Writer / Observer / Builder — Presence, clarity, and living without a script
Author: Richard L. Fricks
Writer. Observer. Builder. I write from a life shaped by attention, simplicity, and living without a script—through reflective essays, long-form inquiry, and fiction rooted in ordinary lives. I live in rural Alabama, where writing, walking, and building small, intentional spaces are part of the same practice.
I’m currently taking a writing, blogging, and coaching sabbatical due to family health issues. For now, I’ll repost selected articles from my Fiction Writing School.
The other day I was talking to another writer about the young adult time travel story I’m writing. Her first question was, “Do you have the book English Through the Ages?” I didn’t, but at her encouragement I got one immediately. The minute I opened the book it was my favorite writing tool, and I knew I had to tell you about it. Then I got to thinking about all the great writing tools on my bookshelves (both physical and digital), and I thought you might enjoy hearing about those, too. So today I’m sharing with you my favorite books that help me write books, beginning with my newest, English Through the Ages by William Brohaugh.
If you write contemporary or speculative fiction, you might not have a need for English Through the Ages. But if you want to know which came first, the chicken or the egg, stick around because this book has the answer and I’m going to share it. Plus I’ll tell you about other cool tools you might be interested in.
English Through the Ages is a hefty tome that’s kind of like a historical dictionary. It begins with Old English words that were in use in 1150, and then adds words decade by decade as they came into use through 1990. The words in each section are divided into categories like “Technology,” “Fashion,” and “Everyday Life” for easy reference. Plus a full third of the book is an alphabetical index so you can quickly find a particular word you’re curious about.
I use the book in a number of ways to make sure the language I’m using in my story is appropriate to the time period. The chapters I’m writing now take place in the U.S. in the early 1900s. I have one of the characters saying the word “quibble,” but I wasn’t certain if that word was in use then, so I looked it up in the index. Turns out the word has been in use—with the same meaning—since the 1650s, so I’m set! I can use the word with confidence.
Another way I use the book is to browse the decade following the one I’m writing about—these words should NOT be used in my story because they weren’t in common use yet. Example: the word “brassiere” wasn’t commonly used until 1915, and “bra” not until 1935. This could be important to a modern-day girl who finds herself in 1900 (my protagonist), so I did some further research and learned that bras themselves were in use in 1900 but just not called bras. Fascinating and useful, too—it gave me an idea for a scene where my character’s modern bra threatens to give her away as someone who doesn’t belong there…err, then. (Time travel is hard!)
Note that English Through the Ages is out of print and there is no e-book version available. However there are plenty of used copies floating around. Check your local library, used bookstore, or online bookseller. You’re sure to find a copy, and inexpensively to boot. (“To boot” has been in use since 1150.)
Another writing book that’s recently become one of my favorites is Save the Cat: The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need by Blake Snyder. I’m not a screenwriter, but after one look at this resource I understood why so many novelists swear by it: the information is awesome (a word that’s been in wide use in this context since the 1980s) and easily applicable to novel writing. For me, the gem in this book is Snyder’s “beat sheet” – a 15-point list of the critical elements that comprise a story’s structure. Not only does the book tell you what elements to include in what order, it specifies where in the story they should occur for maximum impact. When I used the beat sheet to lay out the plot of my current work-in-progress, I discovered a couple of “holes” I needed to fill, plus some areas where I might want to tighten the timing between plot points. As a bonus, if I get stuck while writing the story, I can simply refer to my beat sheet to get back on track. I’ve found this method of story planning to be so helpful, I expect to use it on every novel I write from here on out.
Before I discovered Save the Cat, Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey was my constant companion when story planning and plotting. This book takes the groundbreaking work of Joseph Campbell’s “the hero’s journey” and puts it into an accessible, digestible form for writers. Like Blake Snyder, Vogler’s roots are in film, and he draws on his experiences working on The Lion King and Star Wars to provide examples that are both illuminating and relatable. Also like Snyder, Vogler lays out story elements in clear terms, providing guidelines and milestones for great storytelling. I still refer to this book and the “hero’s journey” when story planning (“plan” was a latecomer to the English party, not appearing until the mid- to late-1900s), and I find The Writer’s Journey to be particularly helpful when I’m determining exactly where I should begin my hero’s journey.
My reference shelf holds a number of books I consult when creating characters. My favorite for building a protagonist is The Complete Writer’s Guide to Heroes and Heroines:Sixteen Master Archetypesby Tami D. Cowden, Caro LaFever, Sue Viders. Archetypes (in use since 1545) provide powerful templates from which to craft characters, and Heroes and Heroines serves them up on a platter for writers’ use. For building villains (in use to mean “antagonist” since 1830), my go-to reference is Bullies, Bastards And Bitches: How To Write The Bad Guys Of Fiction by Jessica Morrell. This book covers all kinds of bad guys—not just bullies, bastards, and bitches but anti-heroes, monsters, and sociopaths, too. It’s a must-have for any writer who wants to graduate from mustache-twirling one-note villains to multi-dimensional antagonists who torment your other characters deliciously and believably.
I recently celebrated a milestone birthday, and as a gift to myself I bought a book I’d been hearing about frequently from other novelists: The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Expressionby Becca Puglisi and Angela Ackerman. Thesauri (or thesauruses—equally acceptable) have been around a long time. In fact, the word “thesaurus” entered the lexicon in about 1600. But this thesaurus is different. The Emotion Thesaurus doesn’t provide synonyms for emotions, but rather gives writers an abundance of sources to draw from when s/he wants to depict or describe an emotion. Each entry includes lists of physical signals, internal sensations, mental responses, and cues that indicate different aspects of that emotion. To indicate dread, for instance, it offers options like giving my character a hunched posture and a drooping head (physical signal), a sluggish heartbeat (internal sensation), and/or an inability to see a positive outcome (mental response). If I want to show cues of suppressed dread, I can have her attempt to escape her problems using distractions, like TV or music. Or to indicate acute or long-term dread, I can have her jump at sudden sounds or seek any excuse to avoid what is to come. For further exploration of this emotion, it’s suggested that acute dread may escalate to anguish or terror, both of which have their own entries in the thesaurus. This book is def (1985) a serious (1985) writing tool, and that’s no spin (1985).
If I had to pick just one writing book that has helped me the most in my career, hands-down (in use since 1870) it would be GMC: Goal, Motivation, & Conflictby Debra Dixon. This book is an all-purpose tool—it works on character, plot, conflict, you-name-it—which is why I refer to it as the “Swiss Army knife of writing tools” in this previous blog that discusses GMC. Once I discovered this powerful tool, it was like the clouds parted and a ray of insight shone down upon my writing. Before I was introduced to Dixon’s book I’d never thought much about what my characters wanted or why they wanted it; this book showed me how to look at my characters in that light, as well as how to create conflict by putting formidable obstacles in my characters’ way. It allowed me understand my protagonists better, build stronger villains, raise the stakes, and increase tension. In short, I’m a better novelist because of this book.
Photo by Stephen W, courtesy of Creative Commons
Okay, here’s what you’ve been waiting for:
Chicken came first. Or at least the word did. According to English Through the Ages, historical records indicate that “chicken” entered in Old English sometime before the year 950. “Egg” doesn’t appear until the early 1300s.
Now you know.
Whatever it is you need to know, remember that books can be our best tools for writing books. I’ve told you my faves (in use since the 1940s). What are yours?
I’m currently taking a writing, blogging, and coaching sabbatical due to family health issues. For now, I’ll repost selected articles from my Fiction Writing School.
Have you ever been flipping through a magazine and found an excerpt from a book, maybe one you’d never read? And did reading that short passage make you want to read more, prompting you to go looking for the book? This is why a lot of authors and publicists publish book excerpts: to generate interest in their story. Erik Klass from Submitit is here to discuss why this might be a good idea for you, too.
A few years ago I read Elizabeth Gilbert’s “The Signature of All Things” in the journal One Story, and was blown away. When the eponymous book came out a short time later, I bought it. For readers like me, who skipped Eat, Pray, Love, getting a taste of Gilbert’s fiction was important. We can understand why the author (and probably her publishers) went to the trouble of getting an excerpt published.
But a more important reason to excerpt a novel, I believe, is that, with a few publishing credits in the quiver, an (otherwise) unpublished writer might have an easier time finding an agent and eventually a publisher for his or her first novel. It is a great separator, a free pass to the top of a (towering) pile of queries.
But, you say, your novel is structured with care. It is complete. It adheres to a particular emotional arc. It is the sum of its parts—or, correction, is greater than these parts. A completed puzzle. But a chapter, no mirror or fractal of its larger whole, may not have an arc of any kind.
And I rejoin: If a novel is a love affair, a short story is a one-night stand. It’s quick. Sometimes a little dirty. Strangers remain strangers. In many of my favorite short stories, very little actually happens. Not much time passes (it may stand still). They are all mood and indigo. A thought. A gesture. A crack in a bathroom mirror opens up a violence. The silhouette of a child’s kite against a setting sun brings back a memory. Let’s go into the woods and follow a stream and spot a deer beneath a blood-red sky. There can be great profundity in the small.
I’m currently working on a novel about a man wandering the streets of Łódź, Poland, contemplating the loss of love. In one chapter, about halfway through, the narrator sits in a small square in the city and remembers an afternoon at his ex-lover’s apartment. A moment in time echoing a moment in time. That’s it. No real narrative arc—maybe this is another word for plot—no arc at all. And yet, there are colors and sounds and smells. There’s that inescapable feeling of loss. The haunting fleetingness of memory. I’d like to believe it will work as a publishable excerpt.
Yes, short stories are often subtle. This, I think, is good news for your excerpt. You don’t need to connect all the dots. I recommend you don’t. Hint. Sprinkle breadcrumbs. Those gaps? Leave them. Have you ever stood close to a painting—let us say, Van Gogh’s Roses(1890)—and studied just one small section—perhaps a single white fallen petal in the canvas’s bottom corner, painted, it seems, with the tip of a finger? It is easy to miss, white against nearly white. It is a beautiful thing. This may be your excerpt.
But not all chapters are ready to reveal themselves, to throw off their novel (in both senses) clothes. An excerpt may require some work.
Let’s say your excerpt requires a little background. Try this: summarize your novel (up to the chapter) in a sentence or two. It’s a surprisingly easy—and startlingly effective—way to start a story. I just came up with this: My wife would be meeting her lover at 4 in the afternoon (Ulysses).
I think I’d keep reading.
