Having recently returned from a six month secret mission, Tom Schreck presents part six of his ongoing series on writing and being a working author. In addition to being the author of five books, he is has written for a wide variety of publications including The Business Review, Fightnews.com, American Health and Fitness, Professional Counselor and Catfancy:
There’s a lot of bullshit communicated about successfully writing a novel. If you heed it you’ll get paralyzed and never be able to finish your own work of fiction.
It is particularly paralyzing if you’re pressed for time. If you’re using time as an excuse to keep you from writing, read on. We might be able to dispute some assumptions that keep folks from getting their book completed.
The truth is that writing a book isn’t joining the Marines, it isn’t Transcendental Meditation nor is it discovering cold fusion. It has more to do with cleaning your basement, building a birdhouse or creating a garden in your backyard.
In other words it involves some planning, some trial and error and quite a bit of time on task.
It doesn’t require any of this crap:
Large amounts of uninterrupted time in a beautiful oak paneled office.
I write before my day job in between hound bays and getting up every 7 minutes to act as the uniformed doorman for my three four legged VIPs.
You must have a completely formed idea, outlined neatly with Roman numerals, bullet points and color coded categories.
Actually, you need an idea. Then, another idea of where to go. Do that for 300 pages and you get a book.
You can’t start your book until you go on police ride-a-longs, volunteer on the local SWAT team or travel to Rome to interview the custodian at the Vatican for your story background.
This is fiction. You make this shit up. Read an article, go to Wikipedia and then start writing.
You must write only when the muse comes to visit you.
Good luck with that. It’s plain crap.
You can’t finish because you’re blocked.
You’re not a colon and you don’t get blocked. You stop working. If what comes next to you isn’t obvious then you have to problem solve, do some trial and error and rewrite. It’s work.
Tom Schreck is the author of The Vegas Knockout, a recent number one hard boiled mystery on Amazon. His most recent release, Getting Dunn reached number seven. Visit www.tomschreck.com
