Learning to Edit Your Own Writing

Painters carefully choose what to include, what to edit out. I learned this when I studied still life. You may see ten things but you focus on three because it makes the painting stronger.

Same is true in writing. It's called editing. Do you know how to edit your own writing?

Can you easily see what needs to stay, what needs to go? Can you tell when your tendencies, the places you go "unconscious" in your own work, take over, making the writing less strong and the writer more stubborn? In the final revision, do you have the detachment to let go of what's not working, even if you love it more than your first-born child?

Editing is a craft. Trained editors are truly craftspeople in their work. When a writer is able to self-edit, that becomes an art and a craft. Art, because what emerges is often transformative to both writer and reader. Craft, because it requires practice, discipline, and appreciation for how it improves your work.

My training as an editor came in the trenches of a small press in the midwest where I worked for eighteen years, and as I freelanced for other publishers throughout the U.S. as a book doctor. I learned the craft of editing different genres--what adult literary fiction demands, compared to a children's book, compared to a mystery or self-help or memoir. At the small press, a team of four very experienced editors suffered through my early years, as I learned ways to enhance, not erase, the original voice of the writer and bring out what the manuscript could be.

As I learned to edit other people's manuscripts, I noticed my own writing improving. I began to publish more: essays, a short story here and there, my first books. I didn't really connect my editing training with my writing success until a publisher asked me if I worked as an editor, by any chance. "I can always tell someone with editing background," she said. "The writing they send me is so clean."

Wow, I thought. Learning to edit means learning to write?

Self-Editing Toolkit

I began to put together a toolkit of techniques I used in editing, which might apply to my writing. This included my tendencies to expand or contract as a writer, where I went unconscious (usually during a highly emotional moment in the writing) and skipped over important details, where I was overwriting, where my love of sparseness got in the way of conveying a setting, where I explained too much of what was really obvious, where the pacing slowed too much or sped up and lost a reader.

This toolkit was really valuable. In my workshops, I began teaching special sections on editing. I wanted to give writers a new understanding of their own "unconscious areas" and a new appreciation for editing tools as the solution.

One of the favorite writing exercises, one that draws big "ah-ha's" from the class, is called Expansion/Contraction. It reveals, in very short time, where we get too expansive with our words, covering huge territory, and the reader loses track of the point. And where we are so careful with each sentence, crafting it so sparsely, that the story drops big pieces. It's different for each writer. This week's writing exercise shares part 1 of Expansion/Contraction.

Next Sunday, March 28, I'll be teaching Self-Editing for Writers, the one-day workshop I developed from what I learned. I teach this workshop twice a year. It's going to be at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, 11:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m., and it costs $78. There's still room. If you are serious about learning editing techniques, you may enjoy this workshop. More information below.

This Week's Writing Exercise

1. Choose a paragraph of your writing. Read it aloud to yourself and find the one sentence that really is the essence of the paragraph for you--be it action, character, information, or setting. Now rework that one sentence until you have condensed the paragraph effectively. The writing won't be better; don't try to get that. It's just going to help you see where your paragraph's main punch might be.

2. Now do the opposite. Take that one sentence and expand it to two paragraphs.

3. Which was easier for you? Practice again, with another paragraph, whichever was harder. This tells you a bit about your tendencies as a writer--are you more comfortable expanding or contracting?

Self-Editing for Book Writers

A fast-paced, hands-on workshop to explore how to edit your own work, refining it from draft to final revision. We'll cover the art of pacing, line and structural editing, substantive editing (filling holes), and much more. You'll leave with a new perspective on your work and a toolbox full of essential techniques for getting a manuscript ready for publication or submission to agents and publishers. Bring 2 double-spaced pages of your manuscript or story/essay draft to use in the exercises. For all genres and skill levels.

At the Loft Literary Center, 1011 Washington Ave South, Minneapolis, MN, http://www.loft.org/.

To register, please call the Loft at 612-379-8999.
Day: Sunday
Date: March 28
Time: 11:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.

