Category: 5 For Writing

By Doug Peterson

The expression, “The proof is in the pudding,” goes back hundreds of years, although the original wording was a bit different. The longer version said, “The proof of the pudding is in the eating.”

Back then, pudding wasn’t a creamy dessert that you eat with a spoon; it actually referred to sausage and meats stuffed into animal intestines. Because it was tricky keeping meats safe without refrigeration, you had to test the food with small bites to make sure it didn’t make your stomach do somersaults. So the “proof of the pudding is in the eating” meant you had to carefully sample the meat. Today, the expression means that you don’t know if something really works until it’s been tried or used.

When it comes to writing, however, you don’t know if a story really works until it’s been edited…and edited…and edited. The proof is in the pudding—and in the proofing.

I can be a bit obsessive when it comes to proofing text. You might even say that I have OCD—Obsessive Copyediting Disorder. Back when I was primarily writing 1,000-word magazine articles, I would edit a story until I got it to just where I wanted it—and then I’d proof it another 20 or more times to polish it up.

It’s a bit more difficult to be that obsessive when I’m dealing with a 90,000-word novel, rather than a 1,000-word magazine story, but I still go over the manuscript with a fine-tooth comb—an expression, by the way, that comes from using a comb to pick out lice eggs, or nits, from a person’s hair. That’s also where we get the expression “nitpicky.”

Here are some of the techniques that I use to nitpick as I edit a story:

1. Proof the story in print. I don’t think I’m alone when I say that it’s much, much easier to notice mistakes on paper than on the screen. A text can look immaculate on the computer screen, but as soon as I print it out and proof it on paper, other mistakes suddenly start jumping out at me. Therefore, I do all of my initial editing on-screen. Then, once I feel good about a story, I print it out and do the rest of my editing on paper. It makes a difference. A huge difference.

2. Read you story out loud. When you read something out loud, you hear things that you wouldn’t notice by reading it in your head. You get a better sense of the flow of sentences, and you’re more likely to notice the repetition of certain words in a sentence. When you read silently, your mind may automatically skim over words, but you can’t do that when you’re reading aloud. It forces you to read every single word, and your proofing is more thorough.

If it’s a short magazine story, I might read it out loud several times during the editing process. But if it’s a novel, I can read only a small section at any one time. So I spread out the chore, trying to read each chapter out loud at least once. I might read Chapter 20 aloud on one day, and Chapter 21 aloud the next day.

3. In addition to reading the entire book or story out loud, read the dialogue by itself. Running through the dialogue tells you whether the words sound natural or forced. Would a real person talk like that? You might even do a bit of play-acting, speaking the lines as you imagine the characters would talk.

This strategy is especially important when writing screenplays.

4. Set your story aside overnight. When I set a story or chapter aside for a night or two and then return to it, I come back to it with fresh eyes and notice things I didn’t see before.

5. Edit a story until you’re sick of it. When I’m starting to get sick of proofing a story, that means I’m getting close to the end of the process.

Finally, when you’re done with your story, find a person whose judgment you trust, and then let them take a whack at your manuscript and give you feedback. After all, the proof is not just in the pudding. It’s also in your readers, especially nitpicky readers.

* * *

5 for Writing

• Get writing. Find the time to write. Then do it.
• Learn by listening—and doing. Solicit feedback, discern what helps you.
• Finish your story. Edit and rewrite, but don’t tinker forever. Reach the finish line.
• Thrive on rejection. Get your story out there. Be fearless. Accept rejection.
• Become a juggler. After one story is finished, be ready to start another. Consider writing two at once.

By Doug Peterson

I will never forget the day my parents took me to the theater to see the movie Fantastic Voyage—a sci-fi thriller in which a crew is inserted into a ship, shrunk to a microscopic size, and then injected inside a human body. I can’t remember their specific mission, only that it had to do with saving the life of the patient.

What I do remember is my sense of wonder.

