How to Stay Hungry

Will I make it as a writer? One by one, we asked this question of a writing guru. It was before I'd sold a word, fiction or nonfiction. I got an ambiguous answer, but the one that stuck with me was, "You've got no choice." This was addressed to a fellow student who had a disabling genetic disease. Writing was probably her one shot on any happiness in this life.

Commitment. Drive. Hunger. If you want to create a body of work, fulfill your dreams as a writer, and "make it," this cannot be a casual activity. Max Adams puts it well: "Nobody ever won an Olympic medal just showing up weekends and winging it."

If you've got no choice, you'll stay hungry. I had a teacher who suggested that if I really wanted to be a writer,  I needed to get a boring, dead-end job. A day job I was desperate to quit. He may have been right. Some of my most productive periods have been when things weren't going well at the office. But there is a risk. Mind-numbing work can numb your mind. Writing for a buck can dull your taste for the good stuff. Desperation can lead to unfortunate choices. And it is possible to die, as a writer, from neglect. Hungry does not equal starving.

The right spot for you is somewhere between contentment and desperation. With that in mind, here are five suggestions for getting and staying hungry:

• Have reasons to write. Do you want recognition? Do you have something you need to say or a change you want to create? Do you want to hobnob with celebrities? Your reason to write is your business, but write it down. Keep it in front of you. And, while you're at it, write down the reasons why your current project must be completed. It won't do much for your writing career if you work on something new every day and never finish anything.
• Form the habit. They say it takes 30 days. So write every day for at least that long. If it is long enough, you'll find yourself itching to put words on paper even before you realize what that feeling is. (Warning: If you stay away from writing for 30 days, you'll have a new habit. Avoiding writing.)
• Seek out small successes. Enter a contest. Have an actor read your work. Find a market on duotrope.com Take a detour and write a flash fiction story in one sitting. You don't need to make the bestsellers list to be recognized, interpreted, or published. You don't need to finish you magnum opus before you get to write "The End."
• Be ready. Create obstacle-free opportunities for yourself. You know how distractions can make you forget to eat even when you are hungry? That happens when you are hungry to write, too. And if you put yourself in an environment full of distractions, you'll kill your appetite for telling stories.
• Don't satisfy your hunger. Resist the urge to tell people about your work in progress. Anything that gives you the rewards before you finish the work saps your energy as a writer.

When it comes to hunger, we are not created equal. Some people naturally need less than others. Some people are surrounded by love, friendship, and material goods. It may be easier for a rich aspiring writer to pass through the eye of a needle than to become published. But somehow, even those with every advantage manage to succeed. If they can do it, so can you. Treasure the gift of hunger.

Don't Waste Your Time with Courses: Put them to work!

I began my day by writing a sex scene. I don't write erotica, and the scene is not part of a work in progress. It's homework for an excellent course by Max Adams. (I've taken almost all of her courses, and they have provided me with amazing value as I've sought to improve my writing.)

I'm a big believer in continuing to study writing, for writers of all levels. Obviously, the right teacher in the right course can help developing writers to master the skills needed to find success. But, just as classical musicians continue to study with coaches and instructors even after they have become renowned soloists, I see a benefit in even experienced writers seeking out teachers who can introduce them to new ideas, identify weaknesses, and prod them into doing better.

Courses and workshops can provide the impetus to become more productive (meaning raising quality as well as wordcount), but this is not always the case. In fact, I see many writers of talent and ability gliding through courses as a means to avoid writing. It can become one more of those insidious distractions that Kristan Higgins calls “writerly activities.” Doing exercises, absorbing lectures, and engaging in class discussions is real work, but it doesn't mean anything unless the lessons are applied to manuscripts intended for publication. With that in mind, I'd like to suggest a few rules for those who want to keep their coursework in balance.

1. Spend as much time on your work in progress as you do on your class activities. For intense courses, this may be difficult to accomplish for any given 24 hour period. It is best to make an estimate of the length of time–3 days, 5 days, a week, a month—within which you want the times to equal out before the class begins. Then, you need to track the time the time you spend working in the class and keep your commitment to yourself.
2. On any given day, apply a lesson from the class to your work in progress. This doesn't have to be a lesson from the same day. In fact, it is generally difficult to apply to many lessons over a short period of time, and that can lead to a disorganized and fractured approach to composition. But keeping a focus on the true purpose of the course through direct activity will help you to get more value from the instruction and will help you avoid consuming more courses than you can use.
3. Get out of your comfort zone. It's good to select the course that is not directly related to your effort and that you have doubts about from time to time. Certainly, if you want to master plotting, it's good to take a course that deepens your knowledge and sharpens your skills in that area. However, if you are repeatedly taking courses on one subject, it's good to ask yourself why. It may be better to head into an area with the possibility of fresh ideas, mistakes, and failure.
4. Keep a list of key ideas from a course and make sure you try them out in your work sometime in the future. I suggest actually creating a handwritten (with full sentences), and checking off each item once you feel that you have achieved mastery in the works you're writing for publication. You may even want to put the items on the list onto specific calendar dates to remind you to put them into effect. Too often, only a few ideas from a course work their way into practice and many that might have real value are forgotten within days of the completion of the course.
5. Take a vacation from courses if they are getting in the way of your writing. Courses can be as big a distraction as video games or television or social media. Now, none of these are bad in and of themselves. In moderation all of them can enhance your work. But they can also claim too much of your time. And courses, in particular, can provide and unwarranted righteous feeling that an hour wasted watching American Pickers can't. That's what makes them dangerous.

Obviously, I don't want to discourage people from getting the real value that courses offer. (I expect to take several courses this year, and I'll be teaching fifteen courses and workshops myself.) But, the writing must always come first. Remind yourself that you are primarily a producer of art (or entertainment or content or whatever you choose to call it), not a consumer. And allocate your time and attention appropriately.

Rewrite 6 - Getting Descriptions Just Right

I struggle with descriptions in rewriting. It's feast or famine. Either I have an avalanche of details that buries a reader or a scene so spare it leaves readers wandering in a void. This is such a persistent problem for me that I've created lists to help me move quickly in cutting or reimagining descriptions.

When there is a feast of description:

• Setting - Here, the biggest problem is what I call throat clearing. When I want to get going on a scene but my brain doesn't, weather becomes very important (especially clouds). Every stick of furniture in the room needs a paragraph. I worry about linoleum scuffs and pet hair on the couch. Readers don't care. Cut, cut, cut. Instead, which words anchor me in space? What does the setting tell me about the characters? What do I need to know so the plot makes sense?
• Characters - I often have something that could be used by the police to identify a suspect. This slows things down and leaves little to the imagination. I highlight telling and memorable details, the minimum needed to create interest, raise questions, and distinguish this character from the others. I also make sure that the number of words used are proportional to the character's role.
• Something unique - I get carried away here, especially in something like science fiction. You probably don't care what the exact dimensions of the time machine are and what color the paint job is. If I force ranked the elements of description, which ones would be at the top?
• Mood - Cutting to the bone can make description functional, so sometimes I need to go back and see if my trimming has destroyed the mood. Providing that mood is appropriate, I may give a reprieve to a sentence or two.
• Overall - Length is important.  White space is important. Pages in a story cannot have too many big blocks of description. I love delectable prose, but it presents dangers. Unless it is done to make the passage memorable, too many language tricks (alliteration, metaphors) can distract and weigh down your work. Kill your darlings? This is what Faulkner was talking about.

By the way, detailed observation is your friend. In my first chemistry class, the teacher had us write down everything we could about the flame of a bunsen burner. Some people wrote down the colors they saw and the shape. I started there, but I went on to fill a couple of pages with temperature at different distances, changes over time, the heat distortions (schlieren effect), sounds, and smells. I collect observations, especially when I am in strange places or emotionally charged situations.

They are good to draw upon, but they are raw material. I would never cut and paste my observations from a visit to morgue into a detective story. Details on that level, according to Stephen King, are for instruction manuals, not stories. Writers need to be selective.

Cut, but don't erase. Save your trimmings to a notes file. They may be useful later on.

A fill-in-the-blanks approach to description will not work. I really need to put myself back into draft state with the internal editor turned off. But questions can get me going when I'm telling myself to let the reader figure it out.

When there is a famine:

• Setting - I begin with a minimum of space, light and texture, something I learned from Script Guru Max Adams. I took her Visual Writing course (highly recommended). She has a short article here.
• Characters - I make sure I have identified one distinctive feature (a suggestion from Kristan Higgins). His rough calloused hands. Her sleepy eyes. If one doesn't stand out in my mind, I choose one based on the inner state of the character. In "Chinatown," Evelyn has a flaw in the iris of her eye.
• Something unique - When I write about strange worlds (SF, fantasy, or exotic locales), there may be objects or species that readers have no reference points for. I need to provide what they need 1) to get oriented and 2) fit it into the story.
• Mood - This is always the toughest for me. It often emerges from building up the bits from scenes, characters, and objects. But sometimes I need to force myself to think about the emotional arc of the scene or to read a scene from another work and see what the mood is and how it is created.
• Overall - I need to evaluate how the description contributes to the logic, pacing and emotion of the scene and the work as a whole.

Of course, after I have released these descriptions from my brain, they are often overdone. I'm forced to go back to the feast questions to bring them back down to size. (Both of these are really different sides of the same coins, so my shuffling back and forth is unsurprising.)

With all of these, attention to audience makes a difference. Kids need an approach to description that that offers more about things that are obvious to adults and less in total. SF and fantasy readers tolerate more description than thriller readers. So keep specific readers' needs in mind. Readers are the beginning and the end of the rewrite, and this includes description.