This month was the highly anticipated release of the Netflix adaptation of The Umbrella Academy. This weird little comic by Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá has been living in my heart since 2007, and I was terrified and excited to see it come to the small screen.
Netflix has done all right by the Marvel superheroes, but The Umbrella Academy is a different sort of beast, with way more emphasis on the emotional dysfunction of superheroes than on the superheroic fights. (Like, even more so than the current age, which thrives off superhero dysfunction.)
All my expectations were exceeded and my fears assuaged because this is a beautiful adaptation of the source material. And it is truly and wonderfully an adaptation, not a reproduction (which would have been kind of a nightmare). It’s different from the original, borrowing from both the “Apocalypse Suite” and “Dallas” storylines and combining them into something that is both familiar and different. It has the right vibe, is both tragic and comedic (as all good superhero things should be), and it has these recognizably broken and beautiful characters at its core. (Also, it gave me more Ben Hargreeves, which is something I have been wanting for OVER. TEN. YEARS.)
Watching this series over the course of a few days while also putting the final revisions into my highly linear and much less dysfunctional novel reminded me of how much I love nonlinear storytelling about broken characters. (Not enough to change my novel again—it’s been changed enough!) I’ve been noodling over a sci-fi short set in space, not sure how to attack it, and I think the problem I’ve had every time is I keep trying to treat it like a linear narrative and I don’t think it is. The characters are messier and the dramatic motivation is murkier and I think I need to channel a little of what I love about The Umbrella Academy into writing it.
Here’s to the things we love and how they inspire us.
For full access to The Write Life, sign up on Patreon for $1 or more per month. You’ll also receive a personalized thank you in a future edition of The Write Life.
While I was addressing comments on my steampunk novel, Lara Eckener was kind enough to share Victorian drop candy with me! Drop candy is made by rolling heated sugar between brass molds. As it is pressed between the molds, the sugar cools and hardens. To release the candy pieces, the rolled film is dropped, breaking the thinner film away from the candy, thus making it “drop” candy.
The candy itself is from a confectionary in Tallahassee called Lofty Pursuits. They have a magnificent YouTube channel showing their Victorian rollers in action and other videos of their hand-made candy.
The picture here is the drop candy composed around a section of the novel in which the main character watches automated robotic arms roll out and drop nectar candy. (Lofty Pursuits was absolutely the inspiration for adding this world-building moment.)
For full access to The Write Life, sign up on Patreon for $1 or more per month. You’ll also receive a personalized thank you in a future edition of The Write Life.
I started December by finishing off a final revision of my Clockman novel. (Yes, another final revision.) This pass included addressing some concerns I had about Chapter 12 and then reviewing the entire manuscript for filler words and adverbs to make sure the sentences were as tight as they could be. I used some of the website apps I’ve talked about previously in Writer Resources (available on Patreon) to assist with these passes, which made looking for filler words and adverbs a breeze.
The manuscript is currently off with a friend from the MFA and my MFA thesis director, and I’m doing a final (“final”) hard-copy review wherein I’m discovering horrifying typos and further tweaking sentences (because I. Am. Unstoppable!) Our formerly feral cat Pink is assisting in this work, but he keeps falling asleep on the job (sometimes literally on top of the book).
I’ve also been preparing a presentation on Non-Traditional Revenue Streams for Writers (like Patreon), which I’ll be presenting at the OCLS Writers Conference on January 26. If you’re local to Central Florida, make sure you register soon! (Seats are going fast.)
For full access to The Write Life, sign up on Patreon for $1 or more per month. You’ll also receive a personalized thank you in a future edition of The Write Life.
While I hit the majority of my 2018 goals, I’m not entirely satisfied with my progress this year, which is why I’m making some major changes to my writing life for next year. But that topic is next year, and this post is about 2018 and all my success and less-than-success that has come and gone.
Let’s start with the metric-based goals:
I wrote every day in 2018.
I wrote 150 or more words every day.
I wrote 1,000 or more words 33 days out of 40.
I wrote 205,068 words over the year, exceeding my goal by 20,068 words.
I read 53 books, exceeding my goal by 18 books.
