On Writing Confidence

Writing a story and getting it out in the world requires confidence. A lot of writers – if not every – sometimes have moments were they lack that confidence. You think your writing absolutely sucks and that no one will ever want to read your book. Moments like that are very humbling and every writer should have them every now and then, even the very best. Being overly confident will make you arrogant but having no confidence at all will lead you nowhere. 

I am not a very confident person. I doubt a lot and I know how unhappy that can make me. My inner critic is a fierce monster that I haven’t been able to tame. The fear of not being good enough and the bouts of ‘my writing sucks’ can be severe enough to ruin my day. Sometimes I even question why I am putting so much effort in it. Why would I make myself feel horrible by trying over and over again? There are times that I have no answer for this and when it is really very bad (which luckily doesn’t occur that often) I might even end up curling in my bed and cry. I am never going to be able to make my dream come through, is what spooks through my mind then. There is no one around to cheer me up and tell me my writing isn’t as horrible as I think. The only ones who can get me out of this writing slump are the characters. They refuse to leave me alone and demand that I spend time with them and continue telling their story. I love them for that, though they aren’t always very convincing. 

But if I stop writing, what else will I do? I am only as passionate about reading but that does not offer me the creative outlet that I need. I cannot make anything of my own with only reading. I need to pick up those words and group them into sentences that eventually become a story. The prospect that I have to severely cut back on writing time very soon because of upcoming exams makes me sad. And this proves me that I meant to write. 

One time you might feel like we can write as good as or even better than, our favourite authors. Yet some time later, you might feel like your writing is worthless crap. It is far harder to get out of that, but remember why you are writing and think about what you would do if you weren’t writing. If you like the possible substitute of writing more, you might want to consider if you are truly passionate about telling a story with words. Without passion, you will get through the hard days and the less fun aspects of writing.

Hold on to the magic of writing and never give up. The journey is very difficult and perhaps dangerous for your sanity, but I heard the rewards make it all worth it. 

Writing Descriptions

Descriptions are an important part of the story. They help to create the atmosphere and, especially in fantasy and science fiction, they add to the world building. But how much should a writer describe and how much should be left to the imagination of the reader? 

This is a difficult question and there really is no right answer for it. Some readers love a lot of description while others get easily bored by it and rather skip it. For me, it all depends on the skill of the writer. Yet I do not want page after page full of descriptions. I often forget it anyway. Some writers describe their characters in elaborate detail, but the most I tend to remember is their hair colour, eye colour and their build or other remarkable details such as a scar or a tattoo. The shape of their eyes, their nose, his large feet or their unusually small ears vanishes from my mind quite quickly, unless it has been repeated a couple of times or the writer put an emphasis on it. I create my own image of a character, building, place, etc. in my mind on the basis of the information I can remember. 

For me, the most important role of description is that it helps to get to know the characters. If you give description from the point of view of one of your characters, you should focus on what the character will see, hear, feel and smell. A character that has not eaten for quite a while, will notice the smell of food before (s)he sees the expensive tableware and the painting of an alien on the wall. The character who loves art will most likely see the painting of the alien first and (s)he shall look at it in more detail than the hungry character. 

Description can also bring your story alive. Often small details have a major impact on convincing the read that the story you are telling is real. In Harry Potter we do not get to see every detail of the shops in Diagon Alley, but J.K. Rowling describes just enough to let the whole street come to life. The best way to make your world come to life, whether if it is a world you build yourself or our word, is to make use of every sense. Too often smell and sound is left out and then you get a flat image. If there is a fire, describe the sounds. How it roars as it destroys everything in its wake or how a dungeon smells of death and decay besides describing how dark and cold it is. You want to make your readers shiver as they plough through the snow with your characters; you want them to smell and taste the freshly baked bread and feel how soft the fur of your monster is. 

Create the atmosphere, point out how expensive his clothes look and how the tiger’s coat looks in the setting sun, but do not describe every drop of rain, every wrinkle in his clothes or every stripe on the tiger’s coat. Leave some room to let the reader build the world in his head. I like to think of the descriptions in stories as the foundations of the reader’s imagination.

Inspiration

Inspiration is not something you can force, though it is a necessary component of the creative process. Knowing what inspires you and exposing yourself to it, can help to get inspiration flowing.

I do not actively look for inspiration but I expose myself quite often to things that I know that can inspire me. Inspiration does not come out of thin air for me. Most of the times when I get an idea, I am deep in thought and creating stories in my mind. Talking with other people about things, they can be very random and have not to be related to any kind of creativity, I get inspired as well.

