The Number One Problem Writers Face

By: Deb McLeod

This past year has been one of experimentation for me. I’ve started projects, shelved projects, or put them off until later. I’ve finished four novel drafts, and a few half-drafts. I designed and delivered a class on revision. And, I spent the past year working with marketing experts to determine if and how to bring my coaching business online. It’s been quite a year. 

Now I’m beginning to look at what was accomplished, what was not, and what continues to baffle me.

The Writer's #1 Problem

Working with the marketing experts has been particularly intriguing. One of the key ingredients necessary when you’re working on marketing your business is to discover what the #1 problem your clients have. Of course, if you can provide an answer to that #1 problem, well, you’re golden.

Even if potential clients don’t know fixing the #1 problem is what they need, the clients who need to find you will find you because you’ve articulated their biggest problem. And of course, when you provide a solution, well, it’s a win-win.

I’ve been coaching for more than seventeen years so I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what a writer’s #1 problem might be. Over the years, I would uncover a problem, either in my client’s work, or in my own. It might be craft, it might be process, it might be accountability. Then I would design a class, design a way to be accountable, or document my process so I could teach it. All would be well for my clients for a bit until another problem surfaced. 

I never could get to the bottom of the problem pile though. What I offered helped, but it wasn’t the fix. 

For a long time I thought accountability would be the fix. I thought the problem was a lack of communal drive to get the work done. Creative competition is a great driving force. Creative support will get work done like nothing else. But after my year-long experiment hosting an accountability membership site, I can see that accountability is a surface portion of the real problem. That under accountability lies a bigger issue. 

After much thought, lots of questions, and comparing notes with other coaches and writing teachers, I now know what I feel like I knew all along. So simple to recognize when you’re looking at it the right way. 

The #1 problem writers face is a lack of inspiration. 

I want to say – well, duh!

But it feels great to be able to put that into words. And it feels strange too. You see, I never really thought I suffered from a lack of inspiration. My suffering always centered around time. Around too much life to live to take time out to write. Then there was a lack of knowledge about craft. My ideas were bigger than I knew how to write. Then there was lack of process. I had no clue for a long time how you got from the beginning to the end of writing a story. 

But I always wanted to write. I always saw myself writing. I always, always knew I would find a way. And I squirreled away time to write. I got up in the middle of the night. I wrote on my commute to work by dictating into a tape player. I wrote at lunch when I had to work and that kept me "cubically" sane. 

I was always inspired to write. Wasn’t I? 

Or were the issues that kept me from committing to writing in a real way (money, job, kid) manufactured by me because I was inspired to dabble? Not inspired to write? 

I’ll never know the answer to that because I’m inspired now and I will never go back. Life simply isn’t in Technicolor when I don’t write. 

The #1 Solution
So early in my marketing investigations, I never really considered that a lack of inspiration would be the #1 problem writer’s face. But what I do know is that it will continue to be a problem until writers find a way to make their writing a practice. Not a habit. A practice that they have to do to make their world feel right. 

By the way, a writing practice can be created. But the million dollar question is: can it be taught? How do you inspire someone to come along on the transformational journey that is a writing practice?  

I do not have the answer.  

Pom Pom Girl

At times my husband, John, calls me the Pom Pom Girl, or says your pom poms are showing again. Aside from the obvious jokes about that, what he means is that I’ve spent a lot of time on the sidelines of my family (and my clients), cheering everyone on. I’m the one who knows they can do it. I’m the one who sits with them until we find a solution. I’m the one ready with the smile, with the words of encouragement. I love pooling resources and brainstorming and finding a way, no matter what the issue is. I’m the Pom Pom Girl and life is great!

Until I’m not, because a more thankless job could not possibly be found, right??? And where’s the Pom Pom Girl for me??? Well, my clients have been my Pom Pom Girls. Over the years sharing success, sharing dreams, sharing solutions and doing it together has been what’s inspired me. 

And I’ve crossed a line that became very evident not long ago. Writing for me is not a habit. It’s a practice. 

Here’s how I can tell
I used to do vacations differently. In the old days, vacation for me meant bringing my writing because that was the treat I got to do when I stepped out of my day-to-day life. I have so many journal entries of short stories written as we drove in the car or flew toward the beach. I would get so many ideas when I was on vacation. I have pages of observations about where we were and the people we met. Invaluable details about place. 

But not long ago we went to San Diego. We were at a wonderful hotel on the water for a full seven days. John was in a conference every day from early till late. I planned to get a ton of writing done on my vacation. I brought the supplies. I had the time. I found the place(s) to write. I found the coffee. I had the sun. 

It was the hardest writing I’ve ever done. Because I WAS ON VACATION! Writing had become the day-to-day and vacation-me wanted a break. What a fantastic turnaround!

So now, when I go on vacation, I bring my work, but not my expectations. I’ve earned the vacation from the writing just like anyone who takes a vacation from their job. Though I still bring it and I still work most every day. But not as hard and not as fiercely as I used to when writing was still a “treat.” 

