Leveling Up Your Craft as a Writer

This week at the SFF Seven, we're asking each other if our writing changed - and, if so, how?

It might seem disingenuous to say this, but yes my writing has changed: I've gotten better. 

I mean, one would hope so! 

And I realize that "better" is a nebulous descriptor, so I'll attempt to define it. One thing about writing skill that it seems I end up telling newbies over and over is that I absolutely have gotten faster at every stage of the process. It's like when you learn to drive a car. (And I learned on a stick shift, so there was an extra layer of learning curve there.) At first you consciously think about a hundred different aspects of the task: the brake, the accelerator, (maybe the balance between the clutch, the brake, and the accelerator, which was a real treat), steering, watching the front, the side, the rear view, reading street signs and traffic signals, and thinking several cars ahead, and remembering where you're going... It's a LOT to think about and overwhelming at first. But later, after you've been driving for years, you don't think about all of that anymore, right? Mostly I think about where I'm going and how to best get there - and sometimes I zone out and forget even that, defaulting to familiar routes - but otherwise the rest is subconscious.

Writing is the same way! (I include revising in this.) After time and practice, you don't have to think about the zillion details of craft, liberating your mind to focus on storytelling. 

I think this is something that more experienced writers forget - how much we've internalized the mechanics of the process, allowing us to allocate more resources to our creative selves. This freedom allows us to try new things, write more difficult and complex stories, to test our writing chops. Maybe it's like, to extend the analogy, learning to drive a race car or fly a plane. Going for the fancier skills is predated by learning the basics.

The thing is, I think a lot of us who grow up reading the works that inspire us (which should be all of us, really) have this idea that we can leap directly to doing THAT. Everybody loves the concept of the wunderkind, the prodigy, the creative who makes a list like "30 under 30," as if that's meaningful in any way. Spoiler: it's not meaningful; it's just unusual, which is why we're fascinated.

So, do what I advise the writers in my mentoring Discord: take your time, learn the basics. It *will* get easier. And THEN you can deliberately choose to make it harder!

 

Leveling Up - Whether We Want To or Not

This week at the SFF Seven we're asking each other: do you look for new skills to try each year? Or with each book?

My first reaction is that this isn't an annual process for me, but an ongoing one. Because it's absolutely something that happens with every book. And not because I plan it that way! Quite the reverse. With 65 published titles, I often go into new books thinking something along the lines of "This one will be a fast and easy write because x, y, z."

I am, inevitably, always always wrong.

That's not to say that some books don't write easier than others, but they all pose unique problems. It seems to be the nature of the beast, that the creative process goes to a new and more challenging place every time. 

I have two caveats to this:

1. I do kind of look at this on a yearly basis because of my agent, Sarah Younger at Nancy Yost Literary Agency, who sets up annual chats with all of her clients at the beginning of each year. (She jokes that she has to dig some clients out of their caves once a year for this. You know who you are.) I really love this about Sarah because it's part of what she brings to the table: long-term career strategy. She says she keeps a goal book for each of her clients and we revisit those goals and set new ones each year. For me, a big part of this conversation is always how can I grow and expand? What do I need to do to level up?
2. The second caveat is that I save some ideas for when I have the chops to execute them. Writers often talk about (and are asked) where they get their ideas and how we choose what to write next. (See above for that.) For many of us, ideas arrive all the time, but that doesn't mean we're ready to write them. The second novel I ever wrote was like that - only I didn't know that I didn't have the chops to execute the concept. So, over the years, I've gradually been adding skills as the stories demand them. In Shadow Wizard, book one of the Renegades of Magic trilogy, I added extra points-of-view (POVs). That was the first time I wrote in more than two POVs. In book three of that trilogy, Twisted Magic, I had five POVs. Who knows where it will end??

Except that someday (maybe?), I'd like to go back and rewrite that second novel. I bet I could pull it off this time.