No Excuses.

Let's talk about that novel that's been in progress for ages, the one you're pretty sure you'll finish someday (especially if it's your first novel but even if it's your twentieth). Let's talk about why it's stalled.

I'm finishing my novel for Lent. For reasons we don't need to get into here (but I did elsewhere, for the curious) I've turned the runup to Easter into my own personal NaNoWriMo. You may remember I said I don't do NaNoWriMo, and I don't -- I've set the word count at a sustainable rate for myself, and I've been able to nail it every day except for the time the school called and said they foresaw an ambulance ride in my son's future. (There wasn't. He's okay.)

What I've realized is not just that I required a swift kick in the pants to get finished, but why I needed it: I was allowing normal problems to derail me. So let's back up a bit. Are you too-easily discouraged?

The problem with being an instinctual writer, the kind of seat-of-the-pants writer who navigates the drafting process via instinct rather than road map, is that sometimes our instincts are wrong. Or rather, as instinctual writers, we believe it should be easy. When it gets hard, we may mistake resignation for a writing pause.

This kind of stall is not just the writer making excuses for not writing. I mean that sometimes we legitimately get derailed, only by something that shouldn't have had that much power over us. Maybe in those cases, it's time to borrow tricks from our more-disciplined outlining and word-counting siblings to clear the hurdles. Maybe that's the time to pull out the yardstick and figure out just how much we should be producing per day. And then produce it. No excuses.

Just after the midpoint of my WIP, the reader needs to know a minor character has realized something vital to the plot. The problem? He's not a POV character. Another problem? He keeps this information to himself. I couldn't figure out how to convey his realization, but I had to because it's going to explain why things start going wrong for my protagonists, and yet no solution I came up with resolved the problem to my satisfaction.

I asked my agent. I ranted at my Patient Husband. I lamented to a friend. I wrote nothing. I wasn't even at that part of the novel, but I stalled.

But once I resolved to write my daily minimum, that scene came up, and when it came up, I had to solve the problem. I had no choice. No more dithering. And while I walked out to get the mail, on the day I needed to solve it -- I found the solution.

It's not just that one scene. I've discovered repeatedly that when I'm forced to solve a problem because the word count demands it and we're at that scene...the solution comes. What's the next scene? I don't know. But that doesn't mean I need to take five weeks to figure it out. It's not going to be any easier to figure it out in May than it is today, right? The pace forces me to settle on a solution and enact it -- today. Otherwise I won't get today's pages done.

That's not to say I haven't revisited those pages the next day to do it better. What I'm saying is that sometimes if you're a SOP writer, the tendency is to say, "The solution will come when it comes."

Maybe instead it's better to get up and stride toward the solution. Because now I'm chugging ahead on the manuscript, and I'm furious at myself for the time I've lost waiting for The Idea Fairy to present the next scene, or a way to convey a third party's information, and so on. 

I still hold to the idea of a literary pause. But not literary laziness. Only the writer can tell the difference.

Here's my suggestion, though. If you've got a work-not-in-progress when it should be, and if your literary pause has lasted longer than a week, pick it up again. Write all the way up to your trouble spot. Force yourself to write through it. If it works, then you're steaming ahead. If it doesn't, then rip out those pages and try another approach. But don't discount the idea of momentum. Sometimes going through the motions does lead to real results.

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Jane Lebak is the author of The Wrong Enemy. She has four kids, three cats, two books in print, and one husband. She lives in the Swamp and spends her time either writing books or ejecting stink bugs from the house. At Seven Angels, Four Kids, One Family, she blogs about what happens when a distracted daydreamer and a gamer geek attempt to raise four kids. If you want to make her rich and famous, please contact the riveting Roseanne Wells of the Jennifer DeChiara Literary Agency. 

Always Write Terrible First Drafts

The Skeleton: A Terrible First Draft

At least when it comes to fiction, I write the worst first drafts, and I know I’m not the only one. In Bird by Bird, author Anne Lamott says that her first drafts are so bad she worries about getting into a car crash and dying…because she’d never want others to see her stuff before she’s had a chance to revise it. 