I’m on the other side of that. And I’d love to know how to help other writers get on the other side of their writing too. But that takes me back to the question of whether or not you can inspire someone to take the writing journey.

After much thinking, what I’ve discovered is that the solution to prodding writers to exercise their voice is not a-one-size-fits-all solution. Writers need different things to inspire themselves so they will find a place for their work in their day-to-day world. They need different things depending upon where they are in their project. They need different solutions depending upon where they are in their life and how writing fits into it and whether their families are supportive, tolerant, or outright scornful. Everyone needs a different solution.

So I don’t have any answers, but at least now I know where the focus needs to be for each and every writer. In order to transform your world from where it is to a writing world, the answer is to discover, develop, and honor what inspires you.

So I’m asking. Really. Spend some time with yourself and see if you can figure out what inspires you. Ask yourself these questions:
  

When you’re writing, and I don’t mean slogging to a deadline, or earning your green check mark on my accountability site, what is it that gets you to step out of your day-to-day life to write? 

• Is it the story you’re working on that you’re excited about? If it is, when you’re excited about your story, try to say when in the project you typically get excited. At the beginning? Or further in when the story starts to come together and all you have to do is write it? Does revision inspire you? (NOT!)

• Is it when you learn a new piece of craft and try it?

• Is it after you’ve attended one of my Spilling Ink! Classes and learned all the ways the scene you thought was flat actually contains your own brand of brilliance?

• Is it when you go on vacation? 

When your life is said and done if you knew what inspired you and you kept that in the forefront of your world... seems like that would be the difference in whether you made the transformation or you did not.

I’m always here to help if you need me – my pom poms are at the ready. 

But, really, inspiration? That one’s on you. 


About the Author: Deb McLeod, MFA, practices novel research immersion. For her novel, The Train to Pescara, Deb journeyed to Sardinia to study ancient goddess worship and spent time in the Abruzzi village her great-grandparents left in 1905. Her metaphysical knowledge for the Angel Thriller, The Julia Set, culminates from four years of studying and teaching meditation, clairvoyance and chakra healing. For over fourteen years, Deb McLeod has been a creative writing coach helping other writers to embrace their passion and get their words on the page. For more, see www.debmcleod.com.

Upmarket Your Fiction

By: Deb McLeod

I have the first step to all writing, all marketing, and all book-selling problems! And I'm going to give it to you right here....

Write a story worth reading!

Sounds facetious, doesn’t it? With the advent of self-publishing, standards are slipping. It’s too easy to publish without editing so that’s what a lot of writers are doing. Somewhere along the line a fantasy developed around self-publishing and it’s now deemed a fact. According to the fantasy, all you need to do to make it as a self-published author is to put out more content.

But I’d challenge you to find self-published authors who are making any kind of real sales who have simply slapped up a quick drafty-draft and written another. The exception is erotica. Erotica audiences don’t appear to be too discerning.

While it is important to feed the reader pipeline as quick as possible, what will really make a writer successful is a readership who will not only buy your books but who will become rabid fans. And the key to that is to write a book worth reading. My definition of that is a novel that is both well-written and contains a good, juicy story.

To be really honest, even the writing doesn’t have to be all that great. It’s the story that has to work.

Case(s) in point, among many others: “Fifty Shades of Gray,” “Bridges of Madison County,” Dan Brown’s novels, etc. Just looking at these three, you can note that while the writing isn’t great, the story touches some primal element in a large number of readers. The stories are compelling and that’s what sold these books and built up rabid fans.

I’m a story developer, not without some skill. I’ve been working, studying, teaching, and writing stories for a long time so I know a thing or three.

Recently I was asked what advice I’d give to a new-er writer. Learning story development has to be my first and best advice to any writer.

What is story development?

Story development is a practice based on understanding the dramatic elements of plot and how they work together to create a satisfying and well-paced story. Taking story development one level deeper means understanding the relationship between the structure of a particular story to its content, then letting the content dictate the form.

The three types of fiction: Commercial, literary, and upmarket.

Commercial fiction contains all genre fiction. Its focus is entertainment. Literary fiction strives to make sense of the human condition. It’s focus is generally language. Commercial fiction reads faster than most literary fiction. Commercial fiction generally has a stronger plot element. Literary fiction tends to focus on the quality of the writing over plot elements. Commercial fiction is an easier sell and appeals to a wider audience. Literary fiction is a harder sell and appeals to a narrower audience.

Upmarket fiction holds court somewhere in between. Upmarket fiction contains both excellent writing and a story that appeals to a wide audience. It often genre bends or combines genres. It's new, fresh and sells well.

I teach all my clients, whether commercial or literary, to shoot for the upmarket section on the fiction continuum. If they’re writing in a commercial genre, and they focus on language and the human condition a bit within their genre, is it possible they’ll float to the top of their category? I think so.

Recently a first-time romance author (formerly a literary author) published her book and shot to the top spots on Amazon. She wasn’t even sure when she was writing it if it could be classified as romance. It’s a good story and it’s well written. Now she’s being rewarded for that.

