Following on from yesterday’s post, I decided, as always, to sit and figure out what the problem with my writing of this blog was. For those who don’t want to click; I admitted that getting into the swing of things with the blog-bits has been harder than I anticipated. I’ve “lost the magic.”
Except that’s a pretty rubbish way to look at things; I’ve written before that Writer’s Block isn’t a real thing, (though, clearly it’s a thing that exists) and that if you can’t write, then something is going wrong.
Now, there’s a Mandela Effect for my own writing here; I know I lost a few hundred posts when the blog went down, but I distinctly remember writing an article called “Stop Being Boring.” I can’t find it anywhere, so it’s lost for now.
However… when doing the little introspection session today, I ended up with that being the answer that’s eluding me.
A simple three word mantra that I can string out into multiple articles if I need to.
Stop Being Boring: Writer’s Toolkit
One thing I’ve been trying to do with the pulp fiction stuff I write recently is to take inspiration from Light Novels and Web Novels. I’m writing up a full guide that’ll probably go in The Vault, (have to get more disciplined with premium bits, (and launching the thing, finally – it’s a Q1 goal and we’re running out of Q1,)) but the gist for the purposes of this article is this:
Web Novels work like serials from the pulp days. This breaks down to two things:
- Readers are conditioned to read new material regularly
- Everything revolves around getting them to stay for the next chapter/release
There’s a lot to unpack on both of those, but we’ll concentrate on the second. People will put up with a lot of bad writing, weird decisions, and frustrating situations in fiction, (and in life,) if you keep them hooked on what will happen next.
And if you can keep them hooked, all the other rules tend to go out of the window.
You can be a successful serial writer if you master a couple of key skills; introducing new plot elements, creating character conflicts and creating cliffhangers.
Those three key skills make you the literary equivalent of a drug dealer. This applies to non-fiction and fiction, but we’ll concentrate on fiction for this article. For the bloggers and copywriters among you, there’ll be an article about how to apply these skills to those fields later.
(Take a moment to think about that paragraph though.)
Introducing New Plot Elements; let’s say you’re stuck in the Second Act of your book. Spiderman’s been bitten by the radioactive spider, the murder has happened but the detective doesn’t have the first clue where to start, and/or your characters have had their meet-cute but there’s no reason the billionaire is going to marry the plain-jane librarian yet. What do you do? Something interesting. It doesn’t really matter what, just that it provides the potential to get something going with your characters.
Examples: Frodo is on his way to Rivendell. He has the ring, but he really doesn’t know what to do with it. So his friends get drunk at the pub, (typical English story) which leads to Aragorn revealing himself, Frodo using the ring for the first time, the Nazghul finding the hobbits and Aragorn fighting them off, and then Frodo getting stabbed by the Witch-King, saved by first Aragorn and later Glorfindel or Arwen, depending whether you’re reading or watching.
(This just goes to show writing is everything; that summary makes Tolkien look like a Robert Howard pulp knockoff.)
Introducing Character Conflicts: Maybe the best way to learn this is to watch a soap opera. If everything in your story is going along boringly, you might want to introduce a character conflict and/or subplot – again, just to open up the story and get things moving. It can be within the team, (most Rom-Coms are entirely based on this,) or outside of this, (We can’t defeat the evil empire yet, we’ve got to save the ewoks!)
The danger though is the soap-operafication of your story. It’s not a problem if you’re writing the next Pokemon franchise, but it is a problem if you’re George R. R. Martin trying to finish your epic with four-hundred separate plotlines that are never going to interlock again.
Cliffhangers; are the biggest skill for writing serials that get your readers salivating and hating you in equal measure. Now, you can overdo cliffhangers very easily; “and then a character turned up dead” is about as shocking nowadays as, “I’m really your father, Luke.” Tropes work for a reason, but they’re very fatiguing.
So you need to mix them up and the simplest way to write cliffhangers that don’t follow the “major plot point cliffhanger” is to do one very easy thing: cut your scene in half.
How many times have you read a detective book, or watched a detective TV show, where there’s the crime scene, the body and then the detective gets the “Aha!” moment and then you’re hit with the chapter end/black screen?
Probably so many you’ve never thought about it before. But your logical, writer brain says when creating, “We can’t leave this scene before explaining what the “Aha!” moment is.”
Yes you can. You’re a drug dealer now, and your drug is suspense.
Stop Being Boring; Writing Philosophy
The three elements above are tools that you’ll use to orchestrate the following philosophy; keeping your writing exciting is the only rule.
And, to avoid alienating the literary types, think of “excitement” as “something that keeps the reader turning the page.”
In other words, you don’t have to write Lee Child-esque thrillers with little introspection and a lot of action scenes stitched together as our hero stops the fiendish plan before it’s too late. Though you can.
You do have to keep someone going though; you want to write the book that a person cannot put down and stays up too late and queues in line at the bookstore, (do people do that?) and tells all their friends about it like the inhabitants of a crackden when a new dealer is giving out free samples.
A lot of unfinished projects – and I’m talking about myself here as much as anyone else – sit there because you’re bored with making them. You’re bored of writing your novel, stuck writing a chapter, maybe you draw or paint and you’ve got half-finished projects; if you’re bored creating them, then you’re enfusing your work with that emotion.
Instead, pull out what’s got you bogged down and follow the above to introduce new elements.
This applies to life as much as it does writing fiction. We’ll talk about that some more in the future.