When You Want to Quit

That voice that sounds suspiciously like the most disapproving person in your life will, at some time or another, tell you to give up on writing. You suck. You write like a five-year-old. Stephen King was younger than you when he first published.

And that voice is probably right about most of it. You probably do suck, compared to where you will be in five or ten years. You might write like a five-year-old, if the five-year-old is a wunderkind. Stephen King was, indeed, younger.

But you shouldn’t quit.

That voice is the voice of dissatisfaction with where you are in your writing journey. We all hear that voice. And we’re all faced with a choice: quit or get better.

Because, obviously, that voice won’t let you stay where you are right now.
Quit or get better. Shit or get off the pot.

I’m a proponent of getting better, not quitting. I like to crack open a book right about then, and say to my father’s voice, “We’ll see about that after I learn some stuff.”

Why? Because rarely in life do we get to choose our turning points, but this is one place where we do. We can quit writing, sure, but most of us don’t. That means we can ignore this voice and simply have a fling with writing until the voice comes back, or we can face the voice head-on, arms akimbo and chin outthrust.

Nose in book; red pen on essay.

Accepting critiques or applying lessons in writing manuals are some of the toughest things we do. Acknowledging that our prose isn’t perfect, that our poetry doesn’t evoke, necessarily hurts. It stings. It damages our tiny cat feelings. It sucks.

But if we don’t acknowledge room to improve, we’ll battle all our lives with that voice that says “you aren’t good enough.” Because you know what? We aren’t good enough. We are not good enough today for tomorrow. We do not know everything. Assuming we do is hubris.

“But I can’t afford it. I don’t have time. But it’s my unique writing voice. You just don’t understand my art.”

Listen here: ANYTHING you say back to the voice in your head is an excuse. It’s not the real reason you’re reticent to take that critique. It’s not the reason you’re unwilling to pick up a book. It’s a cover for being afraid. Afraid the voice is right.

So if you acknowledge that the voice is right, you can save yourself a lot of arguing.

But shouldn’t you write for the sheer joy of writing? Yes. You feel super-joyful when you’re wondering whether you should give up your dreams. Time. Of. Your. Life.

Look, writing is awesome. That’s how it got you hooked. And sometimes it sucks, like when you have to sublimate your ego. But it will get awesome again if you get over yourself. Try it.

Just write. And learn. And write some more.

And when you hear that disapproving voice in your head: welcome it. It means that there’s something you need to learn. Dollars to doughnuts, you know what that “thing” is: it’s whatever’s bothering you about your writing. Your characters suck: go study character building. Your world is flat: go study world building. People don’t understand what you mean: study sentence structure. Your prose drags: learn to activate your verbs and select your nouns.

It’s not easy, but it’s worth it. It means the end of angst and the beginning of an exciting journey toward awesomeness.

But only if you don’t quit.

Feedback Loop-or How to Become a Better Writer Fast

Feedback. Whether it’s a screeching speaker or screeching colleague, we all learn to hate it, dodge it, avoid it. When someone offers feedback, we may feel like saying, “Go ahead, tell me what’s wrong with me.”

In writing, feedback is easy to get. You post a paragraph or two, and your friends and family, teachers and associates, all tell you it’s wonderful.  You’re the next Stephen King or Stephanie Meyer, and it won’t be long until your books line their shelves.

Yeah, OK.

Part of you knows they’re blowing sunshine. And that little part of you, your internal editor, knows that you need someone to give you the other kind of feedback, the painful kind. Inner editors get demonized in writing circles. You can’t complete Nanowrimo with your inner editor on your back. But that little voice has a purpose, and its purpose is to show you the drivel.

Not that you produce any drivel. That must just be me. So why don’t you take a break and let me talk to your inner editor for the rest of this piece.

Feedback. Screeching. Pointing out flaws. You know you need it, but how are you going to get it? If you post a portion of your masterpiece, people will misunderstand. They’ll lack context. They’ll tell you that you don’t need ten pages of backstory, but you know you do. So what do you do?

You enter the feedback loop.

There’s a reason that many authors start with short stories (event though short stories can be even tougher than novels sometimes). First, it’s simple. Only one plot-line to contend with. Only a character or two. One decision in your climax and Boom! It’s done.

The second is because you get your feedback faster.  You crank out a short story, you get feedback. 95 people say they love it, but that curmudgeon in the corner always talking about “passive voice” starts in on you. And that’s the person you want to listen to. A thousand people singing your praises won’t make you a better writer; facts-based editing will. And there are facts to writing. There are rules.

Short stories also promote good storytelling. Those ten pages of backstory? Yeah, your reader doesn’t need them in a short. So you learn to write without them. That entire chapter of tea and biscuits where you catch your reader up on what’s transpired? Can’t do that in a short story. A lot of classical mistakes can be avoided in a short, so you can teach yourself not to make those mistakes in the first place.

And that’s what does it: what turns you from a dilettante to a real writer is feedback: the scary kind. The harsh kind. The kind that makes you open up textbooks or manuals of style when you feel like refuting what the critic said. The kind that causes you to clap your hands over your ears and scream, “I’m not listening.”

Because your inner editor is listening. Your inner editor is whispering, “yes, this is what’s wrong with it. That makes sense.”

Your inner editor is learning what kind of feedback to give you, so when you do Nanowrimo next year, your draft doesn’t suck quite so bad.

I write short pieces—fiction or essay—almost every day. Not for the half-dozen people I know will purr and rub against my post, but for the one or two people who will nudge their glasses higher on their noses and say, “You don’t need a comma there. This sentence drags. Passive voice.”