One of my clients last year happened to be someone in my MFA program. She’d written a literary novel but was told by an agent that it would be too hard to sell, unless my friend could rewrite with a tighter plot and some of commercial fiction elements. Basically she would need to bring it closer to Upmarket Fiction. So my friend sent it to me. It was beautifully written but the plot didn’t hold and the character development wasn’t what it could be.

I did a story edit for her. She rewrote it and contacted the agent again. The agent signed her and sold her right out of the gate. It’s difficult to place literary fiction, but my friend had a leg up with that book when she began to understand the plotting elements she needed to change. That will stay with her the next time she writes a novel. And I bet she’ll aim for Upmarket.

But don’t listen to me.

I’m writing this today because I just got off the phone with a new-to-me-client. I don’t do much book doctoring these days. It’s a bit frustrating when someone is already finished with their manuscript before they send it to me and then they find out they have to rewrite. So nowadays, I like to work with people when they’re in the thick of it, as they’re creating the draft or working on their first revision. It saves so much time!

But this person had a draft already done. She knew there was something not quite right with it and she contracted to have me read it and provide advice.

She's multi-published; she’s a literary women's fiction author who was writing a sequel to a novel that was already out there. She had traditionally published that novel and had some success with it.

Before I got the manuscript I read the first book so I could familiarize myself with the story and be ready when it was time to dive into the second. I read the manuscript, made my recommendations and sent it off to her. I always include a section to be sure and call with questions, or to talk about solutions I posed or to brainstorm new ones. I love to do that!

Unfortunately, the manuscript she sent does not work. In my reply to her I used her first story to illustrate why book one works and book two doesn't. She did call that analysis brilliant. And understood a bit of what she had to revise.

After all my work with story these past three years her problems were clear as clear to me. What she needed to consider in order to fix it was also clear to me. She emailed me and thanked me for my comments. Two days later, she emailed again and asked if we could set up a phone appointment.

I thought she wanted to talk about solutions I had posed or to do some brainstorming. But what she really wanted to do was to defend her work to me. I tried hard to stay in observer mode and watch the writerly machinations to prove that the story works (when it doesn't). It so reminded me of being in a critique group. I know I have done this myself so I don't really fault her. It's hard to hear that a piece of work you think is done, really isn’t done. And not only not done, but if there are story problems, that means that down at the bones it doesn't work. This is the exact reason I developed the writing program I have so I’m not trying to convince someone “after the fact” that the story doesn’t work. Because by then, they’re invested in the way they told it.
So, while she talked, I tried hard to bite my tongue and listen, to not get into an attitude of "I'm right" even though I am, but to stay in compassion-mode when what I really wanted to do was to tell her to stop being so obtuse and wasting all that time, effort, and hope on something that could be fixed if she was merely open enough to hear solutions.

Let me digress for a second and remind you she’s a literary writer and her criticisms of my suggestions had to do with the fact that they were “commercial fiction” suggestions about plot.

If you knew me from the old days of writing (the 90s), you would know how frustrating I find the literary vs commercial issue. Each camp could learn a boatload from the other. I know I have. I have a formal literary creative writing education and an informal commercial self-study education.

When I write, I try to be right in the middle between the two. I want to focus on character and language and be respected for my literary prowess. But I want a story that works and one that sells, too. I think I'm smart. I want to be Andre Dubois III when I grow up. He writes in the middle with a nudge toward literary. But his stories are good stories. His novels have plot. I write with nudge toward commercial. When I'm rich and famous I'll lean in his direction. But for now, I've got a plan.

So back to my client. She kept dropping names of people she's studied with and giving their blanket statements about writing. NEVER plot was one of the maxims. How do you fight that ridiculousness?

I let her wind down, tried to tune out and let her defend a turn of her plot that took her heroine out of the story, breaking all forward momentum and basically caused the story to fall apart. As she defended her decision, I typed up her bill.

When we were finished, I began to think about why that conversation had to come into my world. And why it wouldn’t leave me alone. I kept thinking about what she said. So, as with all things in my world, I had to reframe it so I could let it go. And as I thought about it, I began to be grateful for the conversation. I believe in the way I write and what I teach.

I can’t connect with everyone and I’m not right all the time, but I was pretty sure I was right in this case. So after thinking about it, I’m grateful for the conversation, because I came up with a new tagline:

"Work with me and write a book worth reading."

About the Author: Deb McLeod, MFA, practices novel research immersion. For her novel, The Train to Pescara, Deb journeyed to Sardinia to study ancient goddess worship and spent time in the Abruzzi village her great-grandparents left in 1905. Her metaphysical knowledge for the Angel Thriller, The Julia Set, culminates from four years of studying and teaching meditation, clairvoyance and chakra healing. For over fourteen years, Deb McLeod has been a creative writing coach helping other writers to embrace their passion and get their words on the page. For more, see www.debmcleod.com.

The Novel Writing Process

By: Deb McLeod

How do you write a novel?

If you’ve completed a novel you have a process you used that got you to that milestone. If you haven’t yet finished a novel, you, too, have a process you’re using to get you to the end result. If you want to write, but you aren’t, you’re working a process too. The process is not writing and the by-product fulfills the process. Make sense?

