Fiction Writer’s Toolshed | Practical Tools for Authors
When was the last time you wrote something just because you felt like writing? A poem, a little passage, a strange sentence. Something that didn’t first need a place in a novel or a perfectly arranged writing session.
My current best approach this week is what I’m calling free dive or die. Free diving is my metaphor for making contact with the writing: putting words down and seeing what you find.
The “or die” part is about how a writing practice can quietly turn into everything but writing. Learning, organizing, and preparing can look responsible right up to the point where they keep us from making anything.
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Fiction Writer’s Toolshed
Fiction Writing Free Dive… or Die | ep 017
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Check the real calendar
A few years ago, I kept telling myself that I’d been in a good exercise routine not that long before. I knew what that routine felt like. Getting back to it seemed like returning to something recent.
Then I looked at an actual calendar and counted backward. It had been three years. In my head, it felt like months.
I notice the same thing with creative work. I can remember a meeting as if it happened last quarter, then discover that it was in 2022. A project that feels like something I just started may have been waiting much longer.
So here’s a gentle call-out, with me standing beside you: when did you last write something because you wanted to write it?
Look at a date if you can. The real calendar may tell you something different from the feeling that it was only a little while ago. The point is to see where you are, so you can make something now.
Everything but writing
We can do a lot of things that feel like writing while putting off the words.
You’re listening to a writing podcast. I’m recording one. We can both get a creative buzz from that. I think the learning matters, or I wouldn’t be making this show.
But learning about writing and doing the writing are different activities. If I asked you to find a pen and a piece of paper and write something, how long would it take you to begin?
Being honest, it might take me a day or two. I’d agree that I was going to do it. Then I’d start imagining how.
The kitchen-table vision
I can tell you exactly what my writing session looks like in my head. Kitchen table. White printer paper. Blue fine-tip Sharpie. Writing in all caps.
That vision can be useful. It can take me from a vague intention to something I can actually do.
It can also become a box I put myself in. If the conditions don’t look like the picture, there’s friction. I wait until I can do it the way I imagined.
The question is what the vision is doing for me. Is it helping me get words onto the page, or have I made matching the picture a requirement before I’m allowed to begin?
Craft matters, and so does getting into the water
I have close friends who are scuba certified. Listening to them talk about their training gives me an appreciation for what preparation makes possible.
That’s the image I’m borrowing for ambitious creative work. A novel, a series, a musical, or a graphic novel may take tools, preparation, and craft to reach the thing you want to make.
I love those tools. This show is called the Toolshed. I want to keep helping you learn how to use them.
There’s also the pleasure of simply being in the water: moving around, discovering something, emerging, and taking a breath. That’s the writing mode I mean by a free dive.
You get to make something without first building the whole apparatus around it. You can write a little piece because you want to see what happens when you write it.
The shallow waters of process
Here’s the quieter danger I’m talking about. Our writing time can fill up with researching the next book, reorganizing notes, choosing software, and tweaking the outline of the outline.
Then we design the perfect routine. We watch one more video. We listen to one more podcast. We decide that Monday is definitely when we’ll start.
Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for my kitchen table, my white paper, and my blue Sharpie.
That’s what I’m calling the shallow waters of process. In my experience, it can feel like movement while keeping me in the same place.
Research, planning, and tools can support a project. I’m calling out the point where they start replacing the writing they were supposed to help me do.
Put some words down
For a writer like me, breathing is writing. The way back to contact is to put words down.
The dumb sentence. The weird sentence. The wrong sentence. The clichéd, boring sentence.
It doesn’t have to be good enough to publish before it gives you contact with the work. You’ve made something that exists outside the picture in your head.
Don’t drown face down in a perfectionism puddle, an inch from air. Lift your head. Take a breath. Write something.
I’m speaking figuratively about a writing practice here. The loss I’m warning about is letting the act of writing disappear beneath everything we do to prepare for it.
Why do birds sing?
My friend and collaborator Jacob wrote a song about Jason Voorhees. We were working on a horror musical together, so I tried to be a responsible collaborator.
Why had he written it? Was it for the project? Did Jason Voorhees exist in our story’s world?
He shrugged, smiled, and asked, “Why do birds sing?”
Oh. That’s it. That’s free diving.
He didn’t write it for the project. He made it because he wanted to make it. That was a sufficient reason.
I don’t know how hard he worked to finish it. He might have eaten handfuls of nails along the way. Making something for its own sake doesn’t promise that it will be effortless.
But it can begin with the pleasure of making. You don’t have to justify every piece by finding it a job in a larger project.
Make contact with the writing
Should you learn the craft? Yes. Should you prepare for the ambitious work you want to make? Yes.
This week, I’m asking you to put some of that apparatus down and write something. Use what’s available. Let the sentence be ordinary or strange. Let the piece exist before you decide what it’s for.
You don’t need a novel’s worth of words to get back into the water.
Free dive. Lift your head. Take a breath.
A way to begin by speaking
If talking gives you a way into the work, Say it First offers four ways to speak a scene and nine tactics for starting. You can make rough material, bring it into text, and see what you have to work with.
Listen to and read Say it First: Drafting Your Fiction Out Loud.
Fiction Writer’s Toolshed: Practical Tools for Authors is a Make Exist podcast hosted by Tim Kearney. It offers hands-on training for fiction writers to diagnose writing problems, build their skills, and finish more work.