The Companion to the Fiery Cross, a Breath of Snow and Ashes, an Echo in the Bone, and Written in My Own Heart's Blood

by Diana Gabaldon

  Phrase (as printed): yows

  Phrase (if revised):

  Phonetic transcription:

  Book: OLC Vol. I

  pb:

  hc: 244

  Language: Lowland Scots

  Translation: Ewes; female sheep.

  PART SEVEN

  WRITING, AND OTHER GAMES YOU PLAY BY YOURSELF

  MIND GAMES

  he greatest thing about writing is that it’s just you and the page. The most horrifying thing about writing is that it’s just you and the page. Contemplation of that dichotomy is enough to stop most people dead in their tracks.

  Success in writing—and by that I mean getting the contents of your head out onto the page in a form that other people can relate to—is largely a matter of playing mind games with yourself. In order to get anywhere, you need to figure out how your own mind works—and believe me, people are not all wired up the same way.

  Casual observation (i.e., talking to other writers for thirty years or so) suggests that about half of us are linear thinkers. These people really profit from outlines and wall charts and index cards filled out neatly in blue pen with each character’s shoe size and sexual history (footnoted if these are directly correlated). The rest of us couldn’t write that way if you paid us to.

  The non-linear thinkers are described in all kinds of ways, most of them not euphonious: chunk writers, pantsters (I really dislike that one, as it suggests one’s literary output is not from the upper end of the torso), piecers, etc. All these terms carry a whiff of dismissal, if not outright disdain or illegitimacy, and there’s a reason for that.

  (This is the insidious principle that underlies Politically Correct speech, by the way—the undeniable recognition that names have power, coupled with the invidious notion that by insisting on a specific term, the person assigning the name thus controls the person named, by controlling the perception of the named party. Hence the tiresome attempts to rename political parties as “haters,” “tax-and-spend liberals,” etc.

  Stupidly annoying as this may be—it works. Frankly, it’s a lot older than the notion of PC; it’s one of the baseline techniques of exorcism and voodoo. As a character in one of my books observes [paraphrasing], “Ye don’t call something by name unless ye want it to come.”)

  Anyone educated in the art of composition in the Western Hemisphere at any time in the last hundred years was firmly taught that there is One Correct Way to write, and it involves strictly linear planning, thought, and execution. You Must Have a Topic Sentence. You Must Have a Topic Paragraph. YOU MUST HAVE AN OUTLINE. And so forth and so tediously on…

  Got news for you: you don’t have to do it that way. Anything that gets words on the page is the Right Thing to Do.

  As a non-linear thinker myself, I prefer less-pejorative terms. I like “network thinker.” Consider thinking and writing as a process that lights up your synapses (which it does): a linear thinker is like a string of holiday lights. Red-blue-green-yellow-orange-red-blue-green-yellow-orange-red! And it lights up and then you can wind it around your Christmas tree or your Kwanzaa flagpole and it’s all pretty.

  Well. You know those nets of lights that you throw over your front wall or your cactus or anything else that it would be inconvenient to staple strings of lights to? Those look like this:

  The logical connections (the electricity, if you will) between any two lights in that network are there. It isn’t random, and in the end, it’s logical. It’s even linear. It just…isn’t necessarily a straight line.

  Now, the reason that the educational establishment insists on the linear model of writing is that you can force a non-linear writer to work linearly (or at least pretend to). You cannot make a linear writer work non-linearly. (In fact, every time I describe the way I write to a linear-thinking person, they get annoyed. “You can’t possibly do it that way!” they say. By which they mean that they can’t possibly do it that way—and they can’t.)

  But you can make any fifth-grader cough up a reasonably coherent essay using the linear model—and no one ever mentions that this isn’t the only way to do it. (Every time I go talk to an elementary-school class for Career Day, I pause midway and ask the teacher to turn his or her back. Then I tell the kids, “Okay, the teacher can’t see you, so tell me the truth. When you get one of those essay assignments and you have to turn in an outline and a rough draft and a polished draft and a final copy—how many of you just write the final copy and then fake up the rest?” About a third of the class will raise their hands. I think it would be more, but some of them are scared to admit it.)

