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why you don't have to have a college education, and why, in fact, I suspect
you'll have a better chance of becoming a professional writer if you don't,
read the chapter Experts, Professionals, and College.
How do I stay on track?
I usually get this one from folks who start things well but have a problem
finishing them they either have a lot of good ideas but their stories run
out of gas partway through, or they look at what they've done before they
finish it and decide that they stink, writing stinks, and life is starting to
smell like roadkill too.
This is tough. When I was getting started, I was the author of uncounted
thirty-page novels that never made it to page thirty-one. Big plans, no
follow-through. I'm not sure what finally got me through those times, but I do
remember how I finished my first book, and I think I know why I stalled
constantly before that.
I decided when I was around twenty-five that I wanted to finish an entire
novel before my next birthday. I sat down and tried to figure out how I was
going to do this I
rarely even reached the end of short stories at this point in my career, and
the idea of doing two hundred and fifty pages in one project loomed before me
like an unclimbable mountain. I figured the number of words I needed (fifty
thousand for the genre series book I intended to write). I figured out the
number of words I managed
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to fit on a correctly formatted page. (Roughly 200 in those days.) And I
figured out the number of pages I could do in a day when things were going
well.
Then I gave myself a page limit, sketched out a tiny little outline, and came
up with what I thought would be a pretty nifty last line.
I cannot overstress the importance of this to the beginning writer who's
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struggling to finish things. It seems totally unrelated, doesn't it? You ask
how to keep on track and
I say 'set a page limit for yourself and do a little outline.' But it only
seems unrelated.
Your mind is a complex and tricky thing. It looks at the endless plain of a
story stretching before you a plain that you must traverse with no
landmarks, no signs, no map and no compass and it says, Nope. Not me. Not
today. Not gonna do it, don't think that's my sort of thing, I believe I'll
stay here by the river where the water's calm and I know the terrain, thank
you. Try me again tomorrow, won't you? And when you try again tomorrow with a
new idea, you again present your mind with an enormous, uncharted terrain.
Even the sketchiest of outlines creates a few landmarks for you and a bit of a
map to help you navigate. And when you know how long you'd like the book to
run and you set a page limit for yourself, you give yourself a compass. It
doesn't tell you which way north is, but it does tell you when you're done for
the day, and it lets your mind begin planning the terrain you'll cross
tomorrow.
As for all those ideas you come up with while you're working keep a notebook
on hand for them if you'd like. I'll tell you a secret, though. I don't
usually write down the neat ideas that flit through my mind while I'm writing.
The really good ideas will brand themselves on your brain and still be there
when you're ready for the next book.
The mediocre ones that only seem really good will fall through the cracks and
trouble you no more. I don't sweat the ideas I've forgotten. If they were
worth my time, I
would have remembered them.
And as for thinking that your writing stinks . . . don't worry about it. Just
keep writing. You'll get better and your internal editor will eventually shut
up. And then you'll discover that you're a lot better than you thought you
were.
What is a chapter and how do I know when I ve finished one?
The big secret about chapters is that they're not much of anything but a
convenience for the writer, and secondarily for the reader. There are days
when you simply aren't getting the pages done that you want and you
desperately want to say you've finished a chapter because your brain needs to
focus on something fresh. So you come to the
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end of a sentence, make the next one a cliffhanger, and break. Chapter Two
appears and you can tell your significant other that you did an entire chapter
in one day. You feel better, the book doesn't suffer, and the next day you get
to work on a new character or a different location or whatever.
Technically, a chapter needs two things. It should consist of one or more
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complete scenes, and something ought to change. (Lawrence Block did some
chapters that were only one sentence long, and that constituted the entire
chapter. The one that comes to mind is Chip, I'm pregnant, from one of his
Chip Harrison books.) Beyond that whatever you decide constitutes a chapter
(and your editor will let you get away with)
pretty much does. I was anal about chapters for a while, insisting that each
needed to consist of three scenes of ten pages apiece. This was totally
unnecessary from an artistic standpoint, but the Procrustean bed I made for
myself while I was doing that taught me some important things. First, a writer
can fit just about any amount of information into just about any amount of
space. Second, that writer will develop a real feel after a while for the pace
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