I recall reading that you use transcription software to write - could you tell me more about that? A family member is interested in transcription software and I thought “oh, I know someone who uses that!”.
There’s a post over here that talks a bit about the one I use, Dragon Naturally Speaking (and its young mobile-based cousin Dragon Anywhere), mostly in terms of it being a great way to deal with incipient RSI. (Which was the reason I got into using it, originally.)
…Have to add, with some annoyance, that Microsoft has apparently bought Dragon’s company, Nuance. (muttering) I hope they don’t screw it up too much.
It also ties neatly into the simplest version of the formula for getting people emotionally engaged with your characters: or how to build the moment in which your character starts moving from their initial state to the state in which they’ll start changing their own lives.
First, you figure out the one important thing the character believes that they’re wrong about. There’s usually a core misperception that they haven’t examined. Once they’re forced to engage with it, it’ll start to change everything about their perception of the world they’re inhabiting and/or the people in it.
Then, as V.E. says, you identify the character’s great desire and their great fear: the thing that character wants more than anything, and the thing or situation that terrifies them, and that they’ll go to any lengths to avoid.
And having identified these two objects or situations, you build a situation in which the two forces will be in close, direct opposition to one another… then drop the character down in between them, and squeeze. Those two opposing forces become the jaws of a vise… and you crank the vise more and more tightly closed until the character has no choice but to acknowledge those opposing forces, and start (even in a small way) to deal with the pressure being exerted and push their way through.
This does not have to be, initially, a great climactic moment. In fact, it works better if it’s not. It’s more effective if your character has a brief low-intensity brush with these conditions-in-conflict early on. That way, when your big resolution scene comes along about two-thirds or three-quarters of the way along through the story arc, you’ll have set up a resonance between that earlier hint or intimation of what’s to come, and the really big blowoff. Your readers will recognize the resonance—the throb of tension between the two occurrences, like the vibration of a plucked string—and will find satisfaction both in the true resolution having been partially telegraphed earlier, and in how it’s now being experienced and resolved in full.
This approach also allows you to set up more minor resonances between the realization of the conflict and its final resolution. These can serve to bind the structure of the work more closely together: to make it look (and be) less like a series of loosely strung-together plot events, and more like a unified whole, in which ripples of story business flow backwards and forwards, interpenetrating and influencing one another, and hinting at the big one to come.
But none of this can happen until the paired and opposing what-do-they-most-desire, what-do-they-most-fear axes have been defined. So that’s a subject it’s smart to spend some while thinking about (and for all your characters, not just the major ones), to be sure you’re getting it right.
It’s not unusual to get the wrong answers, or merely superficial ones, while you’re still working out what’s actually going on with the characters. So take your time. Eventually you’ll find a set of answers that feel unquestionably right… and you can then nail those down in your notes and get on with making the kind of “good trouble” for your characters that will see them made complete.
Hi Diane, hope you’re doing well! I was wondering if you had any advice for writing characters undergoing change/realizing some of their core beliefs are wrong?
I’m mostly struggling with how to make it feel natural when I have something like “Character X goes through Event Y and realizes Thing Z” in the outline, which feels a lot more formulaic than organic
This is a very smart question to be asking, and you’re to be commended for making your way to it. 🙂
…There are a number of ways to calibrate the style and nature of this kind of shift, strongly depending on what kind of character you’re dealing with. For example:
Are they self-examining (much)? or,
Are they generally oblivious to what’s going on inside them unless prompted to notice it by someone else? (Ideally someone they’re positively emotionally invested in, though it can be interesting if it’s someone they hate.) Or,
Are they the kind of person who refuses to accept anything unless the seemingly-uncaring Universe itself clocks them over the head with it?
Each of those analyses (even in cursory form) is going to suggest what you need to do to that character to, uh, get their attention. 😏
Putting in a break here, because this will go on for a bit. Caution: contains Carl Jung, Ursula Le Guin, David Gerrold, and Kylo Ren.
