No Idea What to Write? Get Over It

It’s not new, but an idea repeatedly struck me at the recent Texas Book Festival while I manned the Yellow Bird booth with poet, novelist, and fellow avian editor, E. Kristin Anderson. This was my first time being the face of Yellow Bird to a general audience (i.e. not a bunch of writers at a conference). I talked to a lot of people who aren’t actually writers, at least not yet. Some had had some good experiences in a few creative writing classes somewhere along the way. Some had always kept journals that no one’s allowed to read. I easily recognized them from my own not too distant past when I, too, thought writing was all about having a good idea.

Well, I’m here to say you don’t need an idea to start writing. Take this post as an example. This morning I stood and stared at the coffee dripping into the pot, thinking about the book festival, and wondering if I could mine my experience for a blog post. I had nothing. It did eventually occurr to me I needed to clean my coffee pot in a pretty bad way. The coffee dripped until I took a cup. I went in and sat down in front of the screen repeating my mantra in my head:

You don’t need an idea to write. You don’t need an idea to write.

So I typed that. Over and over. It’s a technique I picked up from one of the impromptu writing exercises Kathi Appelt was generous enough to lead at the Writing Barn’s Full Novel Revision Week back in August. It’s based on the theory that your brain hates wasting time and energy and that it will come up with something for you to write about simply to stop you from typing all that nonsense.

Imagine my surprise when it dawned on me halfway down the page that I could write about not needing a good idea to get started writing and how that ties in with the people I talked to last weekend, not to mention some of the themes I’ve already been exploring in this blog, and my recent experience at the Writing Barn. Forgive the massive sentence, but I needed to convey the enormity of the connections my brain made in that flash.

All because I didn’t wait for some inspiration to descend from on high. I forced it.

Again, I know this isn’t a new idea. I certainly don’t mean to claim any ownership of it by writing about it here. I just hope maybe a couple of those people I spoke to at the book festival might read this. And maybe one of them will set their alarm a little early tomorrow, and get up and stare at the coffee pot until they can take a cup. Then they’ll go in and type nonsense until they start to write again.

College Football and Revising: Who Knew They Had So Much in Common

Before getting to the blogpost proper, I have an invitation: come visit me October 25th or 26th at the Texas Book Festival!

I’ll be hanging out with E. Kristin Anderson in the Yellow Bird booth. Okay, we’re only in half a booth because we’re sharing with The Writing Barn. But that’s even more reason to stop by. Between Yellow Bird’s editors and the always amazing programming at The Writing Barn, you can probably find a lot of the help you’re looking for to get your WIP whipped into shape. And, as always, we’ll have candy while supplies last, not to mention coupons good toward the cost of future editing.

And the Free Query Letter Raffle is back on!

But you have enter in person at the Texas Book Festival. So stop by Saturday or Sunday, the 25th or 26th(this month). Bring all your questions about freelance editing and get a little sugar fix while you explore the festival.

This concludes the announcement portion of the post.

(Please don’t stop reading.)

I am a fan of UT football. Especially this season. I can’t remember ever being more proud of my alma mater’s football team than I have been this fall.

No. Seriously.

But they suck this year, you may be saying. And with a 2-4 record, you’d arguably be right. Unless you look more closely.

When I watch the Longhorn football team I can’t help thinking of the ways talented but immature writers have to struggle with themselves. Watching Coach Strong doggedly implement his ‘don’t be a dick’ policy with his players, regardless of the short-term cost, reminds me of my own ongoing — sometimes rocky — development as a writer.

I couldn’t help empathizing with UT last Saturday when they beat OU in almost every way except the final score. Their opening drive was a perfect example of what I mean. They ended up moving the ball down the field despite repeated self-sabotage (in this case, multiple stupid penalties) and somehow still managed to put points on the board. They kept showing flashes of brilliance, only to undercut themselves each time. Then they gave up a touchdown on the ensuing kickoff. And that’s pretty much how it went the rest of the day: 1. Sprint Ahead, 2. Shoot Own Foot, 3. Repeat ad nauseum.

