Writing into the Dark

by Dean Wesley Smith

  But to actually give your creative voice permission to put that all in, you need to take all that sort of stuff out of your critical mind. Focus on only having fun telling a story.

  Be prepared to just let the creative voice have its day.

  Really hard to do.

  Impossible to do if you are reading critically.

  THIRD…YOU NEED TO UNDERSTAND YOU WILL WRITE EXTRA

  When writing into the dark, the story will often come in parts, and sometimes the parts aren’t in a real order. That’s part of the fun. And later on in this book I’ll explain how to deal with all that.

  Sometimes, like a reader, you experience the writing process from word one to the last word. But sometimes, like a cave explorer, you have to see what is up a certain cave until it dead-ends into a rock wall. Since you are walking into the dark, a dim flashlight your best guide to see the step ahead, you won’t know until you find the dead end that you were on the wrong track.

  That’s normal.

  And sometimes what you find on that little side trip is valuable to the story and your subconscious took you up that path for a reason. Again, never let the critical voice in to second-guess the subconscious. Just be prepared to accept writing some extra.

  For me, in many books, I write very little extra. But for some reason, in my Thunder Mountain series, I tend to write a lot extra.

  I have two reasons for that. One is that I am used to writing those bloated, longer books under contract that New York wanted me to write. And to get a story up to length, I would often have to just add in plot sidetracks.

  I hated that, and with my own books, I won’t do that. A story is as long as a story needs to be.

  Period.

  But with Thunder Mountain, complex time travel Westerns, I love the setting and the time period, so I have often put my characters on their horses and thought “Wow, wouldn’t it be fun to go off the trail and see what’s over there?”

  (I like doing that in real life as well, but since I have stuck Kris in wilderness areas one too many times, I can now only do that when I am alone in the car.)

  What happens in my novels then is that when I am done, my sidetracks are just things I put in for myself. No plot reason, and my subconscious says, “You had your fun, get that out of my story now.”

  So in that series, I often write a bunch of side roads just for myself.

  And I accept that and enjoy it.

  Expect to write extra, for whatever reason, when writing into the dark.

  FOURTH…YOU ARE NOT GOING TO REWRITE THE BOOK

  That’s right.

  Do not give yourself permission to fix anything later.

  Do not give yourself permission to write sloppy.

  You are writing a book. Period. When you are done writing, you release the manuscript to your first reader and proofreader and move on to the next story you want to tell.

  I will explain later in this book some ways to help you produce clean copy as you go along. But you cannot allow your critical voice in any fashion to get anywhere near the book you are writing into the dark.

  You can’t allow that critical voice to glare in the window, saliva dripping from the teeth, just waiting to get hold of the poor manuscript. That’s a quick way to make writing into the dark worthless.

  And that includes permission from the critical voice to write sloppy or a second draft.

  Otherwise there is no reason to write into the dark. You just might as well outline the poor, sad book and let the critical voice kill it that way.

  Yeah, I know, I can hear the screaming now.

  And why are you screaming???

  Really ask yourself that question. Why are you objecting?

  Critical voice, right?

  All those English teachers taught you that rewriting is the only way to create real art. Those teachers who couldn’t write a creative sentence if forced at gunpoint. Those same ones.

  And you bought into that myth.

  So answer one simple question: Why you do not believe that you, the creative writer, can write a book from the creative side of your brain without that critical voice pissing all over it?

  As I said a moment ago, later in this book I will show you some methods on how to produce clean copy as you go so that when you get to the end, you release and start thinking about the next story.

  But for most, this will be the hardest part of writing into the dark.

  There is no point at all writing into the dark if you are going to give your critical voice permission to ruin what you did.

  And that permission will kill all the enthusiasm of the creative side as well.

  And the entire process will fail.

  All because you bought into a myth and believe your creative brain just isn’t good enough.

  Sad, really sad.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  HOW TO GET STARTED

  One of the established facts of novel writing is that almost no writer can hold the plot of an entire novel in their mind. We just can’t.

  So even if you are outlining ahead, you are spending most of your time just focusing in on one area of the book, one scene, one chapter.

  I have a reminder on my wall above my computer:

  Write Scenes

  That sign was meant to keep me from trying to think about an entire book, or too far ahead in a book.

  The sign under the first sign is:

  Trust The Process

  Can’t believe how many times I repeat that to myself when feeling uncertain.

  Trust the process. Just trust the damn process.

  It’s like a signal to my subconscious to come out and play.

  That’s all fine and good, but how to get started with the actual writing? That seems to be the scary question we all face with every book or story.

