writing

Writing: Rehab, Prehab, Strength

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

When I wrote about writing exercises having a “therapeutic” value for creativity, I shared it with several friends. My core idea was simple enough – that writing exercises helped me recover creatively, and that metaphor was useful. However, my friends provided insights I want to revisit.

My friend Kate Tremaine, a roller derby enthusiast, pointed out that there was not just “rehab” in sports. There’s also what she called “prehab” – pre-emptively strengthening one’s body to prevent damage. Thanks to her, I want to “roll out” a new concept of writing exercises.

I’m old enough to be allowed dad jokes, thank you.

I realized from Kate’s input that we can think of writing exercises as serving purposes similar to physical exercises. Consider this model:

Development: Development exercises are those writing exercises that improve your work beyond your baseline. Examples would be improving one’s vocabulary, learning to write faster, or create better plot outlines.

Protective: “Pre-hab” exercises designed to protect your writing from the damages of things like stress, bad habits, or disruption. Examples include methods for developing focus, learning to break down work into smaller pieces, and self-esteem building.

Therapeutic: These are exercises to help you get “back on track” after a disruption. Examples may include setting aside writing time each day, word count goals when your count is now zero, or “freeform” writing for fun.

I realize my examples for each category may be argued. That’s good because these categories are helpful for the classification of writing exercises. Using these categories requires you to ask additional questions:

You have to ask what your “baseline” writing is in areas like quality or word count. That helps you understand when you need Therapeutic exercises versus Development exercises.

You have to ask what your areas of vulnerability are in writing. That may mean a chance to find Protective exercises – or you may already need Therapeutic ones.

Finally, you have to ask what exercises fit these categories for me. Though I’m sure you and your fellow writer may agree on how to categorize practices 70% of the time, that 30% is significant. You’ll need to ask the right questions for you – and maybe ask when you should stop evangelizing a method to another writer.

I will be analyzing these ideas further in my own work and would like to hear if you have any thoughts. This model has promise.

In closing, I also think this model is helpful to challenge the idea that “A writer must do X or you’re not a writer.” We’ve all heard the “you must write X words a day” kind of pronouncements, and we know they’re wrong. This model suggests that such goals don’t always fit an individual writer’s needs or their baseline.

Therapy is individualized. So is health – in body, mind, and writing.

Steven Savage

Questioning Your Way To Solidity

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

Fiction is a canvas upon which you can do anything, and that’s why its limiting. When you can do anything, you have so many options you become paralyzed.

My friend Serdar talks about this, by comparing it to how many brands of Toothpaste we have:

“Choice paralysis is, as you can guess, a major issue in creative work. Because you have complete control over what you put into a story, that can manifest as being stranded between too many choices, and you end up in a Toothpaste Meltdown, goggling at the screen and drooling into your keys.”

He goes on to analyze how the choices you make are best shaped by what fits the story you want to write, and asking the right questions. This is something I see (to no one’s surprise) in my work using Agile methods.

Agile methods are obsessed with asking “what is valuable for the customer/end user/etc.” The basic idea is find what’s important, rank things in order of the importance, and start from the top. If you’re not sure, then you have to ask more questions about who your audience is, what they want, etc.

That one word, Value, helps say so much.

In my recent work on my novel, A School of Many Futures, I started a massive edit after getting editoral, prereader, and my own feedback. What helped me was asking what chapters, scenes, etc. did anything for the audience. The result shocked me.

  • Two chapters merged into one, moving the plot along.
  • Several scenes were thus combined, making them richer and snappier.
  • An entire sub-subplot and mini-character arc emerged from the above deeply enriching the overall story.
  • A cat who appears perhaps twice, became a useful way to exposit (hey, people talk to cats).

All because I asked what matters to the audience. What had value, to them.

This doesn’t mean I shirked on worldbuilding – this is me. It just meant that I found a way to tell the story, in the world, that worked better for the reader. I violated none of my obsessively detailed continuity, I merely found which option told the story best.

So next time you’re stuck with the “toothpaste conundrum” in your writing, ask what your audience wants and write it down. Then sort these ideas in order of what is important to them. Start from the top and go through your list.

Even if the audience is just you, you might be surprised at what you really want . . .

Steven Savage

Red and Blue, Focus and Schedule

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

One of the significant challenges of writing is focusing on writing when we have to worry about schedules. We want to get words into reality, but we also have to ask if the book is on time, where the cover art is, etc. It’s hard to write when you’re worrying – and rare is the writer I’ve met who didn’t have concerns about time weigh on them.

I found a helpful perspective in the works of David Marquet. Previously I wrote about Marquet’s concept of Redwork and Bluework from Leadership is Language. It’s a valuable concept that humans work in two modes – Red (measured, time-based, measurable) and Blue (imaginative, non-linear, creative). Some of this applies to writing and worry – in a surprising way.

The act of actually writing is Redwork in many ways – putting words down following an outline or a direction. Bluework is the plotting, imagining, and outlining. In some cases, one may alter which kind of work they’re doing rapidly, but the division is useful.

Redwork may have a time component – you work for so long or deliver so many words – but it is not the time far into the future. Whatever limits and goals we set on our writing Redwork, those should focus us on the job at hand. Anything else is just disruptive.

The Bluework of writing – plotting, making timelines, etc. – is when we want to think of larger timeframes. That’s when you work out how you’re doing on your schedule or what the plan is. Bluework may be imaginative, but sometimes it takes imagination to figure out how to get a book out on time.

What I learned from this examination is that when I write, I focus on writing. If I worry about the schedule, I just focus on the writing all the more – almost like a meditation. There’s no time to think long-term, and that will just mess you up.

So now I’m working to save my worrying for when I’m not writing. If I get words down and words edited, I’ll always move forward. If I think about schedules during the Bluework of planning and review, I’ll be ready to figure out how to get to my goals.

Marquet’s idea of dividing up work into two kinds is useful, and it’s also useful to figure how they apply to various goals. I think I’ve got more lessons to learn as they apply to writing.

Steven Savage