#writingdotcoffee

I'm hyperventilating, I had never come this far without stopping for a while. What kept me going? Four things:

—A story I love, with which I had been dreaming and working with since months ago.

—TK, or the method of not doing research while writing, which I heard of on the first day of NaNoWriMo thanks to Tumblr.

—Group sprints on the Discord channel of NaNoWriMo Argentina. I had never written in group, nor had I done sprints ever in my life. Turns out it's just what I need to get writing. All my NaNoWriMo words so far are from sprints.

—Writing Analytics, a writing software developed by @writingdotcoffee . I can't tell enough awesome things about this. It's saved me, and the editing lock... I didn't know I wrote so badly on the first draft until I used that feature. My text looks like a monster. But I can't delete words. This has added immensely to my wordcount, and I'm keeping up with the NaNoWriMo schedule for the first time in my life.

Superpower or superskill? I can't seem to find a word that doesn't sound cheesy. But I believe it's a vital thing to understand.

Stories are the fabric of our society. Our history, politics, religions and even science to a certain degree are all based on stories. They form the foundation of our relationships and education and anything you can think of.

The human brain has a system built-in that responds to stories. It's how we understand the world around us. If you know how stories work and how to tell a good one, you'll always be a step ahead.

However, this second part doesn't come naturally. Some people are better at it, the same way some people are better at basketball. But the rest of us need to figure it out and practise.

When you tell people that you write fiction, they will give you that patronising look.

'You can't make money from writing. Unless you're, like, Stephen King.'

They will tell you it's a waste of time and that you should focus on a real career.

Great, thanks. At least you've heard of Stephen King.

It's an exercise in self-control talking to people like that. For one because, as a fledgeling writer, you're dealing with enough self-doubt as it is. And secondly, because they're just wrong.

Sure, not everyone will make the same money as Stephen King. Many writers never get their books published. But every writer serious about their craft will learn how stories work and get a huge amount of practice in what might be the most important skill of all.

Even if you don't succeed as a fiction writer in the traditional sense, the next time you'll want to sell something, you will be telling a story. The next time you'll meet your friends, you'll be telling a story. The next time you'll go to a job interview to advance your 'real career', you'll be telling a story.

Writing fiction is one of the best ways to learn how stories work.

It's not just about making things up. You have plenty of stories of your own. Writing fiction will help you to recognise them. By understanding how stories work and why we tell them, you'll know how to arrange things and what to highlight to make your story compelling.

A goal. An obstacle. Relatable characters. Progressive complications. Surprising twists and turns. A satisfying ending. Change over time.

In real life, stories aren't fully formed. People tell them in fragments and signals. But they are there nevertheless.

Too many people are stuck going through the motions of their real careers that they forget to ask why are things the way they are in the first place like a writer would.

That's the real waste of time.

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Past Editions

#155: Do You Care About Your Stories Too Much?, August 2020

#154: A Better Way to Write, August 2020

#153: The Uncertainty of Being a Writer, July 2020

#152: Working with Creative Constraints, July 2020

I lift my eyebrows and the little man sitting across me mimicks my movement. He has scraggly hair and a gold tooth. My head tilts to the side and he follows my movement. I laugh quietly and his laughter drowns my quiet whimpers into silence. I cry. He slaps me on the face. My head whips to the side. He turns his back on me. I wish he would go away.

I stare across the room to the magnificent mirror adorning my wall. My pallor face stares back. There are dark circles under my lacklustre green eyes. The baggy clothes hanging on my scrawny frame give me the appearance of a scarecrow. I bite my tongue and look away.

I hear my mom call me for dinner. Her voice echoes in the silence of my mind as I make my way downstairs. Photographs of my brother and me adorn the edges of the staircase. I feel like a delicate passerby as I walk down the stairs. I can imagine the happy memories floating into each other. Isolating time. Creating a void through which no happiness can escape.

The void fills me up. It weaves patterns with the sounds of laughter. The patterns dance across my exterior. They breathe life into my brother. His voice carrying me across the world and to the past. It’s a beautiful escape. And one that gives me my brother back.

My mother’s reprimanding voice cracks through the void sharply. I enter the kitchen to see my parents staring at me reproachfully, sucking the happiness coating my crumbling body. I remember that my brother is an institute for attempting suicide. My shoulders hunch. My eyes droop. My face crumbles. I am disgusted at my fragility. I scream.

