The Vagabond Trust
Writers At Home In Migration

Writing in the 21st Century appears here every Thursday. If you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to leave a comment, or email the author at mromard@gmail.com. This column is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License.

I know, I know, you’re very busy. You want to write, but you just can’t find the time to do it. I often feel that way too, and I still manage to put together at least 500 words most days.

A friend of mine once told me that that busy people who want to get a lot of stuff done don’t find the time to do it. They make the time. There’s a pretty essential difference there.

You’re never going to find time, even just half an hour, if you just wait for it to pop up while you’re doing other things. You’re never going to find the time if you think you need to be inspired, or if you always feel a need to do more research before you start writing. You’re definitely not going to find the time to write while you’re refreshing Facebook or watching YouTube videos.

All of these things are fine activities, but they won’t help you put words together. And that’s because you need to make the time to write.

So here’s what you do. Tell yourself that you’re going to write, and then do it. That’s it.

But the kids will distract you, and you’re waiting for some important email, and your best friend from high school just posted a bunch of pictures from prom and you’ve got to tag everyone you know in them because they didn’t do it themselves.

Find someone else to look after the kids for an hour. Your email can wait, as can anything else you think you need to do online. The internet will still be there when you’re done. So will all of your housework. You can watch TV later. Now is writing time, and you’re going to have to get serious about that if you expect to actually get any writing done.

You don’t have to exist in a vacuum to get some writing done, but you do have to learn to ignore distractions. That might mean closing your web browser, or turning off your phone, or locking yourself alone in a room for a while.

Or it might not. Maybe you can have your web browser open and keep an eye on your Facebook news feed while you’re writing. Maybe you can sit on the couch with your laptop and watch TV while the kids are screaming and playing in the room and you can still get your writing done. I don’t know, I’m not you. If you feel that you just can’t stop doing something to write, to to write while you’re doing it. If it doesn’t work, you actually are going to have to stop doing whatever that is for a little while.

If you find that you still can’t stop whatever that is, or get a break from it, ask yourself if it’s really a higher priority than your writing. Is it really that important to watch every one of those TV shows? For some of them the answer may be yes (I don’t know, I don’t really watch much TV myself, and when I do it’s in short bursts). For really important stuff like watching your kids or going to work, I would definitely hope that the answer is yes. But when the answer is no, you know that’s some room in your schedule that you can make time for your writing.

Writing in the 21st Century appears here every Thursday. If you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to leave a comment, or email the author at mromard@gmail.com. This column is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License.

Small bit of administrivia before we start: I’m shortening the title of this column because it’s not really a how-to, exactly.

I was watching the special features on the Braveheart DVD that I have, and one of them was about Randall Wallace, the guy who wrote the script for the movie. Now, Braveheart is a flawed movie in many ways, but it’s also one of my favourites. It’s a very exciting, epic adventure story with kick ass fight scenes and it’s genuinely funny in parts (especially in the characters of Hamish and his father, and Stephen the Irish guy). Braveheart has also been attacked for its many historical inaccuracies, which are too numerous to list here, and would detract from the point that I want to make here (but just for fun, here’s an analysis of the first two and a half minutes, with several errors and a minute and a half of opening titles and aerial scenery).

In watching Wallace talk about the script, it’s pretty evident that historical accuracy wasn’t his biggest concern. He wanted to write something that felt true to himself as a story. It seems like any attempt to add historical accuracy only occurred after the script was completed. Wallace has a decent sense of humour about it, pointed out at one point that he was being made fun of for details like having a castle with glass windows.

Now, I’m not going to defend the film’s many inaccuracies. But I would like to point out that, in the end, they didn’t rally matter. Braveheart was a hugely successful film, doing well at the box office and winning several awards. And this happened because Randall Wallace wrote what he wanted to write.

You should do the same. If you want to write, you’re going to enjoy it a lot more if you are writing the stories that you want to write. I don’t care if it’s an historical inaccurate epic adventure, or some slash fan-fiction. If you don’t enjoy what you’re working on, at least a little bit, you’re not going to keep at it.

You may be limited in what you can do with your writing if you take this approach. You might have a hard time getting your work published. In fact, if you’re writing fan fiction, you may not be able to legally publish it at all. Some creators, like Diana Gabaldon get really pissed off at the idea that fan fiction even exists, whether it’s published or not. Others, like Charles Stross, don’t care as long as you aren’t making money from it, and they don’t have to read it.

Go ahead, let yourself write the story that you’ve always wanted to write. Who cares what other people think about it? What you think about it, and whether or not you enjoy writing it, is what really matters anyway.

This is part five of an ongoing series of articles to help you start writing. This series will appear every Thursday.

This week I want to talk about making sure that your characters seem like legitimate people. We’ve all experienced works with characters that are flat or one-dimensional. Those of us who write have probably all written characters that are one-dimensional too. It seems to me that the problem often lies in focusing too much on the protagonist, and not enough on the characters that the protagonist interacts with.