The product you get is created by the process you follow. 

• Focus on improving the process and you’ll improve the product. 
• Focus on improving the product and while you’re in your processes, trial and error ensues. Judgment rules and writer’s block flirts on the horizon. 

Writing a novel is a matter of focus. Where will you put your focus? On the product or the process?

While no two people write a novel the same way, or use the exact same processes, there are generalities that can be applied. Here are the four stages of novel writing as I see them:

1. Idea stage
2. Creation stage
3. Revision stage
4. Sharing stage

Each stage involves getting clear on the processes used to achieve the goal of the stage. Let’s say I’m in the Creation Stage and I’m focused on the end product – my really good novel I want to create.

Are the pages I produce during the creation phase going to be good enough to stay in my really good novel product? Probably not. These are first draft pages. And drafty ones at that. What happens when those creation pages are judged against the end product (my very good novel)? They fail. When they fail, I freeze. I go take a craft class. Or join a critique group. Or get writer’s block.

Turn that around and look at what happens when you give yourself permission to really be in the stage you’re in and focus on learning what works best for you within that stage.

If I’m in the creation stage, and I’m okay with the fact that everything I’m writing is teaching me what my book wants to be, then whatever I write is okay. Right? It’s all fodder for the gristmill. And you never know what connections you’re going to make if you give yourself permission to freewrite scenes that may or may not make the cut. What happens if you quick-write scenes that aren’t fleshed out but have the gist of what you want to say?

I’m a firm believer (because it holds true for me) in “How do I know what I mean until I see what I say?”

It has been said that the first response will be a cliché. And it’s been said that the first thoughts are thoughts without a filter. Which one are you? Do you gravitate toward the predictable? Or if you write fast enough that your internal editor can’t shut you down, are your scenes more vivid and memorable? I think you should know where you fall here. It’s good information for next time. Right?

Take a look at the stages that follow and see some of the definitions, goals and the skills that are necessary to use the stage to your advantage.

Idea Stage – freewriting, reading, mulling, talking, brainstorming, playing what if, creating an overview outline, digging into characters.
Goal = deciding on an idea with characters you think has legs. Legs simply means an idea that has the possibility of being interesting and will hold for the length of the novel.
Skills necessary to master: novel concepts, plot twists, outer conflict potential, character exploration and psychology, mythic characters.

Creation Stage – freewriting, using prompts, NaNoWriMo, word vomit.
Goal = accumulate enough material for your novel.
Skills necessary to master: Freewriting to an ever-changing timer, scene construction, type of conflict, using the senses, figurative language, metaphor, discipline to write daily, a place or container that is conducive to your writing, how to use prompts effectively (even the stupid ones).

Revision Stage – analyzing, model book(s), thematic discovery, detailed outlining for character arc, detailed outlining for scene arc, rewriting.
Goal = understanding what you wrote and how to shape into a viable product.
Skills necessary to master: story structure, following theme trails, outlining, deep character discovery, scene structure and conflict, rewriting for the reader.

Sharing Stage – critique group, beta readers, sending to agents, etc.
Goal = testing the waters with your almost finished product.
Skills necessary to master: letting go of your baby, cultivating a rhinoceros- thick skin, finding reader readers rather than writer readers, considering the possibility of self-publishing. Most important of all in this stage is: Start something new.

How do you learn the skills necessary? One: by doing them. Two: by taking a class. Three: by working with me. :)

Pieces not the whole
I learned the art of breaking big projects down into smaller bits when I worked as an accountant. The enormity of the (boring) job had the potential of making me want to call in sick. But the pieces gave me a sense of accomplishment. Like checking things off a list. Lo and behold, when I did the job long enough, I actually came to like it. The investigation piece was especially interesting, but even the day-to-day getting the numbers where they belonged was good, in the way cleaning a house can be good. You know? I focused on the individual pieces and came to like what I was doing. Essential for health and happiness, right?

But the skills I learned in those accounting jobs have served me greatly in writing novels and in teaching novel writing. My clients work the process and step away from judging the quality of the product too soon. They allow themselves the creative freedom to explore. They write better books, more true to their voice and their deepest feelings about the themes.

Best of all, focusing on the process gets the job done. And gets it done faster.

So narrow your focus, write every day, and master your career in steps.It just makes the whole thing achievable. And far more pleasant. 

The Writer's Inner Journey: Part Two

By: Deb McLeod

Last month I promised a road map to achieve the Zen of Writing. I’ll waste no time getting to it. Here is the answer in four simple steps:

1. Act as if 
2. Master the art transformation
3. Structure your life
4. Defeat the virus of fear

Collect the key to that illusive writer's club.

Act as If

Acting as if something is already here opens the pathways for that thing to come. Is that too woo-woo for you? Here’s a story: Once upon a time, in a between time, my husband and I were very poor. By between time I mean between jobs. We were so poor I had to be a coupon-clipping, penny-counting, budget-checking miser to make ends meet and we were sinking fast. Something had to change.

I was talking to a friend about this coupon system I found that was saving me a lot of money. She asked some questions, giving me the opportunity to brag about how little we were able to live on.