It escapes me in a hush of strong wind, the sound pumps me with strength and I pull the table cloth on which dinner is set. Chaos ensues. The spaghetti dish plunks to the floor and the glasses and plates and forks rattle against each other before flying and crashing against the wall. This jarring melody gives a voice to the cracking silence of my heart breaking. I think I’m still screaming. I want my parents to actually look at me. I am in pain. I want my parents to see that. I need them.

My parents look at me with anger and disgust. Its the way I look at myself in the mirror. I hope I’m wrong but I think that my parents hate me the way I hate myself.

I look out the window and I can imagine that little man with his scraggly hair and gold teeth staring at me angrily. He is too far away to slap me. He shakes his head at me. His frown deepens. Then a pause. His lips move. I feel devastated. My lips start moving of their own accord and painfully morph into a smile, the screams skidding against the walls of my mind fading into silence. I have lost.

“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Six-word stories are a thing, and you’ve just read what is probably the most famous one. Ernest Hemingway supposedly wrote it on a napkin at a restaurant to win a bet, although there’s no evidence that it actually happened. I love it because it not only is a fantastic piece of writing, it can also teach you a lot about how stories work. All that in just six words. Let’s break this down.

What strikes me the most is just how little you need to get people’s imagination going. A skilled writer doesn’t need paragraphs of description to put an image into a reader’s mind. Pick one or two features of a place or object. If you choose the right ones, that’s all your readers need to see a vivid image. Sally Rooney is good at this.

Stories are as much about what is on the page as about what was left out. When you read this particular piece, the whole story happens in your head. There are no characters, no setting. And yet, most of us are probably thinking about death. The baby died before or during birth. There’s no need for shoes anymore.

That certainly is an explanation, but is it the best one? Wouldn't the parents want to keep the unused shoes as a reminder of their lost child? And if they were trying to forget, why not just give them away?

We assume that there was some sort of tragedy – because that’s what most stories are about. When someone is telling a story, we expect them to have something important or interesting to convey.

'So I went to the supermarket. Got me a pack of Walkers. Went home. Watched the telly. Went to bed.’ That’s boring because there are no stakes, no conflict. Someone is being lazy on a Sunday afternoon. Unless you got punched in the face by the till attendant, ran over a cat on the way back and found out that someone had stolen your TV while you were gone, there's no reason to tell a story like that.

Back to the baby-shoes story. What if the people selling them weren’t expecting a baby at all? What if they stole them and are trying to sell them off? What if the well-off parents had bought too many shoes and the child grew out of them before getting a chance to wear them? What if the person is lying? The shoes are mildly worn (as most baby shoes probably ever get) and the seller hopes that you won’t notice. What if it’s a pandemic and the child simply didn’t need any shoes because they had to shelter at home for months? We could go on and on.

These are all very different stories. Some better or more plausible than others. Which one would you say had Hemingway in mind when he wrote those six words?

For me, this is the most important lesson here: you’re not in control of how your readers interpret your writing. Stories rarely have a single, absolute meaning. There may be a generally accepted one, but different readers will interpret your story differently in subtle and sometimes not so subtle ways. Give us guideposts, not chains.

The best stories contain layers and layers that you only discover when you’re reading them for the third time; layers that even the authors themselves had no idea they were there. Writers and readers create them together.

Even if you craft your story into perfection, it’s only perfect in your eyes. The next time someone reads it, it will change.

So what’s your story really about? Well, that depends on who’s reading it.

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Past Editions

#141: Architecture and Gardening for Writers, May 2020

#140: When Can You Call Yourself a Writer?, April 2020

#139: What Can You Do to Fail More?, April 2020

#138: 5 Ways to Focus on Your Writing, April 2020

There are good days, and then there are days that are not so good. On the good days, you sit down in the morning and the next thing you know, it’s dark outside. You’ve been writing for the whole day. It’s good.

Bad days are tense. You know that you should be writing, but you can’t make yourself do it. Life goes on around you, but you feel like it’s left you behind. When several bad days come in a row, you start losing your sense of direction. Then negative self-talk kicks in.

