Jacqueline Corcoran

I finished my book, WRITE YOUR WAY TO RIGHT THINKING, as part of the December Finish Your Novel Challenge! One tip I can offer for completing work, particularly non-fiction, is to find an opportunity to teach the material you’re writing about. For WRITE YOUR WAY TO RIGHT THINKING, I offered a workshop at SavvyAuthors.com. There are three ways teaching is a useful way to complete a book.

First, it motivates you to actually write the material. I ended up writing 11,000 words for a new textbook when recently I had to facilitate an all-day training on Motivational Interviewing. I was motivated to write that many words in order to prepare for training – the powerpoint slides, the handouts, and the exercises.

The second way training/teaching is helpful is to see how people react to your material and to find out what works well and what doesn’t. As a result, all of my textbooks evolved out of courses I taught as a professor in social work. I could see firsthand what helped students with their work with clients, what caught their interest, and how best to present the material, as well as exercises that faciliated their learning.

A third way training can help is to get you more examples. Sometimes it’s hard to come up with all the examples you need in your own work, but other people are a trove for ways to apply the material and how it fits their unique situation. You will have to ask permission if you want to use other people’s examples, and then also make sure that you acknowledge them in the acknowledgements section of your book. To a person, everyone I have asked has given their consent, and usually people are flattered that you would like to include their applications in your book.

How can you find a way to test the material you’re writing? Is it by offering a course or a training? If this is not possible, is it by featuring a podcast, a YouTube video, or a blog post?

I started this post last time by recommending Carol Hughes’s writing class Deep Story. This post I want to suggest two more master teachers. The first is Margie Lawson at http://www.margielawson.com/lawson-writers-academy-courses. I have taken Maggie’s Deep Editing and her Body Language classes, and found her material both original and inspiring. Her courses are best for revising work that you already have, not for coming up with those words to start with. If you can’t take the classes, she also has lecture packets for sale for less than the price of a hardcover.

My third recommendation is Mary Buckham at http://www.marybuckham.com/Onlineclasses.html. She is the author (with Dianne Love) of BREAK INTO FICTION. I have taken Mary’s Pacing and Active Settings class. I credit her with helping me find just the right first line for my mystery A MONTH OF SUNDAYS, which soon after I took Mary’s class, finally sold.

All three of these writing teachers (again, check the previous post for the first one) offer fresh ideas you won’t find in writing craft books that will act to inspire your creativity, and that you will reference again and again.

Any questions about these writing instructions or their classes? What online course can you recommend?

In my never-ending quest to find creative ideas and hone my writing craft, I’ve taken dozens of writing classes. Today I’m going to feature an upcoming class that I’ve gotten a lot out of.

As I’ve talked about, I’m pretty non-linear, and a lot of writing advice breaks things down in a very left-brain linear fashion. However, I sometimes find this kind of advice helpful when I get stuck and don’t know what to write next. Carol Hughes isn’t as well known as some other writing teachers, but she has a wealth of ideas derived from her T.V. and screenwriting experience about the necessary elements for stories. A lot of it is based on the Hero’s Journey (originally from Joseph Campbell but adapted by many for use with screenwriting); she also has the Lover’s Journey for romance writers. Carol is a very generous instructor and responds personally to each student’s post. She also has a yahoo group set up after you finish her class where you can share information and ask questions. What I have found most useful are the various dimensions Carol presents (the journeys, the throughlines, the important scenes for every story, the different types of dialogue scenes). This way, I’ve come up with a lot of ideas for scenes I need to write and flesh out because I always struggle to have enough of a story to keep going. Carol is teaching her Deep Writing class at Savvy Authors this January: http://www.savvyauthors.com/vb/showevent.php?eventid=983. What I am really looking forward to is her Part II class that she is preparing now.

What is your process for writing fast? One way I write fast is to be non-linear about it. The easiest thing for me to write is dialogue and then that means that at least I have some people interacting. So I write dialogue to start with and very little else.

I also jump from different scenes if I’m inspired to write one and not another, or if I see another one more clearly at first. Then as new things occur to me about a prior scene I’ve already dabbled in, I’ll write some more that relates to that prior scene.