Like a writer clinging to a scene or image that’s brilliant but just doesn’t fit his story, this Longhorn team clings to its former — let’s just call it traditional — superstar athlete mindset. But like a good editor – come on, you knew I was headed there, it’s an editors’ blog – Coach Strong keeps pointing them in what he sees as the right direction, insisting on a level of self-discipline and commitment a lot of his players obviously struggle with.

UT’s new coach has fired a lot of talented young stars. But like an editor confronted with that brilliant but not quite right scene, he knows that sometimes you just have to make the ruthless cut. Push delete and keep focused on the big picture. Get through that first season as best you can and build your program from there. I just hope he gets a chance to finish his revisions.

Because, unlike an editor working with a writer, the whole world’s watching Charlie Strong and the Longhorns go through their rewrite process. That’s got to be rough.

Oh, and Hook ‘Em!

The Background Threat as Tension Builder

My last personal blog post played around with the idea of how I’ve grown to fear rain. This is becausewater has come into my house a couple of times in the past year during particularly heavy downpours. I only mention it because my recent drainage catastrophes have got me thinking about ways to establish and sustain tension in my WIP.

There are lots of tried and true ways of doing this. Most of which seem to be variations on the idea of putting some kind of countdown or deadline into the story: if the hero doesn’t complete his or her task within a certain window of opportunity, all is lost. The countdown is a great device, which is no doubt why it’s used so frequently across all genres. But I want to talk about another, perhaps more difficult tension building strategy, namely The Constant Low-Level, or Background, Threat.

I just finished Shana Burg’s A Thousand Never Evers which employs this latter type of tension building method. In it, the hero, a southern black pre-teen living in rural Mississippi in 1963, is forced to adapt to the growing racist reaction against the Civil Rights Movement. This threat sometimes seems to lessen, but it never goes away. And, most importantly, the white violence against her and her family escalates throughout the story, usually in a direct reaction to the choices the hero makes. Burg’s setting turns out to be her story’s greatest source of tension. It’s both elegant and compelling.

Which brings me back to my recent experiences with the flash flooding Central Texas is so famous for. If my household travails were a story, the opening scene (aka inciting event) would be me and my shovel last October ignorantly piling some dirt around the foundation at the back of my house where erosion has taken its toll. I’d probably have my “me” character look up at the threatening sky a couple of times as I unwittingly clogged the drain that allowed the rainwater to run off my patio.

From there I could go on to show that first night the water came in. Our frantic but futile reactions both inside and out. Our tearing out of the floor and the baseboards the next day. Me reinstalling them. Only to do it all over again nine months later.

After that I’d show my partner sewing the long thin sandbags we now deploy around the back of our house. And me digging and piling dirt in various configurations, mixed in with the increasingly brittle conversations we continue to have about the efficacy of my experiments in hydrodynamics. The mid-point of my tale would be a scene of the two of us watching the rain through our sliding glass door. Then, because I write fiction, I’d have the couple’s relationship begin to crumble under the stress of it all.

And that’s my point. Good low level, ever present threats in stories usually start off as just a vaguely menacing part of the setting. Like the sleeping dragon in The Hobbit, or the white racists in A Thousand Never Evers, it’s just a fact of the hero’s life. And it will probably remain a distant, passive threat so long as the hero doesn’t pick up her metaphorical stick and poke it in its eye. Of course, then it wouldn’t be much of a story.

Motivation and Voice

I’ve been having this conversation in one way or another since grad school. It comes through in different ways and at different times, but it’s always the same theme. Most recently, I had it at the Writing Barn’s Full Novel Revision Workshop – which felt like a tiny slice of grad school, so I guess that makes sense. Most times in this conversation more experienced writers talk to less experienced ones about the need to be ready to hear good advice.

Since I was often the less experienced half of the discussion, I would nod right along like I knew what they meant. Even better, I wrote down everything everybody said at conferences and classes and then promptly forgot most of it. I let the information wash right through me and into my notebook without sticking. And my work showed it.

