Do you hear where I’m coming from?
Lastly, some people respond well to descriptions of touch. For them, you may write about the crinkly dry leaves, or the rough, ragged bark on the trees, or the slimy moss on the wet stones. These people are described as being kinesthetic.
Of course, you can’t tell what type of person a reader may be, so you can’t target your book to your readers individually. Instead, you alternate between them in your writing, and strive to stimulate as many of our human senses as possible.
I’m perhaps also guilty of describing lots of movement in my novels. The characters are always doing something, and I think I write my books from the perspective of an invisible reporter who is constantly following the characters around just a metre behind them.
Perhaps one last tip, from my perspective, if I may.
I find it rather odd, but I am often told that my characters are very real. People can really identify with them, and they can picture them very well.
This is rather curious because I never really describe my characters at all.
I seldom say what colour hair they have, how big they are, or what clothes they wear.
I do this deliberately.
My characters are basically blank canvases onto which my readers can paint their own interpretations of who they are. In general, I try not to force my readers to think of characters in any particular way.
The result is that an awful lot of my readers think that I have described them very well indeed.
In fact, what is happening here is that the ‘SC’ in all of my readers is getting involved.
When a reader reads my books, their SC is whispering into their mind just what that SC sees or feels. And the reader accepts it.
Effectively, I am harnessing the power of my readers’ imaginations (their SCs) to do my job for me!
Thankfully my readers all have vivid imaginations, and I get given all the credit!
I thank you all.
Chapter 14
Overcoming problems by looking backwards not forwards
Writing a book can be a very daunting task. Even before you first sit down at the keyboard and stare at that blank page - a vast chunk of white space glowing ominously at you on the screen - onto which you are meant to type reams of wonderful words that will make people laugh, cry or bite their nails with the tension you create, the whole thing can be pretty scary.
Some people – who are not using the Irvine Method for writing – will never get past the first page. For them it will be like standing on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, their shoes, off, their trousers turned up, and their socks in their pockets, and wondering how they will ever cross the sea from Scotland to America. The space between the beginning of the book and the end just seems so vast, and without any knowledge of how they can possibly navigate their way across, they just stare at the waves for hours, then just put their shoes and socks back on, and go to the pub instead.
With the Irvine Method, it’s all very different. We have broken down the process of writing a book into steps, each of which is manageable. I’ve tried to show you how to approach each step, and I’ve tried to take the pressure of your writer’s shoulders by convincing you that most of the hard graft will actually be done by SC – your subconscious self – when you are not even aware that it is happening.
If I haven’t yet managed to convince you about the capability of your mind to do wonderful things for you, I’ve got one more idea about how to convince you of this.
Apparently, according to the answer I just found from googling my question on the internet, the human body has around 37.2 TRILLION cells in it.
That is, officially, quite a lot.
When you are healthy, and not in pain, most of us simply live our lives without even thinking about our bodies, our skeletons, our muscles, organs, blood vessels, or finger nails.
Yet, without us even sparing a momentary thought for it, our nails grow, our hair grows, our heart beats, our lungs give us air and help produce energy for our muscles to move, grow and repair, our organs keep us alive and moving. They flush out the toxins we are continuously filling our bodies with, even though we know it’s bad for us. We talk to each other, processing sounds and visual stimulations into meanings and experiences which we memorise and often treasure.
We live.
We enjoy life.
We have ideas.
We create things.
We solve problems.
We do our jobs and earn money.
And almost all this time, the one thing that manages all aspects of all these processes - millions of processes that take place simultaneously and never stop, and of which we are never CONSCIOUS - is our SUB-Conscious.
So, given that your SUB-conscious has already got so much to do, what’s the problem with just chucking in the small, tiny, miniscule little task of writing the next War and Peace, on top of all it’s already got to do?
Actually, for your SC, it’s not that big a job.
Just trust it to do it, and it will be done.
However, even though I say this, and even though most of you will believe it, others of you might want to believe it but still have a few hiccups along the way.
So, for those of you in that category, and perhaps anyone else who wants to learn this new mental trick so you can apply it to your private life in a million different ways when needed, can I share with you a novel little idea on how to overcome problems?
Basically, the issue that I want to help you overcome is this: sometimes, in life, when you face a problem, the issue seems so huge, so insurmountable, or so complex, that you feel overwhelmed. You give up trying to overcome the problem before you even start to try, because it just seems so … daunting.
