Recently, I read that Graham Greene, author of “The End of an Affair”, tried to restrict his writing to only 500 words a day, a little less than two pages. Not even two pages a day? The task seemed…well, like a piece of cake. However, like anything too good to be true, there was a catch. Greene stopped at exactly 500 words. That means even if you were in the middle of a sentence you would have to stop, you couldn’t exceed, not even by one extra word. I wanted to give it a whirl nonetheless.

I attempted this with some novel material I’ve been working on. I was picking up mid-scene and was going to have to be uber-conscious of my word count. However, I ran into a problem right off the bat. The writing started off slow and my muse didn’t seem to want to play along. This experiment wasn’t going to work if I couldn’t even get to the 500 words. I took a break with total word count of 93 and started to read, a nifty technique I like to use to invigorate my creativity. Half an hour later and I was ready to go.

My second attempt was much more successful. I fell into my stride and was going strong when I noticed that my word count had reached 489. Eleven more words. That’s all I had left and I was on a roll. I silently cursed myself for choosing this lousy experiment in the first place before begrudgingly continuing with the task at hand. My last sentence looked like this:

The wash basin shattered upon impact, sending tiny shards of porcelain

I could have gone on. The thought was on the tip of my brain ready to tumble to my fingers and onto the page. I played fair though and stopped. I walked away and tried desperately not to forget what came next. As it turns out, I don’t think I could have forgotten it if I had tried because all I could think about was what came next and even what came after that. Mr. Greene was definitely on to something.

The following day, I found myself eager to return to the writing and the 500 words seemed like nothing. I used Graham Greene’s technique for a whole week and found it to be amazingly beneficial. Forcing yourself to stop before you feel you’re finished keeps you thinking about the story and when you’re thinking about your story, you can’t help but to keep pushing it forward even if it is only in your mind. Not only that, but I found myself scrutinizing more over word choice. What would be the best fit for that sentence? Is that really what I want to say?

I enjoyed this exercise because it forced me to slow down and really see my story, something I think is key to a good narrative. Also, 500 words really isn’t asking a lot, is it?

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500 Words A Day: The Graham Greene Challenge

From Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge:

* It was as if marriage had been a long, heavy and complicated ordeal, and now there was this lovely and light dessert.

* Years later, the situation squeezed Olive so hard she felt like a  package of vacuum-packed coffee.

* For the first time in years, Cliff thought about God, who seemed like a piggy bank that Harmon had stuck up on a shelf and had now brought  down to look at with a new considering eye.

* The appetites of the body are private battles.

From Ron Hall and Denver Moore’s Same Kind of Different as Me:

* The surgeons filed in, looking grim, and I wondered bizarrely is they teach appropriate facial decorum in medical school.

* I could see through his eyes that little pieces of his heart was break off while we was standin there.

* He stood away from anyone – which did not surprise us since the others always treated him like a bad dog on a long chain.

* When all you doin is bringin in the Man’s cotton, ain’t nowhere you got to be at ‘cept where you at

And from Lynne Truss’ classic Eats, Shoots & Leaves:

* He saw commas as so many upturned office chairs unhelpfully hurled down the wide-open corridor of readability.

* Cruelty to punctuation is quite unlegislated: you can get away with pulling the legs off semicolons or shriveling question marks on the garden path under the powerful magnifying glass.

And the story that makes this last book’s title such a classic:

A panda walks into a bar. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.  “Why?” asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit.  The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder. “I’m a panda,” he says at the door.  “Look it up.”  The waiter turns to the relevant entry, and sure enough, finds an explanation.  “Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”

What are some of your favorite well-worded descriptions? Please share yours, and why you like them, in the comments below.

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Description that Grabs You

We can see this in some of literature’s greatest protagonists; Odysseus, who longs to return to his family and kingdom; Frodo Baggins, who desires to spare his homelands from the ravages of war; Harry Potter, who must face a destiny that is beyond his control; or even Henry V from the William Shakespeare play, who must prove his maturity and ability to lead a nation in the fires of war and death. And that is just to name a few, and what’s more, this need for compelling characters are not just limited to just males, or even humans. They just need to have that intuitive spark that captivates their audience into wanting to be like them, and to be with them until the end.

So then, now that we covered the basic ‘why’ of the main character (MC), it’s time to examine how to make one from scratch. I’ll go into greater detail as to what is needed to be considered for your MC.

Personality

First and foremost, you need to develop a personality, whatever that may be. Will your MC be friendly, distant, rude, arrogant, kind, humble, boisterous, greedy? There are thousands of characteristics that need to be taken into consideration, but you only need a few. Keep in mind that you cannot have a perfect character. No one wants to read about a person who is perfect. They’re not interesting, at all. Look at Superman and DC Comics for example, he was virtually picture perfect in the first two years of his run. This was somewhat acceptable, because his audience was very young, but as these children grew with the comics, and their literary tastes matured, they began to look for characters with more poignancy and depth to them, which was what helped make the Marvel Comics, and their flagship stars popular with their older audiences.

