Work, School, and Daily Routine Don't Belong in Your Story (More Than Once)

Not every protagonist in every story is a wandering, one-eyed sellsword, a dangerous grandson of a witch sent on a mission, or a cybernetic super soldier deployed onto an alien battlefield. A lot of our protagonists are, in fact, just regular people. They have routines they follow, and but for the events of our story their lives are pretty much the same day in, and day out.

With that said, however, the audience isn't here for that daily routine... they're here for the story. So if the tale you're telling spends too much time at the office, or in the third row of English Composition 302, it's probably time to start re-evaluating where your word count is going.

Absolutely riveting, this test-taking scene.

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Trim The Fat

A story needs to establish a character's routine; that should go without saying. However, the problem arises when the author just keeps going through that same routine time and time again when it isn't adding anything to the story.

As an example, we've all read a few YA books in our time. Some of us have read more than a few. Whether the protagonist is the new kid at a regular old high school, or they've been accepted to a super special sorcery academy, we still follow them along through their average day at least once. We need to see them in their natural environment, figure out who they're sitting near, what teachers hate them, and so on, and so forth.

But after that? We don't need to know. At all.

But... but my routine!

That is not to say that the setting of the story needs to completely change once routine has been established. Your office worker who caught the eye of the billionaire CEO will still have to clock in to keep earning a paycheck... but after that first run through we should only see them at work when it advances the plot. Whether it's chatting with a coworker about said CEO showing up around the office more, or the worker finding themselves alone in the records room with the big wig in a sexually tense scene, we should only be tuning in if the scene in question advances the story in some way.

What we should not be seeing is our protagonist just doing the same old thing. If they're just rearranging flowers on the shelf in the home and garden section, or attaching labels to the items at the auction house they work at, or even if they're a detective who's interviewing witnesses and filling out paperwork, stuff that doesn't pertain to the story you're telling should be cut.

Ask What The Audience is Learning

Every scene in a story needs to show the audience something about the world, the character, the plot, etc. And sometimes an extremely useful scene may seem like it's useless if you don't lift up the hood and ask what it's doing.

The best way to do this is to ask what the scene is showing the audience.

For example, that scene where the office worker shares lunch with their best friend from the records department may not seem like it's vital to the story. It's just two office drones eating chicken salad and trying to make it through the day. But is this scene sharing painful parts of a character's past? Is it giving the reader need-to-know information, such as that one of them has an ex who might be a stalker? Is it setting up dominos that can later be knocked down, such as discrepancies in the records that might lead to motive in a murder plot that's uncovered in chapter 11?

Sometimes the thing your audience learns is subtle. Sometimes it's blatant. But if a scene can be trimmed away without costing your audience anything, chances are good you can probably do without it.

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That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

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Authors Need Discipline, Not Inspiration

It's the new year, and you've decided you're finally going to the gym. For the first few days, you're sweating like a champ. You're sore and achy from the muscles you haven't pushed since you were back in school, but you're pushing through. Then you start cheating. It's not that you don't still want to lose that weight, and get the body you've been talking about for years, but you'd have to wash your workout clothes, and get off the couch, and drive through traffic... and it just seems like it's not worth the effort. One day won't kill you, and you can get back to it twice as hard the next day. Then the next day comes around, and you find some other excuse. Then, before you know it, you've been paying for a gym membership you haven't used in six months, and you're wondering how you got here.

And that dream physique goes right back to being just a dream.

If you're wondering what any of this has to do with writing, replace "going to the gym" with "working on your book," and you're there.

Inspiration is Temporary, Discipline is Eternal

Don't get me wrong, inspiration is great. It's that shot of adrenaline that slams into your head, and makes all your synapses fire at once when you get a new idea. It's the excitement you get when you sit down to work on a new project. It's a drug that can leave you buzzed for a while, and make you feel great about what you're doing. When that high wears off, though, all too often your work ethic evaporates along with it.

I wonder where I could get some more of that...

This leads us to another problem; the serial starter. A lot of writers think that losing their enthusiasm means the project isn't ready, and they use that as an excuse to stop trying. So they put it down, and start work on something else that's grabbed their attention. These inspiration junkies comfort themselves by saying they'll get back to the first project once they find that fire again... but they won't. And then they hop from the second project to the third, the third to the fourth, and pretty soon they're surrounded by a bunch of introductions and starting chapters, with nothing remotely resembling a complete work.

You don't need inspiration to be an author. It's nice, and it helps, but it isn't necessary. To be an author you need to have the ability to sit down at the keyboard, focus your brain, and get shit done. Maybe you can only do a few hundred words per day. But you know something? If you put in 500 words every day (which is probably less than the length of this blog post), then that means you'll have a 100,000-word novel in 200 days. That's one novel a year. If you could keep this up for a few years, then you'll have a respectable stable of books to your name.