  Beyond the fascinating process of figuring out how your brain works, though, are the more mundane but nonetheless important mind games: the ones you play with yourself (or others) in order to write—or not write—in the first place.

  THE “I’LL START MY BOOK AS SOON AS…” GAME

  This is the one where you avoid even beginning to think about writing, by making the assumption that you can’t possibly write anything worthwhile unless you have several hours every day to be dedicated to writing, the full approval and support of family and friends, and a Room of One’s Own, equipped with ergonomic chair, footstool, and keyboard.

  I had a friend like this, at the university where I used to work. After I published Outlander, all my friends and colleagues in the department1 were agog, and several of them began to consider the possibilities of writing a novel themselves. Whenever I saw this one friend, he would tell me all about his novel: he had a wonderful premise (it really was a wonderful premise), and as soon as he finished the seminar he was teaching and got this pesky report out of the way, “I’ll have a big chunk of time and can sit down and get started!”

  After several repetitions of this, I drew a deep breath and sadly told him the truth. “Bill,2 you’re never going to write that book.” And sure enough, he never did, alas.

  It’s a simple but harsh truth: nobody ever finds the time to do something; you make time, or you haven’t got any.

  Where a lot of people go wrong, I think, is in the assumption that you can’t write unless you do have large blocks of time that you can dedicate to the activity. This actually isn’t true. (In fact, some people can’t write for long stretches. I’m one of them….) What is essential is that you actually do write—no matter how much time you have available.

  If you have no more than ten minutes a day in which you can write (while your spouse is showering, perhaps), then write for ten minutes. Eventually you’ll have a book. If you say, “Oh, I can’t write unless I have three uninterrupted hours”…you won’t have a book.

  If you’ll pardon a bit of personal testimony here: when I made up my mind to write a novel, I had two full-time jobs3 and three children under the age of six. Both my jobs required constant writing, and I wrote in the middle of the night, because that’s when you work if you have small children and work out of your home.

  I couldn’t do what people normally do when they encounter a block in the writing—i.e., get up, wander away, and never come back—because I had to keep producing words in order to get paid. So what I did instead was sort of tag-team writing: when the grant proposal I was working on stuck, I’d shift immediately to the top software package waiting on my review pile and start a piece for Byte or InfoWorld. When that stuck, I’d either go back to the proposal—which might have unstuck itself while I was gone—or start in on a handout for one of my seminars.

  When I decided to write a novel,4 I just added it to the rotation: grant proposal, software review, textbook chapter, scene from novel. This method kept me sitting at my keyboard, being productive. So during the three or four hours I’d normally work at night,5 I was probably hitting the novel scene three or four times and ending the night with five hundred to a thousand words…to say nothing of half a software review, two pages of textbook, and two or three paragraphs of a grant proposal.6 Not saying this approach will work for you, mind, but you won’t know what does work unless you try things.

&nbs
p; Moving right along, we come to the sort of games that rely on other people to stop you.

  THE “I FEEL TOO GUILTY TO WRITE” GAME

  This one is gender-specific; only women play it. “How can I possibly be so selfish as to take time away from my family to do something that I probably can’t do, and even if I could do it, it wouldn’t make any money, and…and…and…”

  Ahem. Do you by chance watch television? Oh, you do. Do you feel guilty about it? Do you have a hobby? Do you have friends? Do you feel guilty about those things?

  While you ponder that one, I’ll admit that often it isn’t entirely misplaced guilt; your family really will try to stop you from writing, because they feel threatened by anything you want to do that doesn’t involve them. Their instincts tell them that if they wanted you, you would instantly stop watching television or doing Pinterest and attend to their needs, whereas if you were writing something…maybe you wouldn’t.

