Strategies for Procrastinating Writers

Today I welcome Shelley Munro to Terry’s Place. Shelley lives in New Zealand and has been published since 2004. Her current releases are Cat Burglar in Training, available from Carina Press and Eye on the Ball, which is available exclusively from All Romance ebooks.

Change procrastination to productivity.

Does this sound like something you need? Yes? I have to admit there are times when I’m a champion procrastinator. Yes, it’s true. Sometimes attacking the ironing pile seems like way more fun than sitting down to write. On days like this it can take me hours to pound out my target number of words, and each one is dragged from me kicking and screaming.

2011 was a bad writing year for me, and after months of writing nothing new, I had to do something drastic. I don’t believe in writers’ block, so my lack of writing came down to a combination of procrastination/laziness and plain fear because my confidence was at an all-time low. Once I admitted this, it was easier to formulate a plain.

Here are some strategies I used for dealing with my procrastination.

Writing With Triggers

What I'm reading: An Invitation to Sin, by Jo Beverley, Sally Mackenzie, Vanessa Kelly & Katilin O'Riley; Island Nights, by P.J. Mellor

Only 5 more likes and 12 more followers before I give away more books. And don't forget to sign up for my newsletter on my website, which also enters you in the giveaway. Details on the Deals and Steals tab.

Today it's another recap of an Emerald City Writers Conference workshop, this one given by Bernadette Pajer. She called her approach "Trigger Writing" and she made some interesting points, giving another way to look at the "show don't tell" rule.

Pajer defined a trigger as a carefully crafted description, rich in innuendo or emotional responses. She said the beauty of triggers is that they engage readers by allowing them to be an active participant in the story.

When you use triggers, you're using implications and connotations rather than denotations, or strict definitions of the words. You're trusting that the reader will have the same associations with the word that you're trying to get across in your prose.

For example, if you put a Dumpster in a scene, odds are your readers are going to see and smell the scene, even if you don't go into details about what it actually looks like or smells like.

New Ideas for the New Year

Jeffrey A. Carver is the author of numerous science fiction novels and stories, including the Nebula-nominated Eternity's End, Battlestar Galactica: the Miniseries novelization, and the hard-SF series The Chaos Chronicles. Jeff also teaches writing in settings ranging from MIT to conferences for young writers, and he's dropped in today to talk about one of the thorniest challenges faced by many aspiring writers.

New year! New ideas! Where do you get your ideas? That's the question most asked of every science fiction writer I know. It's a good question, I suppose, though the answer is simple: everywhere, everything I read, everyone I talk to, everything I see on the internet or watch on TV, everything that filters into my brain is a potential story idea. I'm up to my ears in ideas! The real question is, how do you turn an idea—which can be anything, even a simple concept or image—into a story, which is a sequence of events, one arising from another, in which believable characters grow and change?

Here’s a simple idea that is not a story: The king dies, and the queen dies.

Yes, things happen, but there's no motivation cause or reason, nothing to care about. Here's that same idea, turned into the nucleus of a possible story: The king dies of a mortal wound, and the queen dies of sorrow. How much character, how much cause and effect, is embedded in that one sentence?

Advice from Kurt Vonnegut

What I'm reading: Hold Tight, by Harlan Coben.

What I'm writing: End of chapter 4, gearing up for Chapter 5, scene 1. Also evaluations of contest entries.

The contest I'm judging now doesn't use quantifiable score sheet. Instead, we critique the manuscript, marking it up as we see fit, plus we must write an overall evaluation. Once again, this analysis provides good insight to improving my own writing, as I find myself reading over the previous day's efforts even more critically than usual.

And, in a moment of relative synchronicity, today's Yahoo quote of the day was some excellent advice from the late Kurt Vonnegut.

1. Find a subject you care about.
2. Do not ramble, though.
3. Keep it simple.
4. Have the guts to cut.
5. Sound like yourself.
6. Say what you mean to say.
7. Pity the readers.

I'm especially aware of #6, because dear Mr. Holtby, my high school English teacher pounded this one into us. Tenth grade English was more focused on writing the expository essay, but everyone dreaded seeing SWYM on the paper --- almost as much as the single red line across the page, which meant, "I stopped reading here."

Each day as I try to transcribe what my characters are saying and doing, I have visions of Mr. Holtby's SWYM keeping me in line.