Writing Help

When you're writing in the third person, you're generally doing it in the past tense. Wagner ran to the store and picked up a carton of milk, three boxes of lime Jell-o, and a box of rat poison. And the issue of when the story is being told doesn't really come into play. It happened at some point in the past, and it involves Those People. Fine.

Writing in the first person and keeping track of story time is another kettle of fish, and one that, like the soup presented to me when I was a kid in Alaska once, contains things like eyeballs. And fish heads. It can get pretty messy.

I am indebted to Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing Down the Bones, for what has become one of the staples of my own writing practice. Though I don't do timed writing quite the way she says most of the time, I still find it essential to cutting through the murkiness of my own mind when I'm stuck, and for sharpening images while I'm working on a book.
Here is timed writing my way. I prefer working at a keyboard to writing in longhand, so I almost always type my timed writings directly into the computer. If you don't like doing raw material at a keyboard, try it anyway for a while. You can always go to a notebook and pen when you're waiting at the dentist's office---timed writing is much more interesting than reading the June, 1974 issue of Field and Stream that he still has in there. (After you've read the Patrick F. McManus article, anyway.)

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Your short story or novel has not been going well, or maybe you've even finished it but now discover that you hate it. At the moment of your greatest frustration, you conceive a delicious plan -- you'll print it out in triplicate and feed each copy into a fire one hated page at a time. If this is your situation, you have my sympathy: I recently tanked 283 pages of a novel that was going to all the wrong places, and even with a brutal deadline hanging over my head, I've never been so happy to see something go. Never been at this stage of dissatisfaction with your work? Don't worry -- if you keep at it long enough you'll get there.

You're sitting at your desk staring at your manuscript, realizing that you've written ten or fifty or three hundred (ouch) pages in which nothing really happens. People talk to each other and they go places and they do things, but you couldn't find enough suspense in what they're doing to fill a thimble, and you're creeping up on the sneaking suspicion that your book is a wash, your ideas were stupid, and your characters are duds. Or worse, that you are. Maybe it's time to throw in the towel, admit defeat, take your parents' advice and go into the family wax-dummy business.

Don't do that. You can fix this. It may not be easy, but if you want to save your characters and your idea and at least some of the work you've already done, you can.

A guide for new authors by O'Reilly, outlined like a book itself.

A guide for new authors by O'Reilly, outlined like a book itself.

First, let me say that worldbuilding is an essential skill for every writer, regardless of genre. Not all writers need to concentrate on all areas of worldbuilding, but every writer must do some worldbuilding if he hopes to have a novel that is coherent, consistent, and real. Second, writers seem to come in three varieties -- those who really have no idea what worldbuilding is or why they should bother with it; those who do know, but figure they'll wing the details as they go; and those obsessive folks who secretly believe that they really can't start the book until the whole planet is in place. I've spent time in all three camps -- most of my time in the last one. My yearnings still run toward nailing everything down in advance of writing, but after years of dealing with deadlines and the cold reality that money doesn't come in until the work goes out (actually, until well after the work goes out), I've learned to do a minimalist version of worldbuilding that still doesn't skip on the essentials. I used my new system to develop the world of Matrin -- a world critics uniformly praised for the depth and complexity of its world.