The Finishing Game: Simplify

I was the girl who never finished anything. That was my rep as a child when it came to finishing my math homework or cleaning my room; that was how I thought of myself when I first started trying to be a writer.

This is a blog post in the IWSG blog hop: https://www.insecurewriterssupportgroup.com/p/iwsg-sign-up.html

it is also the first part of a series on learning to be a finisher of writing projects.

Then I read about Heinlein’s business rules for writers. The Second Rule is that you must finish what you write. And I didn’t think of myself as a person who could do such things.

But wait a minute. There WERE writing things that I regularly finished without a problem. I have written loads of short poems, and I finish most of them. I used to regularly submit poems to poetry ‘zines and got published.

I also can finish blog posts. I have no doubts about my ability to finish this one, even though I’m writing it on Evernote instead of on Scrivener because BOTH of my old wore-out and/or demon-possessed computers don’t want to let me use Scrivener right now.

And based on this accomplishment in the finishing department, I recently completed a short non-fiction book on blogging called ‘Getting More Blog Traffic: Steps Towards a Happier Blogging Life.’ I thought of it, not as a big scary book-writing project, but as a bunch of little blog posts. Only instead of publishing them one-by-one on a blog, I compiled them and published them as a KDP ebook.

When I think of a book writing project, fiction or non-fiction, it gets big, scary and never-ending in my head. And that’s what kills the project. What helped in the blogging-book project is that I simplified. Instead of focussing on everything I could possibly say on the topic of blogging, I narrowed the topic to things that help improve blog traffic— the number of readers one gets for one’s blog.

I narrowed my focus for the audience as well— mainly author bloggers and other topical bloggers who blog out of love for the topic rather than as a blogging-get-rich-quick scheme.

By narrowing the focus that made the project into something I could do and finish. It wasn’t any more difficult than writing several blog posts on different aspects of the same topic.

The same narrowing can make a fiction idea more doable. My current fiction WIP is science fiction set on a lost starship. Now, I have been making up stories in my head about these characters for years, and I have pages and lists of backstory, dozens of characters, enough for a 20-book sci-fi epic that I could never finish because I could never hold all that detail in my head.

So, instead of writing yet another novel-beginning destined to have no end, I’m paring things down to short-story level. Instead of having to introduce and develop the three major characters and the dozens of minor ones, I’m paring it down to a story focussed on one of the three and a single challenge he must face and overcome. (Current plan is to do one short story for each of the three characters.)

The paring-down process seems to help. Instead of doing something that might involve months of outlining and planning before actual writing even starts, I’m setting my sights on something short enough to start today and work on until the finish.

Both doing actual writing (not planning to write or talking about writing) and finishing what you write can be such a challenge. But not writing and not finishing don’t exactly help you develop your writing skills. I can’t write a 100000 word book right now in my writing life. But I can and do write shorter things. And shorter things can add up to something epic.

Springtime greetings,

Nissa Annakindt

Questions: Have you ever had problems finishing writing projects? Have you tried things that have helped? Have you tried things that just made everything worse? Share your thoughts in a comment!

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Recommended Reading: Heinlein’s Rules: Five Simple Business Rules for Writing by Dean Wesley Smith (author of over 100 books.)

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Character-in-Setting for SF & Fantasy

I’ve been rereading ‘Writing into the Dark: How to Write a Novel Without an Outline’ by Dean Wesley Smith lately. In one spot he tells what to do to start a ‘written into the dark’ story— put a character into a richly detailed setting and let that character react to it. (Chapter 5 is where the book gets into detail about it.)

I also have writing books that tell me how to write outlines and I have written outlines for a number of failed writing projects in my past. (Why did they fail? Probably because writing the outline turned the whole project into a dull, predictable mess I couldn’t work on once the outline got done.) But I do believe that ‘writing into the dark’ is a bit of a different proposition for the sci-fi or fantasy writer.

Imagine a contemporary detective story where the main character is a private detective. There are a lot of things you know about the story without thinking, because you live in the contemporary world. You know your main character may have dark or light skin color— but not purple or green skin, not tiger-striped skin (unless tattoos are involved) and isn’t a seven-foot-tall brown-furred creature with six arms.

In science fiction and fantasy stories, we don’t know those things. Our main characters can be humans or space aliens or elves or orcs. They can live in holes in the ground, fairyland, or someone’s expandable pocket. All bets are off in a fantasy or SF setting— so ‘writing into the dark’ may involve a bit of pre-creation of the setting, or perhaps redrafting 5 different versions of chapter one before you figure out that your main character is a dog.

