The Most Important Advice I Can Give To Writers

petermorwood:

blue-author:

blue-author:

Go to YouTube.

Watch Bob Ross.

Listen to him talk about painting.

Seriously, this guy… this guy is full of advice for a writer who’s having trouble getting started.

He’s not writing, he’s painting, but… okay, like, he can sit there and talk about geology and the diffusion of light and make it clear that he knows what a mountain is and he knows what goes into the interplay of light and perspective, and then you’ll watch him smear some black paint on top of a still wet canvas with a thin metal wedge, and then take a brush and push it downwards so that it mixes with the base in such a way that it ends up lighter at the bottom and eventually just fades into the background.

And then he’ll take some titanium white paint and do the same thing to add snow and light, and you’re thinking… “But… interplay. Geology. Perspective.” and he’s just pushing paint around, talking about figuring out where the north slope lives and how there are no mistakes, just happy little accidents and then he steps back at the end and holy moly, it looks like he painted a mountain.

It doesn’t look like he pushed paint around for ten minutes, it looks like he looked at a real mountain somewhere and copied it.

Is there a real mountain that matches the painting? No. Could he use this method to exactly replicate an actual mountain? No. But he made a mountain that looks real enough, and even if he didn’t have 100% control over the final look of it, he conjured it out of his imagination.

This is the trick that more writers need to learn. It’s possible to create a story or even a whole book through meticulous planning and careful construction, but… most people can’t do that. It’s not that we’re not willing to put in the work, it’s just too easy to get stuck. Too easy to never leave the “Well, I’m still worldbuilding/researching” stage. Too easy to write oneself into a corner or get bogged down in the details.

So this is my advice today for fiction writers:

Learn how to speed paint.

Learn how to work wet on wet.

Learn how to push paint around on the edge of a knife.

Learn how to figure out where things want to live by feel and how to allow for happy little accidents.

There will be places for fine details and intricate sketches. But when you’re staring at a blank canvas and you have no idea where to start… paint the whole thing blue and start scraping up some mountains. 

Quick, broad strokes. That’s all it takes to get you started. Quick, broad strokes and a few happy accidents.

Reblogging for myself.

Useful advice, especially this –

It’s possible to create a story or even a whole book through meticulous
planning and careful construction, but… most people can’t do that. It’s
not that we’re not willing to put in the work, it’s just too easy to get
stuck. Too easy to never leave the “Well, I’m still
worldbuilding/researching” stage. Too easy to write oneself into a
corner or get bogged down in the details.

Until you’ve created a sky and a landscape there’s no need to research the shape of leaves on trees, and even less need to find out how their veins wiggle. If something that minuscule is an important plot point – and if it’s too minuscule it’ll start to feel like a Deus ex Machina – come back to it later once the story is complete.

I speak from guilty rivet-counting experience here. Four carefully-researched chapters out of a projected fifteen Did Not Make A Finished Book – and perhaps never will, because I got so embroiled in tweaks and polishes that I literally lost the plot and spoke (or thought) the Eight Deadly Words. Bad enough when a reader says them; if it’s the author, there’s a problem. That material is now in the “check this later maybe” folder that’s the Dropbox equivalent of shoved to the back of the drawer. At least it hasn’t been deleted. (Never Delete Anything.) Be warned by me.

(It’s why so many of my arms and armour (etc) posts have a slant towards use in writing, and why you’ll often see observations like “if specific – a 7.62mm Nagant revolver with a Bramit suppressor – isn’t vital, vague – a silenced handgun – works fine with less chance of error”.)

@dduane often uses and mentions C.J. Cherryh’s “ten-item-shopping-list” technique – ten sequential incidents to take a story from “Once upon a time” to “The End”, and ten smaller incidents inside each larger one to take a chapter from its start to its finish. That’s what will happen to he things at the back of the drawer when/if they come out again.

Given how many novels DD and CJ have written, it’s a technique worth noting even if outlines aren’t your thing.