A writer never forgets the first time he accepted a few coins or a word of praise in exchange for a story. He will never forget the sweet poison of vanity in his blood and the belief that, if he succeeds in not letting anyone discover his lack of talent, the dream of literature will provide him with a roof over his head, a hot meal at the end of the day, and what he covets the most: his name printed on a miserable piece of paper that surely will outlive him. A writer is condemned to remember that moment, because from then on he is doomed and his soul has a price. (Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Angel’s Game)
You know what’s tough at the end of a day like this?
STOPPING.
…Saying to yourself: You broke the back of a novel’s structure today. THAT’S ENOUGH.
Go have a drink and a snack and stop second-guessing it.
Leave the fine detail for the next day or two. Today, you did the thing that the witless clueless greedy AI bros can only wish their hopped-up autocorrect machine can do.
I just wanted to say thank you! Because you recently shared the Shopping List Outline you use, I now have an outline roughed out for my book. And Because of the outline I was able to figure out some of the plot points I wasn't sure about before when I'd been writing. So, thank you very much!
Holy crap, you wrote My Enemy, My Ally in ELEVEN DAYS?! One of my favorite books ever that was and still is one of my go to books for comfort (my copy has been getting a workout lately), that I still pull out and study for the gorgeous language and turns of phrase when my own writing is stuck?
*wanders away, shaking head* Evidently I still have a lot to learn…
And yeah: eleven days. (It might’ve been longer had my housemates not kindly taken on my snow-shoveling duties for that period. It was snowing a lot in Philly right then.)
This speed of execution (and the luxury of having the leisure to relax into language and dialogue issues) was made possible by having a very detailed outline—a “road map” very completely drawn in advance. …That having been what sold the novel in the first place.
But then if you’re going to work in somebody else’s IP, no matter how talented you are (or think you are), you have to be prepared to demonstrate, via outlining, that you know exactly where you’re going to be going. Trust me when I tell y'all that at the end of the day, Corporate will have zero interest in how you got stuck mid-story while you were “pantsing it.” To work without a sufficiently-detailed outline in somebody else’s universe is a near-guaranteed pathway to Only Getting Hired Once.
Meanwhile, more details on how to outline at this level of granularity—or whatever level you need—are here.
And relatedly, how the HELL are you handling the seemingly inevitable wrist and arm issues that come with the craft? Last time I speed-wrote anything, my physical therapist called me a dozen kinds of idiot. Silently, because he’s a nice guy, but the expressions were an experience…
(I hope I do not overstep here: I’ve currently got a novel burning half my brain and a deeply unhappy right wrist, so it comes from a very proximate inspiration!)
The quick answer: because I too ran into the RSI barrier at an early stage, I’ve been using speech-to-text tech whenever possible, from when it very first became available in the early 1990s. @petermorwood and I were very early adopters of the first truly reliable STT software, Dragon Dictate (which eventually became Dragon Naturally Speaking).
We got Terry Pratchett hooked up to it, too, and thereby, if indirectly, made it possible for him to finish a book or two (or three…) more than would otherwise have been feasible for him. (Terry’s own experts came in and fine-tuned the basic software for T’s own needs.)
I’ve currently got the professional version of Dragon Naturally Speaking installed on my desktop machine, and can sit in my Comfy Chair with my feet up and dictate, watching the words spill out onto the big TV screen in the living room. Or alternately: due to currently being on the road a lot, I’m mostly using the app version of the software, Dragon Anywhere. Dictate to it, when hooked up to broadband, and it types what you’re saying as you watch, with 95%-or-better accuracy out of the box. (And the program is endlessly configurable to handle specialized vocabulary, weird alien character names, or whatever.) When you’re done, you save the file and the app’ll email you a .doc-file transcription of what you just dictated. Cut and paste this into your preferred writing software and—having exuded a chunk of “zero draft” without excessive amounts of wear and tear on your sinews—you can then edit at your leisure.
The app runs on a relatively low-cost monthly subscription model… which makes it handily accessible to folks who can’t afford the (unquestionably hefty) price tag on the standalone big-machine install of the full program. I recommend the app highly. You might consider trying it for a month or so and seeing how it works for you. The subscription goes month-to-month, and is easily cancelled if you don’t care for it.
(sigh) Easily. All the arts are full of apparent contradictions like this.