  Also, in all justice, they understand things like scrapbooking, gardening, and having coffee with your next-door neighbor. They don’t understand writing, because they don’t know anyone who does it, and everyone feels threatened by things they don’t understand.

  This suspicion is particularly acute in husbands, who fear not only the loss of your attention but harbor the suspicion that the book will seduce you away from them. (Fortunately, this type of interference is fairly easy to deal with: take him to bed and wear him out—thus simultaneously reassuring him of your affections and putting him to sleep—then get up and go write.)

  A refinement of this game is “the dreaded silence,” as someone of my acquaintance described her family’s and friends’ response to her writing. This is where you brave the disapproval (real or imagined) of your family and write anyway, but when you attempt to share the fruits of your labors with them, they meet your overtures with indifference, refusing to comment at all.

  I’ve often heard stories from writers about family members being dismissive or hostile about their work. Which, you know, should kind of tell you something. Like…don’t show your stuff to your family and friends.

  I never did; I didn’t even tell them what I was doing. On the one hand, it puts people in a really difficult position: almost no one (other than another—experienced—writer, and often not then) is equipped to give genuinely constructive feedback. Your family? Almost certainly the only thing they could say would be either a feeble “Oh, I like it” or “Oh, God, this makes me squirm to read it.” More often than not, they’ll just avoid the discomfort of trying to find something to say by ignoring it.

  On the other hand…having a writer in your immediate vicinity is genuinely disturbing—not to say threatening—to a lot of people. On the most basic level, they—your family, and particularly your spouse—feel that you’re taking time and attention away from them to do this weird thing that isn’t likely to result in any positive outcome. And, you know…you are. Which is why a lot of women who write feel terribly guilty about it and often give up. (Men, oddly enough, seldom feel at all guilty about taking time and attention away from their families to build kit cars or play golf….)

  On a higher level, family and friends may feel disturbed because they don’t understand how writing actually works (nobody does, except the people who do it) and think that you are literally transcribing incidents from your life (they having dimly apprehended some aphorism about “write what you know”) and are “putting me in your book.”

  (Frankly, I’m not sure silence isn’t better than the other possible reactions, like people constantly asking when you’re going to finish “that book” and sell it to the movies for a million dollars, or asking if you’re writing smut, because they understand that’s really profitable, or suggesting that you write children’s books—instead of historical fiction, say, or mysteries—“because that’s really easy and you’d be done sooner.”)

  So you really have two choices about this:7 brass it out, announce to your family what you’re doing, grit your teeth, and resist all their efforts to sabotage you, or…hide what you’re doing until it’s too late to stop you.

  Me, I hid. Not entirely on my family’s account—but because I didn’t want anyone trying to tell me how to do it or pressuring me to do this or that (or not do this or that); I needed to figure it out for myself.

  Everybody does.

  All right. So you defy family, friends, and the clock and actually write something. The mind games aren’t over….

  THE “I KEEP DELETING” GAME (AKA “THE EDITOR ON MY SHOULDER WON’T SHUT UP…”)

  This is the one where you write a sentence, decide it’s no good, and delete it. You write another one, decide that’s no good, and delete it. And so forth and so on. I can’t count how many times I’ve seen someone post a lamenting message saying something like, “I worked all day and have nothing to show for it! I deleted all three thousand words I wrote and I feel like crap.”

  Yeah, who wouldn’t?

  Fortunately, the answer to this one is simple: Don’t Do That.

  I mean, really—why assume that pressing the DELETE key is progress? It isn’t.

  Part of this is purely psychological, and another part is totally pragmatic:

  One) If you end the day with a blank page, you will naturally feel as though you aren’t getting anywhere, because you have nothing to show for your work. You deserve credit for your work! (Whether it’s good work at the moment or not, it cost you a chunk of your life. It counts.)

