Archive for category Productivity

Writing While Not Writing

Jan 26

Posted by Rocky Cole in Productivity, Writing Craft | No Comments

Alta in the old days

Recently I returned from a vacation of sorts. I live in the misty chill of the San Francisco Bay Area – on an island near San Francisco actually – but once a year I make a pilgrimage to Utah to ski with some high school friends from Florida. Florida and snow skiing seems a stretch, but it’s what we do. Mostly, these trips are just to hang out and ski, and as we have drifted apart in other ways, this is the one consistent annual event in all of our lives. In any case, long experience has taught me that there will be little creative writing done during the annual ski trip. There will be banter, drinking, over-eating, and of course skiing, but little writing.

Yet as I think back over the week just spent sitting in a Subaru named “Scoobie” on the way to Alta, Solitude, Brighton and Park City ski resorts, and the hours spent riding silent ski lifts through steady snowfalls, I see that the writing was never far away and that all my literary ambitions benefitted by the break. Routines for writers are good, don’t misunderstand that, but at times just getting away from the writing table gives you a new perspective on writing in general and on specific scenes in particular. Vida Winter, the fictional writer in The Thirteenth Tale tells her biographer, Margaret, that writing comes from the composting of the writer’s life. Well, a ski trip with friends you’ve known for over twenty years definitely is filled with compost – believe me on that one.

So don’t be afraid to take a break or go off on a little adventure and see what happens. Take along a notebook for writing down thoughts and imaginings (I’m never without one) but leave your expectations and plans at home and just see what happens. You may find that you do some of your best writing while not writing.

How to Begin a Story With the Technique Stephenie Meyer Used to Write Her Twilight Vampire Novels

Nov 21

Posted by Rocky Cole in Fiction Writing, Productivity, Writing 101, Writing Craft | No Comments

Twilight

Beginning stories and novels is always a challenge. Most beginnings are discarded eventually. Often, these ignoble starts bear no resemblance to the final product. This difficulty is, I believe, a direct result of the writer having an unclear idea of the story and of the characters who will populate their imaginary world. Stephenie Meyer, the highly successful author of the ‘Twilight’ series, offers a tip in the way that she began her first novel. Stephenie’s experience of beginning Twilight can be used to a writer’s advantage when starting a new story or novel project.

Stephenie, who had written very little and had no great ambition as a writer prior to the amazing success of Twilight, did not sit down initially to write a bestselling coming-of-age vampire novel series. She was a reader, a sporadic writer, and fan of the “vampire-genre” and of the “romance-genre”. Her compelling story that becomes ‘Twilight’ begins with a dream she had one night. This dream will eventually become the ‘meadow scene’ in her first book where Bella Swan, in the forest with Edward Cullen, discovers Edward is a vampire. This is a powerful, key scene in the novel, and Stephenie has described how jolted she was by the images in the dream. Stephenie awoke and wrote the dream down, and this became the key scene the entire book was written around.

We all have dreams and flashes of scenes and characters from time to time, but what Stephenie did with this dream is something that writers can use to begin to craft a story. Stephenie wrote outward from the key scene she devised from her dream to answer the questions posed by the scene:

Who were the two people in the dream/scene – a human girl and a handsome vampire?
And, why would she willingly give herself to him?

These two questions make up the key components of the story, and in answering them, Stephenie is drawing her readers into a detailed world where vampires and humans exist throughout a long and complex history.

How to use what Stephanie did with Twilight

1. Begin with a compelling image or character.

2. Free-write the scene you imagine, or as much detail as you can about the character that you see/imagine.

3. Step back and answer some questions about what you have written:

What came before this scene?
What is important about this scene and how did the character get to this place or in this situation?
Why does this particular scene matter to the character that is there?
What could make this scene or situation worse or complicate the issue or event?
What is the natural outcome of the event, and, what is the least likely outcome?

The key takeaway from what Stephenie did with Twilight is to find a compelling scene and then to seek to answer the questions about who is there and what is going on. You write both forward and backwards from the event, trying to give it a realistic (regardless of genre) past that got you to that point, and future, that the story and characters will inexorably move towards.