 

High on my list of things that inspire me is music. Especially music with sad lyrics. I automatically start building a story around the lyrics or I try to relate to them. Sometimes I marvel at how certain emotions are described. More than once music has helped me to convert a certain emotion more clearly to ink and paper. Sometimes I come across a song that fits extremely well for a certain story/scene/character and I can listen to it over and over again without getting tired of it. But not all music inspired me. I have to like it. I am able to get most inspiration from band I really love.

The beautiful, magical northern lights serve as a great inspiration for me. One day, I hope to see them myself.
source: Google images

Nature is also a great source for ideas. Reading, especially poetry, and writing has taught me to stop rushing and enjoy the simple beauty around me. It does not have to be an incredible landscape from a faraway place. A seemingly dull tree or a bird that you see everywhere can be enough to trigger a flood of inspiration. Especially autumn is a great season for ideas for me. All the colours and the world slowly preparing for the cold and dark winter are very inspirational. The world is changing right before my eyes. It is truly incredible.

Another important thing that inspires me, are my literature classes and reading. While they do not always give me content ideas, they do, however, want me to experiment with language. Writing is not only about telling the story and how you tell it, but also about using language. Sometimes the language part is very difficult for me because I do not write in my first language. I deem myself to be a decent user of English, I know that my vocabulary is sometimes very limited. Luckily there are always dictionaries and the thesaurus to help me resolve that problem.

There are far more things that inspire me, but those mentioned above are the most important ones I can almost always fall back on. To make them work I have to more or less relaxed. They are, lucky for me, also great ways to become relaxed. But sometimes when I am stressed or very worried, it is almost impossible to relax and inspiration stays away. These states of mind do not last long and I do not allow them to meddle with my writing. There is always something to write about, even though it is about grocery shopping or walking to work. Even such simple things can make a great story if told and written well! Who knows where they might lead.

Write Because a Story Bruns Within You

“Write because a story burns within you, and you find yourself thinking and dreaming of it every free moment.” Christoper Paolini (The Inheritance cycle) tweeted this some time ago. I can very much relate to this quote. While I have written (or better said started) several stories before, nothing burned so within me as the current one does. Wanderers’ Tale saga (this is the working title of the series) that I write with a co-writer, is always on my mind every free moment. Unfortunately it tends to slip to the front of my mind when I shouldn’t be thinking about it as well.

For those who do not know, I am co-writing a story that started out as a fan fiction (we used our idols as the main characters) but we decided that the plot was interesting enough to turn into an original story. Now we are finishing off the fan fiction version and will use that as a rough outline for the original story.  We are writing this round-robin: we each take turns writing short pieces, continuing on what the other has previously written. This is a very fun way to write and explore possibilities but it also creates inconsistencies and is very very slow.
 
I do love this story a lot, especially the characters, but it is starting to become tedious. It has been dragging on for about 10 months now and we had to postpone the deadline a couple of times because we could not reach it. The latest deadline we agreed on is the end of October. While the story is coming to a close, we are not going to be able to finish it in time unless we rush. Thus we agreed to abandon the deadline and just try to get it finished as soon as possible. It is not an ideal solution, but there is not any better. This weekend I actually realised how tired I am of this method of writing. It was the first time I had not really thought about the story for more than a day. The last 9 months the story and the characters have been on my mind daily. I love plotting and creating scenes while I try to sleep, it relaxes me and helps me fall asleep. It became a habit that I finally broke this weekend. It felt good!
 
The most annoying thing of it all is that I have quite some free time and thus writing time this term, but there just is not much I can do! I could prepare some world building for the rewrite of the story though as long as my co-writer and I do not have a contract about the book(s), I am not very keen to start on it. My co-writer is very busy until the end of the year and then, when I will have a busy term, she will have more free time.
 
Waiting to be able to write something can be frustrating. I tried to start on another story, but I discovered that I could not really get into as long as Wanderers’ Tale is stuck in my head.  I suppose the only thing I can do is have patience. I am, however, not a very patient person. What makes up for that is that I do not complain easily and thus when I am frustrated, I do not show that quickly.
 
In the future I am going to try to post at least one blog a week in the weekend and write more about my personal writing and share my struggles and victories!

Let Your Characters Make Their Own Decisions

Characters are the soul of the story. They are born out your imagination and ought to grow beyond it. Let them become more than ink and paper. Let them come to life! Unless you have Frankenstein like ambitions, they will never be made out of flesh and blood. But as a writer, you have the prefect excuse to have imaginary friends. It would be a shame not to use it!