She looked at me, puzzled, and asked a life-changing question. “Are you sure that’s something you want to be good at? Living on next-to-nothing?”

Actually, no. I didn’t want to be good at living on next-to-nothing. I wanted to be good at living on abundance. 

Her question started me on a new path. I began focusing on what we did have and not what we didn’t. I began a gratitude journal. I stopped coupon clipping and all the other money-saving things I was doing. I worked on really believing. And things changed.

The woo-woo answer here is that I changed the energy of what I wanted to attract into my life. The right-brain, reality-based answer is that the political climate changed and environmental jobs opened up so my husband got work. My focus on abundance simply made the time more pleasurable while I was waiting.

Of course I believe the woo-woo version, but either way, if you act as if right now, you will get where you want to go. Don’t take my word for it. Check out the experts – start with Wayne Dyer.

I have a friend who was an oncologist. When she transitioned out of that field and into creative writing, the first thing she did was go out and buy some writer-type clothes. She wore them, started acting as if she already was that capital W Writer. She pulled on the identity and the identity became real.

So what are the elements that would help you act as if? Maybe it’s clothes. Maybe it’s writing a little bit every day. Maybe it’s hanging out with writers. Going to conferences. Joining a group. Maybe it’s calling yourself a writer when people ask what you do. Maybe it’s an assumption that you have something to say and the ability to say it.

Master the Art of Transformation

Stories transform. They often depict characters who transform throughout the story. The reader is transformed by absorbing the experience of the story. The writer is transformed by writing it.

Seeing life as story
Are you a narrativist? Do you see your life and the lives of others as stories strung together? Can you look back on the events in your life and see their beginning, middle and end? Can you see how the major events have shaped you as a person?

In my world, life is a series of growth periods. Lessons presented, accepted, worked, and absorbed. There are financial growth periods, relationship growth periods, health, parental, work or career growth periods. We’re all learning all the time. Every time something new enters your world, you’re in a growth period learning to master whatever you need to in order to move out of it. And into the next one.

Standing to the side, as observer-you, with practice, you can see what your growth period is and where you are in it. Simply knowing that makes it more manageable, to be sure. But studying growth periods, yours and those people around you, primes you to create them on the page. And stories are about transformation.

In life there is no real “sense of an ending” in our growth periods or our stories. Some say that’s one reason people read, to get that sense of an ending we don’t experience in life. Readers want to see transformation on the page – whether the character transforms (comedy) or doesn’t (tragedy), it’s the container of transformation that attracts.

Structure Your Life

Look around your world. Does writing come last? Is it the first to go when you get busy? Are there so many reasons you can’t write that acting as if is impossible? Granted there are times when you really can’t write. There are only so many hours in a day. And, if you’re going through a heavy emotional time, it’s also possible that sitting down with your thoughts is the last place you want to be.

But I contend that even during those times, it’s important to see how you might put your writing toward the top of the list. Small steps. Look for boundaries you can erect around your time. Look for writing solutions to deal with emotional pain.

Discover what rituals work for you to get into your writing space. Carve out a the time and a space. Find 30 minutes in a day, even if it means getting up early. Set a schedule. Put a sign on the door like I did when my daughter was old enough to read – Fire or Blood. When the door was closed as it was for an hour or two a day, I wasn’t to be disturbed unless there was fire or blood.

Prepare your family. Writing necessitates communion with the self. And that means you have to withdraw from what’s going on with family, friends, internet. My solution has always been to write early. When my daughter was young, I wrote in the middle of the night, when no one needed me for anything. I napped with her later.

When you’re ready to take your writing life seriously, you will start to put your writing, if not first, very close to the top. And you won't really be serious about it until you do. 

Defeat the Virus of Fear

• I don’t have time – fear based
• I don’t have an idea – fear based
• I’m blocked – fear based
• I have nothing to say that hasn’t been said – fear based
• What if the work isn’t good enough? – fear based 
• What if I get rejected, ridiculed? – fear based
• Who will listen to me? – fear based
• What if I can’t get a publisher, agent, audience? – fear based

How is “I don’t have time” fear based? Look at your world as it stands now. You have time for what you love, don’t you? You make time for your kids, your job, your spouse, your communities, your socializing, your entertainment, right? You make time because it’s not hard to do those things you love.

What is hard is to make time to do those things you fear.

There are all sorts of reasons why our first response to many things is fear. One of the most basic reasons is that that’s what we were taught. Writing is somehow not open to all, though all can write. Yet only those select few somehow get the key to the castle.

Here’s your key to the writer's club 

There is a magic answer. There is a key that is freely available to all though only precious few actually use it.

Focus on the process, not on the product.

That's the key. Work the process and before you know it you’ve taken a chunk out of your project. Perfect the process and soon it's so easy to write you're getting up before the alarm, like me. 

My clients have changed their focus from product to process and they're finishing books they’ve been working on for years. Their internal editor has bailed and they are suprising themselves creatively. 

