As a writer, you probably know that creative writing takes a special state of mind. It is when you are relaxed but alert, calm but keyed up, focused but not panicked, that good writing tends to happen. It’s a little like what athletes call “being in the zone”. Your best athletic performance, too, depends on your mindset. It depends on having warmed-up muscles, being hydrated, and all those other ways that we prepare ourselves for exertion. We know that athletes and artists alike have to warm up to get into this zone.

So why do we continue fooling ourselves, and believing that we can leap straight into novel-writing after an hour on Twitter? Why do we watch TV and then try to pull out our notebooks, or get in a fight with a friend and then try to write?

The last example aside, doing internet-ish or media-related tasks immediately before writing is a mistake in my opinion. Brain studies done recently show that the brain is actually very bad at multi-tasking, and switches tasks only slowly and laboriously. Switching back and forth between your email and your short story may feel productive, even stimulating, but you’re actually only scrabbling at the surface of your normal levels of comprehension, struggling to make do with less. Multi-tasking feels addictive because of the way it “lights up” the brain, but it prevents deep focus and concentration.

After the jump: how to transition into writing.

So let’s lay down some ground rules for transitioning successfully into that special mindset that writing requires.

1. Don’t jump into writing after Facebook or Twitter
Facebook and Twitter are good examples of scatter-brained activities. They provide a constant stream of interesting or somewhat interesting information, but they scatter your thoughts in a dozen directions at once. Even after you close the window, I can bet you’re still buzzing with data, thinking about the ten different links or people or pieces of gossip you’ve seen. That’s no way to jump into your novel! Give yourself a time out before you try to write.

2. Don’t interrupt your writing with other tasks.
Once you’re writing, commit to writing. Don’t check your email (in fact, quit the application so the number of new emails isn’t showing up at the bottom of your screen). Don’t keep an internet window open. Don’t look at texts on your phone. If at all possible, turn off all the notifications around you. Writing time is writing time.

3. Warm up before getting to the hard stuff.
Athletes don’t try for the long jump the minute they put their sneakers on. Try a few writing stretches and warm-ups first. Once you’ve finished your previous task, take a moment to quiet yourself. Look out the window, or do something that lets you think. I actually enjoy cleaning up around the house as a way of getting ready to write. Putting things in order helps me put mental things in order, too. Whatever is a quiet activity that lets you think, do it. Then start writing a bit, but not on your actual story or novel. Take notes about a scene, or do a separate writing exercise. Once you feel like you’re regaining your concentration, you’re ready to do the real thing.

But the song can continue to teach us a good lesson about human cognition, and also about writing.

The way we notice things

First let’s talk about the human cognition side of things. We’re pretty much programmed to notice outliers, or to see differences standing out much more dramatically than similarities. This starts very young; when testing whether babies can count or what other mental skills they possess, researchers test by noticing what different thing the babies attend to. If the babies know that four is more than three, for example, and if a fourth item appears before them, they will look at it longer.

There are all sorts of ways adults notice differences, too. We always over-weight odd or outlying experiences; for example, many people are frightened of shark attacks and we always hear about the dangers of shark-infested waters, but we’re far more likely to be in a car accident. It’s the outlying experience that we pay attention to.

So how can we use this to our advantage in writing?

Using outliers in writing

Writers must occasionally act as amateur psychologists; we must be aware of how readers’ minds work and use that to our advantage. That means that if we describe things as uniform in our stories, they will be far less interesting to readers than if we allow something to stick out, to be unusual or unsettling. It also means we should use the rule of threes; readers are primed for lists of three things in stories to have the third thing as unusual or different from the previous two. Fairy tales adhere rigidly to the rule of threes, but modern writing does as well; jokes, for example, often use it, and plot points do too. After two trips to the haunted house with no trouble, for example, the reader will pay close attention to the third trip, expecting something.

There are other ways we attend to the odd one out. We expect the main character to stick out in some way; you should not be assuring us how utterly normal the character is. Let us see something slightly off about your character, some failing or neurosis or deep-seated trauma.

And in simple description, this noticing the odd one out can help as well. To describe a uniform field of wheat or street of houses is uninteresting and unremarkable; to describe a field of wheat with a tree jutting out of the middle, or a street of white houses with one orange house, will stick in your readers’ minds.

On “Give Us a Reason to Read“, Amy said:

I love that – thanks for sharing. I’ve found that as I write, I tend to “plan” benign but then as I start writing, the ugly tends to come out of my characters. It’s sometimes hard to have them be awful because I really like them, but I think you make a good point that it is that behavior that clarifies life and makes good writing good.

Nice technique, Amy. I think it’s a great idea to start slow and then discover the ugliness in our characters as we learn more about them. In a way, this mimics our actual experience of getting to know someone — on a first date or first meeting, only positive, benign things are going to come out, but on subequent meetings, we’ll see the person when he or she is irritated or fatigued, and as you say, the ugly will start to come out.