You may not know exactly where the story will end, but if you begin with a vivid character or scene you can write around it to tell a compelling story.

Try this technique on a short-story and see how it works. I’d love to hear how it comes out. Send me an email at info@colewriting.com and let me know how it went if you try this exercise.

Establishing a Successful Freelance Writing Practice in Five Steps

Oct 28

Posted by Rocky Cole in Freelance Writing, Productivity, Writing Craft | No Comments

WomanLaptop-main_Full Writing is something that is more than just a job for some of us… it is more of a calling. It has also been defined as a “craft”, meaning that there is a set of skills that can be learned and practiced. While this is true to an extent, the “art” of writing is more subtle and difficult to define. It is hard to put a finger on the specific qualities that make someone a great writer. Laying that hard-to-define something aside for a moment, here are some more tangible steps that will allow a writer to work more effectively and establish a successful freelance writing practice:

1. Before you begin, define what a successful freelance writing career will look like for you. Will you consider yourself a success if you are writing commercial copy, magazine articles, technical papers, books… or will success for you be paying the bills and earning a living? The measure of success will be different for each of us.

2. Write a business plan. Don’t be scared off by the term “business plan”. This plan can be loose and brief, but should include what you are doing to establish your writing space, market your services, and get your first clips as a writer. I’d also add a section on what you plan to do to continue your development as a writer.

3. Find a mentor. This can be done before you write the plan or after, but if you can find a mentor who is a freelance writer you can avoid some of the pitfalls every new freelance writer will come up against. I did this and it saved me a lot of time and wasted effort because I did not have to reinvent everything or learn freelance writing lessons the hard way.

4. Learn to write a great query and to apply for assignments. Queries are the bread and butter of freelancing, especially when you are starting out and do not have clips and samples of your published work. When you are first starting out queries seem intimidating, but you know what? The more you do the easier they get. Don’t get overwhelmed with the thought of writing a query. Do them one at a time and put in the research and work to refine your first query to make it as strong as it can be. Make sure it is perfectly tailored for the publication you are querying. Submit it, and then move on to the next one. And save every query – you will be able to use each one as a model. In other words, go for quality in queries not quantity.

5. When you land your first assignment focus all your energy to writing the best piece you have ever written and deliver it early to your customer. Exceed their expectation. Then, keep sending out queries and marketing yourself. As word spreads about your work – and it will – you want the word on you to be that you deliver on time and exceed expectations.

Freelance writing is a “practice” and a writer should always be developing their skills and tools and seeking to expand their repertoire of abilities. Trust yourself as a writer and keep setting goals to develop as a writer and you can have a long and successful career.

Writing 101 – Start With the End in Mind (Write to Educate, Entertain, or Preferably Both)

Oct 27

Posted by Rocky Cole in Non-Fiction Writing, Productivity, Writing 101, Writing Craft | No Comments

cave_painting_l

What I am going to tell you here will be obvious to some readers, but to others, perhaps not. There are two objectives that any piece of writing has, only two, and this is true for either fiction or non-fiction.

All writing exists either to:

1. Educate (self or others); and/or,

2. Entertain (self or others).

That’s it. That is the bottom line. You can think about any piece of writing from the cave paintings in Lascaux France to the operators manual for the Superconducting Supercollider, and they were all written to educate or entertain. My view is that if the writing does both then it is better.

So what has this got to do with keeping the end in mind? What I mean is, have a clear objective when you start writing something, whether that objective is written down or just in your mind. A clear objective, a destination, saves time and makes your writing better. Let me give you an example from my own work.

One of the things I do as a freelance writer is craft regular features for a website devoted to United States soccer. The site covers Major League Soccer (MLS), the United Soccer League (USL), and Women’s professional Soccer (WPS).

Now the owners of that website are in business, and to make the site interesting and useful enough for consumers to go there and keep coming back they need good content. In other words, there needs to be something useful and interesting that the site provides, ergo: It needs to educate and entertain.

