I’ve spoken
to hundreds of people over the course of the years, all of whom had one thing
in common. OK, two – they were all frustrated and they all classed themselves
as ‘aspiring’ writer. Why aspiring? I would ask. Those of you who read my occasional
blogs know that my position on this is either you write or you don’t. I think
it was the Bengali philosopher and poet Rabindranath Tagore who said “You can't cross
the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.”
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| Palmeira, Galicia, Spain - a first step |
Their confusion with my posture is that they confuse ‘aspiring writer’
with ‘published writer’ or ‘famous author’. Hey, wake up! While they’ve be
lamenting their lack of writing success, the World has moved on. This is a
different paradigm. Many of the ‘traditional’ obstacles in ‘Traditional
Publishing’ have ‘traditioned’ themselves out of the game.
But wait; this is not yet another rant against the Old Way of
publishing. No, today I want to provide you with a tip. Before I expound on
this, remember my often-quoted martial art Master’s words: “use what is useful,
throw away the rest.” So if what I’m going to tell you helps, then go for it;
if not, then you’ve lost nothing by reading this blog other than a few minutes.
The above mentioned ‘aspirers’ usually have great ideas for a novel, sit
down at their keyboards and peck away furiously as they race to force their
creativity onto the page before the well runs dry. But then, about the 50-page
mark usually, the tale they are writing just fizzles out.
Writers’ Block, they say! It happens to all of us, they say. But this
isn’t writers’ block, my friends. It’s something far more insidious. I call it
the 50-page Burn-out.
Hello, my name is Eric and I have always had the 50-page Burn-out.
What! you say. You write 90,000 word thrillers. That’s one hell of a lot
more than 50 pages!
Yes, I respond, but I found the answer.
Over my strange and rather unconventional life I’ve done quite a lot of
training in survival techniques and put much of it into practice. One basic technique
for survival in any environment is that you need to have your priorities clear
at all times. Is it shelter, fire, water, food etc.? But from a psychological
standpoint you always need to have an objective! Always! And just getting
through the day isn’t it. That gets you ‘aspiring’.
The objective is a medium to long-term goal that you need to make steps
toward every single day, whilst you are ‘surviving’ (or writing). The survival
tricks then have a context and a purpose.
Back to my ‘aspiring’ friends. How do I usually respond when they
manifest their 50-day fizzle? I usually ask them one simple question: how does
your tale end? I’m not looking for a generic answer either. I want to know if
they could write the final chapter NOW. Okay, it will be a draft, and will almost
certainly evolve, change, mutate as the preceding pages are produced. But that’s
not the point. Are they just going to make a primitive home in the jungle,
somewhere to stay until the water runs out and they die? Or… is the plan to find
a way out of the dense vegetation, venomous snakes, crocodiles, wild pigs and
whatever and back to ‘civilization’?
This is how I write my 90,000 word thrillers: I start at the end!
The King of Hearts in ‘Alice in Wonderland’ is often referred to, by me,
as the World’s first computer programmer. Why? Do you remember his advice to
Alice when she was asked to testify in the trial scene? “Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the
end: then stop.” While this may be great advice
for a witness, and a computer programmer, it is useless for most writers: it
will lead to the 50-page Burn-out as sure as Hatters are mad! (Note: the mad
hatters are an historical fact – they used lead-based glue in the manufacture
of their headwear and this resulted in poisoning which produced their
occupational hazard – so if you’ve stuck with this blog up to here, you’ve
learnt two new things! Don’t
say I don’t give value for money!)
Alright, so you now have an
ending. Should you now do a Cheshire Cat and start disappearing at the tail to end
with just an incorporeal smile? My answer is yes and no.
Once I can write the ending, I
figure out the beginning (forget the feline form in between for the moment). I write
thrillers and I firmly believe these should start more with a bang than a
whimper. They need to grab the attention of a potential reader whilst raising
questions, creating intrigue and laying hooks so they will keep reading. That
gives me the broad parameters for the start. The content must always have
something to do with the main storyline; otherwise you are cheating your
readers. Okay, it may not be evident initially – for the novel I’m working on
now, ‘the CULL’, many who have read its opening chapters have commented that
the first chapter is written using a style and tone that contrasts sharply with
the following chapters, which are more fast-paced; it’s almost as if the first
chapter came from a different book. Why did I do this? The opening chapter is
about the main story line – exclusively. In the following chapters there are no
other references to that story line because we shift to follow what happens to
one of the protagonists, but not the one featured, albeit very briefly, at the
start, and her first bloody encounter with the novel’s prime antagonist. (I
should have yelled SPOILER WARNING – I’ve just given away one of the novel’s
early secrets). I wanted to make the first chapter the ‘Intrigue’ chapter – Who
the hell is this? What’s going on here? Who’s that under the bed and why? Plus,
I couldn’t resist including a ‘Wink’ (my name for the hidden secrets in my
novels) right on the first page this time. [What’s the Wink about? Sorry, you’ll
have to wait to read the explanation on my web when the novel’s published.
(More intrigue!).] To highlight this brief opening, it’s a little more than
half a page on my word processor screen, I used a marked style/tone change so
the reader won’t forget it. But if all you are reading is an extract, it does
look strange, that I will admit. So, put yourself out of your misery and buy
the novel when it’s published in December.
But the important issue is that I
had the opening clear, shortly after having the way it’s all going to end
equally defined.
Now you have a start and a
finish. Filling in the middle depends on your genre, your story arcs, your tale
structure, the message you want to convey. But the good news is, as though by
magical artifice, the 50-page Burn-out problem has disappeared. You are no
longer surviving from day to day but now you have a clear objective: write that
last scene or a version of it, at least.
It’s a simple trick, as most good
tips are. It works for me and has done so for many years. I’ve applied this
trick not just to my fictional output, but to the innumerable presentations,
seminars, articles etc. that I’ve written in the last thirty-five years.
So as Tagore says, don’t aspire
to cross the sea, imagine what you’ll do on the other side and stick your foot
firmly in the water!
More tips on my website.
Eric @ www.ericjgates.com
More tips on my website.