Here's how to turn the key:

• Create a space in your life for your writing. 
• Do it every day even if just for 30 minutes.
• Break what you need to do into manageable pieces. Don’t get overwhelmed by the enormity of the project.  
• Find a way to know how a novel gets put together (craft). 
• Make a process. Or borrow one. 

Work on your project one piece at a time. Bring the happy (aka Stephen King, On Writing) into your world by writing daily and keep your focus on the process. Not the product. The product then becomes the by-product of all the days you wrote. And, I don't know anything that makes a writer happier than to "have written."

So in order to be happy, all you have to do is write every day for thirty minutes or so. I don't know anyone who can't find thirty minutes. The product will get created. And you will be focusing on what’s working in your writing world, not what isn’t working in your writing world.

Here’s the process I use and teach: 

1. Major character exploration first
2. Plot structure – I use Blake Snyder’s 15 beats and if I’m writing romance, I use romance beats to plot one liners for each scene in each beat.
3. Write the first draft as fast as you can. Pretend it’s NaNo if it isn’t. 
4. Take your draft through a revision process. (I’m teaching this later in the month, if you’re curious.)
5. Find a critique group for the editing phase – the nitpicky stuff. But don’t let them talk about plot. I wanted to add: unless they're really good, but even then they're going to be writing their book with their ideas, not yours. You don’t want to fall into that critique loop of writing by committee and changing the plot now. Just use them for what works on the scene level (tension, conflict) and fixing grammar. 
6. Repeat the process again and again. 

For more information about the methods I use and how you can join a supportive community that actually enables writers to get work done faster than if they did it on their own, check out this page: The Green Checkmark

About the Author: Deb McLeod, MFA, practices novel research immersion. For her novel, The Train to Pescara, Deb journeyed to Sardinia to study ancient goddess worship and spent time in the Abruzzi village her great-grandparents left in 1905. Her metaphysical knowledge for the Angel Thriller, The Julia Set, culminates from four years of studying and teaching meditation, clairvoyance and chakra healing. For over fourteen years, Deb McLeod has been a creative writing coach helping other writers to embrace their passion and get their words on the page. For more, see www.debmcleod.com.

Lessons learned from NaNoWriMo

By: Deb McLeod

Every year I orchestrate and deliver a two-week NaNo Prep Countdown designed to help writers who want to win get ready so they don’t face the blank page when they’re trying to reach their daily word count. And every year for the last six I’ve competed in NaNoWriMo myself, this year writing book two in my Twin Flames Romance Series with the working title Silver Love.

So I’ve spent the last two weeks playing with the plot. When I prep for a novel I have a certain process I follow and I like to immerse myself in the dream of the book before I write. This year I was ready to start writing at least a week ago, but I held off, trying to be true to the NaNoWriMo rules. I don’t always care about being a NaNo purist, but this year I decided to wait and keep working on the plot.

The result of waiting was that when I sat down at my desk today I wrote almost four scenes and 4550 words. And I could have kept going but the day’s obligations kicked in after I’d been writing straight for five hours. Oh, the bliss of getting lost in the story.

If you’ve never tried to build your understanding about your story before you actually start writing, I’d highly advise you to try. Here’s what some famous author/teachers have to say about the practice:

Robert Olen Butler wrote an entire book about it called From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction. He says artists access the way they see the world only by “going back to the way in which chaos is first encountered – that is, moment to moment through the senses. Then, [the writer] selecting from that sensual moment-to-moment experience, picking out bits and pieces of it, reshaping it, she recombines it into an object that a reader in turn encounters as if it were experience itself….”

He advises writers to get into the dreamspace of the unconscious to discover the yearning of the characters and the moment-to-moment sensual experience of the story. To dream the book alive.

Spending time in the dreamspace of the book is an excellent way to have it at your disposal when you start to write.

Madison Smartt Bell in Narrative Design: Working with Imagination, Craft, and Form says that daydreaming is the writer’s vocation. That you create for yourself a sort of autohypnosis. “You put yourself apart from yourself, and you enter the imaginary world.”

He also says there’s an unconscious structure to the chaos that begins to morph when you allow yourself to ramble thought the bits and the parts of it.

The unconscious in action

Well, it’s day one of 2016 NaNoWriMo, and I can say for certain that both of those things happened to me this morning. I had been rambling around for two weeks, and when a piece of the structure suggested itself, I went with it and out poured 4550 words. I had spent enough time in the dreamscape of my novel that when it was time to write, I was already there.

So here’s my morning:

Four-thirty a.m. I’m at my desk. I hadn’t even made coffee yet. I read over my Scrivener scene card for the first scene. I have a scene card I use to prep the scene and really dive into when it’s time to revise. But the only part I’d filled out for all the scenes for NaNo was the synopsis: what happens during the scene.

I like doing the rest of the prep work right before I write the scene – figuring out the conflict and the arc. So I was reading over my notes and cycling through the various forms of conflict I could use for the first scene when a lightning bolt slammed home.

This is an historical romance set in Denver in the 1870s and I’m using the romantic trope of a mail-order bride to bring my hero and heroine together. The hero has won the bride in a poker game from her intended and I plotted it that they would get married fairly soon after they meet – as it’s only proper – and spend the book learning how to fall in love.

