by Crawford Kilian
Different
writers face different advantages and drawbacks in forming good writing
habits. The circumstances of your personal life may make it easy or
hard to find writing time, but time itself is not the real issue--it's
habit. Writing must be something you do regularly, like brushing your
teeth. The writer who waits for inspiration will wait even longer for a
complete, published novel.
Writing habits flourish best in routine, but the efficient writer also exploits opportunity.
Routine:
Set aside some time every day when you can work undisturbed for an hour
or two--first thing in the morning, during lunch, after dinner,
whenever you can set aside other demands. Ideally, it's the same time of
day. Your family and friends will soon build their routines around
yours. With luck, they will resent your unscheduled appearances during
your writing time, and will send you packing back to your desk.
Keep
your writing equipment (paper, pens, software manuals, etc.) in your
writing place, close at hand. Minimize distractions like interesting new
magazines and books. Try to find a writing time when few people phone
or visit. If a cup of coffee and some background music make you feel less lonely, by all means enjoy them.
Use
household chores as thinking time: a chance to review what you've done
so far and to consider where your writing should go next. Walking the
dog or vacuuming the carpet can provide more ideas than you expect. This
is really just ``controlled daydreaming,'' letting your mind freewheel
in a particular direction: What the heroine should do in the next
chapter, how the hero would respond to escaping a car bomb, how the
villain developed his evil character. But the process doesn't seem to
work if you just sit and stare at the wall. You need to be up and moving
in some automatic pattern.
Don't lean on others for
editorial advice and encouragement--least of all people you're
emotionally involved with. Spouses, friends and roommates rarely have
both editorial perceptiveness and the tact to express it without
infuriating you or breaking your heart. Empty praise will get you
nowhere; unconstructive criticism can destroy your novel in an instant.
Instead,
be your own editor: set aside regular times to write yourself letters
discussing your own work, articulating what's good and less good in it.
In the process you'll easily solve problems that could otherwise grow
into full-blown writer's block. On a computer, the letters can form a
continuous journal, recording your reactions to the evolving work.
Checking back to the first journal entries can help keep you on
track--or dramatically show how far you've moved from your original
concept.
Writing a letter to yourself is especially
helpful if you're beginning to have anxieties about the story. Sometimes
we try to suppress those anxieties, which only makes them worse.
Anxiety turns to frustration and despair, and finally we abandon the
whole project. If you can actually write down what bothers you about
your heroine, or your plot, or whatever, the answer to the problem often
suggests itself. The act of turning our chaotic thoughts into orderly
sentences seems to lead to much quicker and more satisfying solutions.
In
addition to these self-addressed letters, keep a daily log of your
progress. Word processors with word-count functions are powerful
encouragers. The log can give you a sense of accomplishment, especially
on big projects, and can enable you to set realistic completion
deadlines. For example, if you know you can write 500 words in an hour,
and you write three hours a week, you can have a completed novel
manuscript of 75,000 words in 50 weeks. If you write ten hours a week,
the ms. will be complete in 15 weeks.
Compile a
``project bible.'' This is a list of facts, names, and so on that you
expect to be using for constant reference. If you have some important
research findings you plan to use, put them in the bible along with
their sources. Include lists of characters' names (with descriptions, so
their eyes don't change color), unusual words or spellings, etc. The
best format for this bible may be a looseleaf binder you can carry with
you. (A word of caution: If your bible gets too big to carry easily,
you're defeating its purpose.)
Opportunity: If you
decide you ``can't write'' unless you're seated at your Gigabyte II
computer with Mozart on the stereo and no one else in the house, you're
just making life harder for yourself. Your ordinary domestic routine
will always contain ``dead time''--periods when you're away from home
(or at least away from your workplace) with no other task at hand. You
might be waiting in a doctor's office, on a bus, or trapped in a large,
dull meeting. Use that dead time constructively by carrying your
notebook bible in which you can record at least a few lines of a rough
draft. Or you might jot down some background notes about your project,
or a self-editing idea that's just occurred to you. You can then use
these when you're back at your desk producing finished text.
These
are general habits that will help you at all stages of the
novel-writing process. But you may also find that you need to understand
those stages and adapt your habits to each of them. You may not do
yourself any good if you plunge into the writing phase before you've
worked out a decent outline. So let's take a look at the stages of the
novel-writing process, and then consider some techniques to maximize
your efficiency in each of them.
Except from "Advice on Novel Writing by Crawford Kilian."
About the Author
Crawford
Kilian was born in New York City in 1941. He moved to Canada in 1967
and now resides in Vancouver B.C. Crawford has had twelve science
fiction and fantasy novels published. He has been nominated for an
Aurora Award 3 times for his novels Eyas, Lifter and Rogue Emperor- A
Novel of the Chronoplane Wars. His latest contribution to SF is a
non-fiction book for would-be SF writers called Writing Science Fiction
and Fantasy. Crawford has two more novels in the works.
To learn more about him at Wikipedia.
Crawford Kilian Books at Amazon