Overall, success! I didn’t write 1,000 words in a day as often as I wanted, but after spending three years developing a steady writing habit, I no longer have trouble producing words. Which is a huge success, as anyone who has experienced a second of writer’s block knows well.
While the words flowed easily, I spun my wheels on projects more often than I finished them. I spit out words to write the words, instead of writing to write a story. Writing was a rote process, instead of a creative adventure. Which is why I did not finish a draft of a novel this year.
I made progress on a novel, decided what I was doing wasn’t working, and I scrapped the whole outline. On paper, not finishing a novel draft is a failed goal, but I learned a lot about what wasn’t working in my approach and figured out the novel I want to write (mostly). So even though I didn’t “finish” a novel, I made progress that will help me write that novel in the future.
In general, that’s how I feel about my progress this past year. I spun my wheels, I learned a lot about which pressures and obligations were causing negative results, and reflected on how I want to make changes to my writing life going forward. 2018 was very successful, don’t get me wrong, but I’m looking forward to taking what I learned about my writing life and applying it to my writing future.
How did your writing in 2018 go? Did you make progress in your goals?
It’s time for a confession: the way I’ve been going about this blog has been challenging and exhausting and it makes me want to quit.
Whew. Way to finally get that off my chest! I’ve been feeling this way for a long time, but repressing that feeling by thinking about what I thought I should do and not listening to what I wanted to do was making it worse. After some conversations with friends, I’ve decided that with the start of a new year, I’m making a few changes about how I organize my online spaces which I’m hoping will overall encourage me to create more and engage more.
Starting in January, I’ll be shifting the content of this blog to focus more on my writing life and a handful of short projects. Posting will consist of one monthly post and a second semi-monthly post.
- During the first week of each month:
You’ll be treated to The Write Life, a short review of what I’ve been working on or done related to writing during the previous month and what events are coming up.
If you’ve been a patron on Patreon these last months, this will sound familiar—but fear not, the Patreon version will still be there, and will be an expanded version of what appears on this blog. So if you ever decide you want the full skinny on what I’m writing or what writing events I attend, head over to Patreon and pledge at least one dollar per month to unlock the patron-only feed. - During the third week of most months:
You’ll get to read the latest installment in a limited series. These series will include deep dives into genres or writing craft, creative ways of addressing writer support, and the return of DIY Edit (and possibly other things). Each series will be 4–6 posts, which will be collected after the series is complete and available in a pdf or other digital format.
These changes feel more natural than the rigid definition of blogging and posting I’ve been holding myself to for the last year and a half. I’m actually looking forward to blogging again and I’m especially looking forward to devoting more of my time to writing fiction in 2019.
If you feel drained of ideas and motivation, that could be a sign that you need to take a writing break and let yourself entirely off the hook. Spend the day reading a book, catching up on TV, or actually, you know, interacting with people. I find that having conversations with other writers and creators is often the best way to find inspiration again.
But let’s assume for a moment that you can’t take a break and you have to write no matter what (ahem, like when you’re in the middle of NaNoWriMo). What do you do on those days when you have to force yourself to write?
Maintaining a Streak
If you’re writing to maintain a streak and it doesn’t matter what you write, so long as you write, it may be a day to shelve the current work in progress and try something new.
Shift over to your ideas notebook, grab a random prompt from the internet (there are a jillion, so if you don’t have a favorite site bookmarked, Google “creative writing prompts” or “writing prompt generator”), or ask your friends if there’s a story they’d like to be told. I’ve written some fun one-offs about my original characters inspired by things my friends prompted me or scenes they wish they’d read.
If you’re still struggling to get any words on the page, or are generally finding yourself uninspired, it’s time for some free writing. This free writing could eventually evolve into a blog post or story, but it might just be an activity to get you writing again.
Start with a question about what’s bugging you. This could be anything from, “Why am I so tired today?” to “How am I so uninspired?” Once you have that question nailed down, twist it into a question you can analyze and/or give advice about. “Why am I so tired today?” might become “How can you write when you’re tired?” or “What’s the greatest obstacle between a writer and a nap?” or “Why is sleep so important to the creative process?” Once you have a question, and one that is built on a topic that’s currently bugging you, you have something to write about. And turning it into a question that you can either analyze or give advice about lets you turn free writing about your problems into a positive exercise. Too often free writing about problems can turn into negative thoughts and self-immolation, but turning it into a question to be answered lets you think about the same topic in a completely different way and hopefully can inspire you to help yourself!