  SOME ACCEPTED WAYS

  In writing book after writing book on this topic, the same basic answers come up about getting started.

  They all say that you need one or more of the following:

  —An idea

  —A cool setting

  —Cool character

  —Great first line

  Okay, those sometimes help. For me, a cool title helps as well.

  But if I had to wait around for a cool idea or a cool first line like Billy Crystal in that movie Throw Momma From the Train, I would be dead.

  So sure, all those things help. But then what?

  How do you really get started?

  For the answer to that, let me back up to the basics of every opening in any story or chapter.

  You must have a character in a setting.

  Readers read for characters and all characters must be in something besides a white room.

  So to get started, stick a character in a setting. Cool character or not. Cool setting or not.

  Just a character in a setting.

  Period.

  Sounds simple, doesn’t it?

  Nope. Far, far from it.

  THE DEPTH WORKSHOP

  The most important and successful workshop I do through WMG Publishing Online Workshops is the Depth Online Workshop.

  Here is how to think of depth when writing openings.

  Imagine a lake. All beginning writers just try to get their readers to go out across the top of the lake. But the surface of that lake is the line that allows a reader to leave your story. If the reader gets above that surface line, they put the book down.

  A simple image.

  A story with depth is one that the writer takes the reader and drags the reader under the surface and down the steep slope to the bottom of the lake. And then the writer has the reader follow the story along the bottom of the lake.

  From the bottom of that lake, it is a long way to the surface and the writer can do all sorts of things without fear the reader will surface and leave the story.

  So the worst thing you can do it just let your readers waterski across the top of the water. You want your readers deep in your story, with no chance they wi
ll leave.

  That is called depth.

  And it takes me six weeks and five assignments and a ton of examples to show writers how to do that in that Depth Online Workshop.

  So back to the question on how to start a story.

  Take a reader quickly down into depth.

  Those who have taken the online workshop know how that’s done.

  For everyone else, let me just say this:

  Depth is caused by having a character be firmly in a setting with opinions and all five senses and emotions about the setting.

  None of this can be from a writer’s perspective.

  It all must be inside a character’s head.

  AN EXAMPLE

  A few months back I wanted to write another Thunder Mountain series time travel novel. I always start those novels with new characters, but I had no character, no idea of a character, nothing. I just had a title: Lake Roosevelt.

  Roosevelt Lake is a lake in the center of Idaho with a town under it. All the Thunder Mountain books had been around that lake in one form or another, so I figured it was time to call one of the books by the lake name. Thus the title.

  So I sat down, typed in the title, and grabbed a character name out of a phone book from some faraway city and typed in that as the first two words of the story.

  And since I live on the Oregon Coast I figured why not just set the opening here? That thought flashed across my mind from somewhere unknown.

  So I started typing. I had the character enjoying the fantastic beauty of the Oregon Coast and going into a small café in a small Oregon Coast town.

  Café had great smells, of course. Great tastes, the ocean air, the sounds of the waves, and the warmth of the late summer day. I had all five senses and I layered them in really thick, giving my character’s opinions of the setting with hints of what she was doing there.

  Character.

  Setting.

  Then I ended the chapter and did the same thing with a male character in chapter two who was following the first character.

  Character.

  Setting.

  And it went from there.

  I stuck two characters in two chapters in rich, thick setting that they had opinions about.

  Did I know where the book was heading? Nope, other than I figured at some point they would make it back to Idaho.

  Did I know the characters? Nope, just learning about them as I typed.

  Just as a reader would learn about them as the reader reads the book.

  HOW TO GET STARTED WRITING INTO THE DARK

  Take any character and put the character in a setting.

  Any character.

  Any setting.

  Then climb into the character’s head and park your butt there and don’t allow yourself to type one word that doesn’t come from the character’s opinion or sensory feelings or emotions.

  Stay parked inside that character’s head.

  And let the character (and the reader) experience the story.

  CHAPTER SIX

  SOME PROCESS HINTS

  In this chapter, I’m going to talk about some process hints before we go any farther.

  Remember, trust the process.

  That takes a belief system in your own work. Of course, believing in our own work is where the critical voice hits us all the hardest. And where our wall against the critical voice is the weakest.

  But writing into the dark takes a belief system in story. It takes a trust that your creative voice knows what it is doing. And it takes a vast amount of mental fight to walk against all the myths and let the fine work your creative voice has done alone and not ruin it with rewriting.

  Writing into the dark also takes a complete awareness that uncertainty is part of the process, a normal part, not something to be feared.