Because, really, the only way to get better is to know where we’re screwing up. It’s scary, yes, but also liberating. The first time you post a rough draft and no one has any crap to say about it? Priceless. Or better, when you post something and only noobs are ragging on it, and saying terribly inaccurate stuff: boss. Then you get to correct them AND rock the emotive monster.

Try it. Join a critique group (I know a good one), or a writer’s prompt group (I know a good one), or get a writing coach (I know agood one), and dive into the experience of actually becoming a better writer. The feedback loop is the only way to improve. Get out of your own way and grow!

When Characters Don't Attack

When Characters Don’t Attack: Wrestling Them Into Your Plot


You’ve heard authors say (and maybe you, yourself, said), “My characters aren’t doing what I wanted them to do,” or “My characters have taken over my book!”


Tell the men in white coats they can go back to the asylum. It’s OK. They’re not crazy. You’re not crazy.


The thing about characters is that they’re not people. They’re distilled people. Not whole, not real, but merely cut-outs. Given salient details about a person, enough to give them a recognizeable personality, a goal, and a mode of behavior, but they aren’t actually sentient. So, when this well-defined character in your head does something strange as dances out from the keyboard, you wonder: how did he do that? And why? And how the heck do I get him to behave?


For our first answer, let’s look at the human brain. All your life, whether you know it or not, you’ve studied psychology: individual, social, group, behavioral, all of it. Why did Mom leave me? Why does Dad get so angry? How can I make her like me? These questions epitomize the search for motivation.


Mom is motivated by fear. Dad is motivated by his disappointment that life never meets his expectations. Julie is motivated by chocolate and by witty conversation. Your character needs to be motivated, too. Not just a little bit, but VERY motivated. Internally, externally, emotionally, logically, your character needs to have such a good argument for doing something that he could not possibly decide any other behavior.


Our brains make assumptions. We leap to what we think is going to happen, not what actually does happen. How do you think we drive? If we waited for the visual signal of the car in front of us to acctually process, we’d have already hit it. So our brain assumes that the car in front of us is stopping as soon as we see the brake lights and hear the screech of the tires. We don’t have to see it stop. We don’t have to feel the impact of our car hitting theirs. We are compelled by our assumptions, by our motivations, to stop the car.


Maybe we don’t need to slam the brakes, so we spill coffee on ourselves and feel silly. That’s OK. It beats dying. Maybe you overmotivate your character, and only one or two of the motivations you use actually provide real meaning. That’s OK. Go ahead and overmotivate them. But don’t you dare undermotivate.


And undermotivated character is a wildcard. It’s willful; it’s disobedient. It’s like a bored teenager: you don’t know what it’s going to do. It could explode. It could implode. It could turn Goth.


When you hear someone say: “My character did x, when I wanted him to do y,” you know it’s an under-motivated character. The vast computer that is the author’s brain calculated the personality of the character, the stimulus, and the motivation the character feels and came up with bupkis.


Uh-oh.


Time to dig deep into that character’s psyche. Time to examine whether disappointment or chocolate, witty conversation or fear motivates the character, and then provide that in spades for them. Make the situation so bad for the character that he must leap off the building. Make the chocolate smell so good that she must meet the man who baked it. Make the mother so terrified of her own failures that she must leave, to spare her children the heartbreak of her mucked-up life.


Increase the stakes. Drive the tension up. Create circumstances that force the character to do what needs to come next. And any time your character appears to hijack your manuscript, you look them right in the motivations.

A Close Third

Third person point of view(POV) is the most common POV for fiction. Third-person means the narrator is telling a story about some third person (i.e., not you or themselves). Although the days of narration are mostly long behind us, the art and craft of telling a story in third person remains one of the most important skills a writer can master.


A good third-person POV is intimate We may or may not know the thoughts of the character ("limited" if we do not hear their thoughts), but we know their attitude. We see everything through their lens, hovering just behind their ear, along for the ride.


But how do you do it?


If you’re like most writers, your third-person goes something like this: “Amanda walked to the store. She saw the children playing in the sprinklers. From behind her, she smelled the sweet scent of freshly baked cookies. She thought about how much she liked cookies, and how she could use one right about now.”


Using the senses: check. Active construction: check.


“So what’s wrong with that?” you ask.


And I answer with another question: while you’re reading this, where are YOU? You’re with Amanda, sure. But if this were a movie, where is the camera?


It’s somewhere else, looking at Amanda.


Well, heck, if I wanted to watch a movie, I’d go rent one.


No. I want to be IN Amanda. I want to experience her life. I want to be the hero, darn it!


So now, how do we get intimate with Amanda? (Look, I know you are all laughing behind your hands at the double entendre, but focus, grasshoppers, this is important.)


We do it by eliminating as many references to Amanda as we can. We do it by pretending we’re writing a Holodeck program: we can influence the world, but not Amanda. We can react to her, but we can’t make her do anything.


So here’s how it goes. First sentence: “Amanda walked to the store.” How can we make this sentence about her surroundings? Is Amanda tired? Is she happy? We don’t know, so let’s pick one: happy. This influences how she perceives her surroundings.


"The concrete passed underfoot like gray treadmill.” “The miles unspooled behind her.” “The world bounced with her every step, as if jumping for joy.”


Ok, but we haven’t gotten to the store, right? Ah, now you see a major point: showing uses up more words than telling. It “unpacks” the narrative, and brings out experience. And that’s what makes a third-person perspective intimate: the reader becomes the main character, just as completely as in first or the rarely-used second person. So go out there and take the camera out of the sky, or off the ground. Nestle it right behind your POV-character’s ear, and record the sights and sounds from there. Try to limit the number of times you reference your character at all. Let the inanimate objects do the work instead of some distant narrator.