Writing to a Deadline
If you’re writing for a deadline and you must work on a specific piece, the real problem is that you have to find inspiration in a specific work, so jumping to other pieces isn’t always an option.
But it’s still where I would start.
When feeling totally uninspired on one story, I start by writing on something else. If you have another project in progress, spending some time on that might reinvigorate your motivation for the deadline project. If no other project is available, you can take any of the suggestions above and apply them here—prompts, free writing with a question, etc.
No matter what you’re writing, set a timer to limit how much time you spend working on other activities or projects. I recommend 10–15 minutes for warm-up writing before trying to get back to the project you’re supposed to be working on.
Or, instead of writing something different, you can use prompts that allow you to work with the same characters or the same world, essentially approaching your deadline project from the side instead of head-on. Try posing what-if situations for your characters, alternate scenes/endings, or writing something from the perspective of someone else in your world.
You can use a similar strategy as the suggested free writing activity by answering a question related to the thing you’re stuck on—”How can my character get out of this situation?” or “Who should my character partner with for this mission?” or “How does the world’s society/laws limit my character?” Using the free writing format as an opportunity to organize your thoughts can help you work through the problem in a different way than just thinking about it. (This is why so often solutions might come when we’re talking to someone else, rather than when we’re just thinking to ourselves. Different ways of communication allow us to organize our thoughts differently, so if you don’t have a friend on hand, have a conversation with a blank page!)
If you absolutely must be working on your deadline-driven project and don’t have time for warm-up activities, try reading the last 1-2 pages you’ve written and allow yourself to revise and edit them. One of the best ways for me to get back into a story is by working to flesh out the last thing I wrote. If the last thing I wrote is literally what stumped me—and I had difficulty figuring out where the story goes next—I rewrite from where the story started to derail. Sometimes I might keep all the action and description, but change the dialogue. Sometimes I might move the setting. Sometimes I might scrap the entire idea, or even shift who is in the scene and take the whole thing in a completely different direction! It may not feel like you’re getting anywhere (especially if you end up trashing that version and starting again), but what you’re doing is eliminating the ideas that aren’t working and helping find the idea that does work.
No matter what’s going on with you creatively, there are ways to dig deep on those days when you’re feeling drained. And the more often you practice digging deep, the easier it can get. I still sometimes hit days when I’m totally worn out and need a break, and on those days I write my minimum word count using one of the strategies above and call it a day. But because I’ve put in so much effort, it’s easy for me to use one of those strategies and see success. So even if it’s hard now, know that putting in the hard work will help train you as a writer and eventually you’ll be able to sail past those inspiration-less days with no trouble.
The day after NaNoWriMo 2017 I saw a conversation from someone saying they haven’t been able to win since the November they were unemployed. I also saw confessions from people who gave up or from people who never started. Being a Municipal Liaison, it’s easy to forget that NaNoWriMo isn’t for everyone, that—in fact—writing 50,000 words in a month with everyone watching might be unhealthy for some people.
So before you sign up for NaNoWriMo 2018, consider these ways in which NaNoWriMo works for me, but may not work for you.
I’m a Plantser
Plantsing is the combination of planning and “pantsing” (writing by the seat of your pants). While I normally write with a planned structure and outline, I’m flexible enough in my plans to let inspiration take me off course.
This combo can save me if I get stuck in my outline or am having difficulty with a character or a scene. Because I have a plan, I can skip ahead and write a later scene that isn’t giving me trouble. Conversely, because I’m flexible, I can get “distracted” by an interesting minor character, or wind up inventing a new subplot because of something I discovered about the characters. Since I have flexibility, I don’t feel restrained by my outline, and since I have a plan, I’m not a slave to the muse. I can write forward by either following my plan or by following my inspiration. The ability to shift back and forth between those writing methodologies helps keep me writing throughout the month.
