I’ve been struggling to silence the little voice in my brain that tells me I suck at writing. This isn’t a new problem, for me personally or for plenty of writers in general. There are lots of posts out there that talk about silencing your inner editor while you write. This is well-trodden territory with winding, muddy footpaths stomped down by plenty of other equally frustrated writers.

I know it’s partly a confidence thing: a lack of trust in my voice, my ability to handle plot pacing and character development, and to make the stories that live in my head come out onto my screen without losing that essential bit of life that made me want to write them down in the first place.

It’s best at night, right as I’m trying to fall asleep — a process that takes at least an hour and lately has required a glass of warm milk and failing that, a dose of some over-the-counter sleeping remedy with some too cutesy brand name. The voice falls asleep before I do most nights, and the stories sneak in after that.  But you can’t do all your writing after midnight in a filter-free, drowsy haze, right? And besides, the little editor will still have to read it over in the morning, with a more critical eye after having been duped the night before.

How do you writers silence the voice and get your first drafts out (naturally, steering clear of any solutions Hemingway or Coleridge would have approved of)?

I made a trip today to a bookstore closing sale. Always a sad event, but even more so in Vancouver which, in two short years, has become an independent bookstore wasteland after the closing of Duthie Books, Sophia Books, and now Book Warehouse.

Hopping on a bus after work, I fought through the rush hour foot traffic and puddles to see what I could salvage from the shelves, all the while feeling guilty that, even as I had made this same pilgrimage many times before in the years I’ve lived in this city, it was not often enough. Browsing and stacking, restacking and debating the merits of buying far more books than I had planned on, I came away with a handful of non-fiction titles: Wikinomics, by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams; Biopunk, by Marcus Wohlsen; The Scavengers’ Manifesto, by Anneli Rufus and Kristan Lawson; and, perhaps most appropriately given a little gender-bending, The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, by Allison Hoover Bartlett.

I am indecisive to a fault (though given that indecisiveness is probably a fault already, that expression isn’t terribly descriptive, is it?), and so I also left half a dozen books behind unbought and undoubtedly feeling very ill-used for having been so roughly browsed, carried about the store under one arm, and then unceremoniously reshelved in a fit of frugalness. I would apologize, but they are, after all, just books and don’t actually care one way or the other. Sometimes I forget that.

image: roland/flickr

I’m terrible at coming up with new ideas for stories. This is probably not something I should be admitting, given my ambitions as a writer, but it’s a confession I’m willing to make. Free writing has never worked me either. I’m not an off-the-cuff type person. Given a blank sheet of paper, a pen, and nothing but my wits, I will inevitably end up writing a very detailed record of that morning’s breakfast and my tentative plans to take a nap that Sunday afternoon.

So instead I read a lot of news and keep a folder of articles, blog posts, and photos that would work as story starters. And given how many blogs I have streaming through my Google Reader, there’s no lack of folder fodder. It’s like my kindling. I take in enough information from disparate sources, let it mix in my brain, and eventually something will spark.  I’ll rush back to my handy folder, pull out the articles that created the spark, try to coax the spark into a blaze, and then follow that signal flame into the story.

I like the weird stuff best: The article about the perils of shrimp factory farming; a post about the biofuel black market of restaurant grease; another about nano-robots capable of herding of live bacteria. Since I’m drawn to writing science-fiction more than other genres, the weird stuff works best for me, which will be convenient if I ever decide to take up as a hobby conspiracy theorist. The shrimp farms are obviously a front for the biofuel black market. If only I could figure out where the nano-robots come into it, I’d be able to blow the whole operation wide open. Wide open, I tell you!

image: kori monster/flickr

In a recent NYTimes artcle, “Finding Your Book Interrupted By the Tablet You Read It On”, a Letter to the Editor was posted that I found completely amusing, and may have led to some spontaneous fist-pumping. While the article itself argues that reading on a tablet is distracting to the point of, well, pointlessness, the Letter suggests otherwise:

Reading the real-life printed version of your paper and immersed in your article about the distractions found on electronic devices that prevent us from finishing a book, I was annoyed when I reached “Continued on Page B2.” On my way to B2, I got lost in three other articles before remembering my original destination.