And endings: Unlike most novels, your excerpt doesn’t need tidy resolution. In fact many short stories leave things vague. But you probably need a hint of resolution. Perhaps there is a catalyst, a spark, and we’re left to imagine the oncoming conflagration. (This might be how you’re ending your chapters already. It’s what we do, we novelists.) But if you need to tie things up ever so slightly, tie away.
The chapter I mentioned above ends with my narrator eventually rising from where he sits in the little Polish square and continuing his journey through the city. No resolution. (It’s a sad chapter.) But I didn’t want to end this excerpt like this. So in the last couple paragraphs I created a new character (yes: deus ex machina), a girl with long legs and violet-blue eyes. Not a word is spoken, but there’s that hint. It’s enough.
What I’m trying to say is that we may change our chapters. They are malleable, these precious things of ours. They are made not of stone, but of clay. We may even tear them, sometimes to shreds. For this novel—this interminable novel of mine—I wrote a chapter about eight Polish poets preparing for Vladimir Mayakovsky’s famous visit to Warsaw in May 1927. I get into their minds, explore their loves. With just a bit of work, I was able to pull short excerpts from this chapter and submit these new “flash” stories to a handful of journals; all but a few were accepted. (Here’s one, if you have half an interest.)
Most chapters, I believe, hold this potential. Consider it an exercise. Free of the pulling weight, the magnificent magnitude, of the rest of your novel, you may enter into your story’s story, use the tip of your finest brush (or finger), and paint anew.
Finally, there’s a whole art to submitting your—I must call it now—story. There’s much to submitting, but I’ll leave you with one piece of advice: read. There are literally hundreds of journals (I have over 400 on my list), and they vary widely. Many writers use Duotrope to search for journals—it’s a great place to start. (And if you want to make it really easy, I run a company that can help.) Read these things. It is pleasant homework.
I hope the above inspires you to submit excerpts from your novel. And I wish you success.
Erik Harper Klass is the founder of a full-service submissions company called Submitit. He has published stories in a variety of journals, including New England Review, Summerset Review, Maryland Literary Review, and Open: Journal of Arts and Letters, and he has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes. He writes in Los Angeles, CA.
I’m currently taking a writing, blogging, and coaching sabbatical due to family health issues. For now, I’ll repost selected articles from my Fiction Writing School.
One of the greatest challenges of writing better stories is knowing exactly which scenes to write. The best scenes focus on the core elements of conflict — which means before you can write amazing scenes, you have to find the central conflict in a story.
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You may have a great story idea in your head. But the specifics of it — which moments to capture — are unclear. The result is often writer’s block, or a story that feels “off,” meaning it isn’t focused on the right stuff.
That’s where Conflict Mapping can make your writing even better!
Strong scenes come from strong plans. And visualizing the types of conflict between your characters is a great way to do just that.
To give zest to your plot and move it forward, you need to integrate a type of conflict in every scene.
This can be seen as a moral conflict that sparks an internal struggle, or a force of external conflicts that threaten a character in a physical or other way.
Rarely does a story’s conflict magically appear in our minds. That’s because inspiration frequently comes from other sources: beauty, music, or situations. Rarely are we inspired by a focused sequence of events built around pursuing a goal (which is what a story is), because this tends to happen too quickly to note.
So when we sit down to write, we’re really just translating the image or idea we had into a word-picture.
Except those aren’t major conflicts.
I experienced this in 2012 when I decided to write a murder mystery about a family in New Orleans. My wife and I even went on vacation there, staying just outside the French Quarter.
And while we saw a lot of beautiful things, heard some amazing music, and came up with many interesting situations, strong story conflict did not come to us as we sweated our way through the city.
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The beauty, music, and situations that inspire you to write are wonderful—but these alone are not the core conflicts of your story.
How can we translate inspiration and ideas into clear conflict in a story?
Simple: Start by drawing two circles.
Conflict Map: Drawing a Relationship
To begin your Conflict Map, draw two empty circles. Then, connect them with arcing arrows, like this:
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Now, decide which two people are in a relationship in your story. You don’t need names. Just people. Mom and daughter? Boyfriend and girlfriend? Owner and dog? You decide. Just put something in there.
The point is that you are intentionally developing multiple characters in a a story, which gives you an opportunity to create conflict between people, particularly between one character and your protagonist.
Once you’ve done this, on the arrow extending from a character’s bubble, write what they want from the other character. It can be physical (preferable) or non-physical (okay — but add something physical to go with it, like “affection = hug”).
Then, consider what the other character might want from the first. Write it on their arrow.
As you do this, consider traits that might be essential to each character. Jot them in the circles. This is the time to create without any fear or reservations.
And to keep it fear-free, do it in pencil so you can erase and alter to your heart’s delight!
Create 4 Relationships
According to Robert McKee, there are four character types that nearly every protagonist has a relationship with in most stories. Whenever I’m building a new story in a new world, I find this to be a fantastic starting place, and it’s what I did as I built the world of my New Orleans play.
The four character types to fill first, as you plan, are:
Friend: What one might want from a friend? What does the exchange of goals look like in friendship?
Authority: How does this relationship create benevolent and/or negative energy?
Love: How does the protagonist think of, and possibly plan to, pursue their love interest?
Enemy: Who opposes the protagonist? Is it direct opposition (contradicting the protagonist’s goal), or competitive (pursing the same or a similar goal)?
Once you’ve established what the protagonist wants from each of these characters, draw arrows connecting the characters to each other. What might the Authority want from the Friend? The Friend from the Love? And so on.
Not only does this give you more characters to work with, but it plants the seeds for plenty of conflict that will blossom into strong scenes. When characters are engaged in authentic relationships, the conflict between them occurs more naturally. It doesn’t feel unclear, nor does it come out of nowhere.
So plan out two (or more) characters who want things from one another that cannot easily be given.
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When you have characters in conflict, you have the makings of a strong story.
You can see my protagonist, Isabel’s, relationship with two of these characters below: the Friend (her adopted brother) and her Authority (her mother, Natasha). Note that I hadn’t figured out Andre’s goal, yet. This truly is a way to discover your protagonist’s “world!”
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Add Goals and Go
When I was done with my Conflict Map, it was so big that my play couldn’t possibly contain all the characters and relationships. So I cut five of them!
Yet the map was invaluable for planning the relationships and conflict I would need to make the story work. It gave me the seeds of great, dramatic scenes.
And the result was a fun, thrilling play that surprised everyone with its authentic conflict.
There is one thing I didn’t do, though, that I highly recommend you do: Add action verbs to each character’s goal. There’s a big difference between an Enemy who chooses to “annihilate” to get their goal, versus one who “humiliates.”
My protagonist, a bride-to-be, chose to “soothe” her overbearing mother in order to get her goal of “genuine love and approval. The play would have been much different if she chose to blame, lie, or ignore. Verbs matter, and they can help you as you craft these crucial scenes.
Conflict is crucial in a plot and between characters and other forces, like the environment, that challenge the protagonist.
To help you come up with conflict, turn to your planning process. Remember, this is supposed to be messy, not a perfect, finished product. A well-executed plan can lead to a wonderful final product.
Whether or not the main conflict in your scene is internal conflict or minor characters blocking your protagonist and their pursuit of their scene goals, or other external obstacles standing in their way, engaging conflicts will advance a plot and keep your readers engaged.
To plan and implement conflict into your story, give Character Mapping a try. And watch as your story get stronger right away!
I’m currently taking a writing, blogging, and coaching sabbatical due to family health issues. For now, I’ll repost selected articles from my Fiction Writing School.
By Angela Ackerman, @AngelaAckerman Part of the How They Do It Series
JH: It’s a special treat today! Angela Ackerman takes the podium to share thoughts on the emotional wound and how it benefits our characters–and our stories.
Angela Ackerman is a writing coach, international speaker, and co-author of the bestselling book, The Emotion Thesaurus, as well as five others (including The Emotional Wound Thesaurus). Her books are available in six languages, are sourced by US universities, and are used by novelists, screenwriters, editors, and psychologists around the world. Angela is also the co-founder of the popular site Writers Helping Writers, as well as One Stop for Writers, an powerful online library built to help writers elevate their storytelling.
Take it away Angela… In fiction, a single piece of information usually drives the action, whether writers realize it or not: the protagonist’s emotional wound. Wounds are painful events that lurk in your character’s backstory, and in some way they changed how he or she views the world and themselves…in a very unhealthy way.
A wound might be a single event (like a terrible car accident or the death of a child), repeated episodes (such as domestic violence or a string of toxic relationships) or an ongoing detrimental situation (perhaps living in poverty, or suffering neglect at the hands of addicted parents).
Regardless of it’s shape,this shattering event leaves behind fear, pain, and destruction in its wake. Your character will adopt biases, negative attitudes, personality flaws, and other dysfunctional behaviors as emotional shielding to prevent more hurtful events from happening. While this shielding does help create a “buffer” around the character, it comes at a cost: fracturing his relationships, preventing self-growth, sabotaging his ability to achieve meaningful goals, and ensuring fear is ever-present in his life, steering his actions and choices. This is a recipe for unhappiness and unfulfillment…unless it can be reversed. If this sounds like character arc territory, you are correct. The character must learn to let go of the past and move forward differently if he is to achieve his story goal.
Because wounds are invasive, shaking even the strongest character’s foundation, choosing the right one is no small (or easy) task. While some authors prefer to let a protagonist’s fears and wounds emerge as they write, spending time up front to dig around in his or her backstory can save countless hours of revision.
There are a variety of ways to unearth what particular past event (and the fear it generates) is steering your character’s actions within the story. Here are a few areas to brainstorm which may help lead you straight to that painful past wound.
Past Influencers
It’s unfortunately true that those closest to us are in a position to inflict the most pain. In this way, the people our characters interacted with prior to the start of the story are often tied to their wounding events. Caregivers top the list, with their maltreatment birthing deep fears, generating irrational beliefs or biases, creating a legacy of abuse, or even causing unintentional parental failings to be passed through the generations.
For example, imagine a girl who helplessly watched her four-year-old sibling choke and die. She, in turn, could become a controlling mother, her fear causing her to hover over her own child to keep him safe. She may choose his friends and make most of his decisions for him because she believes she knows what’s best. And her son, growing up in this tightly monitored environment, will likely have lower self-esteem because he doesn’t trust his ability to make good decisions. Place this young man into your story as the main character and you have someone who struggles to be independent, obsesses about what others think, is hypersensitive to criticism, and avoids responsibility because he thinks he’ll screw up.