I Hate Writing First Drafts
I really hate writing first drafts. There’s a reason I’m an editor, and it’s because I like improving content that’s already written. Revising makes sense to me because it’s like untangling a ball of yarn. But writing a first draft is making the knot, and I’ve always liked creating order rather than chaos.
NaNoWriMo forces me to write the first draft as quickly as possible, and it forces me to keep working on the draft. While I could potentially spend November rewriting the same scene multiple times until it’s perfect, it’s difficult to hit 1,667 words a day if you’re only tweaking text. NaNoWriMo is full steam ahead on the first draft, which is a gift for me because otherwise I will relentlessly avoid writing a first draft. (Case in point: I’ve been working on the same first draft the past three NaNos because, without a deadline, I struggle with forcing myself to write it at other times of the year.)
I Can Write 1K in 30 Minutes
When I’m on my game, I can write 1,000 words in about thirty minutes. It’s a valuable skill for NaNoWriMo, to be sure. It means I can hit the pace-goal of 1,667 words in less than an hour. Since I don’t write at that pace year-round, I have to work to get myself back into that kind of writing shape (I typically start November around 700 words in thirty minutes), but once I’m into the stride of things, it’s something I can rely on to make NaNo easier. Spending less time physically writing means I’m more likely to fit writing 1,667 words into my day every day.
Healthy Competition Keeps Me Motivated
A little healthy competition keeps me writing. Most days I’m just competing with myself and the pace bar in the word count graph, but sometimes my co-ML and I pit our word counts against each other. Nothing got me writing more than when Brad was going to beat me! We kept all our battles lighthearted, which is the key to competition being a positive motivator.
I’ve had plenty of NaNos in which I knew I wouldn’t meet the 50K, so I used the month to write as much as I could without adding on the pressure of “winning,” But every time I’ve set out to win NaNoWriMo, I’m one of those writers who will kill myself to win. I find deadlines invigorating. They’re stressful and tiring, too, but pushing myself electrifies me and helps me actually finish. I thrive on that, and it’s a big reason why NaNoWriMo works for me.
Those are some aspects of my writing life that make NaNoWriMo a good match for me, but since all writers are different, it’s easy to see that the 30-day deadline or the suggested pace count or the feeling of falling behind could easily stress out or intimidate another writer. It’s sometimes hard to say no to NaNo, especially if it seems like all your friends are signing up, but if you know the challenge doesn’t work for you, keep this in mind: writing is hard enough without the added stress. Keep writing and keep working on a process that works for you.
Tomorrow is my 1,000th consecutive day of writing!
On one hand it is a holy-cannoli moment. Ten years ago, I never would have dreamed of having this kind of regularity in my writing life. Even before I was depressed, I wrote in fits and spurts and when I felt like it, sneaking in a writing life in between work hours, chores, family functions, and everything else. I could commit during NaNoWriMo, or when I had a deadline, but I was wholly unconcerned about when I would write next or what I was building toward. My writing life was an amorphous thing and even though I had goals (get published!) I had no plan. I was basically an underpants gnome where my plan was:
Phase 1: Write
Phase 2: ????
Phase 3: PUBLISH!
I had this idea that I’d like to write every day, but I didn’t understand what it would do for me and I didn’t have the follow-through to make it happen. When I realized I had written every day the first week of 2016, it was a surprise. I haphazardly decided to keep going, but that cavalier decision hardened into resolve and I slowly figured out how to juggle writing and all my other responsibilities. I learned that I had to prioritize writing to make my writing life happen. I learned that I had to tell friends and family things like, “this has been fun, but I have to go write,” even though I felt silly and trivial doing so the first few times. I learned that writing was as important as my job (because I wanted it to be my job), so I had to value it.
All of those little lessons and small goals helped me to get to the other hand of how I feel about this landmark.
On this other hand, this non-holy-cannoli-moment hand, writing 1,000 days seems inevitable. It’s still an achievement, don’t get me wrong, but I see no reason why I won’t write for 1,000 more days. Daily writing is such a part of my life now that I no longer question how I will shuffle my day to include writing. And that’s the real power that comes from building a writing habit. I have confidence that I will write today and from that confidence stems other confidence:
That this won’t be my last great idea.
That I can figure out how to write this scene.
