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Especially For Young Adult Writers and Readers Suggestions
to Young Writers:
What to do when you’re stuck?
Writer’s Block… It does happen, and many writers are so afraid when it does they think that they will never write again. Except in a very few cases, that is not true—the cases being writers who only have one story or book in them. Harper Lee, for instance. She seems to have been content to write the brilliant To Kill a Mockingbird. She said in that book all she wanted to say, and moved on to other things. That is not writer’s block, that is retirement. Some writers do retire, taking up quilting, or painting, or family life, or stock broking. The thing to remember is that they moved on by choice. The writer who can’t write but wants to, I have found, is just between projects. Unless a horrible disaster strikes, what is going on is that one’s subconscious has said its piece and needs time to look around for new ideas, unless the writer is to do the same story over and over again.
So if writer’s block hits you, well, don’t fret. My suggestion is to keep up the writing habit by keeping a journal. Write down interesting people you’ve seen, interesting conversations you’ve overheard, describe the fall of light outside your window on a stormy day, or exactly how you feel when your pet cuddles up to you and nestles down to sleep. Read. Walk. Change your routine, explore new subjects. Have a life! After all, isn’t it life we’re writing about? Your subconscious will start sending you new images, and if you keep up the writing habit, you will be ready to dive into that new story idea as soon as it forms in your mind.
Rewriting
Editorial suggestions
In the best of all worlds, it is an editor who demands a rewrite, after having paid you for your work. The editor will try his or her hardest to make the book the best possible book it can be—after all, they invested money in it, so they believe in it. Now, that doesn’t mean the editor is always right. Most of the time they have a good grasp of what their readership will think of your book, and will help you try to widen the spectrum of reader appeal. But once in a while—it doesn’t happen often--their ideas are going to distort your story so much that it no longer seems to be your story, it has become someone else’s. If an editor wants you to change a story materially, you owe it to yourself as well as the editor to try to get past your ego and see if you can look through the editor’s eyes. If you still can’t bear the suggested changes, then express as clearly as possible why you are having trouble with the suggestions. Sometimes, in finding a compromise, you end up taking the story to a richer and deeper level than hitherto envisioned.
Sometimes your inner vision could hurt the story. Most of the time this happens when the writer is imposing a point upon the story. The story’s ‘truth’ seemes to be headed in one direction, until we see the author’s hand enter it and force the characters—reduced to puppets—into another path entirely, to satisfy a point she wanted to make out here in the real world. Many readers feel that this happened in the third of Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, for example.
Workshop Suggestions
Now, let’s say you haven’t sold it, and your workshop group [more on workshops coming in Part IV] has made suggestions for rewrites. Again, you need to balance your own feelings about the story against what you are hearing. Are the critiquers trying to rewrite your story into their story? Generally speaking, if a lot of readers feel the same way about important elements of your story, then there is a good chance that the readership at large will feel the same. In other words, if all your readers say “I like the story, once I got past the slow, slow beginning,” it could be that you need to get rid of that long prologue that explains the history of your world, even if you worked on it for three months, and love every carefully selected word. Can that explanation go somewhere else in the book—maybe after the reader is really hooked on your world and wants to know more about it?
Individual reactions are sometimes easier to gauge. Reader A might say your fight scenes are all too long, but that’s because she hates fight scenes. If Reader B loves the fight scenes but thinks your cooking scene is tedious, but Reader C says that the cooking scene is his favorite part, then you have to decide whether or not to heed them at all. Maybe things are just fine the way they are. But if all three readers say that the love scene made them laugh, and you meant it to be serious, you can probably count on the fact that you do have a problem in that love scene, and maybe you need to close yourself in a room alone and read it out loud, trying to hear it as an audience would.
Rewriting on your own
But let’s say you don’t have a workshop or a friend who can be relied on for critiques. How do you know what to rewrite? This is far more difficult, except if you’re a genius like Jane Austen, who apparently only had her sister as a listening board, and Cassandra was not a writer. For the rest of us, we have to find ways to get rid of our feelings about the story (of course we love it! Of course it feels like a part of us!) and see what is really there on the page. But first, we have to realize this fact: that if we want to share it with the world, then it is NOT a “part of us”. It doesn’t matter how much we cried at the ending, how many hours we worked at a white heat writing it. The text is just a text, and our own feelings must convey themselves to the reader through the words, and not through our anxiously dancing around saying, “But it means so much to me!” You cannot visit the home of every reader and tell them how you suffered for your art.
One of the biggest dashes of cold water in my own face was finding out just how little of the vivid story I saw in my head actually got onto the page of my first drafts. It took me years and years, believe me. Every time I picked up and reread an old story, I’d seen the movie in my mind all over again, and I read along happily, thinking how great my writing was. Hah! It wasn’t until I forced myself to see it as text and not try to “live” it, as I did when writing it, that I discovered I had almost no description on the actual page! Me! Here I’d plumed myself on being such a vivid writer, but it had all stayed in my head, with only the barest scraps of description, and most of that dead cliché, on the page.
So I had to learn a new skill: description. The best way to describe things is to see that you use all the senses, and have the characters react to their environment. In other words, don’t stop the story to do a “camera panning shot” describing every window, piece of furniture, painting, plant, floor and ceiling. The reader will skip that in search of story. An editor might stop altogether, and stuff the story back into the envelope. Generally speaking, when we enter a new situation we look and listen fast, to gain a quick impression of things. We notice details as we need them. We also notice details according to what is important to us. So if you've got a tough mercenary coming into the room, he's not likely to notice all the details of the girls' hair styles. And if you've got a little girl who likes to draw coming into a room, she's unlikely to scan for at least two exits and the best defensive position, before she sits down. If we follow this pattern in our writing—introduce the setting of a new scene with a single vivid sentence, and then add details as characters react to them--the rhythm will seem more natural, the pacing swift.
There is a lot that has been written on scene structure (Bickham and Robert McKee are the ones I recommend the most) but for the beginner, here’s a simple rule: if your mind begins to wander when you are rereading your own material, your reader’s mind will probably wander as well.
As for specifics, here are some good prose pitfalls to watch out for. |