The ability to inflict pain is not just reserved for family, so think about people who left a negative mark on your character, perhaps restricting her growth, sabotaging her self-worth, inflicting a humiliation, or undermining her self-confidence. Mentors, past lovers, ex-friends, and people in positions of power may have imparted negative life lessons. Try asking this question: Whom from your character’s past would she never want to run into again and why?
Unpleasant Memories
Wounds hide within negative past experiences, such as a particular time of hardship, an event that cannot be forgotten, or a moment your character wishes she could utterly erase. Don’t be afraid to interview her about difficult situations she’s endured. Every person’s past is littered with mistakes, failures, disappointments, feelings of inferiority, and fear, so try your best to learn about these painful memories.
Personality Flaws
For some, personality is the first thing to emerge when brainstorming a new character. Maybe she has an amazing sense of humor, loves to learn, and is the most unmaterialistic person you might meet. But along with these qualities, she’s incredibly temperamental, going from hot to cold in a flash and taking offense when none was meant. Do some digging to uncover the why behind this flaw. What causes that reactiveness and hypersensitivity? Why is she so quick to see enemies where none exist? Identifying the situations that lead to this knee-jerk response will help you spot the emotions the character doesn’t want to feel, which will help you brainstorm the wounds that could be the cause of her emotional armor.
Fears
Fear is something most people are reluctant to experience, because while it can push us to strive harder for what we want, it also comes with a host of uncomfortable emotions. Clearly, your character will have a deep fear sitting at the heart of the defining wound that must be faced, but other fears and worries can also be markers of a wounding event. If you realize that your protagonist is afraid of water, why is this? If her heart rate picks up when her sister calls, delve into that response for more information. Fears don’t manifest by themselves, so search for their underlying reasons.
Secrets
One thing experience teaches us is that everyone keeps secrets. It’s second nature to hide the things that embarrass us, cause shame and guilt, or leave us feeling exposed and vulnerable. Ask yourself what your character is hiding. What information does she guard closely and would never want others to discover? This most likely touches on a shard of emotional trauma that she wishes to keep buried in the past.
Insecurities
Self-doubt is, to some degree, a problem for everyone. Worrying about not measuring up, making a mistake that impacts others, and disappointing loved ones can eat away at our self-worth. If your character is insecure about fitting in and being accepted, why is that? In which situations is she reluctant to make decisions or take risks? Thinking about her doubts and worries will create a starting point for brainstorming the negative experiences and influencers who left her feeling this way.
If you need more ideas on how to root around in your character’s history to find the defining wound, leaf through your Emotional Wound Thesaurus book, or browse the huge list of emotional wounds at our website, One Stop for Writers.
Readers connect to characters with depth, ones who have experienced life’s ups and downs. To deliver key players that are both realistic and compelling, writers must know them intimately—not only who they are in the present story, but also what made them that way. Of all the formative experiences in a character’s past, none are more destructive than emotional wounds. The aftershocks of trauma can change who they are, alter what they believe, and sabotage their ability to achieve meaningful goals, all of which will affect the trajectory of your story.
Identifying the backstory wound is crucial to understanding how it will shape your character’s behavior, and The Emotional Wound Thesaurus can help. Inside, you’ll find:
A database of traumatic situations common to the human experience
An in-depth study on a wound’s impact, including the fears, lies, personality shifts, and dysfunctional behaviors that can arise from different painful events
An extensive analysis of character arc and how the wound and any resulting unmet needs fit into it
Techniques on how to show the past experience to readers in a way that is both engaging and revelatory while avoiding the pitfalls of info dumps and telling
A showcase of popular characters and how their traumatic experiences reshaped them, leading to very specific story goals
A Backstory Wound Profile tool that will enable you to document your characters’ negative past experiences and the aftereffects
Root your characters in reality by giving them an authentic wound that causes difficulties and prompts them to strive for inner growth to overcome it. With its easy-to-read format and over 100 entries packed with information, The Emotional Wound Thesaurus is a crash course in psychology for creating characters that feel incredibly real to readers.
I’m currently taking a writing, blogging, and coaching sabbatical due to family health issues. For now, I’ll repost selected articles from my Fiction Writing School.
There are two definitions of story beat. Both of them refer to a change.
One use of the term beat refers to the subtle change in the dynamic of a relationship that a line of dialogue brings about in a scene. There are usually several beats within a scene, each a marker for pushing the scene forwards dramatically.
The other meaning of the word beat in storytelling applies to changes in the plot brought about by scenes. A plot is a succession of events linked causally, a narrative chain of cause and effect. One event effects a change, determining what happens in subsequent scenes. Writers might arrange these events on a board or “beat sheet” during the planning phase.
One of the most popular exponents of planning a plot according to beats was Blake Snyder. In his how-to book Save The Cat! The Last Book On Screenwriting That You’ll Ever Need, he presents fifteen scenes a Hollywood movie requires, starting with the Opening Image and ending with the Final Image. During story development, these scenes are arranged on a board containing exactly 40 index cards divided into four segments. The other 25 scenes connect the fifteen important ones.
While the emphasis in Save The Cat! is on commercial or popular storytelling á la Hollywood blockbusters, there are many aspects of Snyder’s approach that encourage the author to think about the audience’ emotional reaction to scenes. The Save The Cat moment of the title, for example, is a key scene placed early in narratives in which heroes do something selfless, such as rescuing a feline, thus establishing a core of goodness in their character so that the audience cares about them and will root for them when they later face dangers.
To read more of Beemgee’s writing craft articles click here
I’m currently taking a writing, blogging, and coaching sabbatical due to family health issues. For now, I’ll repost selected articles from my Fiction Writing School.
One way to think about plot is as a “push-pull between protagonist and antagonist.” Although the protagonist is the character who frames and, indeed, decides the story’s structure, the role of the antagonist in story structure is equally important.
Last week, I shared an overview of the antagonist’s role in the first five major structural beats within a story. I originally intended it to be one post, but it turned out to be nearly twice as long as usual, so I split it in two. Today, we’ll be rounding out the subject by examining the role of the antagonist in the second half of a story’s structure—the Second Pinch Point through the Resolution.
1. The antagonistic force will function in fixed (and therefore relatively universal) ways within story structure, in order to evoke the most resonant responses from the protagonist.
2. The antagonist, as a human character, however, will be much more dynamic and even unpredictable within the story. What I’ve shared in this series is focused more on the antagonistic force’s impact upon the structure, and is therefore very general. Within your specific story, the antagonist as a character may function in ways much more nuanced than what is presented here.
The Antagonist’s Role in the Second Half of a Story’s Structure
For the protagonist, the Second Pinch Point mirrors the First Pinch Point in emphasizing the stakes and the potential threat of the antagonist. Specifically, it will foreshadow the “Low Moment” of the Third Plot Point to follow. Whatever the antagonist threatens here will be significantly endangered or destroyed later in the Third Plot Point. However, the very threat itself is what prompts the protagonist into the (possibly hubristic) gambit of the False Victory that precedes the Low Moment.
For the antagonist, the Second Pinch Point also mirrors the First Pinch Point in representing a moment of significant aggression (to whatever degree) against the protagonist. Here, the antagonist flexes his muscles, acting from his place of strength after the Midpoint. His strength is real, but because he has not gained any new insights (either practically or thematically), his ability to adapt to the forward momentum of the plot is beginning to stall out. In short, the protagonist is evolving faster than the antagonist—and this will be the deciding factor in the end.
Antagonist’s Role in the Second Pinch Point: The antagonist will initiate the events of the Second Pinch Point based on his advancements at the Midpoint. From his perspective, what he enacts here may seem like the beginning of the endgame. He may push back at the protagonist in the belief that one more shove will be enough to topple his foe and remove the protagonist as an obstacle. However, he will likely overestimate his own position and underestimate the protagonist’s. As a result, he may not even fully realize that the effort he expends here does not have its desired effect. The protagonist may seem to retreat, but unbeknownst to the antagonist, this retreat is only so the protagonist can gather her forces for what the protagonist deems as the beginning of the endgame.
At the Third Plot Point, everything changes for both characters. The protagonist initiates this major beat with a calculated pushback against the antagonist (or, alternatively, toward the protagonist’s own plot goal). In many ways, the protagonist’s gambit will succeed. She will use what she has learned in the previous beats to overcome the obstacles that once stymied her. She may well strike a significant and damaging blow against the antagonist. But because of her own ongoing and incomplete inner conflict between Lie and Truth, she will also pay a huge price for this attack. For the protagonist, the two sides of the Third Plot Point can be termed False Victory and Low Moment.
For the antagonist, this beat is similarly complicated. On the one hand, the protagonist just hit him where it hurts. Prior to this, the antagonist believed himself in a good position from which to triumph. Now, his weaknesses and blind spots have been exposed. But on the other hand, as we’ve already seen, this was a Pyrrhic victory for the protagonist—meaning the antagonist may still be able to win, if only by default. Both parties will retreat to lick their wounds. From here on, a final confrontation is not only necessary but inevitable. Their next meeting will decide who will reach their ultimate plot goals and who will not.
The Role of the Antagonist in the Third Plot Point: The antagonist will be consolidating his own resources and preparing for a major pushback against the protagonist as well. He may receive the protagonist’s efforts with some sort of ambush, which turns the tables on the protagonist at the last minute. The antagonist will not be defeated here and may even gain some significant ground in the overall conflict. However, for the antagonist too, the Third Plot Point will usually represent a comparatively desperate moment. Time is running out; both parties will recognize that the conflict will soon have to be decided. Although the antagonist may well still hold at least a slight advantage over the protagonist, the playing field will have leveled some since the beginning of the conflict. Even if the antagonist’s goal is within reach, he is still likely to be feeling the tremendous pressure of the stakes.
The Climax properly begins halfway through the Third Act and will ramp up to varying degrees until the Climactic Moment at the end of the entire story. This turning point is what moves the protagonist and antagonist out of their respective reactions to the Third Plot Point and into their final confrontation.
This confrontation may be directly between these two characters and may even be the entire point of the story. One character will defeat the other. This defeat is either the goal of the story or the single remaining obstacle to enabling the goal.
However, the “confrontation” may also be indirect or even incidental. It’s possible the protagonist’s final pursuit of her goal may not require that she directly move against or overcome the antagonist; rather, just in doing whatever she must to triumph in her own goal, she may incidentally defeat the antagonistic force. The latter is particularly likely in stories that focus on inner or relational conflict.
