There is the novel in your head. Then there is the novel currently refusing to appear on the page. Over the next five days, I’m looking at some of the places where that gap opens up—and a few practical ways to get the book moving again when it does.
I’ll be posting one lesson a day this week, accompanied by visual evidence that the process is going extremely well.
Lesson #1
Primal Terror–The terror is vivid. The sentence is buffering.
Sometimes the problem isn’t the scene. It’s that your brain has apparently gone out to lunch without leaving a forwarding address.
If the sentence won’t come, change tools: sketch the scene, talk it through out loud, or write the moment as dialogue only.
Useful point: You don’t need to be brilliant on command or manufacture terror at your desk. Give the reader the physical facts—the shortened breath, bad footing, narrowing choices—and let the terror arise from the situation.
The goal is not to describe fear more dramatically. It’s to build the scene so the reader has no choice but to feel it. And then get out of the way.
Lesson # 2
When You Can See It but Can’t Write It
How to Get What’s in Your Head Onto the Page
There is a particular kind of misery reserved for writers. The scene in your head is magnificent. You can see everything. The light. The expression on someone’s face. The exact second the mood changes. You know what the room smells like. You know who is lying. You know what your character wants and what he is pretending not to want. The whole thing is practically playing in surround sound.
Then you write it down. And the sentence is idiotic. This does not necessarily mean the scene is bad. It may mean you are asking the sentence to do too much. A scene arrives in your head all at once. Prose cannot. Prose has to go single file.
Some solutions
1. Stop trying to put the whole movie into one sentence.
Writers often wreck a perfectly good moment by attempting to reproduce everything they can see at once. The character moves. The weather changes. Somebody remembers something. A bird screams. There is a metaphor. Possibly three adjectives.
Meanwhile, the reader is still trying to find the door.
Pick one thing. What does the reader need to notice right now? Put that on the page first. Then give them the next thing.
2. Write the physical action before explaining what it means.
If your character is afraid, you don’t not need to announce it. Give us what fear makes him do. He checks the lock twice. He leaves the headlights off. He keeps talking when nobody has asked him a question.
Concrete behavior gives the reader something to experience. Explanation tells the reader what the experience was supposed to be.
Usually, the behavior wins.
3. Do not translate every image in your head.
Some details are useful because they change the scene. Others are merely there because your imaginary cinematographer had an excellent morning.
Ask yourself: Does the reader need this detail to understand, feel, or anticipate something? If not, admire it privately. Then cut it.
4. Find the sentence the scene is really about.
Most scenes have a center of gravity. Someone realizes something. Someone decides something. Someone sees something they cannot unsee. Someone lies. Someone understands that another person is lying.
That moment deserves the cleanest writing in the scene. Do not bury it under choreography.
5. Study writers who get out of the sentence’s way.
Whatever you write–thrillers, mystery, romance, sci-fi, fantasy–study the best writers in your genre. Don’t study the plots, though. That’s a trap. Instead, study sentences.
Take a page from a writer you admire and look at what happens line by line. Where is the action? How long are the sentences? What gets described and what gets skipped? When does the writer give you a character’s thoughts, and when do they make you infer them?
A few particularly amazing authors I love to study:
Tana French — for atmosphere, psychological tension, and sentences that can be beautiful without stopping the story.
Dennis Lehane — for muscular, emotionally loaded prose that rarely feels as though it is trying to impress you.
Gillian Flynn — for voice. Her sentences do not merely report what is happening. They tell you who is seeing it.
S.A. Cosby — for velocity, physical action, and sharp imagery that earns its place.
Megan Abbott — for compression. She can make a short sentence carry an alarming amount of menace.
Attica Locke — for place, character, and suspense working inside the same sentence.
Michael Connelly — for clarity. (Particularly useful if you have a tendency to decorate a sentence after it has already done its job like I do.)
Do not read your favorite authors looking for phrases to imitate. Read them looking for decisions. Why did the writer stop the sentence there? Why that detail? Why no adjective? Why did the writer let the character act instead of explaining the emotion?
6. Let the first draft be embarrassing.
This may be the most useful rule. The first sentence does not have to match the movie in your head. It only has to get you onto the page.
You can sharpen it later. You can move the emphasis.
You can replace the melodramatic metaphor you were extremely proud of at 11:47 p.m. You can remove six adjectives and discover, to your irritation, that the sentence is much better.
The scene in your head has unlimited production values. It gets on the page.
Give it a chance.
Lesson Three
The characters have stopped cooperating.
At some point in writing a novel, a disturbing thing happens.
You create a character. You give him a history, a job, a collection of bad decisions, and a perfectly serviceable plot to follow. Then you write him into a scene. Everything goes great for a few paragraphs, then he notices something–or someone–more interesting, and wanders off.
Writers talk about this as though the characters have somehow become autonomous. They haven’t, of course. They are still imaginary people being operated by the same brain that forgot why it walked into the kitchen ten minutes ago.
But the sensation is real.
Jennine Capó Crucet described it beautifully: “In fiction, the characters tell me what to do, and I live for the moment they take over whatever I was trying to do.”