Mary is also offering this workshop:

How to Plan, Write, and Develop a Book

Spend two intensive days getting to know your book—what it is about, how to structure it, how to plan to finish it! You’ll learn a step-by-step plan, including flexible timelines, chapter grids, storyboarding, and other techniques. You’ll look at ways to flow chapters, find holes in your material that need filling, organize research and concepts, construct plots, and bring your book into manifestation. You’ll also learn what editors and agents look for and gain essential tips on editing and evaluating your book in all its stages. Designed for nonfiction authors who have a book concept or a work in progress, and for novelists who need a fresh look at their material. Bring an SASE to Saturday’s class and up to fifteen double-spaced pages of work, and the instructor will mail you feedback.

At the Loft Literary Center, 1011 Washington Ave South, Minneapolis, MN http://www.loft.org/

To register, please call the Loft at 612-379-8999.

Fee: $146 for both days
Day: Friday & Saturday
Date: March 26 & 27
Time: 10:00am–4:30pm (both days)

Book-Writing Map Workshop--March 26/27 at the Loft Literary Center. Register now while there's still room.

Find out why writers have called it "the best writing workshop I've ever attended!" Fee: $146 for 2 information-packed days. Transform your book, finish it, get it published. To register, call the Loft at 612-379-8999. Loft Literary Center is in Minneapolis. www.loft.org.

Discouragement as a Springboard into Higher Creativity

It was a discouraging week for one of my writing classes. We delved into a new level of information about books, and many writers crashed.

I was deluged with emails after a few days--"Help!" "I'm lost/stuck/floundering." "Not sure I really want to write a book after all." Big discouragement.

Discouragement means losing heart, losing perspective, and it happens to all us writers, no matter how often we've been published. It's a terrible moment when your work looks like dog meat, when you can't imagine how you're going to move forward, when you read other (wonderful) writers and sigh with the impossibility of being that good.

I got a couple of chapters back from a good editor in early January. I had thought these newly revised chapters were almost there. But my editor friend had much to suggest--and this was our third call-and-response session (I call out, she responds with edits). She's so good, she sees so well what needs work, that although I felt the discouragement keenly for at least the length of a long car ride home after our meeting, I knew better than to give up.

So I set about finding what was truth for me in her suggestions, and what she might be seeing that were my own blind spots and therefore invisible to me?

Make a List

The first thing I do with feedback that discourages or overwhelms me is make a list. List-makers for generations, my family instilled in me the beauty of list-making as a way of getting perspective. When faced with an onerous task, my mother made lists. Revising for the twentieth time is certainly onerous, so when I got home I took a sheet of paper and listed my editor's main suggestions.

It helped. A lot. As I listed them--the global changes, the smaller changes--I felt myself move into a different viewpoint. I saw how 90 percent of her suggestions actually made the chapter flow much more smoothly for a reader.

My stomach felt better too.

Perspective--Learning about Your Personal Learning Curve

Next, I put the chapter away for a week. I wanted to spend a little time away from the editing and get perspective (that word again) on my personal learning curve. Where was I in the process of this manuscript? I'd worked on it for four years, it had been through group and individual feedback, and I thought I was really there. But she was telling me that from a reader's point of view, things were still jumbly.

After a week I looked at it. My God, she's right, I thought. The temptation to get newly discouraged rose fast. Why hadn't I seen those things myself!

I reminded myself that blind spots are blind to us until we get perspective. Then we see what we didn't see before. Seeing new levels is a sign of growth, and growth is a good thing. She'd pointed out what was not visible to me before, and now it was visible. Lucky to have someone to help me see blind spots in my writing. Lucky too that she'd given me practical steps to fix them.

I went back to my list and began making the changes that made sense to me. Some of them were so big they caused tremors throughout the chapter--lots had to be rearranged. But I reminded myself that this was all good, this was all growth, and I wanted the chapter to be the very best it could be.

How This Process Makes Us Better Writers

After I corrected my chapter, I printed it out, got some Coconut Bliss, and let the chapter rest for an hour while I stared out the window and went into heaven with my bowl of ice cream. Then I read it aloud. Wow, was it better! So much better, I was amazed.

I felt grateful now, not discouraged. And curious--would this learning translate into changed skill? Would my attempt at the next chapter come out better because of what I'd just learned?

This is the goal--you gain skill from good editing, from good feedback. Yes, there's discouragement, losing heart, but there's also skill--if you keep on keepin' on.