Re: writing, specifically: This work is a very particular kind of magic. And like all real magics, the use of it inevitably has a price.
“Soul-sucking” strikes me as a slightly harsh idiom for the payment of the Writing Price. But that’s okay, because the idiom itself points at the remedy. And it’s really simple! Just this:
Every time you sit down to write, you have to consciously work to do it well enough so that you grow some more soul.
(I mean, you don’t think that souls run out when you use them, surely? Or can’t regenerate over time? They can be surprisingly resilient… assuming you don’t buy into the idea that they’re limited to what you feel like you started out with, or what you’ve got at the moment.)
Repeatedly pouring your soul into your work is very much like bodybuilding. At first it hurts like hell. Then the body starts to adjust to the increased demands you’re putting on it. After a while you look back and find you’ve blown way past the boundaries that you earlier thought were impassible.
When you start getting that soul-sucked feeling, it’s just a sign that the workouts are having an effect. It’s the equivalent of the lactic-acid ache after a session at the gym. But you still need to keep working at it to improve your results. If you find you need to take more rest time between writing bouts to replenish your reserves, fine: work out what your best refractory period seems to be, and adjust your workload to suit that as best you can. But at all costs, keep writing, at whatever interval works best. Over time, it does get easier.
Does it ever stop “sucking” / demanding that price?
Nope. Sorry! But you can learn over time to grow into those inevitable demands on your time, energy and commitment. Just keep reminding yourself: Nothing truly worth doing ever comes without a price tag. And the more you work at your craft, over time, the bigger the price tags you’ll find you can afford without flinching.
no writing workshop can help you improve your writing as much as this screenshot can
Oh gods. (hides eyes)
…I’ve been coughing my lungs up for the last three days now and am sick and tired of it, and seriously weary, but THIS makes me want to sit up and start ragetyping.
(reaches down into drafts folder, rummages around to grab hold of the screed I wrote in, dear sweet Thoth on his ebike, January) and then decided not to post in the heat of the moment)
Something trundled by on my dash some days back. And I got all ready to write a post about it, and then Peter had his accident in the kitchen and it got jarred out of my head for days. Until now, in fact..
Anyway. The “something” was a beautifully made chart of “dialogue tags”. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble over it, clearly with the intention of helping other people. And after I spent a while admiring the design (and the ingenuity of it), I nonetheless started having, yet again, the same set of annoyed and frustrated misgivings I get every time one of these substitutes-for-“said” or suggested-dialogue-tags lists crosses my path.
These lists aren’t a new phenomenon by any means. In the last century you could buy whole books of them. They were called “saidbooks”, which is kind of ironic, since “said” was about the only word they didn’t include. (Look, hello-delicious-tea over here knows about them too.) But their purpose was to provide people who were nervous about repeating themselves—and thought they’d be mistaken for bad writers when they did—with lots of other words to use.
(sigh) Plainly this misapprehension is still with us.
Am I about to get prescriptive? Depends on your definition of the term. (Though it’s also true that in New York state, where I was licensed, properly trained nurses can prescribe. And in this paradigm, after nearly fifty years of doing this work, and various bestseller lists, blah blah blah, maybe I can be considered properly trained.) Anyway:
(adding a cut here, as I got distracted from doing so earlier by yet another spell of coughing)
Do you think people who are virgin should write smut? I feel like most of them don’t even know what they’re writing and just write what they think sex is
the implication this ask suggests that people who write about murders, cannibalism, politics, magic, royalty au, sci-fi, wars, supernatural, time travel, medieval era, werewolves, vampires, mermaids or goblins must be murderers, cannibals, presidents, wizards, royalties, astronauts, ghost hunters, soldiers, time travelers, knights, werewolves, vampires, mermaids or goblins in real life is so funny to me
…And to Ursula Le Guin as well, it looks like.
As for “Write what you know,” I was regularly told this as a beginner. I think it’s a very good rule and have always obeyed it. I write about imaginary countries, alien societies on other planets, dragons, wizards, the Napa Valley in 22002. I know these things. I know them better than anybody else possibly could, so it’s my duty to testify about them. I got my knowledge of them, as I got whatever knowledge I have of the hearts and minds of human beings, through imagination working on observation. Like any other novelist. All this rule needs is a good definition of “know.”