Another non-linear method of mine is to write in different notebooks and the computer. Some parts of scenes will be in one notebook that I happened to have with me in one room or in a certain bag, other parts might be in another notebook. I do most of my writing longhand still. I feel less intimidated by a notebood and pen and feel more connected to my creativity this way. But some parts are also typed into my word processing file.

Eventually, though it all turns into such a mess that it’s like how my office gets. I’m very comfortable with a lot of mess in there, but it does get to a certain point, when I can’t find something, that I realize I have to clean up to be able to go on. I have reached that point in my manuscript, where I have to type everything up and put all the parts that belong together in one place just to see what I have. Then as I go through it, I will fill in the missing bits, namely description and setting. To keep my motivation going through the tedium of typing up my notes and dialogue, I’m listening on headphones to Michael Connolly’s FIFTH WITNESS. It is a legal thriller I recently enjoyed in book form. Since my manuscript is a legal thriller, I’m using it to become immersed in the genre at the same time.

Would any of this work for you, or does it sound so non-linear as to be unmanageable? What are your methods for writing fast?

My biggest problem in trying to write fast for fiction is getting stuck in my plot. I have some general ideas about where I might go, but the how’s of getting there may stump me. Or, worse, sometimes I don’t even have the general ideas. I just have what I think is an interesting premise and a good set-up, but then what? I can stay in one of these modes for months unfortunately, but I also have some tricks to lambast me out.

One strategy is to get the advice of other people, usually my critique partners and my husband. This method isn’t always available though or they come up with ideas that I am lukewarm about it. But even in the latter case, the process of talking with them generally gets me thinking about angles that might work even better.

Another method to move past stuck points I’ve adapted from Donald Maass’s Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook. First, write the characters in one column, the elements you’re interested in including in another, and the settings of the novel in a third, and see where these connect.

A third method is to use mind mapping, drawing a circle with the question in the middle and then using smaller circles connected by lines and branching off for ideas of how to solve the problem you’re facing. More information on this technique is provided here: http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newISS_01.htm. The premise for mind-mapping is to free yourself from linear and sequential thinking and instead tap into a freer, creative process that is less bounded.

Working through these methods this weekend has hopefully moved to the point where on Monday, I can start writing again. What strategies work for you when you get stuck in your plot?

The way I made National Novel Writing Month work for me was to (constantly) switch projects. I started out with my YA Victorian mystery, but after a week I felt like I was only just whipping myself when I faced a plot conundrum I couldn’t seem to get past. I got cold sores, a vicious headache, and took to my bed. After that, I decided to change to a textbook instead and wrote about 20,000 words on that. Nonfiction is easier to write in a lot of ways because at least you don’t have to pull ideas “out of thin air.” Then I had a training to put on and preparing the materials took 11,000 words between the exercises and power points. Toward the end of the month, I switched back to the legal thriller I’m writing now. In this way, I easily cleared 50,000 words. In National Writing Month terms, this is called going “rogue” (deviating from fiction and working on several projects), but it worked very well for me in terms of productivity. But December is about finishing a project, so perhaps I will have to pick. What’s your project for December, or will you move between different works?

The December writing challenge is http://www.nanofimo.org/. The purpose is to finish the novel that you might have started in November or in any other month. This group is based on the National Novel Writing Month concept but is not affiliated with it.

Even if you made 50,000 words in November, usually that is not enough for a novel-length manuscript. I write on the short end, and I still aim for 75,000-80,000 words. Do you want to join me on this writing challenge? The books I am working on are a legal thriller, a Victorian YA mystery, a self-help journal book, and a textbook. Should I choose just one? That wouldn’t work for me. More on my multi-tasking/rogue tendencies next post!

Who among us wouldn’t like to write faster? That is the allure of National Novel Writing Month started by Chris Baty: http://www.nanowrimo.org/. Since then, lots of other monthly writing challenges have popped up, and my goal in this blog is to do one of the challenges each month and to hopefully inspire you to undertake the challenges, as well. I will report on progress, what works, lessons learned, and on ideas from craft writing books, blogs on writing, positive psychology, and motivational interviewing.