This is the way I plotted the entire first half of the book. Though I will admit I was having trouble plotting the second half, but that often happens to me. I sort of have to wait until I get there to know what the possibilities are.

When I was mulling the conflict of the first scene and thinking about the setting, my hero is waiting on the train platform for her train to arrive, my hero spoke up and said – I don’t want to get married.

And he’s right. He doesn’t. He’s not at all the marrying kind. That’s what was going to make scenes with his new wife so cute. But I realized she’s the one who wants to get married. Not him. In fact, she’s desperate to get under some man’s wing or she wouldn’t have answered the ad for a mail-order bride in the first place. And though she doesn’t know that her intended gambled her away, the hero is such a better catch than the guy who lost her in the poker game that she would marry him if only he’d ask.

So when she comes to Denver, she’s not only greeted by a different groom, she’s greeted by a man who will jilt her before they get in front of a preacher.

The energy from that new way of looking at the plot just drove the three-and-a-half scenes right onto the page.

I think I had prepped enough, put off starting to write long enough, and put myself in the miasma of the novel that it actually allowed me to think of the story differently. And when I did, I tapped into some kind of subconscious structure that wanted to exist.

Or is that too woo-woo for you?

Predreaming

If you’re competing in NaNoWriMo this year and you want a cutting edge, find a system of “predreaming,” as Butler calls it, before you write your scenes. Butler says:

“There is no intellect in this world powerful enough to create a great work of novelistic art. Only the unconscious can fit together the stuff of fiction; the conscious mind cannot.”

So tune out and tap into your world. Try what Butler calls “dreamstorming.” Dream around your novel and write down only eight to ten words that represent the potential scene you’re dreaming. Make sure it contains a sensual hook, a cue that will bring you back to this space once you start writing the scenes. “A little vision of something, a little smell or taste of something, a little sound… Don’t trust a scene that presents itself to you as an idea.”

Now if you’re competing in NaNo, you’re probably saying, where was this advice two weeks ago when I had time for dreamstorming? Well, don’t despair. You can do this too.

Take the time before you write to walk around the scene you have planned. Close your eyes and put yourself into sensual experience of it. Not just the five senses, feel where the characters are on the stage of the scene. Put yourself in your main character’s place and feel what he or she feels and why. Stay in that space just a little longer than you’re comfortable.

For me, when I’m ready to write a scene the first line pops in and off I go. Wait for that impulse and then start writing. Sort of a freewrite in scene form. Maybe, like me, the scenes will flow easier and be more vivid if you’ve predreamed the sensuality in the scene.

Work in weeks

For the first week, write act one scenes. For the second week, work on the scenes you would find in the first half of the second act. The third week, the second half of the second act. And week four has you writing the finale.

No worries that you’re skating over the novel and what you have needs revision. I’m a big revision teacher. That’s where the book solidifies. For now, and all through NaNo, get the gist of it and move on. Write the full scene if it comes do you. And if it doesn’t, write the senses, experiment with different conflicts scene by scene. Accumulate your words and go for a first draft that gives you something to work with.

Forget perfection and you can do it.

About the Author: Deb McLeod, MFA, practices novel research immersion. For her novel, The Train to Pescara, Deb journeyed to Sardinia to study ancient goddess worship and spent time in the Abruzzi village her great-grandparents left in 1905. Her metaphysical knowledge for the Angel Thriller, The Julia Set, culminates from four years of studying and teaching meditation, clairvoyance and chakra healing. For over fourteen years, Deb McLeod has been a creative writing coach helping other writers to embrace their passion and get their words on the page. For more, seewww.debmcleod.com.

90-day Challenge: Writing Hot

debmcleod.com

By: Deb McLeod

Life decided to intrude into my 90-day Romance Novel project since my last post. So I lost some days and the project isn’t 90 consecutive days, but I’ll still be finished before the 90-day deadline. I’m at day 63 today and I’m almost done revising the first act.

If you’ve been watching my previous posts you know I’m designing and testing a process to produce a genre novel of choice in 90 days – from idea to final revision. When I’m done with the revision, I will hire a proofreader and publish before November.

As a sixteen-year writing coach, my theory is that the writing process I developed should allow both my clients and me to produce quality fiction quicker than we currently are. To that end I decided to test my theory in the genre of my choice – romance.

Now in the final third of the 90-day Romance Novel trial, I’m deep in revision as I write this. Before I move onto the discoveries I’ve been making, I want to talk about revision.

Revision vs editing

I work and socialize with a lot of writers. When I ask them about their revision process almost all of them approach it the same way. After they’ve finished the first draft they begin to read, either online or in print, and jump into editing line by line. But that’s editing, not re-visioning. And it’s editing a story that isn’t ready for editing.

My theory of story is that the first draft is for the writer. It’s a skate across the surface of the story. As the writer you need to find out what happens, you need to know where to plant the tickles and the clues that will pay out down the plotline. You need to focus on the arc and the development of your character. You need to follow the riffs that occur to you, to allow subplots to emerge, and beyond. Basically you need to tell yourself the story on the page.

