In today’s Journal
* Quote of the Day
* Writing (Practicing) Is What Matters
* Musings
* The Numbers
Quote of the Day
“Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It’s perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we’ve learned something from yesterday.” John Wayne, quoted from his 1971 Playboy interview
Writing (Practicing) Is What Matters
Over ten years of practicing writing into the dark, I’ve pondered that overall topic countless times. WITD has become part of me. It and the first three Heinlein’s Rules are the core of what I teach other writers.
Writing into the dark isn’t a difficult technique to follow, or even to master.
In fact, as opposed to every other technique out there, it’s a freeing, fun thing to do. There is no work involved. And it’s the ONLY writing technique that builds self-confidence and self-reliance.
Yet it’s so very simple. So I’m a little surprised that one aspect about it has finally come into focus for me to pass along.
First, the key (and only) steps to writing into the dark are these:
- Decide to trust yourself and the characters in your creative subconscious.
- Set aside (or push aside or rudely shove aside) the critical voice that comes from you conscious, “logical” mind. (Repeat this step as often as is necessary. It will become necessary less frequently as you practice.)
- Write.
Of course, I also recommend that you learn (a function of the conscious mind) something new about the craft between the end of one story or novel and the beginning of the next one.
I recommend learning by
- reading the works of other writers who are more advanced in the craft than you are,
- reading craft books from valid sources, and-or by
- attending workshops or
- engaging in mentorships.
If you read my fiction, you can even email me at harveystanbrough@gmail.com to ask why I did or didn’t do a particular thing in a particular passage. That isn’t something you can do with Hemingway or Bradbury or King et al.
I’ve even written over a dozen craft books and kept them inexpensive to help enhance your learning. For those who aren’t aware, the all-encompassing Writing Better Fiction is the only craft book on writing fiction that you’ll ever need.
And of course you also have a life—which is how writers refer to non-writing-related things—complete with other commitments and other things you enjoy doing and other things you have to do.
But no matter what other things you do with your time (learning new craft techniques, tending to your responsibilities, visiting with friends, enjoying other activities, etc.) one major truth stands out about writing:
If you want to keep your fiction-writing skills current,
you have to write fiction regularly.
You have to put new words on the page regularly. If at all possible, every day.
If you do that, you will build a habit. A routine.
And if you don’t do that—if you don’t exercise your writing skills regularly through practice—those skills will atrophy.
Even learning via reading others’ works, reading craft books (even mine, bless you), or attending workshops or mentorships or conferences, etc. must be a far lower priority than putting new words on the page.
How Do Writing Skills Atrophy?
It isn’t that you forget the skills. If you’ve learned them in the first place, they’re still lodged firmly in your creative subconscious, waiting for you to use them. This is true for all writers, even those who don’t write into the dark.
It’s why we who trust ourselves and believe in ourselves and write into the dark don’t have to go back and review a skill we’ve already studied, learned and absorbed.
Like Story Structure or Writing Setting or Writing Scenes or Writing Characters.
Instead of looking back at old notes for a “refresher,” we practice. We put new words on the page. And in practicing, we learn more about and advance those skills every day.
But again, you have to practice using those skills regularly.
When you don’t write regularly you send a message to your creative subconscious that conveying the stories of your characters isn’t really all that important to you.
And the characters, since they and their stories have been demoted in your priorities, stop talking to you.
At best, they stop using everything you’ve given them with all that learning. Because you’ve told them they and their stories just isn’t that important.
And that is why, as Robert Heinlein wrote in his essay in Of Worlds Beyond (Fantasy Press, 1947), “there are so few professional writers and so many aspirants.”
Musings
Having wrapped a copyedit yesterday for a writer I consider a longtime friend, today I’ll be back in fiction writing mode. I’ll be doing the one thing I really love to do: writing fiction, conveying my characters’ stories.
I’ll start my 27th Blackwell Ops novel today. The POV character and the idea for it occurred to me the day before I started the copyedit.
At 26 novels and counting, Blackwell Ops is my longest running series, and I very much enjoy writing in that world.
It’s also a unique world. I mentioned recently that each Blackwell Ops novel is a compilation of several short stories.
That’s another benefit of writing in that world. Not only do I get to write a novel roughly every two weeks, but I get to write several short stories during that same time.
Just a rough guesstimate tells me that over the course of writing the first 26 novels in that series, I’ve also written 130 to 200 short stories.
So writing in the Blackwell Ops world enables me to keep practicing my writing chops in writing both novels and short stories. How cool is that?
If you’d like to see the “formula” that has arisen since I started writing Blackwell Ops novels (all still written into the dark), paid and comped subscribers can click here.
Free subscribers, if you email me at harveystanbrough@gmail.com and request it, I’ll send you the formula. It’s really cool.
That’s it for today. Talk with you again soon.
The Numbers
The Journal……………………………… 1020
Writing of
Day 1…… XXXX words. To date…… XXXXX
Fiction for August…………………….….… XXXX
Fiction for 2024…………………………. 468400
Fiction since October 1………………… 732050
Nonfiction for August……………………… 2080
Nonfiction for 2024……………………… 249090
2024 consumable words………………… 678083
2024 Novels to Date……………………… 11
2024 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2024 Short Stories to Date……………… 4
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)……………… 93
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 9
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 241
Short story collections…………………… 29
Disclaimer: I am a prolific professional fiction writer. On this blog I teach Writing Into the Dark and adherence to Heinlein’s Rules. Unreasoning fear and the myths of writing are lies, and they will slow your progress as a writer or stop you cold. I will never teach the myths on this blog.
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