Plot Lines in a Writer’s Life

Do you see your writing journey as concrete as the output of this plotter? Or is the ink all smudged with erasures and restarts?

I’ve met a lot of writers, some early on in my life and many more in the last five years since I really got serious. And  I often wonder if they have all gone through the journey that I have or was it just, write the manuscript, edit, and publish?

What I do know is that there are plot lines in a writer’s life, elements of similarity which we all experience, and they resemble a plot diagram with publication the final climax.

5 Ways for Writers to Work While on Holiday

If you read much about writers, you’ll think most of them never take a break from their writing routine, never skip the morning writing sessions, and certainly never take a holiday from writing! And then there are the rest of us.

How do we keep the writing muscles flexing while driving down the American West Coast highway? That’s where I am this week, and it’s a delightful dream of ancient redwood trees and sudden Pacific peeks and being blissfully alone, yes, alone! on the highway for long sublime stretches, at least on the northern part.  California, here I come!

5 Ways for Writers to Work While on Holiday

1.  Set a reasonable goal for what you will accomplish.  Mine is two hours of work in the evenings.

2.  Don’t beat yourself up when you’re not writing.  Fully embrace the waterfall walk–you’ll likely never pass this way again.

3.  Take pictures you can use for your trip album and your blog posts. (See above–me with a giant tree!) You may even see something that will work for your book, a unique character, perhaps.  I saw a man with the most unusual hairline at the back of his head.  Black, close-clipped hair grew all the way down the back of his neck to his t-shirt.  That picture will stay with me, for sure.

4.  Keep up with your social media and email.  There’s nothing worse than going home from a holiday and facing an inbox full of hundreds of unread emails, not to mention the writing tips and tricks you won’t learn because, once home, you’ll just delete everything and start new.  A trick I use is to delete what I don’t need and put the ones I’m keeping in a folder called ‘already read’.  When I get home I have only those to move to the appropriate place.

5.  …………..I’m on holidays, folks.  With thoughts of redwoods and mountains and the ocean and the Golden Gate Bridge, I just couldn’t think of 5!

Perhaps my readers will help me out with their best ideas for working while on holidays!  Please, please leave a helpful hint in the comments.

8 Traps Writers Will Discover

Every one of them has snagged me.  Every last one of the following traps for writers is something that has happened to me along the wriggly road to publication.  And though they haven’t hurt physically as much as the awful bear trap at left, they’ve changed me.

8 Traps Writers Will Discover

1. Believing your writing needs no revision. When I first began this novel-writing journey, ‘darlings’ were people and I certainly wouldn’t cut them out. I didn’t know what I didn’t know, a dangerous spot to be in when you go to your first extreme editing course, armed with your 100,000-word novel and people start to snip away at your treasure which took a year to write.  Luckily I’ve changed and learned.

2.  Ignoring the story arc conventions. Who ever heard of those and of what use are they?  Surely a writer can just start at the beginning and let the story happen.  Not so much.   Take a look at Donald Maass` Writing the Breakout Novel for some excellent information on story arcs, among many other topics.

3.  Going to courses or workshops which don`t help you.  Don`t get me wrong.  Courses and workshops are vital.  The absolute must skill you have to develop is distinguishing between those that are and those that are not.  Look at the credentials of the people there, both instuctors and fellow participants.  Listen to those who have walked the walk and are published in a genre similar to your own.  I once had a new writer working on her first children`s book tell me to make sweeping changes to my historical fiction, even though she freely admitted to never having read the genre and not liking it.  Lovely person though she was, her comments were not helpful to me.

4.  Getting stopped by critiques.  This links closely to the last point but a writer must learn to take criticism because there is a lot of value to it.  What stopped me up was learning how to distinguish between helpful points and critique which did not fit with my vision, even though it came from published authors.  As a writer, I`m still learning to listen to what everyone says but use what I want.  There is a fine line between having respect for others`opinions but then choosing not to use them.

5.  Sending your manuscript or query letters out and getting rejection letters.  Ouch, they hurt!  But remember the boy`s answer as to why he kept hitting himself in the forehead with a hammer–it felt so good when he stopped. Submitting is a little like that.  Terry Fallis said he first sent his ms for The Best Laid Plans to 48 people and only had a reply from one of them.  And that was a no.  The rest never even answered but Terry kept going and self-published his novel, submitting it to the Leacock award contest on a whim, and winning that award.  Check out his website to see where this determination has taken him.

6.  Ignoring conventions about developing fully rounded characters.  I really love plot when I read.  What happens next is paramount to me, so that when I started my novel, I did do character sheets but did not realize just how authentic my characters had to be.  It came up time and again before I realized I had to make those characters so real my readers would go to bed at night, expecting to get a call in the morning from my hero.

7.  Resisting suggestions to do a total rewrite of your manuscript.  This is so hard to do that many of us put the reviewer suggestions in a special part of the brain, never to be revisited.  We have spent so many months and years to get to this point, only to be asked for a complete rewrite.  Double ouch.  But consider how much you have learned on your journey and then apply those lessons to this tired manuscript.  Imagine how much better it can be and just plan it out and do it.

8.  Walking away for days, weeks, months, even.  I have done this, telling myself we were downsizing, or my brother was desperately ill, or even just that I deserved a break.  Each time I came back, having lost time but still with a great desire to finish what I started.  Sitting at the keyboard for hours a day with my door closed and my eyes firmly averted from the sunshine just outside my window is the only way to get the job done.  And when I finish my three pages for the day, I am alive as never before.  My grilled cheese tastes amazing, the jokes my husband tells are delightful, and cleaning the toilet is so rewarding.

My wish for you is that you spring all the traps quickly and  positively as you write to success.  Consider leaving a comment to tell a story of your own writing journey.