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The Power of the Loopback

I hit my wordcount goal yesterday (Nov. 6th, 2020), but it took longer than usual.

Why? Because I did a loopback!

I’m a huge advocate of writing forward, and keeping momentum going. But sometimes you don’t remember what you wrote two days ago. It’s okay to loop back, read through it, fix little errors, and add in details as long as you stay in the mindset of discovery and avoid the overthinking that comes with invention.

This is not the time to be “polishing” or rewriting. Many writers get trapped in a loop of continuous polishing of early chapters and then grind to a halt because momentum is lost. (You know who you are.)

The purpose ofa loopback is to refresh your memory, regain momentum, and pick up where you left off with your creative mind fully enganged in discovery.

When I start writing this morning, I will only loop back a few paragraphs. In a day or two, I’ll probably loop back a few thousand words.

Write forward, loop back a little bit, get a running start, write new scenes, loop back a little bit, get a running start, write new scenes.

“Write. Don’t think. Relax.” —Ray Bradbury

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Hating or Loving Your Writing is a Choice

e] by admin

George Orwell struggled with his writing.

In a letter to a friend he wrote, “I am so miserable, struggling in the entrails of that dreadful book and never getting any further, and loathing the sight of what I have done. Never start writing novels, if you wish to preserve your happiness.”

His letters are filled with this sort of stuff.

It’s almost like he was performing self-criticism for his friends and colleagues to shield him from external criticisms. I see this all the time with new writers.

The Orwell state of mind is not an advantage if one wants to be happy and (dare I say it) enjoy writing. It’s certainly not helpful if you want to stay motivated to write.

Orwell is trying to be writer, editor, and critic all at the same time. He was qualified in all three of these domains. And that was his biggest problem.

If you write with an editor on one shoulder and a critic on the other, writing will be miserable indeed. Orwell was miserable all his life.

Ray Bradbury, by contrast, just wrote. He wrote Farenheit 451 in the basement of UCLA on coin-operated typewriters. A dime would give him 30 minutes of writing time, and he didn’t have money to spare. He spent $9.80 writing that book. Money was slipping away every second. He couldn’t sit there and agonize over things or rewrite the same scene over and over. He got on with it.

So here’s my takeaway: You will gain nothing by hating your writing. It will not improve your book, and it certainly won’t make writing easier. You will not protect yourself from criticism by criticising yourself first.

Hating or loving your writing is a choice.

It’s obviously wiser to love it, considering how much time you’ll spend doing it.

So brush the editor and critic of your shoulders and immerse yourself in your world. Go on the adventure and delight in it.

“Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.” —Ray Bradbury

Writing tips, tricks, and inspo straight to your inbox. Bi-weekly except for November when I send a daily email to keep you on track for NaNoWriMo.

What About Story Structure?

e] by admin

Does it feel natural to you to outline your novel?

Go ahead!

I know many authors who do that. And they are very deliberate about the three act structure. They puzzle over what inciting incident will kick off the action. They scribble down their M.I.C.E quotient, or plot out the 40 beats of the Save the Cat formula. They’ll make sure they’ve plotted a false victory, a dark night of the soul, and a Hero Returns Home.

These concepts are learned through study. They help us reverse-engineer successful stories to see why they work. As we move forward in our writing careers, such learning is essential. And it requires thinking, which I’ve discouraged in every email so far.

To deepen your craft, thinking is necessary.

To learn these models, we have to apply them intentionally. We have to push through the frustration and confusion caused by molding our creative output into unfamiliar shapes.

If I gave you the assignment to write a page without ever using the word “was,” you might have to think about it. You’d have to rephrase sentences that otherwise flowed up from your subconscious. That’s a writing exercise that will train your creative mind to reach for more vivid verbs when they are appropriate.

If I asked you to outline a novel that perfectly matched The Hero’s Journey, you’d have to think about it and puzzle over it.

These are valuable exercises.

But if this is your first NaNoWriMo project, focus on training your mind to just write when you sit down to write. Embrace the Bradbury mantra I’ve been repeating in these emails “Write. Don’t think. Relax.” Trust your subconscious; it knows story. This is the fundamental skill.

If you get stuck, loop back, gain momentum, and write forward. Hit your wordcount. You don’t need to know anything more than you already know to write your novel.

When NaNo is over, study plot, character, or prose style. Do writing exercises to teach the creative mind these skills. Then get back to writing without thinking. Your creative mind will use your new abilities automatically.

Writing tips, tricks, and inspo straight to your inbox. Bi-weekly except for November when I send a daily email to keep you on track for NaNoWriMo.

Writing Out of Order

e] by Eric

You don’t have to write your novel in sequence.

I know of at least one writer who doesn’t know what order scenes will be in when she first writes them. Once she has a bunch of chapters, she sits on the floor and arranges them. Then she writes transitions to make them fit together.

If this sounds crazy, don’t do it.

But if you get exciting ideas about a fight, or a meet cute, or a cat-and-mouse sequence, go ahead and write it and figure out where it goes later.

I move chapters back and forth in the chronology of my novels all the time. And because I know this will happen, I often jump ahead in the story to write what I think will be a pivotal scene.

This gives me something to write toward. And that builds momentum.

If your creative mind throws up a brilliant scene (or fragment of scene), write it. Your creative mind will then happily fill in the gaps.

Writing tips, tricks, and inspo straight to your inbox. Bi-weekly except for November when I send a daily email to keep you on track for NaNoWriMo.

