Building Skills

 

This creative development question is my topic. It came to me because years ago, a friend who is now a very successful author decided to write her second book. She sat up in our local writer's meeting and said, "I want to make readers cry. I'm going to try to write a book that makes 'em cry." It stuck with me. She's continued with having a goal for each book - something that stretches her skills and at the time, I was envious of and intimidated by the conscious decision to attempt something like that. What if you failed? I've since gotten over that fear of failure silliness. New skills are new skills whether you execute them perfectly the first time or not. In the spirit of 'what doesn't kill me makes me stronger' nothing new that's attempted is ever wasted.

At the moment, however, I have only one goal. Recover from burn out and finish the book I'm working on so I can write the book that was due a few years ago. My goals for books are currently in a really simplistic place. I want to tell a competent, compelling story. I'll worry about technique after. I need the story to feel right before I can fuss with heightening whatever skill I stumbled on accidentally -  which is what usually happens. As an example, the book I'm currently working on requires that I learn how to handle a little bit of horror technique. I have no clue whether I'm doing it correctly. That will be for readers to decide. I'm *trying*. But it wasn't a conscious decision. It was simply what this story needed. It's the story that intrigued me enough to write and as I wrote it, the story revealed to me that it needed a reasonably high creep factor. This was a skill I did not (and to this day, may or may not) possess. But yes. I sought out a class. A couple, in fact. 

My next book requires me to tackle a theme that isn't entirely my forte. We've been eyeing one another, that theme and I. There's been research and some free writing around the associations and emotional loads. Now lets see if it will mature into a plot that won't bore readers to death. If I don't stick the landing, so what? I'll still have learned something that I'll carry forward into the next story. And the next.

As a part of the recovery process, I'm doing my best to keep writing as nourishing as possible. Some days that means fun. Some days that means challenging. Some days it means trying things I've never done before - with the awareness that such experimentation might not end up being ready for anyone else's eyes. That's okay. I look at it as building strength. It's also a useful way to break up writerly monotony. Experiment builds upon experiment, and eventually, there a new skill is likely to emerge.

Planning for specific skills for each book? No. Not yet. I'm not there yet. I aspire to be. Working on it. For right now, the stories lead the way. What they want, I attempt to deliver. Succeed or fail, I at least give it my best shot and trust I'm learning from the process. I expect that at some point, I'll learn enough that I'll be able to declare an objective like "I want to make them cry!" and be able to rise to the challenge. But for today, finishing is good enough.

What Can I Teach You?

 

I have a bit of a jaundiced view of classes targeted at authors these days. There's such a proliferation of "pay me to make you successful" schemes out there targeted at writers, most of which are predatory. Maybe you'll learn something? Probably not. Also, unfortunately (to my mind), the ones that seem to be the most successful are those that make people feel good without giving them real, helpful advice or tools.

There are good teachers out there, and good advice-givers of other kinds, but the best way to get good at doing anything is to do a whole lot of it.  That's why, though I occasionally teach workshops - I really like teaching Master Classes! - I'm mostly mentoring, coaching, and advice-giving through my Patreon. (I know, I know - seems like everyone has a Patreon these days!) Mine is modest in size (and in advice-giving, really) and works mainly to give me a place to offer insights from my experience to people who care enough to invest in hearing from me. We have a terrific, supportive community and I'm really loving it!

Come and join for as little as $5/month!

Becoming a Better Writer - How to Do It?

      

 

ROGUE FAMILIAR has a cover!! I've been loving the enthusiasm for it, too. It's a great inspiration to me as I write Selly's hunt for Jadren. 

This week at the SFF Seven we're talking tools for writers who aren’t beginners. I seem to be hearing a lot of interest in this topic lately. I've been contemplating setting up some online classes and not long ago I asked for input on what kinds of classes people would like to see from me. (Feel free to comment or message me if you have ideas or requests!) One of the suggestions that came up often was a desire for classes for more advanced writers, targeting those who’ve written several books but want to learn how to keep getting better at it.

So, I've been working up some lists of more advanced topics I could teach - and thinking back to where I learned the intermediate and higher stuff. Some of it is always going to be self-study. Reading other authors. Listening to other writers talk about their process. Re-reading favorites to study how those writers accomplished what they did. I think those are the best tools.