End of story: The next chapter was indeed much better. When I went back to work on its revision, I saw much of the same problems as my editor friend had caught. Blind, but now I see. And I did see, a lot more, which means my skills as a writer had increased via this path of discouragement.

This Week's Writing Exercise

If you can get some feedback on your writing this week, do. Then try one of the techniques above. Make a list. Set the writing aside. Have some ice cream.

See if your learning curve isn't a springboard into higher creativity, in disguise.

Setting: The Best Way to Get Emotion into Your Stories

Author Annie Kelleher sent me a great question about setting in her upcoming mystery (she’s a well-published writer) set in the Florida Keys.

“I’ve tried to be more mindful of adding in atmosphere,” she wrote me, “to heighten the sense of being in Key West, but one of the things that struck me when I visited the Keys was how familiar they seemed, how much like the Jersey Shore town I was born and raised in: the landscape, marshy and swampy and riddled with bays and inlets in South Jersey, has long encouraged all sorts of the same activities that take place in the Keys.

“Even the architecture is similar,” she said, “and the tourist trade and the activities are all alike. How do I give the reader a sense of Key West while showing that, for my character, it feels so familiar?"

Setting Brings Out the Emotion

Setting is what brings emotion to the reader. Dramatic action creates momentum, makes your book a page turner. Good characters well depicted and vivid on the page, linger in our memories long after the book is finished. But setting, the way you frame your story in physical time and space, generates the emotion. Seems counter-intuitive, doesn't it? But it's true. Just check it out in one of your favorite books--notice where the setting it, and what emotion is conveyed there.

Even if you know a setting well, your reader won't. Even if the character knows the setting, from growing up there or visiting, your reader won't. So place us in space, time, weather conditions, hot and sultry or cool and breezy. Place us in the intense greens of summer or the black-and-white landscape of winter. Place us in the time of day, letting us experience the light slanting across the floor or the way the night wind rattles the windows.

You can even mention the familiarity of it to the character, let us into that aspect. But we haven’t been there. Just like we’re not inside the writer’s head, we’re not yet inside the character’s either. So place us there, via how the character notices where she is, how it impacts her, what she sees and what she ignores.

You can’t skip this step. Or else we won’t feel your story.

Why Setting Delivers Emotion

I worked for several years with a promising new novelist who was coming from a nonfiction background and trying to learn setting. In nonfiction, setting is used effectively in the anecdotes that illustrate ideas, theories, or methods—you’ve probably noticed the small stories that accompany a diet book or a book on repairing communication in your relationship.

But setting is not primary in nonfiction. In fiction it is.

This new novelist was stumped with setting. At first he thought it was just plug and play: rather stiff (his words) descriptions of breezes, sunlight, and birds injected into a scene willy-nilly. I asked him why these setting details were placed just then in his scene, and he couldn’t tell me. He was just trying to check “setting” off his writerly to do list.

I explained that setting details must make sense with the moment when they are used. When his character, Jules, was struggling with a big decision, he might notice something in the setting that mirrored uncertainty. Not the clichéd dark and stormy night, but a small detail like a sweater buttoned the wrong way on an old man he’s talking to. Or shoes scattered in the front hall. A smoking pan on the stove.

The idea was to use the setting to echo the character’s emotion.

If Jules just thinks about his decision, it stays in his mind—and doesn’t reach the reader’s gut. If the setting, an objective part of the story, reflects Jules's indecision, the setting emphasizes what we’re supposed to be receiving from the scene.

A small example. It really helped the writer.

When Is Setting Too Much

You choose your placement of setting details. Nobody rushing to a hospital will notice many setting details. Maybe two or three short bursts pass by, but not long paragraphs of it.

Keep setting to where there’s a turning point, emotionally. Keep outer drama where you need momentum.

Setting slows, drama speeds the pace.

This Week’s Writing Exercise

Use the following checklist to help yourself enhance setting in a section of your writing where you want the reader to really get a punch of emotion. Choose three items and slip them in—not long sections but short (five to ten words) phrases.

1. What does the narrator smell at this moment?

2. What does the narrator feel on their skin at this moment? (air temperature, etc.)

3. What does the narrator hear close up? In the distance?

4. What three objects are in the room?

5. What’s the time of day—morning, afternoon, late evening, night? How can the narrator tell via the setting (without a clock)?