Ridley Pearson says something similar: “Characters ‘take over’ the author.” For him, that happens as he spends more time writing about them and their arcs become more defined.
Children’s novelist Gennifer Choldenko takes it one step further: “If my characters don’t begin behaving in ways I don’t expect, then they aren’t good characters.”
Which is reassuring. Also inconvenient—especially if you’re an outliner. Character A was supposed to confront Character B, reveal the crucial information, and move the plot neatly along.
Except Character A no longer wants to do it.
Why?
Because the character you’re writing now knows more than the character you outlined. An outline is built before you’ve spent hours inside a character’s head. Once you start writing scenes—watching what they notice, what they avoid, what makes them angry, what they’re afraid of—you understand them differently.
Eventually, you know the character so well that the thing you’ve planned for him or her to do in your carefully constructed plot feels false.
But there’s something you need to notice at that moment. A character “refusing to cooperate” isn’t automatic evidence that you wrote yourself into a swamp. The resistance in your brain is simply telling you:
He would rather swallow a roofing nail than do that.
This doesn’t mean that your character gets to run the novel. You still do. But it does mean that you’ve learned something since you outlined the plot, and the plot may need to catch up.
Here are three ways to handle a character who has gone off-script.
Follow them. If their choice feels more truthful and creates interesting consequences, revise the plot.
Raise the stakes. If you genuinely need them to make the planned choice, give them a compelling enough reason to make it.
Stop them. If the detour is amusing but irrelevant, cut it. Characters do not actually have constitutional rights. You may remove the surfer girl.
(Although certain Kaua’i detectives may object.)
The curious thing is that once this begins to happen, the novel often starts to move with less resistance.
It doesn’t become easy. Let’s not get ridiculous.
But the novel catches fire as you stop dragging characters from plot point to plot point and let their decisions create consequences. The risks they take (or won’t take) change their relationships.
The machinery has disappeared. The story is moving because the characters are moving it.
That is what it means when we as writers say our characters came alive. We finally knew them well enough to stop telling them what to do.
Which is an excellent development for the novel. Less so for the outline.
Excerpted from: Five Writing Lessons Nobody Explains Properly
Lesson #4
The Sea Cave Dilemna: How far do you have to go to make a scene feel real?
Research can tell you almost everything about a place. What it can’t always tell you is what happens when you step into it. Or what it feels like to actually be there.
While writing Lolo Girl, I had scenes involving sea caves on Kauaʻi, including one in a turtle cave where the physical danger of the place mattered. I’ve lived on Kaua’i for many decades, and I know these waters. I know what a sea cave sounds like when a swell enters it, and I know why to treat them with respect.
A wave entering open water has somewhere to go. A wave entering a confined cave has considerably fewer options.
Water surges into a narrowing space, rebounds from rock and collides with the next surge coming in. What looked like a manageable opening seconds earlier quickly becomes a churning chamber of water, rock and very bad decisions. Hawaiʻi ocean-safety officials specifically warn about cavernous shoreline areas because sudden waves knock people down and sweep them into the ocean. There are many serious injuries and fatalities inside confined coastal caves.
So when I was writing that scene in the cave, there was a fairly obvious problem with the traditional writing advice to go experience it yourself.
Sometimes that is excellent advice. Sometimes it is an efficient way to eliminate the author.
Research until you can feel the place
Annie Proulx is probably one of the best examples of a novelist who treats place as something more than scenery. She has described spending enormous amounts of time researching landscape, geology, weather, local history and the ways people actually speak. She visits places, photographs them, studies ordinary details and even paints landscapes because prolonged observation fixes details in her mind. For her, character and story grow out of place rather than simply occurring against it.
Michael Crichton used a different version of the same principle. His research involved visiting locations, talking to experts and reading technical journals—then returning for more research when the writing exposed something he still didn’t understand.
Thriller writer Taylor Adams took yet another route when writing about caves: he immersed himself in helmet-camera footage of real cavers navigating narrow passages so he could understand the physical sensation of confinement without pretending he had personally experienced everything he put his characters through.
That is the useful distinction.
Authenticity does not require autobiography. It requires specificity.
You need enough real information that you stop writing the generic version of the experience.
So yes, I took the risk and went into a sea cave. In truth, I’d been into them before, but only for a few minutes, and I hadn’t taken the time to notice what I needed.
I quickly found out I’d missed a lot. A generic sea cave is dark. A real sea cave has rhythm. A generic sea cave is mysterious. A real sea cave has hydraulics. Unfortunately, the hydraulics are usually more interesting.
You begin listening for the next swell. You notice where the water reaches on the wall. You notice the opening you came through because suddenly getting back through it matters more than admiring anything inside. Sound changes. Distance becomes difficult to judge. Rock that looked smooth from twenty feet away becomes something entirely different when the ocean slams puts your shoulder against it.
Those are the details that make a reader believe you.
So how much should you actually experience?
As much as you reasonably and safely can. Walk the street. Sit in the courtroom. Ride the ferry. Spend an afternoon in the neighborhood. Talk to the fisherman, detective, nurse, mechanic or botanist who knows what you don’t.
