#process:misc

I saw a post once about how young artists get told to “practice” but nobody ever tells them how. Like, what exactly are you practicing? The same is true for writers. People will tell you you just gotta “write a lot,” but if you’re unhappy with your writing and you don’t know why, how will that help?

So: what does a writer’s training regimen look like? I will tell you mine. I’ve tried a lot, but the techniques I come back to again and again are:

During my writing session, I write fast and loosely for at least ten minutes. I wouldn’t call this freewriting, exactly. I’ll work on an actual scene, but rather than thinking thoughts and then writing them down, I think aloud on the page. It’s the same as normal writing except where I’d normally say “no, that’s not the right word, try another one,” I just...don’t. I write the wrong word, and then I write maybe twenty more before I get one I like. I let myself make big, weird gestures I would normally discard - odd turns of phrase, nonsensical metaphors and images, slang that isn’t really appropriate, grammatically bizarre sentences, etc. It’s like those vocal warmups where you make silly sounds to access the full range of your vocal apparatus. I find it meditative, in a way. It’s like going into a little trance.

On the opposite end of the spectrum: I read other stories, figure out how they do something I like, and then imitate it. Maybe I like the particular way a writer knits together a character’s inner reflections and external perceptions in the narration. I take a paragraph of theirs, analyze how exactly they’re doing it, and then try to do something similar in a paragraph of mine.

If you are looking to develop your style and skills, you have to read what other writers do. That’s how you refine your taste, your sense of what “good writing” looks like. But when it comes time to apply the lessons of other writers to your own work, where do you start? How do you derive practical specifics from other writers beyond “wow that’s some good shit, wish I could write like that”?

For me, it starts with me getting frustrated by some aspect of my work. I then pick up a writer I like to see how they do that specific thing. Here are a few things I’ve studied other writers for:

How they write those bits between lines of dialogue where the characters communicate their state of mind through gestures and expressions

How they weave introspection into action so they don’t get huge blocks of nothing but a character thinking

More generally, how they get deep into a character’s inner life without constantly telling us their thoughts directly

How they weave the description of a place into the action

How they describe characters physically and how they parcel out that description over time

What kinds of verbs they use and how

How they vary their sentences syntactically

How they begin paragraphs

How they use dialogue tags (answer: a lot of good writers use them as little as possible)

So: now that I am free from the burden of my degree, I have the bandwidth to write again. Like, the writing I want to do.

Here’s what I’m doing today that you could also do.

I’m getting a notebook and putting it where I can always reach it. Actually, I’m getting two, one for the purse and one for the bedside table. Also, both notebooks will have a pen on a string taped to them, because I never seem to have pens.

The point of this is not to “write every day,” or to develop a consistent journaling habit. The point is only to prepare for when I might want to write something down, so when the moment comes, no effort will be required. I won’t have to get up and look for anything, I’ll just grab the notebook and start.

Here’s the thing: in and of itself, procuring and placing a notebook is not hard. It’s no different from buying toothpaste. It only gets hard if I start thinking about whether I’m going to write in it. So I don’t think about that. I am acquiring an object and putting it in a prominent place, that’s it.

I’m thinking of it like a first aid kit. It’s good to be prepared, and even if you only use it once, you’ll still be glad you got it. Similarly, maybe I get the notebook and don’t write anything in it for six months. Then one day I do. Then I never do again. That’s fine.

I’m just removing all the obstacles in the event that I might one day need somewhere to write down a thing.

Some people like pretty notebooks. I need shitty ones because I feel compelled to keep the expensive ones neat and then I don’t use them. But maybe you’re the opposite. Large notebooks make me uncomfortable so I need them to be small, but you might find small ones too cramped. Again: whatever you do, just figure this shit out in advance.

I’m also setting up a box to store any finished notebooks. I’m doing it now, not when I finish a notebook, because this is about getting everything in place before I need it. (A box is also good because if I happen to write notes on loose pages I can just throw them in there.)

Additional alternatives if notebooks aren’t an option: notetaking apps on your phone. Voice memo apps on your phone. I’m also putting a folder on my computer desktop called “writing notes”; between that and the notebooks, I feel pretty covered. Just pick the most convenient and comfortable recording device(s) you have. (And if the device is handwritten, DO NOT forget the pen.)

The most important thing I’ve learned in the last five years, as a writer and a person, is that problems I think originate in me often have mundane practical solutions.