PS Be sure to visit Annie Kelleher's blog at http://anniekelleher.blogspot.com/.

Let Me Know What You Think!

Visit a chapter-in-progress from my forthcoming writing-craft book, Your Book Starts Here, at
http://www.loft.org/for-writers/a-view-from-the-loft/315-how-a-book-journey-beginsand-why-it-helps-to-have-a-map.

Envision, Think, Dream, Refine: The Four Steps to Manifesting

The process of manifesting a published book, whether seen from the starting gate or halfway to the finish line, demands a lot of trust. We often don't know how to get over the blocks and open stretches ahead of us. We hope that we are good enough writers with a good enough idea to make it to publication.

What if you knew there were four measurable steps that successful book writers pass through? Four steps that are far from magic, that don't demand unusual talent, that only ask for your belief and persistence to follow them. And if followed, result in a finished manuscript?

I came across these four steps by trial and error. And desperation. And getting lost and frustrated and overwhelmed by my book projects time and again.

But I'm a systems lover (as well as a creative person). And after successfully publishing thirteen books in three genres, I suspected a system might exist that could help book writers overcome the overwhelm.

I began looking for anything that dependably brought a book to the finish line. Looking in my own writing notebooks to see what I'd done with my own books, interviewing other published writers, reading writing articles and craft guides. What actually made the book journey successful? Was there any common experience between book writers, in any genre, who published their dreams?

Successful Book Writers Use Visioning
Most writers said they spent a lot of time, before they wrote much, just visioning the book. For some this didn't take place on paper. Others took notes while musing over their book idea, jotting down ideas and images that came through the creative right brain. Others discussed their ideas with friends and writing buddies, testing the waters (and this worked as long as the energy was not dissipated by the talking).

But more than just jotting notes or talking, writers who succeeded with this step actually "saw" the book in their imaginations. Some said they saw the book as a completed manuscript, a stack of papers on their desk. Others saw it in published form, on a bookshelf. In this step, the successful writers infused the journey ahead with confidence and belief in their project.

It's an ancient principle: As above, so below. As you vision, so shall it be. It's the basis for visualization, used in professions from sports to business.

No surprise that successful book writers use it too.

I love the visioning step of manifesting a book because it's so intensely internal and delightfully creative. I spend time visiting bookstores, seeing what else is out there, imagining my book and how it will be different and unique and speak to the readers' need. I also love drafting a mock cover of my book--complete with wished-for testimonials by famous writers. Collage is great in this step (scroll down to see book collages from other writers in my post two weeks ago). I also love writing a visioning statement for my book, asking myself, What's this book about?

Step Two: Thinking It Out
Successful authors often move directly from a solid vision to the action step of thinking. Once the book is alive and breathing inside, then it's time to plan the journey.

Planning feels very "uncreative" to many writers. But books take planning, because they are so large. Many writers spoke about planning including their research tasks, character sketches, drafts of scenes (also called "islands" or "freewrites"), or interviews.

For me, a writing notebook is necessary now. I use it to freewrite often, get deep into the idea of the book, try out ideas on paper. While visioning can be done completely internally, planning begins to externalize the process of manifesting a book. My goal during the planning step is to get my book thought out on paper, and create as much written material as possible so I have plenty of choices later.

This step can take months, even years, depending on how much time a writer devotes to the book.

Dreaming the Form
There's a moment when the material grows so plentiful, it must become organized or insanity might result! When a writer has so much written, then dreaming the form takes over. This is a fun step, as the book starts to look like a real manuscript.

I use storyboarding now, to pick and place, arrange and rearrange, until I have a good structure and can use that to cut and paste together a first draft. I'm looking for something that is still rough, but something that looks a bit like a book--it flows, it makes me proud or at least hopeful.

Few published writers omit this step. Many note that it's the place where manuscripts can feel like impossible journeys. Sometimes this third step feels like slogging through thick sand. But if the writer is persistant, the manuscript comes together.

Dreaming is about structuring, accepting the need to organize the material you've generated so that it makes sense to someone outside your writing world. The reader is very important in the dreaming stage--that's why I call it "dreaming." It's as if you are finally creating a world that can be entered fully and populated with witnesses who are also able to enjoy your story.