I’m dating myself by bringing up this movie because Fantastic Voyage came out in 1966—a time when special effects were a far cry from today. But I had never seen anything like it, so when their sub began zipping through the bloodstream, my eyes almost popped from my head. I remember the looks on the faces of the characters as they stared out of the sub’s window in wonderment as blood cells floated all around them like gigantic jellyfish. These people were inside a human body!

Last year, Fantastic Voyage was streaming on Netflix, so I decided to check out the movie, which I hadn’t seen since I was 11 years old. I couldn’t believe that I actually loved this movie. Films back then moved at a much slower pace, but this one moved at a glacier speed. It seemed to take forever for the scientists to finally shrink the ship to microscopic size.

A lot of my disappointment had to do with advances in special effects, obviously. But it was more than that. The wonder of being inside the body was no longer there.

Some of the loss of wonder has to do with age. As we get older, we lose this sense of amazement—but a good story, particularly a good fantasy or science fiction story, recaptures this sense of astonishment. In his essay, On Fairy-Stories, J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings, calls this “Recovery.” He says that a good fantasy story helps us to recover a sense of wonder.

Tolkien says Recovery is a “regaining of a clear view.” It’s a way of seeing things “as we are meant to see them.” He compares it to cleaning our windows so we can look outside and see things as they are meant to be seen. We are “freed from the drab blur of familiarity.”

For those who have eyeglasses, another analogy is when you pick up your new prescription and suddenly the world look sharper and seemingly more colorful. This is Recovery. This is what every good story should do—help people see the world in a brilliant new way.

Tolkien’s idea of Recovery actually comes from G.K. Chesterton, a writer who inspired both Tolkien and Narnia author C.S. Lewis. In his book, Orthodoxy, Chesterton says that fairy tales tell us “that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.”

With age comes wisdom—and weariness. We become weary with the world, and we forget to see the wonder.

In one of my favorite passages, Chesterton says that adults have lost the ability to “exult in monotony” because we think we have seen it all. To make his point, he talks about how when children love something, they want it to be repeated over and over and over again. Children do this because they have an excess, not an absence, of life.

“Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged,” Chesterton writes in Orthodoxy. “They always say, ‘Do it again’; and the grown-up person does it against until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.”

Chesterton proceeds to point out that God also has an abundance of life, and He too is strong enough to exult in monotony.

“It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our father is younger that we.”

So strive for this sense of wonder in your stories, especially if you’re writing the kinds of stories that carry readers into new worlds, which are designed to remind us of how miraculous our own world is.

If you do, then your readers might just exclaim, “Do it again” when they reach the end of your story.

* * *

5 for Writing

1. Get writing. Find the time to write. Then do it.
2. Learn by listening—and doing. Solicit feedback, discern what helps you.
3. Finish your story. Edit and rewrite, but don’t tinker forever. Reach the finish line.
4. Thrive on rejection. Get your story out there. Be fearless. Accept rejection.
5. Become a juggler. After one story is finished, be ready to start another. Consider writing two at once.

By Doug Peterson

I stepped slowly out onto the board of a high dive at our local swimming pool, and I was terrified.

I was in elementary school at the time, but I still remember it vividly. I leaned out over the edge of the board and stared down in horror. From above, the drop looked a million times higher than from below. The diving board seemed so high that I thought I should be wearing a parachute, and if I could have retreated back down the ladder without losing face, I would have. I eventually jumped that day, but I didn’t do it again for years.

But what in the world do diving boards have to do with writing?

For some of us, taking the plunge and starting to write in the morning can be as painful and as intimidating as jumping off a high dive. As a result, we procrastinate. We stare out the window. We check our Facebook page. We wander downstairs for a cup of coffee. We do anything except put our fingers on the keyboard and start writing.

In my “5 for Writing” rules, which you can find at the end of this blog, my first rule is: “Get writing. Find the time to write. Then do it.” It sounds simple and straightforward. But for many writers, taking that first step—taking the plunge—is the most difficult part of the job. This is especially true if you’re a procrastinator by nature.

