SpiralTruth

Chris Brogan just wrote a great post on writing habits. I just finished the final draft of my first novel, Leaving Wonderland (preview here), and I think he was pretty bang on. His emphasis on structure is key. I wrote Leaving Wonderland in chunks. A scene here, a scene there. Sometimes I didn’t know where something would even fit as I wrote it. But even writing in this sort of haphazard way, I always had the major plot points in mind. The beginning and the end were never in question. This novel was also the last in a long line of false starts. None of those false starts were particularly bad ideas. It’s easy to come up with great ideas for a novel. The problem was that I simply ran out of steam. And I ran out of steam because I hadn’t written enough to know how to keep motivated on an idea. The only cure for that is, of course, to keep writing. Chris takes a much better approach than I did originally, by writing in many different formats and on many different subjects. Always writing about something allows him to hone his skills and get valuable feedback about finished works while he chips away at the longer pieces. One of my karate senseis told us that the only secret to karate is repetition. Same goes for writing. You just have to do it over and over again until it gets to where you want it to be.