Finally, Refining
Many published writers love this last step, refining. I think it's the make-or-break moment for books. If a writer has no love, skill, or tolerance for refining, the book doesn't usually make it to publication.

Because refining can take up to 50 percent of the book journey, it helps to reach out for help during this step. I get feedback from writing colleagues and good readers, even hired editors, to help me see with fresh eyes.

Working as a Whole
These four steps are not separate from each other. Often, they weave together as the writer journeys forward. For instance, we revisit our visioning as the book shifts, as new ideas are explored midway through. It's normal that creative work doesn't travel a straight path. But it's also helpful to know approximately where you are in the journey at any one time.

That way you have a sort of map which can orient you if you get overwhelmed, frustrated, or just plain lost.

This week, take a look at your manuscript or writing project as a whole. Think about where you are with these four steps.

If you'd like, get out your writing notebook and dialogue with your book on paper. Ask it where it thinks you are. Write some notes to yourself about your next steps.

PS If you live in the Minneapolis-St Paul area, I'll be teaching this four-part process at my workshop, "How to Plan, Write, and Develop a Book." It's a two-day, very hands-on event held in the beautiful writing classrooms of the Loft Literary Center on Friday and Saturday, March 26-27. For more information, visit www.loft.org or my website (look under Writing Classes) at www.marycarrollmoore.com.

Receptive Listening--How to Get to Know Your "Players"

We stand with our players, the souls who populate our writing, and we think we know them pretty well as we write our books. But do we? What if we're not really listening deeply enough to know the story behind their stories?

A reader from New York sent this wonderful comment:

"I was reading about one of my favorite subjects, something called Narrative Medicine. This is where doctors learn to listen receptively to their patients and frame their illnesses like a story. That means going beyond the clinical and getting into the whole person.

"And it struck me as curious that the techniques used in attentive listening, that docs are supposed to use to uncover their patients' stories, work because [these techniques] uncover what patients usually don't tell their docs. Thus the idea.... why not apply that to fiction?

"Listen receptively to your characters to learn what they haven't told you. Receptive listening leads to the truth."

Learning to Be a Better Listener to Be a Better Writer
How do you listen better in real life?

How do you use the same skills to listen better in your writing?

In real life, a good listener puts all attention on the person speaking, looks the person in the eyes, reads body language for what's not being said, even repeats back to them what's being said so they know we're listening well.

Most importantly, a good listener lets go of what they think they already know about this person--to be delightfully surprised, to let the speaker have the freedom to change.

In writing, we use similar skills. Full attention, repeating back, looking deeply. But most importantly, getting past our own reactions or beliefs about our stories and the players in those stories.

A challenge for many of us writers. We know who these people are--maybe we grew up with them, if we're writing memoir. We can predict every eyebrow twitch.

Fiction writers get equally stubborn about "knowing" their characters. "She'd never do that!" my students exclaim, when I ask about an idea to up the stakes in their novels.

But our current view is often limited, gives the person no freedom to change, and occupies only one perspective. So this week, try opening your perspective on your players, using the simple question I wonder...

This Week's Writing Exercise
1. Pick somebody in your writing you'd like to get to know better.
2. Make a list of 10 things this person would never do.
3. Pick one item on the list. Set a kitchen timer for 15 minutes. Begin writing to answer this question: I wonder what would happen if this person did this? Let receptive listening begin.

Remember this is just an exercise; you don't have to include this in your story. In fact, you may not for many reasons. But it will very likely let you get a new perspective on the player who has been hiding behind what you think you already know about him or her, and you'll hopefully be surprised at what you hear.

Remedies for Writer's Block--How I've Been Using My Storyboard to Break Through

How you open your book determines whether it's read. What's opening your story right now? Is it compelling? Exciting, like a flower about to burst into bloom?

This week my on-going book-writing classes at the Hudson Valley Writers' Center in Sleepy Hollow, NY, are working on this question. We're studying Act 1 of our books, asking ourselves if the opening chapter of Act 1 is strong enough.