When facing a huge question, or task, you might not have the faintest idea of where to begin, or how to start to go about finding an answer. How should you tackle a problem? What needs to be done to overcome it?
You don’t know what questions to ask, because you don’t really know how to quantify the problem. Is there just one big task, or a million small tasks? What questions do you need to ask?
Imagine, once again, you are standing at the edge of the ocean in the UK, and all you know is that you want to get to America. All you have is a pair of shoes and the clothes you stand in.
For many, the problem of ‘how’ you might get to America is so overpowering that you just can’t cope. Your brain can’t compute the questions, because you don’t know which questions to ask.
You are faced with a barrier, a wall of uncertainty and vagueness, and the wall seems so tall that you can’t figure out how to get over it.
We stand in front of that barrier or wall, look up at it and tremble.
And give up.
Let me teach you another approach.
It’s a very simple, yet very powerful technique or ‘trick’ that you can use to solve many, many different types of problems you may face in your life.
It also goes hand-in-hand with the visualisation technique I taught you in Chapter 9.
Here’s how it works.
Should you ever face a seemingly insurmountable problem, or task (like writing a book!), I want to imagine that instead of facing the problem from the front of it, that you are looking at it from the other side.
I want you to IMAGINE, to PICTURE IN YOUR MIND that you have ALREADY OVERCOME THE PROBLEM, that you have COMPLETED THE TASK - whatever task that is - and that you are looking backwards into your past, across the task you have completed, to where you started your journey.
First, I want to you sense what it feels like to have completed the task.
Imagine that you have already succeeded.
The task is behind you.
The work is complete.
The job is done.
Remember that feeling.
Next, I want you to ask yourself a question: how did you overcome the problem and get it done?
How did you approach the task, and complete it?
/>
How did you succeed?
Remember, in your mind’s eye, that you have already completed the task. You have already overcome any problem that you might have faced before. But you have overcome it.
How?
Ask yourself what you did? How the problem was overcome?
Was that huge, enormous problem that you faced before, actually just one problem, or many smaller problems put together?
If so, what were they, and HOW DID YOU OVERCOME them?
Remember, believe that you have done it!
For example, in your mind’s eye, you may now be standing at the top of the Empire State Building, having successfully made it to America. Or you may have written a book, had it published, and now you are sipping cocktails under that tree in the Caribbean working on your next book.
So, how did you get to America, and how did you write that book and get it published?
It’s not, “How WILL I get to America?” or “How WILL I write this book and get it published?”
It’s “How DID I get to America? Or “How DID I write the book?”
One word is different in the question you ask yourself, but the effect is phenomenal.
In the first question, you were overcome with the task, and your sub-conscious did not know how to FRAME the question. You never really tasked it with anything to do. You never gave it a problem to solve, because you couldn’t FRAME the problem and break it down. In your imagination you just saw a wall. You didn’t know how thick it was, or even if there were other walls behind it. How many walls (or problems) did you really need to overcome?
In the second question, you are asking your mind to start from a very different base-point. You are asking how you succeeded. You have programmed yourself to believe that you have already succeeded. There is no question of failure. You have not failed. You have succeeded.
You then ask your subconscious-creative-self to go away and think about how this was done.
Bingo!
A few days later, or weeks, or months, depending upon the size of the task/problem you have completed, or the scale of the achievement, your subconscious self will start feeding you answers as to just HOW you did it.
It will detail how you got from the start of the journey to where you imagined yourself at the end of the journey. It will detail the different stages you may have to go through to get there, breaking the journey down into smaller problems, and then detailing or suggesting how you got over those smaller issues.
With the benefit of visualised hindsight, SC will tell you how many walls you had to climb over, how thick those walls were, and how you did it.
Sometimes it will suggest solutions which are so obvious you will kick yourself.
“How did I get over the wall?” your conscious self may ask.
“You borrowed a ladder.” SC might reply.
Turning to the example of the book, in the earlier chapter I asked you to imagine that you were touching or holding the finished product to generate real motivation and belief in yourself that you could achieve the task of writing that book.
I asked you to imagine that you had done it.
In response, SC would then later help you with all the small serial tasks of writing that book, chapter by chapter.
Occasionally, whilst you are writing the book, you may come up against some small challenges or problems which are either real or imagined.
You can use the above technique to overcome both.
Sometimes the ‘problem’ appears in the book, where a character has to do something, seemingly impossible, but to progress you have to come up with a way to describe how the character does the impossible.
Mentally, for a while, you consider this from the ‘front’ of the problem. You face the problem. You get nowhere.