I should say up front that procrastination is not a problem that I face. But I have talked to many writers who struggle with the issue, and my wife is a therapist who has counseled people on procrastination. She explains that there are two primary forces driving procrastination—fear and comfort.

Fear. Some writers have a hard time sitting down to write because they are afraid that the ideas won’t flow, or that people who read their material will scoff (or, even worse, fall asleep). To make matters worse, they may have just read what they wrote the day before, and they’re disappointed. It sounded so much better yesterday! What happened overnight?

In my metaphor of the swimming pool, this writer’s fear is the equivalent of being afraid of jumping off the high dive. But my swimming pool metaphor doesn’t end there. The other reason that my wife says people procrastinate is…

Comfort. Writing is hard, especially when you’re trying to squeeze out those first few lines, so I compare this form of hesitation to walking SLOWLY into a cold pool. I swim twice a week, and there’s nothing more excruciating than cold water. Okay, a root canal is more painful…I’ll give you that. But for writers, those first few paragraphs can be as painful as walking slowly into a pool of ice-cold water.

In a cold pool, it’s actually less painful to jump right in than it is to wade into the water, because if you do it slowly the water will creep its way up your exposed skin, torturing you inch by inch. But this torture still doesn’t stop us from putting off that inevitable plunge into the frigid water. The same is true with writing. We try to put off the pain of actually starting, and we increase our suffering in the long run.

So just jump! Dive right in.

Keep in mind that “jumping in” doesn’t mean that you don’t plan out or ponder what you’re going to write before you begin. I do a minimal amount of outlining—just enough to know what I’m going to write that morning. But beyond that, I dive in.

Even with all of the good intentions in the world, there are always those pesky distractions and temptations, luring you to do something other than write. It’s the same at the pool. You know you need to be getting exercise, but the deck chair and snack bar are oh so tempting. Why get all wet and out-of-breath swimming laps when you can soak up the sun and drink lemonade by the pool?

Similarly, when you face your blank computer screen, you can think of so many other things you can be doing. The problem is that procrastination creates guilt. Even if you try to delay the work by doing something that you think will be more enjoyable, a sense of dread may eventually develop—especially if you have a deadline hanging over your head.

The bottom line: Procrastination might give you short-term pleasure, but it gives you long-term problems. So start writing, even if your initial work ends up in the trashcan. We all belly-flop sometimes.

So, bring to your writing the discipline of a swimmer. And before you come up with a dozen or more reasons why you shouldn’t be writing, sit down and start typing. If you’re really inspired, feel free to yell, “Cannonball!”

* * *

 5 for Writing

1. Get writing. Find the time to write. Then do it.
2. Learn by listening—and doing. Solicit feedback, discern what helps you.
3. Finish your story. Edit and rewrite, but don’t tinker forever. Reach the finish line.
4. Thrive on rejection. Get your story out there. Be fearless. Accept rejection.
5. Become a juggler. After one story is finished, be ready to start another. Consider writing two at once.

By Doug Peterson

When J.R.R. Tolkien’s novel, The Hobbit, was published in October of 1937, it was so popular that the publisher began clamoring for a sequel—preferably to be published within a year or two. But when all was said and done, it took almost 20 years for that sequel to be written and published—the kind of slow, methodical work that probably drove the publisher nuts.

As the publisher watched and waited, Tolkien’s sequel became longer and more complicated, and the company expected to lose money. But that sequel became known as The Lord of the Rings trilogy, with the third and final volume published in 1955.

I think it’s safe to say that the books made money, so it was well worth the wait. But if you go back to when Tolkien was just starting on this sequel, he was at a loss for what he might write. At the time, he said, “I cannot think of anything more to say of hobbits.” And in another letter, he laments that “I fear I squandered all of my favorite motifs” in The Hobbit.

So let that be Lesson Number One from Tolkien: You never know what you have inside of yourself until you put it on paper. As The Lord of the Rings demonstrated, Tolkien had plenty more to say about hobbits…and dwarves and elves and men and monsters.

