The Art of Clever Writing & how to Finish what you Start

Carry a notebook/pad everywhere – the Art of Clever Writing

First off, writing is an art-form because it transports the reader to another place, another world. And new characters who, if done well, become as important to you as your real (or real virtual) friends. When done exceptionally, you, and others, will quote characters and dress as them at theme parties and create games and almost worship the characters. Such is the power of great books. It has always been this way and I think it will always be so, no matter the format or forum.

So that’s the finished product – the work of art. It’s not the work-part. Just as a dancer spends years in practise and months in painful rehearsal, so it is for a painter, or a sculptor, or a musician … and so it is for an author.

Lets get something clear. If you’ve always dreamed of buying yourself a little cabin in the woods or a cottage by the sea, where you’ll have a cute little loft office with a view of the valley, ocean and sky, and you’ll happily pound away at your keys with a sedated cat purring on a lumpy sofa, just close enough for the odd pat but not too close so as to disturb you, great! You’ve got a vivid imagination. You can probably smell the honeysuckle creeping up the cabin or the salty-tang of the sea. You can imagine chooks clucking in grassy green paddocks or seagulls squeaking. You can even smell the hot chocolate that’ll be there for you, when you sit back, pressed up against your chair, musing over your newest sage words and dreaming of book-launch-day. Are you there?

Now wake up and smell the coffee, no seriously, you forget about it, it’s the damn percolator that’s gargling not chooks and seagulls your hearing. Here’s the thing, the only real part of that *might be* that you can afford to buy a place in the country or by the sea. If you can, great, but honestly, most authors can’t afford to buy much more than two-minute-noodles for much of their writing careers.

Now, like I said, if you imagined all of the above (and more) then you are half-way to writing a scene everyone can imagine – and love. That’s the good news. The bad news is, being a good, or even a great writer isn’t enough.

So let’s talk about how to go from good, to great  to Oh-my-lordy-lordy-wow! 

Before anything else, your character, their actions, their mannerisms (etc.) must sound authentic. There are a lot of things to consider.

1. what age is your MC
2. what age does your MC act (this is important especially in MG)
3. what era is it set in
4. what language is it set in – now, now, none of that. Yes I’m talking English but which English? UK, Canadian, New Zealand, USA, Australian, Fiji English? And then within each of those, what’s the inner culture. Is it USA Southern or NYC Brooklyn? Is Melbourne Eastern Suburbs or is it Western? Is it city or rural? Is it French Canadian or English? Is it pigeon English? Are you seeing where I’m going here? A contemporary mystery set in Melbourne Australia will use not only a different version of English spelling, but also local terms, the meaning of certain words, accent, dialect etc, to one set in central London or Queens NYC.

Here are my tips on Writing Process 

Author’s Survival Fit 101

Whether it’s electronic or pen & paper, never be without a pad – EVER. Sometimes the silliest things pop into your head that could be that Eureka moment.

The little secret I’m about to share, I’ve done so before & most have loved it.  Why? Because you’ll never struggle to try and remember that line that popped into your head half-way home from work on a busy train. You know the one. The brilliant one that was your ideal hook. The one you lost because the train was too crowded and the girl sitting next to you was babbling on the phone – and by the time you got off the train you couldn’t quite remember the EXACT wording?

Yeah – that one! So here it is – In every jacket, in every purse, every trouser pocket, every wallet, put an A4 piece of paper folded up into eighths, but before you fold it up, take 2-3 pencils and have them cut into three. Sharpen all of them and put one small pencil in the first corner of your folded paper. The paper will protect the pencil and will still be small enough to stuff in most places. If the page is still too big, once at 1/8 of the size, roll it up, cigar-style, and stick it into your wallet/purse… everywhere. Now, no matter where you are, if an idea strikes, or if a conversation taking place inspires you, unfold, grab your pencil, and make notes. You have a lot of paper for notes, on both sides, and you have a pencil – this should be considered an Author’s Survival Fit 101.