‘I can’t focus. I never get anything done. This will never work.’ Things spiral out from there.

Sometimes it’s hard to get an objective view of your life when things don’t go exactly as planned. Even though you might be doing a lot of things right, a single failure can overshadow all the positivity. You’re beating yourself up which is only making things worse.

A few years ago, I got tired of all this. I’m not always extremely productive, but I get things done. And there’s no reason to feel terrible about a slip up. So I started keeping a victory log.

Every time I do something that matters to me, it goes on the list. Usually, I record everything at once at the end of the day or early in the morning. I decide what makes it to the list and this changes over time. Sometimes, it’s completing a draft of a book. Sometimes, a victory is washing the dishes.

Things add up, as they do, over time. My list now has thousands of entries. When I scroll back, I can read what I was doing a week ago or a year ago. It’s not a massively interesting read to be honest, but it puts things in perspective. Seeing all the things that I’ve done in the past reassures me. It shows that having a shit day once in a while won’t ruin everything, even though it can feel like that at the time.

I aim to put ten new things on the list every day, and that on its own motivates me to get out and do stuff when I’m not feeling like it.

Anyway, that’s all that I want to share with you today. It’s a simple thing, but it helps me make sure that I don’t sleepwalk through my entire life.

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My email subscribers receive a notification when I publish these posts along with a few things I found interesting or helpful on the literary internet every week. Click the link below to join the club.

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Past Editions

#147: Finishing things is a skill, June 2020

#146: Black Lives Matter, June 2020

#145: Creativity Doesn’t Have a Downside, June 2020

#144: Lots and Lots of Bad Stories, May 2020

Writers need failure (and rejection) to learn, improve and ultimately succeed. Many bestselling authors wrote several failed manuscripts and had their debut novels rejected dozens of times. The important bit about these publication horror stories is that the rejections didn’t just come to them. The authors poured their heart and soul on paper, then researched the market and sent out query letters only to hear ‘Nah’ many times in return. That must have been a lot of hard work.

The evolution and decades of schooling urge us to avoid failure whenever we can, and that is often a good strategy. When you fail to see a person crossing the road in front of your car, you’ll kill them. When you fail to hear a grizzly bear lurking in the bush behind you, that might be the last failure you’ll ever make.

When it comes to writing, it’s totally the wrong approach. Sure, being judged or rejected sucks, but the types of failures writers experience are different. There aren’t any raging bears in the area. It’s just you, stuck inside your own head.

Avoiding failure as a writer makes no sense. In fact, you want to get as many of them as you can, because that means you’re finishing things and sending them out to people. You’re putting yourself out there and getting your reps in. That brings me to the original point of this post. What can you do fail more?

Only Honest Effort Counts

Disclaimer: I don’t mean that you should start submitting your unedited first drafts or spamming people who don’t want to read your story for one reason or another. You won’t learn anything by doing that. This whole thing only makes sense when you do the work to the best of your ability. Make your story the best you can. Do your research. There are no shortcuts.

Never Abandon One Story to Start Another

One prerequisite to being rejected is finishing a story in the first place. How about that? While finishing every story that you start wouldn’t be realistic – terrible ideas happen. There’s no reason to waste time on something that clearly won’t work.

However, you should never abandon a story only to start a different, better one. The shiny new object syndrome is very real, and it’s easy to fall into a vicious cycle of never finishing anything.

When a new idea comes up, make copious notes, but finish what you’re working on first.

Start an Anonymous Fiction Blog

It doesn’t matter if anyone will read your stories. Just developing the habit of finishing them and posting them on a blog regularly will help you improve.

Not writing under your own identity will make your worry less about what people think about you and focus on the story itself. If it blows up unexpectedly, you can always choose to reveal who you are later.

Join a Writing Group or /r/destructivereaders

Getting regular feedback on your writing from your writing group or online can be a great way increasing your confidence in your writing ability as well as training your ego to handle criticism. When posting to a forum, remember to give feedback to others first!

Submit a Story to a Magazine Every Month

This is where the real rejections start coming in. Magazine editors are incredibly busy people so most of the time, you’ll get only a generic, usually very carefully worded message.

Setting a goal to submit one story every month should be enough time to finish and edit a short story but not too much so that you end up dwelling on inconsequential details.