Whether you’re an outliner or a pantser, things are still going to flow differently once you start writing, and insisting on having a reasonably good first draft may cause a variety of problems. 

First, it’s important that every writer realize that a first draft is just that – a first draft. No matter how great it may have seemed while you were working on it, everything needs to be proofread and polished up over several more passes. One of the biggest mistakes I see beginning writers making is that they’re impatient with editing – they want their masterpiece out there, already. Often before it's ready.

But masterpieces not only require you to review the manuscript to work out the kinks, they also require feedback from others, who will let you know where the problems you can’t see are. And if you always consider your first draft terrible, you’re not going to be offended when others point out weak areas.

Second, if you’re snailing along trying to get everything right the first time, you may not notice places that the novel’s tension drops. That is, when I’m writing frantically to get all the ideas onto the page in some form, I really notice when everything sloooowwsss down, and I know that those are places that are going to need particular work (or they may even need to be cut completely). 

I’ve always liked that Iris Murdoch quote, “Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.” In other words, what ends up on the page may not capture your vision as well as you’d hoped. And if you’re spending the whole process worrying about that, you’re never going to accomplish anything.

To put this into psychological terms, if your inner critic is sitting on your shoulder tapping its pointy-nailed fingers, it’s unlikely you’re going to break into a “flow” state.  Flow, as defined by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (yes, you can pronounce that – it’s me-high chick-sent-me-high), is a state of complete involvement, elevated mood, serenity, great inner clarity, and a sense of competence. It is, in other words, that feeling you get when you’re completely immersed in a project, time is zipping by, and the words just flow. Csikszentmihalyi argues that this occurs when we have a perfect balance between our skill level and the challenge before us.  If the inner critic is worrying too much about doing things “just right” the first time, flow can’t happen. 

I think of writing a book as a layered process. I see the first draft as the skeleton. It provides a framework. Next are the tendons and muscles and organs. The stuff that makes your story (forgive me for using this word) meaty. This stage takes several passes for me, each time building another layer. Finally comes the skin, the hair, the features. This is the fine-tuning, the polishing, the part that makes your manuscript truly presentable. 

At the skeleton phase, I’m telling the story far more than I’m showing it. And I write everything – the awful melodrama I really want to put in there (but shouldn’t), conflicting information if I’m not sure exactly which way I’m going to handle something (or if things are changing as I write), the stuff we don’t want our parents to see. (Darned if that stuff doesn’t usually end up being some of the best stuff for me. But if I weren’t writing a Terrible First Draft, I’d never put it in there.) 

If I think of something important that has the potential to interrupt my single-minded creation of the Terrible First Draft, here’s what I do. Let’s say I have an idea for what I want to write tomorrow, or somewhere farther along in the story. If you have an outline, or use outlining software, you may find it easy to pop those things in with a new notecard or file. But if you don’t know where the idea goes, or you don’t want to stop long enough to go back to your plotting board, you can always write the idea right in the first draft. I usually write these pieces in ALL CAPS (I started doing that in my manuscripts before that was known as shouting) or in italics. They just go in there wherever they occurred to me, single-spaced to make them stand out, and then I plunge right back into the story.

Later I might move the idea into a writing program like yWriter so I can play with it some more, but when I’m writing, I’m writing.

So don’t be afraid to write Terrible First Drafts. I know if I didn’t, I’d miss out on a lot of great possibilities. Plus I’d be too paralyzed to get much done in the first place. 

If you’ve never tried writing a Terrible First Draft, you might want to try NaNoWriMo, which starts November first. Writing 50,000 words (or more) in a month is one way to shut off the worry about producing something Good the first time. There’s no time to worry – only to write!

So how about you? Do you write Terrible First Drafts? What are the benefits you’ve discovered?

Carolyn Kaufman, PsyD's book, THE WRITER'S GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGY: How to Write Accurately About Psychological Disorders, Clinical Treatment, and Human Behavior helps writers avoid common misconceptions and inaccuracies and "get the psych right" in their stories. You can learn more about The Writer's Guide to Psychology, check out Dr. K's blog on Psychology Today, or follow her on Facebook! 