Draw on real life.

If you write Picture books, Middle grade, or Young adult especially, but even for NA and adult, listen to the language of your main characters peers. Look for key words repeated. Look for interesting inflections in pitch and tone. Note mannerisms, they change just a little with each generation. Look at fashion-style, even hair styles.

No, you don’t want to info dump all that information in one big blob, but getting these things right will help the reader trust the author and will also help the story to progress naturally & organically.

Even if you write fantasy, or SciFi, or historical romance, draw on real life. Your world MUST make sense to us, the reader. No we don’t need to know why your planet has 7 moons or even the names of the moons, but if your planet DOES have 7 moons, do your research on how a planet with so many moons might differ from ours. Will there still be a tide? And if so, will it change 7 times a day? Or will other factors influence your world’s seas? Draw on real life to make your world actively real to us.

Keep a Diary/Calendar

Now this does not need to be a big deal. I recommend an electronic one, perhaps linked to your email account. Each day you write, note this in your calendar and/or diary. Note what you wrote, new pages, editing Ch 1-7, blog post, author novel review (etc.) and note how much time you spent on writing that day. Don’t get bogged down with “I wrote 3,000-words today” because, OK, I’m going to say it; the number of words you wrote is not the significant part – SERIOUSLY. Especially for first draft because much of what you wrote will be edited, cut, re-edited, added to, cut some more, manipulated and then edited again…

So writing 3,000 words on any given day, while awesome, is not a measure of how much work you did.

List what you did that day, and how much time you devoted to your writing, include research too, everything to do with writing. Some day’s you’ll spend all day on Twitter. That’s OK, Other days you’ll spend checking your facts on a 7-moon planet. That’s OK too. What you want to do is establish how much time you are devoting to:

• Writing
• Revision
• WIP Research
• Preparing and entering competitions
• CP/BETA reading other peoples work
• Reading for purpose (that is to say out of your preferred gene)
• Reading for pleasure (just as important to read, read, read)
• On Facebook/Twitter and other social media forums
• Agent research
• Preparing and sending our submissions.
• Blogging
• Observing – YES observing, taking time out to people/season watch
• Anything else you’d like to add.

The point of this is, if you are not doing all of the above, you are not working at your art-form. This is your preparation and your rehearsal and your show.

Writing about What you Know   

 – Do Your Research

OK, I’m going to caveat this one. As far as I’m aware, not too many of us have ridden a live dragon, or lived under the sea, or met an alien, or whatever, so this is one of those bits of advice that needs a caveat.

DON’T write about an Indigenous Australian living on a remote cattle-station in the Northern Territory if you’ve never been on a cattle station, or the Northern Territory, or ever met an Indigenous Australian.  If this is your Dragon ride out of your comfort zone – GREAT! all for diversity and spreading your author wings while also spreading the love – but do your research!

DO connect with people from the Northern Territory and Indigenous Australian’s

DO read fiction and non-fiction on Dreamtime Culture

DO have Indigenous Australian friends/authors/facebook mates read your pages to see if it rings true to them.

And I’m about to be very boring – READ, READ, READ. Everything and anything. reading about the migration of crane’s may give you ideas on how your dragon will fly over mountains. Or reading about someone discovering a new cure for some exotic disease could lead you who-knows-where. Read Fiction & Non Fiction. I highly recommend reading as much flash fiction and poetry as possible too. There is a special skill in telling an entire story in 100-200 words and there’s a magic in really great musical poetry. No not necessarily the rhyming stuff, but the rhythmic stuff – there is a difference 🙂

You don’t have to ride a dragon to be able to write about dragons, but in order to pull it off,

you need to understand the beast, physically and metaphorically. 

So what is it You Want To be?