Make sure you do your research before submitting!

Final Thoughts

Finishing a piece of writing makes you vulnerable. People will judge it, and it will feel like they are judging you. Learning to fail and learning from those failures are the only way to make it as a writer.

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My email subscribers receive a notification when I publish these posts along with a few things I found interesting or helpful on the literary internet every week. Click the link below to join the club.

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(I won’t spam you or pass your email to a third party. You can unsubscribe at any time.)

Past Editions

#138: 5 Ways to Focus on Your Writing, April 2020

#137: How to Create a Writing Routine for Life, April 2020

#136: The Words Will Add Up, March 2020

#135: Quarantine Survival for Writers, March 2020

I would like to extend my deepest condolences to the family of George Floyd and the families of the countless other victims of police brutality systematically targeting people of colour.

Thank you to everyone who’s been taking part in the peaceful protests in and outside of the US. Clearly, not being a racist yourself isn’t enough. We need to do more to fight the bullies and those who turn a blind eye and allow this oppression to continue. We need to rally against companies like Facebook who give a platform to hateful ideologies and help launch them into the mainstream to sell more ads.

It works because mindlessly scrolling through content channelling hate at your scapegoat of choice is easy. It’s easier than facing your own demons and solving your own problems.

If you don’t want to fight for people of colour, for the LGBT community, for refugees, for immigrants, then fight for yourself. Because when we allow hate to fester in our society, it will eventually come to you.

Every week, I write a short post like this one. I want to share something that I’ve learned or an idea that I’m pondering related to writing. The series has been running pretty consistently for over two years now. You would expect that after almost 120 posts, I would develop a reasonably accurate sense of what’s going to go down well with my readers. It’s not super complicated, is it?

I wish. Some posts do better than others, of course, and I seem to have very little control over it. I may labour over a post for days only to see it go down Tumblr’s drain with barely anyone noticing. Sometimes, I’m in a rush and hammer out several paragraphs late on Sunday evening, which will do vastly better. Why? I can’t explain it.

As it turns out, I’m not the only one struggling with this. Almost every creative does in some form—from budding writers to international film studios. How else could you explain movies which receive hundreds of millions in funding only to be shredded to pieces at the box office during the premiere weekend? Surely, one of the hundreds of people working on set could’ve pointed out that the $25 million car crash scene that the crew was about to shoot made absolutely no sense in the script?

The problem is that regardless of experience or how much money you have, we’re all terrible judges of our own work. Art is also largely subjective. A 1000 people might read a book and like it, and the next person that reads it will see something completely different. Our perception is a function of our experience. Artists can hope that others will like what they make. They can work as hard as we can to make their work good. But they can never know for sure whether it is actually good.

Even the biggest and most talented novelists have written books that they would prefer to quietly disappear from their bibliography. You know, just pretend that it never happened.

On the contrary, many songs that went to become greatest hits were afterthoughts – mere filler tacked on to the backs of albums to justify the $20 price tag.

Putting things out there is as much a gamble if you are Joe Nobody as if you are Margaret Atwood or Steven Spielberg. You have no track record when you start out, but the more credit you earn, the more pressure there is. When people go see a Steven Spielberg film, they expect nothing short of excellence. Every detail gets scrutinised by the press. To be honest, I’m not sure which one of the two is better.

No matter how long you agonise over your current project, no matter how perfect you make it, you still only see what you can see. Whether you think that it’s the best thing that happened to humanity or the absolute worst piece of crap, it’s not up to you to decide. So stop worrying and put it out there. If it bombs, you can always write something else.

What I Am Reading

I’m reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. I’m about a quarter in and things are just about starting to pick up.

At the same time, I’m also listening to The Testaments by Margaret Atwood — the recently published sequel to The Handmaid’s tale. It’s familiar but different at the same time. Definitely lighter in tone than the original book. But I’m only about halfway in.

Want More?

My email subscribers receive a notification when I publish these posts along with a few things I found interesting or helpful on the literary internet every week. Click the link below to join the club.

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(I won’t spam you or pass your email to a third party. You can unsubscribe at any time.)

Past Editions

#116: The Prolific Life, November 2019

#115: Secret Project Update, November 2019

#114: Writing and Stress, November 2019

#113: Is It Worth It?, October 2019