The Antagonist’s Role in the Climax: At this point in the story, it is more important than ever to keep in mind that the antagonist is a character with personal desires and goals of his own. Although his primary goal at this point may indeed be to destroy the protagonist, he must still be pursuing that end for a reason—and now that the conflict has reached its final deciding stroke, that reason will be more important to the antagonist than ever. What he has been working toward throughout the story is about to be decided in a definitive way. Even if the stakes seemed higher for the protagonist throughout most of the story, now the playing field has been leveled. The antagonist has every bit as much at stake as does the protagonist.
The Climactic Moment ends the Climax—and the plot conflict. It is the moment that decides who “wins” and who “loses.” In a positive story, the winner is almost always the protagonist. However, the concept of “defeating” the antagonistic force should be understood in the context of the obstacles having been removed from between the protagonist and her ultimate plot goal. This is what brings the conflict to an end. (Thus, it is not so much that there is no conflict without an antagonist, but more so that there is no antagonist without the need for conflict.)
In a story in which the predominate aspect of the antagonistic force is found within the protagonist, the external antagonist’s ultimate positioning within the finale will not be as important. For instance, returning to last week’s example of a story about competitors, the protagonist’s victory may be moral than literal. Even if it is a literal victory within the competition, the emphasis will be less on the protagonist’s having overcome at the antagonist’s expense and more on the protagonist’s own inner transformation into strength.
In fact, in some stories the conflict will end with the protagonist and antagonist resolving their differences and perhaps even mutually claiming the plot goal.
The Antagonist’s Role in the Climactic Moment: The Climactic Moment functions similarly for both characters. It is the beat in which the conflict ends. The relationship of both protagonist and antagonist to their plot goals will be definitively decided, via their actions, in some way. There will be no forward progression toward this particular goal any longer.
The Resolution is the beat after the Climactic Moment. In most stories, it will be given at least a scene, maybe more. In other stories, it is literally nothing more than a beat. It is the closing note in the story, the “fade out.” Functionally, it exists to provide closure to the cause and effect of the entire story and the Climactic Moment in particular. It shows the reactions of the protagonist and antagonist to what just happened.
The Antagonist’s Role in the Resolution: In many stories, the antagonist will not be present for the Resolution. Either he will have been functionally eliminated from the story world (killed off, banished, etc.), or he will have become irrelevant to the protagonist now that he is no longer an obstacle. In other stories, particularly those in which the antagonist is an important relationship character, the Resolution may offer a conciliation between the characters. This may range from a full-on partnership agreement between them to merely a shaking of hands and a nod of respect before they go their separate ways. It is also possible that one party (probably the protagonist if she’s following Positive-Change Arc) may be willing to reconcile but the other is not and simply walks away, effectively banishing himself.
***
Too often, we synonymize “antagonist” with “bad guy.” From a structural perspective, the antagonist is merely a force opposing the protagonist’s forward progress and therefore prompting the protagonist’s growth. Understood in this way, the role of the antagonist in structure can be strengthened to create a more rounded and convincing story at every beat.
I’m currently taking a writing, blogging, and coaching sabbatical due to family health issues. For now, I’ll repost selected articles from my Fiction Writing School.
Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Oliver Sacks, Rebecca Solnit, Bronson Alcott, Michael Pollan, Jamaica Kincaid, and more.
BY MARIA POPOVA
Something happens when you are in a garden, when you garden — something beyond the tactile reminder that, in the history of life on Earth, without flowers, there would be no us. Kneeling between the scale of seeds and the scale of stars, touching evolutionary time and the cycle of seasons at once, you find yourself rooted more deeply into your own existence — transient and transcendent, fragile and ferociously resilient — and are suddenly humbled into your humanity. (Lest we forget, humility comes from humilis — Latin for low, of the earth.) You look at a flower and cannot help but glimpse the meaning of life.
Perhaps because the life of a garden is also a vivid reminder that anything of beauty and radiance takes time, takes care, takes devotion to seed and sprout and bloom, gardens have long been living cathedrals for the creative spirit.
Here, drawn from a lifetime of marginalia on great writers’ and artists’ letters and diaries, essays and novels, is a florilegium of my favorite exultations in the rewards and nourishments of gardens.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
In the spring of 1939, looking back on her life, Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882–March 28, 1941) recounted her earliest memory — red and purple anemones printed on her mother’s black dress — and her most vivid childhood memory, also of a flower, in the garden by the large white house on the Celtic Sea coast where she grew up:
I was looking at the flower bed by the front door; “That is the whole”, I said. I was looking at a plant with a spread of leaves; and it seemed suddenly plain that the flower itself was a part of the earth; that a ring enclosed what was the flower; and that was the real flower; part earth; part flower. It was a thought I put away as being likely to be very useful to me later.
All writers are unhappy. The picture of the world in books is thus too dark. The wordless are the happy: women in cottage gardens.
This was less a lament than a life-tested truth, for Woolf had found the most reliable salve for her own battle with the darkness in a cottage garden.
At the end of WWI, as the Spanish Flu pandemic was sweeping the world, Virginia and Leonard Woolf knew they had to leave London — their landlord had given them notice a year earlier. They went to the country, went to an auction, and purchased, for £700, Monk House — a sixteenth-century clapboard cottage without running water or electricity, but with a splendid acre of living land. Its story and its centrality to Woolf’s life and art comes alive in Virginia Woolf’s Garden (public library) by Caroline Zoob, who lived at Monk House and tended to its lush grounds for a decade.
Flowers by the Bloomsbury artist Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf’s sister.
At first, Virginia Woolf approached gardening the way one approaches any new creative endeavor: with passionate curiosity and quavery confidence. She wanted to grow her own food, but was unsure what would thrive or how to tend to it; she wanted flowers, but was unsure what would bloom or how to start the seeds, so she planted some in soap boxes filled with soil, then wrote to a friend asking if this was the way. Within a couple of years, much thanks to Leonard’s increasingly ardent devotion to the garden, she was eating pears for breakfast and reporting that “every flower that grows booms here.”
At the peak of her first spring at Monk House, having worked in the garden past sunset on the unusually chilly last day of May, Virginia exulted in her diary:
The first pure joy of the garden… weeding all day to finish the beds in a queer sort of enthusiasm which made me say this is happiness.
Over the next few years, the garden became her great joy and solace; for Leonard, it became a life’s work and his great creative achievement. Just before the December holidays of 1925, during that most contemplative of seasons, she wrote in her diary:
I’ve had two very happy times in my life — childhood… and now. Now I have all I want. My garden — my dog.
Virginia Woolf at Monk House with her dog. (Photograph by Vita Sackville-West.)
For nine years at Monk House, she had been using the unheated garden toolshed as a writing studio. In 1928, the surprising success of Orlando — the art she made of her love for Vita Sackville-West, which Vita’s son later called “the longest and most charming love letter in literature” — rendered Virginia and Leonard solvent for the first time in their shared life. Now, with a half-disbelieving eye to a proper room of her own, she exulted in finally having “money to build it, money to furnish it.”
And build it she did, overlooking the garden, which she came to regard as nothing less than “a miracle.” She gazed out at the “vast white lilies, and such a blaze of dahlias” that, even on cold grey English days, “one feels lit up.”
After a particularly debilitating spell of her lifelong depression began lifting, she found her “defiance of death in the garden,” declaring in the diary: “I will signalise my return to life — that is writing — by beginning a new book.”
But it seems to me that it was only after a guided tour of Shakespeare’s house one May day in her early fifties that Virginia Woolf, in recognizing the role of the garden in his creative life, fully allowed herself to recognize its role in her own.
Marveling at the mulberry tree outside Shakespeare’s window and the “cushions of blue, yellow, white flowers in the garden,” she wrote in her diary:
All the flowers were out in Shakespeare’s garden. “That was where his study windows looked out when he wrote The Tempest,” said the man… I cannot without more labour than my roadrunning mind can compass describe the queer impression of sunny impersonality. Yes, everything seemed to say, this was Shakespeare’s, had he sat and walked; but you won’t find me, not exactly in the flesh. He is serenely absent-present; both at once; radiating round one; yes; in the flowers, in the old hall, in the garden; but never to be pinned down… To think of writing The Tempest looking out on that garden: what a rage and storm of thought to have gone over any mind.
I find it not coincidental that Shakespeare haunts the conclusion of her exquisite reflection on the childhood memory of the flower-bed that revealed to her the meaning of art and the meaning of life, inspiring her most direct formulation of a personal philosophy:
It is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we — I mean all human beings — are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.
EMILY DICKINSON
“If we love Flowers, are we not ‘born again’ every Day,” Emily Dickinson (December 10, 1830–May 15, 1886) wrote to a friend just before her springtime death at fifty-five. When her coffin was carried across the field of buttercups to the nearby cemetery, as she had requested, most of the townspeople awaiting it knew the enigmatic woman with the auburn hair as a gardener rather than a poet. Her first formal act of composition as a girl had been not a poem but an herbarium, and only four of her nearly two thousand surviving poems had been published in her lifetime, all sidewise to her overt consent. Susan — the great love of Emily’s life, to whom she had written her electric love letters and dedicated most of her poems — listed her “Love of flowers” as the foremost attribute of the poet who often signed herself as “Daisy.”
But make no mistake — the garden was the true laboratory for Emily Dickinson’s art, and in that art flowers figured as her richest symbolic language. She might have written her poems on the seventeen and a half square inches of her cherrywood writing desk upstairs in the sunlit bedroom facing West, but all creative work comes abloom first in the mind — the rest is mere transcription — and her mind was most sunlit among her flowers. It was there, too, that she beamed her penetrating intellect at the invisible interleaving of the universe and came to see, a year before Ernst Haeckel coined the term ecology, how every single flower is a microcosm of complex ecological relationships between numerous organisms and their environment.
Emily Dickinson captured this understanding in a spare, stunning 1865 poem, in which the flower emerges not as the pretty object of admiration to which the conventions of Victorian poetry had confined it but as a ravishing system of aliveness — a silent symphony of interconnected resilience, which the flower-loving one-woman orchestra Joan As Police Woman set to song for the opening installment in the animated season of The Universe in Verse, with art by Ohara Hale based on Emily Dickinson’s herbarium and lettering by Debbie Millman based on Emily Dickinson’s handwriting:
BLOOM by Emily Dickinson
Bloom — is Result — to meet a Flower And casually glance Would cause one scarcely to suspect The minor Circumstance Assisting in the Bright Affair So intricately done Then offered as a Butterfly To the Meridian — To pack the Bud — oppose the Worm — Obtain its right of Dew — Adjust the Heat — elude the Wind — Escape the prowling Bee Great Nature not to disappoint Awaiting Her that Day — To be a Flower, is profound Responsibility —
DEBBIE MILLMAN
A century after Virginia and Leonard Woolf started their Monk House garden amid the Spanish Flu pandemic, Debbie Millman — my longtime former partner and now darling friend — and her wife Roxane undertook a kindred act of resistance to despair as the deadliest pandemic of our own century was furling humanity into fetal position. Watching their small garden grow into a blooming emblem of aliveness, Debbie composed an illustrated love letter to its unexpected gifts, to the way it bridged the seasonal and the cosmic, the transient and the eternal, to its blooming, buzzing affirmation of Gwendolyn Brooks’s poetic-existential observation that “wherever life can grow… it will sprout out, and do the best it can.”
