How Not To Stop

I wrote a post a while ago about deciding what you were going to write about, and what form that writing was going to take. Even if you're certain that your idea deserves 70,000 words or more, and you're enjoying writing them, there are going to be points where the book feels like a slog, and the writing seems to be something you need to plough through to get to the next interesting bit. Below are some ideas of how you can keep going. As ever, they work for me, but your mileage may vary.


1. Identify the "way points" along the route

A row of peaks, somewhere or other.

If you have any idea of what is going to happen in this novel (which you should have) you'll know that there are certain important scenes that have to be included. Pirates arrive on Danger Island; the dog falls down a ravine; Anne and Julian argue about George. What you're writing isn't a single long slog from A to Z: much of the time you're working towards the next point of excitement - hangliding to the next peak, if you like. If you can break it up like that, it looks like much less of a struggle.


2. Can you skip ahead?

When I wrote Straken, I was working to a time limit. I needed to be producing 500 words a day, if not more (and for someone writing to order, that's a fairly lenient time frame). The option to just stop and wait for inspiration wasn't there.I found the easiest way to keep going was to jump ahead to the next part whenever I got stuck. This worked because I had a pretty good plan from which to work, and was able to resume the story at a later point without worrying that doing so would damage the stuff I'd already written.

Of course, this can leave you with some awkward gaps in the text, which you have to go back and fill. Filling gaps is never the most fun element of writing. But, if you're looking at the book as a set of connected "way points", when you go back, you'll probably be working towards another way point, and hence will have something exciting to aim for. Of course, if it still seems dull, you need to ask yourself...


3. Do you actually need this bit?

And when exactly is this happening?

This can be a very difficult question to answer. Ideally, everything that happens in a novel both moves the plot forward and develops the characters of the protagonists, preferably while upping the stakes. Sometimes it only does one of these things, and it's necessary to make the decision whether or not to keep it in.

Say two characters are going to assassinate a politician. Do we need to learn about the journey they took to the politician's house? Maybe we do, because on that journey they discussed their motives and an important realisation was made. Or perhaps the technicalities of the assassination are very difficult, and so their discussion will give the reader an idea of what needs to happen for the assassination to occur (and which then goes completely wrong). But maybe the journey is just there to pad out the word count. In a way, this is a bit like the question of where you begin a story.

However, too much cutting and the story loses its flow. One of the (many) flaws in Prometheus was that there was no way of knowing how long it was all supposed to be taking. The ship landed on a planet, some things happened to various people, perhaps at the same time, and it all ended. My suspicion is that it was heavily - and unevenly - cut. The best plan, I think, is to cut, but to save what you cut just in case you cut too much.


4. Don't ask for permission to keep writing

I've seen this on forums and in writing groups: a person writes a chunk of their novel, then puts it up for comments before writing the next bit, effectively asking for permission to continue with it. I suspect that this is an easy habit to get into, and it's probably rather comforting to know that nobody you know has told you that it's rubbish yet.

I think this is a bad habit. It risks the writer working for approval of a group that may not represent the world at large and probably doesn't represent the writer himself. At the extreme, it's not much different from saying "I want to write about a wizard: please tell me what to say".

Discovering what you can and can't do is important. If you are going to be original, you need to write about what matters to you, not what a committee approves. Of course, you'll have to write it well, but that's another story (so to speak). The important thing is that you're writing at all.