David Farland’s Daily Kick in the Pants—Prewriting

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Category: David Farland Newsletter

Published on Sunday, 15 January 2012 06:23

Written by David Farland

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The other day I was speaking to a young man who said, "I’ve always wanted to write, and sometimes I get great ideas, but when I sit down to write . . . nothing comes."

I think that’s the classic definition of "writer’s block." You have a general idea about what you want to write, but when it comes time to put words to paper, it just won’t come.

Normally, that’s because you haven’t done your "pre-writing." Now, what is "pre-writing?" Pre-writing is that time that you spend imagining what you’re going to write. It might be done for example before you begin outlining a novel. If you’re writing a short story, I spend time pre-writing and thinking about it. In fact, every time that I write—before I sit down and write a scene—I spend a little time thinking about how to approach it. I might imagine my setting, or consider how an argument might form, or think about how my character is feeling as I set the tone. In short, it’s "Imagineering."

Imagine that you’re going to make a meatloaf. You know what you want in it

—hamburger, sausage, onions, celery, all topped with brown sugar mixed with tomato soup.

Those are your ingredients. With your story, you need to come up with your basic ingredients

—your characters, conflicts, settings and themes. Very often in the early phases of a story, you might not have all of those pieces in place. You might sit down to write, and suddenly discover for example that you really haven’t got a "villain." Sure, you’ve got some other characters, but you’ve never bothered to spend time thinking about your villain.

What do you do? Well, if you were making a meatloaf, you’d go to the store and buy whatever it is that you don’t happen to have. With a story, you need to sit down and brainstorm a little. You need to spend some time "pre-writing" while you think about a possible villain for your story. What kind of villain is he? Well, you look at real villains and think about them as possibilities. If you watch the news, you’ll find plenty to choose from. But you can also look at historical figures, political figures, and so on. In other words, you go shopping for "model villains," and put pieces together until you’ve developed one that works for your story.

But maybe you don’t need a villain. Lots of stories don’t. You might be writing about a person with a social conflict or someone facing an inner weakness. That’s all right. Not all the stories are the same, and not all of them need the same "pieces." In just the same way, you don’t use the same ingredients to make a turkey dinner that you would to make a goulash.

Now, if you’re new to this, it may be unclear to you "what pieces you need." Since every story is different, you might find that your needs are slightly unlike any that you’ve seen. If you’re writing a "first-encounter" story, you might need two or three species of aliens. If it’s a novel, you might want a woman doctor and her love interest, perhaps her nine-year-old daughter and her daughter’s friend. In other words, to a large extent, you get to determine what your pieces are. But I’ve listed the basics already

—characters, conflicts, settings, and themes.

"Ah," you say, "I have all of the ‘pieces’ to my story, but it still doesn’t work!" Well, if you were making a meatloaf, you couldn’t just take the raw ingredients, shove them in a pan, and expect the meatloaf to turn out, could you? You also have to understand how to prepare the meatloaf

—chop up your onions, throw in some eggs and cracker crumbs to bind it, mix the meats, then let it sit in the refrigerator to set up for a couple of hours. When you bake it, you have to put it in a pan, then pour over the topping, and of course bake it properly. In other words, you have to know how to prepare your pieces and implement your story plan.

With writing, we break our story into scenes. We might have a scene that introduces a character, a problem, and setting and then takes us to a certain point in the story. Here are some scenes that I like in my stories: introductions, inciting incidents, complications that broaden the conflicts, complications that deepen the conflicts, climactic scenes, and the denouement. I’ll talk more about how to implement those "story steps" soon.

So as an author, you have to take some time once you’ve created your character and think about how you’re going to introduce him or her. You have to consider how you will depict the setting, what the opening conflict will be, and how quickly you want to reach that inciting incident. In other words, before writing, you need to have a plan of action for the story

—a broad outline—and you probably need to brainstorm on how you’ll put that opening scene together. You might have to ask yourself questions like, "What character will I use? How deeply do I want to penetrate into his thoughts and emotions? What is he doing when the story starts? How does his world change during the course of this scene? How much attention do I want to put toward use of poetic elements? What emotional tone do I want to portray?" and so on.

In other words, if you start a story and find that you’re not ready to write it, it’s because you’ve almost always got more "pre-writing" work to do. This is the kind of work that you don’t necessarily do at the keyboard. Much of my pre-writing gets done when I’m on a drive, or when I’m taking long walks. Sometimes I will sit in front of the television while I think about my stories, or I’ll find that while reading, a twist of a phrase gets me thinking.

The problem is, as a writer, time spent "pre-writing" doesn’t look productive from the outside. If I’m sitting quietly and thinking

—and my mind might literally be storming inside—my wife will inevitably say, "Since your just sitting there, why don’t you go out and fix the garage door? Or maybe get a good start on next year’s taxes?" The problem is that if I try to concentrate on doing the taxes, I’m not getting any real work done on my story. I often feel guilty for the time that I spend pre-writing.

You have to get over that guilt. You have to learn to boldly stare off into space, and let your imagination take you where no person has gone before!

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This coming Feb 4th is set for NinoCon

—an online writing convention. To learn more or to register, go to www.ninjaswrite.com

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