Writers can generally be divided into two categories: those who care about creating the best work they can and those who write to show how clever they are. Sorry if that sounds harsh. But I’m really not judging. Well, except maybe myself.

For me, this vanity-writing stage was a necessary step along the path to becoming … well, a real writer. I had to work through why I write. For decades I had used my creativity to basically show off. Ever since that first little poster board diorama I made in Sunday school and peopled with costumed plastic spoons, I’ve been telling stories and dealing out one-liners in the hopes of being deemed clever.

Needless to say, I didn’t exactly enjoy learning this about myself. But it shamed me into not putting my ego so blatantly onto the page.

It’s still there, don’t get me wrong. A little piece of me will probably always get crushed every time I learn I haven’t, in fact, created a chunk of prose all humanity must surely agree is perfect. But it’s a much littler piece now. And it’s morphed into a sort of spiritual lizard’s tail that breaks off before any permanent self-esteem damage can occur.

I fear that last metaphor may have pushed this post into the realm of accidental irony, so I’ll get back to the point. Put simply, a writer’s attitude toward writing translates quite blatantly to the page. The ‘why’ matters.

In fact, I think a writer’s motivation for creating comes through (or not) in that indefinable concept known as voice. I’ve based my conclusions purely on self-observation, so I’m hardly being scientific here. But I can tell you that I only began to find my voice after years of receiving honest and supportive (if sometimes heartbreaking) feedback and advice. This includes all that literary wisdom I ignored, by the way. Because somewhere deep inside I guess I always knew those great writers and readers were right. Why else did I keep seeking them out?

Or maybe I’m just I’m bullheaded and clueless.

Either way, it all gelled at some point, and I stopped taking notes and started listening. I started to apply what I was learning to both myself and my work. And that included an honest assessment of the ‘why’ of my own writing. Did I want to keep clinging to my need for praise, or did I want to create the best work I was capable of?

Okay, fine. I decided I wanted both. Just not in the same proportions as before. Now I write (and revise) to make the story better, not to showcase my clever wordplay. And that shift in motivation — along with a lot of time at the keyboard — has allowed my voice to emerge.

At least I hope it has. I’ve gotten a little nervous about the whole unintentional irony thing again.

What Kind of Editing Do You Need? Part the Third

In case you’re just tuning in, this post completes athree part series detailing the various freelance editing services offered by Yellow Bird. I promised to talk about copy editing in this edition. No really, I did. And you seemed okay with that. So here we go.

What is copy editing and how is it different from proofreading? To answer that, let’s start by defining the two levels of copy editing:

Standard copy editing includes corrections for grammar, punctuation, capitalization, verb tense, spelling, sentence structure, awkward phrasing, and word usage errors. Intensive copy editing covers all of the above with an additional focus on style, consistency, clarity, pacing, and dialogue.

So where does proofreading fit into the mix?

Proofreading is essentially the same thing as standard copy editing. However, the distinction is that proofreading is done on a PDF or print-ready file (for example, when getting ready to self-publish a book). In addition to correcting spelling, punctuation, capitalization, etc., your editor will also check for visual disruptions in the text layout, such as widows and awkwardly-placed hyphens at the end of a line.

So if you’re just looking to give your manuscript a final once over before submission, then go with proofreading or standard copy editing. An editor will go through and fix only the mechanical things. This is probably the least subjective editing service because it’s all about the rules of writing.

But if you need a little more guidance, a little more spit with your polish, then you might be looking for an intensive copy edit which delves deeper into more subjective questions of style and usage. This slightly more expensive service is perfect for the writer who feels pretty good about the “big picture” but still needs help wrestling with clunky sentences and paragraphs before sending her baby out into the world.

And that’s that. We’ve reached the end of our journey. Now I’m off to a workshop/retreat at Austin’s own Writing Barn where I’ll start revising my own manuscript for a change of pace.

Happy writing!