CSFW's Random Writing Strategies

This set of ideas comes from the Cambridge Speculative Fiction Workshop, a group headquartered around Boston. Current or former members of CSFW include Hugo and Nebula winner James Morrow; Hugo and Nebula winner Geoffrey Landis; Tiptree Award nominee Laurie Marks; Hugo and Nebula winner Jim Kelly; Nebula nominee Steven Popkes; Tiptree Award winner, Hugo and Nebula winner, and World Fantasy Award nominee Kelly Link; New York Times Notable Book author Alex Jablokov; and double New York Times Notable Book author Sarah Smith.

We are, to put it modestly, one of the great genre writing workshops.

A while ago we got together for dinner and shared our strategies for writing, creating characters, plotting, using time well, and having a cheerful attitude, as well as a few offbeat ideas.

Please email me to suggest other strategies! I'll post them here with your name (unless you'd prefer to remain anonymous).

Writing

Anything worth doing is worth doing badly at first. (Jacob Varela)

Write it down even if it sucks. No one ever got an unwritten book published.

Write down the hardest thing, the thing you don't want to write down, the real difficulty with the plot or the embarrassing shortcoming of your principal character. Write down the thing you can't possibly write down. You don't need to show it to anyone else; you don't need to print it out; but it's been said.

Write it all the wrong ways first. Write something down, knowing to yourself that it's wrong. Let it sit overnight (or however long it needs). Then ask, "What about this isn't wrong?"

Write more than one thing at once. Sometimes one book just needs stewing time; you can be working on something else.

Keep a journal about your reactions to what you're writing.

Creating Characters

Make extremely copious notes and do character sketches. (Jim Kelly)

Get your characters together in an imaginary unfurnished room. Have them talk over a plot situation. What's their take on it? Get them arguing. What do they really want? Who's going to win? Get them explaining their philosophies. Have them tell you their life stories. Write it all down.

Give each of them a distinctive way of speaking. Make them talk like people you know, Humphrey Bogart, whatever. Have them keep talking in that distinctive way, and talking, and talking, until they say something. Then fit the words and the way of speech together.

Give each character a goal. Have him or her do a soliloquy about what they'll do to achieve that goal, who's in their way, what they're going to do about it.

Give each character a tic. "I hate mice," says a prostitute. "And I hate virgins worse'n mice."

Plotting

Are you one of those people who comes up with wonderful single scenes but can't sustain a book for more than fifty pages? See “How to Plot When You Can’t.”

Plot problems are sometimes background problems. Keep notebooks or files on backgrounds.

Keep a notebook or computer file or shoebox of ideas. When you get stuck, go to the ideas file and see what's there.

When your characters don't want to do what you want them to, it may be because they desperately want to do something else. Let them do something stupid, which you don't know how to get out of. Then see what happens.

When in doubt, send somebody into the room on a unicycle with his hair on fire. (Philip K. Dick, via Tim Powers)

Give away the plot. Take all the neat things you thought you were going to save for the end and put them into the middle. Instead of making The Great Revelation a surprise ending, give it away. Make it something the characters are going to react to and let their reactions become a part of the second half of the book. (Annie Dillard)

Efficiency

Have a really good agent and delegate your business issues to him/her.

Everything that works for business efficiency works for writing, such as project management and project planning.

Plan your work week by week. Set daily and weekly writing schedules. You may not keep to them, but you know where you should be in order to get done with the project by the end of the allotted time.

Write an outline. Know where you think your plot and characters are going. (In the heat of writing, it's easy to lose track.) Don't feel you have to stick to it; use it to remind yourself.

Give in to writing binges.

Occasionally give in to the desire not to write, but don't wait for inspiration to strike before you write; be at your writing space regularly, every day.

Having a Cheerful Attitude

Nobody cares as much as you do, so you're in charge. You can do anything. (Neal Stephenson)

A way of life that requires you to bare your innermost feelings so that they can be either ridiculed or ignored will not always feel good. Recommended books: Ralph Keyes, The Courage to Write; Dr. David D. Burns, Feeling Good (a very decent book on cognitive therapy). Talk to your friends, your family, your pets. Have family, friends, and pets. Some people can live with only their writing to sustain them, but don't feel badly if you aren't one of them.

Some books will be better than others. Some will get more recognition than others. Do your best, then go on to the next thing.

It's not necessary to be a fulltime writer...or to be published...to learn a lot from writing. Reviews and recognition are great. They help you talk to more people. Financial success buys you time to write. But if you're a writer, what you learn comes from writing. And anybody, "successful" or not, can have that all their life.

Oblique Strategies

Play background music. The best music is something that's evocative but not intrusive., something not more than three or four minutes long, looped obsessively on the CD player or iPod or computer for hours. It keeps people away, too.

Take breaks. Get exercise. Keep an exercise machine in the office. Take care of your body.

Know about ergonomics.

Try Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies, a famous set of creative strategies developed by Brian Eno and the painter Peter Schmidt. (I have had a version for years and use it often.) For years people copied this rare set of cards by hand to give to friends; now of course we are in the computer age. Gregory Taylor's Oblique Strategies site (http://www.msn.fullfeed.com/~gtaylor/ObliqueStrategies/index.html) has the text of all of the editions and links to several online versions. Lonnie Foster has written a wonderful version for the Palm Pilot (http://www.serv.net/~tribble//pilot.html).

Use a Tarot deck.

Read books on creativity.

Read in areas you don't write in.