The ‘How’ of the Writing

By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

For someone who doesn’t think of herself as much of a speaker, I’ve been very busy with speaking engagements in the last few months.  I’ve got less than two weeks before my next talk, this time at a North Carolina high school.  An English teacher invited me (I have a very difficult time turning down high school English teachers…my father was one) to speak during lunchtime to a group of kids who were interested in creative writing.

I asked the teacher what she’d like me to speak on and she mentioned a variety of different topics.  Then she said, “They mostly struggle with the how of it.”

Which I remember.  I remember poring over writing books and thinking, okay, this is all fine, but how do I do this?

The sad thing is that now I’m in the same boat—the how is no longer a problem, but how do you explain how?

My tips are mainly on process. I have a series of best practices that typically work very well for me: wake up at the same time each day and before anyone else does.  Think about my story before I sit down to write. Write one sentence at the end of each writing session to indicate where I left off and where I need to pick up. Use timers. Write in short sessions. Be flexible as to time and place for my writing so that I can squeeze writing into small openings in my day. Don’t edit as I go.

Those are, I think, good tips.  But does this really address the how?

When I read writing craft articles when I was just starting out, they were definitely helpful for everything from character creation to pace to literary elements. But they didn’t seem to give me the general compass I was looking for. The how.

I read an interesting article last week by Courtney E. Martin called “How the Sausage Gets Made” about creating in life’s chaos.  She makes a great point about progress occurring in “the invisible muck of creation,” the doing of it.  The writing, in the middle of living.  The article reminded me again that I think the most important trait for writers is stubbornness.  But, still, what about the how?

At this point, for me, it’s automatic because I’ve written the same genre for over ten years (counting the time before I first got published).  But how did I do it that first time? And the time after that?  I had to sit down and reconstruct it.

One of the most glib bits of advice for new writers is “read a lot.”  It’s essentially good advice. But it’s really too vague to be helpful.

What I did for that first book I wrote was to read a lot of the genre I felt most able to write.

I asked myself: what if this book hadn’t ended this way?  What if Jim had been the killer instead of Ellen?  How would that have changed the book?  Would it have made it better?

I read cozy mysteries in great numbers and carefully noted patterns in each book.  Did they start with dialogue? Action? Was there a body at the very start of the book? Was it later?  How many authors introduced suspects one at a time?  At once? How did they handle it so that it wasn’t confusing?  What made their sleuth likeable or at least charismatic if not likeable?   What was the pace like?  Does the story work?  What don’t I like about the story?

And, most importantly, what were the best parts, the most satisfying parts of each book and what were my expectations as a reader the more cozies that I read?  How did I feel when these expectations weren’t met?

Then I read reviews of the books.  The most helpful were the bad reviews, the customer reviews on Amazon.  They offered scope to help me see what made readers pleased and upset.

And then, after a while, the rhythm of the genre became automatic. And I had to really figure out exactly how I’d figured out the how.

It was a lab.  A self-created lab on writing this particular subgenre. And it helped me to pattern my own book after the more successful stories.

For me, this is the how of it.  But I’m curious to hear yours.  How did you figure out how to write your genre?  Advice for high school writers?

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