Get to know your characters well. Go to a bar with them, take them with you on a walk through the woods or play truth or dare with them. It does not matter how you get the know them, but it is important that you do. Your whole story will be spun around them. The characters that stay with us long after we finished a book. 

When you know your characters, you will know what drives them and what choices they will make. This is very important if you start building your plot. You cannot force your character to take a certain decision that will be more favourable for the plot. They have a mind of their own and they are driven by their own motivations. That is why it is important to create the plot around the characters and let them influence the plot by their choices. Do not bend the characters in such a way that they fit into the plot, but bend the plot. 

source: Google Images

That is why I barely plan the plot ahead. I know what the main conflict in the story will be and I have an idea of how it is going to end, but what happens on the journey is something I have yet to discover. While writing I come up with events that can happen during the stories and while I am looking forward to write them, they might not end up in the story because of a certain decision a character makes. 
I spend a lot of time writing a certain scene that was  supposed to be pivotal in the healing process of one of my characters. The scene would give him insight of what had happened to him and how he could continue on living his life. I knew exactly how the scene was going to be. I pictured every detail in my head. Unfortunately the scene did not fit the character. It would have this enlightening effect that it was supposed to have. 

When I start writing a story, I know where it will begin and I have an idea about how it will end. Sometimes I have ideas about events that can take place throughout the journey the characters make. When I write I get into the head of my characters. I discover most of the story while I travel with them through it. This makes it very easy for me to respect my characters and accept the choices they made; even when that means that very cool event I was dying to write will not happen. On the contrary, it would damage the character even more unless I would force him to think a certain way and perceive certain things in a different way. It would be very out-of-character for him. It was a tough decision the scrap the scene because I already put quite some effort and time in it. It was for the greater good. 

Getting to know your characters well will take a while. You will never know them as well as you think you do and that is great. Nothing is as thrilling as discovering something surprising about your characters. Let them be born out of your imagination, let them grow beyond the page and give them their own voice, thoughts and emotions. Respect them and never force them to do things they would not do. If you want your character to do something uncharacteristic, make sure you have a good reason for it. Maybe another character forces him/her to do it or perhaps he/she will lose something/someone very dear to them if they do not do it.

Co-writing

While I am not yet an expert at it, I have been co-writing a fan fiction that shall be turned into an original story for about 9 months (for more information about this, check the current projects tab). It started out as something fun to do, but slowly became more serious. It is still very fun to do but the decision to transform it into an original story and try to publish it, adds responsibilities to it.

I have this rule to never engage into business with a friend and I broke it. I am writing with a friend and even though I do not care much about the money we may get when we publish, it turns it into a business. That’s why I will not write anything of the original version of our story before we made up a contract. A contract is the basis of good partnership because it gives insurances. Things like deadlines, who writes what, who earns how much, what about expenses and what happens if someone does not want to continue anymore should be covered in such a contract. It will put your mind at ease!

Co-writing has both advantages and disadvantages. The best advantage is that you have more brainpower to come up with interesting plot twists and solutions to problems. The downside is that it can also make it a lot more difficult to agree on things. It is unavoidable that each writer has their own view on the story and the characters. That is why communication is very important. I have been talking almost daily to my co-writer. Our conversations are not always about the story, but it is an important part of our discourse. If you are too stubborn to give up on your ideas, you should not co-write! 

A big disadvantage for me is that I am not a very patient person. Since we are still writing round-robin at this moment, I sometimes have nothing to write until my friend finishes a part. And this can be very frustrating! This is the only project I am currently working on and beside school I have not much else to do and this gives me quite some time to write. My friend, however, has a lot more other things to do than I. I perfectly understand that, but, as I said before, I am impatient. This difference in time we have to spend on writing might cause some problems setting up deadlines. They have to be viable but at the same time I do not want to spend years and years working on this.

We divided the portion of work more or less equally. We all have our ‘own’ character to develop, have about the same amount of point of views to write and we split up the world building. This was fairly easy to do in our case, but when you both want to write the same character or both to the same part of the world building progress, it might be harder. 

While co-writing is a lot of fun with the right persons, it is a lot harder than writing solo. Everything has to be discussed and you must count on each other. It can ruin friendships. So far is had been a great experience for me, but if you want to try it, pick someone who has the same views as you and expects the same of a story. Be very careful and do not start a project with the first person who is willing to work together without!

When I have more to say about this topic, I shall write another blog. If you have questions, feel free to leave them in the comments or ask them on twitter!