When I hit a snag, I tend to attribute it to some inner deficiency. If I were smarter or a better writer or a better person, I could get around this. But nine times out of ten, it’s not my fault, it’s the problem’s fault.

Let’s take a problem I share with a number of you: I do my best thinking when I’m driving, but when I reach a place where I can write something down, it all vanishes. It’s because of my bad memory, I think. Or the ideas weren’t substantial enough for my brain to keep. A real writer wouldn’t have this problem.

Those beliefs kept me from seeing an obvious practical option: find a way to record those ideas while I’m driving. 

I resisted this for a while. My mind kept throwing up roadblocks because it didn’t want to change its habits. Fiddling with the voice memo app on my phone in the car was dangerous, for instance. But hey, Siri exists. I never use Siri - okay, so I learn how to set it up. If you don’t have a smart phone, you can get inexpensive digital voice recorders on Amazon, some of which are voice-activated. If you can only afford a cheaper one, start recording before you start driving.

My biggest obstacle was that I felt oddly embarrassed explaining my story ideas out loud, even if only to an empty car. So I practiced first. If I wanted the benefits, I had to push against my own habitual helplessness.

My therapist recently told me, “there’s only so much you can do on your own.” Eventually you optimize your internal motivation resources and you need to look for external ones. There’s no shame in that. So my advice is: find a writing partner. The beauty of a writing partner is that you help each other. This relationship can work many different ways:

You can physically sit near each other and work. Hey, make it into an evening. Get some good food, light some candles, whatever feels nice. Then you do, say, a few time-limited sessions - again, whatever’s comfortable and gets you working without stressing you out. You could even talk through the bits you’re working on if you get stuck. When you’re done, do something fun.

You can do a similar thing over the internets. This is better for folks who don’t live near each other, obviously, but also for folks who can’t concentrate with someone else in the room. You can check in with each other via chat, or you could even Skype each other and work with your Skype connection open. (I’ve done this and it’s odd at first but ended up working.) 

Corollary: recently I learned about “writing sprints,” in which you and a friend agree to write steadily for fifteen or so minutes and then debrief when those fifteen minutes end. I believe there are even places around the internet where you can go to do this with people you’re not yet friends with. (Actually, we’ve got a channel on the Discord server for this very purpose!)

Second corollary: meetup.com might have writing groups near where you live. I went to one for a while and all we did was write in silence for an hour or so. A few people would share their work at the end but only if they wanted to. The whole thing was oddly pleasant.

You can make a bargain with your partner to send each other what you’ve written by a particular date/time. It’s even better if you can give each other some feedback, but not even always necessary. Just having a deadline by which you’re expected to produce words can help.

You can co-write something. This isn’t for everyone but it can be really fun.

Yeah, I think there absolutely is a point when that can happen. I find it happens in life generally as well. As a mentally ill person, I’ve gotten so hypervigilant about my inner state and so frantic to activate all my coping skills whenever anything starts to trend badly that I have trouble just…leaving myself alone and feeling bad in a normal way like everyone else. “Self-care” can slip unintentionally into “self-improvement,” and that “oh no I’ve got to make myself better” habit of thought was precisely what fucked me up in the first place.

Lately I’ve reduced my coping strategy to one principle: if I can’t do something, I stop doing it and ask myself what I can do. In other words, if I get overwhelmed, I step away, calm down a bit, reassess, and then ease gently back in.

Because yeah, it’s like, even if by some chance one’s writing habits were optimized, writing would still be hard. It’s hard and painful for people who aren’t mentally ill. Writing is a mess for everyone - nobody ever discovers a fool-proof process that lets them travel smoothly from beginning to end.

So I guess my recommendation is: if you’re obsessing over your process, reduce your process adjustments to one principle, and make it one that targets what causes you the most pain. Personally, I get tied up in mental knots as I try to solve the infinite and impossible problem of my story, which is why “step away, calm down and get some perspective” works well for me. If, say, you get all stiff and blocked when you sit down to write, you might find one technique for alleviating that (put the story aside and write free-associative nonsense for five minutes, say) and then invoke that protocol when you notice yourself starting to freak out.

This isn’t going to optimize anything, but as you say, if optimization were the goal, you could chase that dream forever. It might ultimately help more to make the goal more modest, something like “get a bit of relief.”

Folks?