Chain Anchors to your Characters

e] by Eric

Help your readers remember who’s who by anchoring them.

Here’s the problem. I read some books very slowly. I might read chapter 2 on Monday and not get to chapter 20 for a couple weeks. So that side character with Very Important Information who the detective spoke to in chapter 2 will be forgotten by the time I get to his reappearance in chapter 20.

Characters that come and go like this are important, but can also be confusing. If you’ve ever been 2/3s through a book and had to stop and say, “who is this guy?” then you know what I mean.

Anchroing is an excellent way to remind readers who a character is. That is, give them a memorable quality or two that you refer to whenever they reappear.

In Starside Saga I do this with all my side characters. Fallo has a single black caterpillar eyebrow and he’s ugly. In the early books Henley wears a knit cap, and has fiery hair. Marlow has a “salt and pepper” beard. The Cloak has a “wolfish grin” and a black cloak. Ragin Keel has white hair and pale complexion. Quinn is raven haired and is constantly reaching for her shadline dagger. Flaumishtak has hair that flows into tendrils of smoke. Nax has white chin and feet. Lop is portly and always wants food. Oly hisses at Kila pretty much every time he appears. Bazron’s scales are so black, he is an absence in the air. Klayne has a charming smile and looks like a king.

You get the idea.

For main characters like Fallo and Henley, these qualities aren’t as important in later books because readers are very familiar with them. But early on, they had to be tagged repeatedly to anchor who they were in readers’ minds.

Anchor with visuals: A scar, a tattoo, a unique quality to their posture or their hairstyle, a hat, a narrow nose, a birthmark, an absence of eyebrows, a mannerism.

Anchor with sound: a penchant for cursing under his breath, a wheezy voice, a nasally voice, the whistle of breathing through his nose, a habitual cough, difficulty breathing, a tone of certainty, uptalk, someone who speaks so softly you can’t hear them.

Anchor with smell: soapy and herbal, distinct perfume, sweat and livestock.

Anchor with taste or touch: harder to do with characters, but I would never say impossible. A man could have leathery skin (which is a texture visual that serve two senses at once) or hair as soft and light as eider down. Referring to the taste of lipstick after a kiss or even taste-related smells. “His garlicy whispers made Jack recoil and cover his nose.” Or “Mindy leaned over him at the cafeteria table, interrupting his conversation with Autumn. She snapped her wintergreen gum and whispered too loudly: ‘You asking her out?'”

That wintergreen detail would be all you needed to remind readers’ who she in ten chapters later.

To give dimension to your more important characters, give readers more than descriptive details or behaviors. You introduce them with anchors that you repeat, then begin to add new ones. But most importantly, give them a unique voice in dialogue.

A character that always makes an inappropriate joke.

A character who responds in one or two words.

A character who always speaks in compound sentences.

A character who uses euphemisms to be overly polite.

A character who expresses intolerant attitudes and leaps to violent conclusions.

A character who insults everyone.

A character who says things that rhyme.

A character who expresses weariness.

A character who uses slang, or dialect.

A character who uses clichés.

This is what makes writing fun.

So, anchors aweigh!

Writing tips, tricks, and inspo straight to your inbox. Bi-weekly except for November when I send a daily email to keep you on track for NaNoWriMo.

How do you pronounce that? (Naming Characters)

e] by Eric

One thing that satisfies my power madness is naming characters.

I just love it. But here’s a secret: I don’t think about names for very long. I have never evrer agonized over what to name a character.

I don’t know if this even counts as a tip, but when I need to name a character I just start typing consonants and vowels and see what comes out. If it’s too close to another name I’ve already used, I change a couple letters.

Here are some actual tips:

Try to make names pronounceable.

I’ve been accused of coming up with unpronouncable names. (Ahem, Yples. Or Flaumishtak.) In my first novel I had a character called Boffoygeedanama. (In my defence, he was a bigfoot. And he went by a much easier to pronounce nickname: Grizz.)

Avoid having characters with similar names. For instance, Sauron and Saruman might be confusing for some readers.

Don’t worry too much. Changing a name is easy with find and replace. I once named a character Beyonce. That did not make it to the final book.

Here’s where a few names in my books came from:

Harvin: a character in my first series (Bigfoot Galaxy). I needed a name. I happened to have a Green Bay Packers game on. I looked up and their adversaries for the day (Minnesota Vikings) had a talented wide receiver called Harvin. I saw it on the back of his jersey. I took it. I moved on.

Writing an early version of Thief of Sparks I had to name a ginger-haired young thief. I was listening to The Eagles at the time. I grabbed the name Henley from their drummer, Don Henley.

The monarch of Starside’s first name is Ell, which I stole from my daughter Ella.

When I named Dunne Yples (who later in the series becomes Kila’s main foe), my mind drifted over Ypres, the Belgian town figuring in WWI battles. Why? Who knows. I went with it, and the resonances (which are meaningful to me and invisible to my readers) ring in my subconscious mind as I write his story.

The donkey Tolky was originally named Tolkin, but I thought that was a bit too on the nose. So I shortened it.

The Hargothe was a phrase I typed purely in the stream of creative flow. I later read an old science fiction novel by Leigh Brackett that had a character called Hargoth! I couldn’t believe my eyes.

Terms like dragnithan, qiznithan, yoznithan, or felnithel. All of that comes from stream of creative flow. Same thing with the term “shadline” which first appeared in an unfinished proto-story that I wrote years before starting Staride Saga.

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Help your readers remember who’s who by anchoring them.

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