Tools of the Trade

Are you a plotter or a pantser (by-the-seat-of-your-pants writer)? Have you interviewed your characters? Do you know their GMC? Have you written your outline? Constructed your collage? Selected your soundtrack? Do you have a visual representation of your plot in sticky-notes across your desk?

If not, don’t panic. You’re okay. These are not necessary steps to best-sellerdom. They are just tools. They may be good tools for you. Hell, they may be the perfect tools for you, or they may be a one way ticket to disaster.

We writers are creative people. We are not only good at creating worlds and the people who populate them, we are also good at creating systems for the creating of the worlds. At conferences, workshops, and chapter meetings, you’ll hear people swearing by these tools, but that doesn’t mean they are for everyone.

Jennifer Crusie uses collages? My God! I must use collages! Of course, that isn’t how my brain works, so the images I collected lived in a manila folder in my filing cabinet while I wrote, never to be looked at again. Perhaps there was some value in the collecting itself, but I found that the images in my mind were much more dominant than the ones I had shoved into that manila folder. Sometimes an image will set me off – my current screensaver is this spooky looking Victorian house where I am setting my latest ghost book - but collaging for me is just wasted time.

Don’t get obsessed with what other people do to get where they need to go. These tools are options, not requirements. Give it a try, but don’t kick yourself if it’s a dead end. Eventually you will find the system that works for you.

My system involves vectors (everything I need to know about writing I learned in AP Physics), the kernel, percolating, generating, tweaking, occasionally overhauling, talking to myself as I drive around in my car (no, I do not have a blue-tooth, so if you see me driving around the peninsula and I look like I’m talking on an invisible cell phone, I am just crazy. No excuses), swimming, taking long showers, telling my mother how the story is going to end (she always cheats and reads the ending first anyway), and lying on the floor moaning in Italian. All of these things are necessary steps. For me.

Find your own necessary steps. If you don’t have a clue what your process is, I recommend going to workshops, reading how-to books, studying the craft and giving a few different methods a test drive. Or maybe you’re one of those writers who does best without a system. That would terrify me. If I didn’t know what it took for me to write a book, I would never feel confident that I could do it again on command. And unless you want to be a One Book Wonder, you need to be able to do this on command, under a deadline, with distractions and obligations battling for your attention.

So create your system, write like a fiend, and someday a newbie writer will be attending your workshop at the national conference on the tools to make it to the big time.