But sometimes research means more than that. Sometimes it means following your character somewhere a sensible person would not go.
So that’s why I’m officially giving you permission to walk into a Kaua’i sea cave. Just don’t do it during high tide with a northwest swell running twenty feet. Or if you do, don’t cite me in the accident report.
Excerpted from: Five Writing Lessons Nobody Explains Properly
Lesson #5
Editorial Clarity: I Have Finally Eliminated the Weak Parts
There is a peculiar stage of revision when you realize the manuscript has two voices. One is yours. The other is the voice you apparently hired to sound like a novelist.
The second voice is fond of adjectives. It likes atmospheric throat-clearing. It explains jokes. It explains emotions. It often explains things the reader understood three paragraphs ago.
That “literary” voice needs to go.
One thing you quickly learn when editing your writing is that cutting prose reveals voice rather than diminishing it.
We tend to think of voice as something we add: a striking metaphor, an unusual turn of phrase, a clever observation.
But natural voice is often already there. It’s buried under the sentences we wrote because we thought novels were supposed to sound like novels.
Start with the sentence you’re most proud of
This sounds perverse, but try it. Find one of those sentences where you can practically hear the awards committee clearing its throat.
Delete it. Read the paragraph again. Do you miss the sentence?
Sometimes you will. Put it back.
But sometimes the whole paragraph suddenly relaxes.
That’s not because the sentence was necessarily bad. It may simply have been performing harder than the story needed it to.
Cut the explanation after the good line. This is one of my worst habits.
You write:
“Fine,” she said. “I always wanted to die in a parking garage.”
Good.
Then, because apparently we don’t trust anybody: She was trying to make light of how frightened she was.
Delete that second sentence. The character already told us.
Your voice lives in what you allow the reader to understand without assistance.
Look for the sentence that arrived before the sentence First drafts frequently contain lots of airplane runways…as in, e was beginning to realize that perhaps something wasn’t quite right. (Well, not usually that bad.)
The reason for those runways is that writer hasn’t quite reached the thought yet.
Stephen King has famously argued against leaning on adverbs, particularly when dialogue already carries the meaning. Elmore Leonard took the same general approach even further: he wanted prose that didn’t call attention to the writer doing the writing.
That’s the principle worth stealing. Ask:Is this sentence or word creating meaning, or announcing meaning? A furious wave smashed against the jagged black rocks.
As opposed to: The wave hit the rocks hard enough to throw spray over the cliff. Now something happened.Concrete detail has more authority than description telling us how to feel about it.
Like most writers, I read what I put down aloud. Your eye is forgiving. Your ear is not.
Read a page aloud and you’ll hear the sentence that belongs to somebody giving a keynote address instead of somebody telling a story.
George Saunders described revision as a process of repeatedly reading his work and noticing his own tiny reactions—where the energy rises, where it falls, where something feels false—and adjusting accordingly. That’s an enormously useful way to think about editing. Not:Is this good writing?But: Do I believe myself here?
Find the places where you’re trying to impress and cut them. I’ve found they tend to cluster. One metaphor followed by another. One obscure word that technically works followed by two more. A paragraph containing four sensory details when one would do.
When you find a sentence that quietly turns around to admire itself, cut it. Then the next one. The strange thing is that the prose usually doesn’t become plainer. It becomes more distinctive. The joke lands because three other jokes aren’t elbowing it. The beautiful description gets room because the paragraph around it isn’t also auditioning.
My final tips: Keep the odd thing
This is important .Editing for clarity does not mean sanding away everything peculiar. If there’s a slightly strange observation that only you would make, be suspicious of cutting that. Keep the gecko.Cut the paragraph explaining the gecko. Voice lives in choices: what the narrator notices, what the character refuses to notice, where the joke appears, what gets described and what gets left alone.
Anne Lamott’s famous permission to write terrible first drafts matters partly because those drafts give us enough material to discover what we’re actually trying to say. Revision is where we remove everything that was helping us get there.
There is one final danger.Once you’ve discovered that cutting improves prose, it becomes extremely satisfying to cut everything. As my Friday cartoon demonstrates, the goal isn’t minimalism. The goal is concentration.
Keep the sentences that sound like you. Keep the details nobody else would have noticed. Keep the rhythms that feel natural in your mouth. Keep the occasional sentence that shows off a little, because sometimes it has earned the right. Cut what explains them. Cut what imitates somebody else. Cut what arrived because you were trying very hard to Write Well.
And somewhere underneath all that effort, you may discover the thing writers spend years trying to manufacture: your voice was already there.
Five Writing Lessons Nobody Explains Properly
Find all these articles on my X/Twitter feed:
Monday: Primal Terror — The terror is vivid. The sentence is buffering.
Tuesday: The Scene in Your Head — The scene is amazing. The sentence is idiotic.
Wednesday: When Characters Stop Cooperating — That’s when the bikini intruder shows up.
Thursday: The Sea Cave Challenge — Apparently the next chapter was down there.
Friday: Editorial Clarity — I have finally eliminated the weak parts.
That’s the week. Five problems solved. Several new ones created.