Looking back on the record of his experiment, he observes:
Patterns and themes and concerns show up… My mother is often on my mind. Racism is often on my mind. Kindness is often on my mind. Politics. Pop music. Books. Dreams. Public space. My garden is often on my mind.
The garden indeed proves to be his readiest source of daily delight — a living reminder that spontaneity, unpredictability, and the occasional gladsome interruption of our habitual consciousness are essential components of delight. In an early-August entry titled “Inefficiency,” he writes:
I don’t know if it’s the time I’ve spent in the garden (spent an interesting word), which is somehow an exercise in supreme attentiveness — staring into the oregano blooms wending through the lowest branches of the goumi bush and the big vascular leaves of the rhubarb — and also an exercise in supreme inattention, or distraction, I should say, or fleeting intense attentions, I should say, or intense fleeting attentions — did I mention the hummingbird hovering there with its green-gold breast shimmering, slipping its needle nose in the zinnia, and zoom! Mention the pokeweed berries dangling like jewelry from a flapper mid-step. Mention the little black jewels of deer scat and the deer-shaped depressions in the grass and red clover. Uh oh.
This wildly delightful tone, fusing the miraculous and the mischievous, carries the book:
When people say they have a black thumb, meaning they can’t grow anything, I say yeah, me too, then talk about the abundant garden these black thumbs are growing.
Inevitably, Gay — like every gardener — arrives at the spiritual aspect of this earthliest and earthiest of the arts:
A lily was the first flower I planted in my garden, and I pray to it daily in the four to six weeks that it offers up its pinkish speckling by getting on my knees and pushing my face in, which, yes, is also a kind of kissing, as I tend to pucker my lips and close my eyes, and if you get close enough you’d probably hear some minute slurping between us, and for some reason I wish to deploy the verb drowning, which, in addition to being a cliché, implies a particular kind of death, and I will follow the current of that verb to suggest that the flower kissing, the moving so close to another living and breathing thing’s breath, which in this case is that of the lily I planted six years ago, will in fact kill you with delight, will annihilate you with delight, will end the life you had previously led before kneeling here and breathing the breathing thing’s breath, and the lily will resurrect you, too, your lips and nose lit with gold dust, your face and fingers smelling faintly all day of where they’ve been, amen.
I plan my garden as I wish I could plan my life, with islands of surprise, color, and scent. A seductive aspect of gardening is how many rituals it requires… By definition, the gardener’s errands can never be finished, and its time-keeping reminds us of an order older and one more complete than our own. For the worldwide regiment of gardeners, reveille sounds in spring, and rom then on it’s full parade march, pomp and circumstance, and ritualized tending until winter. But even then there’s much to admire and learn about in the garden.
Considering the existential universals that pulsate beneath the particulars of any category of creative expression, she adds:
Gardeners have unique preferences, which tend to reflect dramas in their personal lives, but they all share a love of natural beauty and a passion to create order, however briefly, from chaos. The garden becomes a frame or their vision of life… Nurturing, decisive, interfering, cajoling, gardeners are extreme optimists who trust the ways of nature and believe passionately in the idea of improvement. As the gnarled, twisted branches of apple trees have taught them, beauty can spring in the most unlikely places. Patience, hard work, and a clever plan usually lead to success: private worlds of color, scent, and astonishing beauty. Small wonder a gardener plans her garden as she wishes she could plan her life.
ROBIN WALL KIMMERER
The preeminent bryologistRobin Wall Kimmerer has devoted her life and her lyrical prose to contemplating our relationship with the rest of nature. In Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (public library), she bridges her scientific training with her Native heritage to explore “the equations of reciprocity and responsibility, the whys and wherefores of building sustainable relationships with ecosystems” — questions rendered most intimate and alive in the garden.
In a splendid antidote to the four-century delusion of dualism Descartes cast upon us, Kimmerer writes:
A garden is a way that the land says, “I love you.” … Gardens are simultaneously a material and a spiritual undertaking.
Illustration by Carson Ellis from What Is Love? by Mac Barnett
Half a century after the protagonist of Willa Cather’s novel My Antonia exclaimed while lying on his back in his grandmother’s garden that to find happiness is “to be dissolved into something complete and great,” Kimmerer reflects:
It came to me while picking beans, the secret of happiness.
I was hunting among the spiraling vines that envelop my teepees of pole beans, lifting the dark-green leaves to find handfuls of pods, long and green, firm and furred with tender fuzz. I snapped them off where they hung in slender twosomes, bit into one, and tasted nothing but August, distilled into pure, crisp beaniness… By the time I finished searching through just one trellis, my basket was full. To go and empty it in the kitchen, I stepped between heavy squash vines and around tomato plants fallen under the weight of their fruit. They sprawled at the feet of the sunflowers, whose heads bowed with the weight of maturing seeds.
As she ambles past the potato patch her daughters had left off harvesting that morning, Kimmerer considers the parallels between parenting and gardening in what it means to care for, to steward, to love — whether the particular piece of nature that is every child and every living thing, or the totality of nature. Drawing on the ways she shows her daughters love — making them maple syrup in March, bringing them wild strawberries in June, watching the meteor showers together in August — she finds a mirror-image in the way nature loves us:
How do we show our children our love? Each in our own way by a shower of gifts and a heavy rain of lessons.
Maybe it was the smell of ripe tomatoes, or the oriole singing, or that certain slant of light on a yellow afternoon and the beans hanging thick around me. It just came to me in a wash of happiness that made me laugh out loud, startling the chickadees who were picking at the sunflowers, raining black and white hulls on the ground. I knew it with a certainty as warm and clear as the September sunshine. The land loves us back. She loves us with beans and tomatoes, with roasting ears and blackberries and birdsongs. By a shower of gifts and a heavy rain of lessons. She provides for us and teaches us to provide for ourselves. That’s what good mothers do.
I am reminded here of how the English language, unlike my native Bulgarian, pays homage to this parallel between parenting and planting in its lexicon: nursery is the word for both the place where we nurture our young as they start their lives and the place where we start our gardens. Kimmerer captures this parent-like responsibility to the life of the land, to the mutuality of care:
In a garden, food arises from partnership. If I don’t pick rocks and pull weeds, I’m not fulfilling my end of the bargain. I can do these things with my handy opposable thumb and capacity to use tools, to shovel manure. But I can no more create a tomato or embroider a trellis in beans than I can turn lead into gold. That is the plants’ responsibility and their gift: animating the inanimate. Now there is a gift.
People often ask me what one thing I would recommend to restore relationship between land and people. My answer is almost always, “Plant a garden.” It’s good for the health of the earth and it’s good for the health of people. A garden is a nursery for nurturing connection, the soil for cultivation of practical reverence. And its power goes far beyond the garden gate — once you develop a relationship with a little patch of earth, it becomes a seed itself.
The garden is a place of many sacraments, an arena — at once as common as any room and as special as a church — where we can go not just to witness but to enact in a ritual way our abiding ties to the natural world. Abiding, yet by now badly attenuated, for civilization seems bent on breaking or at least forgetting our connections to the earth. But in the garden the old bonds are preserved, and not merely as symbols. So we eat from the vegetable patch, and, if we’re paying attention, we’re recalled to our dependence on the sun and the rain and the everyday leaf-by-leaf alchemy we call photosynthesis. Likewise, the poultice of comfrey leaves that lifts a wasp’s sting from our skin returns us to a quasi-magic world of healing plants from which modern medicine would cast us out.
Such sacraments are so benign that few of us have any trouble embracing them, even if they do sound a faintly pagan note. I’d guess that’s because we’re generally willing to be reminded that our bodies, at least, remain linked in such ways to the world of plants and animals, to nature’s cycles.
REBECCA SOLNIT
“If war has an opposite, gardens might sometimes be it,” Rebecca Solnit writes in Orwell’s Roses (public library) — the unsynthesizably wonderful story of the rose garden the thirty-three-year-old George Orwell planted at the small sixteenth-century cottage his suffragist aunt had secured for him as he contemplated enlisting in the Spanish Civil War.
Solnit observes that the garden, paradoxically, both feeds and counterbalances the art that is both her life’s work and Orwell’s:
A garden offers the opposite of the disembodied uncertainties of writing. It’s vivid to all the senses, it’s a space of bodily labor, of getting dirty in the best and most literal way, an opportunity to see immediate and unarguable effect.
[…]
To spend time frequently with these direct experiences is clarifying, a way of stepping out of the whirlpools of words and the confusion they can whip up. In an age of lies and illusions, the garden is one way to ground yourself in the realm of the processes of growth and the passage of time, the rules of physics, meteorology, hydrology, and biology, and the realms of the senses.
In this place of paradoxes and pleasing tensions — control and chaos, transience and durability, planning and surprise — none is more pleasing than the garden’s dual reminder that we are insignificant particles in vast a cosmos of process and phenomena, and we are potent seeds of change, our littlest actions rippling out into the evolutionary unfolding of the whole. Solnit captures this with her signature pointed poetics:
To garden is to make whole again what has been shattered: the relationships in which you are both producer and consumer, in which you reap the bounty of the earth directly, in which you understand fully how something came into being. It may not be significant in scale, but even if it’s a windowsill geranium high above a city street, it can be significant in meaning.
DEREK JARMAN
In 1989, shortly after his HIV diagnosis and his father’s death, the English artist, filmmaker, and LGBT rights activist Derek Jarman (January 31, 1942–February 19, 1994) left the bustling pretensions of London for a simple life on the shingled shores of Kent. He took up residence in a former Victorian fisherman’s hut between an old lighthouse and a nuclear power plant on the headland of Dungeness, a newly designated a conservation area. He named it Prospect Cottage, painted the front room a translucent Naples yellow, replaced the ramshackle door with blue velvet curtains, and set about making a garden around the gnarled century-old pear tree rising from the carpet of violets as the larks living in the shingles sang high above him in the grey-blue English sky.
