Will any amount of skill compensate for an author’s zero creativity?  Will readers read a creative and inspired story when the writer has no skill?  The answer to both questions is no.  Good storytelling needs both creative talent and good skill in spinning the yarn.  Although writing genre fiction might not be called an art form by some, it is, and it’s similar to other art forms.  Mozart was a creative genius, but he was also a skillful composer and pianist.  Most musicians aren’t in Mozart’s league.  Just look at the number of revisions Beethoven made to the end of the first movement of his Fifth Symphony.  But Beethoven was both creative and skillful too, of course.  Writing is like that—we all have our strengths and weaknesses.

Developing skills is the easy part.  In most cases, it just means practice, practice, practice, which in writing means sitting down and pounding the keys a bit every day.  That’s blood, sweat, and tears.  And then doing it all over again.  When you’re not doing that, you should be reading about what it takes to write genre fiction.  I’ve probably done my part in blog posts you will find in the category “Writing.”  Don’t look for these to tell you how to write the next NY Times bestseller, though—they won’t, because otherwise I’d make them Top Secret and use them myself!  No, they just tell you about things that I think are important in writing fiction—the skill term in the storytelling equation.  You can also read books like Stephen King’s On Writing (probably his best book, by the way!) and Orson Scott Card’s Characters and Viewpoint.  There are also many other writing blogs with advice pieces—mine tend to be unconventional, so caveat emptor (of course, my advice is the best kind—it’s free!).

So, let’s assume you have the skills down or, at least, you’re working on them.  (I learn something almost every day, by the way.  I might not use it, but I make note of it.)  What about the creativity?  Here’s my algorithm to help you down that road:

Always have your writer’s hat on.  By that I mean, be observant of people, in both their personalities and what they do.  Every writer should be an amateur psychologist.  I might be an ex-scientist, but my old colleagues might be surprised to know I spent more time analyzing them than I ever did on my equations.  Human beings are weird, diverse, and interesting.  If you don’t know and observe that, your characters might turn out flat—what’s often called two-dimensional.  Dynamics are as important as statics—people evolve over time.  Your characters should too.

You can combine people-watching with creating what-ifs?  They can occur anywhere, so you either have to have a good memory or jot them down.  I’ve jotted them down on napkins and donut bags.  I was sitting on a Hoboken park bench once just watching other people and the flow of the mighty Hudson when I asked, “What if a guy pulls up in a motorboat, jumps up, and starts shooting?”  That became the first scene of The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan.  Even before that, while still in my day job, I asked, “What if the government doesn’t want employees with secrets to run around loose after they retire?” (note: I didn’t work for the government).  That became a short story, but later I incorporated it into Golden Years.

Your what-if list should grow rapidly.  That’s being creative.  So is jotting down character ideas, venues, themes, and so forth.  The others are clear, but what do I mean by themes?  They might be in the form of what-ifs, but my idea is the following: I want my fiction to have some social relevancy.  Retirement and old age is a theme in Golden Years that goes beyond the what-if.  Sex trafficking and exploitation of children for porn and other nefarious enterprises is a theme in The Collector (so is art theft, of course).  Family is a theme in Family Affairs.  Terrorism is a theme in many of my ebooks.

Forget about writer’s block.  Note that doing the above is creating, not writing per se.  You are creating things you can write about in your fiction.  Even if you have a day job and struggle to find time to write, you can still do that kind of creating.  You’re recording ideas for stories, and they’re ideas you have created.  With all that material, why worry about writer’s block?  So, start writing.

Yeah, I know: easier said than done!  Especially if you have a day job and providing for a family to distract you.  (By the way, don’t give up that day job.  Many people, more so now, won’t be able to make a living writing.  Yeah, it sucks.)  Children’s author Alinka Rutkowska spoke about the Pareto Rule in one of her book marketing guides, but it applies to the use of your time too: choose that 20% of your tasks that will give you 80% of the results when managing your writing time.  Here’s a trick: select some of that material you’ve accumulated and start to put words around it.  Start connecting the dots—well, maybe that’s wrong, because it’s not often a linear process.

Let the words flow.  Your mind will start putting things together if you’re a writer.  Make it into a story and write the story (don’t worry about whether it will be a short story, novella, or novel).  It might change as you go along.  Can’t use what you did the night before?  Keep it around.  You might be able to use it later.  Don’t sweat the small stuff.  If you’re a born storyteller, everything will come together.

