Known Unknowns #5: Tricks

The Known Unknowns is a twice-weekly series of posts about the things that bedevil me in my writing life. It’s a catalog of what I’ve learned, and am still learning, from years of missteps, blind lunges, and thick-headed perseverance. 

Ex-magician still knows the tricks/Tricks are everything to me

– Pavement, “Trigger Cut” (Slanted and Enchanted)

Are tricks ever good? It depends. Anywhere in the world at a given moment, some kid somewhere is tricking his little brother or sister into eating dog crap. Con-artists and swindlers will trick you out of your money and/or possessions. On the other hand, magic tricks are fun, if we in the audience can trick our rational minds — just for a few seconds per trick! — into not asking too many questions about what we know is and isn’t there. Someone who pays a prostitute for a predetermined unit of sex and simulated companionship is called a trick. That unit of sex and simulated companionship is itself called a trick. Which leads me to the subject of writing, which is itself an act of simulated companionship, if you think about it. I can pick up David Copperfield, 141 years after its author’s death, and engage fully (or so it seems) with the mind of Charles Dickens.

When I was fifteen, I learned a valuable thing about myself: That I could do good work, but only if I tricked myself into it. This was the year I realized I really could turn in a good term paper, but only if I a) did the necessary reading; and b) waited until the very last minute and then stayed up all night to do the writing work. This was key. For years I’d worked in the b) trench only, blowing off all aspects to a thing until it was nearly too late.

What I didn’t know at the time was that I was an ADD kid. I wouldn’t learn this, in fact, until I was diagnosed at 34, based (partly) on a lifetime of patterns and habits that were textbook ADD. In the great landscape of things that can form in the human brain, ADD is pretty small potatoes. It does often go hand-in-hand with other learning disabilities, and ADD/ADHD people are highly prone to depression (at least when we remember to be sad), but it’s pretty lightweight stuff when compared to, oh, autism, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia. Mainly, it causes a little chaos in your daily life, due to qualities like:

• Lack of concentration
• Lack of focus (this is not the same as above)
• Difficulty starting projects
• Difficulty managing projects
• Difficulty finishing projects
• Ability to start fires with one’s mind

So what do you do when you have difficulty focusing or managing projects? Do you just give up? Some poor fuckers certainly do. The rest of us invent all manner of tricks to get ourselves to do things like normal humans. Some of these are simple and familiar: important dates and info go right into my iPhone, lest they be forgotten instantly and forever; I try and do certain things at the same time every day, so that behaviors will become imprinted. Other tricks are a little different. I have a fairly complicated time- and food-based reward system in place for getting myself to complete certain tasks, and that’s all I’ll say about that.

But that’s daily life, and this blog is about writing. And what I’ve done over the years, largely without knowing it, is devise a set of tricks — some craft-based, some process-based — to get myself to do better work. I share these with you, because you may one day find yourself needing a little nudge. (Note: There are, of course, people who are singularly driven on a constant basis, who have vast reserves of patience for process, who never have an issue with starting or finishing projects. We call those people “assholes.” The rest of us require a good deal of self-maintenance.)

1. Make a schedule and stick to it. “I don’t have time to write!” is the most common complaint I hear. Well, you just think you don’t. I’m guessing if you had all day to write, you might not then, either. You’d find other stuff to do. But if you had just a half hour or an hour? You’d be shocked how much writing you got done. One of my very favorite Twitter people, TV writer Jane Espenson, regularly encourages people to do “writing sprints” with her. Let’s do a half hour, she’ll tweet. Go! My own routine involves one hour each morning. There’s no internet, no phone, just me and the work. I will also write late at night, if I get the opportunity, but at the very least I am always doing a solid hour a day, and every hour produces something.

You may be wondering: An hour? Great, but where’s the “trick” in that? Deadlines. “I need deadlines in order to write!” people will say, and this is a big reason for the explosion in low-residency MFA programs, writers’ workshops, and conferences. Which is great, but don’t forget that every day can contain a multitude of deadlines if you let it. Next time you’re feeling like an unproductive creator, force yourself to block off that half hour between waking and getting ready for work. Do this for a week and see what you have at the end. I’ll bet it’s not nothing, which is what you would’ve had just sitting around complaining about time, friend-o.

2. Figure out which time of day is your time. Related to the above. Your control over this will vary according to work schedule, kids, etc., but be aware of when you do your best work. After grad school, I got on a nighttime schedule. And this seemed to make sense — I could work for as many hours as I could stay awake — but after years of this, I had to admit that my writing was beginning to feel, well, sleepy. My wife is the one who said, “Can’t you work in the morning?” To which I said, “That’s insane! Because…because….” But I had no good reason. I could only write for a short while before I had to switch over to other work, but then my unlimited nighttime hours hadn’t given me much to show for them. Working for a year or so on my hour-a-morning schedule, I finished the book of short stories I’d been stuck in for the previous few years.