The conversation really got hopping on my post about the connection between poetry and blindness. Let me say first off that I agree with a few commenters who pointed out that my sample size was tiny and my evidence anecdotal. However, I was more interested in what the connection could mean for us sighted writers, and how limiting sight might actually improve our writing in some ways. We lean heavily on sight above all other senses in writing, and we’d do well to look at the world from a more tactile or auditory perspective from time to time.

Margaret said:

A good friend in college was blind, and she was one of three other girls with whom I shared an apartment in college senior year. Sharon would fill a pot with water, carefully placing her finger at the point to which she wanted to fill the pot — and by touch, she knew when it was full. She also could tell the level of water in a glass by sound. I am still aware as I fill my water bottle of the rising tone as the bottle fills.

Fascinating detail, Margaret — I’m always interested in the ways people learn to move about in and adapt to their worlds. This is a detail that is ripe for the plucking in fiction, too — whether your character is blind, or just in a dark room, feeling for the surface of the water.

Michael Washburn said:

If the pool of examples is limited to three, counterexamples come readily to mind. Aldous Huxley, who was partially blind, can most charitably be described as an interesting failure — a mediocre novelist whose work, especially later in his career, has a self-indulgent, ponderous quality, as if he is trying to distract the reader from the lack of a strong narrative with one flashy intellectual bauble after another….Although many vision-impaired people are amazingly gifted, I also note that James Thurber, Jorge Luis Borges, and Wyndham Lewis are very good writers who nevertheless fall short of Saki, Franz Kafka, and Ezra Pound.

Very true, Michael! I definitely agree that there’s far too small a sample size to infer that there is a causal link between blindness and a certain writing style. However, imagining what a blind person’s universe might be like can help us enrich our own sensory details in writing. And I’m also continually astonished at the power of human imagination — critics were hard on Helen Keller, for example, because in some of her writings she uses visual or auditory imagery; these critics seemed to believe that Keller was not entitled to use these metaphors because of her lack of actual access to them. But Keller claimed that of course she could use them; she could imagine them as well as anybody. Based on information I read, for example, I think I could imagine pretty well what it might feel like to be on the summit of Everest — the blinding sun, whipping wind, physical exhaustion, etc.

Mary said:

I think you HAVE hit on an interesting correlation between blindness & writing, BLH. So much of our ‘sight’ is in the amygdala, the ancient brain. Blind people can walk down halls strewn with boxes & they’ll naturally skirt them. More than just our orbs are involved in seeing…

In a vaguely related vein, I once sang in a band with a sax player who worked as a caregiver for the blind. I learned of this & began extolling the magical wonderfulness of our sight-deprived brothers & sisters, & this guy stopped me in mid-oration.

“Hey, hey–blind people can be big A-holes just like anybody else! People always make ‘em into saints & they’re NOT. They’re just regular people…”

Thanks, Mary. I’m fascinated by that other “sense” that allows us to feel space around us as well — my reading of Oliver Sacks tells me it is “proprioception”, and it enables us to balance ourselves and be aware of our bodies’ size, shape, and movements as well. Apparently we have far more senses than just the usual five, including senses of temperature, pressure, and pain. Some doctors even list nausea as another sense, because it is such a different category of feeling.

And as for your point, I think it’s important to remember! The blind or deaf or otherwise disabled are ordinary folks like the rest of us, and it is reductive to put them on pedestals.

Thanks for your comments, readers — ’til next time!

This week’s tip is:

Eliminate filler words.

“Like”. “You know”. “Seems”. Of, to, from, because, with. These are filler words. Due to the conventions of English, they’re often necessary bridge words between the real content of a sentence, linking phrases to clauses, modifiers to the things being modified. At the same time, they’re doing absolutely nothing for your style. They’re clunky, potato chip words, the kind that can fill you up — or make your sentence feel “full” — without giving you any nutritional value. A certain amount of them are necessary, but many of them can be avoided with more careful, lean sentence structures and phrasings.

Today, look at the two most recent pages you’ve written. How many sentences are full of these clumsy filler words? They’re often most easy to identify if you read the piece aloud. Many people read their work aloud too quickly because not every word is actually necessary, and they’re hurrying through out of a kind of embarrassment, aware that some words just are in the way.

So today, look at those two pages and see what you can strike out. Re-arrange a sentence so you don’t have “the brother of the girl of the woods.” That’s too many of’s. If you have to, break the sentence into two different thoughts. If the boy seemed quiet, why can’t he just be quiet? If the sky is dark like a wilting rose, why can’t the sky be a wilting rose? Cut out the unnecessary words, and in just one pass, your two pages will sound remarkably improved.

That’s part of the hard road we novel-writers follow, and we can accept that. But it’s important to remember the joy that’s in writing from time to time. And if our novel isn’t giving us too much joy at a particular point, then it’s worth looking elsewhere. That’s why so many writers write vacation stories.