At low tide, he collected some handsome sea-rounded flints washed up after a storm, staked them upright in the garden “like dragon teeth,” and encircled each with twelve small beach pebbles. These rudimentary sundials became his flower beds, into which he planted a wondrous miniature wilderness of species not even half of which I, a growing gardener, have encountered — saxifrage, calendula, rue, camomile, shirley poppy, santolina, nasturtium, dianthus, purple iris, hare-bell, and his favorite: sea kale. (A gorgeous plant new to me, which I immediately researched, procured, and planted in my Brooklyn garden.)
As the seasons turned and his flowers rose and the AIDS plague felled his friends one by one, Jarman mourned loss after loss, then grounded himself again and again in the irrepressible life of soil and sprout and bud and bloom. The garden, which his Victorian ancestors saw as a source of moral lessons, became his sanctuary of “extraordinary peacefulness” amid the deepest existential perturbations of death, his canvas for creation amid all the destruction. On the windblown shore, living with a deadly disease while his friends — his kind, our kind — are dying of it in a world too indifferent to human suffering, gardening became his act of resistance as he set out to build an alternative garden of Eden:
Before I finish I intend to celebrate our corner of Paradise, the part of the garden the Lord forgot to mention.
The record of this healing creative adventure became Jarman’s Modern Nature (public library) — part memoir and part memorial, a reckoning and a redemption, a homecoming to his first great love: gardening. What emerges from the short near-daily entries is a kind of hybrid between Tolstoy’s Calendar of Wisdom, Rilke’s Book of Hours, and Thoreau’s philosophical nature journals.
On the last day of February, after planting lavender in a circle of stones he collected from the beach under the clear blue sky, he writes:
Apart from the nagging past — film, sex and London — I have never been happier than last week. I look up and see the deep azure sea outside my window in the February sun, and today I saw my first bumble bee. Plated lavender and clumps of red hot poker.
Iris from A Curious Herbal by Elizabeth Blackwell, 1737. (Available as a print, benefitting the Nature Conservancy.)
In the first week of March, Jarman arrives at what may be the greatest reward of gardening:
The gardener digs in another time, without past or future, beginning or end. A time that does not cleave the day with rush hours, lunch breaks, the last bus home. As you walk in the garden you pass into this time — the moment of entering can never be remembered. Around you the landscape lies transfigured. Here is the Amen beyond the prayer.
In the essay on Jarman, titled “Paradise,” she twines the questions of whether gardening is a form of art and whether art is a form of resistance — a necessary tool for building the Garden of Eden we imagine a flourishing society to be:
Gardening situates you in a different kind of time, the antithesis of the agitating present of social media. Time becomes circular, not chronological; minutes stretch into hours; some actions don’t bear fruit for decades. The gardener is not immune to attrition and loss, but is daily confronted by the ongoing good news of fecundity. A peony returns, alien pink shoots thrusting from bare soil. The fennel self-seeds; there is an abundance of cosmos out of nowhere.
[…]
Is art resistance? Can you plant a garden to stop a war? It depends how you think about time. It depends what you think a seed does, if it’s tossed into fertile soil. But it seems to me that whatever else you do, it’s worth tending to paradise, however you define it and wherever it arises.
A century and a half after Walt Whitman extolled the healing powers of nature after his paralytic stroke, the poetic neurologist Oliver Sacks (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015) gave empirical substantiation to these unparalleled powers.
As a writer, I find gardens essential to the creative process; as a physician, I take my patients to gardens whenever possible. All of us have had the experience of wandering through a lush garden or a timeless desert, walking by a river or an ocean, or climbing a mountain and finding ourselves simultaneously calmed and reinvigorated, engaged in mind, refreshed in body and spirit. The importance of these physiological states on individual and community health is fundamental and wide-ranging. In forty years of medical practice, I have found only two types of non-pharmaceutical “therapy” to be vitally important for patients with chronic neurological diseases: music and gardens.
Having lived and worked in New York City for half a century — a city “sometimes made bearable… only by its gardens” — Sacks recounts witnessing nature’s tonic effects on his neurologically impaired patients: A man with Tourette’s syndrome, afflicted by severe verbal and gestural tics in the urban environment, grows completely symptom-free while hiking in the desert; an elderly woman with Parkinson’s disease, who often finds herself frozen elsewhere, can not only easily initiate movement in the garden but takes to climbing up and down the rocks unaided; several people with advanced dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, who can’t recall how to perform basic operations of civilization like tying their shoes, suddenly know exactly what to do when handed seedlings and placed before a flower bed. Sacks reflects:
I cannot say exactly how nature exerts its calming and organizing effects on our brains, but I have seen in my patients the restorative and healing powers of nature and gardens, even for those who are deeply disabled neurologically. In many cases, gardens and nature are more powerful than any medication… The effects of nature’s qualities on health are not only spiritual and emotional but physical and neurological. I have no doubt that they reflect deep changes in the brain’s physiology, and perhaps even its structure.
BRONSON ALCOTT
“I had a pleasant time with my mind, for it was happy,” Louisa May Alcott wrote in her diary just after she turned eleven, a quarter century before Little Women bloomed from that uncommon mind — a mind whose pleasures and powers were nurtured by the profound love of nature her father wove into the philosophical and scientific education he gave his four daughters.
The progressive philosopher, abolitionist, education reformer, and women’s rights advocate Bronson Alcott (November 29, 1799–March 4, 1888) developed his ideas about human flourishing and social harmony by observing and reflecting on the processes, phenomena, and pleasures of the natural world — something he shared with the Transcendentalists of his generation, and particularly with his best friend: the naturalistic transcendence-shaman Ralph Waldo Emerson.
In 1856, while living next door to the visionary Elizabeth Peabody in Boston — the seedbed of Transcendentalism, a term Peabody herself had coined — Alcott borrowed and devoured Emerson’s copy of a book sent to him by an obscure young Brooklyn poet as a token of gratitude for having inspired it: Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, published months earlier.
Hot pepper from Elizabeth Blackwell’s A Curious Herbal. (Available as a print, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Whitman’s unexampled verse — so free from the Puritanical conventions of poetry, so lush with a love of life, so unabashedly reverent of nature as the only divinity — stirred a deep resonance with Bronson’s own worldview and inspired him to try his hand at the portable poetics of nature: gardening. Right there in the middle of bustling Boston, where his young country was just beginning to find its intellectual and artistic voice, Alcott set up his humble urban garden. One May morning — a century and a half before bryologist Robin Wall Kimmerer contemplated gardening and the secret of happiness, before Olivia Laing wrote of gardening as an act of resistance, before neurologist Oliver Sacks drew on forty years of medical practice to attest to the healing power of gardens — the fifty-six-year-old Alcott planted some peas, corn, cucumbers, and melons, then wrote in his journal:
Human life is a very simple matter. Breath, bread, health, a hearthstone, a fountain, fruits, a few garden seeds and room to plant them in, a wife and children, a friend or two of either sex, conversation, neighbours, and a task life-long given from within — these are contentment and a great estate. On these gifts follow all others, all graces dance attendance, all beauties, beatitudes, mortals can desire and know.
By mid-summer, Alcott had discovered in his garden not only a creaturely gladness but a portal into the deepest existential contentment — something akin to the creative intoxication that he, like all artists, found in his literary calling:
My garden has been my pleasure, and a daily recreation since the spring opened for planting… Every plant one tends he falls in love with, and gets the glad response for all his attentions and pains. Books, persons even, are for the time set aside — studies and the pen. — Only persons of perennial genius attract or recreate as the plants, and of books we may say the same, as of the magic of solitude.
JAMAICA KINCAID
A chief gladness of gardening comes from its dual nature, from how it salves our longing for making order out of chaos but also frustrates it. There is elemental satisfaction in the reminder that we can never fully control nature — that, in fact, any sense of control is a childish fantasy, for we ourselves are children of nature, made by the selfsame forces and phenomena we play at bridling.
That is what the writer and gardener Jamaica Kincaid celebrates in My Garden (Book) (public library) — a fractal delight I discovered via Ross Gay, who devotes to it a midsummer entry in his yearlong journal of daily delights. (All delight is fractal.)
Writing in the first year of the twenty-first century, in a passage evocative of the poetic physicist Richard Feynman’s insistence that “nature has the greatest imagination of all,” Kincaid reflects:
How agitated I am when I am in the garden, and how happy I am to be so agitated. How vexed I often am when I am in the garden, and how happy I am to be so vexed. What to do? Nothing works just the way I thought it would, nothing looks just the way I had imagined it, and when sometimes it does look like what I had imagined (and this, thank God, is rare) I am startled that my imagination is so ordinary.
What to do? becomes the recurring incantation of the garden’s imagination. Puzzled by why her Wisteria floribunda is blooming out of season and reason, in late July rather than in May, Kincaid wonders:
What to do with the wisteria? should I let it go, blooming and blooming, each new bud looking authoritative but also not quite right at all, as if on a dare, a surprise even to itself, looking as if its out-of-seasonness was a modest, tentative query?
[…]
My garden has no serious intention, my garden has only series of doubts upon series of doubts.
This, of course, is the definition of the scientific method — the vector of revelation as a series of doubts and tentative queries continually tested against reality. But there is also a spiritual dimension to Kincaid’s questioning refrain, to the longing for an answer from an external entity with higher powers of omniscience — this, of course, is the definition of religion. In her gasping wonderment, she arrives at something beyond reason and beyond belief — the single animating force beneath all science and all spirituality:
What to do? Whom should I ask what to do? Is there a person to whom I could ask such a question and would that person have an answer that would make sense to me in a rational way (in the way even I have come to accept things as rational), and would that person be able to make the rational way imbued with awe and not so much with the practical; I know the practical, it will keep you breathing; awe, on the other hand, is what makes you (me) want to keep living.
I’m currently taking a writing, blogging, and coaching sabbatical due to family health issues. For now, I’ll repost selected articles from my Fiction Writing School.
Have you ever written for several hours, then emerged from your creative stupor feeling like you’ve just run a marathon?
I tend to hang around a lot of writers, and our routine is as follows: Wake up > eat > write > nap > eat > write > sleep. Notice that nap wedged in the middle of writing? Yeah, that’s necessary.
It could be because we’ve been staring at a screen for hours on end, or maybe it’s the growing cramp in our hands, but if you catch us sans-nap, we’re gonna look like zombies.
