#mariowritesforyou

[mariowritesforyou]

Try writing a "plot irrelevant" scene

We all have it drilled into our our literary heads: every piece of writing, every scene, every beat, every single sentence has to have a purpose or be justified for its inclusion on the plot.

I'm a big fan of justifying my narrative decisions but sometimes the writing can't have a purpose right from the moment it's being written.

So much bandwidth is allocated to the intensive brain-intensive process of putting stuff to words, I feel I should myself some slack if I can't fit them into the overarching themes or theses.

This especially becomes a problem on longer works where there's so much room for meaning and mistakes and mishaps. Worrying that everything has to be foreshadowing or pay off or symbolic can sap the enjoyment of building a scene and thus, kill the velocity of writing it.

So, how about if we just don't care for a bit?

Write a scene or sequence that you sort of know might make the cutting room floor, but has something in it for you if you write it, be it spending time with your favorite characters, coming up with lines for later, or fleshing out the tone. Imagine outlandish meetings of characters that would not meet otherwise, see how they react to situations unseen inside the plot.

You see, we know that readers need variety in a story, but the writers need the variety too. There's a point of critical saturation where chipping away at something will yield diminishing returns whose solution is often to rest by doing something different. Your brain will still be working on that plot thread you left on pause, but in a freer, open and more relaxed state on the background.

A bit of horizontal progress can go a long way for vertical progress.

[mariowritesforyou]

Don't be afraid to jump ahead in your story.

I was struggling with this scene, a rather gruesome, exhausting scene. I get to a point where the scene's point is made and then what's left for me to do is to write the set up for a narrative shift in the scene. This set up is what's known in filmmaking as "shoe leather": the mundane actions (sitting down, saying "goodbye" on the phone, walking inside a room) that don't provide much to the story besides them being things that the characters do to get them to the juicy stuff.

I was not looking forward to chewing on that shoe leather until I got an idea:

why not just cut that boring stuff out and jump ahead to the things people actually want to see?

And so, that scene was divided into two, and a little time jump where the shoe leather would have happened was placed in between scenes.

As everything, this tool is a case-by-case thing, but just knowing it's there can help remind ourselves of a couple of very important things that are often forgotten when we're so cycled on our writing:

Not every single thing needs to be spelled out, the audience can infer a lot of things with enough clues.

Giving screentime to a thing is giving importance to that thing; is describing the way they open a door relevant? Only you can know.

You're here to write what you want to write. Some parts (action scenes, my god) will always be a bit more of a slog, but the important thing is that they lead to your enjoyment of the whole work in the writing process, which quite likely will lead to the audience's enjoyment in the viewing.

[mariowritesforyou]

Do a logline for your story (it helps I swear).

Loglines are mostly used in film, I believe, and they are basically one-sentence summaries of the whole flick. They are very much audience/marketing focused, so no spoilers or twists revealed; it's what you tell to sell someone on the movie.

And yeah, I do believe you can do a logline for any story no matter how grand or complex you might think:

Paul, the young heir of a noble family, must become the Messiah of the planet Dune and its people if he wishes to survive against rival factions.

(Long sentence, but only one sentence.)

The real value of a logline is that it can help you reveal

what your story is about instead of just what happens in it.

By finding the core of the plot you can deduce (and more importantly, justify) the additional elements that make the story come alive. Does a funny scene fit if your logline is about a dark, revenge story? Could be!, as long as you know why it's there (maybe for breathing room, or to build atmosphere or for fleshing out characters).

It's a great starting point, at least. I'm personally quite skeptical and wary of overrelying on writing equations and formulas to make your story "right". Nevertheless, structure can be phased out whenever it has served its purpose, your story being like the green of a garden that has kept blooming and growing to the point that the pots and walls have been covered by what they have borne.

[mariowritesforyou]

Be strategic about which part you're writing.

Some parts of writing are easier and get done faster than other parts, that's just a law of the universe.

Me? My productivity gets destroyed when I have to go back on the chapter after sketching out the dialogue and add the action and flavor in between each line. Happened recently in an interrogation scene where, I stop to see the stopwatch (not the timer!) and it tells me I'm three quarters through today's writing quota, but then the word count tells me I'm only at the halfway point of my desired daily output.

I like seeing that number go up, I'm a simple creature like that, but I simply know that fleshing out a scene takes me longer than starting one, and the more detailed the scene gets the longer I spend on it and the more frustrated I get at the lack of volumetric progress.

Then I get an idea:

why not treat myself by pausing the difficult writing and do what comes easier for me?

And so the rest of the session I spent starting a new chapter, which is where I can get into the flow state where I just semi-consciously produce and produce and produce. Boom, half of my word count done in half the time it usually takes.

I believe this is another example of the Pareto principle, better known as the "80/20 rule", which stipulates that "80% of outcomes (or outputs) result from 20% of all causes (or inputs) for any given event"; outcomes in this case being word count, and causes being writing time.

It took me a while before I understood that writing (as in sit-your-ass-down-and-get-typing writing) doesn't have to be a linear pursuit. Sometimes, chipping away at a roadblock will start giving you diminishing returns, and perhaps a change of pace is necessary.

For this, you have to know yourself as a writer; what your quirks and strengths are, and play up to them. Of course, for how much they may suck, the difficult parts could have a lot to add to the story, so we will eventually have to come back to them. However, we should always know that the easier parts will be waiting for us with warm, open arms.

[mariowritesforyou]

Try writing with a stopwatch (not a timer)

I've always struggled with my writing stamina, using timers to keep my pace up or trying for a minimum word count a day with middling success.

I know these techniques can be really useful for some, but I can't stress enough how using a stopwatch has been so much more psychologically friendly and encouraging to my work. If I had to guess as to why, I'd say that the stopwatch gives me more of a sense of progression rather of depleting time (in the case of the evil, evil, timer). Also, it feels less shameful to stop the stopwatch whenever I'm pausing or researching.

Sounds ridiculous, I know, and maybe it has been mentioned before, but it's how now I'm nearing 2 hours writing a day now and maybe it could be the same for somebody else.

[mariowritesforyou]

Scale Model I Did For My Play

A physical mock-up of Your Home (now a web serial here: mariowritesforyou.com)’s set design I did.

This was my last project for college. I wanted light projections to light up the whole stage with patterns I had designed. To previsualize this I clipped on the printed patterns to the cardboard model. There you can see the tiny audience seats and Meli’s big chair.

[mariowritesforyou]

I may have peaked as a writer (of course not).

Writing a wrestling match is SO FUN.

[mariowritesforyou]

You don't realize how much of a potty mouth you really have until you do the first pass of edits on your dialogue.