No, vacation stories aren’t stories about going on vacation. They’re not boring beach reads or empty, conflict-free tales of your family’s trip to the Bahamas. Instead, they’re stories that are themselves vacations, trips away from the world of your novel. Instead of being stuck in the dreary nineteenth century London of your novel, for example, try putting it aside for a week and writing a story set in space in 2100. If you’re writing a tense family drama, write a horror story. If you’re writing about the Bahamas, write about the snowy fields of Siberia. Whatever would be a vacation from the world of your novel is where you’ve got to try going.

Writing a vacation story is more than just a little break. It can also refuel us, revitalizing our writing, our love of writing, and our ability to write that novel. You may be surprised to discover that stepping outside of your characters’ heads for a while can give you valuable insight into their situation. It’s sort of like living in a messy, cluttered house, and then leaving for two weeks. You may not have noticed what a mess your house was for years; but when you return after leaving, you’ll suddenly see it in a new light (and maybe be galvanized to tidy it up). You can achieve the same effect for your novel by living in a different literary space for a while.

So why not try taking a breather and toning some different writing novels this week? Give yourself a break and write a story that lets you explore the things you’ve had to avoid for months. Write about the world of men if you’re focusing on women; write about a fantasy world if you’re stuck in reality. Let yourself escape, and you’ll be surprised what you learn when you come back.

Print out your story and write on it.

It’s wonderfully easy to edit a story or manuscript on the computer. With the click of a button, we can whisk a paragraph halfway up the page, or rearrange a sentence just to our liking. The problem is that this leads to pretty bad editing. Because it’s easier to move a bad passage around than to chuck it, we tend to keep bad writing. We’ll also write in a more wordy way because typing is faster than writing by hand. So this week, I’m offering another analog solution to a surprising number of writing ills. When editing, print out your story and work on it with a good old fashioned red pen. Try shrinking the page so that you can put two pages on a single page; this will enable you to get a larger perspective on your writing.

Work on it in this way, or by spreading out several pages on a desk or the floor. Look at your novel or story like a map, and make sure the pieces are fitting well together. By seeing the words in reality on a page, you’ll be more critical and discerning. I’m not even completely certain why this is so, but believe me — it works wonders for your editing skills.

So why is it such difficult advice to follow? Why do we struggle to show and not tell?

If we want to understand how to show and not tell, then I think we need to understand why it’s so difficult to follow this old common-sense advice. We love our favorite books for doing it, but for some reason we can’t manage to do it in our own writing. And it all boils down to a few fundamental reasons. These are the reasons that “show, don’t tell” is sometimes painful, sometimes counter-intuitive — but nearly always worth trying.

1. Insecurity

This is the big reason that we just can’t help ourselves and insist on over-explaining a poignant moment or spilling a character’s entire back story in the first page. We are fundamentally lacking in confidence as writers; we aren’t sure of our own talents, and so we overshare in an anxious attempt to prove our story, to apologize for it. When we over-explain, we’re telling our readers that we know this character isn’t interesting enough on his own, but if you’ll just please read on, you’ll see that he also has lots of interesting problems, so won’t you please, please read?

How to fight it: It’s time to grow a little backbone. Your writing will never improve until you have confidence that it will improve. So take a deep breath and remind yourself that you are in fact a writer. You can do this. You don’t have to beg for readers.

2. We want to explain it just right.

We tend to spend a lot of mental time on our novels. We have an idea in mind and we might spend years of our lives getting it just right in our heads, figuring out just how the metaphors and tropes and central conceits are all going to click sublimely together like the workings of some sort of fine Swiss watch. That’s why we want readers to appreciate all this hard work and intricate interlacing. So we over-explain. “See, this scene perfectly parallels this other one,” we want to point out. “Isn’t it gorgeous?” Rather than letting our readers figure out the inner workings for themselves, we want to hold their hands, pointing out the greatest sights.

How to fight it: Step back and take a breath. The pleasure of reading comes from figuring out these things on our own — remember? You should be trying to recreate your favorite reading experiences in your own writing. Write the books you want to read, which are usually the ones that aren’t hitting you over the head with their metaphors.

3. Editing is harder than emptying our brains on the page

The other obstacle in the way of showing over telling is the very way we tend to think about scenes when we’re planning them. We know at the beginning what the scene means and who’s feeling what; we don’t think about it in terms of the hidden gestures and wordless looks that may truly belong in the final draft. So the first draft is likely to be very tell-y. It’s you, emptying out all your thoughts about this scene. More than a scene, a first draft can often be saying, “Here’s what I think has to happen in this scene, and what everyone has to be thinking.” That’s an important first step, but it’s a bridge step to the shore of the finished work, not the finished work itself.

How to fight it: Once you’ve clarified all this on the page and in your head, you can go back and eliminate that bridge. You needed it to get to this new shore, but now you don’t need it anymore. Strike it out.

How do you fight the urge to tell more than you show?