I like working with the three-act structure in books, because it makes the hugely unweildy manuscript more manageable. But it means doing a storyboard. If you've been reading this blog for the past weeks, you know my love-hate affair with storyboards. They force a writer to structure the story, to know what it's about. And the opening chapter stares you straight in the face.

But the beauty of a storyboard is this: It is fluid, compared to an outline. Parts move around as you learn. Writers in my classes will bring in their storyboards this week and we'll rearrange stuff. Maybe chapter 5 will become chapter 1. Maybe the other way around.


Inner Story Comes Through in a Storyboard
Storyboards also reveal that serendipitous inner story. Inner story is the surprise element that emerges when we're not looking, and it's directly responsible for theme, voice, and elegance of manuscript--those memorable bits that delight both writer and reader. Inner story explores meaning versus event. Inner story can't be forced, and in my experience, outlines tend to make the book's structure rigid and hard to change, much as we want to.

Storyboards are very successful because they are organic. They evolve. But you still have to decide what you're really writing about. That's the other beautiful aspect of storyboards. They make us choose.

Choosing Act 1 Elements
Your storyboard of Act 1 should contain certain elements. If you look at three-act plays, at books that use a three-part structure, you'll see some very important elements in these opening chapters. From my study of Act 1, I've compiled a little list:


1. Act 1 needs an opening that's strong enough to launch the rest of the book. It delivers the main question or quest of your book and make us want to read on.

2. Act 1 also benefits from some parallel action or discussion or moment in its final chapter (say, chapter 7 or chapter 18). In other words, whatever you start in chapter 1 gets echoed in the final chapter of Act 1. This creates a very satisfying loop for the reader: we believe the writer is truly on the ball, because we recap what we've covered so far. Not in obvious ways, just as a parallel moment. For instance, letters received in chapter 1 of Act 1 could be revisited and then burned in the final chapter of Act 1.

3. This final chapter of Act 1 must launch more trouble, a bigger question, to propel us to Act 2.

4. It's helpful, especially if the book has multiple locations, time periods, or points of view in Act 1, to create a strong thread that runs through all of these, to hold all the chapters together. For instance, a recurring object in all chapters, or a metaphor or symbol.


This Week's Writing Exercise
Line up seven Post-It notes on your desk. Close your eyes and drift into the creative imagination. Of all the ideas you have for your book so far, what's the strongest possible opening? Jot it on the first Post-It. Close your eyes and consider what possible ending for Act 1 would echo that first chapter idea. Jot it on the last Post-It.

Now go back to your outline, storyboard, or book notes. Compare what you just came up with and the ideas you originally had for opening your book. Which is strongest?

See if you can fill in the remaining Post-Its. Add more if needed. Then look at your storyboard. Sometimes this exercise results in surprising openings. And the storyboard changes. Make those changes--see how they feel this week. Do new doors open for you? Does writer's block disappear?

Creative Collages--A Way to Get Deeper into Your Story and Your Life

I'm a huge fan of collage. Making a collage, from bits of magazine photos and words and sketches and pretty much anything that can be glued onto paper, is a way I lift myself out of what I already know into what's possible.

Two readers, Lynn and Carole, were inspired by a previous post on making a collage for your writing project. Collaging your writing goals, dreams, focus, or questions can help clarify and bring in new energy. Lynn and Carole said:

Before we got started, we contemplated and then we talked--about what we'd both like to understand about our characters in our stories, what our purpose for writing the story would be, things like that. Collages tend to take on a life of their own sometimes but it's always great fun and a nice reminder afterward to look at for inspiration.

They gave me permission to share their collages with you.

Here's Lynn's:













And here's Carole's:
















See what variation there is, how free each collage is, how beautifully it speaks of individual creativity. Can you take on the assignment this week? Get together with a writing buddy. Bring some magazines, posterboard, glue or rubber cement, colored pencils, scissors.

Your Weekly Writing Exercise
Once you've created a collage, try the exercise below. It's great fun and oh-so-revealing about your writing project.

It comes from writer Sheila Asato of Monkey Bridge Arts, (her website is www.monkeybridgearts.com), who passed along some wonderful questions she uses to ask about collage.

I've taken Sheila's ideas and developed them specifically for book writers. When you've finished your collage, ask yourself:

1. Is there a pathway in my collage, a beginning point and ending point? If so, how do these relate to the beginning of my story and the possible ending?