You never really know how much you have to say—or how good your ideas might be—until you begin to put them on paper. Ideas are like seeds. The seeds are no use if you just carry them around in your pocket, so you have to plant them. You have to sit down and write.

I have been immersed in Tolkien’s writings this fall because I am taking a class on the famed British writer at the Urbana Theological Seminary here in central Illinois. One of the highlights was a recent trip to Marquette University, which has the original manuscripts for The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and two lesser-known works. Marquette has handwritten pages, typed pages, and galley proofs—thousands of pages in all. Because Tolkien did a lot of writing during World War II, when paper was in short supply, we even saw some of Tolkien’s notes written on the back of Oxford Air Raid Report Forms, as well as on the backs of student essays graded by Tolkien’s good friend, C.S. Lewis.

It was fascinating to see the writing process unfold on these pages. And if I had to pull out a second lesson from Tolkien, it’s this: Edit, edit, edit.

When it comes to editing, however, you don’t have to be as obsessive as Tolkien. He couldn’t stop making changes to his story. This approach worked wonderfully for him, but that was because he was not just writing a trilogy of books. He was creating an entire world, complete with languages, maps, calendars, systems of measurement, and much more. Most of us are not attempting to create an entire world, so we may not need nearly 20 years to write our next book.

I’ll say it again: Tolkien must have driven his publisher crazy. We saw galley proofs, the final stage before printing, and they were extensively marked up with Tolkien’s handwriting. Whenever I receive galley proofs, I am afraid to make changes beyond a word correction here or there, or if I’m really brave, maybe a revised sentence. Tolkien had no such fear. We saw one galley page where he hand-wrote long paragraphs to add to the novel, and he taped the new material to the bottom of the galley proof. Remember, this was long before the personal computer age, so making changes at this stage was much more difficult.

Some writers can compose a story with very little editing. I have one writer friend who can do just that, and he has been enormously successful. Evidently, Tolkien’s friend C.S. Lewis could do that as well. That’s why Lewis was such a prolific writer, and I have heard that Tolkien was a bit envious of Lewis’s ability to write clean drafts.

Most of us probably fall somewhere in between the extremes of Lewis, who did little editing, and Tolkien, who never stopped editing. My writing needs plenty of editing, but I try to not be obsessive—although it all depends on what you call obsessive. When I write 1,000-word magazine stories, I typically get the story to where I am satisfied (which takes a fair amount of editing), and then I read it over another 10 to 15 times, just to be sure it is right. Proofing a story so many times is possible with 1,000-word stories, but not so easy with 100,000-word novels. Nevertheless, I still spend well over half of my time editing my novels.

In the case of Tolkien, his editing paid off. After all, if he hadn’t tinkered with his story, Frodo Baggins would have been called Bingo Baggins. That’s right. Frodo’s original name was Bingo. Also, if Tolkien didn’t tinker, the One Ring would not have been a powerful symbol of evil and sin. In the original published version of The Hobbit, the One Ring didn’t have the same corrupting influence. All of that came in The Lord of the Rings, so Tolkien had to go back and rework those sections of The Hobbit to make the ring more sinister.

So tinker away with your stories. But don’t edit endlessly, if you ever intend to get published…unless you’re creating an entire world. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was Middle Earth.

 *  *  *

5 for Writing

• Get writing. Find the time to write. Then do it.
• Learn by listening—and doing. Solicit feedback, discern what helps you.
• Finish your story. Edit and rewrite, but don’t tinker forever. Reach the finish line.
• Thrive on rejection. Get your story out there. Be fearless. Accept rejection.
• Become a juggler. After one story is finished, be ready to start another. Consider writing two at once.

Photos courtesy of

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Legolas.png

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hobbit_hole.jpg

I still remember the day my fiction-writing teacher made it clear that he was not happy with me. However, he wasn’t unhappy about my writing. He was unhappy about what I was reading.

