Retreat, Day 7

A metaphor that I was exposed to at Clarion West (now nearly a decade ago) still works beautifully for me, and it’s one I use when teaching: the idea of the writer’s toolbox.

In my mind’s eye, it’s a big red metal tool chest, small enough to be carried around, large enough that you wouldn’t want to HAVE to carry it around all the time. Inside, drawers lift out to reveal neatly packed devices and tools, each in their own padded slot.

There’s a blade capable of lopping off awkward paragraphs, and sharper, tinier words designed for work at the sentence level, trimming beginnings till they catch a reader like a fish hook and pull them into the story. There’s a box of punctuation marks, with a special slot for the semicolons. There’s the intricate device of an unreliable narrator, calculated to wobble like a gyroscope yet still remain true to the story’s course. There’s a set of filters, each one a specific point of view, each letting you cast a section in a different light. And a layer of ornamental gadgetry: epigraphs and scraps of poetry. And a valuable gimlet, capable of drilling down to a character’s motivation: the question, “What does s/he WANT?”

Even this metaphor’s a device (and if you want to know more about metaphor, I can do no better than point you at Chuck Wendig’s excellent piece, in which he’s said everything I’d say and then quite a bit more).

I’ve been thinking about it in going over notes for the class on Literary Techniques in Genre Fiction, because my aim in that is two-fold: to give students not just a whole bunch of new tools, but some sense of when to use them and a chance to experiment with them. Because a device shouldn’t be separate from a story, but an integral part of it, something that adds more to it than just a chance to see the writer being clever.

To push the metaphor a little further, stories are like furniture, only without the useful part, like being able to sit on them. You want them to feel like a single piece, not a table with some drawers and ornamental hinges glued on it. In the class, I try to introduce new tools students may not have (consciously) worked with before, including defamiliarization, hyperbole, synthesia, and a lot of other fancy words. And I also try to expand a drawer they’ve already got partially filled: sources of creative inspiration.

Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.

Here is the only thing I know to be true about writing advice: none of it is 100% true. There are always exceptions, always idiosyncrasies of individual process.

Here is the smartest piece of writing advice I ever got: said by Syne Mitchell while I was at Clarion West in 2005, “Try different things, find what works for you, and do that. Lots.”

Writers should pay attention to our own process. Sometimes we’re reluctant to do so. We worry that like the centipede in the story who stops being able to walk after thinking about exactly how she does it, looking at our own process will damage or kill it. A Schrödinger’s cat: we know we’re doing something, but if we look to prove that, it’ll vanish.

This is not actually true. Looking will, most probably, not kill it. If you are the rare exception that cannot look at their process without damaging it, a brief examination will let you know this without damaging anything too much. Maybe. There are no guarantees in writing advice.

But if you are part of the vast majority that WILL learn from it, what will you gain?

• A knowledge of WHEN you’re productive that will help you make the most of that time. Is the morning your most productive time? Then schedule your writing for those hours rather than the draggy and low word count afternoon.
• A knowledge of WHAT conditions make you productive. Does the coffee shop’s bustle and a few doses of caffeine stimulate you into productivity? Or do you need solitude and the ability to read aloud as you go? Find it out and do it, do it, do it.
• Permission to indulge yourself. Do new notebooks spur you to new stories? Then go for it. Does a two hour walk shake loose the clarifications you need for that revision? Then put on your sneakers.
• A sense of yourself as an artist. Because you are, you know. Your mind is a precious machine capable of creating wonderful things. Coddle and care for it. Appreciate the amazing combinations it makes, the verbal webs it spins, the hard glitter of its jewels.

Take a few weeks. Track your daily word count as well as the circumstances that accompany it, such as when and where you wrote. But go further than that. Track the other things that affect it: your mood, your diet, your sleep. You may find that daily walk doubles your output, that the days when you took time to eat breakfast rather than just slug down a latte, change your outlook.

FOr many of us, stress is a killer of productivity. I know nothing can drive me faster to the distraction of Bejeweled Blitz or cruising my Twitter stream. All the more reason to de-stress your life whenever you can, all in the name of writing.

Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.