Don't Start With The End In Mind

I’ve heard it over and over again, too many times. No doubt, you’ve heard it too—“start with the end in mind”. Many writers advocate such a plan. I’m not one of them.

It ruins all the fun. It containerizes me; keeps me in a box. It prevents the story from taking me somewhere I haven’t gone before. Creativity is not about knowing the end before you begin. Creativity is about discovery. Writing fiction is about discovery. It’s about venturing on a new journey. Pulling from experiences—some new, some old, some imagined—and letting the story take me where it chooses.

Knowing the end feels mechanical and constrained like I’m going through the motions. I never want to feel that way. I’ll stop writing when that happens. Maybe the story doesn’t turn out how I thought it was going to in the beginning. It takes courage to let a story direct its own path. It can be scary venturing off the worn one.

There is a place for knowing how things will end. I know a bit about that. It was an integral part of my engineering world and the reason why it’s a profession. There’s a responsibility for knowing how the end will turn out. We want the wheels to stay on our cars and airplanes to stay in the air. We want those equations filled out with the upmost of correctness. We want the end result to be the right answer.

But in creating a story, “starting with the end in mind” seems like reading the end of a book before the start. Spoiler alert, spoiler alert! What’s the point of the story then? Why write if I know where I’m going to end.

I can’t think of a story I’ve started knowing how it will turn out. Sometimes the end comes sooner than I anticipate but often it’s the other way around. I want to follow where the story leads me. It’s part of discovering what’s inside me—the good, the bad and the ugly—and how the story pulls it out of me. Seeing the connections that weren’t at first apparent and being fooled by what I thought were.

My love for the physical aspects of writing likely had a hand in this as well. I love the feel of holding a pen in my hand and watching the words and sentences come out on a fresh, blank piece of paper. Writing simply lead to the story.

That said I usually have some idea of what I want to write about and at least a character’s name. My characters almost always start as a name.

It’s fun yet intimidating to follow where a story takes me. Life is like that and that’s what I write about.

It brings to mind a quote from Frank Herbert, author of the sci-fi magnum opus Dune. “There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.” Such a realization makes it all but impossible to “start with the end in mind”.

Book Signings - A Gift to Authors - Part One

Book Signings - A Gift to Authors - Part One

For something I had decided I wasn’t going to do, in-store book signings have turned out to be an activity that in my book world now follows writing and reading.

My initial reluctance was really related to my own reservations and confidence. My thinking was that
book lovers and constant readers go into a bookstore to find a book and a shelf to get away from the world in for a while. Why would I want to interrupt such a fabulous pastime? I decided I didn’t.

Then a very fortuitous meeting, quite by happenstance, took place while visiting one of Canada’s national book chain stores. I was trying to find a way to get The Actor (my STARBook awarded novel) onto their bookshelves. The store manager confronted me with the question: “Why would we want your book on our shelves? Nobody knows who you are.”

Wow! And to think this hardwood head of mine actually heard what the book manager was saying. The Actor would take up valuable shelf space, and unless somebody knew about The Actor and valued its story, it was going to stay on the shelf hogging space that an otherwise known book might take. I had to find a way to change that. But as I said, this was a meeting of good fortune that changed everything for me and what followed.

The book manager asked me a question after a short exchange, perhaps seeing the glimmer of determination in my eye: “Have you thought about doing book signings?” I, of course with my naïve expertise, explained (whined) as to why I had decided not to do them. It wasn’t "the way". But the “magic” came in the manager’s next question: “Where else are you going to go and talk about your book and your work for a couple of hours, in a bookstore and—no guarantees here—possibly sell a couple of books?” I couldn’t answer that question. In fact it made so much sense that I booked my first signing there and then – technically not my first “signing”, but rather my first “booking”, eight months away. The reason for the date being so far out, as I later found out from the manager, was because he never expected to hear from me again.

All that is in the past now, after 75 book signings in our national book chain of Indigo-Chapters stores across Ontario and elsewhere in Canada. In fact, in July I reached a milestone 1000^th book from a book signing.

While having no desire to become a “carnival barker” at the front of a bookstore, I figured if I could have professional career as an engineer and still become an author, I could likely find a way to become comfortable promoting my books. That comfort has mysteriously become love. I love talking about books and writing with almost anyone, but especially with book lovers and constant readers. Mix in my love of movies and music, and it’s a wicked combination of fun and discussion.

Signings may not work for everyone, but for me its great way to get in touch with readers and book lovers. Today it feels a little unfair, as I take away so much from the interesting people I meet at each signing. Many have touched my life in ways they’ll never know. As the great Stephen King once said, “it all goes in”. But remember, none of this makes one iota of difference without first writing the book that you love.

I’ll talk more about how to actually book a signing in my next post.

TDG

Writing...

Writing

I write. That’s what I do. It’s what I’ve always done. Only I didn’t know it.

Writing is something I can't not do. I control my fingers on the keyboard and what comes out on the screen. I control the movements of my pen on what comes out on the paper. I control what I write down. I do not control the thoughts that come into my head or my need to write them down.

In writing, I control what stays and what doesn’t. I am the great adder and subtracter. I control when I start and stop and when I’m finished. But the when and why of what comes into my mind—nada.

