Posts tagged "advice"

4
writing advice

Nov 25

On Writing, Part I


(Photo by cayoo)

One of the other things I wanted to do on this blog was talk about the act of writing itself, because even though I’ve been writing professionally (or semi-professionally, by which I choose to mean that people want you to hit a deadline but don’t want to pay you) for most of my adult life, the past year has probably taught me more than the entire decade before it.

If anyone wants some context or a brief bio, I’ll keep it short: I’ve done a bunch of journalism in the past decade and a half, writing for magazines like VICE and Punk Planet and eventually ending with me being Editor-in-Chief of DiSCORDER (a Vancouver-based music monthly) and Terminal City (a Vancouver-based alt-weekly). On top of that I’ve written dubbing scripts for a couple of different anime series. Some older samples of my work can be found here.

So, it’s not like I’m a stranger to writing, but it’s funny that some of its main truths evaded me for so long, and that my most massive epiphany dispelled one of my most sacredly-held beliefs.

It was one of those things I wish someone had sat me down and told me twenty years ago. I really do. Got all up in my face and practiced some tough love on me, pounding the table and making me realize they weren’t fucking around—because figuring it out now makes me feel like I’ve been wasting way too much time. Still, I like to think I’m a reasonably decent guy, so in case there’s any impressionable young writers out there who want some hard-won advice, here it comes:

WAITING FOR INSPIRATION IS FUCKING BULLSHIT.

It is. It’s a bunch of crap that allows you to keep blissfully procrastinating. Now, to be clear, I’m not talking about inspiration itself. When inspiration strikes, it can be one of the most euphoric sensations you’ll ever experience, but writing (and all art, I would imagine, though I’m not inclined toward music or visual art) is about sitting down and doing the work. It is, to quote the trite saying, 90% perspiration. But nobody ever explains what that means. It almost seems to imply that you should wait for inspiration to strike and then knuckle down to deal with the other 90%.

Fuck. No.

You need to sit down and start. Quite possibly what you’ll write will be crap, but as time goes on it just might evolve into something spectacular so keep going. And unless you’re one of the beat poets whose work is immutable AND CAN NEVER BE CHANGED (a view I think is one of the most gigantic loads of horseshit going), you’re free to go back and change the parts that suck. Rewrite the beginning. Change the sex of the main character. Hell, scrap the first five chapters if you need to. It’s yours to do with as you please, but unless you sit down and write the damn thing in the first place, you won’t have anything to change later.

Yeah, sometimes you’re not in the mood; I know. I don’t give a shit. Sit down and write. Pick a time when you can write every day. Super-early in the morning or really late at night are good options, because there’s less distractions. What matters ultimately is treating it like a job, because that’s what it has to be to you: a part-time job with a long internship but an amazing benefits package at the end.

And sure, it sounds like a lot of effort, but what’s the payout? Well, a book or screenplay or massive writing project that people respect and want to toss money at you for. Or maybe just something you’re happy with, or maybe something you’re not happy with at all. But even if that’s the case, there’s always the possibility of the next one, and let me make this perfectly clear: absolutely nothing will happen without you sitting down and writing.

Up until last year, over the course of my life I’d written multiple chunks of books, some as small as a few chapters and one that was 3/4 done and 125,000 words long. None of them are completed. So what spurred me on to finally finish one? Yeah, sitting down every day and just doing it. And what gave me the inspiration? Well… that was National Novel-Writing Month.

COMING SOON: On Writing, Part II – The NaNoWriMo


4
nanowrimo writing advice

Dec 02

On Writing, Part 2: The NaNoWriMo

I’m prepared to go out on a limb here and say of all the different books, courses and advice on writing I’ve been exposed to over the years, less than five had anything really useful to say to me, and exactly none of them supplied me with the inner fortitude necessary to complete a novel. Well, none but the NaNoWriMo.

I’d heard about National Novel Writing Month for a few years before I actually decided to do it and while it seemed like something fun, it also bordered on the outlandish. I mean, writing a novel in a month? Yeah, it’s possible, but it’s unlikely and what kind of novel are you gonna get out of that, anyway? I chalked it up as the 3-Day Novel Contest’s moderately saner cousin.

Then last year one of my friends posted a status update on Facebook to the effect of “I’m going to do the NaNoWriMo this year. Anyone with me?” and I considered it. At that point I was working part-time in a book store and didn’t have too many other responsibilities (aside from not letting the house slip into abject chaos). Why not? It would give me something to do. I signed up.

