Best-selling author Jeffery Deaver (The Bone Collector, and the New Bond novel, Carte Blanche, among many, many others) was in Charlottesville, VA last weekend to offer up his advice on writing to aspiring writers at a symposium sponsored by a Virginia Writer’s Club at Piedmont Virginia Community College. You can find an article hitting the high points here.
Deaver made so many great points, things every aspiring author should hear. I find these particularly salient:
When deciding what kind of book to write:
“Writers should bear in mind that mint-flavored toothpaste is vastly more successful than liver-flavored toothpaste.”
On the notion that just completing a story should be enough to get it an audience:
“Just because you have a word processor and an idea doesn’t mean the book needs to see the light of day.”
On a personal note, I have recently been bombarded by notes and blog postings by other authors and graphic novelists trumpeting their self-discipline, based on their notion that they’d rather complete a story, even if it wasn’t quite up to their standards, than not complete it. I take the opposite view, even though I would be hard pressed to tell you why. Deaver, I think, has put it succinctly here. Yes, we must finish our work or we haven’t done our jobs – we haven’t told our stories. But just writing it isn’t enough. Just completing it isn’t enough. Yes, you have to finish it, but you have to finish it right, or what is the point?
Deaver also spoke at length about his process, describing outlines as the bulk of the work for his novels, outlines that can themselves become documents 100 pages long or more. He did insist, as many novelists do, that his process is just the one that works for him, and if you or I or anyone else has a different process that works for us, that’s all well and good. His way isn’t the only way. But, he insists, it is a good way. Deaver suggests would-be writers take a book they enjoy reading and break it down into outline form just for the exercise.
Still, he points out that outlines are easier to throw away than chapters, and that certainly helps streamline the process quite a bit. That makes sense to me – as an artist, it seems foolish to me to take a drawing all the way to completion before I even know what I’m drawing, before I have even sketched it out, but when I write, I take exactly that approach, working with just a whisper of an outline, discovering the story as I go. No wonder I get overwhelmed by it at times.
If what Deaver is saying is correct, then more structure is just what writers need to get the story out the right way. It’s odd – I have heard many successful novelists credit their outlines as the key to their success, while I’ve heard many would-be novelist hopefuls say that they hate making outlines, saying outlines take the fun out of the work. I wonder if it’s any coincidence that the successful ones embrace outlines while those who eschew outlines tend to remain wannabes. As Deaver points out, some people enjoy reading but not writing. That is a good distinction to be able to make.
Deaver’s final advice to aspiring unpublished novelists was a variant of that old saw “Write what you know”, “Write what you enjoy reading”, which I think works better for most of us would-be fiction writers and fiction fans. But he also offers the advice that you don’t need to copy what you enjoy reading either. Although people may enjoy mint-flavored toothpaste more than liver-flavored toothpaste, you don’t have to write about wizards or vampires just because JK Rowling and Stephanie Meyer’s books are runaway hits.
