L.M. Merrington's Blog, page 3

Creative play

I’ve just come home from five wonderful days at the Sydney Artists Retreat, which I try to get to every year. On the drive back, I happened to listen to a fantastic podcast from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) with Liz Gilbert (author of Eat, Pray, Love and Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear) discussing creativity.

One of the many topics that came up was the blocks that people often have about creativity – her statistic was that something like 78 per cent of people say they’ve been told at some point that they’re not creative (e.g. that they “can’t” sing/dance/paint/write), which often leads to people becoming blocked or giving up on certain art forms. Often, sadly, this occurs in our childhood and adolescence, and a lot of us never get over it. Julia Cameron’s seminal book The Artist’s Way is used by practically every artist I know to address this – but that’s a post for another time.

Anyway, the thing that struck me most about this in the context of the retreat was that even if we’ve got over our blocks sufficiently to develop a primary art form, many of us still feel that way about other types of art, as if they’re all mutually exclusive. There’s still the idea that you’re a writer or a visual artist or a musician, when in fact creativity often crosses boundaries. Although it’s true that most artists excel in one main field – due to the sheer amount of time and effort involved in developing talent to a high standard – it can be immensely freeing to engage in creative play in mediums that aren’t your natural inclination.

[image error] One of my paintings from the Sydney Artists Retreat

One of the things I love about the Sydney Artists Retreat is that it’s one of the few places I’ve been that actively encourages this. The competitive aspect of art is stripped away and attendees are encouraged to engage in whatever art form they feel called to, even if it’s not the project they came to work on. So, despite intending to spend the week working on the second draft of The Iron Line, what I did most was paint, sing, play piano and make things out of clay. Was it immediately ‘useful’? No. I’m a writer, and words will always be my primary art form. But it was incredibly relaxing and refreshing, which was exactly what I needed after several months of stress and creative paralysis. It didn’t matter if my paintings were ‘good’ or not – what was important was that the act of creating them tapped a well in me that I was worried was starting to run dry.

So I guess the moral of this story (and I’m sure Liz Gilbert would agree) is don’t be afraid to play. It doesn’t have to be great – it doesn’t even have to be good, whatever that is. Just get stuck in – sculpt, paint, write, dance, sing, sew – whatever gives you joy. Because ultimately we’re all creative beings – we just have to stop telling ourselves we’re not.

Dictation for writers

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One of the great myths about writing is that it only occurs when you’re typing on a keyboard (or writing by hand, if you prefer). In my case, however – and I know I’m not alone here – a great deal of my ‘writing’ takes place when I’m away from my desk, often when I’m doing something mundane, like housework or waiting for the bus. Different stories take different lengths of time to percolate, and I’ve found no relationship between the length of the story and the time required. Greythorne, for example, came together relatively quickly – within a week of getting the idea I was writing it down, and I had a first draft in three months – but The Iron Line is taking a bit longer. And, weirdly enough, I just finished a 2000-word short story, Reset (which I hope to make available to my newsletter subscribers very soon), which has been percolating for nine months – a long time for such a short piece.

In recognition of the idea that ‘writing’ actually often consists of random musings while doing other things, a growing number of authors have turned to technology, especially dictation software, to fill the gap. Indie superstar Joanna Penn often dicusses how she dictates her books while going on long walks, and many others have followed suit. In the past, I’ve found that switching mediums (especially going from the computer to writing by hand) can really help me when I’m feeling creatively blocked, so I decided to test-run the dictation thing, with interesting results. I used Dragon Naturally Speaking and dictated directly into Scrivener at first, before switching to recording directly into my phone for the second experiment.

Conclusion 1: Dictating my novel directly doesn’t work for me.

Dictation software has improved in leaps and bounds over the last few years, and it’s now actually pretty accurate most of the time (especially if you have a decent mic). My dislike of dictation stems not from the reliability of the software, but from the way it changed my thought processes, which was completely unexpected.

I’m a very visual person and, it turns out, there’s also something about the touch of the keyboard or pen that helps words flow for me. When I had to dictate them, my brain felt sluggish, as if it couldn’t handle having to get the words out through my mouth rather than my hands. Pauses were more awkward, as I felt like I should be speaking fluently, and at the same time I was very conscious about having to speak clearly so the software would pick it up.

It’s also worth noting that I’m a fast typist, so I didn’t gain a lot time-wise from dictating, especially when you factor in the time needed to go back and edit the mistakes (one of the best ones was when I mentioned how someone “smiled with his mouth but not his eyes” and it heard “mouth” as “mouse”). However, if you’re a slower typist, have issues like RSI, or are more of an auditory person, dictation may work very well for you.

Conclusion 2: Abstract recording (as opposed to direct dictation) really helps when I’m blocked.

I’m currently working on the second draft of The Iron Line, which is written in the first person. In the past when I’ve got stuck, I’ve often ‘interviewed’ my characters in my head and written down their responses. During a particularly blocked patch about a month ago, I decided to go one step further and record myself speaking in the voice of the main character, just as if it was a proper interview. I’d been taking some improv acting classes and was feeling much more comfortable about developing a character on the fly, so I figured it was worth a try.

It worked a treat. Unlike the direct dictation, where I kept getting stuck looking for the right word, these ‘interviews’ were more guides for the plot than anything else. I basically asked my character ‘What happened next and how did it make you feel?’ and then got in her head and told the story in her voice. The words didn’t necessarily make it into the written version verbatim, but listening to the recording helped keep the plot on track, and there was much less pressure just sitting on the couch and talking, rather than staring at a screen. Perhaps it’s because of my journalism background, and the fact that I’ve done a lot of interviews on both sides of the mic, but I found it really unlocked something just by approaching it a different way.