Now just imagine if you could write 1,000 words a day. That isn't much, but it would let you do two books a year. If, that is, you can grit your teeth, build up the discipline to put your ass in your chair every day, and add that much story without browsing the Internet, texting your family, and succumbing to the siren's song of whatever TV show you've been binge watching.

It sounds easy. Trust me, it isn't.

Making The Habit

If you haven't already gotten in the habit of writing every day, then it's going to take time. If you can make it through a month, you'll be doing well. If you can make it three months, you'll have the habit set. Do it for a year, and it's going to take more than a new season of Game of Thrones to make you skip a day.

Seriously, it's easier to say "no" with every death.

The gym metaphor is important to keep in mind, because if you've ever tried to get on a workout regimen, that's a lot like writing a novel. You know what you're doing, and you have a notebook that tracks your basic outline to help keep you on task. All you have to do is show up, and sweat. That's the part a lot of writers don't want to do, but you need to if you're ever going to finish something.

You think inspiration is addictive? Wait until you get used to completing a project. It will turn you into a fiend. Trust me.

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Routine is Great For Writers, But Terrible For Your Story

I've mentioned in the past that, for a time, I was an editor at a small press. The way my contract worked was that I received no money up-front, but I would be given a small percentage of the royalties when the book was released. It wasn't an ideal situation, but I figured that if I edited good books with potential, and if I edited enough of them, then I could count on a fairly regular check. The problem, of course, was that small presses aren't flooded with brilliant novels written by the next genre leaders; they're beacons for slush.

It's like this, only significantly more unpleasant.

While slogging through that slush I remember one particular story. In this story our main character was a veterinary assistant, she lived on a small hill in a small town, and rode her bike everywhere. She would ride into work in the morning, have lunch at a cafe, do some grocery shopping after work, and then ride her bike home to make dinner. I remember this cycle specifically because it was repeated over, and over, and over again. In the first half of the book (all I managed to read) the reader was dragged through her completely pedestrian routine no fewer than four times. She didn't run into mysterious figures in the bread aisle, or receive a tape that would self-destruct with her coffee... she just trundled through her boring-as-shit life waiting for something to happen to her.

The Never-Ending 9-5

Most of us live our lives based on routines. We go to work, we come home, we sleep. We go to the gym three days a week, and we work out at the same hour every time. Some of us even eat lunch at the same goddamn place every day when our break comes up. The point of a novel, though, is to focus on the things that move your plot along, and which contribute to the story. So if Stacy is a waitress, we should see her go through her average workday one time in chapter one or two. If Tom is going to college, then show us his class schedule and mention the course load he has to establish that he isn't neglecting his responsibilities. Once you've established that your lead has a job/vocation, though, it's time to focus on the plot.

But then an ancient order of assassins recruited Tom into their ranks, and he never graduated.

This doesn't mean that you immediately jettison your lead out of his or her routine, but it means that you do not focus on it anymore. If Stacy is at work then it should be because something happens while she's there, or because she's about to be called away by the mysterious young man who left a bizarre stone on her table as a tip. Tom might be in class, but while his chemistry professor is droning on, he's replaying the strange events of the previous evening and drawing out timelines in his notebook.

The focus isn't on washing dishes or taking notes; it's on driving the plot forward. Work, school, etc., cease to be important. The regular routine of your character's life is the background of the play, but it should not be center stage.

Also, if you end every chapter with your lead going home and going to sleep, then chances are you really need to spice up your story.

Uses For Your Background

I'm not saying you shouldn't establish who your character is, and what they do. Those are important traits, and in the case of cop thrillers or private detective stories that's what the book is about. Not only that, but by following your lead around to his or her job you get a sense of the world around them. You know whether the story is set in a small town, or in the depths of dark, dirty city. If you're writing sci-fi or fantasy story, though, then your lead's daily life is one, big piece of exposition. Whether they're building space ships or serving in the town militia, everything your lead sees and does, every conversation they have, is going to lay the ground work for the world around them.

The shrouded ruins of Old Neve were forbidden... and horrors dwelt within.

In addition to showing us the world, though, your lead's day-to-day gives us an insight as to who he or she is. By watching them in their natural environment we see if someone is dutiful or clever, lazy or cantankerous. We see what they excel at, and what they fail at. However, all of this is setup to your book, and not the book itself.

Put another way, people would be really interested in a compelling story about Detective Jack Warner, and how he has to navigate his own strengths and weaknesses to solve a triple homicide that might mean indicting one of the most powerful men in the country. By contrast, no one would be overly interested in a book where Detective Warner makes traffic stops, writes tickets, gives depositions on open-and-shut spousal abuse cases, then goes home and ticks another day off work until retirement.

Your character's routine is like the fiber in your diet. Yes, you need to have some, but no you don't want every chapter to be bland, boring bowls of cereal.

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