Don’t blame electronic media for following in the footsteps of their analog ancestors.

Mainly, I liked the reminder that, however advanced our reading tech becomes, it’s inevitably built upon the foundations set-out by its predecessors. Heck, even the word “tablet” harkens back to those clay and stone slabs that were once used to carry around our words. Add to that the act of “scrolling” (as if our screens were made of papyrus, not pixels), and you can have fun with the idea that the 21st century reading experience really is the culmination of all that came before it, making all this e-book/tablet fear-mongering a tad silly.

image: muffet/flickr

Out of the big pile of books that I brought home from the library, Jane Vandenburgh’s Architecture of the Novel had the prettiest cover, so it gets the distinction of being the first book covered in my highly strategic course reading list. Lucky for me, Vandenburgh’s handbook on writing and revision turned out to be an excellent way to start my self-education on writing theory.

In Scene vs. Summary of Scene

“We prefer sounding as if we know what we’re doing, so we naturally try to fabricate something overarching and thematic…We think we need to be creating beautiful language instead of creating scenes, when the vivid specificity of scenes is the only place the story actually exists.”

“Scene before summary, we all explain, and yet we all feel we need to explain what a scene wants to be before we allow it to go ahead and demonstrate itself.”

Seeing as I will be starting my second draft from scratch, I liked Vandenburgh’s insistence that your provisional draft (i.e. early, crappy draft) needs to be written entirely in scene, as if you are a physical witness to the events that are happening in the story, rather than as a summary of scene.  I know this is something I struggled with in my first draft. I would get so impatient telling the story, wanting to rush so that I hit all my plot points and fit everything in, that I started writing passages in which story events read like newspaper accounts.

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Lately, I’ve been trying out some new podcasts. My first entry into podcast listening began with Stuart McLean’s Vinyl Cafe a few years ago, which, if you haven’t yet had the pleasure, is some good ol’ heart-warming, wholesome fun. Seriously, I’ve been known to get weepy on public transit listening to those Vinyl Cafe stories, it’s embarrassing. I’ve since branched out into other shows and nerdier fare like Boars, Gore and Swords (a Game of Thrones podcast that is neither wholesome nor heart-warming, but damn funny), and the Nerdist Writer’s Panel, a show that brings together well-known TV writers to talk about their craft.

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I am not a morning person. This fact is confirmed each time I get stuck in the elevator at work—before my first cup of coffee—with some poor soul who actually is a morning person. It’s never pretty. Because of this unfortunate flaw in my genetic make-up, I do my writing at night, after I’ve gotten home from work, made dinner, and done any number of other grown-up type duties. Not surprisingly, prodding my foggy brain and tired fingers to tap out fictional masterpieces at that late hour is never my first choice of leisure activity. This is the rock and hard place that belong to most writers who work full-time at non-writerly jobs.

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Even though I may have outlined in general terms what this blog is all about (i.e. I’m attempting to write a book and then get it published), without some concrete goals and a timeline, there isn’t much point to all of this. I could just keep writing and editing forever and forever without an end in sight. And then I’ll have another doomed book on my hands. No one wants that, right? Exactly. So I think it’s time I set out some ground rules for this project. It’s goal-setting time!

There are basically two types of goals you can make. Okay, there are probably loads more, but for the purposes of this post it’s convenient to divide everything along clean lines. There are goals that you have complete control over, and there are those that require outside help in order to get them done. Writing a book is something that I can start and finish all on my own, assuming I stick to it. But getting that book published afterwards is going to be a mix of a whole lot of variables, some of which will be out of my hands entirely.

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I’ve always found this to be a thorny question, particularly when your first run at a manuscript is lengthy. Is it better to scrap your first draft entirely and use it only as a rough outline for your second draft, or do you work with what you’ve written so far and rework/expand/trim/etc. as needed from there?

The first draft of my novel weighs in at just over 90 pages, or 27,000 words for you word-count sticklers out there. This makes my draft a novella, rather than a fully grown novel (at least according to the gods of the Nebula Awards, and as they’ve been around for ages, they likely know what they’re talking about). With this draft, I’m also at only one-third the page count I’ll be shooting for in my final manuscript.

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