From start to finish, the writing process is exhausting. We all know how difficult a first draft can be, and the edits that follow are painful and seemingly never-ending. But that’s not the only reason writing drains the life out of us.
The fact of the matter is, writing can be a very strenuous activity on the brain.
Before we get into the segment I’d like to call “This is your brain on drugs writing,” we have a couple myths to bust.
Myth #1 – Humans Only Use 10% of Their Brain
If you’ve seen the movie Lucy, or Limitless, or the T.V. show Limitless, or The Matrix, or pretty much any sci-fi movie that involves brain power, you might hold the misconception that humans only use a limited portion of their brains. This means the possibilities, should we be able to access the full extent of our brain power are… I guess you could say… limitless.
That’s a load of hooey.
Neuroscientists exist to study the brain; they’ve been doing it for years and have gotten pretty good at it. They take their work seriously, but if you ask any one of them about the “unused section of your brain,” they’ll probably laugh at you.
According to neurologist Barry Gordon in an article by Scientific American, the entirety of our brain remains active “almost all the time,” and we use every part of it.
This is doubly true when you’re writing, but we’ll get into that in a bit. Your main takeaway from this busted myth is that we do use all of our brains, and it is possible to operate at full capacity.
As a side note, though, never write a story about accessing the full extent of your brain. It’s overdone.
But I digress.
Myth #2 – The Left Brain and the Right Brain
The second myth that we need to bust is a very widely held belief. That of the left brain and the right brain.
Many believe that the human population can be split into two categories: the analytical left-brain thinkers and the creative right-brain thinkers.
While some people can be defined by their logic and some by their creativity, it’s not the side of the brain they most use that gives them those traits.
Yes, it’s true that the brain has a left side and a right side, and that they even have somedifferent functions (strong emphasis on some). However, one side cannot operate without the other, one side cannot dictate your personality, and there is no way for one side to be “more dominant.” That’s not how brains work.
So, when people say that writers, artists, or (insert creative profession here) are brilliant because their left brain and right brain are working together, it’s like saying someone is alive because their heart and lungs are working together.
DUH. THAT’S WHAT BRAINS DO.
And that leads us to the main point of this article.
Your Brain on Writing
We are lucky to live in an age of technology, invention, and discovery. Scientists yearn to understand how the world works and how the people who inhabit the world operate. They run tests and conduct studies until they find evidence that satisfies them.
Enter Martin Lotze of the University of Greifswald in Germany.
Martin Lotze and his merry band of researchers sought to discover what the brain looked like when engaged in a writing activity, comparing a novice writer’s brain to an expert writer’s brain as they wrote.
Lotze had done multiple studies on artists’ brains, but never writers, because of the intricacies of the available technology.
To pull off this study, Lotze had to find a way to take a brain scan —more specifically an fMRI — while his subjects were writing. This would require that their heads be in a gigantic, magnetized device, with limited movement, and it would require that they see what they are writing. See the challenge?
Lotze found a way to use a series of mirrors attached to the machine (and a specially designed desk) that would allow the subjects to see their writing without having to move their head around. Then, all Lotze needed were volunteers.
To gather a control level for his subjects’ brain waves while writing by hand, he had his 28 writers copy an excerpt. After the baseline brain activity was gathered, he had the subjects brainstorm and write a short story for three minutes.
According to the research, some areas of the brain became more active when the writers were asked to come up with their own stories rather than just copy text.
During the brainstorming session, the occipital lobe (which helps with visualization) became more active — meaning that the subjects might have been “seeing” the scenes they were writing in their heads.
When the actual creating began, the hippocampus and the front of the brain became active. Lotze suggests that these regions were gathering factual information to include in the story and sorting through the different characters and plotlines available to the writer.
The research shows that different parts of your brain are active at different stages of the writing process. If shown a photo of your brain, a neuroscientist could probably figure out whether you’ve been writing or not, and how far you’ve gotten in the process.
But What About Expert Writers?
The ones to whom brainstorming comes as second nature, and who can juggle characters and plotlines more effortlessly.
Lotze and his team moved their study to the University of Hildesheim and their prestigious writing program. They recruited 20 expert writers (or, those who were attending this prestigious program) to participate in the same study, allowing Lotze and his team to discover whether expertise affects brain activity.
What they found was interesting.
Muscle Memory
Ok, so the brain isn’t technically a muscle, but it often behaves like one.
Expert athletes have trained their muscles to perform certain functions, and expert creatives can do the same with their brain.
Lotze and his team of researchers discovered that, while writing down their stories, the expert writers used an additional part of their brain — the caudate nucleus.
The caudate nucleus is the region of the brain that handles automatic functions, or functions that are practiced over time. For example, the act of handwriting letters on a page. You learned the letters when you were a toddler, traced them, and learned how to write them yourself. After years of practice, it’s now an automatic function. When that region is active, it means there is some form of memory involved.
What kind of memories are expert writers pulling from? It’s kind of hard to know what someone is thinking when their brain is cycling through ideas, sentences, and the many automatic functions it takes to write. Our technology is advanced, but not that advanced.
We could hypothesize that they are pulling memories from sentences they’ve formulated in the past, stories they’ve thought up before, or maybe even techniques they’ve learned about storytelling. But we may never know.
They also discovered that, in the expert writer’s brain, the regions that deal with speech and word formation (known as Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas) are used more frequently in the brainstorming stage compared to novice writers, who tend to visualize in pictures more. This could mean that, before even putting pen to paper, expert writers are already thinking about words or phrases they are going to use to tell their story.
It could also mean that expert writers have trained their brain to see things differently, to be more language oriented, and to visualize not just with the occipital lobe.
Training Your Brain
If you’re not a professional writer, or haven’t been for very long, chances are your brain operates like the novice writers’ in Lotze’s study.
How do you get from novice to expert? How do you train your brain and activate your caudate nucleus?
You need three things:
Time
Willpower
Several hundred pieces of paper
Ok, so maybe you need several hundred things (if we’re counting every sheet of paper you’re going to use).
The point is, training your brain takes practice, maybe even years of it. Ever heard of the rule that you need 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert? Spoiler alert: scientists debunked that a while back, but the base idea still stands. It may take 1,000 hours. It may take 10,000; it may even take 50,000. It depends on your brain plasticity (or your brain’s ability to change over time). Either way, you’ll need patience and a whole lot of willpower to get through it.
Here are some activities you can do to help expand your mind and train that brain!
Free write every day for at least two minutes a day. You can write whatever you want in those two plus minutes. You could write a haiku, a diary entry, or something a little more ambitious. (That isn’t to say haikus aren’t ambitious.) The goal is to get used to the act of writing and coming up with content as you go.
Read your #writinggoals. If you’re a writer, you’re a reader, and all readers have their idols. Read the kind of content you aspire to write, and read a lot of it. Your brain will absorb the vocabulary, syntax, and general style of the writing you’re reading and naturally incorporate it into your own work.
Look things up. Artists, athletes, and even scientists are always learning new techniques to help them get better. Writers can do the same. Expand your vocabulary by flipping through a thesaurus or a dictionary, study grammar books, and definitely look something up if you don’t know it. Push yourself to learn more about your craft, and you’ll grow because of it.
Overwhelm your brain. The brain is pretty damn powerful. If you push it, chances are it will rise to the occasion. Test your limits by writing for an hour longer than you think you can. Read Derrida. Write a haiku! Treat your brain like a muscle and do reps until you just can’t do it anymore. Just like a muscle, your brain will grow.
Don’t think about it too much. If you put in the work, your brain will grow on its own. Your subconscious will pick up on what you are doing and adjust accordingly. Trust your brain. It’s gotten you this far, hasn’t it?
Work Hard, Play Hard
If there is anything the research tells us, it’s that our brain is one very active organ when we’re writing. Both the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere work together to handle the comprehension, brainstorming, story creation, and physical writing of a story. Not 10% of your brain, ALL of your brain.
No wonder you feel exhausted after writing for a few hours. Your brain has just run a marathon!
Moreover, the research on expert writers tells us that some can actually operate on a sort of autopilot. It proves that writing is a skill that takes practice and repetition to train your brain before it becomes easier.
To become an expert writer, you’ll have to work at it, dedicating a lot of time and patience to the craft. Luckily, all that practice has scientifically proven results.
So keep working hard, but make sure you take a break every so often. Your brain deserves it!
I’m currently taking a writing, blogging, and coaching sabbatical due to family health issues. For now, I’ll repost selected articles from my Fiction Writing School.
Procrastination – the act of delaying an event – is a universal human habit. Authors fall victim to it just like everyone else. Despite claiming writing is our passion, many of us will do almost anything to distract ourselves from putting words on the page. That’s fine in short periods. It becomes a problem, though, when you let it happen so often you hardly ever write. Millions of passionate writers have killed their careers by allowing this sickness to possess them. A monstrous seagull of a mental state, procrastination picks off fledgeling writers like turtle hatchlings on a beach, and even pecks at experienced authors to stop them slipping back into the water.
To be clear, procrastination can be a symptom of burnout, but it isn’t burnout itself. Yes, you might feel tired of writing, but those who suffer from burnout haven’t been slacking off, avoiding it for weeks, months or years; they’ve hustled relentlessly and injured themselves from overwork. It you’re burnt out then only rest will help you. If, however, you suspect you’re not injured from overwork but paralysed every day by the seagull of procrastination in your mind, you’re in a good position to escape that seagull and get back into the flow.
As you will find out in today’s blog post, while procrastination never goes away completely, you can manage it. Yes, the seagull will appear on occasion but, unlike turtles, we can learn survival tactics. We can create and carry mindset tools to protect ourselves and internalise strategies to live in a way that helps us avoid the beast altogether. Killing procrastination for good is impossible but, by educating ourselves and changing our habits, we can clip its wings and tame it. This article will show you how.
Remove Obstacles
Those who give advice on how to write more often start with time management tips. The problem, though, is that procrastinating writers often have spare time and know how they should spend it. Their issue isn’t availability or knowledge; it’s friction. James Clear, author of the habit guide Atomic Habits, explains it clearly when she says, “The greater the obstacle — that is, the more difficult the habit — the more friction there is between you and your desired end state.” Writing isn’t hard but it is a daunting obstacle and, to procrastinating authors, other activities seem easier by comparison. As a result, many of us follow the path of least resistance.