Another example of forgettable MCs would have to be those seen often in the romance genre. Now to be fair there are other genres that are guilty of this flaw,  but having read Janice Radway’s essay on this particular genre, I can use this area better than with the other points. But I digress. Mass produced romance novels are normally produced on a massive scale and for the most follow a very clear-cut system of clichés and formulas. You often find a supposedly independent intelligent woman, falling for and become virtual slave to the man they are trying to woo. And somehow, the couple comes to an understanding that benefits the two at the end of the book. MCs in these novels often seem very two-dimensional, so much so that it is sometimes hard to remember one very vividly and clearly from the other.

So in short, give your character flaws, real flaws, human flaws. My advise, pick at least one sin and stick with it. For my case, I used wrath, a lot. I mean A LOT. But this is just my case, and with what you are writing you need to tailor your MC to how you see fit.

Back-story

Onto the second aspect to work on. Where does your character come from? Were they a villain before? Were they a victim? Did they have a family? Did they kill their family? These are just a few questions that you will have to ask yourself when you are working on your character’s back-story. Thankfully, once you answer your first question, the rest tend to answer themselves, unless you want to make a new twist in the tale, which is never a bad thing.

Usually it helps with the story, and with the character’s drawing power, if the back-story is influential in what their personality is during the story. Learning what happens to a man’s family is important to why they are on a journey of vengeance, for example. A man searching for redemption to a past sin is another good one. To give your character reason for doing what they are doing. And again, it has to be a believable back-story, anything too far into the imagination will just make the readers think the story is just weird, period.

Own Worst Enemy

Finally, while a physical obstacle is usually required for the MC to have to face in the novel, I always like it when the worst enemy that MC has to face… is themselves. For a reader to read about someone who must face themselves as well as a ‘traditional’ antagonist can strike a very personal chord within the reader, which in turn will make them want to read on further and see if your MC is able to overcome their personal demons. Now this isn’t to say that this demon has to be completely eliminated in the end, look at George MacDonald Fraser’s “Flashman” series. But to see someone who has to face their flaws on a regular basis is rarely one that readers would come to dislike.

We ourselves have to face our demons at certain points in our lives, and to read and take some form of escape that helps to reinforce our resolve to face these demons helps to connect the MC to the readers on an intimate level. And because of this connection, there is a relationship with these characters that is more poignant then if the MC is a simple cookie-cut character.

What are your main characters like? How have you filled them with “character” to create a living, breathing, interesting person? Please share your thoughts in the comments below!

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How to Make a Great Leading Character

Fortunately, you don’t have to force yourself to write (that’s actually one way to bring on writer’s block) or wait for the muse to rescue you from that staring contest.

But first, it gets worse.

Though most writers fear writer’s block for the obvious reason, there’s something else happening on another level that most writers don’t acknowledge.

Writer’s block stunts your growth as a writer.

Because you’re not able to produce work, you’re not able to grow from experience. And if there’s one thing we can all acknowledge as a community, it’s that the more we write, the better we get … I mean, who isn’t embarrassed by their earlier work?

If you’re not writing, you’re not growing.

Here are three quick things that help avoid stunted growth during writer’s block.

Try Writing For Another Medium

Though most of us aren’t as talented as Niel Gaiman, it’s good exercise for writers to try their hand at other mediums. If you’re a novelist, try writing a children’s book; if you’re a screenwriter, try writing a poem; if you write fiction in general, try writing a helpful article or starting a blog.

The idea here is to expand your horizon by trying new forms of writing. You never know, you might find you’re a horrible poet, but an awesome blogger. Regardless if you find another medium you enjoy, you’ll at least know where you stand, and where your strengths and weakness are.

Push yourself into new areas of the craft and explore your abilities. You might find that you really enjoy a medium you weren’t interested in before.

Read the Work of Your Idols

For me, this is the single most important things to do when struck with writer’s block. Not only does it create inspiration purely because of the how exceptional the work is in nature, but also because it slingshots you into places you otherwise might not have explored.

This applies across all mediums — whether working with poetry, creative fiction, blog posts, and more.

Look to your idol for inspiration by reading their work — chances are you’ll develop a better understand of the craft and pick up on their style.

Quick Note: If you find yourself unable to read the work of your idol, let alone others, you might want to consider asking yourself if you’re writing for the right medium. Be honest with yourself and move on if needed.

Read the Back Cover of 10 Neighboring Books

Similar to when you used to spin a globe, wait a moment, then stop it with your finger — the place you pointed to being the place you would eventually live — writers should randomly select a spot in their local book shop and spend some time reading the back covers of 10 or more neighboring books.

It’s a great way to gain a refreshed sense of story, and see just how different, yet the same, most stories are.

What Keeps You Growing During Writer’s Block?

Those three suggestions work for me, but how about you? Is there anything you think works in terms of continuing to grow as a writer, even in the face of writer’s block?

Please share your own methods of beating writer’s block and growing and improving your writing in the comments below!

