Creative decision-making
The Writes of Fiction: The creative choice matrix, how to tell what sort of book to write, what characters know, and handling fiction tropes.
I’d be a pretty rotten curator if I didn’t leap at the opportunity to share some writing craft wisdom that kicked my own butt.
’s recent observation that “ruminating leads to more ruminating” changed the shape of my entire day today. Instead of sitting down to, ah, ruminate on a writing project, I’m sitting down with a goal in mind: to explore constraints.Savvy writers know that confining a story to one milieu helps turn up the tension. “Try to find one arena for the story,” writes John Truby in The Anatomy of Genres: How Story Forms Explain How the World Works. “This allows you to create the pressure cooker within a confined space. Too much time or change of locations let pressure escape.”
This principle of confinement is as beneficial to writers as it is to stories. I’ve long guided writers deeper into their creative vision by urging them to embrace its constraints. “Constraints, far from being opposed to creativity, make creativity possible,” maintains cognitive scientist Margaret Boden. “Random processes lead to first time curiosities, not radical surprises.”
Constraints actually sharpen creativity. Boundaries force you to seek clever solutions—thinking inside the box, not outside it. Embracing constraints as a natural product of the creative process positions you to discover innovations you might’ve missed given unlimited options.
This is why my writing session later today will be light on endless ruminating and blue sky thinking. No more “thinking outside the box” for me. That big dark box over there in the corner? That’s where I’ll be, deep inside, happily bumping and bumbling into its parameters.
Today in our practice of The Writes of Fiction:
Exploring the creative decision matrix
What kind of book should you write?
Characters can just know things
Tropes: The good, the bad, and the ugly
The creative decision matrix: How to make your efforts count
Enjoyable and beneficial is the dream. We enjoy what we’re doing, and it is creating progress and improvement for our work. Many of us feel this way about early drafts. The accumulation of words feels exciting, along with the discovery of the story. Sometimes we feel guilty about just how fun this is, so if you need a permission slip, here it is:
You may enjoy the writing process. Really.
Not enjoyable but beneficial comes for us all at some point. The day we don’t want to sit down and write, the days the writing feels rough and ugly, or like we’re not getting the flow we desire. Still, showing up is beneficial, so this is productive.—Read the rest from Caroline Donahue at Book Alchemy.
More on the responsibility of writing: We live in an age where it has become frighteningly easy to go on autopilot and hand over creative control to experts, gurus, teachers, or some other authority. Being a conscious writer is about taking your creative power back and taking full responsibility for your writing process, creativity, writing successes, and writing failures.
Yes, even your failures. And that’s the good news. Because if your writing failures are always someone else’s responsibility or something else’s fault (such as some writing process or method or widget), then you’re done.
You have no control over other people. You might think you do, but you don’t. You can only control your own actions—your own writing. That’s why being responsible for it all is good news, because now you can do something about it.—Read the rest from Jeff Lyons at The conscious writer: Taking back your creative power.
What kind of book should you write?
This is not a time to conserve resources! This is a time to produce! The more you make, the more you will make. Trying different things is the best way to gather information about your options.
Also, you will develop the habit of thinking about your book, and the habit of sitting down every day or every weekend or whenever you have the time and actually making stuff, rather than ruminating over it.
Ruminating does not lead to answers. It leads to more ruminating. Making stuff leads to the accidental, free-floating, always-dancing-around-in-the-back-of-your-mind type of thinking that does, in fact, produce answers precisely because you’ve stopped trying to find answers and are instead making things with your hands.
Even if you make the “wrong” thing (there are no wrong things), making the wrong thing gives you something tangible to look at and say, “That’s not it, but now I know why that’s not right, and I have a different idea to try.”—Read the rest from Amy Stewart at It’s Good to Be Here.
More on maintaining momentum: Stories demand so much from us. Taking apart the engine of a story and putting it together—that’s hard work, my friends. Much as your brain tugs at the knots of your story while you’re in the shower, or at the kitchen sink, or in the car, I too worry and fret over your stories.
That kind of 24/7 obsession can be wearing. When I first began working exclusively with novelists, I found my creative tanks drained long before the end of the work week. That’s when I learned that just as career authors do, I needed to protect what coach Dan Blank refers to as my clarity and energy.
Another simple way to protect your creative juju is to get enough social sunshine. If you’re an introvert like me, it may take you some time to find the right tribe and the right way to connect. A social support system should give you a charge, not drain your batteries. Happily, you’ll find that many writers and creatives are also inwardly focused, and they’ll be happy to meet you at that level too. This is all doable. Give it a whirl.