At the time, I was an undergraduate at the University of Illinois, so this was a long time ago. Having arrived early, I slipped a copy of the Lord of the Rings out of my backpack and began to read, minding my own business. But as I read, I sensed the eyes of my teacher boring down on me. It wasn’t exactly the evil eye of Sauron, but I could sense the teacher’s disapproval. I cannot remember the exact words that my fiction teacher used, but he essentially asked why in the world I was wasting my time reading fantasy trash.

This attitude is as old as Middle Earth. As Joseph Pearce says in the book, Tolkien: Man and Myth, many people in the literary community were scandalized when a 1997 survey of 25,000 people in Great Britain voted J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings the greatest book of the 20^th Century.

“Personally,” wrote one columnist in the London Sunday Times, “I won’t keep the thing in the house…With its awful runes and maps and tedious indexes, the sight of it filled me with depression…A depressing thought that the votes for the world’s best 20^th-century book should come from those burrowing an escape into a nonexistent world.”

So there it is—the word that is often flung at literature that is actually fun to read. Escapist.

Tolkien had heard the same old complaint when he was alive. In his landmark essay, “On Fairy-Stories,” he confronted the accusation head-on by saying, “I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories.” He then went on to add, “Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?”

In other words, what’s so bad about escaping? He argues that fairy-stories (they didn’t call it fantasy writing back then) should aim for Escape with a capital E.

We all seek escape in one way or another. And that’s all right, depending on what you’re using to escape and what you’re escaping from. Some forms of escape actually become an even more horrendous prisons. For example, people use drugs to escape, and they become slaves to their addiction.

But reading a rip-roaring book with heroic values? I heartily approve of that form of escape. In his essay, Tolkien talks about many positive forms of escape in fairy-stories—escape from hunger, thirst, pain, sorrow, and injustice. He even includes escape from machines such as the internal combustion engine, as fairy-stories offer an escape into a land of trees, rivers, and lakes. He also touches on the escape of archaism, into a world of dragons, knights, horses, sailing ship, elves, kings, and priests.

Our desire for escape may stem from the built-in sense that we are all strangers in a strange land, that we were created for another world—a world where pain and suffering will be no more. I love life, but I realize that this existence is not my true Home. Stories such as the Lord of the Rings remind us that there is another world, and it’s not too far away.

This built-in desire to escape is perhaps why The Great Escape, with Steve McQueen, remains my favorite war movie of all time. And perhaps this is why two of the first novels that I ever wrote were real-life escape stories. The Disappearing Man tells the true story of Henry “Box” Brown, a slave who escaped slavery in 1849 by shipping himself from Richmond to Philadelphia in a box. Another of my novels, The Vanishing Woman, is about Ellen Craft, who escaped slavery in 1848 by pretending to be a white man, while her husband posed as her slave.

As the lyrics of the popular Christian song say, “There is power in the name of Jesus to break every chain.”

If you have a chain around your ankles, what could be so wrong about breaking those chains and escaping? But maybe the critics who fling around the word “escapism” are just being sloppy in their criticism; maybe they simply mean that they think the book is poorly written.

Maybe.

I think part of the reason they use this term so freely is that some people are afraid to recognize that we all need to be freed by Someone greater than ourselves. In that sense, they actually fear the idea of escape. And as Tolkien’s good friend, C.S. Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia, once observed, “The only class of people who fear escape are jailers.”

Of course, the greatest escape story of them all is the granddaddy of breakouts: the Resurrection. The authorities put Jesus in a tomb, rolled a massive rock before the entrance, and posted a contingent of well-trained guards in front. But on the third day, He escaped. He didn’t tunnel his way out, and He didn’t crawl through the sewer. He conquered Death and rolled the stone aside.

Escapist? Sure, it’s an escape. But it’s what we all desire, and it’s the only thing that will ultimately satisfy us. As Lewis also said, “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”

* * *

5 for Writing

• Get writing. Find the time to write. Then do it.
• Learn by listening—and doing. Solicit feedback, discern what helps you.
• Finish your story. Edit and rewrite, but don’t tinker forever. Reach the finish line.
• Thrive on rejection. Get your story out there. Be fearless. Accept rejection.
• Become a juggler. After one story is finished, be ready to start another. Consider writing two at once.

