Dreadful Writing Advice: Timelines are Bad

Perhaps you’ve been wondering where I’ve been for lo these many weeks while my unfortunate internet platform has been withering and dying.

Well, I’ll tell you: I’ve been rewriting.

During which, I was saved from hum-drum tasks such as going to the market and washing my hair and having any leisure time whatsoever because, ta-dah, right from the start, I stood fast to my writing motto, “Chaos Works Good,” and eschewed the timeline.

(Also, the outline. But I’ll save that for several other helpful posts.)

Here’s the thing. In this rewrite, I took three years of story and boiled it down into a more intense single year. Actually, more like nine months. And during this process, which was already hard enough, I decided to avoid unpleasant mathematical endeavors, such as counting. Because I prefer to allow my characters to float freely through the time-space continuum, throwing caution, the laws of nature, and the story arc to the wind.

Soon I had chapter after chapter of events all unfolding organically during quite the protracted fictional month of December. As it turned out, my characters had revealed themselves exquisitely (and don’t forget organically) during a month with 84 days in it.

Sadly, this book is supposed to be realistic contemporary, so I was trapped with the conventions of my genre.

What can I say?

But let me assure you that the book was much, much better before I became enslaved by the calendar and the soul-snuffing dictates of the timeline, and had to spend weeks and weeks digging myself out of my deeply creative hole.

So if you, too, are a deeply creative soul, so fully immersed in your own process that counting the days in a month would introduce tedium and crassness to a universe of inspiration and flashes of magical whatsit (as indeed you should be), avoid that timeline!

You didn’t want to go to the market, wash your hair, or finish that book anyway, right?

Really Bad Writing Advice: Worst Tips Ever - When to Write

Being sadly short on the kind of blatantly idiotic questions that inspire really bad writing advice, I have taken to generating dreadful tips.

Follow these tips scrupulously, and soon I will be the only novelist on earth and it won’t even matter if my rewrite has gaping holes in the so-called plot because everyone will be so desperate for a book.

1.) Write only when you’re inspired.

2.) Write only when you have finally saved up enough to purchase an ergonomically perfect chair. In leather. From Sweden.

3.) Write only when you’re not tired.

4.) Write only when you have found the exactly right software to organize your every word. It’s out there somewhere. Keep looking.

5.) Write only when your children, husband, and dog are asleep.

6.) Write only when your house is immaculate. Dirty dishes and unmade beds are a terrible distraction. How can you write when you ought to be vacuuming?

7.) Write only when you’re not tempted to surf the internet. If you want to surf the net, it means your head isn’t in your book anyway.

8.) Write only if your have the perfect outline. Rework that outline. Is it perfect yet? I didn’t think so.

9.) Write only if you have carefully revised every word that you’ve already written.

10.) Write only if you have a womb that has produced children. OK, this is a shocker coming from me, big opponent of the mommy wars, but if you haven’t read the world’s least charitable obituary post on Maeve Binchy in The Telegraph, don’t write until you’ve seen it. Don’t write until you’ve scanned any number of online newspapers for disturbing articles; the adrenaline rush will help you write faster. Should you ever write.

Here’s the article: Don’t quit before the last line. You’ll write so fast.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/9446816/If-Maeve-Binchy-had-been-a-mother-....html