Now that I’m about to dive back into my writing, I feel like it’s best I spread some wisdom. By force. Here’s a few writing tips I’ve come up with along the way:
- Spend nearly every moment you can in your head. Your friends and family will get used to you staring off into the distance. Do not tell them you were thinking about how to “make giant robots realistic”. If you do, they may stare off into the distance. They are not thinking about robots. They are thinking about disappointment.
- Write down everything you think of. Yes, even that.
- You may find yourself getting bored of telling people the synopsis to your book. If so, start sprucing it up with phrases like, “it’s a metaphor for modern life”, “you’ll have to read it”, or “and then he becomes a time traveling dinosaur.”
- Please refrain from showing people all the things you have written down. The sentence “Guy gets caught rifling through panty drawer, the girl freaks out and yells at him, pause, then gives him five dollars” will not impress people.
- Keep your descriptions short, especially on the Internet where all writing typically has a 2,000 word max. Get angry when people avoid reading anything you write that’s longer than this. When your friends give you something longer, pretend not to notice the irony as you avoid reading it for a few weeks.
- Forget everything you can in order to make more room for those precious ideas. Not knowing where your car keys are or your mother’s birthday is a small price to pay to know what kind of tea your characters would drink on the moon.
- Smile and nod when someone says you should read a particular book. While their back is turned, read the book’s synopsis on wikipedia. They probably don’t remember the book that well either.
- Keep reminding yourself that you are writing something that could be taken seriously while downloading Dungeons and Dragons mapmaking software.
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April 30, 2009 at 9:33 am
Stefanie
I am currently in the process of writing a 20 page craft essay for my studies in fiction class, which I have chosen to make about the process of losing your mind and falling off of reality that occurs in fiction writing. I think my professor is concerned. In any case, this reminded me of that project, and reminded me also why you will always be cooler than me.
April 30, 2009 at 9:49 am
kjwilson
Cool! I’d like to read that sometime. The Alan Moore article I referenced in an earlier post (http://mouches-d-eau.blogspot.com/2008/07/craft.html) has an interesting tidbit on this subject:
“With a writer, you’re dealing with the actual stuff of existence, you’re playing the God game. All the things that you will have to consider before you write a story are exactly the things God had to consider before he created the universe – plot, characters (laughter) and what’s it mean, what’s it about, what’s the theme here…motifs. A lot of them suns, they’ll do, we’ll put them everywhere – hey, snakes! These are easy…(laughter).
So you’re dealing with dangerous stuff, you’re in dangerous territory. It can…you can start to forget, for example…there’s a great thing in a Jack Trevor Storey book, and he’s a brilliant writer, Jack Trevor Storey, he was, just before he died. There’s one bit where he’s talking to this woman, and she’s telling him about events that have happened, and she says: “Wait a minute, did that happen, or did that happen in my story?” And she suddenly starts to look terrified, and he’s a writer himself so he knows what to do: he walks up, slaps her round the face and says: “What’s your name?” And she sort of, so he slaps her again and says: “What’s your name?” and she gives him a name, and he says: “Right, what’s just happened to you is that you have for the first time confused your real life with your fiction. Don’t worry about this – this is going to happen quite a lot. It’s just important that you remember that you’re a real person, this is your name, that other stuff was stuff that you wrote. Keep the line there”.
But it’s difficult to do, especially if you start messing around and writing self-referential things, like writing a novel about your home town in which you are the final character… “
May 6, 2009 at 11:48 pm
Stefanie
i wouldn’t suggest reading it. it’s long and boring and narcissistic… nothing new from me. but i’ve been writing up a storm this semester — 4 new short stories and a nearly finished novel — and i’m glad to hear you’ve been getting back into yours well. here’s hoping we’re both able to maintain our sanity in this time of productivity.
May 7, 2009 at 9:20 am
kjwilson
Same to you. Glad to hear you’ve been churning out the short stories! I’m currently in a firestorm of productivity myself. Just finished building a website for Favorite Show, building a website for Scrap (i’m going to chronicle me building the book, character profiles, concepts, etc), and this website. I just got in contact with a guy that will be willing to take a short story concept of mine and translate it into a comic book, and I killed a werewolf.
Hooray for productivity!
May 7, 2009 at 9:19 am
kjwilson
Same to you. Glad to hear you’ve been churning out the short stories! I’m currently in a firestorm of productivity myself. Just finished building a website for Favorite Show, building a website for Scrap (i’m going to chronicle me building the book, character profiles, concepts, etc), and this website. I just got in contact with a guy that will be willing to take a short story concept of mine and translate it into a comic book, and I killed a werewolf.
Hooray for productivity!
May 7, 2009 at 9:21 am
kjwilson
Did you not notice the “reply” button until it was too late?
Yes, Kevin, as a matter of fact that’s exactly what I did.
May 7, 2009 at 10:05 am
Stefanie
yeah, this page just kind of exploded. i am convinced at this point that your level of productivity is exponentially linked to mine, even when we’re not aware of how much the other is working. i write a short story, and you have a religious epiphany. i finish the draft of my novel, and you open your own publishing house. but it’s great that you’re keeping on top of stuff. just be sure not to destroy any lives in your whirlwind of activity. sometimes you get in the zone, and you don’t know who you’re hurting. while you’re drawing pictures of kittens.
May 7, 2009 at 10:30 am
kjwilson
My pictures of kittens hurt everyone. Especially because I draw them hurting everyone.
Yeah, I’m trying to keep an eye on that. Lately I’ve been trying to tackle how quickly I get overwhelmed and stressed by what I do. The first step, making sure I’m not putting time to things that won’t benefit me in the long run, I’ve gotten that pretty much down. Now I’m focusing on trying to break things into smaller chunks in order to get things done in a timely manner.
You should tell me your short story ideas sometime.