Book Excerpt—To Find Time to Write Your Novel, You Must Make Time to Write

by Linda Rodriguez

I have recently been asked by a number of people how to find time to write novels. I decided to offer a free excerpt from my book, Plotting the Character-Driven Novel, that deals with precisely that problem to the Writers Who Kill readers. I hope our readers will find it helpful.

 https://www.amazon.com/Plotting-Character-driven-Novel-Linda-Rodriguez/dp/097912915X

Book Excerpt from Plotting the Character-Driven Novel

Writing a novel requires several things—time, motivation, the willingness to keep learning the craft of fiction, and an ability or process to access your creative thoughts. We’ll deal with the first two in this chapter briefly since they’re mostly beyond the purview of this book, and the rest of the book will concern itself with elements of the craft of fiction and a process for accessing your own inner knowledge of your novel by freewriting, brainstorming by yourself, and thinking on paper. I will be including samples of actual work documents I have used with this process to create published novels in order to give you examples of how these techniques and tools work—and also to show that behind those perfect books you pick up at the bookstore lies a great deal of hard work, messy process, and flailing around. This book is designed to help you keep the flailing around to the minimum.

To Find Time to Write Your Novel, You Must Make Time to Write

How do you find time to write the novels which are your vocation in the midst of job and career demands, family and housework demands, community and societal demands? When everyone else expects so much from you that there’s nothing left for your own dreams, what can you do about it?

First, we have to change our terminology from “finding time to write” to “making time to write.” The sad truth is that no one finds time to write. There aren’t big pockets of time just lying around waiting to be picked up and used in most of our lives. For most of us, we’ll have to give up some comfort or pleasure to make real time to write—in some cases, to make any bits of time to write at all.

The first step is to make the decision to own your own life. Time is not a commodity--the time we’re talking about is the substance of your life. When it’s gone, so are you. If you want to write anything, you have to claim your own life and find out what you want.

How do you find those pieces of time and the regular schedule for writing that leads to a body of work? The trick is to create order and make a tourniquet for a time hemorrhage, but first you must destroy all of those 'shoulds' and 'what will people thinks' that are standing in your way. Make it easy on yourself by asking for help and accepting help when it’s offered to you. Take the time to de-stress. When you’re not frazzled by stress, you’ll find it easier to set limits and boundaries and hold to them.

Whenever you find your desk or day becoming chaotic, take time to reorganize. It will repay in more time that you can steal for your illicit love affair with the novel. To make sure you stay on track with those things that absolutely must be done, make a brief list of the way your time was spent at the end of each day and week. Check it for places where you abandoned time reserved for writing or other truly necessary tasks to engage with lower priority urgencies or comfort activities. After a disastrous day, sit down with a notebook and figure out how to handle things differently if you face the same situations again. Review the situation and just what happened step by step, pinpointing the spot(s) at which you could and should have made a different decision or taken a stand against someone else's urgency with your time. Figure out a strategy for dealing with this situation when it next arises, and write it down. Then forget the day and relax.

Worrying about the myriad things, some great but most small to tiny, that we must take care of wears us down. When you find yourself doing this rather than being able to write or revise the passage you want to work on, keep an ongoing master list and write down each task or obligation the moment you think about it. Get it out of your head and onto paper to free your mind and stop the energy drain. Then, later, you can decide which tasks can be delegated to someone else and arrange the remaining tasks in the order that will allow them to be done quickest and most easily.

We can also free up energy by developing habits and systems to take care of the mindless stuff. We already do this every day, brushing teeth, driving to work, without having to make decisions for each tiny action that comprises these tasks. Develop a system for handling things that recur, and stick with it for twenty-one days. Then it will be a habit, and you can forget it and set your mind free to be more creative.

Much time use is sheer habit. Work smarter. Find the ways in which you want and need to spend time. Steal those minutes and hours from low-priority tasks. Break down everything on your to-do list into small tasks and estimate the minimum time to accomplish them. (Double all time estimates!) Schedule into your calendar. If they won't all fit in the time allotted, then something must go. Nothing is fixed in stone--renegotiate and eliminate whatever you can. Of the rest, what can you successfully delegate? It pays to invest time (and money, if possible) in training someone to do it.

Become assertive. Don't be afraid to approach someone with a request, and don’t take it personally if they refuse you. Learn to say 'no' kindly and firmly and to receive a 'no' without letting it affect your self-esteem or your relationship. Be secure.

Author of many published novels and teacher of writing, Holly Lisle, says it the best way I’ve ever seen it. “Realize that real writers who write multiple books and who make a living at it have systems they use. A process for brainstorming, a consistent way of outlining a story, a certain number of words or pages a day, a way of plotting, a way of revising, a way of finishing. Writing is work. It doesn't fall out of your head by magic. It doesn't just happen because you want it to.”

Linda Rodriguez's Dark Sister: Poems has just been released. Plotting the Character-Driven Novel, based on her popular workshop, and The World Is One Place: Native American Poets Visit the Middle East, an anthology she co-edited, were published to high praise in 2017. Every Family Doubt, her fourth mystery novel featuring Cherokee campus police chief, Skeet Bannion, and Revising the Character-Driven Novel will be published in 2019. Her three earlier Skeet novels—Every Hidden Fear, Every Broken Trust, and Every Last Secret—and her books of poetry—Skin Hunger and Heart's Migration—have received critical recognition and awards, such as St. Martin's Press/Malice Domestic Best First Novel, International Latino Book Award, Latina Book Club Best Book of 2014, Midwest Voices & Visions, Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award, Thorpe Menn Award, and Ragdale and Macondo fellowships. Her short story, “The Good Neighbor,” published in the anthology, Kansas City Noir, has been optioned for film.

