Brian Yansky's Blog, page 31

wear a helmet & kneepads

"You've got to jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down." Annie Dillard.

Sometimes you have to do this in writing. You can plan all you want but if you're writing from the place I believe you should be writing from-- that place deep within you and below your conscious mind which is all too interfering in the intuitive connections stories require—then you will be jumping off some cliffs and building your wings on the way down.

Good luck.

Wear a helmet and kneepads.

tension

What makes people tense? Lots of things. But what makes them most tense is when they're unsure about something. For example, they think they might know that their boyfriend or girlfriend or husband or wife is having an affair, but they aren't sure. Once they're sure, one way or another, they might feel a lot of things but the tension is different. I could be wrong about this but I think the peak of the tension is not knowing.

When your goal is to intensify tension one of the best ways to do t...

WADD

Along with this notion of the necessity of writing nearly every day for some length of time should be my confession that, however long I sit at my desk, I am writing during much of the day when I am away from it.

It's a kind of disease or illness that can certainly lead to trouble for the writer. I've got a name for this disease. I call it WADD: Writers' Attention Deficit Disorder. How many of my brother and sister writers out there suffer from it? Very many. Perhaps most.

Here are some signs...

writewritewrite

I read Stephen King's book on writing not too long ago. I admire his work ethic as a writer and his struggle to write the best he can. He says a writer should find three or four hours a day to do some combination of reading and writing. Of course, he doesn't have a day job, so it may be that your job stops you from finding that much time. Some days mine does.

But you do need to find time to write. In my opinion it needs to be almost every day, even if you only find thirty minutes to write. E...

Sooner is Better

One thing that my last manuscript taught me is something I had heard Kurt Vonnegut say and something I'm trying to do in my new WIP.

Tell everything you can as soon as you can. Don't hold back. Don't try to keep things hidden in the hopes of adding suspense. Okay, there are plot points you may eventually realize can be hidden and their press against the story will help in terms of tension BUT too often we withhold because we think something is cool and needs to be set up with a lot of events...

delusion

Delusion can be a good thing for a writer.

You have to fool yourself into writing. If we didn't fool ourselves, we would never start in the first place. You have to fool yourself when you're a novice that you're writing good fiction when, most likely, you're struggling to find your way, learn technique, learn what works for you and what doesn't. And every first draft, whether it's the writer's first novel or fifth or beyond, requires that the writer fool himself into pushing on. In a first dr...

Process 4--revision

After I've gotten through my drafting stage I get to my first revision (which most likely is the third or fourth time I've worked through the manuscript). It's still messy but the main elements of the story are there: the characters are fleshed out, and the structure seems pretty sound. I may still move chapters or sections around a little, but I have a sense at this point that I might actually finish this novel. I have a pretty good idea of what the larger concern or concerns is or are in th...

Making Connections

How do you get the reader to connect to your work? You make them feel involved. Sure, right, but how? One thing they must do is be involved in the story and one way you can get them involved is by not with-holding what is going on in the character. The character is constantly being affected by what is happening in each scene. He's changing. OR he should be. If he's not maybe something is wrong in your scene.

All these changes can be small ones that occur when he encounters something, well, s...

Process3-drafting

For me, first revision isn't really a revision. I call it drafting because for the first two or three drafts I'm still working on finding my way. I know that, in a way, until you get to the time of polishing the novel—the end stage—it's all really finding your way, but in the first drafts I'm spending most of my time finding my way and I know I'm lost a lot.

In draft 1 I'm chopping my way through the wilderness. I don't really know where I'll end up. I'm not sure I'll end up anywhere. Draft 2...

Process2-first drafts

First drafts are messy. There's no way around that. They're infuriatingly messy. You can't THINK too much when you're in front of the computer screen or you will freeze up but you do think about the manuscript at other times. Compulsively, you wonder about this detail or choice or character. Especially the choices—these you wonder about a lot. You get lost. Your story zigs. It zags. It leads you through a wood so thick you have to hack your way out.

You will think, of course, but when you si...