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How to Avoid Stunted Growth During Writer’s Block

That is exactly what is happening right now, as I write my first novel. About 25,000 words in, and I’m struggling to stay faithful to it. I am beginning to see all of the flaws of the story, and I am exaggerating them until they are all I can see. I am finding it hard to see past its flaws, finding it hard to love it and to get excited about it. My mind wanders, and I find myself looking at all my short story ideas that I have written down, wondering which one I should finally start writing. My imagination has been coming up with new ideas, even, new ideas for short stories, that in my mind sound new and exciting and sexy.

I want to write them.

So tentatively I start to write a new story, in secret, as though I’m cheating on my WIP, and that if it ever finds out its characters will come alive (especially the bad ones) and will come after me. My new story thrills me, and the words fly out of me, whereas before with my WIP the words come slow and laboured.

But then the guilt creeps in, and I stop. I say to my new story that I can no longer see it, I have to stop writing it. But I can’t return to my other story, I can’t face going back to it. So I end up writing nothing.

* * *

I may have embellished this a little (and made it sound more like a sordid affair than it really is), but this is pretty much how I’m feeling right now with my WIP. I’m sure lots of you have felt like this before, or do so now. How can we get over it? How can we remain faithful, and continue with our works-in-progress through the tough times?

Find the excitement again

Look hard and find out why you are having problems with your WIP. If where the story is going is boring you, don’t be afraid to change it. Have one of your characters make a drastic decision. Make them do something unexpected.

“When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.”- Raymond Chandler

Expert advice from Chandler. Don’t get bogged down in your story. Make something happen. You’re the one with the pen in your hand, or the keyboard under your hovering fingertips!

See your ‘affair’ through

One way to remain committed to your WIP, would be actually to commit to your affair. If you are getting a bit bored of your WIP, and have a great idea for a short story, why not write that? But, unlike me, commit to seeing it through. Ignore any feelings of guilt you may have, otherwise you won’t write either story. Put your WIP aside, and write your ‘affair’ story. Write it quick, with passion. Then, once it’s done, go back to your WIP. And never speak of the other story again.This recharge of your writing batteries will probably help with your story once you go back to it. A break from it, but a break where you are still flexing your writing muscles instead of agonising over not being able to write, will do you good. Plus, you’ll have written another short story to add to your collection in the meantime.

Take a break

Perhaps it might be time to just take a break. To put down the pen, step away from the keyboard, and just not write for a while. If you are going to do this, and you’ll probably know if this is the right thing to do for you, you must do it with two things in mind.

1. What are you going to do while you aren’t writing? You should aim to fill your time away from your WIP with at least something creative or active, instead of just wasting your extra free hours in front of the television. Take some photos. Paint. Juggle. Go for a run.
2. Set a date when you will return to your WIP. If you don’t, you might find it difficult to get back into it. Just like you would do if you were taking a holiday from a proper job, set the dates when you will be off, and return to your writing when you get back. Stick to this schedule, treat it like a proper holiday.

These are just three ways to stay faithful to your WIP, and to continue writing it when you begin to struggle. One might work for you, the other’s might not. Personally, this time, I’m going to find the excitement again. Men with guns might not fit, though. Monsters under the stairs, on the other hand…

How do you stay faithful to your work-in-progress when you feel like writing something else? Please share your thoughts and ideas in the comments below!

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Staying Faithful to Your WIP

You see, a novel isn’t just a bunch of words telling a simple tale…well it could be, but then it would be a pretty boring waste of paper, and I’m certain that this isn’t what you’re trying to write. A novel is a window into new ideas, new avenues of philosophies and views, and the best ones stick with a person long after they have finished reading them. Now back to what I was saying, you want to write something that is thought provoking, engaging, and that could even push the world of literature and the world itself into a new age of enlightenment…or you just want to make some extra money for college and other living expenses (myself included, haha!)

To do any of these things, you have to write something that is good, very good, brilliant even. Very, very few authors write books solely on the fly, and an even fewer number of those authors write decent material worth reading. If you want to write a good book, you have to plan it out. Figure out what the intricate parts of the story are going to be, how characters are going to react, basically you are about to play “God”, and you’re going to have to know what you’re going to do in order to make your creations acceptable and palatable for your audience.

The first thing you need to do is break your story into parts. And in most cases there are four major parts to a novel that pushes it towards great recognition:

• Plot: Which covers the overall story, pace, and the ever-popular twist.
• Characters: Which covers back stories, development, and character flaws.
• Setting: Which deals with time, place, and attention to detail.
• Language: Which takes care of description of settings and dialogue.

These four parts are essential to the novel as a whole, since they work together much like a complex machine. A quick science lesson, a complex machine is a piece of equipment that is comprised of several simple machines, and without the multiple simple machines working together, the bigger machine simply cannot work. So all four parts of the novel need to move together and help each other along in order to make your novel shine its brightest; to you, to the publisher and to the reader.

Now the first thing that needs to be done is developing a plot, since without a good plot the rest of the novel is virtually useless. This isn’t saying that you can’t write a novel without a good plot, and not get it published, authors from John Milton to Ayn Rand to Lauren Conrad have written books that have become major successes, but the failings in these works is the lack of a substantial plot.

With John Milton, he put too much emphasis on describing in his work ‘Paradise Lost’. Ayn Rand, in ‘Atlas Shrugged’, allowed her message of pure capitalism take over what could’ve been a moving epic of social injustice and how to solve the problem. And with Lauren Conrad, what could’ve been a half-decent coming of age story in modern society was just a bland collection of episodes from “Laguna Beach” and “The Hills” in book form.

All of these are linked together, because they lack a meaningful and identifying story that the reader can put them in. If the novel does not have an emotional link with the reader, then the novel is not going to achieve that intimate relationship that is truly critical with the reader. And the chances of your novel having a lasting impact are severely weakened.

Components of a strong plot

Now how do you come up with a good plot? First thing is to come up with the obstacle, what is the problem that the protagonist is facing. Is it tangible or intangible? Is it something they can control or is it a force that is determining their fate for them? These are the basic questions one asks when they are brainstorming for their plot. Then you come up with the basic solution the protagonist will use to solve the problem, if they are to solve in the first place. Will they negotiate the solution, will they fight, will they accept their fate, or will they come up with a whole different path to achieve their goals?

Then of course you have to consider characters, will the protagonist have allies, will they have physical enemies, will they have a love interest, will they be poor or rich? These are just a few questions that will be considered when writing a book. Thankfully, these questions can be answered very quickly and early in the planning stage if you take the time to think the story through before you begin writing.

Pacing

Pacing in a story is important since if you did a chapter for every hour, of everyday, in a novel that is suppose to take place over a three year period, you are going to have a very, very, very long book. When I was writing my book, I actually set out to vary the time difference between chapters. For example chapters 3,4,5 take place immediately after another. While in chapters 6,7,8,9,12,13, months take place in between events occurring in these respective parts. Of course, depending on the story itself, pacing in the novel can change too, you could write a novel that takes place in one day, like James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’, or you could write a novel that takes place in a year, the limitations are endless. But remember not to bog down readers with too much going on in order to keep the flow from being interrupted.

Twists and turns

Finally with plot twists, I have this to say. As a writer, they suck! They are the hardest thing to do in a novel out of everything. And you can end up beating yourself senseless trying to have a decent amount of twists and turns in order to keep the reader interested in the work. But it’s something that you have to deal with. And the older the audience, the worse this job is to do. However, there are some things that helped me out with this problem.

First, try to figure out which parts of the book are going to be the most important moments. I’d aim to pick out three, just so that if one doesn’t work you can use the other two to do the trick. Once that’s done you need to do what you can to delay giving away these points until absolutely necessary. Now I’d like to discuss the twists in my novel, but then I’d be giving away the reason for anyone to read the book. But, do give yourself the room to change these twists as you write the book, since you’ll probably come up with more ideas and concepts you’ll want to try out with the novel as you’re writing it.

Oh and before I forget, make sure to allow wiggle room as you write the book. In my case, what began as a single volume became a trilogy, and now it’s a five-part series. So needless to say, planning is very important, but be prepared for changes as they come.

I hope this has been a help in your journey and until next time, keep on writing! Please share your thoughts and comments below.

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Writing a Novel – What You Need To Know

After much deliberation, the birthday boy decided he’d like a fish-shaped cake for his party, and the photo he gave me for reference looked like quite a challenge.

Nevertheless, I spent half of the following day secretly baking, icing and decorating, to surprise him when he would return home from school.

When my husband walked in the door and found me sweating over the colourful creation, he smiled, gave me a hug, and said, “Every kid should have a mom like you. You were meant to be a mother.”

For someone who once thought she would end up an eccentric spinster with a houseful of cats, those words really hit home. I didn’t always think I was meant to be a mother–in fact, I thought I’d be terrible at it. Now I know different.

This got me thinking about what it means when someone says, “You were meant to be a writer.”

A friend once said those words to me, without ever having read anything I’d actually written. For some reason, she felt it was something I was meant to do. While it was tempting at the time to treat it like an empty compliment, the more I thought about it, the more I started to believe her.

I know I’m meant to be a mother because I love my kids, I’m proud to hear them call me “Mama,” and I would do anything for them. Even when I fail my children, even when times get tough, I wouldn’t trade motherhood for the world.

Writing is different. I know I can string together a proper sentence, I have a vivid imagination, I love to read, and most of all–I enjoy writing. But those are characteristics possessed by many people, and not all of them want to (or should) become writers.

What separates us from others who simply enjoy writing? Is it a gift? A talent? A delusion?

How do you know you’re meant to be a writer? Or, if you’re still unsure, what keeps you from believing you have what it takes?

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Are You Meant to Be a Writer?

“Most of what I know about writing fiction I learned by running every day.” – Haruki Murakami

The quote above is taken from Haruki Murakami’s brilliant memoir ‘What I Talk About When I Talk About Running’. He happens to be both a writer and a runner, as do I. Runners and writers are very much alike. They are both, in essence, solitary characters, often confined to long, lonely hours of mental or physical exertion, in order to achieve their goals. They constantly push themselves to go further, to achieve more each time they do the thing that they love. For runners, it’s miles. For writers, words.

Both take commitment, dedication, and hard work. Sometimes I don’t feel like running, and I don’t feel like writing, but I have to work through tough patches. Writers can learn a lot from running. Either by using it in a metaphorical sense, building up our endurance and rhythm, but also in a literal sense. Towards the end of the article I point out how the actual act of running has aided my writing.

Focus

“… the ability to concentrate all your limited talent on whatever’s critical at the moment.”

Murakami describes this as one of the most important qualities for a writer. This is very important for a runner too, focusing all your energy in the moment, as you take your strides, ignoring the cramp in your side or the wind battering you in the face or the pain creeping into your knee. Writers, similarly, have to be able to focus on the task at hand concentrating on the moment, on the words, on the story. Fortunately, we can train ourselves to do this, as runners do.

Endurance

After focus, Marukami thinks endurance is very important, specifically if you are interested in writing novels. I am writing one at the moment, and besides a novel I wrote a few years ago for NaNoWriMo, this is my first real attempt to put together a proper, long piece of work. This is not my natural habitat as a writer – I much prefer writing short stories where I can construct a scene and delve right into the details and emotions of that moment. Maybe I’m lazy – but it’s also a sense of the vast amounts of real hard work and dedication that it takes to write a long piece of work.

Running, especially mid- to long-distance running, is all about endurance and stamina. Through training we can build up this stamina in order to have the strength, endurance and confidence to keep going and push ourselves when we hit a mid-novel crisis point (usually, apparently, around 30k words). We can train ourselves (and I know I’ve said this many times, but it bears repeating) by sitting down and writing. This is exactly what runners do when they run a little bit further each day, in order to build up their muscles and physique.

Rhythm

“Once you set the pace, the rest will follow.”

Every runner knows that rhythm is vitally important. Your running style must be smooth and consistent, in order to not put too much strain on your body, to allow yourself to run efficiently, to conserve energy and to put in the extra effort where you really need it, like when you are running uphill or in the final push towards the finishing line.

In writing, rhythm is just as important. We need to write every day, ideally, or at least in a regular, consistent schedule in order to build up the habit. Through the generation of this habit the words and ideas will begin to flow, which in turn only makes the writing get easier and easier.

Clarity of Thought

When I took up running, something that I never expected was how meditative it can be. The physical exertion, the repetitive beat of your feet on the road and your heart in your chest, the time spent alone focused on yourself, can be a rather zen-like experience. It can empty your mind, and produce a clarity of thought was is surprising and incredible. Often when I run, ideas for my writing flood into my mind. New stories and characters, twists and tweaks to whatever I’m working on, solutions to problems I’m having with my stories or articles. I even end up writing sentences and entire paragraphs in my head as I run! It is amazing experience, and is worth taking up running for on its own. More about running as meditation can be read here.

Are any of you runners? Have you found it help with your writing? Is anyone inspired to take up running after reading this? Please leave your comments and feedback below.

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Running and Writing: Focus, Endurance and More

If you are one of these people, here are some writing and communications-related graduate programs offered throughout the US that are worth checking into further. (Disclaimer: I’ve recently begun taking classes to work towards my Master of Business Communication degree at the University of St. Thomas).

University of St. Thomas- Master of Business Communication (MBC)

California State University Fresno-  Master of Arts: Mass Communication and Journalism

University of Baltimore- Master of Fine Arts- Creative Writing & Publishing Arts

Illinois State University- Master of Arts Degree- Writing

Emerson College (Boston)- Master of Fine Arts- Creative Writing

Fordham University (NYC) – Master of Arts with a Writing Concentration

North Carolina State University- Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing

School of The Art Institute Of Chicago- Master of Fine Arts in Writing

University At Albany (S.U.N.Y.)- Master of Arts with a Concentration in Writing Practices

Texas State University-San Marcos- Creative Writing

University of Denver- Graduate Communication programs include Communication Studies, Advertising Management, Mass Communication and Public Relations

I’ve tried to include schools in all corners of the country but there are plenty of resources out there to help you find a program near you. GradSchools.com is a great place to start!

Are you currently enrolled in a writing or communications-related degree program? Are you thinking about it?

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Furthering Your Education: Writing-Related Graduate Degrees

I know a few of my readers may have already shut off their computers, smashed in their screens, or run from the room screaming in fits of frightened rage. This is acceptable. Now, for those of you who are left, I’ll be discussing the first of all the many hindrances that poets usually have in establishing a routine of revision. Then I’ll compare the art of poetry with other art forms, and finish with a discussion of the finer points of how revision works in a poem.

The Beast Looms

Let’s say you’ve just written down a poem on the back of a napkin. It is perfect in every way and encapsulates completely every emotion you are currently feeling, along with your socio-political stance and your preference on Proposition 8. Later that night, as you are emptying your pockets of lint and ketchup packets, you pull out this crumpled up masterpiece. After reading it again, however, you discover that while it may have seemed like a masterpiece before, it certainly doesn’t seem so now. You now have three choices:

1. Claim that to change the work now would defile its emotional content and would ruin it as a whole.
2. Throw the napkin away with disdain, claiming that if it were really a good poem it would have stood the test of 24 hours.
3. Write (or type) it down on a clean sheet of paper and begin to analyze the parts of it that now seem to be weak.

In all honesty, I have done all three of these. Only one of them helped me get published and get my work out there, however, and it was of course the final one.

What is Revision?

There are a few misconceptions that poets have to get rid of before they will be able to revise effectively. First of all, dismiss the thought that when you revise a poem that you are forsaking the truth of the complex emotion that you experienced while you were writing that poem. That emotion is not going anywhere because it is a part of you, whether it be in your history or in your present. When you revise a poem, you take the rough edges of a diamond and you polish them to the point that someone can plainly see the clarity of the raw material. Even if you try to “preserve your original emotion” by not revising a poem, there will come a time when you will have changed so much through your life that you will no longer be able to connect with that poem in the same way that you once did. Poets must face that fact and do their best to overcome it.

Let us take up the example of another artist: the painter. A painter (if he or she is skilled) will go through many stages of drafting. Beginning with a few ideas and then sketching them out and applying test coats of paint, they move from a very rough idea to a polished, finished product. No one will walk up to Vincent Van Gogh and claim that his final product does not contain any real emotion since it is so far removed from its original state. Painters find a way to move across their ideas as these ideas move beneath them, shifting with their own changing inspiration combined with their constant precision. Poets should be no different.

Making Your Words Speak

The primary thing that a poet needs to do when she is examining a recent draft is to look for any pieces of the poem that are just hanging on like gangrenous limbs. First, look for cliches. Cliches can suck out what precious marrow there is in a poem. The main problem is that cliches don’t say anything. Rather, they are just filler that has been inserted in place of an original idea. For example, if someone were to say “Her breath was as sweet / as a rose, / a rose without thorns,” he would be telling me nothing that popular culture had not been telling me for decades now. “Sweet as a rose” tells its reader nothing beyond the word “sweet,” and this is a weak adjective in itself.

Let us take a page out of the book of Ferdinand de Saussure. He argued that words do not have definite meanings, but rather are defined by what words are placed around them. If we look at this in the context of a poem, then we see that every word that we place in the poem affects every other word already in the poem. By putting a cliche such as “Sweet as a rose” in your poem, you shoot your own poem in the foot and then gag it.

Cliches are not the only things that should be avoided. Any word that does not contribute to your overall design can be suspect. Before beginning the process of revision, ask yourself, “What is this poem trying to say?” In the end, every poem should say something, even if that “something” is that words can be beautifully arranged. After you ask yourself this question, go through your poem and analyze every word based on how effectively it is getting that point across. Are there stanzas of your poem that seem to trail off into another topic for no apparent reason? Cut them or rework them. Are there words that are causing your readers to get a different idea than the one you intended? Examine them closely.

Embrace Feedback

That brings me to my last bit of advice: feedback. Don’t be afraid to let someone else read your work after you have toyed with it long enough. It is important that you take a fair amount of time with a poem in order to let it form itself completely, but after that time has passed, you must take it to a reader and let them absorb it and react to it. I would suggest finding someone you trust, a best friend or a wise, literature-minded elder. Let them look at it and tell you how it makes them feel and what it makes them think of. Compare this with what you had in mind in writing the poem and hopefully you can pinpoint places that need improvement. The important thing is: don’t be afraid of other people. If they can’t offer you something constructive, then their negativity can simply be disregarded. In fact, don’t ever feel obligated to take anyone’s advice, since it is, after all, your poem. I expect, however, that you’ll find people a lot more open and receptive to your work than you might have originally thought.

Once you get over this bridge, nothing can slow you down from making your work its best. Just keep writing, reading, and revising!

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Revision, or The Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal

Your first draft is probably a bit rough and chaotic, right? You know there are lots of things you need to fix. Where do you start?

The obvious way might seem to be to start at the beginning and feel your way. But I find if I do that, I don’t really have control. I might sort out the flow and the language, but I’m still not tackling the structure, or knowing if the pace is varied enough (or if it varies too much), if the crescendos build and are in the right places or if some of my threads disappear. Indeed, some characters may fade off into the background and never return to complete their stories! Or other story threads may prove to be irrelevant and should be saved for another book.
But there’s a smarter way to manage it all at once. And get much more out of the story. I call it –

the beat sheet.

The beat sheet is a document that assesses the entire manuscript in as summarised a form as possible. Hollywood scriptwriters do something similar with screenplays. Not only does the beat sheet allow you to assess your draft at a glance, it can be used as a mission statement for your revisions.

I’ve used it for short novellas and big, sprawling literary epics. It makes the most daunting revision job a piece of cake, no matter how long or complex the book is. And it’s even quite fun to do.

You write a short summary of each scene, assessing its purpose in the story. You use coloured pens for each story thread or group of characters, emoticons as shorthand for the mood of a scene, leave a column down the side so that you can work out the timeline with pinpoint accuracy. You use another colour to draw in where you’re going to swap scenes around, add new ones in, or adjust the content.

Preparing this document might take you a day or two, and the result might look like childish scribble. But I promise you, it’s a seriously useful piece of work.

You can make all sorts of creative decisions with the beat sheet. For instance, the emoticons might indicate you’ve got too much tension building – so you might rework the order of scenes to give the reader a breather. Or you might rewrite one of the tense scenes to make it lighter. You might feel the narrative has got bogged down in a repetitive loop – and looking at the beat sheet will show you where you can trim the flab.

You can use it to assess character development too – as you will see from the emoticons and your summary of the scenes if your people are being put under more pressure and changing the way they behave.

Another great thing about the beat sheet is it also puts me in a positive frame of mind about my first draft. Any problems I come across, I put on the beat sheet and figure out what to do about them. Quite often, it will be clear whether I need to reorder, delete – or maybe expand.

Once I’ve played with the story on the beat sheet, I’m confident it will work on a structural level. Then I can dive in and edit with purpose and pleasure. I know where I’m going and I’ve got all the information I need to bring the best out of the story.

That’s basically it in a nutshell, but you can find more detail at The Beat Sheet – Your at-a-glance revision blueprint.

Roz Morris has nearly a dozen novels in print. She critiques for a leading London literary consultancy and blogs at www.nailyournovel.com Inspiration and Creative Provocation For Writers and is on Twitter at @dirtywhitecandy. The beat sheet is one of the tools in her book Nail Your Novel: Why Writers Abandon Books and How You Can Draft, Fix and Finish With Confidence http://www.dirtywhitecandy.com/archives/202 available in paperback £5.99 or as a FREE downloadable ebook www.nailyournovel.com

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Nail Your Novel: A Beat Sheet

“When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.” – Kurt Vonnegut

If the feeling described in this quote sounds familiar, you’re not alone. We all feel helpless sometimes when we sit down to write, feeling as though we aren’t going to be able to put down onto the page what we have in our heads. This can be a very debilitating feeling, and can demotivate us to the point that we don’t even try.

But, if we take a moment to reflect, we come to the realisation that everybody feels this way at some time. Remembering that masters of our craft, such as Kurt Vonnegut, have experienced this feeling of helplessness too is very comforting. Despite feeling like this, he was able to overcome his self-doubts and write some of the most influential works of the 20th century, and become one of America’s most celebrated modern authors.

So, how can we overcome our own feelings of helplessness? Let’s look at Vonnegut’s quote again, and turn it into positive ways we can fight through our self-doubts and lack of conviction.

Be Legless

Imagine you actually don’t have any legs. You’re not going to be going very far, are you? But do you need your legs to be able to write? Of course you don’t! So stay where you are and just get writing. I know this has been said before, but it really is one of the best pieces of writing advice out there. When we start writing, magic things usually start to happen. Characters start to come alive and they pull us along, encouraging the writing to happen. You realise that you can write, and you can write some really good stuff. You’ll probably write some rubbish too, definitely if you are working on your first draft, but you can always change this later, can’t you? But if you don’t start writing, nothing will happen. Nothing bad, but nothing good either. So sit down and write. Once you get going, and get into a flow, you will feel less helpless with every word that you write.

Be Armless

You could easily write without your legs, but surely you need your arms to write, yes? Wrong! Take inspiration here from the amazing Jean-Dominique Bauby, author of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. He wrote this wonderful book after suffering a stroke that left him with a rare condition called “locked-in syndrome”, in which he become completely and utterly paralysed, but with his brain still working perfectly. He composed the story by blinking his left eyelid, the only part of his body that he could move, communicating with an interpretor who wrote his story down. The power and resilience of the mind to overcome that which restrains us is incredible. Remember this the next time you sit down to write. If you feel hopeless, remember Bauby. Focus on what is in your mind, and get it down any way you can.

Use a Crayon

I’m not going to tell you to try and write with a crayon in your mouth (although if you want to try that, I’m not going to stop you!), but why not write with a crayon in your hand? Buy a packet of cheap wax crayons (or steal some from your children!), pick your favourite colour, and get writing. Enjoy the feel of the stubby crayon in your hand, smell the wax, pick up and new crayon and change colours halfway through a sentence, halfway through a word even! In short, approach your writing in a new, childlike way. Embrace that feeling. Children are not restrained by feelings of helplessness or fear. They don’t exist to them. They just do things. Do the same. You can do it.

Don’t let anything hold you back. Most of our helplessness is simply self-defeating thoughts in our heads, which when tackled in the right way can surely be overcome. Whether your armless- and leglessness is psychological (as with Vonnegut) or actual (in Bauby’s locked-in state), it doesn’t mean that you can’t write. So just sit down, pick up a pen (or crayon) and get writing.

What kind of things do you do to motivate yourself when you feel helpless? Please share your thoughts and any inspiring quotes (reminding us that the literary greats are human too!) in the Comments below.

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So It Goes: We All Feel Helpless Sometimes

Instead of writing a novel in a month, Script Frenzy challenges writers to script a 100-page screenplay in thirty days time. Are you up for the challenge? Check it out!!! If you’re going for it, stop back here and let us know and keep us up to date. We love to see what all you writers out there are up to.

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Script Frenzy: Only a Week Away!!

I used to stay up late and write since that’s when my best material comes out, anyway. But how can I do that when I need to be up to get my daughter to school and interact with the rest of the world when they are awake? I did set up some sort of schedule, which includes taking my daughter to a friend’s house for daycare one day a week, but that day usually gets filled with article writing and slacking off because it’s my only time to myself. And I do have time at night when she is asleep, but that’s the time I use to see my friends and family. I used to write constantly – a few thousand words a day even. For some reason I can’t remember how exactly I did that. I want to finish my novel. I want to write more flash fiction. I want to write just to write…just for the cathartic value. But how?

How do you all do it??? Any suggestions would be more than useful to me and, I’m sure, many of our readers…so feel free to throw anything and everything out there. We writers need all the help we can get to find time to write – to do what it is we love!

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Finding the Time to Write

Most people who would call themselves poets will readily acknowledge that they know very little about the source of their poems. For most of us, poems are those things that come into our rooms at 3 AM and sit on our shoulder until we decide to throw them onto a piece of paper. When we pick up that piece of paper and read it back to ourselves in the morning, it often comes across as something mysterious, something that was channeled through us as if poets were literary shamans. In this article, I will outline one way of looking at a poem that will help the burgeoning writer make sense of what she has scribbled out the night before.

Poetry – The Snapshot

This is one description of poetry that is especially close to my heart, probably because I’m such a visual person. Poetry operates according to a different logic than prose (often this comes across as “no logic”), so readers who are used to the methods of prose will often find themselves stumped when they’re presented with a poem to read.

Prose often works through a series of events, normally following a plot that emphasizes the arc of a character toward a transformative end (though I won’t even try to bring Joyce or Faulkner into this). Prose tends to be more “mathematical,” though I use that term loosely. Main Character’s natural tendency to fear monkeys + Heroine’s natural ability to identify fruit + Villian’s desire to get the Golden Banana + Final Epic Battle = Story. I’m not saying that prose is a bad way of writing, just that it works in a fundamentally different way than poetry. Presenting a sequence of events, the form of prose connects perfectly with the human mind’s way of constructing and analyzing information.

Poetry, in its purest sense, is a relationship between two seemingly unrelated objects. Often, these two objects cannot be rationally harmonized with each other. It’s more like a snapshot of life that has a title scribbled on it that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the picture. For example, if you were given a snapshot of a sunset, and it had written on the back in blue sharpie, “the heart of the earth,” there are tons of ways you could interpret this. The red of the sunset connects naturally to the color of the human heart, and so the sun is a heart that is receding into the earth. This could mean that the earth is slowly hiding its heart from us because we’ve hurt it with our pandemic pollution. This simple interpretation came from comparing the image of a sunset with the nature of the human heart.

IN A STATION OF THE METRO

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

But what is constant throughout all of these examples? It’s a little term that we all heard back in grammar school and are probably still hearing today — metaphor.

The Fact of Metaphor

The poet must use this system of comparing one thing to another through metaphor as his primary method of getting to the riches of the text. This method, however, is part of what has been so off-putting to some who read, specifically those who despise, poetry because it does not “come right out and say it.” But this is necessary in poetry, and any poet can attest to this, because it is impossible for a poet to “come out and say” anything, since the thing that the poet wishes to communicate is something that lies eternally “behind” the words.

The fact that not all readers recognize this revealing effect in reading poetry is not a strike against metaphor, but is rather a sign of its ingenuity. When a magician is performing some trick on the stage, he or she is trying to show the audience something that is not physically present on the stage. The magician does not show the audience her wires, the holes in her cloak, or the trapdoor leading to the basement. She hides them not because these things are not necessary to the illusion, for in fact they are vitally necessary, but rather because if the audience sees these things as they exist physically, it will never see clearly the illusion presented by the cooperation of the objects in the metaphor.

Now this metaphor naturally leads to some negative conclusions concerning the work of poets, but not all of these negative conclusions must be disregarded. Poets do lie, just as painters lie. Poets make it seem as if things disappear and that bunnies really do come out of hats. The difference between the magician’s audience and the poet’s audience is that the readers of good literature realize that, in a way, things do disappear. They recognize that on some other level, things are not as they seem, and that they can never quite explain why they feel this way. This is the beauty and magic that makes poetry so consistently exciting.

Conclusion

This is only one way that you can look at the art of poetry; trust me, there are plenty of others. Whenever you’re hunched over your Cheerios trying to work through the mess of last night’s draft, try taking a look at your work through one of these lenses and see what happens.

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Where Does Poetry Begin?