But the real writing happens during revision.

It’s in re-visioning the story that the book is made whole and becomes an experience for the reader. It’s in revision that all the craft elements in your toolbox should be put to use. The first draft is the figuring out phase. The revision is the deepening phase.

As a story developer and story editor, my job is and isn’t to line edit my client’s work. They expect the line edit. After all, they usually want to improve their writing skills (sentence skills), so I will show them how to improve their work at the line level. But in reality, the most important work I do is at the story level and especially at the scene level.

My revision process, and the one I teach my clients, is to re-vision the story with two goals in mind. To make the work tighter and deeper.

• Tighter is easy to understand: no loose language, no dangling subplots, no faulty story logic, no bloated scenes, following riffs that matter, and more. 
• Deeper means creating thematic continuity, honing the facets of the story, revealing layers of meaning, and crafting a felt experience for the reader. 

By focusing on these two aspects of the novel, the work is simply a better read. I’ve helped dozens of people discover the story under the story so the novel they produced was a higher quality novel.

How do I know what I mean, until I see what I say?

The first draft is for what you say. Revision is for what you mean.

At the core of my teaching is the idea that you have to become the best reader of your own work. So revision starts with analysis. Until you deeply understand a scene, its placement in the overall, and its connection to the themes as well as to the plot, you can’t create an authentic experience for the reader. So you must come up with a process that helps you analyze your story at the story and scene levels.



Word edits will come later.

My plot arc choice is Blake Snyder’s beats. There are other story structure maps that you can use to check the story at story level. For scene level work, I’ve had to develop my own tried and true tools. I have a scene arc tool, a conflict tool, and a way to discover and express the deeper meaning of each scene. I use a note card questionnaire in Scrivener for each scene and answering the questions analyzes what I need to know to deepen the scene for my rewrite.

The big discovery in my revision process

Two years ago I took a 22-week revision class from a popular writer/teacher and learned a lot. But as is my nature, as I was going through the class, I saw where there could have been improvements. This particular method focused on the story logic level of revision, the first level in my estimation.

And, the course was designed so that we spent most of the 22 weeks in story analysis and were then let loose to rewrite. The analysis was great, but by the time I got to the rewrite, the scenes I had analyzed were cold. And there was no help to make them deeper.

So writing hot is the main discovery I made in the revision portion of my 90-day Romance Novel project. When I analyze a scene I write the revision immediately – the same day. The analysis itself creates the spell to write it deeper. The discoveries I make show me what the scene really means. The rewriting uses that discovery to focus not only on the plot of the scene but the words I use and the flavor I create on the page.

I rely heavily on the barn exercise from John Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist. It’s been a long time since I looked it up, but here’s how it is in my head after many years of teaching it. Basically it goes: write a description of a scene where a character comes upon an old barn. First write it from someone who is in love, but don’t reveal that fact or any details about the character’s story. Just let the love the character feels pick the words you use to describe the barn and how the scene unfolds.

Then write the same barn scene from someone who’s in grief, say someone who just lost a parent or a lover. But don’t reveal the details, just let the character’s mood and emotions influence the word choice.

What would the two characters see differently? What words would they use to describe the barn, given their state of mind? When you can do that you’re creating the experience of the barn through the lens of the emotion you want to convey. Now the reader will feel it.

Once you understand where your character is emotionally, it’s simply a matter of incorporating that into the plot of the scene, the beat in the story arc, the choice of verbs and what you show in the setting. It’s more fun than I ever imagined to see the story come alive this way scene by scene.

So I’m analyzing and rewriting day-by-day, scene-by scene, in order to write it hot.

When I’m done I will print, read all and comb any transitions that need it. I’ll run my editing cheat sheet over it for the line-by-line, looking for the bad habits I still carry. Then I’ll chapter it and send it to the proofer.

Here’s my stats at 61 days:

• Total days spent on the project so far: 61 days 
• Average time spent per day: 3.5 hours 
• Exclusive days spent on character development: 3 days 
• Exclusive days spent on plotting the arc: 9 days 
• Plotting scenes and writing: 36 days 
• Revision days so far: 13 days 
• Word total for finished scenes: 52,834 

I’m shooting for a 60k word minimum so I have to add some scenes coming up, but I already know where they go. And I have found that the second half of the second act is a little longer than it should be. If I cut there, I’ll have to add elsewhere so I’m keeping that in mind as I go.

It has been a great discovery process for me. And best of all I’ll have a book when I’m done. So tell me, if you would, what are the revision aha’s you have noticed in your own work?

About the Author:  Deb McLeod, MFA, practices novel research immersion. For her novel, The Train to Pescara, Deb journeyed to Sardinia to study ancient goddess worship and spent time in the Abruzzi village her great-grandparents left in 1905. Her metaphysical knowledge for the Angel Thriller, The Julia Set, culminates from four years of studying and teaching meditation, clairvoyance and chakra healing. For over fifteen years, Deb McLeod has been a creative writing coach helping other writers to embrace their passion and get their words on the page. For more,