Writing is like a muscle that requires daily exercise. It atrophies quickly though I’ve rarely missed a day in twenty years. Like a muscle it needs to be stretched and pushed to grow.  And much like a sport, I need to practice it over and over and over…

Sometimes I feel like I’m chasing something, trying to keep up with what’s coming out. My fear—I won’t catch up. I won’t get there—wherever there is—and what I need to write down will escape. Other times I feel like I’m drawing from a deep well, impossibly deep in the abyss of my imagination. So deep that I find places of divine beauty and profane horror, of grace and disgust, of joy and sorrow, of happiness and sadness that pours out on the page before me.

It must come out. I must take it out. Whether I chase it or pull it. It’s there for me to take. Sometimes the words fall into sentences and sentences into story. Sometimes they don’t. I keep learning. Whether I’m out of breath or out of strength matters little. The story wants to be told, needs to be told and wants me to tell it.

Whether I’m wide-awake or barely conscious. The words come. The sentences form. Sometimes they’re together. Sometimes they’re in pieces. Oh, the dream to write a sentence without feeling it needs to change. But still they come for the story—the all-important story.

It’s always about the story. The story that combines the inside with the outside and the stuff that’s in between. It speaks to who we are, our uniqueness and our humanity.

Writing is a gift, and at times, a confused curse. Being relentless to that taskmaster is what I do. It matters little whether it comes from within or outside. It’s not for me to discern.

As Robert Frost once said, “Writing a poem is discovering.” Writing is discovering and all that accompanies the discovery.

Writing is what I do. It’s what I’ve always done, not that I knew it. I know it now.

To Tweet or Not To Tweet?

To Tweet or Not To Tweet?

I don’t know that there’s a right answer to this question but if you’re not asking yourself the question, you might want to consider it.

Two years ago I was not part of the social media scene. The corporate world that I was part of did not take to this “social thing” kindly. It was new, unknown and seen as unnecessary—a frivolous notion from youth and daydreamers. It was not what serious business required. At best it was a fad—a fad I might add that’s passed its 10^th birthday.

I could all but see the pages of history turning. Hearing those repeated phrases from the past “it won’t be here long” or “it won’t last” or simply “it won’t work”. I wondered. Was it like that for the car, the plane, the radio, the television, the computer, the internet … I think so.

If my world hadn’t been reinvented, I’d still be of that thinking too… maybe…

Packed with the passion and love of writing and my 10,000 hours of practiced rejection, the writing world has become my new home and social media a close neighbor. Twitter resides next door.

The social media world came by force. My publisher said either I hire someone to do it or do it myself but I had to be part of it. I also was quickly learning that “word of mouth” and “they’ll tell two people and so on and so on” were more myth than reality.

I started with LinkedIn. It seemed closest to where I was coming from. It was a way to introduce my business contacts to The Actor (my STARBook award novel) and my new author world. It became my “webpage” with all of my media links (print, video, radio and TV interviews) along with my itinerary of book events. Facebook followed close behind because “everyone is on Facebook”. I’ve found it difficult to expand to any level significant outside of friends and family as so few “share”. Enter my new neighbor—Twitter.

With little idea on how it worked outside of the 140-character message length, I was reluctant to get more acquainted with my new neighbor. It was my son that gave me the final push out the door with the introduction, “Dad just get an account. You’ll figure it out.”

And how right he was.

I’ve been through a lot from the beginning stages of picking who to follow through the “too-numerous-to-count” stages of tweeting and what to tweet. It’s become one of the most active means I use to promote my two books The Actor and The Drive In.

Now with every tweet going to more than 70,000 followers when asked ‘to tweet or not to tweet’ my answer today is an emphatic ‘its better than not’.

TDG

What Would You Do ...

It's been some time since I last posted. Lots has gone on in-between but I thought I'd start back with some of the thoughts I've had over that time.  

What Would You Do ... if you knew you couldn’t fail?

It’s a question that both plagued and fascinated me after first hearing it said years ago. Its sentiment has never left me.

It seemed, from what I’d come to accept, like an ideal I could never achieve yet its very essence came in the incessant two words “why not?”

I think this was mostly brought on because I was bored with what my work life had become. It wasn’t my passion or what I loved to do which I now believe is inextricably linked to what our purpose is here on this planet. I worked hard. I did well. I liked what I did or had come to find a way to like it “enough”. I pleased those around me. And I kept busy—very busy. Being busy can mask a lot of things—important things—but not the questions, “is this it? is this all there is?”

I don’t know that I was looking for something I hadn’t already found. I just hadn’t found a way to put it all together.

I discovered writing as a teenager while playing in a band. I wrote most of our music and lyrics. When the music thing didn’t happen, I went off to engineering school and subsequently a career in the profession. Strangely, I never stopped writing and took it up in earnest a couple of years after graduating. I began to think of myself as a writer who worked as an engineer. But the rejection of my writing never stopped coming. So much so that I had come to the conclusion that “author” wasn’t going to part of this lifetime. But “never say never”. During a family trip to the west coast of Canada to take our daughter off to school, I realized, despite all my years of writing, I didn’t have a keepsake for my family. Everyone knew dad’s dream of publishing a novel yet all I had to show for it was 8-1/2” x 11” pieces of paper. Then and there I decided. I had to at least accomplish that. Thinking of a surprise hardcover of one of my novel length works under the Christmas tree, made things change. I found a publisher, worked with a couple of professional editors and halved the length of my original 800-page manuscript. Today, I like to say I not only transformed the story but I transformed my life—as that writer who worked for so long as an engineer is now a full-time writer. Not only do I have a keepsake for my family but a novel I want the world to read.

I no longer ask, “Is this it?”

And I have an answer to “what would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail”.

I’m doing it!

TDG