But I'd also like to see more craft-focused workshops, classes, and discussions out there. For quite a few years, it seems, the bulk of information offered to writers seems to focus on business. There are countless opportunities to learn Facebook ads, newsletter marketing, keywords, BookBub ads, Amazon ads, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. Why? Because those are easy to teach. Teaching craft is a much more daunting prospect. In fact, I've heard debates among creative-writing professors about whether the craft of writing can be taught at all.

At any rate, this isn't a very informative post, I know. I'm not offering any good tools here (other than the above), but rather food for thought. Improving craft is something we all (well, most of us) want to do. I'm thinking up some ways to get at it. Suggestions welcome!

Leveling Goals

 Goal: Leveling up. How to get there? For me, writing classes. It's not enough to just want more words - that state is eternal. You can always assume I'm looking for a way to make stories happen faster and more efficiently. Over and above that, though, I'm interested in taking skills up a notch. I want to look at words differently. I want to think not just about what makes a story, but what makes a tale compelling. How do I get more emotion from characters into readers - if words are my only tools - I need to experiment with how they evoke a response in someone who isn't me. 

It's that old acting chestnut of Sir Lawrence Olivier supposedly saying, "It isn't my job to feel anything. It's my job to make the audience feel everything."

I'd started writing on the theory that if what I wrote made me feel something, then surely reads must, too. T'ain't necessarily so. Without getting into the showing versus telling diatribe, let's just say there are multiple ways to approach reaching out to touch a reader via nothing more than flat words printed on a page. 

That's my current work on leveling up. Concentrating on skills. While spurring for more words faster than they are currently being produced.

All or Nothing

I took a class from someone who specializes in teaching writers to play to their strengths. Which meant identifying those strengths. That work was done and those of us in the class listened to lectures, chatted amongst ourselves and with our instructor, mostly trying to grasp how far of course each of us had drifted when it came to core personality traits and/or our wiring.

Think of it like vehicles with internal combustion engines. Some of us are motorcycles - lean, agile, able to zip around obstacles that stymy others, but side swipe us with a truck, and it's game over. Some of us are econoboxes - no frills workhorses who won't set any speed records, but we get where we're headed. Some are sporty models - high output engines, speed, flashy good looks and a tendency to end up sitting in repair shops because, man, those engines are fiddly. Or maybe a rusted, dented pickup truck with a lawnmower hanging out the back and one wheel that wobbles and a top speed on the freeway for 40.

At their core, all of these vehicles are the same, right? Wheels and internal combustion engines. But after that, they are all built entirely differently.

So are writers.

And yet, we tell ourselves that if THAT author is doing were-hamster/were-guinea pig mash up romances at the blistering clip of 16 new novels a year, then by all the gods, WE SHOULD BE ABLE TO DO THAT TOO. If plotting is THE way to make writing easier and faster, then let's all learn to plot! So what if the only way we discover story is literally in the writing of it? We can learn anything! Well. Yes. As a matter of fact, we can learn anything. Yay, reading, right? But then we start applying everything we've taught ourselves and over time, we bog down. So we learn more things, trying to get unstuck. It rarely works. We've loaded waaay too much stuff into the sports car and completely ignored that vehicle's great strength - drama. I may stretching the analogy far too thin.

Back to the class I took. It was a series of epiphanies centered around figuring out how we as writers (and human beings) are wired to work. No two of us in the class were the same. But our instructor did a fabulous job of explaining what drives each of the different personalities. Interesting stuff trying to peel back layers of expectation to get at the core of your writing drive. Then, in the final class, the instructor began talking about people who are what she called 'the 0-100 percenters'. When these people do a thing, they DO the thing - no one and nothing else exists for them. That's the 100%. The rest of the time, these people are 0%. They might even deny they're writers during a 0% phase. She kept talking, mostly about the challenges versus the advantages of the type and how to structure your life to take advantage of it. I kept listening, my heart sinking.

I am one of those people. How do I know? After that class, I took the weekend off. I read four novels in two days. This had been my childhood. Devouring books. Getting in trouble because I couldn't stop reading long enough to do the chores my parents assigned me.

I'd always been amazed by (and maybe deeply suspicious of) people who could just read a chapter in a book and then put it down. Then I graduated to wondering what was wrong with me that I couldn't do that. It's because I'm just wired to be something different.

So where's the benefit? The day after finishing the fourth book, I wrote an insane number of words after having been stuck in the low triple digits for months. It was easy. It was fun. It's been a long time since I said that. That's the power of stripping way all the 'shoulds' around what we do and playing to your specific strengths. Now to fun something - anything - to completion.