See where I am going with this? So, when I sit down to craft an article for www.soccerhype.com, I go through the following process:

1. What is it that my readers need to know today? What do they care about?

Okay, the MLS playoffs are about to start, that’s what I will write about.

2. What do they need to know about the playoffs?

Hmmm, well, they need to know who is playing who and when the games are… I will put that in.

3. Besides the essential facts, what can I tell them that they don’t know? What would be interesting or entertaining?

How about if I tell them why each game will be good… how the teams got where they are and what to look for in each game.

Okay, with that in mind I am ready to start pulling the facts I need to relay, like teams playing each other, times and so forth – Educate. Then, I seek to answer the more esoteric questions in an interesting or humorous way – Entertain.

Got it, it is as simple as that. If you can find something the reader doesn’t know already, or an interesting viewpoint that gets him or her thinking, then you have done the job. And while my example is about doing a non-fiction piece, the same basic rules apply to fiction. You want to educate or entertain the reader and take them places they have not already gone. I will write more on how to apply this to fiction in another post.

Find a Process for Your Writing and Trust the Process

Oct 19

Posted by Rocky Cole in Fiction Writing, Freelance Writing, Non-Fiction Writing, Productivity, Writing 101, Writing Craft | No Comments

writingprocess

Have you ever had a wonderful plan to write something, a scene or a section of your fantastic novel, and then not been able to carry it off? You know, you are on a long drive or out running errands and stuck in traffic and it comes to you, “Eureka!” you cry, “now I have it!” The scene is crystal clear in your mind, your characters performing just as they are supposed to, the scene vivid and alive in your mind. You might even find yourself laughing to yourself as you drive, or speaking the dialogue aloud. Satisfied, excited, you go about your business assured that the next step in your story is all but written.

But then, reality strikes. You run the errand, pick up the kids, answer the phone, make dinner, watch some TV, and go about the day not thinking about the epiphany you just had. By the time you sit down at the computer or at your desk with your notebook, the idea seems vague, unclear, and it doesn’t have the heat and vibrancy that it did when it initially hit. So what do you do? How do you keep the heat and color in the images that seemed so real and clear when you were sitting in the traffic jam?

One thing you can do is try and get to the writing as soon as possible after the idea hits you, even if it is just to jot down the idea with some rough images and some of the words that came to you so clearly. Your writing is just as important as the other aspects of your life, and great ideas don’t come that easily. Treat them with respect and give them their due.

Feet and Neo So you are piling up random images and scene ideas in a notebook or on the back of envelopes, what next? Use these images, tidbits, notes, and random snippets of scenes and dialogue to create a “working outline”. I used to not be a big believer in outlines, but as I have written longer stories and realized that consistency and plot matter (at least to me), I understand that notes and outlines help keep the story on track. The notes and outlines I use now bear no relationship to the Roman numerals, big and little letters and numbers of elementary school. Instead, my outlines are more of a rough and fast spilling out of the story. I write them in order to keep the facts and happenings of the story straight, sometimes leaping ahead, sometimes using abbreviations, and never worrying about spelling or grammar. The key, get it down fast and loose. Style doesn’t matter, just get the story down… cleaning your writing up and finding the perfect way of saying things is for later.

Finally, what do you do if you haven’t been able to jot your random brilliance down and get it into your working outline? If you live in the world that I do, then even getting a chance to jot down some notes may not be all that easy. Of course now I have learned to carry a notebook around all the time so that when these inspirations strike, I can at least get something down. Yet every now and then, I find myself adrift without my trusty notebook and pen. So what then? My answer: Trust the process. Just sit down and start to write. The idea may not feel as fresh and new as it did when you were sitting in the car stuck in traffic with no way to record it, but just sit back and relax and start to write. Trust the process and things will be fine. After writing a few lines the original feeling might come back or maybe something better or just as good will arise. Just sit down and write.

Cole Writing

Writing with precision and passion