Category Archives: Craft

12/12/12

Two Ideas to Get You Through (The 1st Draft)

If you follow me on Facebook or Twitter, you already know that I began writing the third installment in the Dakota Stevens Mystery Series last Monday, and that I’ve written about 18,000 words so far.

What you don’t know, because I haven’t spoken about it at all, is what a bitch this first draft has been.

The tension of not knowing exactly where the story is going is killing me.

It’s been a while, you see, since I had to write a Dakota novel from scratch. The last time I sat down and started a first draft was seven years ago.

Seven years.

Obviously, I’ve written first drafts of other work since then—stories, essays and speeches mostly—but nothing compares to the intricacy of a novel.

Which is why I’ve recently taken great solace in two quotes on writing by two masters: E.L. Doctorow and Bernard Malamud.

Doctorow compared writing—particularly writing a novel—to driving at night through fog. “You can only see as far as your headlights,”  he said, “but you can make the whole trip that way.”

Whenever I’ve found myself getting frustrated with not being able to see the story more than a chapter or so ahead, I’ve thought of Doctorow’s quote: “You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

The second quote, by Bernard Malamud, was directed to writers in general: “Teach yourself to work in uncertainty.”

This is especially apropos to the writing of a first draft—the very definition of uncertainty.

Learning to be comfortable with uncertainty is imperative for a writer. Uncertainty about where the story is going. Uncertainty about how it will be received. Uncertainty about finances. Uncertainty of all kinds.

These two ideas—uncertainty, and seeing as far as your headlights—are getting me through the first draft, and they’ll get you through, too.

—Chris

 

11/26/12

Dakota Stevens #3: Starting from Scratch

While writing the first two books in the Dakota Stevens Mystery Series—A Real Piece of Work and The Rich Are Different—I kept notebooks of other plot ideas, titles, scenes, characters and anything else that occurred to me for future installments.

As a result of these notebooks, I had begun two more Dakota novels and created outlines for 3–4 others.

However, when I opened these notebooks recently with the intent of continuing one of the stories I’d started, I didn’t like what I found.

I’d written this material (including the first hundred pages of a Dakota & Svetlana prequel) between 5 and 7 years ago, and I’d matured as a writer since then.

I no longer liked the direction I’d sketched out for the character and the series.

A realization soon followed that made me sick to my stomach:

I needed to dump all of that work and start over.

When you’ve created a series character, starting from scratch is a scary thought. For the first time since I invented Dakota & Svetlana, I won’t have drafts of work to build on. I’ll be facing a blank Page One and all of the paralyzing dread that accompanies it.

But I’m doing it. I’m starting from scratch, mainly because a novel is a hell of a lot of work, and you have to start with a story, a vision, that you really want to tell. It’s the only thing that carries you through.

Ultimately, the task before me now is to figure out what excites me about Dakota & Svetlana, and to ask myself, “What is the Dakota story I would most like to read?”

I know that’s the question I need to be asking because it’s the same one I asked myself before writing the first two novels, and I’m pleased with the results.

Allegedly, J.R.R. Tolkien was partly inspired to write his Lord of the Rings series for this very reason. He thought about the books that he would most like to read, realized they didn’t exist yet, and set out to write them.

He wrote the books he most wanted to read. This is a great lesson for all of us writers.

Over the coming months, I’ll be writing the first draft of Dakota 3. I have no idea what kind of story it will be or where it will take me; all I know is, I want it to be a fresh take on my vision for the series, and I want it to be as well written as I can possibly make it. We’ll see if I can pull it off.

Wish me luck, Dear Reader. I’m going to need it.

 

07/6/12

My Writing Secret Weapon

For as long as I’ve been writing—over 20 years professionally now—I’ve collected articles on writing, handwritten snatches from books on writing, examples from great authors, as well as my own tips, tricks and hard-won wisdom on the art, and I’ve kept it all in a series of composition notebooks titled “Notes on Writing.”

These notebooks are my Cliffs Notes of every (good) book or article I’ve read about writing, and they’ve proved invaluable over the years. Before starting a new project, rather than reread all of those books and articles, I simply reread the notebooks, giving myself a refresher course on story craft, characterization, punctuation, inspiration, grammar and much more.

These notebooks are my secret weapon as a writer.

They are partly responsible for the excellent reviews my Dakota Stevens Mystery Series has been garnering—reviews like, “This book is magic” and “Another one out of the park” and “Real life took a backseat during the two days I was reading each of these books.” (Shameless plug: Book #1, A Real Piece of Work, is available here, and Book #2, The Rich Are Different, here.)

I reread my “Notes on Writing” before I start any major project, and I’m continuously adding to these notebooks from new books and articles. I also steal liberally from my writer and artist friends, jotting down their own wisdom without their knowledge, reminding myself that Picasso said, “Good artists borrow, but great artists steal.”

