Too Stupid To Live (TSTL) - Mistakes of a Rookie Writer

Yes, so, I thought I'd get some objective feedback on the first portion of one of the first stories I wrote. Second draft. Much snappier than the first. Was certain it would get some sort of positive feedback. I mean, my writing isn't Man Booker Prize-worthy, but it's better than some books I've PAID for, right? Right?

No. Not so much.

So before I bury my poor wounded writer's head in the sand and follow that insane impulse to NEVER WRITE AGAIN EVER EVER AGAIN EVER...I thought it best that I just write down a couple of things I need to learn from the whole experience. Maybe they'll be useful to someone else, or at the very least it will help me remember (as if I could forget).

1. TSTL

My first lesson was on the acronym 'TSTL'. New one for me, but a quick Google session told me that every time someone was calling my leading lady 'TSTL', it meant she was 'Too Stupid To Live'. As in, 'How on earth did she get from being born to being an adult without accidentally getting herself KILLED. Killed from sheer STUPID.' Other words used to back up the 'TSTL' label were such glowing descriptors as 'twit' and 'such a ditz'.

Now, I'm not about to go into detail about the actual piece (particularly as it's still partaking in a ceremonial burning on the back patio and LET'S JUST NOT GO THERE), but here are a few more things I'm taking away from the experience.

2. FIRST IMPRESSIONS COUNT

Your character is allowed to be human, make mistakes, and be flawed. But (apparently) you cannot show all their WORST traits in the first two pages without turning at least a few readers into haters. They want to get pulled into the life of someone they can either relate to or at the very least, vaguely respect. So if all I give them is a series of reasonably dumb mistakes and nothing much in the way of redeeming qualities, apparently ...that's a turn-off. Being dramatic is not enough. Being dramatic and DUMB is bad.

This might seem entirely logical and obvious when you read it. You're nodding to yourself now. You're thinking, "Nah, I'd never do that." But how easy is it to forget that we know our characters intimately - especially if we've written the entire book and know their whole story. How easy is it to forget that our character still has to make a first impression on a completely 'cold' audience who don't yet know about our character's winsome smile or quirky laugh or extended butterfly collection? First pages do sorta have to be all about that first introduction. A polite how-do-you-do, or at least NOT a display of all your beloved character's worst traits. Like I did.

3. IF YOU THINK YOU'VE CUT ENOUGH BACK-STORY...YOU HAVEN'T

I really thought I had this down. I'd read enough excruciating 'laundry-list' intros to books that I thought I knew what I was doing. I cut a lot out. I thought I'd been brutal. I wove subtle details in. I thought I'd been clever. But instead of the gripping wash of introduction to my heroine's dilemma that I'd intended, it mainly just came across as navel gazing. Too much thinking. Not enough doing. WAY too not-enough-doing. So, if you think you've been sparing? Cut more. Snip snip. You have a whole book to bore people with the details. Or at least...I do.

4. GO WITH YOUR GUT / STOP OVERTHINKING

Ironically, but probably not very surprisingly, the one line that someone picked out as being reasonably on the way to showing a tiny glimmer of potential was one of my weird, out-of-rear-brain-nowhere things I just chucked in and shrugged about. Wasn't bad enough to cut, so I left it in. And THAT is what they liked.

So often I catch myself writing the way I think writing SHOULD BE. As in...not obeying the words on the tip of my brain's tongue (that sounded weird...but I'm going with it), but reformatting the whole thing until it sounds the way writing is 'supposed' to sound. And in the process, the pure voice of it gets muddied. Muffled. Stamped out. Out goes the visceral. Out goes the instinctual. If there's one thing I am really taking away from this is...give myself permission to BE MYSELF.

That might take a while. Work In Progress.


Lastly...

5. I SURVIVED

That's all.




Top background image Copyright (c) 123RF Stock Photos (with a few little amendments by moi)

Where do you start...?

credit: The Pen And Ink Blog (link below)

I'll be the first to say that I'm still pretty new to this whole 'writing' thing. I've observed from the outside, watched other people write, beta-read for them, etc etc. But until doing it for myself I didn't entirely appreciate how different everyone's creative process could be.

I expect there are some obvious and well-cataloged cognitive reasons for all our writerly differences, and maybe someday I'll get the time to study them fully. What I'm intrigued by at the moment is our starting points. How do we get that lil' toehold into a story and wrestle it until it tells us all its secrets?

I've read plenty of insightful blog posts and articles on how you need characters to build plot and plot to build character and somewhere in there you chuck a few pinches of setting and a few teaspoons of concept and hey presto you have your cake- I mean...story.

But why do we naturally start from different places? Why do some of us build extensive outlines and construct scale-model worlds out of mental-matchsticks and superglue, while others have whole entire people wandering around inside their skulls waiting to jump out into something...anything...they really don't mind what.

These differences were really made clear to me recently. I'd been beta-reading (okay, blatant sneak-peeking!) for a writer friend, and she finally came back to me and said 'Okay, I have to bite the bullet and get some structure into this thing - there's too much going on.' (Okay, my paraphrase, but that's basically it.) I had to sort of mentally blink at the idea that you could have characters wandering around, encountering each other, creating whole scenes...and not actually know exactly where they were headed in the long-run.

Now this is where I must make it very clear that this thought was not one of criticism. More one of revelation. See, here I'd been plotting my stories out from beginning to end, then dropping my half-formed characters into them and seeing how they reacted to the hoops I made them jump through. Yes, I'm one of the plot-structure-lovers. The logic-adoring, detail-oriented neat-freaks of the writerly universe (go on, I know we irritate you!). It had never even crossed my mind to just create a person, and walk around in their shoes for a few months. 

So I'm just getting to grips with this, when I read an interview with author Susan Spann on Chuck Wendig's blog, Terrible Minds. She says that for her, "...character building flows from world building. It’s much easier to write strong characters when I’m inserting them into a three-dimensional, fully developed environment. Knowing the layout of a character’s bedroom, house, and neighborhood makes it easier to understand what kind of person would inhabit that space."

So you mean you can create a world, right down to the furniture and the wallpaper, and your character comes walking right out of the type of carpet you chose for them?! Mind = blown.

Now, I've encountered some of these sorts of differences in people with regards to how they learn. It's pretty common knowledge that there are different 'learning styles' and that everyone has a slightly different combination of cognitive jigsaw pieces that make up how they process their interactions with the world around them. So buried in there somewhere must be some parallels to how we naturally choose to dive into our story-writing, right? I've now read a few...left brain vs right brain, etc, but the jury is still out.

My next thought is that with learning styles, it's advised to try and cater towards people's natural preferences, but that they should also work on 'exercising' those other underused cognitive 'muscles' so as to have a more well-rounded learning experience. So does this mean I should spend time bulking up on other methods of story-writing? Should I try out a character-driven method or a world-building method as a way to jump-start me into a story? Or maybe I just need to start including a few writing exercises for these areas into my initial story-process.

So where do you start? Do you think you should stick to what comes naturally, or push yourself to do something that doesn't? 

[Picture credit: The Pen And Ink Blog ]