Firstly another pet peeve, note I have a lot of them, get used to it. I know we all use ASPIRING WRITER. I hate this term. Let me repeat that HATE it. I hate it because I’m not 100% certain what the hell it means? Does it mean you want to learn to write, as in read and write? If so, then this page must look like a lot of small blobs of ink to you.

What you are is an AUTHOR

Now, you could be a PUBLISHED author, or a SELF-PUBLISHED author, or you could aspire to certain objectives, such as being traditionally published by a non-vanity-press publishing house and this is when you will feel you have gone from ASPIRING to just plain AUTHOR. For each artist the lines are a little different, and that’s OK too, but the one thing you are not is someone who aspired to write.

Aspire to write a NY Times best seller – YES

Aspire to make a ½ decent living from your writing – YES

Aspiring writer ? – like I said it doesn’t even make sense.

So, let’s look at this. What/Who is you really want to be?

• A published fiction author ? Great, what sort of published author. Self-published? Small Press? One of the big 4-5? A best seller?
• A non-fiction writer? What field? Do you have a platform or do you need to create a platform? Working together or alone?
• A freelance writer? Great! What sort? Travel. Fashion. Sport. Technology. Industry? Music? Arts?
• A Blogger/Reviewer? Awesome – Again blogging/reviewing what/who/where?

Now I know many of you are thinking, “Hang on, isn’t this blog-site all about fiction novel writers?” – Actually, well… no! It’s about the business of writing. And yes it’s linked to Lost Lynx Publishing & Media, but first and foremost it’s about working with what you have to develop what you could be and it’s about opportunity. Sometimes we start at one point and end up at an entirely different location. And occasionally when we accept where the road might be taking us, some of us, the lucky and hard-working few, will ACTUALLY get to the cabin in the country or that cottage by the sea.

Don’t dismiss opportunity because of your steadfastness to one idea. That is why keeping a journal, or calendar or whatever you want to call it, is VITAL. After a very short space of time you’ll see where you are spending most of your time, and that will help you make those life decisions. I mean, if you are spending 100-hours per week on Facebook and Twitter and only 3 hours on everything else, surely that’ll tell you something. It may not be GIVE UP, it might be OH my farrky-lordy-lordy, no wonder I’m not getting anywhere with my manuscript, or my short stories, or my submissions.

But on the other hand, it might also be that you start to see you spend a lot of time chatting/tweeting to people who travel. Perhaps your writing career will be as a travel blogger, or reviewer. It doesn’t mean that you MUST stop writing your novel, but it might mean your sea view out the window will constantly change as you hop, skip and jump around the country and world – all the while collecting ideas and notes and journal entries and studying people – and writing and writing and writing.

FIGURE OUT WHO YOU ARE, WHAT MAKES YOU HAPPIEST TO WRITE ABOUT

AND HOW YOU CHEER YOURSELF UP – THIS IS YOUR PATH.

And this is how YOU write. Don’t diminish your path or your style or your commitment, this is you. Harper Lee only published one book (and if you don’t know who Harper Lee is, errh, run for cover, and google. And if you still don’t know, stop reading this and get the damned book and read it instead- no seriously –NOW) Anyway, where was I. Oh yes, Harper Lee.

One published novel folks but what a novel! Now I don’t know if there were other things completed and never offered to the public, but I do know that Harper Lee was an author who understood how they wrote.

Don’t be afraid.

Most of us are not Mozart or Harper Lee. Most of us will need to repeat and rinse many, many times before we get it right and even then, after we’ve finally “got it” we’ll stumble and regress and throw a little hissy-fit and question why the hell we are bothering.

Here’s the thing – you are now acting like a writer. It’s called insecurity and indecision and moments of weakness –and it’s beatable. How, actual writing — it doesn’t matter what, replying to blog posts, revising your synopsis, editing a friends manuscript – just do some actual writing, and all the while have your notebook or pad, or pen and paper or your handy little mini-pencil rolled up in your coat pocket – waiting for that moment when something tickles your writers fancy

OH & FINISH what you begin!

– Make it so!