Hello everyone! I can’t believe I get to say this, but week one is almost over! I’ve never had a work week go by so fast in my life. To be honest, I can’t tell if that’s great or terrible. I enjoy writing and most of the logistics too, so I imagine things will speed by if I’m enjoying myself. Sadly, if things go too fast I’ll run out of time and be forced to go back to a ‘real’ job when I inevitably run out of savings. Its a race against time, which really is a race against my own aversion to working hard. Even though I can feel the clock ticking down, I’m still going to take heart in the fact that it’s Friday, just as I have since I realized school wasn’t a one time deal. We will see if the writing habit I’m currently forcing on myself is strong enough to compel me to get stuff done on a Saturday. It feels like it will be anyway!

Now down to brass tacks. Yesterday I failed to hit my writing goal. I’m not too pleased about it, but I suppose that’s what I get for blowing through all my ideas on Wednesday. I got about 1000 words down on Demonitization, which isn’t terrible progress by any means, but I want more out of myself seeing as this is indeed my job now. I spent some time editing Oneiromancer as well to make up for the deficit. Often I enjoy editing more than I do writing so I have to be careful or I’ll look up and find I’ve spent the last two hours perfecting two paragraphs instead of getting the next chapter going. Well, I’m going to try my best to hit 2000 today even though I missed yesterday. I’ve got some good stuff bouncing around in my head so I should be able to finish off Demonitization, or at least get close.

Where do these ideas come from you might wonder? Personally, I just steal from authors who know what they’re doing. Yes, really. The character beats, the dialogue, set and setting, tropes, the plot structure, pretty much everything except the events that take place in the story and the characters who inhabit it are based on what I see others doing. Its a lot easier for me to read something incredible and take a gander at what makes it so good than to invent from scratch. In fact, some of my favorite books are ‘how to write’ books.

I’m a huge fan of James Scott Bell, an author with plenty of how to write books to his name. If you’ve ever struggled with the complexities of story structure or staying on track during the course of writing, I highly recommend his book ‘Write Your Novel from the Middle.’ In summary, the way he structures a story is like a streamlined version of John Campbell’s monomyth. It centers around ‘the mirror moment,’ which is similar to Campbell’s abyss. This is the midway point of the story where the main character(s) must look inward, figure out why and what they’re struggling to achieve, and how they want to move forward to get it, whether it be to repeat the ways they’ve already tried, or attempt to learn from their mistakes. From this moment you can extrapolate where the character has come from and where they’re going, or in other words, the entire story. It has been extremely helpful in plotting my stories out because without a decent structure, I find it impossible to write an impactful tale.

Another author I’ve been learning from lately is Anne Rice. I’ve only read ‘Interview With the Vampire’ (and I’m halfway through Vampire Lestat) but damn if I haven’t learned so much already. I find myself constantly highlighting her brilliant phrasing and trying match the subtle defining details of the characters she creates in my own writing. Her prose is like wizardry, I can see the scenes in my head more clearly than most everybody I’ve read, and I’ll probably be trying to steal this skill all my life. I’ve already adjusted my paragraph structure, my verb usage, and my adverb usage, all based on what I see in her writing. She actually uses a bunch of adverbs and they work! How?! I’m telling you, she might have actually been a vampire to write like this.

Well, I could go on and on about my favorite authors, and maybe I will dedicate a few blog posts to doing exactly that, but for now I feel warmed up and ready to write! Have a great Friday and please expect my next post on Monday, though don’t hold it against me if the urge to do a weekend post strikes me.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley