Category: Random

Writing a novel isn’t an especially easy task. It takes a long time before you can see any kind of tangible results. For most people, a new draft will take anywhere from multiple months to multiple years. That first draft is going to be rough, both in the sense of “difficult going” and “unpolished,” and it will probably take multiple drafts before it’s even ready for someone else to read. And even if you spend enough time learning your craft to be able to publish a novel, the chances are slim that you’ll be able to make enough money to be a full-time writer, meaning you’ll probably be doing all of this as something between a hobby and a second job.

So why do you do it? Most likely it comes down to a pretty simple answer: because you’re happier when you write. You’re more satisfied and more fulfilled when you write. It’s something that you don’t want to let go of, despite the time and effort and sacrifice.

To be clear—there’s a big difference between “writing makes you happy” and “the act of writing is always enjoyable.” Sometimes producing a few hundred words will feel like performing a self-appendectomy without anesthesia. Sometimes it’s enormously frustrating, and sometimes you’ll feel like giving up entirely. But there’s a satisfaction that comes from the discipline of writing. Almost no matter how hard it was, you’ll feel better for the rest of the day. You’ll know that you’ve moved a little further toward finishing your current project. Hopefully, even if it was difficult, you’ll feel proud of what you did that day, and you’ll look forward to the next day when you’ll write again. 

When your friends and family see you struggling, they may wonder why you keep doing it. You might be able to explain it to them by comparing writing with exercise. The act of exercising itself may be anywhere from enjoyable to miserable, but you feel better overall when you do it. Both writing and exercise take discipline and commitment, and the tangible benefits for both take a long time to materialize.

Comparing writing to exercise doesn’t make it sound very appealing, does it? It’s not quite as forced as it sounds. There are lots of parts of writing that you probably really do enjoy. Maybe it’s the beauty of the language or the back-and-forth of believable dialogue. Maybe it’s the process of sculpting a story into the shape that you want. Or maybe you love it when you get to a scene where the characters and their emotions are so clear that they clamor to get out of your head and onto the page.

But there are days when none of this will happen. There are days when you’ll sit down at your desk and stare at the monitor and wish you were doing anything else but writing. There are days when you’ll struggle through just a few hundred words—or worse, when you’ll delete a few thousand words because a scene isn’t working. On those days, the only reason to keep going is because you’ve made a commitment to yourself. If you only wrote when you really felt like writing, you wouldn’t ever finish a single draft.

There’s a big reason that’s missing from this list, which is the dream of being a successful author. That’s not to say that you don’t want to be successful. But if that were your only reason, you would have given up a long time ago. If you’re going to spend countless hours writing and learning and writing again, it’s going to be because it adds something to your life that you can’t get anywhere else.

from the hidden questions dept

Think back to the last few movies you’ve seen and enjoyed. How many times have you heard someones say, while walking out of the theater, something like this?

That was a really good movie. It was a little unbelievable that $CHARACTER did $THING, but still, I really enjoyed it.

Or think back to some of your all-time favorite blockbusters. How many of them have plots that you could poke little holes in, if you really tried?

Hint: the answer is all of them.

How many of those plot holes ruined the movie for you, or even made a noticeable impact on how much you enjoyed it?

Probably none of them.

By believability I don’t mean realism. Lots of stories have magic or advanced technology that is completely unrealistic. But as long as the world of the story is internally consistent and makes sense to the reader, it’s believable.

And believability is important! If the reader or audience stops and thinks “wow, what’s happening here doesn’t make sense,” then you’ve obviously made a mistake. If you can, then by all means, make your plots, explanations, and world-building completely airtight. The problem is that often fixing believability comes at a cost that isn’t worth the benefit.

To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, those who sacrifice essential momentum for a little temporary believability deserve neither momentum nor believability.

Imagine you’re writing a story where the protagonist is trying to avenge their dead father by pursuing Big Crime Boss. The police have picked up the main character, and the police chief questions them. After a brief, heartfelt conversation, the police chief lets the protagonist go.

How believable is this? Not very. The job of a police chief is to catch people who break the law and hold them for trial, not to make decisions about an individual’s higher moral purpose.

But how important is the lack of believability? The answer is it depends. If you’re writing a story that revolves heavily around the details of law enforcement, then it could matter a lot. If the police chief is a major character, then it definitely matters a lot. But if this scene is just a brief pivot into the climax of the story, and the police chief is a minor character, then maybe it doesn’t matter much at all. Maybe the reader doesn’t really care, and only wants to see the story keep accelerating toward the confrontation with the bad guy. Maybe they intuitively understand that this is how the story needs to be, and that complete, airtight believability just isn’t very important to them.

And what about the cost of the fix? If all it takes to improve this scene is to add a couple of lines of dialogue, then it’s probably worthwhile. But what if it takes a massive rejiggering of your story? What if changing a motivation to fix your problem results in more problems in other parts of the story?

The danger we can get into as writers is to think that there’s some perfect version of our story that fixes every problem that anyone might possibly perceive. We can tinker endlessly, trying to tune every tiny bit until there’s no chance for the reader to complain. And in the process, sometimes we end up with a story that feels overly complicated. Or mind-numbingly slow. Or just plain boring. We lose our story’s momentum.

Sometimes, the right thing to do with a believability problem is just to zoom right past it. A good story catches the reader up in a flood of anticipation and excitement that can easily withstand a tiny bit of unbelievability. That momentum, whether it’s internal or external, plot-oriented or emotional, is the key you’re looking for. It’s the reason why you didn’t care about the silly little believability holes in your favorite movies. Focus on maintaining that momentum, not on tiny bumps and potholes in your plot.

One last note: there’s a big difference between deciding that you’re not going to tinker with a tiny problem where the fix will hurt the story overall and deciding that you’re not going to fix a real issue just because it’s hard. Sometimes the right fix for a real problem means upending lots of other parts of your story. That’s one of the most frustrating things about writing. But it’s not the difficulty of the fix that should be the deciding factor, but rather what makes the story better. Let that guide you, and you’ll always be going in the right direction.

from the tinkerer-tailorer-soldierer-spier dept