Eliminate those easier paths from your life, however, and your writing will seem like less of an obstacle. You could, for instance, clean and tidy your workspace the night before a writing session to ensure you’re not tempted when you should be writing. Or you could turn off the internet before you begin. Having your writing pad, laptop, voice recorder — whatever you use — set in your workspace will also help, removing the friction of having to carry them from elsewhere. Outline what you plan to write in your next session at the end of your current one, too. That makes starting the next day less daunting as you’ll know how to begin.
Block Out Time
We’ve all told ourselves that we’ll do something “later” only to reach the end of the day and realise it’s too late to start so we’ll have to “do it tomorrow.” The issue is that if you keep kicking the proverbial can down the road, 30 years pass and that can eventually becomes a cannot. If you actually want to beat procrastination and make progress then you must make time for it every day until it’s done. For you, that might mean blocking out time for which you can only work on your book, as you would block out a dentist’s appointment. Give your writing importance and make it non-negotiable, otherwise you will let other people derail it forever.
According to a 1997 study cited in Fast Company, morning people tend to excel at nurturing good habits and staving off bad habits. Plus, they tend to procrastinate less. One explanation why is that they execute early in the day when they have more energy, and before the people in their life divert their attention. Not everyone is a morning person, but you can produce similar results by copying the habits of morning people. For example, if you struggle to block out time to write, or you find yourself unable to focus late at night, try going to bed earlier and setting an earlier alarm. In doing so, you’ll create a distraction free time block where nobody expects anything from you as you’re normally asleep. That way, you can execute on your writing before the day begins.
Lower the Bar
“It doesn’t really matter much if on a particular day I write beautiful and brilliant prose that will stick in the minds of my readers forever, because there’s a 90 percent chance I’m just gonna delete whatever I write anyway. I find this hugely liberating.”
That quote comes from mega-bestselling teen fiction author John Green. It’s interesting because his work is both critically acclaimed and wildly commercial. He acknowledges that his first drafts are bad and that, for him, the initial writing process is simply about getting words on the page. This means his editing process is the magic that turns a delete-able first draft into an acclaimed bestseller.
Consider this when tackling your own procrastination. Don’t focus on investing too much emotional energy into writing a perfect first draft. Instead, lower the bar to remove the expectations that paralyse you from writing. Once you’ve done that, you can write without fear of consequence, knowing all you’re doing is filling the page. Worry about editing it later. This approach can work in relation to quality and quantity. Afraid you can’t write your first draft like polished Hemingway prose? Neither could Hemingway! Make peace with writing badly. Daunted by a 2,000-word target? Drop the minimum goal to 100 words and trust that getting over that initial hurdle will kickstart your flow state. Lower every bar and you will start writing more consistently.
Learn Just in Time
It’s impressive when you watch a seasoned self-published author at work. They can effortlessly hop from one task to another; writing solid prose, formatting like an artist, managing designers, crafting efficient blurbs, collating effective metadata and building strong marketing campaigns. When we hear about these people, we want to learn their ways — to become publishing polymaths ourselves — and we want it now. Hence, many of us stop writing so we can consume every blog post, podcast and YouTube video we can find just in case we need the information. Then, after some time, we realise:
We’ve learned a lot but haven’t written in ages.
We probably won’t need most of what we’ve learned.
We’ll have to re-learn a lot by the time we need it.
This is the trap of just-in-case learning. It feels productive but it’s actually a form of procrastination — more edutainment than education. When we do this, we don’t need or remember most of the knowledge we encounter. To work efficiently and make progress like the pros, what you really need is to not learn just in case, but just in time. This means searching for any knowledge you need at the moment you need it. Will this lead to you making mistakes through ignorance? Yes, but the time it takes to correct those mistakes is often far shorter than the time you would have spent becoming a walking publishing encyclopaedia, full of mis-remembered information.
Publish Often
Facebook has a motto: “Move fast and break things.” It endorses the idea of taking frequent action to make swift progress, even if the product you launch isn’t perfect. This idea has served Facebook well because it teaches employees to launch imperfect products rather than keep tweaking forever. It suggests they will never have enough information to achieve perfection so might as well release a product as soon as it’s passable. By their logic, it’s only by releasing a product and receiving feedback that you can learn how to improve it. Authors who spend years writing their debut novel could benefit from this mentality. By releasing a good but imperfect book, they would learn more from the experience than they ever would revising an unfinished manuscript.
Set a deadline to publish often and you too can overcome this form of tweaker’s procrastination. Putting time limits on projects forces you to create on a regular basis. As prolific author, blogger and entrepreneur Seth Godin has said when discussing his secret to writing success:
“If you know you have to write a blog post tomorrow, something in writing, something that will be around 6 months from now, about something in the world, you will start looking for something in the world to write about.”
This is true for the creation of ideas and words. A deadline makes writers’ block irrelevant. When you know you have to publish something next week, you will choose ideas and find words. Will the work meet your idea of perfection? No, but you’ll learn more from a complete project than an unfinished one. Hence, if you keep getting bogged down by aiming for perfection, publish often — somewhere public to keep yourself accountable.
Beating procrastination isn’t easy. It takes time to eradicate bad habits and form new neural pathways to solidify good ones. Follow the tips outlined in this blog, however, and you will procrastinate less and write more often. The seagull will turn up some days, but it won’t stick around long if you keep working to minimise its influence. Push through any blips and writing will eventually become your way of life.
Daniel Parsons
Dan Parsons is the bestselling author of multiple series. His Creative Business books for authors and other entrepreneurs contains several international bestsellers. Meanwhile, his fantasy and horror series, published under Daniel Parsons, have topped charts around the world and been used to promote a major Hollywood movie. For more information on writing, networking, and building your creative business, check out all of Dan’s non-fiction books here.
I’m currently taking a writing, blogging, and coaching sabbatical due to family health issues. For now, I’ll repost selected articles from my Fiction Writing School.
We hear it over and over: Show, don’t tell. You can’t get away from this advice, not in writing workshops, at conferences, or heck, even when visiting this blog. Writers Helping Writers and the thesaurus work we do is all about strengthening show, don’t tell skills.
There’s a good reason for this, though. Showing draws a reader in so they are more emotionally involved. Telling informs.
Often paired with “show, don’t tell” advice is the assertion that not all telling is bad. That’s also true. Telling is necessary, and acts as a balance to showing. If everything was shown, books would be 400,000 word monstrosities. And our readers? Asleep after twenty pages.
Does this means our stories should be equal parts showing and telling? Not by a long shot. In storytelling, showing is King.
The spirit of show, don’t tell is recognizing when a detail or moment is important, and then slowing things down briefly to describe it.
Now “slowing things down” doesn’t mean lazy, liquid writing – far from it. Adding sugary, fluffy words without purpose might pretty up a sentence, but it also slows the pace and weakens writing.
Think of words as currency–limited currency. If we only have so many words to work with, we become more careful about how we use them.
Being choosy is a good thing in writing. Is something important to the story? Will it add meaning and depth, reveal something about the characters, and enhances the reader’s experience? If so, it’s probably a detail to expand upon.
Show, Don’t Tell & Emotion
Most articles and workshops on show, don’t tell focus on emotion. It’s no wonder because emotion is one area where showing almost always trumps telling. After all, we want readers to feel part of what’s happening and connect with what a character is feeling, and it’s easier to do that through showing. Consider these:
Dee waited for Kirk to get home. She was furious. (Telling)
Dee paced the kitchen. She was as mad as Hell. (Weak showing + telling)
Dee lapped the kitchen table, crushing fistfuls of air and counting the minutes until she’d have something more solid to choke. Kirk was a dead man. (Showing.)
Showing engages. It involves. It can make readers feel like they are participating in the moment. That’s why scenes with emotions usually have a higher percentage of showing.
Show, don’t tell is something that we should always keep at the front of our mind as it forces us to think about the reader’s experience and how to make it better. And because we want to do more with less (word currency) we try harder to find the best words to describe something. When we become picky about our description and language, our writing improves!
Mary stopped on the sidewalk. The house in front of her was old and creepy. This couldn’t be the right place, could it? (Telling)
The house towered over Mary, blocking the sun and stealing warmth from the air. Peeling porch steps sagged and the shutters hung askew, like old bones barely able to hold together. Mary dug for the slip of paper Grandmother had given her. This must be the wrong address. Had to be. A cold tingle slid across her shoulders and she froze. Someone, or something, was watching. (Showing)
Showing usually requires more word count, which is why we want to think carefully about which details to include and which not to. I could have also described the scabby lawn and toppled flower pots, or even how the trees seemed to bend toward the house as if cradling its secrets. But it’s easy to get carried away, especially when you are trying to build atmosphere and mood. Choose powerful details that do the job and keep the writing tight.
Show, Don’t Tell & A Character’s Physical Features
Show, don’t tell isn’t always about using one over the other. It’s about using both effectively and challenging ourselves to do more with description. Consider:
Marcy pounded on her upstairs neighbor’s door, ready to lash into the jerk blasting his My dog died and my tractor left me country music at six AM. An old, blue-hair answered, shocking the words right out of Marcy. Not what she expected, not at all.
Marcy pounded on her upstairs neighbor’s door, ready to lash into the jerk blasting his My dog died and my tractor left me country music at six AM. A cherubic grandmother answered, white curls carefully coiffed and a flower-print apron circling her thick waist. “Good morning, dear.” Her smile was the equivalent of a warm cookie on a plate next to an inviting glass of milk.
I, uh, just wanted to introduce myself. Marcy.” She thrust out her hand. “I have the, you know, basement suite.”
Which one sets up the neighbor’s kindly personality and displays Marcy’s shock?
Does every character require thoughtful physical description? No. It’s really up to you to decide which characters are important enough to describe and to what degree, but when you do, challenge yourself to ditch generic details and instead choose ones that give readers insight into who the character is deep down, how they feel, or something else significant and interesting.
Make Each Word Earn the Right to Be Included
Thinking in terms of show don’t tell will make you a more effective storyteller because you get used to doing more with your description.
If you need help getting into this mindset, try One Stop for Writers’ descriptive thesaurus database. It’s the largest database of its kind and will help you brainstorm meaningful details to push the story forward and reveal your character’s deeper layers. If you like our thesaurus books, this database of ours is like that, only much, MUCH bigger!
Remember, the reader doesn’t need to know everything, only the important things. Whenever you’re not sure if you should show or tell, just think about what you the audience to get out of this moment. Do you have a point to make? Are you trying to show a character’s deeper emotions, hint at a traumatic past, or showcase how their flawed behavior is holding them back in life? If there’s something important you want readers to see, chances are you need to show.
Richard L. Fricks 
