“Okay, Em...I have a book that I need to write, and I have had many false starts, always scrapping nearly everything. How do you do it??”
“How would you feel about helping me tell my story? I've been in therapy and I'm ready to share. NOTICE: This pertains to your path of sex Ed.
This also pertains to things I never told you or anyone but it might help someone.”
“Hey you should write my life story. It’s better than syfi.”
I received these three messages in the past week, and far more just like them since I released Scandalous. Since I know that if three are asking, there are far more of you who are wondering the same thing, but just haven’t said the words out loud, so I decided to respond to all in one fell swoop.
Let’s begin with whether or not I will help someone else tell their story – the answer is yes and no.
Yes – I will be more than happy to be a support and encouragement. I will also be thrilled to share with you the tools I used to make my book happen. Depending on the demands on my time, I might even read over what you have written and offer some suggestions.
And this is where the “no” comes in – this is your story not mine, and I currently have twenty of my own books in various stages of completion. They were given to me and I need to honor that gift by taking care of them first. I am not trying to be mean here, but I only have so many hours in a day, and my life is demanding.
Secondly, it’s YOUR story. It was given to you and you need to honor it by investing your time and energy into making it into something that the world can know. Plus, no one, not even me can, can tell your story the way you can. It needs your words, not mine, or will not be your story any longer. If you are truly passionate about sharing it you will find the words because the story will not let you rest until you do.
This leads to the first question – how do you do it?
First off, know that I never thought I would be a writer. I always kinda thought of writing as one of those things that only truly lucky or blessed got to do, and I never envisioned myself as one of those people. It was not until I was twenty seven years old that a teacher approached me with an assignment and asked me, “What have you written?”
I was completely baffled and scared to death that I had botched the entire project. Flustered, I demanded to know what was wrong with the paper he was holding in his hand, but he assured me that I had not done anything wrong. He just wanted to know what I had written for publication because “it’s that good.” I was shocked! No one had ever said that to me before, and I have been writing consistently since I was twelve for my own pleasure and sanity.
It is important that you know this for two reasons:
1. I have no formal training in writing other than a few composition classes, so my approach isn’t textbook. (For instance, I hate outlines and refuse to make one.)
2. If I can write without formal training, you can too.
So, how do I do it?
The short answer is I write. Every day, I write. I write piles of garbage and stuff you will never see. I write things I burn and things I tear up, and I write some stuff that I am sufficiently unashamed enough to put out there for the world to read.
The long answer is a bit more complicated. (Imagine that.)
I work really hard at thinking like a writer. For me that means that I am always looking for the right words to describe something I see, hear, or experience. It doesn’t mean I always write it down, but I am always playing with the words – always. If I see a pile of leaves, I wonder how many different ways I can describe it so that you will want to find that particular pile and jump in. If I see deer picking her way through my front yard, I am trying to figure out how you can experience the delicate way she lifts those elegant but powerful legs. People in the mall? I am constantly “writing” back stories for them all.
See, the work at the keyboard is only a fraction of what I am doing. The words you read are what made it through the winnowing process. A process that happens a lot as I am driving down the road describing what I see to a very disinterested and patient dog.
And that is another huge part of what I do. I am always talking it out. My furniture knows more about Genesis 1:1, a favorite passage of mine to teach, than most seminary students. I want to know how the words sound out loud. I want to know if they feel right, not just to the eyes but to the ears.
I also have people in my life who are great listeners. I tell them about what I am working on, and they challenge me to defend my views or ask questions concerning points that I need to clarify. An added bonus, I get really excited about my writing projects and sometimes I will blurt out the right phrase in the middle of a conversation. More often than not, it is the surprising stuff that falls out of my mouth that serves as the catalyst from idea to written word.
The biggest obstacles to writing that I have found to be true in my life and confirmed by other would be writers is that obnoxious internal editor we are all born with. He won’t catch a typo or the misuse of a homonym, but he is quick to tell you that everything you have just written is junk. (Mine uses stronger language, but I am trying to be respectful of my audience here.) This means the most useful skill you can learn as a writer is to shut down that mean little guy and keep writing. All first drafts are awful, or at least, you should believe them to be.
Give yourself permission to write junk. Go on and just get it on paper. Are you going to scrap it? Sure, you are, but scrapping it means just that – scrap it, don’t delete it. I have a file on my computer called just that “Scraps” and I keep all those false starts and things that have to be cut often for the sake of brevity there. I have learned it is a gold mine for future ideas, because once you step away from an idea for a while, you often go back to it and find it wasn’t so terrible after all.