2. Squint at the collage and find the place with most contrast, which jumps out at you. Ask yourself how it might reflect the highest moment of tension in your book, or the question that remains unanswered, or the unmet challenge your book speaks of.

3. Look at the types of pictures you chose. What are they, mostly--images of people, places, animals, landscapes, buildings, the ocean, the sky, abstracts? How does this predominant type of image tell you something about your book's main focus, the aspect you feel most comfortable with?

Send your writing collages, your questions, and I'll post the ones I can!

How to Survive Writing a Book--The Blessing of Short Assignments

Finding a pathway through your book project can seem impossible at times. You haven't a clue where you're going, and what seemed like a solid outline or storyboard can shift completely, right in the middle of writing.

Despair sets in. Sometimes writer's block. Often overwhelm. How does a book writer survive?

First, we accept that books are organic in nature. They must change as they evolve. The best books always surprise their writers. A teacher once said to me, If the writer isn't surprised, the reader won't be either.

But there's still the factor of overwhelm and how to deal with it. My answer comes from years as a syndicated columnist: short assignments.

The Beauty of Short Assignments
When I was a columnist for the Los Angeles Times syndicate, I produced 600 words each week. Writing became a job in those years, not a romance. I had a firm deadline, I got a paycheck for it, and no excuses were accepted by my boss. I couldn't blow my deadline off even once, or I'd lose my precious slot in the Times lineup. So I did it.

Back then, I wasn't used to short assignments. Six hundred words was really hard to work with. So much to say, so little space on the page.

Over the years, I learned to love the beauty of short assignments. Most times, they reduced any overwhelm. They cancelled out writer's block.

I use short assignments to survive writing books. I break my books into small sections, most often three acts. Since it's impossible to keep THE BOOK as a whole in my head, working on each act individually keeps overwhelm at bay.

Short Assignments Show the Pathway Through
My current novel-in-progress is called Breathing Room. It's the sequel to Qualities of Light, which was published in October. Breathing Room is a much more difficult story. It's much easier to get overwhelmed.

Three point-of-view main characters rotate by chapter. It's very easy for me to lose track of the individual stories, much less weave them together into a coherent whole.

So I broke the story into three acts.

Working with three acts is the perfect short assignment. You focus only on one third of the book, making that act like a complete book in itself, with a beginning, middle, and end, but you create a sudden new beginning again in the final chapter. In other words, act one seems to take us to a nice settled plateau, but it really ends up raising the stakes. That propels the reader into act two. Get it?

It works beautifully in playwriting. I'm finding it works equally well in novels, memoirs, and other genres of books. I'm also using it on a nonfiction book I'm writing about how to write a book. I use a series of key questions, to keep me within my short assignment of each act:

1. Is the storyline for each character tracking well just within this part of the book?
2. Is the triggering event, what starts each person on their individual journey, exciting and dramatic?
3. Does each person go to some new place during act one?
4. What dramatic event ups the stakes at the end of act one, for each person and the group as a whole?
5. What main threads hold the three stories together? How do they intersect via theme, objects that repeat, places that echo in all three stories?

But it's important to give it all you can. Not hoard the best for later.

To Make a Short Assignment Work, Give It All You Got
I was sitting in the library Sunday afternoon, stuck in the final chapter, when I noticed I was holding back. No wonder my character, Mel, was feeling moody and blah on the page. He wouldn't risk anything, and I didn't want to use my "really great" scenes to propel his story into act two.

Then I asked myself, why was I saving these for later in the book? Within this short assignment of act one, or chapter 18 in particular, I needed to give it all I had.

So I took an idea from later in the book, inserted it in the chapter, and let it up the stakes for Mel. From that, three other ideas came forward. They grew into surprising new scenes, right on the spot. The "saved" idea actually fit much more successfully into act one.

When you work in short assignments, don't hoard the best stuff for later. The present is much more important than the future.

Your Weekly Writing Exercise--Two Options
1. Practice short assignments this week. How can you break THE BOOK into manageable bites?

2. Divide your book project into three acts. Use the questions above to analyze whether each act has enough energy. Then, using your storyboard or outline, see what you can rearrange to up the stakes.