Tag: advice.

nicholene:

I want to add in something I learned from music theory that goes along well with writing theory.

You always start with the rules. They’re guidelines to help you build a foundation to stand on as you’re learning the craft. Once you have those rules in place, you start to learn more rules and more rules until finally, you realize the music you love breaks most of those rules.

The thing about theory is learning which rules to break, when you can break them, and why. In early music history and theory, seventh and second intervals were never used because they didn’t sound good to the human ear at that time. Learning that rule establishes a strong sense of dissonance. When you understand that dissonance, you can ‘break’ that rule by using those intervals to create unresolved tension. It’s why the Jaws theme is so captivating – because that minor second interval (an inverted seventh) invokes anticipation and suspense as the audience waits to hear the resolution.

Books and articles are going to teach a classical foundation of writing and it is in your best interest to learn that, to adopt those rules and figure out how to abide by them. Once you understand those rules, you have a better grasp of writing and can use those rules to manipulate your work in ways that invoke strong reactions from your readers. 

Rather than focusing on what rules are broken in published books, try and figure how why they were broken and what impact they have on the story. 

@loegi2308

theliteraryarchitect:

Why Just About Every Published Book in the World Does 57 Things That Just About Every Book About Writing Tells You Not to Do

#1 The author has made a name for themselves and can do anything they want.

Publishers aren’t as discerning about literary quality if they’ve got a writer who they know is going to sell books. Whereas a newbie might get rejected for having 200 pages of backstory and 16 prologues, an established writer with a sales record can get away with it.

#2 Mainstream readers are not as discerning as people who write books about writing would have you believe.

Books about writing are often written by learned literary folk, whose advice is then (sometimes mindlessly) repeated by everyone else. On the other hand, bestselling novels are often written, and read, by regular folk who don’t give a crap about high literary art. It’s kind of like the difference between what they teach in film school and the reality of blockbuster movies.

#3 Really good writers can do anything they want.

The most hackneyed, clichéd, classically do-not-ever-do-this stuff can be made into pure stylistic genius in the right hands. Two chapters of nothing but dialogue? A book written from the point of view of a dog? Excessive footnotes? Run-on sentences? It’s all been done, and been done brilliantly, by really, really good writers.

This can be frustrating for new writers, who want to be able to follow a clear set of rules in order to be successful. That’s why so many of my posts have caveats like “in general,” “as a rule of thumb,” and “most often.” Because the honest answer to every single question I get is It depends. Which is why I really recommend that writers try to connect with a mentor, editor, or teacher who can read your actual work and give customized feedback. This is rarely cheap. But one or two exchanges with a professional can be worth months or years of reading writing advice books with all their generalized Dos and Don’ts.

Which leads me to…

#4 Writing is art. There are no rules in art.

This truth is what makes writing great, and also what makes writing difficult. It’s also why writing books that claim to have all the “answers” sell so damn well. I’m not saying those books aren’t full of mostly true, super helpful guidelines. Back before I had access to any other kind of help and lacked experience, I learned a lot of the basics by reading. So keep reading them! But pay attention to the overstatements, the exceptions, the reality of what excites readers, and, perhaps most importantly, the reality of what excites you. Is a writing book telling you not to do something that sets your soul alight? FUCK THAT BOOK. Do whatever you want. Have fun. Figure out how to be one of the ones who gets away with it.

This inspirational message brought to you by the end of a long day at the end of a longer week. May it rekindle your spirit as it has mine ❤

Yes, you are perfectly right, I guess. An advanced Writer is allowed to break the rules because he knows what he’s doing. A beginner will never succeed that way: you have to know the basics, before you are able to play with them.

And when the beginner, as all beginners do, point to all the rules broken and question why other people can do this when they’re told not to, this is why.

I’m not advocating for someone to break the rules right off the bat; my post is intended to show the end result of learning the rules.

You have to show a writer the benefit of the journey to entice her to make it.

nikkxb:

I said I would do an official post of my experience and the various things I learned in the month of April. (Daily recaps can be found here.) I planned on looking back at those posts and using them as a guide to sum up my experience, so are the Three Main Lessons I Learned Participating in Camp NaNoWriMo.