At the end of the day, don’t let the reason behind your solitary writing grind get pushed aside or buried. Even if the story you’re working on today never gets published, in light of all the little pleasures and hobbies that people indulge in that make life worth living, isn’t this creative effort one of the brightest points in your life? Give yourself the energy and the space to do this thing.—Read more at Productivity for fiction writers: Small strategies to keep you inching along.
Characters can just know things
Sometimes authors feel the need to spell out precisely how characters arrived at possessing a bit of knowledge, like “Mom told Christine the sky’s always orange on Orangedays,” when Christine could… just know that about her world. You don’t have to “prove” she learned it, the narrative voice can just relay it to the reader.
And sure, as a throwaway line, “Mom told Christine X, Y, Z” isn’t a problem unto itself and might fill in some gaps about the character’s broader life. But some writers open the floodgates and spell out how characters arrive at every bit of knowledge. It can end up feeling like the novel gets lost in pedantic information-gathering cul-de-sacs that detract from the main plot.—Keep reading from Nathan Bransford.
More tips on technique: Scene goals are serious business. If your character isn’t invested, readers won’t be either. The scene will flop, bereft of stakes and dramatic tension.
To clearly establish a scene goal, show readers what the character plans to do and why it matters to them. Properly done, this process hooks readers into the scene, rallying them to root for the character and keep reading to see whether they triumph or fall flat in their efforts.—Read more at Navigating common goal-driven scene pitfalls.
Tropes: The good, the bad, and the ugly
Tropes are tools for readers and for writers.
Tropes help readers find stories with elements they already know they like.
Readers, especially those who read genre fiction like romance, mystery, thriller, science fiction and fantasy, have specific tastes around the types of stories they enjoy. When they read back cover copy that indicates “this book has your favorite elements,” they’re more likely to take that book home and read it.
Just as we gravitate toward friend groups with similar interests or favorite foods for meals and snacks, readers gravitate toward stories they already know they will likely enjoy. If I’m trying out a new restaurant, I’ll often scan the menu for a variation on staples like the club sandwich or fish and chips because I know I usually like those dishes and it’s fun to see how different chefs make their version of a common dish. The same goes for stories. Tropes allow readers to experiment with new authors and new books in a safe way because they are already familiar with some elements of the story.—Read more from Trisha Jenn Loehr at JaneFriedman.com.
Related—building character: Vocabulary and the way a character speaks are the outer layer of character voice—the icing on the cake. Instead of trying to build character voice from the outside in, get under the character’s skin by revealing how they experience and interpret the story world from the inside out.
Character voice bubbles up organically when every aspect of the story is seen through a character’s-eye view of priorities, perspectives, and agendas. It’s less like cobbling together a latticework of characters, setting, and events than it is establishing a running commentary on how the character views everything caught in that web.
“Running commentary” may sound like something suited for first-person or deep third point of view. In fact, continually inflecting the story with a character’s personal concerns is a fit for any point of view whose narrator is also a character. It’s a seamless way to write. The character voice—with all its attendant observations, judgments, opinions, prejudices, preferences, thoughts, and emotions—effectively becomes your framework for worldbuilding.—Keep reading Build a character’s voice from the inside out.
Fiction Fuel
Writer and translator Estelle Gilson shares this translation of a rejection slip issued by a Chinese economic journal and, in the process, reveals the most incredible way to say no:
We have read your manuscript with boundless delight. If we were to publish your paper, it would be impossible for us to publish any work of lower standard. And as it is unthinkable that in the next thousand years we shall see its equal, we are, to our regret, compelled to return your divine composition and to beg you a thousand times to overlook our short sight and timidity.—Sweet Theft via James Clear
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Today’s a new day—you can reignite that new year energy all over again. Why not start right now? Click out of your email and do some exploring inside your work in progress. I’ll be over here (deep inside my constraints box) cheering you on.
Onward,
Lisa
P.S. Feeling lost in the gap between concept and execution? Coaching helps you rediscover and fan the spark that made your initial idea so exciting: story concept, plotting, character arcs, point of view, narrative drivetrain, themes, genre, commercial potential, scene effectiveness, and even your writing and publishing goals for this book. Let me show you how to get under the hood and do the work yourself. Ask me about Story Accelerator coaching.
This is The Writes of Fiction, a curated trove of old and new thinking about writing designed to help you get better at the craft of writing fiction. And this is editorial assistant Rémy, blissfully unaware of the spectacular color clash between his collar and his pajamas. 👇
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