We contemporary writers often have a problem with setting. We are warned against doing much description lest we bore readers with a block of description. And so many writers produce stories with characters conversing in a white space. If we are lucky, the writer may drop a hint so you can imagine the scene on a standard-issue space station, or a standard-issue fantasy-world forest. Or perhaps mention a specific enchanted box elder tree when the hero rams someone’s head into it.

The way to make a setting interesting enough to describe is to perceive it through the senses and opinions of your character. Often it is a character new-come to that particular setting. Even if your character was born and raised on a space station, most likely if he is on a space station right now, it’s a different one, where they do everything different and wrong.

Individual details matter. Your fantasy world character shouldn’t stroll past a generic ‘tree.’ Let it be an animated apple tree that throws its apples at people it doesn’t like. Or a maple tree inhabited by a psychotic wood nymph.

The best way to learn how to do this is to examine how popular writers make you see places that have never existed. In the Harry Potter books, look up the exact words and phrases that helped you visualize Diagon Alley or Hogwarts school. (Ideally, you will write them down.) Find other favorite books of yours and look at the first scene in a new setting. How does the author make you see it? And what else is going on in the scene? What do the characters present see or hear in the setting, or smell in the setting? What are their opinions of the setting? Are they the same as the ones the author may expect the reader to have? (A fantasy knight may enter what he sees as a shabby castle that strikes the reader as a paradise of luxury— or enter a state-of-the-art castle that the readers will clearly feel would be improved by some running water and indoor plumbing.)

Once you have a relate-able character and a setting that contains details and points-of-interest, you can start exploring this setting in the course of finding out what the characters goal or problem is and seeing how he solves it. Writers who ‘write into the dark’ may use this method, rather than a detailed outline, to explore their ideas and create a good story.

Happy writing!
Nissa Annakindt & her cats

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Please Help!
I have a new book out, ‘Getting More Blog Traffic: Steps Towards a Happier Blogging Life.’ I share what I have learned in my years of blogging and compulsively reading about getting more blog traffic and blog improvement. It’s on Amazon at: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B086H4FQ4M
Now, I wasn’t really able to get a group of people together to form my ‘book launch team.’ It’s not easy to do that when you are poor and have Asperger Syndrome. So I’d like to ask anyone who is kind enough to read my blog posts to be super-kind and join my (belated) book launch team by clicking on the Amazon link and looking at the book, or perhaps sharing the link on your social media. (I’m not asking anyone to BUY unless they become interested.)

IWSG: Following Heinlein’s Rules

Writers and would-be writers, since we work alone, crave rules that will promise success. Lots of people make up rules for writers— English teachers who have never published anything, or even written anything, wannabe writers who like to boss other wannabes around, people trying to sell writing classes or writer services or recruit writers to be victimized by a vanity press….

This is my monthly post for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group: https://www.insecurewriterssupportgroup.com/

The best rules for writers come from known writers who have actually written stuff, and made a living from writing. Robert Heinlein was such a writer— his science fiction is still read today— and he invented 5 simple rules for writers.

I have a book by Dean Wesley Smith about Heinlein’s rules. Smith is also a professional writer. He got that way by following Heinlein’s rules, he says. Smith has written over 100 novels and an unknown number of short stories, in his early career he was entirely traditionally published and has now gone indie, and I have actually heard of him and have some books he wrote on my shelf.

Heinlein’s rules worked, therefore, for Dean Wesley Smith, at least. Will they work for you? Probably better than writing advice from people who have never made a living at writing, who perhaps have never finished a novel or even a short story.

Here are the rules— Heinlein called them business habits:

1. You must write.

2. You must finish what you start.

3. You must refrain from rewriting except to editorial order.

4. You must put it on the market.

5. You must keep it on the market until sold.

Things are a little different today, as Dean Wesley Smith points out in his book. Putting a written work on the market can now mean indie publishing it. Keeping it on the market until sold can mean keeping an indie published work up, even if it doesn’t sell very well, instead of pulling all your work down because it’s ‘not good enough.’

As the ultimate Insecure Writer, I’m shy about submitting my work for publication, perhaps because of my Asperger Syndrome. Perhaps it’s just I am afraid of being judged by people who just don’t get me. But in keeping with Heinlein’s rules, I put up some of my work on Wattpad, and plan to do more there— a non-fiction work, and a new book of my poetry, both of which may become, in a longer version, at least Smashword ebooks and perhaps proper books (if I can figure out how to format for Lulu and how to afford a decent book cover.)

My Wattpad profile: https://www.wattpad.com/user/NissaAnnakindt

Feel free to share your own Wattpad profile in a comment.