The Key to Everything

This post contains a surprisingly simple concept that is so important, writing coaches like myself, don’t actually want to share it with you. Even if you don’t know of it, for most of you, it is the reason your favorite authors are your favorite authors. It is why you get bored on page two of your friend’s short story, but can read 150 pages of classic literature in one sitting. This post is about variation. If you remember no other concept on this blog, remember this.

Note: Variation has much more to do with the style of your writing than things like story points or character development. Indeed the concept of “varying your character” can lead people grievous mistakes in character psychology. When applied correctly, however, variation can take your style from a D to an A. It will excite people. More importantly, it will make people want to read more.

Let’s begin.

After a while, our brains are programmed to ignore repetition. It is the reason you aren’t constantly listening to your heartbeat or your breath, and why a ticking clock, however annoying, eventually fades into the background. In psychology, this is known as sensory adaptation.

When you are reading a book, subconsciously, your mind registers everything. Most readers don’t know why they stop reading, but more often than not, it is the feeling of boredom that comes from sensory adaptation. Here’s an example.

“She ran. She kept running. She couldn’t stop. He got closer. She saw him. He was too fast. He caught her. He killed her.”

Boooooorrring!

The variation issues here are significantly exaggerated to allow your conscious mind to pick up on what is happening. As a training exercise, try to find the two main problems with the sentences above.  I’ll give you a second… If you read them carefully, you should have noticed two issues: every sentence begins with a pronoun, and none are longer than four words. Another minor issue is the lack of complex verbs or nouns.

Think of your writing like music, or like the tide of the ocean. Your prose has a certain flow. Occasionally, it is rough and jarring (ideally when the events you’re writing are rough and jarring). At other times, it is calm and tranquil. Allow your words to take form and carry your readers along in the most exciting way possible.

Keeping an eye out for ways to vary your writing is absolutely vital. It will keep your writing fresh throughout hundreds of pages, and it will make it come alive! Here are the main categories to look out for—

Length

I love Marcel Proust. He’s a fantastic author. Even so, when every sentence is two pages long, it can be very easy to lose focus while reading. When I complete a sentence, I often think, “Should I put my book down now? I won’t get a chance for another five minutes!” When I read Hemingway, I have the opposite problem. Everything is so short and direct, it’s easy to miss the moments Hemingway intended to be passionate. One of his most well-known lines is, “He came to the river. The river was there.” I don’t know about you, but I felt absolutely nothing reading that.

Sentence length is vital in accentuating your power scenes. Watch what happens in your own writing when you place a beautiful, flowing sentence in the midst of sharp succinct ones—

“He saw her sitting there, and he loved her. It was that simple. The humming of everyday life melted in a fury of illusory dreams, windswept hair and faded paint. He knew then that he could never go back home.”

Surprise us, never let us know what to expect.

Vocabulary

In the example sentence above, I also naturally varied vocabulary. Notice, no other sentence contained an adjective; that sentence had three! Don’t overload your readers with a veritable cornucopia of vernacular. If every sentence requires intense thought, that’s just another way to miss out on the joy variation can bring to your writing. It is for this reason that many authors have been led into mistakenly thinking that “simple is better.”

“Just use language everyone can understand!” they’ll tell you. Well, they can say what they like, but a good vocabulary, used in the right moments, can literally drive your readers to tears.

Style

For God’s sake, start a sentence with a verb every once in a while! If 90% of our sentences begin with a pronoun, you’re doing something wrong.

“Collapsing on the bed in all their passion, they forgot the storm that brewed outside.”

“Laugh or cry, silly girl, it’s all the same to me.”

“Pierce the air with the sound of your trumpets. We will arrive before the sunlight ends.”

Go through your writing and learn your tendencies. Then, make an effort to vary them.

Let me be incredibly clear. This isn't just some concept you should occasionally throw into your writing. It is something that needs to be present in every paragraph on every page of your book. You need to constantly be shifting your writing to make sure that it keeps the reader along for the ride.

It’s easy to chalk up a reader’s loss of attention to random things. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard, “Well, no two readers are the same,” or, “I guess sometimes writers and readers don’t mesh!” Both statements are occasionally true, but as writers, we need to be a step beyond that. We need to understand the minds of our readers and how they function, and craft our beautiful worlds in ways that do them justice…

Readers of Tiny Instruments very often ask me how I managed to keep them interested from beginning to end – or how I managed to craft such beautiful sentences. This is it guys. This is everything you need to know.

Writing Prompt

Write a 500-word short story. It can be about anything. The point is to focus on constantly varying everything in the three main categories: Length, Vocabulary and Style. Send it in and I will help tighten it up and guide your writing as best I can.

Flash Fiction: How To Write Short Stories With Lasting Impact

So you’re stuck on one of the chapters of your draft. You don’t know how to go about developing your protagonist… or maybe, you want to introduce another character that will support the protagonist in resolving the conflict.