So there you have it.
…And me? I know about wizards, too. And about the Powers that Be. And about worlds where relationship comes in some unusual shapes. I know about adventure. And starships. And found family. And swordsmanship. And sex. And making love. And being young. And being centuries or millennia old. (Sometimes both at once… like the sex and the making love.) And about taking good care of other people’s universes, when I wind up on their turf.
(shrug) So find out what you know. Take as much time as you need. Then write about it… because, trust me, no one else can do it the way you will.
I wanted to thank you for your advice! I ended up clawing an old WIP from a half-finished 7500 word story to a rough but finished 29k word story. It's not good, and it's fanfic so it's nothing I can publish, but hey! This is the first time I have completed something longer than 10k words. So I'll get myself a victory cookie all the same (and then start thinking about something I could publish...).
You’re more than welcome! This is what being writers here is for: to give each other a hand over the rough ground.
So: Don’t be too quick to say “It’s not good.” Maybe it’s not! We all excrete, well, excreta, from time to time. It’s part of the drill. But you have to step back a bit and let it sit before you judge. It might be good after all. (And good or bad, you’ll probably wind up rewriting it. All too often, This Is The Way.) :)
So go have that cookie. My guess is that when you reread this work (and I mean this seriously, let it the hell be for a month or so minimum), you’ll find good things that you missed noticing when you finished, and godawful things that will make you scream “WTF WTF” and run for the red pen.
This is normal. The mode you’re in when you’re composing is not usually the mode best suited for examining fine detail. Now’s the time to fix the busted things, smooth out the rough-edged things, and then decide what to do next.
And hey, congrats! (The urge to say “You’ve taken your first step into a larger world…” is way too strong.) :) …It can be hard making the jump into longer work for the first time. Come back to it when you’re ready and see what starts to pop out…
I'm at the start of my professional writing/storytelling career, and while there's a lot of tedious work (especially since I'm mostly doing self-publishing and freelance writing currently), I still get giddy about it. Like, I'm having ideas that take form and are seen (and sometimes even paid for) by other people. It's so cool! Does that feeling ever change? I don't think I want it to...
(Also, I bought your Doctor's Orders Star Trek book at a used book store the other day. I have a couple other books to read first, but I'm looking forward to reading it soon! 🖖)
Hey, have fun with that. the Great Bird only knows I sure did. :)
Per your question: I wouldn’t say that the giddiness ever goes entirely away, though sometimes it does get kinda submerged in the scutwork. (Which has to be done, in varying forms, whatever kind of creative work you’re doing. Editing, copyediting, formatting, ugh.)
…At least, the giddy hasn’t entirely gone away for me. After nearly fifty years of this, however, the reaction may have become somewhat differently formulated.
It takes a whole lot, these days, to kick me up to anything approaching the post-The Door into Firelevel, where the utter astonishment of what seemed to be happening to me (book got published, book got noticed, book got really good reviews for how weird it was, book got me award-nominated…) left me wanting to stagger around my little apartment every morning yelling “Look how cool this all is despite this book having the ugliest cover ever seen by the human eye!!”* …That was heady stuff. Last time that level of ohgodohgoddoyoubelievethisshit would’ve happened would probably have been the premiere of @petermorwood’s and my event-TV/short miniseries thing. Standing up there in front of a theater full of people in another country applauding what we’d written? What a buzz.**
But you know what? The more books/TV/film/whatever you do, the (relatively) less the impact hits, each time, because it just gets… familiar. And this, I think, is inevitable. When a new book or whatever comes out, you get a briefer and briefer flush of the ohgodohgods.And then it’s back to work.
The Work, naturally, being the thing that counts. And here comes the way less ohgodohgod part that, in the end, drives everything else—
(Inserting a cut here, because yeah, this got a shade long. Caution: contains clichés, neurotransmitters, secondary-creation theory, antici……pation, possible borderline heresy, and [apparently] a scene from Young Frankenstein.)