That I can find the right word.
That I can do this.
While I’m proud of having written 1,000 days in a row, I’m most proud of cultivating confidence in my writing life and developing the kind of consistency that makes me certain that, if I want to, I’ll be celebrating 2,000 days of writing in 2021.
If you’d like to know more about building a daily writing habit, I’ve written previously on why you should write every day and writing while sick. I’ve also written about apps that can make it easier to build a writing habit. If you’re thinking about or trying to build a writing habit, I’d love to hear how it’s going for you.
I’m off to DragonCon this week, and while preparing for that adventure is certainly an added distraction this month, it’s not the reason I’m phoning in this blog post. Life has gotten unexpectedly complicated and busy. But that’s one of the most consistent aspects of life, isn’t it? Just when you feel like you have everything under control, something comes along to disrupt the flow.
Many of the things currently disrupting my life are good things (including prepping for my favorite convention of the year and my friend moving back to town), but some of them come with additional emotional complications or stress. Right now I’m reminded to pay additional attention to my work-life balance, to make sure that I’m taking care of myself and my needs, and to cut back on responsibilities where I can. Which is why you’re reading this blog post instead of one of the ones I’ve been working on.
Here’s the take away from this short post: when you’re busy or when life is being unexpectedly complicated, it’s okay to cut back on your responsibilities where you can. This might not be the blog post that you’re looking for, but it’s a reminder I’m happy to share.
Today I’m a daily writer. Even on sick days or very busy days I make sure to write at least 150 words. This is my third year of this schedule and it’s still working for me. There are days when it’s tough, and days when I write my 150 words and then erase them. There are days when I write in 10-minute bursts throughout the day or have to force myself to sit down and spend time writing something. But every day I write is a day when I don’t forget how to write.
That wasn’t the case for me in 2012.
In September of 2012 I started treatment for situational depression. Over the previous year I had lost the ability to feel emotions, to care for myself, and to pay attention to conversations, but the loss that hurt the most was related to writing.
I tried many times during 2012 and 2013 to sit down and write. Every time was an exercise in self-hate and improving my ability to berate myself. I went from writing 150,000 words in 2011 to 60,000 words in 2012 to 15,000 words in 2013. It was a clear—trackable—symptom of my depression, and one of the most frustrating ones.
Before I was depressed, writing was easy and I took it for granted. I would listen to a song, read an article, have a silly conversation with a friend, and—BAM—there I went, fingers flying across the keyboard, 2,000 words plopped out in an hour or so. There were days when I would write 5,000 or 6,000 words. Words were easy and plentiful. I didn’t understand how someone could be completely blocked. Writer’s block was an easy obstacle for me to overcome. If one idea was giving me trouble, I’d jump to another. Being unable to write? When I wanted to? Not me.
While I was depressed, even if I decided to come to the writing watering hole, I could not get my horse to drink. The times I tried to write, I would sit and stare at a blank page. I might ask a friend for a prompt, mull it over, struggle over 200 words, and then delete all of them. Between January 2013 and October 2013 I wrote on a total of 9 days. In November and December, after I’d decided to apply to an MFA program and was starting to feel better, I kicked into “high-gear” and wrote 10 days out of those two months. I wrote 19 days total in 2013 and now in 2018 I’m currently on a run of having written 942 consecutive days. That’s—obviously—a huge change.
Writing was not something that automatically came back after I started feeling better. I struggled in 2014, even after I started UCF’s MFA program. (Let me tell you, starting a writing intensive program while you’re still recovering from depression? Not recommended.) This time when I forced myself to write, I had a different attitude about it. I shut down the negative thinking and pushed forward, continuing to plunk down words. It wasn’t the best writing—oh boy, adverbs ahoy and the longest dialogue tags you ever did see—but it was writing. And it got easier the more I pushed myself to practice and the more I forced myself to keep what I wrote.
Part of the reason I applied for the MFA program was because I knew it would provide structure that would force me to write. With grades as a motivator, I knew I could propel myself to get past the hump and write something because I couldn’t turn in a blank page. I feared all my writing might be crap. I feared the depression might have stripped away whatever talent I may have started with. I feared I was forever changed. But I knew that an MFA program was going to force me to confront those things and either figure out how to write again or discover I was done.