If you dread thinking about how, or whether a character should live or die, check this article on developing characters.

If you’re looking for other ways of effectively presenting a character’s experience, with no nonsense, then you must know how they are treated in flash fiction.

What is Flash Fiction?

Flash fiction is short—very short—fiction, that is nevertheless a self-contained work. Generally, flash fiction runs between 100 and 1,000 words. It’s generally for readers with little time, or short attention spans.

The terms for this fiction form can vary. Works at the shorter end of the scale—100 to 300 words—are sometimes dubbed “micro-fiction”. Slightly longer stories—overflowing to 1,500 words—are occasionally called “sudden fiction”. Anything between 1,000 and 10,000 words is a short story, or perhaps a novelette.

Despite the brevity of flash fiction, it is a complex and difficult form to master.

Some question whether it is possible, in so few words, to tell a moving story. But then, storytelling is never easy.

Well-executed flash fiction can be more memorable than longer works. There's no room for the bad writing to hide.

Take for example Ernest Hemingway’s A Very Short Story. It’s just over 600 words, but heartbreaking. Using fewer, but stronger words can better encapsulate the writer’s thoughts and the character’s emotions.

(An even shorter story, sometimes misattributed to Hemingway, is only six words: "For sale. Baby Shoes. Never Worn.")

How to Write Flash Fiction

Like other stories, flash fiction has characters, plots, and conflict. It must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. It should be complete and—even more than in longer forms—leave the readers no doubt about what happened or how they feel about it.

Unlike short stories or novels, there is no time to develop your characters in flash fiction. Flash fiction does not need it. Here are some suggestions on how to write successful flash fiction:

1. Start the story like you are about to end it. Since there is not much time to explore the setting, many flash fiction writers suggest starting the story somewhere in the middle. This will also help you cut down on unnecessary settings and conflicts. Give out a lot of information at the start, then take the readers deeper in the succeeding paragraphs.

2. Pick a conflict. You must give your story a resolution, so you cannot have too much going on. Get right to your main conflict—pick one, stick to it and resolve it. Remember to put it in context. The reader must know which angle to focus on.

3. Skip the other characters. You do not need a mass of characters in flash fiction to deliver an interesting story. Just choose your most important character, or characters, and how they feel in a certain scene. There is no room for background stories or flashbacks. Even character names take up space.

4. Learn the art of brevity. Using too many words can be a crutch. The poor idea can be camouflaged by flowery language. Imagine Shakespeare as rewritten on Twitter, and boil the story down to its essence. Even 100 words are more than 280 characters. Say more with fewer words. Sometimes, what you leave out is what leaves the reader haunted.

5. Go for the understated beauty of life. When picking a theme, look for something that people are familiar with, even take for granted, then make them see it differently. Make them care.

6. Don’t be afraid to trim. Even if a sentence is beautifully written, if it doesn't advance the story, get rid of it. Writing is therapeutic anyway. View the weeding down of your first draft as one of writing's alternative therapy examples… maybe not as satisfying as crafting the perfect sentence, but still enjoyable, beneficial, and necessary. But don't just throw it away. It might form the basis for another flash fiction!

Writing flash fiction may be challenging at first, but once you know what story you’d like to tell and who your character is, you can finish it in odd moments throughout your day, like while riding the subway.

For inspiration, try reading other flash fiction. The New Yorker regularly publishes interesting short, short stories. There are many anthologies of flash fiction, too, some compiled during the annual National Flash Fiction Day competitions in the UK and New Zealand. It also helps to read poetry. Poems are good at telling one critical moment or scene.

If you are planning to give flash fiction writing a try, start writing. If your draft ends with more than 1,500 words, review some of the suggestions mentioned above. 

Finally, pick out the best title for your flash fiction. There are exercises that can help. Come up with at least 10 titles. The other nine might inspire other stories!

Author

Patrick Bailey is a professional writer who works mainly in the fields of mental health, addiction, and living in recovery. He attempts to stay on top of the latest news in the addiction and the mental health world, and enjoys writing about these topics to break the stigma associated with them. Patrick is currently a writer for Mountain Springs Recovery as well as on his own blog.

How To Come Back. How To Stay Motivated.

Before we start: I looked dozens of articles in research for this one, hoping to find at least one tip that wasn’t drivel. Across the board, every article was utter shit. Apologies for the bluntness of those words, but to the best of my knowledge, this is the only good list on author motivation available on the internet.

Okay, ranting aside, we all try to keep writing - we really do - but the fact is, life happens. “In-between projects” is a state that, if the author isn’t careful, can become permanent; worst of all, it can happen to anybody, completely irrespective of the author’s innate ability (see Harper Lee, Emily Brontë, Ralph Ellison).

Whatever your personal reasons are for not keeping up with your writing: time, stress, et cetera... the following step-by-step guide won't just help you get started again; it'll keep you writing!

