The irony of this post comes from the fact that nothing that I have ever posted in this blog has seen the editing pen.
Most people, at some point in their lives, have said "I would like to write a book someday"". Well, good for you. This means you have an ounce of ambition in you. Sure, an ounce is not nearly enough to go through the process of writing the first draft of a book, but at least you have that much ambition. As for the rest of you fine people, who actually have more than the ounce, here are some brief tips on how to indulge in your literary desires.
Note, these are all tools for genre writers. I don't understand you literary types, and I don't intend to walk down your depressing tunnel to scholastic enlightenment.
1. Do a Little Bit of Everything:
Suppose you pass a music shop, and see a Telecaster in the window, and you just happen to like playing the guitar. Well, by all means, buy a guitar, and learn to play it. If you have a camera, learn to use it well, and take dozens of pictures. Go hiking. Ride roller coasters. Get in fights with strange people who can't kill you because they're too drunk. Make a short film, and have it laughed clean off of YouTube. Do everything. Everything you do, every person you meet, and every experience that you have will enhance your senses. Painting a world with words is challenging, but crafting a setting brings color to your work, so you'd best have some perspective on how you see the world, clarified by your experiences. Having a greater variety of experiences increases your overall palette.
2. Write Too Much, Reduce Where Necessary
A short novel is over fifty thousand words. If you're new to writing, this isn't a lot. On a day of vast inspiration and coffee flow, I've knocked out over ten thousand words. Now, don't get me wrong, a lot of those words were awful, unnecessary, and possibly loaded with incomplete passages, description, etc. While this recommendation may seem like it won't help with this, and really, it won't, it will prevent having to do more when writing the second draft and so forth. If you have painted the picture well, and drawn your world out in every way, then you can decide what is necessary in the second round. And, should you do the right thing and keep your drafts from one round of revisions to the next, you can grab things from that first draft, and place them elsewhere when rewriting.
3. Don't Just Write a Book, Write a History
If you are planning to write a book, then you probably have a cast in mind for the stage of your mind. You might even have a plot. However, the cast and the set aren't everything. Your characters lived before walking onto the page, and just like normal people, their experiences make them whole. They have loved, lost, killed, saved, gotten smashed at bars, and taken up collection at church. They exist. Don't pretend that they aren't real people; because you put them into your world, they do exist. If you put faith in their existence, then you can make their story all the better for it, because the reader can believe in their actions, and their dialogue. When you are preparing to start your book, it helps to spend a lot of time with your cast. I'm not suggesting that every ancillary character needs five thousand words of backstory before you can sit down to write, but your lead characters need to have lived in some capacity before they hit the page. Write a short story, flash fiction, a detailed list of major events in their life; something where they speak, and exist, just so you can get into their mind, and write them all that much easier.
2. Glorify the Hideous, Destroy the Beautiful
This isn't a practice for all occasions, but I still think it's a worthwhile skill. A sense of the grandiose deepens the paint strokes that you drop on your canvas. An ancient courtyard, destroyed by time, can have many distinct characters depending on the scene that you are writing. You can go for beauty by weaving vines and similar flora on the crumbling stone, or you can dirty the dismantled bricks by concealing the patterns in the layout. How the characters relate to the setting can enhance the scene as well. By writing both views in change, based on the character you are focusing on, or if in first person, writing from, you can shift how the reader sees a place. Some people find great beauty in churches lined with marbled stone and stained glass windows. Others will see symbols for manipulation and abuse. Knowing your characters well enough to paint the world accordingly will add a great sense of depth to your setting, and your readers will learn more about the characters as well.
1. When You Write, You Kill. Be at Peace with Homicide.
I can not stress enough how important this is. I may sound like a rambling lunatic, incapable of writing details for any of the previous steps, but by God I assure you that this is one of the most important parts of writing fiction in any capacity, and so many writers ignore such a simple task that is terrifies me.
Stories are built on the idea that a character is either unhappy or in some kind of trouble, and they want to change it. Pain, death, misery, simple discomfort; these are all catalysts for stories in the simplest way. If you aren't ready to hurt your characters, you will not make it as a writer. Conflict drives a story, and conflict is born from some measure of misfortune. I'm not saying that every story that you write will have a body count. Far from it. The dealing of pain is how you must begin a tale.
There might be someone reading this that believes that this whole "be at peace with homicide" thing is going to far. Well, let me introduce you to the concept of believable villains.
A good bad guy believes in what he or she is doing. They would burn the world down for their cause, and nothing will discourage them. I don't know of any story that jumps into the final showdown where the good guy convinces the bad guy that he's simply wrong with a slide show. Sorry, that's now how genre fiction works. If you write about the villain, then you will no doubt start shedding blood with their hands. Make it hurt. Make it so that your cast feels it from miles away, and your reader feels the flesh beneath their fingernails. Subtlety is a great tool as well, but subtlety can bring vast amounts of horror to the table as well.
Indulge in the violence, thrive on the tension, and by God, hurt your cast. If your reader can't feel it, then your cast doesn't either, because the cast has to be the readers link to the story.
Kill, and enjoy it. Kill, and thrive off of the pain you spread. There is a reason why people remember the deaths of their favorite characters. There is a reason why George R.R. Martin has a ridiculous body count. There is a reason why we all wince in pain at the torture scene in Casino Royale. There is a reason why the finale of Seven Samurai strikes such a chord with everyone who watches that movie and has a soul.
If nothing else in this world, all people can relate to pain. Pain makes us human. Loss makes us human. We understand these feelings, and as such, we relate to the characters because they are enduring the most common of all human emotions. Most people are not happy, and while fiction is usually an escapist genre, the character has to endure pain to go on the journey to happiness, as we all do.
I hope this helps someone. Sorry if it's a hair noisy, but, as I said: I don't edit this blog.
No comments:
Post a Comment