Write every day.
Don’t worry about writing every day.
Pay attention to daily/weekly/monthly word counts.
Don’t worry about word count, just make every one of your words count.
Show, don’t tell.
It’s OK to tell sometimes.
Bewildering, isn’t it? So does that mean that half the advice out there is wrong?
I learnt through my own trial and error when writing my novel that there are probably as many ways to write a novel (or short story or non-fiction) as there are books in the world. But that’s what makes writing and reading so varied and exciting. I think the only way to know if the advice works for you is by trying it out and deciding whether it fits with the way you like to work – or at least, the ways that fit best around your life and commitments.
So, here are a few of the things that work for me.
Reading Into the Woods
I love Into the Woods by John Yorke. It helped me to understand structure and plot more than any other book or resource. It has lots of fun examples, mainly from film and TV, such as Thelma and Louise and The Godfather, but virtually all the advice applies to writing fiction of all kinds. It explores the structure of a piece as a whole, but also the structure of a scene or piece of dialogue and how to build conflict and tension throughout your story.
Trying to write every day
I found that writing a little every day kept me connected to the story and made it easier to jump back in again the next day. I didn’t manage it all the time. There were times when I felt ill or just wanted to veg out and read or watch someone else’s work all day. I’ve tried not to put so much pressure on myself. There’s no point giving ourselves guilt trips all the time, it just uses up the energy we need for writing, right?
Writing isn’t the only way to ‘write’
I set weekly and monthly word targets to have some sense of moving forward (not that I hit them most of the time), but I also needed time to just let things soak in. It’s the classic ‘in the shower’ moment, when you find your mind is quiet enough to let other ideas come to the fore. So, on those days when I just couldn’t face writing a word, I gave myself time to walk and cook and you know, live that thing called life, and let the story develop in my mind.
What’s on the page is only half the story, the reader does the rest
It’s important to world-build and create multi-dimensional characters, but I learnt that I also needed to leave enough space for the reader to fill in the gaps. If I give the reader every single detail, it slows down the pace and doesn’t allow them to emotionally connect with the story in the same way to them. Which brings me onto my final point…
Show and tell. Tell and show.
This was one of the most challenging things to grasp and if I’m honest, I still wrestle with getting the balance right. But I learnt, particularly during the excellent Jericho Writers’ Self Edit course, that you do need both. There’s a whole ton of stuff that I could write about this, which I’ll do another time, but if you want to vary your pace and get to the heart of a character’s experience, it’s sometimes OK to ‘tell’, or to skip detailing that entire journey on the bus and move straight to the juicy bits of the story.
And one piece of advice that doesn’t work for me…
In many ways, I pretty much ignore the whole ‘Write what you know’. My novel is set before I was born and tells the story of a family that are displaced from the country they call home. Never experienced that before, thankfully. I like writing about what I don’t know. Why? For the same reason that I like to read. To learn about new people, places and experiences.
So what’s the writing advice that works for you? And what’s the ‘popular’ advice that does absolutely nothing for you or your writing? I’d love to know what works for you so get in touch.