In the Spring semester, the start of 2015, I felt something come alive again. I revisited some crazy prompts I’d seen in the last year. I wrote about sentient robots in an alternate history World War II and about a house that possesses a girl. I wrote short assignments that explored my divorce and reconnected with characters created pre-depression. I started working on my novel in earnest. By the end of 2015, I had written 83,000 words and I was invested in my stories again.
Do I still love what I wrote then? Not really. But it gave me a foundation for stories and, most importantly, for my confidence. In 2016 when I realized I had written every day the first week of the year, it was an easy decision to continue writing every day until the end of the month, and then the next month, and the next. I made daily writing part of my routine, and that routine has helped me get through grief-related depression and anxiety. Since 2016 I’ve written over a half million words. I’ve come a long way.
In my experience, there was no writing with depression, not really. There was writing while fighting to not be depressed. There was writing for recovery, writing to unload negative feelings and trying to find something positive. There was struggling to write and hating myself and trying not to hate myself. There were moments when I was me again and when I could find joy and when it felt like I might be out of the woods. There was writing after depression.
Writing after depression hasn’t been all happily ever after. There are still days when writing is a struggle, when depression rears its ugly head, when life doles out extra helpings of anxiety and grief. On those days I set a timer for 10 minutes and I peck out 100 words. Then I set another timer and peck out 100 more. I check in with myself and ask, “Are you done? Do you have anything else in you?” Most days I do. Most days I can hit 500 words, but some days I can’t and I have learned to say, “That’s okay. This is enough.”
One of the ways I prepare to write a novel is by doing a lot of reading. While some of that reading is nonfiction research to help me with the time period, jargon, or specific details surrounding the novel or topic, some of my most potent research comes from reading fiction.
There are a few ways reading fiction can help with the writing process:
1. Familiarization
Getting familiar with your genre allows you to internalize story structures, characters, and tropes within the genre and speak about the genre with authority. You can find inspiration in what other people have written and you can figure out what concepts have been written about extensively or haven’t been covered at all. Also, the more familiar you are with your genre, the easier it will be to determine comp titles, which are used to pitch your book and for agents and editors to determine the marketability of your work.
2. Internalization
Just like how you can internalize tropes of your genre, you can also internalize the descriptive and narrative techniques of your favorite authors. If you start to analyze why a particular device works, you can start to understand how to recreate and use that technique in your own writing.
3. Research
Reading fiction set in the same time period as your work or about the same subject matter can do some of your research heavy lifting by generating a list of what you need to research to establish authenticity or accuracy. You also might be able to pick up some details from those published novels (just make sure you double check that those details are accurate and fit your story).
Now that you’re on board with reading fiction to write fiction, you have to start reading as a writer and not just for enjoyment. It may sound difficult, but with a few tools, a plan, and some practice, you’ll be ready to dissect any novel.
Tools & Organization
The three most helpful tools for reading as a writer are a set of color-coded page flags, a pencil for underlining, and a notebook. If you’re reading eBooks, page flags won’t be so helpful, but most eReaders have highlighting or note-taking options, so familiarize yourself with what you can use in your app to mark your eBooks.
While you could use any page flags, or even just dog-ear your book, I prefer using color-coded flags (or color-coded highlighting on eReaders)—this was especially useful when I was just starting to develop my skill of reading as a writer.
Pink—anything involving character development, which may include dialogue, reactions and descriptions
Blue—setting and physical description
Purple—world-building dealing with history, politics, religion, or other abstract ideas (to differentiate from setting description)
Yellow—compelling language; sentences that have excellent imagery, syntax, and rhythm
If there’s a different area you need to study (dialogue, how plot fits together, etc), you may decide to swap out a label, or get a pack of page flags with more colors. The important thing is to pick what each color represents and be consistent with it.
In addition to organizing your notes, color coding helps create a guideline for what you’re looking for as you read. If you’ve thought about it before you start reading, it’s easier to tune into craft as you read.
Since a flag only identifies what page you want to review, you’ll need to mark exactly what on the page is drawing your attention. There are a few options for doing this, which I’ve divided between those who will brazenly write in books and those who like to keep their books pristine or who are borrowing books.
