Tip for Beginning Writers ~ Don't Be Afraid

Some people, a few at least, are natural novelists. They can sit down and type out their very first manuscript and it will be so engaging, so natural, so imaginative, that literary agents are breaking down their door.

Then there's the rest of us.

When I decided to take the plunge into writing fiction, the only thing I knew was "how books go", meaning I'd certainly read lots of books, so I understood my story would need a main character, that things would need to happen to her, and that everything would (probably) work out in the end. I was so focused on the mechanics that my story turned out as dull as dirt.

It wasn't so much that I was afraid to take chances, but that I didn't think I should. Each scene should glide predictably into the next, and it wouldn't take a telepathic reader to figure out where the story was heading. And of course the novel's ending would be tied up in a big red bow. Sweet...and snoozable.   

Every would-be writer has at least one talent. Some people are wildly imaginative, some are masters of grammar and sentence structure, some instinctively know how to build tension. But for someone who's serious about writing, the talents that don't come naturally have to be learned. I learn by doing, mainly by doing something wrong and realizing it. If I was to reread my first novel, I'd understand that while a lot of "events" happened, they were so surrounded by boring drivel that even I wouldn't keep reading. (Oh, but the sentence structure is A plus, and all the verbs are conjugated correctly. 🙄)   

Since none of my stories are pre-planned, I'm constantly asking myself, "what if?" The trouble with that first attempt was, none of my what if's were one bit surprising. If I did have an original thought, I quashed it. "No, agents won't like that." Thus, my what might happen became what should happen. 

Now, after eleven published works, my biggest takeaway is, don't write boring. I'm hardly the first person to say it, but every scene has to count; not necessarily in big ways, but if the scene is there, it had better be accomplishing something. 

And those "what ifs"? Be surprising. Another reason I don't (and can't) outline, aside from the fact that I don't want to be just a stenographer, is that my best ideas appear out of nowhere, completely unintended. I can be writing along, knowing right where I'm heading, and then, wait! What? What did the main character just do? Oh, great. How am I going to get her out of that?  

Growing up, I was grimly focused on doing what was expected. I could avoid trouble if I did or acted the way someone ~ parent, teacher ~ wanted me to. If I did everything just right, I patted myself on the back. Whew! Dodged a bullet! In my first eighteen years of life, I think I only got in trouble once. That's kind of sad. I was too scared of the consequences to be a risk taker. But now as a writer, who is there to be scared of? Scared of having only a handful of readers? That's disappointing, but not fear-inducing. I'm not trying to snag an agent, and frankly, they hate everything, so if I was to start querying again, I'd still write whatever the hell I wanted. 

I could go back now and rewrite that first novel, retaining the premise, but writing it so much better. (No, I'm not going to do that.) This time it would be full of twists, full of "what ifs". I could actually make it interesting. 

If you're just starting out, don't waste a lot of time and effort like I did. Write your story the way you want to write it. Take chances. Writing is taking a chance to begin with, so don't blow it.