By Doug Peterson

A funny thing happened on the way to learning how to write a screenplay. I wrote a novel instead.

In 2007, I had spent the previous five years writing children’s books for VeggieTales, but I decided that I wanted to learn how to write a screenplay. So I travelled from Illinois, through Tennessee and the Blue Ridge Mountains to the first-ever Gideon Media Arts conference just outside of Asheville, North Carolina.

My screenwriting teacher, Kathy Mackel, was outstanding, and I left the conference with the first page of my screenplay written. My screenplay would tell the true story of Henry Brown, a slave who escaped from Richmond, Virginia, in 1849 by shipping himself to Philadelphia inside a box.

As it turned out, Kathy Mackel was not just a screenwriting teacher. She is also a gifted novelist, and she suggested that I write my first novel, which became The Disappearing Man—the story of Henry “Box” Brown. Even though the story wound up as a novel, I never gave up on the movie idea, and I developed it into a screenplay while I was making revisions to my novel.

By doing this, I discovered a surprising thing. I found that writing a screenplay helped me write my novel, and I also found that writing the novel helped me write the screenplay. Both forms of writing fed off of each other. Things I did in the screenplay inspired changes to the novel, and things I did in the novel inspired changes in the screenplay.

My screenplay wound up being optioned for film by a company in New York that is actively seeking funding for a movie. But my experience with the screenplay/novel dynamics convinced me of the benefits of writing my stories in both forms, even if the screenplays are never optioned. As a result, I have written screenplays for all of my novels.

Here are a few of the ways that the process of writing a screenplay can impact your novel:

Writing a screenplay makes your novel more visual. In a film, of course, visuals reign. You have no interior dialogue, as you do in a novel, so you have to rely on good acting and strong visuals.

For instance, one of the most powerful images from Henry Brown’s story can be found in two slave narratives published in 1849 and 1851. In those narratives, Henry tells about being taken by his mother to the edge of the forest in autumn when he was a child. His mother points to the trees and says, “The life of a slave, your life, is like the leaves. The wind scatters ‘em, scatters ‘em where it will. And there ain’t no getting’ ‘em back.”

The picture of the leaves in autumn became a key image in my screenplay and, as a result, a key image in my novel. Leaves in autumn became a major metaphor of the story, and it all came from thinking visually when I was writing the screenplay.

Writing a screenplay helps you to show, not tell. In fiction writing, we’re always being told, “Show, don’t tell.” Make your scene real by putting your reader in the environment with concrete details. What does the character see, smell, touch, and hear? Show how a character expresses anger; don’t just tell the reader that a character is angry.

Because films are so visual, a screenplay forces you to tell your story by showing, not telling. You have to show what’s happening. It’s a movie! You have no other choice, unless you’re planning to have a narrator talk throughout the film—a sure way to ensure that no one options your screenplay.

Writing a screenplay forces you to be concise. Every word is precious in a screenplay. After all, each page of a screenplay equals roughly one minute of a movie, so beginning screenwriters are told to aim for about 90 pages—120 pages at the very most. The tightness of the page count forces you to be a concise writer, to cut out the fat, and this helps your novel.

I realize that readers thrive on the kinds of details in a novel that you cannot get in a movie; that’s why a lot of people say, “I liked the movie, but it wasn’t as good as the book.” So I understand that it’s important to let the story breathe a little in a novel, where you aren’t so constrained by the page or word count. But the risk is that a novel will wander and become loaded down with unnecessary details. A screenplay trains you to avoid these pitfalls and to stay focused on the central plot because you do not have the luxury of wandering.

Cutting your novel down to fit into a screenplay can be a painful process, but it forces you to decide what’s most important to your story.

Writing a screenplay helps your dialogue. In most movies (but not all), characters don’t have the luxury to talk on and on and on. Therefore, I find that the dialogue in my screenplay is much snappier and faster-paced than in my novel. After I write a screenplay, I often find myself going back to the novel and trimming my wordy dialogue.

