm sure writing because you're paid to do so also ensures you churn out thousands of words a day. However, I still think there's nothing quite like writing for the simple joy of doing so, when the imagination becomes so vocal in speaking its mind that you can't do anything but write.

Enjoy what I do and provide some escapism? Yeah, that's why I'm a writer.

Writing Habits

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I was casting around for ideas of things people would like to see on this blog, and there seems to be interest in writing processes. When I came across this post by Ali Luke of Aliventures on the 7 Habits of Serious Writers, I couldn't help but write a post about my own habits.

Regularity

I've been writing since I can remember, and I've been writing regularly since I did a creative writing course when I was sixteen. However, it's only really been over the past couple of years that I've written with any serious intent. As a result, I actually write on a daily basis. I'm either working on flashes, stories I intend to submit, or something longer - at the moment, it's a novella. Some days, I might not actually add to the word count of the project, but I'll be brainstorming ideas around it, or working on plot problems. I'm also inherently competitive, so I find the vaguely obsessive-compulsive need to have a full scorecard on 750words.com impels me to write daily, too.

Working with personal flaws

I have the attention span of a toddler so it's all too easy for me to get distracted. Maybe I'll log into Twitter "just to see what's going on" and I'll end up getting involved in a lengthy and enjoyable conversation. Some of the games on Facebook are dangerously addictive. Having said that, if I get an idea for a story and I decide to just "jot bits down", I often find I get so wrapped up in jotting things down as they come to me that I end up writing something anyway. In a peculiar kind of way, I distract myself from the idea of writing with the need to preserve the story as it comes to me.

Books galore

I make a point of reading both fiction and non-fiction. There's always a book in my bag - at the moment, it's a book about the American West, but I'm also reading a book about quantum mechanics, as well as Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I tend to read a lot of historical NF (which informs my historical fiction) but I like to read the works of other writers too. Sometimes I'm trying to get a feel for a genre, sometimes I'm curious how other writers structure their novels, and sometimes I just want to be entertained. Every now and then, I also read books on the craft of writing - I personally enjoy James Scott Bell's books - although I tend to prefer blogs about writing as it feels like less of a slog to get through them.

Work can always be better

I never post the first draft of anything. Whatever you see on here will have always been redrafted at least twice before I paste it into Blogspot, and sometimes it'll be tweaked even before I hit 'Publish Post'. My first drafts are often terrible - my novella is an absolute mess, but since I know what I need to do with it, I'm still quite proud of it. However, I know that redrafting is almost as important to the process as the initial writing, so I might leave a piece for a few days, or a couple of weeks, before I go back and cast fresh eyes over it.

Getting my work out there

I write for three reasons. First and foremost - it never occurred to me not to do so. I've written from the time I was able to form letters with crayons - I asked my mother, and she can't remember a time when I wasn't scribbling down a story, or bashing one out on her old typewriter. Writing is a lot like eating or walking - it's just something I do. Secondly, I enjoy telling stories. It's fun. Thirdly, I want to entertain. Not a particularly lofty goal, but I'm a big believer in escapism, so if I can provide someone with the means to escape the drudgery of their everyday life, then I consider my job done. As a result, I provide my weekly Friday flashes, and I have two e-books available. I submit my work to anthologies, and I'm working on novels. It's all about getting the work out there.

Thinking about it

Even when I'm not writing, I'm thinking about my work in progress, or the next flash. I've started outlining my flashes so I can take a handful of sentences scrawled in my notebook and flesh them out into the stories I post every week. I'm constantly going over the plot points or characters in my novella, asking myself what a character's motivation might be, or what might cause them to behave in a particular way. If it doesn't sit right with me, I change it - because chances are, if something doesn't ring true with me, it won't ring true with a reader. It is the writer's job to communicate the story properly, and it's a job I intend to do well.

These are my habits. What are yours?

Give yourself permission to NOT write

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I've just spent a very enjoyable evening doing nothing but knitting a sock, and watching the first three episodes of Castle. Now, most evenings, I make myself sit down and do some 'work'. It might be drawing, or working out some more 'punchlines' for my forthcoming comic, or it might be working on the next instalment of my serial, The First Tale. I might even be writing another Friday Flash, or deciding what I'm going to blog about. I might be rewriting my novel, or figuring out what I'm going to say in my next AudioBoo. I don't know about you, but that looks like a fair amount of things to be doing in my 'free' time.

'Not finding the time to write' is a common complaint of writers. Other creatives say they simply cannot find the time to create. "Modern life is so hectic", they say. "I have a full-time job and three kids and an invalid parent to care for," they cry. I can fully sympathise with the full-time job issue. Of the approximate seventeen hours I am aware, I have just four to spend on myself, and everyday errands. That's without a family to take up my time!

There are a myriad of blogs out there that will tell you it's okay to cut down your TV time by 15 minutes, or it's healthy to wake up 15 minutes earlier, or that no one will mind if you skip something else in order to write. You can "give yourself permission" to write. It's a very valid argument, and I agree with it wholeheartedly - there probably is a lot of junk in your day that could be safely jettisoned to make room for your creative pursuits. However, creative people often don't like to do anything creative because it's fun. It doesn't feel like work. It can often feel like an indulgence when there are errands to run or chores to do.

That being said, I'm here to tell you it's also okay to give yourself permission to NOT write. Normally, I've got so many projects on the go and so much that I want to do that I get stressed out if I don't get it all done (which would be impossible anyway, unless I somehow found a way of adding more hours to the day). If I hit a creative block, I panic. The work I want to do becomes work that I need to do and thus it becomes actual work, rather than 'work', if you get what I mean. Once that happens, I don't want to do it any more, and then I become frustrated with myself because I start procrastinating, and stop producing. It doesn't help that all these books and blogs seem to be telling me that I need to be writing almost continuously in order to really be 'a writer'. So now I'm not a real writer because I'm not writing every minute of every hour of every day? Golly, talk about pressure!

Yet it has been a wonderfully relaxing couple of hours after I told myself it was alright not to do any writing (aside from this post) for one single evening. I've made some decent progress on my sock (this is the left one I'm currently working on - eventually it will look like the right sock I've posted a photo of up there) and I've discovered a new TV show that combines my interest in crime dramas with my love of Nathan Fillion and a consideration of the writing process - win! As it happens, various ideas have been ticking over in my brain and now I feel refreshed and rejuvenated - ready to start writing on my way to work tomorrow.

So give it a go. Give yourself permission to have a night off, and see what wonders you can accomplish.