The Literary Pause

I've become more instinctual about my writing, which sounds a bit odd because I don't write from an outline. From the time I was twelve, I plotted a novel in my head and made decisions based on what felt right for the characters. I'm talking more about trusting my instincts in terms of what I need as a writer, because I've found lately that what I need and what the story needs are often the same.


I'm working on a rough draft now, for example, but it's not behaving. Hmm.


(If you're not a writer and stumbled on this blog because of a bad Google search, you're going to wonder how a manuscript can not behave. You probably think a manuscript is a bunch of words on the page, and if it's not behaving, it's really the writer not behaving. And to you I say...hah. I wish.)


Every writer has his or her optimal daily output, and normally I clear 1200 words a day. I know this because graphing it keeps me writing every day in order to "feed the spreadsheet."

(It tapers off at the end there because I stopped drafting and started editing, and I realized it was pointless to keep tracking.  But you can see production is pretty consistent.)


So now when I suddenly produce any words at all, or only a couple of hundred a day, I know something is wrong. I have naturally fallen into what I call a "literary pause."


Ninety percent of writing takes place in your subconscious. Well, my subconscious; I can’t talk about those who devise a road map before they set down the first word. But a SOTP writer is whirling things in her brain as she’s writing, incorporating everything she sees into her story.


For example, while I was desperately trying to trap an injured stray cat in my yard, my protagonist was reverberating against my heart while I stood in the yard calling "Kitty-kitty!" and I realized something about my protagonist and something about my injured stray love. Abruptly it was obvious that my protagonist needed to be feeding a stray, what that action said about her, and how the feeding of a stray cat emblematized another relationship in the story.


Of course, you'll never read that in the text (well, you read it right here, but in the book) but the reader's unconscious picks up on the subtext behind the cat food stashed behind the garbage cans. Before the reader's unconscious can pick up on it, the writer's has to do the same, only in reverse.


So here I am today, literarily paused, and uncertain why because this novel has an outline and everything, but I honored my literary pause and did what the book required: I listened to myself stuck in neutral.


Did it come to me? Well, I'm blogging about it before millions, so yes. I'm at the cusp of Act II, where the MC has just committed to solving the story problem, and as Amy Deardon says in The Story Template, you can't slink into Act II. You have to explode into it. 


What had I planned? Kind of a slink. And the story "knew" this wasn't right, so guess what stalled out?


That's what I mean by trusting our instincts. Don't get me wrong: it's important to focus on the craft of writing so you have every technique you could possibly use right there in your tool box. But it's not just a matter of bringing to bear your sharply-honed skills. You first need to feel through what the story requires of you. It doesn't matter how well you accomplish something: if it's wrong for the story, it's wrong.


When you find yourself slowing down, ask yourself why. It may be, as I discovered, your plans don't match the story needs. It may be that you aren't ready yet to write whatever is coming up. It may be that part of the story question is involved with a question you're asking yourself, only you haven't yet figured out the answer. And in many cases, time is the only answer. Like a bottle of wine, let the manuscript breathe. Step back and see whether something grows that you weren't expecting.


So although you don't want to give up, and everyone says to write every day, I'm going to encourage you to follow your inclinations when a manuscript needs time off. A day, maybe two. But just enough time for you (and your story) to catch your breath and say This. This is what we both need right now, and then knowing that, you can give it.


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Jane Lebak's first novel The Guardian will be re-released this September by MuseItUp Publishing! She is also the author of Seven Archangels: Annihilation (Double-Edged Publishing, 2008) and The Boys Upstairs (MuseItUp, 2010). At Seven Angels, Four Kids, One Family, she blogs about what happens when a distracted daydreamer and a gamer geek attempt to raise four children. If you want to make her rich and famous, please contact the riveting Roseanne Wells.

Writing by the Seat of Your Pants

Writer's block can be like trying to force rusty wheels to turn!

I’ve been struggling a bit with writer’s block, so I’ve been reading books on how to get unstuck. I’m noticing a pattern with them – most encourage you to outline as you brainstorm. I love the idea of outlining, of having a rough (or not so rough) roadmap for where you’re going, and for my last novel, I used notecards to create one (a process I talked about with KM Weiland for her book, Outlining Your Novel: Map Your Way to Success). The notecards were glorious, like stepping stones along the way.