It’s a lot of work, and you have to be diligent about tedious things like copying quotes and getting the titles and by-lines right, but in the end it’s worth it: you have your own go-to writing resource. You never have to ask yourself, “Where did I read that excellent passage on characterization?” You never have to ask yourself that because, if it’s excellent, it will be in your notebook(s).

To help you get started with a notebook of your own (if you don’t already have one), I’m going to share a few entries from mine. Following are only a fraction of the quotes and ideas I’ve collected (I’m not giving you all of my best secrets), but these examples should be enough to inspire you to start collecting your own, and I strongly recommend that you do.

 

Betsy Lerner, editor & agent:

“If you are struggling with what you should be writing, look at your scraps. Encoded there are the times and subjects that you should be grappling with as a writer.”

Kurt Vonnegut:

“Make your characters want something right away—even if it’s only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.”

Stephen Koch, Modern Library Writer’s Workshop:

“Use the badness of your first draft. Let the holes and dull spots tell you what needs to be filled and what needs to be cut.”

Ray Bradbury:

“What can we writers learn from lizards, lift from birds? In quickness is truth. The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are.”

Seneca:

“Ars longa, vita brevis.”

Truman Capote:

“The test of whether or not a writer has divined the natural shape of his story is this: After reading it, can you imagine it differently, or does it silence your imagination and seem to you absolute and final? As an orange is final. As an orange is something nature has made just right.”

John Braine on dialogue:

“If you can’t speak it out loud, it’s no good.”

Ethan Canin:

“Nothing is so important as a likable narrator. Nothing holds a story together better.”

Rudyard Kipling:

“…a tale from which pieces have been raked out is like a fire that has been poked. One does not know the operation has been performed, but everyone feels the effect.”

George V. Higgins:

“Nobody ever got started on a career as a writer by exercising good judgment, and no one ever will, either, so the sooner you break the habit of relying on yours, the faster you will advance.”

John Gardner in The Art of Fiction:

Scenes are the “logic” of a fictional argument.

Chris Orcutt:

“Prefer predicate adjectival construction over nominative adjectival construction—produces a clearer set of images. Also, learn about syntactic slots (S-V-O) and the importance of not trying to pack all three slots with information. Packing slots clutters the sentence.”

From Techniques of the Selling Writer:

After a motivating stimulus to a character, the character’s reactions should come in the following order: feeling, action, speech.

From Immediate Fiction:

“1 + 1 = 1/2.”

I’ll leave you to puzzle over the meaning of that last one until you read Immediate Fiction yourself and discover what he meant by that cryptic formula.

I hope you’re inspired now to run out, buy a composition notebook, and start taking notes yourself. Over the years, this process of reading, copying down insights, and referring to them later has improved and deepened my writing. It’s one of my secret weapons, and now I offer it to you. Good luck.

06/29/12

Engaging Novels About a Detective

The other day, after publishing the second novel in the Dakota Stevens Mystery Series—The Rich Are Different—I pulled a giant plastic crate labeled “Dakota Stevens Stuff” out of the closet. This crate contains notebooks, early drafts, and reams of research for the first book in the series, A Real Piece of Work.

As I started to file away the materials from The Rich Are Different, I found the original Black-n-Red notebook in which I sketched out my ideas for the characters of Dakota and Svetlana, as well as the outlines for several adventures.

For an hour or more, I flipped through that notebook, reveling in the development of my detective series. The notebook is full of lists, and the longest lists are dedicated to names—names I had for Dakota & Svetlana before they became Dakota & Svetlana. I won’t bore you with what might have been, but I do want to share with you one entry, dating back to the spring of 2004:

“I’m not sure exactly what tack I want to take with this series—whether it will be traditional or more modern—but I know this: I don’t want to write a series of ‘detective novels’; I want to write a series of engaging novels about a detective.”

The difference may sound like mere semantics, but it’s not. From the outset, it was important to me that I not write yet another “detective novel”—something with a formula detective/mystery at the formula length. There were already plenty of those. I wanted to write novels about a detective, and I wanted to include elements of his life beyond the mystery at hand. I wanted to populate these novels with vivid locations and rounded, memorable characters, and I wanted to render it all in prose that was aesthetically pleasing in itself, so you, the reader, could enjoy these novels on several levels: for the plot or story, the characters and locations, the humor, and the language.

That’s why reviews like this one of The Rich Are Different are so meaningful to me—because the reader clearly took away from the book what I intended to give:

“The Rich are Different is a full-bodied novel, with rich characters, living backgrounds and locations, and a tough nut of a mystery to crack.”

I’m pleased because whatever their other strengths or weaknesses, I believe the two novels in the series live up to my original aim: “to write a series of engaging novels about a detective,” rather than just mere detective novels.

I invite you to decide for yourself. Start with A Real Piece of Work (book #1), because The Rich Are Different (book #2) is a true sequel, picking up a few months after the first case ends. I hope you enjoy them, and if you do, please post your positive review on Amazon. Your positive reviews increase the books’ visibility and rankings, ensuring future installments in the series.

As always, thank you for your support. Enjoy your summer and your summer reading.

—Chris Orcutt