Writing Habits to Sustain You

Think Like a Novice

No matter how much you’ve written, how much you’ve studied writing, how much you’ve read, you can always learn more. You can read a novel in a different genre, listen to an interview with a writer you admire, read an essay about another artistic field, or analyze a book or movie to see what you can learn from it.

Sometimes a novel will come along that expands my thinking on the possibilities of the novel form—such as Flights by Olga Tokarczuc or Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli. More rarely, it will be a book on craft, such as Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative, by Jane Alison. If you feel stuck in your writing, I recommend both Flights and Meander, Spriral, Explode for opening your eyes to experimentation.

But it’s not enough to simply think about different ways of writing in a form you’re comfortable with. For the past year, for example, I’ve been learning to write in an entirely different medium: screenwriting. During all of my years writing books, I never learned how to write for film and television. Writing a screenplay felt like an alien skill, something other people do. Although two of my books have been optioned repeatedly for the big screen (but never made, the all-too-common phenomenon known in “the industry” as development hell), I’ve never been involved in the process of writing the script. It was always someone else who wrote the adaptation.

In the last year, I bought several books on adapting books to film (Great Adaptations by Alexis Krazilovsky was one of my favorites), took an online screenwriting class, and started writing a screenplay adaption for one of my own novels. I’m just as uncertain about writing a screenplay as most aspiring novelists are about writing their first novels. There’s a definite learning curve, and I feel like a fish out of water.

But that’s okay. Uncertainty is good. It’s invigorating. I really have no clue what I’m doing when it comes to writing a screenplay, so I have to approach it as a novice. I’m much more self-critical when I write a novel, because I think, “I should be able to do this. It shouldn’t be that hard” (although, to be honest, it’s always hard). With a screenplay, on the other hand, I feel free to make a big mess and write a truly bad screenplay. After all, it is my first!

But learning shouldn’t be limited to the field of writing, of course. You can also do a deep dive into topics that you want to include in your novel. One way to do this is to have your protagonist work in a field about which you know little, something that has always fascinated you: space, science, mechanics, you name it. (For my books, I have researched photography, an unsolved mathematical conjecture, the life of a general internist at a VA hospital, and the daily life of a coffee buyer, among other things). What can you research that will make the writing process more interesting? What can you learn that will breathe life into your story?

Doing the same thing day after day can lead to a rut. When you make a habit of thinking like a novice and embracing the learning curve , when you decide to learn something new, writing never gets boring.

This is part 2 of a six-part series. Read Part 1, On Becoming a Writer.

You can read about my most recent book, The Wonder Test, here.