So I guess the moral of this story is don’t be afraid to try new things. We’re so lucky with the way technology is developing and that we now have so many innovative solutions available to us – not just as writers, but in daily life. If something isn’t working for you, change it up – you never know, you may just hit on the key that unlocks it all.

Fiction vs non-fiction

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Well, I have some exciting news – my first non-fiction book, Communications for Volunteers: Low-Cost Strategies for Community Groups is out on Monday! It’s an introductory-level communications handbook for grassroots volunteer groups, which I was inspired to write through my own volunteering experience (I realised that many volunteer groups don’t have a good understanding of how best to market themselves or communicate with their members, and there aren’t many resources out there to help them).

This book was turned around relatively quickly – nine months from concept to publication – and it’s also my first foray into indie publishing, which has been a massive learning curve. At the same time, I’ve also been trying to edit and rewrite The Iron Line, which has taken a lot longer and been a lot more difficult than I anticipated, and it’s got me thinking a lot about the differences between fiction and non-fiction.

Many authors prefer to focus on either fiction or non-fiction, but I’ve been lucky in that, over the years, I’ve learned to write in many different styles. I’ve written fiction for almost as long as I can remember (and I’m still learning so much about the craft), but I’ve also worked as a journalist,  published various academic articles (and written a PhD thesis), and worked as an editor and writing trainer for the government, which is a whole different style again.

For me, non-fiction is a whole lot easier than fiction. I’m now pretty comfortable with straight-up general non-fiction, which is what my communications book is, but I still feel I’m on an incredibly steep learning curve with fiction. In general non-fiction, you still have to worry about structure, tone, voice and many other ‘craft’ aspects, but I find them a lot more straightforward to master than in fiction, where you also have to deal with characterisation, plot, subtext, dialogue, emotion and a whole raft of other things. It’s the difference between learning to juggle with two balls and then having to juggle ten – while they’re on fire.

The one writing style I still have a lot of trouble with is creative non-fiction. I’m a huge fan of longform journalism and personal essays, but I feel like a complete novice when I try to write them myself. I recently had a piece rejected by a literary journal (after getting quite a long way through the process) because in the end it was based too heavily on reportage, without enough ‘literary’-style analysis. I guess the moral of the story is that you never, ever stop learning, and just because you’re good at one style or genre doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a master of them all. I have to remind myself of this sometimes when I get a bit despondent about how The Iron Line is progressing – like at the moment, when I’m feeling like every word I write is garbage – and remember that this is a process of growth that takes years, if not your whole life. I think part of the reason I’m finding The Iron Line so challenging is that, now that I know I can finish a book (which was the main goal of Greythorne), I’m pushing myself in other ways. This will hopefully make for a better novel, but it’s pretty painful when you’re in the middle of it. In any case, for now I’m just enjoying the feeling of once again seeing my words between covers. That never gets old.

Anatomy of a Novel Part 9: Troubleshooting

It’s taken four months, but I’ve finally finished the first read-through of The Iron Line and I’m starting to overhaul it. I naively thought the second book would be easier than the first – because I know what I’m doing now, right? Wrong.

The first draft of Greythorne took three months to write and I let it percolate for only three weeks before I launched into editing and rewriting. The first draft of The Iron Line took a similar amount of time – four months, although it’s also longer than Greythorne – and I finished it in September last year…and haven’t touched it since. To be fair, I also completed a non-fiction book in the middle there and had a few other projects on the go as well, but this one needed a bit more time to stew. The first draft read like a bad episode of Midsomer Murders, and I couldn’t really see a way out.

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Then, while I was in Sydney over Christmas, I picked up Steven James’s excellent book, Troubleshooting Your Novel, which was exactly what I needed to get me out of the writing funk I’ve been in. The book is broken into bite-sized chapters that each deal with a different technical aspect of writing, such as causality, escalation, believability, subtext and many more (there are 80 in total!), and James gives great advice on how to identify problems in your manuscript and – even better – how to fix them.

One of the tactics he recommends when looking at causality is to make a list of events (he says in a particular scene, but I did it for the whole book) and how they lead into each other – essentially showing cause and effect. This was a revelation for me and led to a complete overhauling of the plot. When I mapped out the sequence of events it was easy to see that I had the main plot and the subplot mixed up, and the whole thing feels much more coherent now. There are still plenty of things wrong with the story, but I think this problem was the main one. I find I get a gut feeling when a story is working (or isn’t), and with the new outline it feels like the pieces have fallen into place. The same thing happened with Greythorne – everything was slightly out of whack until one of my beta readers suggested a change to the ending, which then fixed a whole bunch of other problems as well.

People tend to think that fiction-writing is primarily a creative or right-brained pursuit, and in the first draft it is. But once that first draft’s done it becomes highly analytical – it’s all about problem-solving, technique and craft. This was the thing it took me many years to learn – that to be a successful writer (‘successful’ by my definition meaning you actually finish things and people read them and don’t think they’re terrible) you have to be able to meld the creative and the analytical. It’s not enough to just have great ideas – you need to have a strong enough understanding of technique to be able to execute them properly. In that sense, it’s like any other art form (no one would suggest you can become a concert pianist without doing lots and lots of scales), but I think most readers – and many beginning writers – don’t understand just how important the craft side is. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I became a much better creative writer around the same time that my analytical skills were kicked up a gear by doing a PhD in an unrelated field.

Anyhow, after several months of feeling rather ‘bleugh’ about the novel, I feel like I’ve now got my mojo back and I’m ready to tackle the next draft. In the meantime, my new non-fiction book, Communications for Volunteers, will be out in early March. I’ll keep you posted.