Writing Tips

Tense Writing

Okay, so you want to write a story. You've picked out an awesome name, done some dabbling, and decided you know what you want your book to be about. Or do you really? The more you think about it, the more you get lost and don't know where to start. It is an awesome story, but it is becoming an awesome, chaotic mess in your head.

I know exactly what this feels like, and so does my husband,(who still hasn't begun his own story idea after thirteen years of marriage and an occasional prodding to do something creative...I think he wants me to write it for him?  Nah, I'm good.  I'm already drowning in my own projects.  Heheh.)

Once, I had a dream-- no, literally, I had a dream. A nightmare. I had been terrified on the subject of vampires all my life, up until I had that dream. Being chased by someone who was possessed was scary, even if the vampire himself didn't want to hurt people and was only forced to do so.  Well?  How do I put this?  It wasn't really...fun? 

I mean, this creature looked like a winged Gollum, mixed with the wet-hair chick from The Ring, and then mixed again with a winged Count Dracula from Van Helsing.  He had the hair...and the wall crawling, creepy demon moves.  There were wolves chasing me, a muddy river that sucked on my feet, an abandoned boat with dried, bloody handprints and a rosarie beneath the seat, and a pit full of bodies out in the middle of the forest, which I nearly toppled into and then had to hide in.

The vampire's master (the scarier of the two) was in the fog, and when he caught me, he used me to taunt the vampire who was fighting his nature. Then he killed me. Oh, yeah, it was terrible to experience, and the one who tried to cast off his nature in order to save me...God, I can still hear the horror in his screams when he saw what his maker had done to me. It's been over seventeen years, and my heart still wrenches at the memory of what that sight did to him. It hurt him worse than I've ever seen anyone hurt in my life, and I still cry when I think about it. I can still feel my body lying there, void of life, my hair plastered to the side of my face in my tears, and to the side of my throat in my blood. Hyper real.

The dream was utterly terrifying, but it captured something in me that set me on a dedicated path. I've never been able to move on from it. It was an amazing story that I knew I had to write. I couldn't dare let it slip into the oblivion of forgotten dreams.

Yet when I tried to write it, it was a mess, just like on this post when I started describing it. You don't know where it really started, you don't know where it really ended, or even how it got there. You just know the scenes, and that they were vivid and filled with action and strong emotions, and there was a sequence of them--not an actual story arc. I didn't even know what category or genre my book belonged to, just that it was a story that needed told or I would die inside. And as a person who has survived a lot of violence and abuse, that story gave me life. Gave me something to fight and live for. I had to save that broken man who was in my dream so that his horror could end. So that he could find peace. So I could as well.

So I started writing it, and every time I later read over it, it was never what I wanted it to be.   Too many slammed doors, fainting characters, shouting in all caps...you name it.  There was a disturbing, heavy reliance on writing crutches of various types all throughout it. After many years of having to write that story, and then rewrite it (and then rewrite it again for the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh times), I finally began to develop shortcuts and figure out the some of the best ways to write and avoid pitfalls that landed me in corners I couldn't write my way out of. I also learned how the changing of tenses could make or break a story or a specific but major scene, and how to draft and outline, as well as how to convert a small idea draft into a full-fledged chapter or book. I can write short chapters now when I used to only be able to write twenty-two page chapters, and I can write clearly, concisely, and without the badly written lines or lagging sections that slowed down the book or made parts boring. You learn a lot by continuing to write. By never giving up.