3. Write in the car. Or in a closet (make sure you have an air supply), or in the laundry room, or standing up if you normally sit down to write. In other words, stick to a schedule and work when you work best, but now find the where. You will likely write differently depending on the environment. A guy I met once had the chance to go into John Updike’s house — this was years ago — and discovered that Updike had three rooms upstairs, each with a desk and a typewriter. “What’s with the three rooms?” he said. He was told that one was for working on fiction, one for poetry, and one was for essays and book reviews. Because of my ADD, I always assumed I should be writing in a quiet space with no distractions. Except ADD is a misnomer; it’s not a deficit of attention, it’s a surplus. I can turn ANYTHING into a distraction! That’s my superpower. But I learned, quite by accident one day, that working in a crowded, noisy coffee shop occupies only the distracted part of my brain and allows the rest of it to hyperfocus and get things done.

4. Skip the beginning. Now we get to the writing itself. There’s a lot of pressure with beginning something. Think of the horror of a blank page. I’ve had students who would spend weeks rewriting (and rewriting) their first chapter. You can get stuck trying to make the beginning perfect. Well, guess what? You don’t know what the hell the rest of your book is yet. If you were building a house, would you start with the front door? And would you spend months and months painting that door and buffing it and making it just perfect before you’d even framed out the rest of the house? Because that’d be crazy, right?

So get through that first part as fast as you can — you’re going to be rewriting anyway — and get to the meat. Or (and I’ve done this with stories, too) start after the beginning. Start with things already in motion in your story. This relieves a huge amount of pressure — something’s already happening, now you can just go back and set it up. OR you may realize you don’t really need the beginning you had in mind anyway. I wrote last week about not knowing where to end. Just as common is not knowing where to start.

5. Leave off in the middle of things. This is a Hemingway trick, I believe. He would leave off in the middle of a scene — possibly in the middle of a sentence, in this Hemingway scenario I’m too lazy to verify — in order to give himself a clear task for the next day, and to keep himself engaged. I use this constantly, and not only does it work really well for me, my hunting and fishing have never been better.

6. Start at the end. Imagine a climactic moment between characters, or between a character and a thing. Now work backwards, asking yourself: How did we get here? Who are these people? What kind of people would do these things? I’ve done this a lot, including with my story The Book of Right and Wrong, which you can read on this very site. The final scene came to me as a mini-movie — a father directing his young son to commit a terrible act on a pre-school playground — and it was so upsetting that I had to know who on earth would ever do such a thing. And once I had the who, I had to know the why. That “ending” scene, by the way, may not turn out to be your ending. Be open to this and all possibilities.

7. Record yourself reading your work. I cannot emphasize enough the need to read your work aloud as part of the writing process. I tell this to students, and they never believe me. And then they finally try it, and their work is magically better. Why? Because when we read silently, our brains tend to lump words and phrases together. Also, if you’ve seen your own words a million times while working on something, you may become blind to your weaknesses. When you read something aloud, you’re forced to go more slowly than when reading silently. Suddenly, ill-chosen words and phrases are jumping out all over the place. If you record yourself reading and force yourself to listen to it, you will catch even more problems, including draggy parts (that’s a technical term), inconsistencies, story problems, etc. Every single cell phone made today has a recorder feature, by the way. If you’re shy about recording or don’t own a microphone, you can sit in your car, read your work into your phone, and anyone who sees you will think you’re just on a long phone call. Possibly planning a murder.

8. Map out your scenes. I can’t not do this anymore. I don’t plan in advance when writing something — at least not when starting it. But once it’s been written and rewritten to a point where I think it’s got some value, I break it down into scenes. You can do this on a whiteboard, or using index cards. I’ve also taken scissors and cut the scenes right out of the pages, then laid them out so I could see what was what. And what you’ll see will often surprise you. “Oh, this is why this drags — this chapter’s supposed to be about what happens when they’re in the city, and I spend the first four scenes trying to get them down the driveway.” The bonus feature to this trick is that once your scenes are on index cards or cut-out pages, it suddenly feels like nothing to try things with them. Move them around. Swap. Cut everything before the fourth scene; what does that do to the piece? And the actual thing is still on your computer, so you’re not erasing all your work. You’re just messing with it.

9. Put it away. This is the trick of time, the diminisher. Did you have an argument with your partner or friend this morning? Are you as mad now as you were at that moment? Same for your fiction. You’ve finished it, you’ve maybe even done a rewrite. Time to put it away for a while. Why? As I mentioned last week, you’re too close to it. You won’t see the flaws, or you’ll see nothing but flaws. William Trevor, one of the two living masters of the modern short story (the other being Alice Munro), puts his stories away in a drawer for a year before taking them out and working on them again. What does he do in the meantime? He works on more fiction. Which is the thing to do. Always be writing. Keep those balls in the air.

10. Rewrite from scratch. Don’t skimp on this process. If you do, you’re essentially saying, “My work is too precious to need improvement.” But aren’t you also saying, “My work doesn’t matter to me”? I got into this a little bit last week, and here we are again, so it must be important. You have to rewrite your work.  Challenge yourself to do this: Next time you have a first draft finished, don’t touch it. Don’t go back into that file, don’t print it out. Just open a new file and start rewriting that story or chapter from scratch, from memory. “But I won’t remember everything I wrote the first time,” you say. Oh my god! Not that! Think of it this way: What did your mother used to tell you? “If you’ve forgotten it, it must not be important.” Well, your mom was right. At the same time, you will be AMAZED at what you do remember from that first draft. And this is usually the key stuff.

There you have it. There are other tricks, and I’ll share those in a future post. In the meantime: Do you have things that work for you? Let us know in the comments!

Thanks for reading!

Matt