Get out of your way

My writing advice today is going to make complete sense to some readers.  And to others, it's going to sound like rank madness.  That's ok. Every writer needs to find their own way, what works for them.

For me, as I mentioned yesterday, my subconscious is much smarter than I am.  Where did it come from? My imagination, of course, but also every book I've ever read, every movie I've ever seen, every song I've ever heard...it's all inside my head, somewhere.  We don't have conscious recall of everything (99.999% of us don't) but it is there.  So I've been absorbing story structure, the hero's journey, the monomyth, legends, parables, fables: in short, stories, all my life.  I'll bet you have, too.

All good writers, read.  They read in the genre's they love and that they want to write.  But if they're smart, they'll also read History, Biography, Poetry and fiction outside their favorite genre.

All of that gets inside us. And for me, the best way to let it out is this:

I start with the characters.  Then, if I'm smart, I think of what the last scene of my 'movie' is.  That tells me where I want to end up, what the characters are like at the end.  So I know how they have to change (or not, if I'm writing an iconic character like Smooth Charles) in order to get there.  That gives me my basic story structure.   It also gives me my genre and what kind of world I'm going to be creating, most of the time.

Down in the nitty gritty, I write each chapter like this: I visualize the scene and dialog before I start writing.  I picture the visual business like I'm watching a movie or a play.  

Then I write.  I hold the scene in my head, sometimes the whole story as well, I I let it flow.  I get out of my own way. I trust in my ability to spell (badly sometimes) and in my ability to create sentences and paragraphs (also a mistake sometimes) and just go.  Write the scene I see in my head.  Describe the action as it happens.  Bake in the emotions via word choice and physical business.

If I sit back and try to plan all this, it doesn't really work. Not for me.  I have to get out of my own way and trust myself.

If you're a writer like I am, this all makes sense.  For a few of you, this may be a lightbulb inside your head.  For the rest...yeah, I'm crazy and unorganized. So be it.  But...if you are one of the latter two writers, or if you're suffering with writer's block try it.  Picture the scene in your head like you're watching it live.  Then just try to write what you see.  It may surprise you, what your capable of when you get out of your own way.