Something to think about, when you’re developing characters, is the Bechdel Test, and whether or not your story could pass it. The Bechdel Test comes to us from a comic strip called Dykes to Watch Out For. In it, a character has three criteria that must be met for her to see a movie. It must:

1. includes at least two women
2. who have at least one conversation
3. about something other than a man or men.

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This is part four of an ongoing series of articles to help you start writing. This series will appear every Thursday.

No dialogue for me, I took a vow of silence.

Eventually your characters are going to have to talk to each other. Well, they usually will, at least. It is possible to have a story without dialogue, but it’s not a common occurrence. Really, unless you set out to write a story without any dialogue (as my fellow Vagabond Jordan Trethewey did a few weeks ago… hey Jordan, why don’t you tell us all about that?), you’re going to use at least a little bit of it.

Good dialogue can be really tricky to write, and I’ve heard it claimed that it’s the hardest thing for new writers to write well. I’m not sure how true that is, because every writer has their own strengths and weaknesses, regardless of how much experience they have.

Personally, I’ve always felt that dialogue was one of my strong points. At any rate, if it isn’t, no one has pointed the fact out to me. So let’s pretend that it definitely is.
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This is part three of an ongoing series of articles to help you start writing. This series will appear every Thursday.

Go ahead, describe me!

Now that you’ve started to flesh out the ideas for your story, it’s time to focus on your voice.

What do I mean by voice? Well, your voice is what sets you apart from other writers. Voice is your tone and your style. Think about the last time that you had to read a memo at work, or a form letter from a business. Now think about the last time that you read an email message from a friend. Other than the messages themselves, what is different about these things? Chances are, the memo or business letter would have been written with more formal and neutral language than the email was (unless you work in a really casual office, or if you have really boring friends).

So how do you establish your voice as a writer?
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This is part two of an ongoing series of articles to help you start writing. This series will appear every Thursday.

Write about monks!

Last week we ended with you writing down an idea. This week, you’re going to start expanding on it.

There’s an old adage that you’ve probably heard before. Write what you know. Try not to take that too literally. You probably don’t want to set your story where you work, with all of your coworkers as your characters. Well, you might want to, but it’s probably not a good idea, because you’re bound to offend someone, and that’s just going to make your life more difficult.

There’s a lot of things that you know that you can write about. You know how people talk and interact with each other. You know that behave differently depending on who else is around, or where they are. You know that different people respond to challenges in different ways. You know what it’s like to experience a wide range of emotions, and why you’ve experienced them. This the stuff that you know that you want to use.

Let’s pull out your idea from last week. Maybe you’ve got an idea for a scene, or a couple of characters that you want to write about. Maybe you’ve got a setting that you’d like to write about, but no idea what the story is yet. What you need to do is to start developing the context for your story.

You need to figure out who your characters are, what’s going to happen to them, and how they are going to react to what’s happening. You don’t need to have all of the answers right away. Part of the fun of writing is that you get to figure some stuff out as you’re writing.

So there are two things that you can do with your idea at this point, now that you’ve started to ask yourself some questions about what’s going on. You can make an outline of what has to happen. Or, if you’re like me and don’t like to outline, you can just start writing. Pick a scene that you want to write, and start working out some details on the page. Introduce some characters and have them interact with each other.

Next week we’re going to talk about writing descriptions, and the ever important show don’t tell rule. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free post a comment on this site, or email me at mromard@gmail.com.

This is part one of an ongoing series of articles to help you start writing. This series should appear every Thursday.

This could be you!

If you’re not already writing, this can be a pretty intimidating idea.

Fortunately, it’s also a pretty simple idea. If you want to write, you need to write. It’s so basic that you wouldn’t think there is a need to say it, but many would-be writers need to be reminded of this. It’s very easy to get caught up in daydreaming about being a wildly successful, rich and famous author, or to talk yourself into believing that you don’t have time to write, or that you don’t have anything to write about. Or maybe you think that you don’t have the tools, the talent, or the training necessary to be a writer.

You’re wrong.
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Copies of the Mind Bloating anniversary revival are now available for FREE pickup at Backstreet Records and Westminster Books. Well, they have been for two weeks now, I just forgot to post a notice.

The zine is open for submissions on an ongoing basis. Issue #2 is only a few pages short of being filled, and will be on the way around the first of August.

Dreams of the special edition, VTZ (Vagabond Trust Zine) are still alive. If the other Vagabonds wish to see it happen by submitting to…

corenski@hotmail.com

Peace out y’all
- The Boxcor Breezer

Howdy NET!
The folks over on feathertale.com (the humour lit. site) have posted my poem If You Turned Into an Alien, How Would I know if You Still Love Me? this past Monday. Please check it out!

just had a milkshake
not one boy came to the yard
I must be aging