Writing On Your Palm

Carving the Writer's Block

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22 January, 2001

In my column "Go, No Go for Launch", I talked about being plagued with writer's block, and that I was afraid my palm-sized tools might have sorrething to do with it. I'm pleased to announce I'm writing again. Not only that, I'm still writing on my handheld. Or, to quote Ellie from the movie "Contact", "OK to go! OK to go!"

In the interest of helping those in the same boat as I was, I'll clue you in on a few things I've picked up en route to writing fiction again.

1. The plot is not the story.

   I had a revelation recently, and it's completely changed the way I write. Anyone who has read Writing On Your Palm has heard the story about how I used to ad-lib fairy tales to older kids when I was in the second grade. What you don't know is why I stopped. Every time I told one of these stories, except for the last time, the stories came to me effortlessly. They just flowed out of me like they'd always been there, and I was just telling a story I already knew. The last time was different. I got about halfway into it, and I got stuck. I couldn't figure out what happened next. Get it? I couldn't figure out what happened next. I didn't let the story tell itself, I tried to figure it out logically. I imposed my conscious will, my ego, onto the story, and the muse instantly hoofed it outta there.

   I learned the wrong lesson from that. I assumed that the reason I hit the wall was that I had not been suffiently prepared. I paid a lot more attention to the craft, the mechanics, of storytelling from that point on. Stories were meticulously plotted and researched beforehand. Character sketches and profiles were written. I did everything I could to make sure that I would not be caught with my creative pants down again.

   And writing became work.

   My first two novels, Between Heaven and Hell and Do Over!, were written this way, plotted out ahead of time and constructed in a paint by numbers fashion. Except the end of Between Heaven and Hell; the better parts of that, which were also written the fastest, came out of left field. The bit about Daniel in the powered armor, something crucial to the resolution of the book, was never in the initial outline. I don't know where that came from. That should have told me something. As should the fact that Do Over!, a 23,000 word novella, took two years to write.

   I don't know about you (every writer is different), but that's not the way my brain is supposed to tell stories. I'm supposed to start at the beginning and tell the story until I get to the end. Sounds simple, right? Well, it took me over two decades to realize it. It's good to have an idea of where you're headed with a story, but don't be a slave to the road map. Tell the story, and the plot will attend to itself. When you get right down to it, storytelling is nothing more than dreaming for other people. But in order to do it right, you have to give yourself over to the dream.

2. Turn off the editor.

   Writing is an intensely kinetic activity. Momentum is everything. You're like a shark: if you stop moving, you're dead (and yes, I realize some sharks do in fact stop moving and sleep in caves, but it's too good an analogy to let go, so just take it in the poetic spirit in which it's meant and stick with me here). And every time you hit that backspace key, you bleed off some of your momentum. I know, I hit the backspace key three times on the last sentence. When you're writing your first draft, or hell, anytime you're entering new text instead of editing the old, forget that the backspace key exists and just type, or just write, or just dictate. What ever you do to get the story out of you, do it without hesitation or second guessing. You don't have to get it print perfect on the first try, that's what the backspace key is for later. But for now, just type. Make your writing sessions white-hot fevers, floods of words. They don't have to be pretty, they just have to get out of your head.

3. Write as much as you can.

   This has two meanings, and they're both right. On the one hand, you should write every chance you get, one of the reasons why working with a handheld is so helpful. This helps in keeping momentum. If writing is a habit, you're more likely to actually get around to doing it. Ideally, you should even get to the point that you start jonesing for writing if you haven't written recently. Keep the flow of words going. Much of it will be crap, but that's okay. That's what revisions are for (see below).

   On the other hand, you should also work on many varied projects at once. I've heard this before, but somehow it didn't sink in on me until recently. I got to talking to my best friend about my writer's block, figuring that as someone who knows me very well, but who isn't a writer herself, she might have a different perspective on things. What she told me was that I was too focused on one project, and when I got stuck on that, I had nowhere to go. She was right. I brought several works out of hiatus, so that could switch off. And the really interesting thing is that once I freed myself up to write more than one thing, new ideas started hitting me left and right. My creativity took off, suddenly free of the bonds I hadn't even realized I'd imposed on it.

4. Trust your instincts, and don't get cute.

   Don't worry about structure. I used to worry a lot about the placement of chapter breaks, whether to break scenes with a pound sign or three asterisks, all sorts of silly stuff that has no place in a first draft. You have to believe in yourself enough as a writer to trust that dialogue, pacing, description, will all flow organically out of you as you tell the story. If you think too much about it while writing the first draft, you'll get all confused, like a centipede trying to decide which leg goes first. You speak English, and you know how to tell a story. Trust that. You can figure out where the chapter breaks go in the second draft.