1. Writing Sucks.

It does. It sucks a giant bag of flaming dicks because it’s not easy. It’s not consistent. It’s not anything you can really count on unless you do it every day. And writing every day doesn’t allow you the distance you need to properly evaluate your work. 

I can’t tell you how many scenes I wrote that I know will end up deleted from the final draft. So many scenes. That’s part of writing. You’re going to write things that will never see the light of day. It’s going to suck, it’s going to tear down your confidence, and it’s going to leave you feeling hopeless with no where to go.

And that’s okay. It’s okay because Writing Sucks and as soon as I accepted that I wasn’t going to vomit out a masterpiece on my first go, I allowed it to suck. I let my writing be crappy and redundant and not make any sense with the plot. And it was because I slugged through the suckage that I learned more about my characters, that I grew to identify things they’d been hiding from me, and that I was able to identify an actual plot and actual issues and actual pieces of gold after sifting through all that dirt.

Part of how I did it brings me to my next lesson.

2. Writing isn’t a solitary hobby.

My main male character is ridiculously easy for me to write. I get him. I’m pretty certain he’s been in my head for years, just biding his time until I was able to give him the attention he needed. Scenes following him flowed, his voice was so clear to me, and I wrote a good majority of those 50k words standing over his shoulder.

My main female character? I can’t get a damn sentence out of her mouth that actually fits without massively reworking it. I don’t get her. I understand her character and I recognize when what I write is wrong, but there’s so much about her I don’t see immediately and I could not have been able to write her without the guidance of a very close friend.

(If you followed my posts, you know I met up with my Writer Friend every Thursday. The angel that saved my female character is Writer Friend’s Wife.)

WFW loved asking me about my story, mostly because I was writing paranormal fantasy and she’s drawn to historical fiction. She said it was interesting to watch the development of this kind of story when it’s something she’d never write. I, gasping for air as soon as the month started, took all the help I could get.

And it worked. WFW saw my female character clearly. She identified with her. When I had an issue with FC, I would simply talk to WFW and see where I went wrong. It was ridiculous how much those two ended up having in common when my character was never supposed to resemble someone I knew in real life. (Funny how writing doesn’t ever do what you plan for it to do.) Without that help, though, I wouldn’t have the story I have and I damned certain I wouldn’t have the potential my characters gave me.

I said earlier that writing every day doesn’t offer the distance you need to evaluate your work, but having an outside friend to bounce ideas off of does. You don’t need to take a week off to gain a clear view when you have people around you that already have that distance. I found a very valuable resource with her.

3. Research ONLY when you absolutely need to.

I’m going against pretty much everything I’ve ever believed with this one, but sometimes you shouldn’t research when writing your first draft. Sometimes, you should just write. Write whatever you need to and if you can fake it, fake it until the draft is complete.

Know what I had to learn pretty quickly? Researching = procrastinating. Big time. I procrastinated hard when I sat down to research. Countless hours later and I’m no closer to continuing my plot than I was before. I lost days convincing myself I needed to research before I continued writing. Did my research help? A bit! Some of it changed the direction I was going in and I’m really grateful I looked it up. Was it necessary? No. Most of it wasn’t. Not at all.

There are going to be some things you need to research. Cultures, history, languages, weapons, so many different things. But how much of that research is absolutely mandatory when writing the first draft? Not as near as much as you think. You can get pretty far half-assing it while you’re focusing on the plot, then go back in and fix the details. I learned that the hard way and the further I got in my draft, the more notes I made. 

I have countless notes telling me what I need to research when I’ve started working on editing this thing. That research might change a hell of a lot, but I’m already going to be editing. I’ll already be changing a lot of things, why not do that all together? I was losing valuable time “researching” when I should have just been writing. It made absolutely no sense to drag out the writing process over a few changes that would be easier made after the first draft was finished.

If you absolutely cannot continue writing without looking something up, look it up. And then get back to writing. The rest of it can wait.