  Remember, if you start focusing on the uncertainty too much, you allow the critical voice to come in and stop you cold.

  So you have to know uncertainty is part of the process, but not focus on it or care about it.

  So now to some hints about major areas we all run into while writing into the dark.

  PLOT TIME JUMPS

  First off, when dealing with time jumps in a plot you don’t know, remember that it is fine to write extra words. You should have no fear of writing extra words. Writing extra words is often part of the process.

  So in the book I talked about in the last chapter, I ended up having three major time jumps in it.

  Of course, when writing the book I didn’t know that. But as I was writing, working my two characters in alternating chapters through their journey, it became clear from what I had set up that there needed to be a section break and a time jump. The characters basically had nothing to do that was interesting for an entire year.

  But where to jump to? When to jump to?

  Without some sort of idea where the story was even heading, I had no idea.

  So I kind of sat there and looked at what I had written and went, “It seems logical they would jump to this point in time.”

  So I jumped there, put them back into a rich, thick setting with depth, and started typing. About two thousand words in I discovered the point where I should have jumped the characters.

  I shrugged, cut off the extra words I had written, and just kept on going.

  I was not afraid to write extra and just explore.

  Back to the exploring a cave analogy. When exploring into the dark, we are often faced with two possible paths: one cave goes to the right, one to the left. We have no idea what is ahead, so we pick one and explore.

  If it’s the wrong path, we back up and go the other way.

  Part of the process.

  Have a belief in the process, and jumping ahead in a story will never be a problem.

  BOGGING DOWN

  Every writer I know bogs down in a story at one point or another. For me, and for most writers, it means we have done one of two things.

  First, we have written past an ending of a chapter or scene, and the creative voice is just going to make us stop typing.

  Second, we are on a wrong path with the plot. (Wrong branch of the cave.)

  The subconscious, when it realizes you have taken a bad path, will just bog you down and stop you from typing.

  What I do when this happens is simple. I look back at what I have written in the last three or four pages.

  Writing past an ending on a scene or chapter is usually very, very clear. The ending almost always just pops off the page.

  So I cut off the extra typing, do the scene or chapter break, and head forward with the characters.

  When I am on a wrong path, I go back searching for the branch in the cave, keeping that analogy going.

  When I find the one spot where I could have gone another direction, I cut off the extra words and go off in the new direction. I’ll know I’m going in the right direction because suddenly the story is flowing again faster than I can type.

  So bogging down is part of the process as well.

  Expect it and don’t be afraid to write extra words or cut words to get back on track.

  END OF BOOK

  When you bog down near the end of a book or a story, it often means you have written past your ending.

  I do that all the time on short stories. I’ll be typing along with the sense that the ending should be coming up soon and then I’ll just bog down. Usually I’ll sit there trying to figure out the end before I have the realization to look back a little bit at what I have already typed.

  Often, more times than not, the great ending is back a hundred words or so. I wrote it and then just kept typing.

  THE ONE-THIRD POINT OF A NOVEL

  On novels, almost every writer I know hits a stopping point about one third of the way into writing the book. It does not matter if you are writing into the dark or outlining—this one-third point is a deadly spot for all novelists.

  And most beginning writers working at their first novel never make it past this spot. This one-third point s
topped me on all my first attempts. On every novel, I still have troubles with it.

  The reason I want to mention it in a book on writing into the dark is because this one-third point stop is often blamed on writing into the dark. Blamed on not having an outline.

  It has nothing to do with it.

  Nothing.

  Here is basically what happens:

  As writers, we are all excited as we get started into a novel. The characters are fun and new, the promise of the novel is like a shining star, the words are all golden, the story flowing like a perfect stream, everything is just powering along.

  Then you hit that one-third spot.

  Suddenly, your critical voice comes roaring in. And it’s loud. Damn loud.

  Everything you have written, all those golden words, suddenly look like crap. The middle boring part of the book is ahead, or if you are writing into the dark, the fear of not knowing what is next rears up and becomes a monster.

  And then the critical voice hits you with the thought, “This book is so bad, so much work to finish, what’s the point?”

  That’s the end of the book. It goes into the unfinished file with a promise to yourself you’ll come back to it, but of course you never do.

  Critical voice has killed the book dead.

  Critical voice: 1. Writer: 0.

  There have been some amazing articles written by professional writers about this spot in a novel. It really is a deadly spot.

  So how do you get through it?

  There is only one way.

  Suck it up and write the next sentence.

  And then the next.