In Today’s Journal
* Quotes of the Day
* About Writing Fiction Into the Dark
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
Quotes of the Day
“Writing is like driving at night. You can see only as far as the headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” E.L. Doctorow, in James McInerney, “Author, Author: An Interview with Doctorow,” in Vogue magazine (Nov. 1984)
“You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard.” Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird (1994)
About Writing Fiction Into the Dark
Okay, first, it isn’t writing ‘in’ the dark. Whether the lights in the room are on or off has nothing to do with this non-technique.
It’s writing—putting new words on the page—’into’ the dark. Moving forward into the dark.
That just means writing without having any clue (or worrying about or even thinking about) what’s going to happen next, or at all.
WITD and Interruptions
People interrupt me all day long, usually with an email. If the email’s important to me or interests me, I take a moment to read it and respond. If not, I wait until later to read it and respond.
I also take a break now and then to walk up to the house and back (about a hundred yards round trip) or go to the store or whatever.
Or now and then my neighbor stops by the Hovel to tell me something or to otherwise chat.
None of that affects my writing.
It can’t affect my writing, because I’m not thinking my way through the story. I’m not “making up” anything. I’m just writing off the top of my head. And yes, I’ve been doing it that way since my first short story and my first novel.
Usually it starts when a character with whatever small problem (a locked door or an untied shoelace or a bead of sweat trickling down his nose) or a line of dialogue pops into my head.
Of course, the character’s always in a setting of some kind: a car, a room, a sidewalk, a front porch, a quiet or loud café, etc. Characters never appear in a completely white-out, noiseless, temperature-less, scentless background.
So that’s the start. I write the opening scene, to include the character description, the problem, and the setting description.
After that, I just go with the flow, observing without intruding. Then I write down whatever happens (as it’s happening) and what the character or characters do and say in reaction to whatever happened. That’s all there is to it.
About every thousand words or so (so about once per hour), I stop and read back over what I’ve written, not ‘looking for’ anything but just reading as a reader. I’m enjoying the story and letting the character(s) pop in to tell me whether I missed anything as I was racing through the story with them, trying to keep up.
If they let me see, hear, smell, taste, or feel (physically or emotionally) something additional while I’m reading (if it pops unbidden into my head), I add it. If they don’t or it doesn’t, I don’t.
I never add anything that comes from me even if I ‘think’ it should be there. That’s author intrusion, and it’s neither my job nor my place.
I’m only my characters’ recorder, the guy who puts their story on the page and then publishes it so others can enjoy it as much as I did when I first witnessed it.
My job is to record their story: the story that they, not I, are living. Then, when I reach the white space again, I go back to observing and recording whatever happens next, their reactions, and so on through the rest of the story.
So it’s impossible to derail my train of thought because there isn’t one. I’m not thinking my way through the story. I don’t outline or try to plan anything in advance. I do try to plan in my own life (my own story) but I don’t even try to plan my characters’ story. It isn’t my place to do so.
In fact, outlining or otherwise trying to plan your characters’ story is a sure way to signal to the characters that you don’t trust them. Do that more than once or twice, they’ll stop talking to you.
So when I’m interrupted by whomever or whatever, I just deal with it, then go right back to wherever I left off in the story and continue writing down what’s happening and the characters’ reactions to that.
So that’s one more benefit—and maybe the main benefit—of writing into the dark: It shoves “interruptions” into the pile of things that just don’t matter. All you have to do is trust your characters and write their story. Well, and keep coming back.
Once you learn to trust your characters, it’s just that easy and that exhilarating.
And until you learn to trust them to live a more exciting story than you can ‘make up,’ it’s just that hard. And it will remain that hard.
Anyone can write fiction. And anyone with a basic grasp of grammar and punctuation can write good fiction.
To begin, all you need is a character with a problem (doesn’t have to be ‘the’ problem of the story, and it usually isn’t) in a setting. That’s all you need to start writing a story or novel.
Try it. You’ll be amazed at yourself. And your characters.
Talk with you again soon.
Of Interest
Do Free Book Promotions Still Work?
Takes Balance in Indie Publishing
The Numbers
The Journal…………………………… 940
Writing of Blackwell Ops 48: Razor Sharpe
Day 1…… 2213 words. To date…… 2213
Day 2…… 1210 words. To date…… 3423
Day 3…… 1318 words. To date…… 4741
Day 4…… 2481 words. To date…… 7222
Day 5…… 1588 words. To date…… 8810
Day 6…… 2215 words. To date…… 11025
Day 7…… 4168 words. To date…… 15193
Day 8…… 2645 words. To date…… 17838
Day 9…… 1682 words. To date…… 19520
Fiction for October………………… 4327
Fiction for 2025…………………… 582865
Nonfiction for October.…………… 1660
Nonfiction for 2025……………….. 211770
2025 consumable words………… 787066
2025 Novels to Date…………………….. 14
2025 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2025 Short Stories to Date……………… 32
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………….. 118
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 302
Short story collections……………………. 29