Having had a good experience with outlining, and having read all these wonderful, encouraging books that talk about outlining, I’d love to be able to outline to get myself unstuck on the two WIPs I’ve got going.

Unfortunately, it’s just…not…happening.

As much as I’d like to be a consistent outliner, the reality is that I’ve been a pantser most of my life. What’s a pantser, you may ask? Why, it’s someone who flies by the seat of their pants. If the outliners are Planners, the people who make it up as they go are Pantsers.

I’m starting to wonder if my problem is that I'm trying to force myself to be an outliner when that isn't really my nature. After all, being a pantser has worked for me for a lot of years. And I’m kind of a pantser in life, too. I don’t like things to be too scheduled, because what if I change my mind? And when it comes to other forms of creativity, like graphic design, I like to try different visual elements together and see what inspires me most, and go from there. I probably hit more dead ends than a lot of other creative people this way, but I also have some pretty unexpected turns in my stories. 

Although forcing myself to open up that document and put words on the page when I feel stuck and directionless is like trying to force rusty wheels to turn, I’ve discovered that if I’m persistent about it, I can get them to turn. And when I write, I discover things about my characters, about the story, that I’m just not sure I’d get if I were outlining. In other words, it’s the nuances I notice along the way that propel me from one plot point to another.

In an example some of you have probably seen me use before, in one of my novels the villain spontaneously shoots one of the heroes. I never had any intention of killing off the character who was shot (after all, she was one of my heroes!), but after she went down, I couldn’t for the life of me get her back up. I threw medical professionals at her, and I wished along with my other characters that she’d be okay, but in the end, she died. Another hero developed PTSD as a result, and that PTSD not only drove the second half of that novel, but most of the sequel. If I’d outlined, I’d never have killed her off. Yet somehow the actual writing is different, and I realized that it was the right thing for the story.

Of course, you can always make changes as you work from an outline, but I think I might have trouble flying off into these tangents that seem to bear the most fruit if I did. It’s while I’m floundering around in the darkness, writing anything I can think of just to get words on the page that I often seem to stumble upon the best material. I have a wild “what if?” moment, and I go with it because I don’t have anything better planned. And because I don’t have anything better planned, I also feel free to just go with whatever crazy repercussions I see as a result of that wild “what if?” moment.

So if you’re a pantser and you find yourself getting stuck, like I have, what can you do about it? Here are a few things that I’ve found helpful.

• Go ahead and try outlining, if you want. I really enjoyed Gene Perret’s Write Your Book Now!, and KM Weiland’s aforementioned book was also great. If you search Amazon, you’ll find at least a dozen more books to help you learn how. You can also check out the snowflake method. If outlining doesn't work for you, though, don't beat yourself up. You may just be a pantser through and through!

• Get away from the manuscript to think about what happens next. I like to sit down to my computer with some inkling of an idea for where things are going next, but I don’t always come up with those inklings while I’m at the computer. In fact, I find that going for a long walk is one of the best ways for me to find my inklings. (Of course, I have been known to talk to myself while I’m plotting, which can be a little weird for the people walking the same place I am!)

• If you normally type, try writing by hand, and vice versa. For some reason, when that blinking cursor on the screen is making me feel hopeless, I do much better on some notebook paper. For more information about why writing by hand can help us be more creative, check out my post, Thinking Outside the Computer.

• Give yourself permission to write whatever it is, even if you think it might be awful. If I had a bunch of thoughts I knew were brilliant, I’d get them down into an outline! But sometimes I get these ideas, and like I said, I don’t have anything better planned, so down they go. And sometimes they end up being the best parts of the story.

If you’re a pantser, what are your tips? What helps you sit down at the computer, even when you have absolutely no idea where you’re going? 

Carolyn Kaufman, PsyD's book, THE WRITER'S GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGY: How to Write Accurately About Psychological Disorders, Clinical Treatment, and Human Behavior helps writers avoid common misconceptions and inaccuracies and "get the psych right" in their stories. You can learn more about The Writer's Guide to Psychology, check out Dr. K's blog on Psychology Today, or follow her on Facebook or Google+!