Rodriguez is past chair of the AWP Indigenous Writer’s Caucus, past president of Border Crimes chapter of Sisters in Crime, founding board member of Latino Writers Collective and The Writers Place, and a member of International Thriller Writers, Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers, and Kansas City Cherokee Community. Visit her at http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com

Book Excerpt—Coming Up With a Killer Concept

by Linda Rodriguez

At the end of 2016, my seventh book, Plotting the Character-Driven Novel, was published. I've taken a popular course I've taught for years on using depth of character as a springboard to a strong plot and turned it into a book designed to help the aspiring writer who wants to tell a story made compelling by the truth and complexity of its characters. In it, I provide actual documents I've used to create my own published novels, demonstrating the methods I teach.

I thought I'd give a sample to our Writers Who Kill blog readers, so I'm offering a section of Plotting the Character-Driven Novel below. You can find the complete book in trade paperback and ebook here.

https://www.amazon.com/Plotting-Character-driven-Novel-Linda-Rodriguez/dp/097912915X

Coming Up With a Killer Concept

Which comes first? Location, situation, or character?

The truth is that your initial seed for your novel can come from any one of these, but you will soon enough have to bring in the other two before you can have a truly exciting concept for the book. We’re going to talk about character-driven plotting in this course, but your character has to be rooted in a place (or be challenged by a new or hostile place), and a situation has to be set up that provides a major challenge to your character. A character floating in empty white space or mythical TV-nowhere land is not going to interest a reader. Neither is a character whose situation offers no problems, challenges, threats, or conflict. Whether you begin with a fascinating character, an interesting location, or a dramatic situation, one piece simply won’t be enough all by itself.

You must have the location and background, the initial situation, and the protagonist solidly in mind before you can really start developing your story. Once you have at least the beginnings of all three of those aspects, then you can use character subjected to the stresses and limitations of the situation and place to plot your novel.

Where do we come up with ideas for any or all of these three aspects of story? The first step is to be open to the ideas all around us. My husband has been going to enough mystery writers conferences and reading so many books that my friends have published that he’s almost as good as I am now about spotting a great location to find a body or have a showdown or set a mystery. (Yes, our conversations don’t bear overhearing—“It’s a perfect spot for an ambush,” “If you dumped a body back in there, it wouldn’t be found until some of those kids over there came nosing around.”) We will witness an awkward conversation or argument between people at a coffee shop or restaurant—be unwilling eavesdroppers to a loud cell phone argument—and speculate about how that state of affairs could provide motive for murder and a volatile situation ready for a precipitating incident.

Pay attention to the people around you, their conversations and their actions. Ask, “What if?” Those two little words are the most valuable tools of the novelist at the beginning of the book. What if a Puritan woman whose husband was gone had an illicit love affair and got pregnant? What if a crazed whaling captain decided to go after the monster whale that took off his leg? What if a poor and plain but intelligent and strong-willed girl in Victorian England refused to be a victim and eventually wound up the governess at a scary mansion for a harsh employer with whom she fell in love? What if scientists could recreate living dinosaurs from the DNA in prehistoric dinosaur bones? What if a giant white shark began to terrorize a beach resort town? All those novels and movies arose from writers asking themselves, “What if?”

You never know when you will encounter that grain of sand around which you can build the pearl of character and/or situation. Henry James once famously said, “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.” And remember what F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “Character is plot, plot is character.”

Keep notebooks always with you to capture ideas and bits of description of places, characters, or situations you see or overhear. Keep these large and small notebooks by your bed, in your purse or pocket, inside your cell phone or tablet, in your briefcase/bookbag, on your laptop or desktop computer, beside all the chairs in which you regularly sit. Use them also to note down interesting ideas and bits from books that you read.

Create an idea file with newspaper articles, internet items, and stories you hear from others. Some of my friends and family send me interesting items of news or research they come across. Even if it’s not something that necessarily sparks my interest—and it usually doesn’t since what catches my interest seldom catches other people’s and vice versa—I tuck it away. Because I never know when it might give me an idea of something I need for a book I’m writing based on one of the fragments of news or research that did catch my interest.

Combine ideas from your notebooks and idea file. Read over both when you’re plotting a new book and let them soak into your subconscious. You never know what bit of this or piece of that will become a vital part of your storyline in some intriguing way. Let your active plotting, your notes, and your idea file build on one another as you’re creating characters, situations, motivations, and actions for your story. Maybe the combination of two or three of these ideas and notes together will offer the complexity you need.

Start right away with two documents—a list of questions about the characters, locations, situation, and story/plot actions to which you’ll add constantly at the beginning and a first-draft journal or a document of first-draft notes. These can be written by hand in a notebook or in a computer document. The important thing is to have these documents or something very like them and to write in them, thinking on paper about your fictional place, people, and plot. Another useful document I’ve discovered is a list of scenes you want to see or write in the book—at the very beginning of the process before you really know what else will happen. In the sample documents at the end of the book, you will find copies of these three documents that I used in writing one of my own novels, and we will discuss ways in which you can use your own versions of these documents.

Linda Rodriguez Bio

Linda Rodriguez's book, Plotting the Character-Driven Novel is based on her popular workshop. Every Family Doubt, her fourth mystery featuring Cherokee campus police chief, Skeet Bannion, will appear in June, 2017. Her three earlier Skeet novels—Every Hidden Fear, Every Broken Trust, and Every Last Secret—and her books of poetry—Skin Hunger and Heart's Migration—have received critical recognition and awards, such as Malice Domestic Best First Novel, International Latino Book Award, Latina Book Club Best Book of 2014, Midwest Voices & Visions, Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award, Thorpe Menn Award, and Ragdale and Macondo fellowships. Her short story, “The Good Neighbor,” published in the anthology, Kansas City Noir, has been optioned for film.