1) Write What You Want To Read

I love challenging myself. I really do. It’s fun to write something that is outside of your normal comfort zone… but there is a reason why Stephen King wrote primarily Horror, and Philip K. Dick primarily Science Fiction: these are the genres that felt most natural for them to write.

Especially when you’re coming back from a long hiatus, you should be writing in genres that you know inside and out.

2) Don’t Just Plan… Write Yourself A Prompt!

Write out a brief sequence of events for every chapter before you begin. Keep it short, but precise. Don’t write things like, “I’m going to introduce my main character.” That's too vague to be helpful.

If I’m writing the first chapter of a greek tragedy, I should write something like--

“Open on a conversation between King Theitis (our main character), and King Linus of Zebanee. King Linus boasts that his top warrior can beat any two of Theitis’s. Theitis, in anger, responds by saying that Tralis, his general, could beat his warrior with one arm behind his back. The battle is set up, and Tralis dies - solely because his arm is tied behind his back.  

Point of Scene: This does many things; most notably, the scene shows Theitis’s pride and introduces the conflict between General Tralis’s troops and the Royal Crown (which will eventually lead to Theitis’s downfall)."

With this self-written prompt, we know where the chapter is going, and we know WHY it is being written… that takes a lot of pressure off the writing, which makes us far less likely to procrastinate.

3) Always End On A Cliffhanger

Conversely, never EVER stop at the resolution of a plot point. Mini resolutions are the death of motivation. When you reach a plot resolution, force yourself to keep writing to the next cliffhanger.

When Tina has a gun to her head, it is obvious that something important will happen. The urgency is omnipresent. In seminars, when I talk about this idea, people always complain that one shouldn’t stop when their writing is flowing. I totally disagree. If you know what happens when you stop, you’ll know what happens when you come back.

For myself, I almost always stop in the middle of a sentence. I’ll leave urgent half-sentences hanging for days, waiting desperately to be finished. Eg. “In a sudden burst of speed, she smacked the gun away and leapt behind...”

Go ahead. You know you want to.

 4) Utilize The Technology-Free Hour

Everyone in my life has great respect for my writing hours, and this is solely because I, myself respect my writing time. Here’s how I do it--

A) I tell everyone who is likely to contact me that I will be writing for the next hour.

B) I turn off my phone.

C) I turn over an actual hourglass (See Tip #7), and don’t leave the chair until every grain of sand has fallen.

D) I limit my internet access to searching for synonyms or doing specific, relevant research on my writing. You might think, if you have writer’s block, that you will stare at a blank word document for the full hour… you’d be wrong. I have never, not one single time, stood up from one of these writing hours without having written something. Fact is, you can only stare at a blinking cursor so long.

Stop worrying about finishing your novel. Just plan that next hour, and slowly, it WILL get done.

5) If You Can’t Force Yourself To Write…

So you’ve read the above tip twenty times, but it hurts you to even think about writing. It’s never as good as you want it to be. You schedule the hour, but can’t make yourself respect it, and find yourself doodling or watching TV…

Well, if you can’t force yourself to write, use your writing time better. Watch something related to your project. Read something that will make you think about the ideas you want to include. The more stories that you burn through, whether in film or the written word, the more excited you will get about the many things you can incorporate into your own fiction.

 6) Join A Writer’s Group

Okay, okay. Not everyone has the time or the inclination. I, myself, haven’t been in a LONG time. That said, when I was writing Tiny Instruments, knowing that the writer’s group was eagerly awaiting the next chapter gave me some kind of motivation when thoughts like, “But the odds of me becoming successful are so slim!” and “But nobody reads books anymore anyway!”, came creeping in.

If your primary motivation comes from others, there’s especially something to be said about surrounding yourself with like-minded individuals who are all working toward the same goal. There’s a certain energy that gets your thoughts flowing.

As far as joining a group goes, my advice is this--

If it speaks to you, do it. If it doesn’t, don’t.

 7) Buy Yourself A New Pen, A New Hourglass, Or A “New” Typewriter

Weird advice, huh?

If you can’t afford it, I wouldn’t recommend doing this one often. Still, this tidbit is far more effective than you might first believe.

The logic is simple. If you have a REALLY nice pen, you’re going to want to use it. If you’re anything like me, you’re going to be just dying to put that Mont Blanc on the paper… go ahead. Feel how smooth it glides across the sheet as you crank out the world’s next great novel!

8) Realize That Crappy Writing Is Better Than No Writing

Perfectionist tendencies in writing are wonderful. They allow you to bring your writing to a whole new level as you constantly search for that perfect turn of phrase… but if you don’t knock it off, you’ll never publish a damn thing! Repeat after me: The more you write, the better you get.

There’s nothing wrong with taking pride in your work, but over-perfectionism can strangle a writer’s career; believe me, I’ve suffered with this throughout all of mine.

It's that simple. Follow the above, and soon, you’ll be holding your finished novel in your hands.