November is coming. For some people, that means Thanksgiving and holiday shopping (if you’re a non-procrastinator, which I definitely am not.) For writers, it means something else….
novels
How to Use Your Learning Style to Adjust Your Writing Style
What’s your learning style?
Figuring that out for yourself could help you figure out what your most successful approach to writing could be. Read on for more…
How Not To Start Writing A Novel
1. Read every piece of writing advice ever written. There could be something out there you missed! Be sure to order every book online and read every article on the internet before you sit down to write.
2. Obey every piece of writing advice ever written. It worked for them, so it must work for you too, and if you don’t listen to them you’re doing it wrong.
3. Plan out every detail of your novel before you start writing it. Extensive outlines, pages of character study, a theme firmly in mind–make sure to have all of this before you start writing.
4. Read writers in your genre and despair over how you’ll never write as well as them. These people probably just went ahead and published their first drafts, after all. They probably didn’t need rounds and rounds of revisions since they are such better writers than you.
5. Daydream about your novel for ages. But don’t sit down and actually start writing it. That’s too scary.
6. Spend loads of time gathering inspirational quotes, photos, and music that will go with your novel. Anything to put off actually writing it!
7. Talk to people nonstop about your ideas for your novel. Better to get the ideas out there in the world to see if people like them before you put any effort into it.
8. Cast the movie of your novel. See #5 & 6
9. Rewrite your beginning over and over again. After all, the beginning has to be good. Best to get that perfect before writing anything else.
10. Go for a walk/clean your apartment/play with your cat/drink copious amounts of coffee and/or alcohol See #5,6, & 8
Do all these things and you’re guaranteed never to become a writer. Because, you know, that’s scary.
Photo by Kinga Cichewicz on Unsplash
What Keeps You Reading?
Last week I asked this very important question, and this week I’m asking something equally important…
What Draws You Into A Story?
I haven’t decided what my next Learning from the Masters lesson will be. So for today, I’m asking a very important question…
MK’s Book Reviews: The Ocean at the End of the Lane
I read Neil Gaiman’s latest oeuvre this week, and I’m here to tell you what I thought…
Getting Back Into Writing
If you’re anything like me, December is a particularly challenging time of year to maintain steady writing habits. I refer to this period as “Novel Interruptus” and I’ve long since stopped trying to fight it/feel guilty for it. After all, the reason writing gets interrupted is because I’m busy doing one of the things I said I’d never give up for anything: spending time with the people I love.
BUT.
Writing Tip: Take A Break
So I know this might seem counterproductive, but one of the biggest things I’ve learned in the 5+ years I’ve been writing is…
Learning From The Masters: On Subtlety
So I want to talk about one of my favorite things in fiction…
Subtlety.
I’ve already written about how one of my biggest pet peeves in books is showing and telling. I also wrote a post on how to not do that.
I think the best novels are ones that show you everything that’s happening–then leave it to you, the reader, to draw your own conclusions. Books like this treat you like you’re smart–the author knows they don’t have to spell everything out for you.
There is one writer I know of who does this exceptionally well, but the example I’m going to give is kind of a big spoiler for this book. So I’m not going to tell you which book or writer it is. I’ve also omitted character names.
For background info: in this novel, a female detective is investigating the murder of a pregnant woman. Earlier on, she finds a notebook where the murdered woman had kept track of her monthly cycles. The detective also hints about a past tryst with a coworker that left her feeling kind of empty, to put it mildly. These people also live in a country where abortion is illegal.
And then, near the end of the novel, we get this passage:
I’m not her, I’m not clockwork, specially not when I’m wrecked and stressed and wretched. By the time the terrible sinking feeling kicked in, I had moved to Domestic Violence, he had been bounced into bureaucratic limbo somewhere and all our bridges were burned to bitter ash; he had gone so far away I couldn’t even see him on the other side. I didn’t tell anyone. I got the boat to England before dawn one sleety Saturday and was back in my dark flat that night—the plane would have been faster but I couldn’t take it, the thought of sitting still for an hour each way, squashed elbow to elbow between strangers. I walked up and down the deck of the boat instead. On the way back the sleet came down harder, soaked me to the bone; if there had been anyone else on deck they would have thought I was crying, but I wasn’t, not even once.
In case you didn’t get it, this character is telling you that she got pregnant as a result of her tryst of her coworker, and then elected to get an abortion.
But at no point in this narrative–or anywhere in the novel–does the character state “I had an abortion.” Instead, the author takes what you already know about that character and the story and presents you with this scene of the detective on a boat on a sleety dark day–and leaves you to figure out exactly what it was that happened.
Of course, not stating things outright means there are some readers who won’t get it. For example, in discussions forums for the above book, some people wrote they had no idea this character had had an abortion. But that’s why it’s so important to read closely (especially in detective novels).
I’m definitely going to be incorporating this into my own writing. How about you?
MK Pagano 