Post #122 May 14, 2018

“Seven Habits of Highly Effective Writers”

You’ve all heard of the book “7 Habits of Highly Effective People.”  The title got me to thinking that there are also a number of good habits and practices that writers should follow to give themselves the best chance to be successful at their chosen craft.  With that in mind, here are my seven habits.

1. Read.  Read widely and read every day.  Writing as a career or even as a hobby requires what I call word sense.  This is the ability to choose the right word for the situation and manipulate words to mean what you want to mean and say what you want to say.  Yes, of course, you learned all this is grade school, along with other ‘useful’ things like diagramming sentences. But a lot of word sense comes from seeing how other writers do it and copying them.  I often run across turns of phrase in some story or article that somehow becomes embedded in my memory and often pop out just when I need them.  You can’t read too much. 
2. Write.  Every day.  Writing is like a muscle.  Use it or lose it.  You have to be in the mode of choosing words and putting them down to exercise that muscle.  It really doesn’t matter that much what you write: a diary, an article, a few pages of your novel, a recipe for a neighbor.  Just get into the habit of putting words down in some coherent order every day and keep doing it.  There’s a hoary old saying, for writers of fiction, that you have to write a million words to flush out all the crap from your writer’s brain and get down to the real you.  I think there’s lot of truth to that.
3. Be ruthless in editing.  I always think of editing as a lot like flossing your teeth.  Nobody likes it but you’d better do it and do it well and regularly if you want to avoid problems.  Being ruthless requires putting on a different face and learning how to back away from your precious words and scenes and characters and ask yourself: does this really work?  Does this move the story, illuminate character, provide setting or in some way advance the story?  If it doesn’t, delete it!  Learn to love your delete key. 
4. Make outlines.  I am a diligent outliner.  I make extensive outlines ahead of time for my story, with scene descriptions and transitions and details that I need to know where I’m going in the story, every day.  I do deviate from my outlines when it helps the story but I rarely deviate far and I always come back to my outline, to stay on track.  As a consequence of this, I can truly say I’ve never suffered a single day of writer’s block or had any real fear of the blank page.  With outlines, you always have a way forward.  And you can always change it later.
5. Do your homework.  Let’s face it: nobody likes homework.  Doing your homework, as a writer, means researching details of your background and setting and characters in enough depth to make it all come alive.  Over-research, if possible.  That doesn’t mean you have to include every single detail of your research in the story.  You’re not writing an encyclopedia.  Include enough to give the story a feel of realism.  You’re trying to put your reader in other times and places and you should include just enough to magically transport them to your fictional world.  I like the word verisimilitude.  This means ‘the quality of appearing to be true or real; resemblance to the truth.’  If you write fiction, as I do, you only need to do whatever it takes to make the reader think what you’re describing is or could be true.  The reader’s imagination will do the rest.  But to do this, you’d better do your homework and get it right.  Readers love to call you down on factual inaccuracies.
6. Read your own work like a reader.  This is part of editing and re-writing.  Read over your work and try to read it as if you just bought the book and have settled down for an hour late one night, with a glass of wine, to read it.  I like to read over each 100 pages I’ve just written.  Does it engage you?  Does it make you want to know more, to keep turning the pages?  Does the story hold together?  Are there gaping holes or inconsistencies in the plot?  Do the characters do believable things?  If any of this is not true, you’ve got something to fix.  The proof of good writing is in reading. 
7. Know your readers.  Know who reads your stuff or who you want to read your stuff.  Know your genre, if you’re writing fiction.  Study your audience.  Are they mostly middle-aged white guys with a yearning to be Rambo or Navy Seals?  Are they teen-aged girls?  What’s expected?  Maybe make a little twist on that.  Know how your readers want a story to unfold…fast, with lots of action or unique ideas or lots of richly detailed characters or maybe an ersatz Downton Abbey?  There’s nothing wrong with writing what may be called a ‘trashy novel’ if people will buy it and be entertained by it.  It’s an honorable profession, maybe honorable than most.  Storytellers have a long history with us human beings.  They hold the collective wisdom of the tribe.  They explain or demonstrate or illuminate things that are important.  They give words to our feelings or hopes and dreams and our fears and horrors.  They’re part of what separates us from apes.
    
   These are my ideas on some attributes you will need to succeed as a writer…of anything.  There are more.  People will disagree on some of these.  You may want to add your own ideas.  But I’ve found all these to be useful and helpful hints on what it takes to be successful in putting words down for a living…or even just for fun.
    
   The next post to The Word Shed comes on May 21.  In this post, I want to take a closer look at the tradition of storytelling and the role it has played in making us humans what we are today.
    
   See you next time.
    
   Phil B.