There is one ultimate goal in the NaNoWriMo: write 50,000 words of a novel in a month. Ideally, it would be nice if the 50,000 words coincided with the completion of your book, but if you hit the 50k mark and you still haven’t finished it, you get the prize just the same. That was their rule, though – not mine. I knew if I started my book on November 1st and didn’t finish it by November 30th, it was never getting done. I had 125,000 words of an incomplete steampunk faerie tale to attest to that. (Incidentally, I wrote that a decade ago, because that’s how ahead of the curve I am… with my uncompleted manuscripts.) So there was nothing for it but to go balls-out and get it done by the end of the month come hell or high water.

I also knew my limitations: I can’t write with other people around, especially people I like. They are a distraction. So trying to get my daily quota of words done while having my lady putter around was a no-go. I had to get up before she did to get my writing done. I set my alarm for 5:30am.

It was a little brutal on Day 1. Halloween was on Saturday night and I started writing on Sunday morning. But I did it. I got it done and the world didn’t stop spinning, which was probably encouragement enough to keep going. And one of the odd discoveries I made was that once I’d removed the angsty, writery maxim of waiting for inspiration (because I couldn’t wait for inspiration when I had a daily goal of +/- 2,500 words to hit), it became much easier. Hitting my word count was non-negotiable, so I just sat down and wrote and the words came. Yeah, I did a some advance planning (I’d spent the week leading up to November 1 working out plot points); I knew where the story was going and how it would get there (more or less), but I wasn’t afforded the opportunity to agonize over individual word choices like I otherwise might have. That was a consideration left to the editing process.

So I kept going and the words piled up and I started each day with a big-ass mug of tea and two slices of peanut butter toast and in 25 days I’d done it. I’d written the first draft of a novel. The NaNoWriMo had enabled me to do something I never had before, and I attribute my success to two of its intrinsic characteristics:

1) A deadline. I’m a procrastinator. I need deadlines for pretty much anything that needs to get done. If I don’t have one, “Ehn, it can wait ‘til tomorrow.” Tomorrow turns into tomorrow, and as Macbeth so eloquently noted “to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow”. Having a one month limit where you’re forced to write 1667 words a day (an amount that, as it turns out, is surprisingly reasonable) gets the job done. It forces you to knuckle down, because if you don’t finish your book you’re confirming that you can’t do what you set your mind to (an option I wasn’t willing to bear).

2) It’s in public. Everyone can see your daily word counts on your account page. If you screw the pooch in Week 1, everybody knows. Moreover, I raised the stakes by involving everyone on my Facebook friends list as well. That added another few hundred more people who’d be witnesses to my potential failure. Quitting partway through ceased to be an option. The threat of public shaming is a powerful writing motivator and shouldn’t be discounted.

It’s a little late for you to do the NaNoWriMo this year (seeing as it takes place in November), but that just gives you eleven months to get ready for the next one. Or, you know, you could always just decide that January or March or whenever is gonna be your personal Novel Writing Month and set a personal goal to do it then. There’s really nothing magical about November; it’s just the month that got chosen for the event. And if you want to go that route, No Plot? No Problem!, the writing guide by NaNoWriMo founder Chris Baty is also full of useful tips and advice for getting a novel done in a month (I know the title is absurd – just ignore it). But I recommend giving the exercise a shot. In a worst case scenario you’ve pushed yourself and (if you’re being really hard on yourself) wasted a month. In a best-case scenario, you took 30 days and wrote a book.

How can you not take that gamble?


2
advice book covers self-publishing publishing

May 01

On Book Covers

NB: This may (read: “almost certainly will”) get a little boring if you’re not interested in the details of self-publishing your own book. TAKE WARNING.

I am a huge fan of book covers. HUGE. In my life I’ve worked at a half-dozen book stores and in every single one of them I’ve noticed the same thing: I rarely pick up a book with a lousy cover. The only exceptions come when I’m looking for a specific book or something by a specific author. If I go shopping with an agenda, I’ll consider buying an ugly book, but if I’m just browsing, I’ll immediately drift to the ones which are well designed and/or have extraordinary character.

They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, but everybody does. You can’t not. Have you gone into a book store? There’s thousands to choose from! You can’t treat them all objectively, picking each of them up and reading the first chapter to gauge whether or not it’s a quality purchase. There aren’t enough hours in the day. So, it’s left to our sense of taste and aesthetics to take the first step for us.

That’s why I consider designing a book cover to be the most important creative decision an author can make (after writing the damn thing).

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