Writing novels and writing screenplays are very different processes, so not every novelist will want to tackle a screenplay. But if you love movies and think you might have a knack for screenwriting, then by all means give it a go.

To play off of the words of Forrest Gump (a book that became a movie), “Writing is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.”

That applies to both novels and screenplays.

* * *

5 for Writing

1. Get writing. Find the time to write. Then do it.
2. Learn by listening—and doing. Solicit feedback, discern what helps you.
3. Finish your story. Edit and rewrite, but don’t tinker forever. Reach the finish line.
4. Thrive on rejection. Get your story out there. Be fearless. Accept rejection.
5. Become a juggler. After one story is finished, be ready to start another. Consider writing two at once.

NOTE—Doug Peterson’s previous blog, Do Your Research Right When You’re Writing Historical Fiction, discussed his research habits. This is a follow-up to that blog.

I guess I should have known what day it was when I showed up at the old watchtower in Berlin in 2011. I didn’t realize that I was arriving there on the 50^th anniversary of the death of Gunter Litfin, whose memory was being honored by this very watchtower—a tower that had once been used by East Berlin guards with shoot-to-kill orders.

Back in 1961, Gunter Litfin became the first person to be shot by guards while trying to escape from Communist East Berlin into free West Berlin. Gunter was killed while trying to swim across a canal, which was located not far from this very watchtower.

When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and Germany reunified, Jurgen Litfin, the brother of Gunter, had the watchtower preserved as a museum in his brother’s honor. But because I showed up on the 50^th anniversary of Gunter’s death—to the day—I found that the watchtower was closed in his memory.

But I didn’t give up. I was in Germany for a week doing research for my Berlin Wall novel, The Puzzle People, so I came back to the watchtower the next day. This time, I found a decent-sized crowd milling around, but no one was being allowed inside the watchtower. Standing in front of the tower was a stern-looking, elderly German man, whom I learned was Jurgen Litfin.

“Why isn’t he letting anyone inside?” I asked a woman.

“I don’t know,” she said, “but he kind of scares me.”

When I approached Litfin, I found that he didn’t speak a word of English. So, with a German man translating for me, I explained that I was writing a historical novel based on the Berlin Wall, and one of my key scenes takes place in a watchtower just like this one.

To my amazement, he allowed my wife and I—and no one else—into the watchtower. So we climbed up all three levels, and I took photographs and videos like mad.

The reason I bring up this story is that my visit inside the watchtower led me to completely revise the climactic scenes of my novel, The Puzzle People. This experience also taught me about the importance of visiting the location of your novel when doing research. Of course, some budgets will not allow visits to exotic locations, but all of my other historical novels have been located in the United States, where on-site visits are much more economical. So if your budget allows it, by all means visit the location of your story.

But when should you visit? Before you begin writing, during the writing process, or after the novel is completed?

My choice is to go after I have completed a rough draft. That way, I know what locations I need to see. Then I can make revisions based on what I saw on location, as I did with The Puzzle People. Although my watchtower scene needed some heavy reworking, in most cases a visit to the location does not require me to make drastic changes.

Last year, when I finished the rough draft of a novel based in New Orleans during the second year of the Civil War, I went to the Big Easy with a list of locations that I wanted to see and photograph. If you give talks about your novels or historical subjects covered in your stories, the photographs you take have the added benefit of providing you with plenty of visuals to use in these presentations.

But before you visit the location in person, I suggest you make some “virtual visits.” The Internet today makes it possible to get a lot of the on-site research done from the comfort of your own office. Google Earth now makes it possible to walk the streets of European cities, without having to buy an airplane ticket and take one nibble of airplane food. So if your budget doesn’t allow a trip to a foreign country, take a trip with Google Earth.

Studying the location of your story is like buying a house. It’s a good idea to explore houses online before going out and seeing them in person. But you wouldn’t buy a house without ultimately going to the home and walking through it and hiring an inspector.

It’s the same with a novel. Check out the setting online, and then visit in person—if you can. At the very least, you’ll get a nice vacation out of it.