- Underline in pencil or pen
- Highlight using your flag color coding
- Take a picture of the page
- Write down the quotes in a notebook
Regardless of your method, document the sentences/paragraphs you want to come back to review. If you are writing them in a notebook, it’s helpful to include a page reference in case you need the full page context later.
Study Plan
Once you’re in the groove of tagging, you need to have a plan for how to go from reading fiction to learning from fiction. This is when your notebook will come into play.
When you’ve finished a few chapters, or are at a comfortable stopping point, go through your flags to study what you’ve marked. Compiling notes every few chapters ensures those chapters are still fresh in your mind and makes analysis a little easier.
The most organized way of studying the highlighted material is to go through your flags by color, grouping your notes by topic of study. By focusing on one topic at a time, you might start to see patterns and make connections about what you’re seeing the author do.
Consider this routine as you start:
- Copy the quote in your notebook.
- Underneath, write why you captured the quote.
- What made you think this was exemplary writing? What about it drew your attention? How does it provide context to the wider narrative?
- After you’ve organized the quotes for one flag color, start thinking about how you can use these same techniques in your own writing. In short, what can you learn about writing from reading this novel?
- Summarize what you learned. Include a checklist of strategies and techniques you want to try. You might refer back to the quotes to identify examples for each strategy.
If you don’t copy the quotes in a notebook, I recommend at least capturing what you learned from the book. It’s easier to try writing strategies if you have a list of writing strategies you want to try.
Read & Practice
Practicing is the only way to develop the skill of reading as a writer. A good way to practice is by studying a book you’ve already read. Using a book you already know well, you can start to see how the beginning affects the end, and you might even notice more writerly things because you’re less concerned with knowing what happens since you already know the plot and outcome.
If you find it difficult to keep track of all the things going on in a book, consider focusing on one thing. Personally, I struggle with knowing where to incorporate description, so I might decide to just focus on how characters and locations are described and when those details enter the narrative. Starting by focusing on one area of craft can help you learn how to identify and appreciate individual elements of craft within the wider narrative and can help you build the skill of reading as a writer.
As you continue to develop this skill, you may be able to skip some of the steps, eventually passing on page flags, or just keeping a notebook beside you as you read. However your process evolves, ask yourself two questions when you finish reading a book: What did I learn from this? What can I apply to my own writing?
Even though I’m an editor for hire, I firmly believe in self-editing. Each month I’m going to drop a tip for developing your ability to edit your own work or identify things to look for as you edit. Make sure to check out all the DIY Edit Tips to improve your self-editing.
12 Voice Intrusions
The fiction you consume influences what you write. Not just in terms of content, but in how you write and in the words you use to express your ideas. This is often a subconscious element of writing that appears during drafting, when another author’s syntax and diction might sneak into your draft. Don’t let that stop your forward progress—or turn you off reading!—accidental intrusions are normal for any author. The work of identifying those intrusions and correcting them comes in revision.
It’s important to be aware of what’s your voice and what’s someone else’s. Absorbing other authors’ craft is a great way to develop your own writing and allow it to evolve. But it’s important to absorb and internalize that craft so it becomes a natural part of your voice and not a glaring error. Revision is the time to smooth out those bumps, find those intrusions, and craft something that truly sounds like you.
- Does the dappled, wind-swept meadow fit in among your descriptions or does it stand out? Do you have lots of long, flowing descriptions of the settings and characters, or have you been reading Tolkein?
- Is that a ten-cent word one you’d normally use—and are there more of them—or is it there because you were reading David Foster Wallace?
- Are short sentences really your thing, or have you been reading too much Hemingway?
Pay attention when you or your readers identify something that sounds out of place within the rest of the manuscript. While you want to have sentences and descriptions that sing, it’s important to maintain consistency in your voice. Word choice and syntax are the foundations of an author’s voice, so pay attention to both while you craft your writing and make sure that your story sounds like it came from you.
Hiatus! DIY Edit will be going on hiatus for a few months. Expect it back in early 2019.
Like what you read? Help me continue making this content by leaving a tip through Ko-fi.