A Winning Writing Tip

I’ve just returned from the Boyup Brook Book Bonanza armed with enthusiasm and a wealth of knowledge and new ideas.
For those of you who love to write, I thought I’d devote a few blogs to sharing what I’ve learned.

The first thing I want to talk about is probably the hardest skill to maintain. And that skill is writing freely without engaging the internal critic.

It’s something we all know, but also what we all forget as we learn about the importance of plotting, developing characters, researching and “showing, not telling” the reader what is happening in our stories.

Dr Alan Hancock, a teacher and freelance writer, was the guest speaker at the literary dinner during the Book Bonanza. It was Alan who threw out the idea to us that all these things - plotting, working on sentence structure, spending hours on drawing up our characters - didn’t need to happen. Of far more importance is the ability to run with an idea from beginning to end.

I wouldn’t have been surprised if some of us around the dinner table were thinking, “who is this guy?” because as writers, we know how important all these things are in creating good writing. But he clarified his message by asking us the following question: “If I asked you to tell me what you’re thinking right now, would you do it, and if not, why?” In effect, he was showing us how we restrain ourselves constantly, evaluate what we are thinking, edit it and reconstruct it before we dare to speak it. In doing this, we block our ideas and our creativity.

It’s the same with our writing. How many times have you had a great idea, then written the first sentence, stopped, re-read it, deleted it, then sat staring at the computer screen thinking, “maybe that wasn’t such a good idea”? It’s true, it happens all the time. The critic in our heads has risen from its slumber to run a red line through our work and deem it stupid or badly written or dull.

Alan wasn’t saying never to use all the skills and techniques we have in our writer’s kit to produce brilliant work. What he’s saying is to let the ideas and words flow freely in the first writing. Once the piece is written, then the editing begins. If we continually second-guess ourselves and squash an idea, we will lose that flow of ideas.

As I reflected on all this, I realised that this is the way I write. . I always run with ideas that spring into my mind, and most of them happen at night. Even if the idea sounds basic, or as though it is going nowhere, I work on it anyway. In fact, my first novel, “Seeing Dogs” came about in this way. I hadn’t done any plot lines or character studies. I’d just written the whole thing. Then I went back over it and saw with surprise that it had a good plot and the characters were distinctive. Needless to say, it required a good edit before I could send it off to a publisher, but at least the story was there.

So my goal from here on in is to continue that style of writing, to allow more ideas to take root in my brain. Let’s hope it works! As a writer, I need all the ideas I can muster.

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