   In one of my novels, I had the idea to have little quotations at the start of each chapter. I'd seen this in several SF novels I'd enjoyed, and I thought it was a really neat device, little dollops of foreshadowing. The problem was that I got so caught up in trying to think up new, relevant quotations, and imagine the reference books and histories they were taken from, that I stalled on writing the actual novel. Little touches of artiface like this are what second drafts are for. In retrospect, I would have been able to come up with even better quotations, more relevant to the chapter at hand, if I'd actually written the damn chapter first anyway. In your first draft, just tell the story.

5. Use the proper tool.

   I touched on this a little in "Go, No Go for Launch", but I thought I'd give you the expanded version here.

   For writing, I've narrowed my Jornada down to two input methods. I use the keyboard almost exclusively for first drafts, and I use Transcriber's handwriting recognition for editing and correcting. If you think about it, this makes perfect sense. The Stowaway is small and portable enough to take anywhere, and for data input nothing is going to beat a full-size keyboard for speed. I've said before that I type as fast as I think, so any more speed would be superfluous. And Transcriber's recognition, while alarmingly good, still isn't accurate enough to avoid distracting me. Maybe this will change once I get better at turning off the internal editor. It just has to be accurate enough for me to know later, at revision time, what the heck I meant.

   On the other hand, when it comes to editing, I don't have to enter as much data, but I do have to select and correct things, maybe even cut and paste sentences around, all things that the stylus is much more efficient for than the keyboard. So I do revisions in pen and drafts with the keyboard, an odd reversal of the paper way of doing things, but hey, it works for me. It's comfortable, and I'm happy with it.

   I do use Fitaly and Character Recognizer, by the way, but I don't use them for writing. They work well for other Pocket PC data entry, but not as well for writing. Both input methods take up screen space (something neither Transcriber nor the Stowaway driver do) and require me to look at the input method rather than the result. Not a problem for entering financial transactions or appointments, but distracting for writing.

6. Drafts are your friends.

   This is something that I never really understood until recently. Whenever people talked to me about writing multiple drafts of something, I always thought it sounded like an awful lot of work. I suppose that's because I always envisioned writing a second draft as starting over from scratch. The very thought of it was too much for me to handle. "What? I just spent six months writing this damn book and now I have to start all over and write it again?" It was too daunting a prospect, and all too often I just never started in the first place, or worse, endeavoured to get it right the first time. And striving for perfection right off the bat is a sure fire way to never get anything done at all.

   Drafts don't really work like that. It's more like sculpting. Let's say you want to sculpt a horse. You start off with a block of stone that doesn't look like much more than a block of stone. Then, you hack off large chunks, until you have something that vaguely resembles a block of stone that is somewhat horse-shapped, meaning that while it in no way looks like a horse, it looks more like a horse than say, your aunt. Then you hack off smaller chunks of stone, until you have something that still lacks definition, but is definitely horse-shaped. If you saw it late at night and happened to be squinting at the time, you might conceivably mistake it for a chubby horse. Then you hack off more, until you have a good likeness of a horse, but blurry. Finally you chip off small bits of stone and polish the rest until you have something that looks very much like a horse, albeit very still.

   Writing drafts of a novel is the same. You start out just trying to tell the story. Don't give a toasted damn about grammar, realistic dialog, or anything else but telling the damn story. Your first draft is where you have the freedom to write the worst dreck you can produce, assuming you're true to the story. Once you have that down, then you go in and tinker. You fix major plot holes. You make sure characters act in accordance with their motivations. You probably rewrite every single line of dialogue. Twice. And please, ditch as many adverbs and passive voice constructions as you can find. Chances are, your second draft will have very little in common with your first draft in terms of actual words used, but it should be a better, more polished version of the same story. The words change, but the story does not. Repeat this revision process as necessary until you're happy with the outcome. The important thing is that you free yourself up in that first draft to write whatever comes to mind, even if it sucks. You can always fix it later, but first you have to have something to fix.

7. Read as much as possible.

   This last point is very important, and I didn't realize how much until recently. To be a writer one must be a reader. Not only to learn from others' writing, but to absorb it into your own. There's a story, I don't know if it's true, but it's about a science experiment involving planarians, a kind of flatworm. The scientists taught these flatworms to navigate a maze, then chopped them up and fed them to flatworms that had never seen the maze, and found out that these flatworms could suddenly get through the maze. Intelligence passed on as food.

   When you get right down to it, we're not much better than the flatworms. As writers, we digest what we read and spit it back out as our own writing. We're all influenced and guided by what we read. We write (or should write) the sort of books we most enjoy. And the more you read, the more subconscious writer's tricks you pick up. More flatworm grist for the mill.

   So read. Voraciously. You can't read too much if you seriously plan to write. You need the mental nourishment. We're done here. Go. Be nourished.

Jeff Kirvin
jkirvin@yahoo.com