Another major thing I do is to surrender to the words. This means that I often have an idea, sentence, or phrase that I cannot quit writing but have no idea where it is going. An example:
“Some stories are too painful to write, but you know that already, don’t you Charles?”
When I wrote that I had two major questions:
1. What story is that painful?
2. Who in the world is Charles?
So I kept writing just so I could answer those questions, and I am thrilled with where the story is going. Hopefully, you will get to read it soon.
However, just to be honest, Charles and Jaden (the characters of the book) have started becoming unruly and refusing to talk to me at this particular date. Instead of fighting with them, I have put them on hold and went to work on other projects. Sometimes you can’t force a story and you just have to set it aside for a bit. In a month or two, I will go back to what I have written and things will click. In the meantime, I am writing for the blog and bouncing between editing my first novel, writing two pop theology books, a revised edition of Scandalous, and seventeen fictional works.
Bouncing back and forth between tasks keeps me excited because I am always seeing progress, and I always have a reason to feel like I am accomplishing something. And it has the added benefit of letting me get some distance from the story for a better perspective. Not to mention, stories that I have set aside for a while tend to bubble up in my subconscious, often hitting me out of the blue with a great new plot twist or a revelation of something obvious I had missed that now needs to be addressed. I return to them with renewed energy and excitement that makes writing fun.
Nonfiction is a bit trickier. There are so many things you have to get right if you are going to remain true to the message you are trying to convey. These works go much slower for me and I don’t feel as “inspired” when working on them. Here is where that nasty internal editor plays havoc with my emotions and thoughts, but once again, it is a matter of writing in a steady, disciplined way. Don’t get caught up in trying to make it polished, just write and them after a few months break, go back and edit. Books aren’t typically written overnight, they can take years to hammer into shape and that is exactly what it feels like – hammering at an unyielding stone to get all extraneous stuff out while still maintaining the necessary points. But you can’t hammer on what you don’t have, so it is vital you give yourself something to hammer on and that means you keep writing.
Writing nonfiction is the closest I get to breaking my “no outline” rule, but instead of writing an outline (which I would just lose), I write my ideas on a mirror or sticky notes. I write out my sections in no particular order, print them off and then hang them on the wall. This way I can arrange and rearrange at random until I find the configuration that works. If I tried to stick to an outline, instead of writing what appealed to me in the moment, I would get so frustrated I would never finish what I started. Once I get the big chunks written and ordered, I then go back and fill in with my transition pieces so it doesn’t feel like it has been cut and pasted together – which it totally was.
Doing it this way keeps my big ideas in front of me, which I need because anything I can’t see doesn’t exist in my mind (just check my cabinets that need to be organized but I only remember that when I am digging for something for something I need to finish dinner and have no time). Also, it helps me to not be so repetitive, which I am horribly guilty of just check out Scandalous. I could have really cut some pieces of it for that reason, but oh well, too late now and I will fix it in the next edition. This was my first published book, so it was only practice, right?
I know this is starting to sound redundant, but that is what this whole process is – redundancy repeated ad nauseam. Keep in mind that all this is practice, this blog post, my rough drafts, the first editing, all of it practice, and you must give yourself permission to practice your art or you will never get better.
In the arts, there is a horrible myth that you are either born with it or you are not, and it has stopped so many people from even trying. When I was teaching oil painting classes almost everyday someone told me that “I wish I could paint, but I don’t have the skill.” As if they were supposed to wake up magically knowing how hold a palette knife, what reflected light was, or how to properly portray perspective, but with a little encouragement many of these people went on to paint pictures they now display in their homes with pride. Now, I hear the same thing from would-be writers as they fall prey to the same mentality.
The truth is writing takes practice just like any skill and if you are bad when you start, so what? I was, and I really hope Steinbeck was too, or I will just drown in depression because who doesn’t want to right like that? So stop trying to write a Nobel worthy piece, just write!
The good news is like any skill that is practiced writing gets easier with the repetition, and if you go at long enough there will be a day when someone asks you a question and writing out the answer isn’t work, it is like breathing.
If this is helpful, be sure to let me know. If you have further questions, ask those too and I will try to answer. If you have a great writing tip, please, share in the comments! Writers can always use another great idea.
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