Young Writers Society

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 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 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.


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Source: http://hollylisle.com/how-to-write/#6