* * *

5 for Writing

1. Get writing. Find the time to write. Then do it.
2. Learn by listening—and doing. Solicit feedback, discern what helps you.
3. Finish your story. Edit and rewrite, but don’t tinker forever. Reach the finish line.
4. Thrive on rejection. Get your story out there. Be fearless. Accept rejection.
5. Become a juggler. After one story is finished, be ready to start another. Consider writing two at once.

“Where words fail, music speaks,” said Hans Christian Andersen, writer of such legendary stories as The Little Mermaid (not the Disney version) and The Snow Queen (the inspiration for Disney’s Frozen).

I make a living with words, and so did Hans Christian Andersen, but I know exactly what he meant when he said that music can do what words cannot. Sometimes, just the snippet of a song can bring up a well of emotions and memories that all the words in the world cannot. If you have ever watched a scene from a movie, presented with and without the music, you can see the difference that a good soundtrack makes, and you get a greater appreciation for just how important music can be in storytelling.

But we’re talking about writing books, not watching a movie! Until e-books come equipped with musical soundtracks, what in the world does music have to do with fiction?

Music may not play a role in the experience of reading fiction, but I have found that it does play a part in writing fiction. When I write a novel, I find it helpful to select musical themes that connect me with certain characters or put me in touch with certain scenes. For example, I have been working on a new historical novel, based on a true story that took place during the second year of the Civil War, and I stumbled across a song that fit the mood of my two main characters—a husband and wife. I call the song “André and Felicie’s Theme,” although it is actually called “Beethoven’s Secrets,” and it’s performed here by the Piano Guys. Check it out:

Video: “BEETHOVEN’S SECRETS,” by the Piano Guys

When I was writing this new novel, I would often listen to “Beethoven’s Secrets” before I sat down to work on scenes with André and Felicie. The music would put me in the right frame of mind, or rather “the right frame of heart,” because it would bring up the emotions that I needed to write.

As another example, take my second novel, The Puzzle People, which follows the fate of two couples who were split apart when the Berlin Wall went up in 1961. One of the characters, Elsa, is a tortured soul, and the Evanescence song, “My Immortal,” fits her story nicely. The lyrics, as well as the music, captured the feeling of the losses in Elsa’s life.

Here is a video that displays those lyrics while “My Immortal” plays:

Video: “MY IMMORTAL,” by Evanescence

Sometimes, when I find an inspiring song, I don’t always use it to connect with a specific character or scene. In some cases, a song captures the mood of the entire novel. Again, let me use an example from my Berlin Wall novel, The Puzzle People. While writing that novel, I often began my work day by listening to a song from the Scorpions, “Wind of Change”—a song that celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall and went on to become one of the top-selling singles worldwide of all time.

This video begins with a long musical introduction, accompanied by sobering statistics about the Berlin Wall. Then, about 1 minute and 50 seconds into the song, the lyrics begin and so do some of the most iconic images dealing with the rise and fall of the Wall. So here is the “Wind of Change” video, and I recommend you stick with it until the images and lyrics begin at 1:50 into the song.

Video: “WIND OF CHANGE,” by the Scorpions

When we write, we all want to draw certain emotions out of our readers, and to do that we first need to draw out these emotions in ourselves. And what better way to do this than through music? Your reader will not hear these songs when they read your story, but perhaps some of the emotion from the music will make its way onto your page and into your characters’ lives and stories.

As Hans Christian Andersen said, “Where words fail, music speaks.” But sometimes the right music can inspire you to put the right words on the page—words that don’t fail.

* * *

5 for Writing

1. Get writing. Find the time to write. Then do it.
2. Learn by listening—and doing. Solicit feedback, discern what helps you.
3. Finish your story. Edit and rewrite, but don’t tinker forever. Reach the finish line.
4. Thrive on rejection. Get your story out there. Be fearless. Accept rejection.
5. Become a juggler. After one story is finished, be ready to start another. Consider writing two at once.

Photo credit:  Gavin Whitner