So, you switch viewpoints. In your mind’s eye you imagine that you (your character) is standing on the other side of the problem looking back. You ask SC to figure out and tell you just exactly how you did overcome the problem and achieve what needed to be done.
Bingo.
SC soon pops an answer into your head suggesting how you or your character did it. (It may be soon afterwards, or a few days later, but generally, it always works!)
Alternatively, the ‘problem’ you may encounter whilst writing the book may be a real one.
For example, your Wi-Fi has just stopped working and you can’t get access to the internet to do some vital research which you need to do in order to write your next scene and make it more realistic.
You become really frustrated and angry!
So, you imagine that you have solved the problem and that the research was done, and the scene was written.
“So, how did I do this?” you ask yourself.
Suddenly, you remember that the local library - with FREE Wi-Fi! – is only ten minutes’ walk from your house!
A last example, if I may, in the book context, could be from the discussion we had above about pacing yourself throughout the book.
You find yourself having written 40,000 words of a 100,000 word book. You have 10,000 words to go until you get to the scene you intend to write that will occur in the middle of the book.
You get nervous. A little scared…
“How on earth will I be able to get from where I am now, to that scene in the middle of the book?” you ask yourself.
Wrong question.
Instead, you should imagine in your mind that you HAVE already got to the middle of the book, and you then ask SC the question, “How many chapters did I have to write between where I was in Chapter ‘X’, and where I am now, in the middle of the book. And what action scenes or events did I have to write about in between, en route from there to here?”
It’s a different question.
To which SC will give you a useful answer!
Okay. Enough. I hope you see the point I am trying to make here.
Whenever you face a problem, adopt a different view point. Imagine that you have overcome that problem, and ask yourself just how you did it.
And when you sit facing a blank page, suffering from writer’s block, and not knowing what to write about in that next chapter, imagine instead that you have already written the chapter and ask SC to tell you what you wrote in it.
Then write it.
Chapter 15
Editing (Part One): Edit as you go!
Writing can be fun!
I love it!
But…there is one part which I, personally, do not like.
And I think that few people will.
It’s called editing.
Some people argue that it’s the most important part of the bok.
Sorry, that should have said ‘book’. (I’ll have to edit and correct that part later!)
People have different ways of writing. Some writers create the first draft of their book, and then go back and edit the document only when the first draft is finished.
Others edit it on screen as they go.
Another option is to print off everything you have written each day, and then edit that the same day. Basically, you write in the morning, edit early afternoon, and then correct on screen all the mistakes you found earlier that day.
Authors/writers who can afford it - it’s not cheap – pay professional editors to polish up the first draft.
Most beginners, however, probably rely on themselves to do the first few rounds of editing, and then hand the book to their friends and ask them to read it and pass judgement…and ‘please, if you can, mark-up any mistakes you find on the way?’
So how do I do it?
Well, I write one or two chapters a day when I’m in the middle of writing a book. I have a day job and a family so I only get about an hour each day to write, in the evening.
I sit down and let the creative juices flow, and try to let SC tell me as clearly as possible what my fingers should be typing.
When I’ve hit my target for that day/evening, I print off my pages, then take a break.
Before
I go to bed that evening, I find the time to sit down somewhere quiet, or take it to bed, then read what I’ve written that day. Whenever I find a mistake, I underline it on the page, and make a mark in the border to indicate the mistake. I find that if you don’t do that, you might miss the mistakes later on when you’re going through the pages.
If I find a bit that’s rubbish, boring, repetitive, or doesn’t make sense, I might write new text in the border area of the page with a line linking it to where it should go in the main text, or I simply make a mark and jot down a note that it needs to be rewritten.
When the first draft is complete, I clean my office, get all the pages with the corrections on them, and then spend several days or weeks going through the book, correcting all the mistakes found, and generating Version Two of the book.
Then I print off the book, read the whole book from beginning to end, mark down all the mistakes and suggested edits that I have found, and then spend the next few days correcting everything. Again.
I may then do this one more time.
What happens next is what we will discuss in Part Two of this chapter topic.
Chapter 16
Build a pile and watch it grow!
The Irvine Method of writing is all about motivation.
Creating motivation, building motivation and maintaining it as you slowly (or rapidly!) create your book, and move from Page 1 with a word count of ‘Zero’ to the last page with a word count of approximately 100,000. (Or more, depending upon your strategy and how carried away you get!)
Get Writing! How ANYONE can write a Novel! Page 6
