Learn Writing with Uncle Jim, Volume 1

Congratulations!

I'm honored to be here, Jim. Really.

If this is my second post, I ought to introduce myself. And then I'll talk about my current challenge in my novel-in-progress.

As you know, Jim, but others here don't, my career is as a writer, specifically tech journalism. I write a lot for work every day, I write a little on Internet discussion forums too, and when all that's done, I haven't had time or energy for fiction. Even though I've dreamed of being a science-fiction writer since I was about 11 years old.

But lately I've had more discipline. I've turned out four short stories and novelettes in the past two or three years. Until recently, I've been submitting them fairly conscientiously. But my experience being rejected -- and, more importantly, other people's experience -- has discouraged me from shorter lengths. There just isn't a market for it. More importantly, there just isn't a READERSHIP for it. Some people write to get their names on books. Some people love writing. I write to be read.

So now I'm working on a novel. I'm about 34,000 words in. I've finally found a system that seems to work: Don't outline, don't worry about planning ahead, just sit and write. Every day. 250 words a day.

I find that having a do-able quota for word-count is absolute magic. It's the best thing I could do to make myself produce fiction. Because it gets to be a habit.

Jerry Seinfeld, the comedian, had a great tip for this kind of thing. He tells up-and-coming comedians they have to write, and have to do it every day. (Stand-up comedy is a form of writing -- who knew?) He says you should get a paper calendar, put it on the wall, mark a red X every day
you write. Eventually you will have a row of red Xes. The row will get to be quite long. And you won't want to skip a day writing, because you won't want to break up that row, and have a white space interrupting that long row of red Xes.

And that works for me. I don't have an actual calendar, but I visualize one. And sometimes it does get to be 9 pm or 10 pm and I still haven't done my writing for the day, and I think about blowing it off, but then I think about breaking up the row of red Xes and I say to myself, "Come on, you don't want to break up the row of red Xes. And it's only 250 words." And I sit down and do my 250 words that day.

That's another thing that contributes to the magic: 250 words isn't much. A guy like me can do that in a few minutes. This post, up until the preceding paragraph, was more than twice as long as that.

I don't know where I came up with the figure 250 words a day, but I do know that it was Cory Doctorow's quota while he had a full-time job that he traveled the world for. So it works. He turned out a mess of acclaimed short fiction and one or two novels on that system.

My biggest problem as a fiction writer is that I have no confidence. I think everything I write is crap. I'm currently in a patch of novel that I think is particularly craptacular. My solution in the past would be to "put it aside," which is a euphemism for giving up. But now, my solution is: Write it out.

My two immediate problems:

I think I may have too many redundant characters. Four of them, who all seem to tell the hero what he needs to know, and tell him what to do (which he either obeys or doesn't). I was able to articulate that problem to myself a week or so ago, and I realized immediately that the four characters serve very different *emotional* purposes for the hero: One is his only friend, one is his love interest, one is his mentor, and one is ... well, he's a new friend, and I may end up getting rid of him because he really *is* redundant - but on the other hand, he's a really neat character, so I'm inclined to keep him around anyway.

The other problem I have is that I'm afraid the scene I'm writing may be a cliche. The hero is a former policeman, a commoner who finds himself among aristocracy. An aristocrat has challenged the hero to a duel. The hero thinks dueling is nonsense, but he feels there really is a a point of pride at stake, so he refuses to back down, against the better judgment of his companions (three out of the four characters mentioned above). I've seen that before -- Richard Sharpe did it a couple of times in the Sharpe novels by Bernard Cornwell, and it came up at least once on "Firefly." But I feel if I ground the scene thoroughly in the settings, story and characters, it will work.

As I said, my solution to both of these problems is just to keep writing and have faith that solutions will present themselves. But I wonder: Is there a better way? Something I could do to fix the problem faster? Something I can do without interrupting writing at least 250 words per day?

Thanks, all.