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This tip may seem a little out there--which wouldn't be the first time, I guess--but nevertheless: Employing creative visualizations, holding certain pictures in your mind in order to achieve some specific outcome in the real world, can be of immense help in getting through a novel project.
This is something athletes and musicians already know, and that many use as part of their practice, most often in the form of mental rehearsal--imagining that you're acing a piano etude, or sinking a putt, or making a free throw, and then seeing that the mental practice has made a difference in the real-world performance. (Back when I played music, I'd often use creative visualization before a performance. But without realizing I was doing so, and in the opposite direction: I'd imagine that I'd fall apart up on stage, get completely flustered, and then, no surprise, that's exactly what I'd do. I finally realized what I was doing and knocked it off...but not before making some godawful racket.)
Now, you might think that creative visualization techniques wouldn't necessarily apply to writing as to other forms of performance--what good would it do to visualize yourself typing? make you a better typist?--but there are some creative visualizations you can use to help get you through a long project like a novel...and, more to the point, to help you more easily find and fall into the fictional world you're creating.
1. Visualize a completed manuscript. When you're at the beginning of a novel project, a completed manuscript often seems so far into the future as to be incomprehensible...but thinking of it as incomprehensible, as unlikely to materialize, is a good way of making sure that happens. So a simple visualization to start off with, and to return to, is a complete manuscript sitting on your desk. Don't just picture it in your head--though do look at it closely, at how pristine it is coming off the printer, how worn the edges get as you read through and mark it up--but imagine the tactile feel of it as you thumb the pages. Give yourself a paper cut with it. Bring it up to your "nose" and smell it. Shoo the mental cat away from it. It's not a unicorn or a yeti. It's doable and inevitable. (This is my feel-good tip, true...but this visualization has helped me immensely at times when a full three-hundred pages seemed impossible. Or even when the next page seemed impossible.)
It's been almost a month since my last blog post, and I wanted to assure my readers--both of you--that the blog isn't defunct. I've been busy this summer rewriting my novel The Strikeout Artist, and I've neglected everything but hygiene to get it done before the school year starts back.
On the plus side, when I finally resume blogging on a regular basis--by the end of this month, I imagine--I'll have a number of interesting topics to discuss, such as:*How to become a hermit (or the more dreaded hermit-crab);
*How to trick yourself into writing like you have all the time in the world, when clearly you do not;
*What to do when the finale you've had in mind since the very beginning of your novel project just doesn't do it for you anymore;
*How to consume your weight in coffee;
*How to rejoin society after a self-imposed exile; and
*Why all of the above is worth it when the novel finally falls into place.
In the meantime, let me direct you to a few site updates I've made, including spiffy left-side columns for site news, recent posts, and subjects discussed; beautiful pages from The Nighttime Novelist added to the Excerpt page; and a new section for Downloads where you'll find worksheets from the book offered for free. (I plan on adding more worksheets, geared toward the creative writing classroom and/or group, in the near future.)
My thanks to Terri Woesner for making the worksheets available, as well as for the beautiful job designing the book...which I just held in my hot little hands for the first time yesterday.
Hope you're all enjoying the summer and writing well. See you on the other side.
It's the summertime, which means I'm spending most of my time rewriting my novel The Strikeout Artist. And since I now have a blog to keep up with, and to post on somewhat regularly, I'm debuting a new feature here tonight: a paragraph from my novel with absolutely no context given and no reason to post it.
Tonight's installment comes from the beginning of Chapter 5. Take it away, narrator:
Cleveland finished the sweep, giving us 0-9 to think about as we packed our bags and headed down the dark rail to Cincinnati. Enough time to get angry, rediscover our tempers, come out ready for recompense against the Gentleman Pig Farmers, and by the time we pulled into town we were belligerent as Scotsmen, blustering off the train and mouthing off to people on the streets all the way to the ballpark--none of them had any notion who in the hell we were--and we brought our red-hot anger right into Pig Farmer Park and right up to the plate, and then Cincinnati swept us, too. It must’ve been heartening for the other teams to see us coming. Everyone we'd played had earned three in the win column, courtesy of the Knights-Errant. Cincinnati took four from us—their first wins of the year—and on the final out of that final game, somebody let loose a sow in the outfield and the park crier picked up his megaphone and implored young kids to come from the stands and chase it down. Ohio, by its nature, is a well-meaning disaster, but never more so than when pig wrestling is involved.
NOTE: This paragraph may be edited or stricken from the novel altogether. Except for the part about pig wrestling.