  Two) As one well-known author often says, “You can’t fix a blank page.” Look. Perfect sentences do not “just flow” from a writer’s fingertips. It doesn’t work that way. Still less do elegant and intricate stories pour unfettered from a writer’s brain—any writer’s brain.

  Now, I’ve never read How-to-Write books (I was born with a strong “says who?” gene that tends to inhibit my taking on faith anything that’s authoritatively stated), but I have read writers’ biographies and stories about How They Did It. That’s very valuable, because it shows you a little bit about how writers actually work—as opposed to “Step 1: get a large sheet of whiteboard and pin it to your wall…” or “Never write in the first person…”

  P. G. Wodehouse, for example (a very famous—and very good—British writer of comic novels), worked regularly, six hours a day (and produced something like ninety-five novels as a result). He wrote for three hours in the morning, had lunch and a nap, then spent three hours fixing what he’d written in the morning.

  He described his office, with the pages of the novel he was working on pinned all along the walls; the pages that worked and that he thought were good were pinned up straight, while the ones he didn’t like were pinned crookedly, so he could see at once what needed work.

  This guy didn’t delete stuff he thought was imperfect; he fixed it.

  Ross Macdonald (pseudonym of award-winning crime writer Kenneth Millar) described how, when he was starting out, he decided that he must take writing seriously, as though it was a real job. He couldn’t afford to rent an office but talked the superintendent of his building into letting him work in the boiler room. So every morning he would dress carefully in his only suit, with a clean, ironed shirt and tie, pick up his briefcase, and go downstairs to work.

  As it was his only suit, when he reached the boiler room, he took it off, hung it on a hanger, and sat down to work all day in his underwear. Pretty sure he wasn’t deleting stuff, either—he took his job seriously.

  I should probably admit that I’ve never understood the “editor on your shoulder” concept, because I don’t have one. Not (I hasten to clarify) that I don’t view what I write with a critical eye nor yet that I don’t take infinite trouble over my work—just that I’ve never seen the point of deliberately getting in your own way.

  I see a lot of writers—mostly women, though some guys do it, too—who go on and on about how they can’t get anything done because they keep throwing away their work, and they’re obviously bad at this, and why did
they think they could write in the first place, and it’s so depressing, etc. I mean…why add the component of self-blame to what’s already a noticeably difficult profession? You don’t have to do that.

  I suppose it doesn’t behoove a nice Roman Catholic girl descended (perhaps) from converso Jews to admit to not possessing a sense of guilt, but I really don’t see the point. I mean, maybe you should feel guilty about spreading gossip or not giving the bum on the corner a dollar when you have one in your pocket, but about your own work? C’mon…

  What you do when you write is a noble thing, no matter what the outcome. Give it—and yourself—a little respect.

  Words have power; use them carefully. And now…watch this:

  “A CODA IN THREE-TWO TIME” (ANNOTATED)

  Last year, I was a presenter at the Surrey International Writers’ Conference. This is my very favorite conference—the only one I go to every year. That being so, though, I’ve given the same (more or less; I kind of ad-lib them) workshops several times: Details, Character, Dialogue, etc. So when the organizers asked me what I’d like to teach that year, I decided on the spur of the moment to Do Something Different.

  This requires a little backstory: a few months prior to this, I’d been asked to write a foreword for a Writer’s Digest Annotated Classics edition of Jane Eyre. Now, “annotated” here means something different than it usually does: this was to be a special edition for writers, and the annotations were meant to point out to aspiring writers exactly what Charlotte Brontë was actually doing at various points of the novel, in terms of technique.

  I thought that was a great idea. Because a lot of aspiring writers are always looking for “the secrets of great writing” (or however the latest how-to book chooses to put it), and that always struck me as misleading—because the simple (and appalling) truth is that writers don’t have secrets. Anything a writer knows how to do is Right There on the page. And if you’re looking with an analytical eye (or maybe just read a lot), you’ll see what it is that Writer X knows how to do.