In Today’s Journal
* Quotes of the Day
* What Is Writing Into the Dark?
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
Quotes of the Day
“[The] reality is that the more you use your creative voice, the more it wants to be used. It never gets tired and you are the only thing that limits it.” Dean Wesley Smith
“Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn’t try to write fiction. It’s not a grand enough job for you.” Flannery O’Connor
What Is Writing Into the Dark?
This is a blast from the past, an almost verbatim repeat from a post in October 2021:
At its most basic, Writing Into the Dark (WITD) simply means writing without giving any particular thought to what will go into a story. No character sketches, no outlines, no advance world building, etc. Just write.
Of all the writing techniques, WITD is the most freeing. It’s actually a non-technique. You write one clean draft, then submit or publish it, then move on to the joy of writing another story.
WITD requires only that you believe in yourself and trust what you’ve learned about life and writing up to the current point. You’ve learned and absorbed a great deal more than you realize.
But you’ve also been taught, mostly subliminally, not to trust what you’ve learned. Not to trust your abilities. Not to trust your creative subconscious.
You’re also taught those things, intentionally, by sharks who want to sell you books about how to outline, how to revise, and how to rewrite. They tell you to allow your conscious mind to question and correct your creative subconscious through revision and rewrites. And the more you revise and rewrite, the farther you get from your own unique, original authorial voice.
Don’t do it. Instead of following the advice of your English teacher and a bunch of others who have never written a novel, be a professional and follow Heinlein’s Rules:
- You must write.
- You must finish what you write.
- You must not rewrite.
- You must put it on the market (submit or publish).
- You must leave it on the market (and write the next story).
The most practical, efficient way to follow Heinlein’s Rules is to write into the dark.
If you’re ready to try writing into the dark, the best method is to take a deep breath and jump into the deep end.
First, know this: Despite the sweat beads breaking out on your forehead at even the thought of WITD, nothing bad will happen.
If you write a crappy story, nobody will come to your house and beat you up or shoot you. Nobody will bomb your car. But the thing is, you have a much greater chance of writing a crappy story by outlining, revising, and rewriting than you do by simply writing one clean draft.
And another thing: What you believe is a crappy or so-so story, another reader will think is wonderful. Stay in your lane. You’re a writer. Write.
To try writing into the dark,
- start with a character who has a problem. The problem that begins the story usually is not “the” problem of the story. It might be an untied shoelace, for example, or a closed door the character can’t open without putting something down.
- Drop that character into a setting, then just keep writing the next sentence and the next and the next until the character(s) leads you through to the end of the story.
The key to WITD is letting the characters tell the story that they, not you, are living.
You have no business worrying about where the story will go or what will happen next. It’s the characters’ story, so where it will go and what will happen next is literally none of your business.
Imagine for a moment that your neighbors have heard of your writing prowess and they’ve asked you to accompany them to Cabo San Lucas for the weekend. They want you to document their vacation (their story) in writing. You get a free trip to Cabo, and all you have to do is go with them, observe what they do, listen to what they say, and record it all for posterity.
Of course, it’s their story so you can’t change anything. For example,
- you record only their take on the various settings (not your take) and
- you write down what they say and do (not what you say and do or what you believe you would say or do in their place).
- You record what happens but you record it through their physical and emotional senses, not your own.
Again, it’s their story, not yours. They, not you, are living it. You’re only observing.
On the other hand, so what? As your initial payment, you’re getting a free weekend in Cabo. And your neighbors have already told you that you own all rights to their story. So you can sell it as a short story or novel. So what’s the down side here?
There isn’t one.
Writing your characters’ story is exactly the same thing as writing your neighbors’ story. Exactly.
Your characters invite you to go along on their adventures in the wild west of the 1880s or on a space voyage two hundred years in the future or tagging along with a detective or a PI as he or she solves a murder. They invite you to document a romance or a shooting or a bank heist or the failure of the magnetic drive in a space ship.
What they do NOT invite you to do is “invent” or “make up” what you’re writing. Again, your only job is to record for your characters what happens and what they say and do. And yeah, then make money off their story for the rest of your life.
Again, there is no down side. It isn’t even your job to decide whether the story is “good” or “bad.”
You’re only the impartial recorder. You’re only vouching that the story is what your neighbors or your characters actually experienced as their story unfolded. So you write it, you submit or publish it so others can read it, and then you move on to the next story.
Some of you are thinking But what if that one doesn’t sell?
Again the answer is So what? What do you care? Some readers will buy it and some won’t. Of those who buy it and read it, some will like it and some won’t.
You have zero control over any of that, so don’t worry about it. Besides, you should already be working on the next story in the queue.
No individual story is important. No individual story matters, At All. You’ll like some of the stories you write, and you won’t like others, or you won’t like them quite as much. But again, so what?
If you’re a writer, what matters is THAT you write, not what you write. What matters is the sheer joy of creation, and having fun letting your creative mind play.
Talk with you again soon.
Of Interest
Limits in Writing and Publishing I had a few other items for Of Interest, but I’ll save them for another time. This is an important post. I’m SO glad he posted this yesterday just in time for my WITD post today. The guy even mentioned me, so I left a comment (grin).
Dr. Mardy’s Quotes of the Week: A Flattery Lexicon
The Numbers
The Journal………………….. 1240
Mentorship Words…………….. 150
Total Nonfiction…………………. 1390
Writing of Blackwell Ops 50: Sam Granger | About TJ Blackwell
Day 1…… 1440 words. To date…… 1440
Fiction for October………………… 60428
Fiction for 2025…………………… 638966
Nonfiction for October.…………… 21250
Nonfiction for 2025……………….. 231360
2025 consumable words………… 862757
2025 Novels to Date…………………….. 16
2025 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2025 Short Stories to Date……………… 36
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………….. 120
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 310
Short story collections……………………. 29