I just described the way I work.  Other people like to outline the story, indicating in the outline how to work in some of that material they’ve accumulated.  That’s fine.  The outline just becomes more info you can use.  But nothing’s written in stone.  Expect things to change as you start writing.  99.9% of the time, they will.  I rarely outline.  I did with Evil Agenda, because it appeared as a serial in this blog first.  The final ebook version still changed, even though I had much more than an outline.  Again, the way I work.

Make cut and paste your friend.  Even old Jessica Fletcher ended up using a laptop (yeah, remembering that TV show is probably dating me).  Any word processor you’re using has cut and paste.  (It also has other functions like grammar and spell checking that are useful.)  Do your own content editing!  You can hire an editor for copy editing and proofreading if you want, but content editing is part of the creative process where only you can preserve your style and voice.  (Critique groups and MFAs based on that concept do a good job in killing creativity and innovation in writing—caveat emptor.)

That’s why I don’t like outlining.  It doesn’t fit in my 20% of the Pareto Rule.  What are you going to do?  Go back and change the outline each time you cut and paste?  The creative process is often non-linear; outlining your book is linear.  Even if you include flashbacks in your outline, you’re probably still going to shuffle the cards by the end.  Outlining just adds roadblocks to your creativity.  That doesn’t mean your story doesn’t have to hang together when you’re finished, but no outline will guarantee that.  To paraphrase Clancy, fiction has to seem logical.  Even vampire romances and fantasies have to have a logical flow to them so the reader doesn’t get lost.  But outlines are too logical and rigid.

Axe the draft idea too.  Drafts belonged to the days when writers wrote longhand and had secretaries type up their manuscripts.  Fred Flintstone had drafts.  You shouldn’t.  Cut and paste avoids the need for multiple drafts.  And you should copy edit your manuscript on your own before sending it to anyone—beta-readers, editors, or agents.  Maybe when you have their input, you’ll want to make changes and call it revised version 2, 3, and so forth.  That’s not the original definition of draft.  That meant content editing was still going on back in the day—we’re writing in the 21^st century now.

Be brutal!  You have to balance the Pareto Rule against Sturgeon’s Law, which is that 90% of anything is s*&t!  (Actually, for human beings, it’s surprisingly water, but Theodore’s comment applies to most other things.)  The Goldilocks Principle applies.  And if you cut, you don’t have to paste, and your prose might be the better for it.  I’ve probably written tens of millions of words since I’ve been writing—I estimate only a million or so have seen the light of day.

Finish the story.  This might be very difficult for some authors.  We tend to tinker around with our creations, as I discussed above.  Artists do that.  Beethoven is an example.  Sometimes you should just go with your first few attempts instead of infinitely tinkering.  With all that material you have, you want to soon be writing the next book.  Especially if you have muses like mine, who are really banshees with tasers!

Moreover, tinkering just muddies things up.  My father’s best paintings were those where he didn’t go back and touch up in spots—he didn’t tinker, so all the colors remained fresh.  His redwoods looked like the originals; his ocean scenes looked tempestuous and dynamic.  Same thing works for books.  Use the old engineer’s rule (another one!): when making something 5% better requires 50% or more work, forget about it!  (I’m probably misquoting that.  I was a scientist, not an engineer.)

Note that I’ve not only focused on the creative process and not skills per se in this post, but I haven’t touched on that eight hundred pound gorilla in the room (that poor silverback gets blamed for everything!).  PR and marketing your ebook once it’s done isn’t easy, whether you’re a traditional or indie author.  I have yet to see a guide or self-help book that has some magic potion for this.  All I’ll say is that, as much as I think it’s the least user-friendly social network around, that’s where the readers are.  An author should care more about readers than other authors—by writing entertaining fiction as well as reaching out to them on Goodreads.  A few authors might read your ebooks; there are still many more readers than authors, though.

[99 Cent Promo for readers of this blog: Angels Need Not Apply, #2 in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series,” is on sale for $0.99 on Amazon, June 1-7.  Al Qaeda, a drug cartel, and neo-Nazis combine forces to create mayhem!  Thank you for reading.]

In elibris libertas…. 

 

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