For The Beginning Writer: Writing Goals

by Auburn Rutledge Fox

“I write because I love it/have to/need to/want to.” You've likely used some variation of this line on at least one occasion to answer the question of why you write. And that’s a good thing. Writing should be a passion and something you feel compelled to do. But there is more to it.

Writers need goals.

If you are considering writing as a serious source of income or to be published, to break into an industry or grow your career,—you need to have goals.

I break writing goals down into two basic types:

Type One Goals: What you hope to accomplish with your writing as a whole.

Type Two Goals: How you will write on a day to day basis.

Type One Goals are overarching and far-reaching and depend very much on what you are writing. Is it a nonfiction book based on your area of expertise and meant to build your platform? A novel to establish you as a professional writer? Editorial work for a newspaper, magazine or blog to earn your own column or byline or publication? Knowing what you write and why you write it determines what your overall goal should be and helps you structure Type Two Goals.

Type Two Goals are very down-to-earth, day-to-day work. How much will you write each day? Each week? Will you measure your accomplishments in hours or word counts or pages or chapters? Understanding your approach to writing—when you write best, how quickly or slowly, what tools you use—will help you establish your output.

Goals should be three things: personal, calculable, and realistic. Personal means that no one knows better than you what you are capable of, and only you can determine what your writing will do for you? Base your goals on what you want and what is best for you. Calculable means that you can measure what you’ve accomplished with numbers, rather than vague ideas. How many pages? Did you meet the deadline? Realistic means that you can accomplish what you set out to do. That’s not to say that your goals are immutable or won’t change as you do. That’s inevitable and should be accepted as the natural course of doing anything. But without direction, without an understanding of why you are writing, you won’t know what to do with your work or how to share it. And writing, as we well know, is meant to be read.

Auburn Rutledge Fox is currently an online marketer by trade. She’s a former film-TV major-turned-social media lover, book nerd, blog reader and geek following the latest trends in non-traditional advertising, publishing, social networking and digital media by day. She spends her nights writing, watching movies, surfing her favorite sites for news, and flipping through comic books. Sometimes all at once.

Comments (0) 28.05.2010. 11:00

When does style get in the way of content?

A large part of what sets literary fiction apart from genre fiction is style. Genre fiction is about getting from Point A to Point B and so on as quickly and enticingly as possible. It's about entertainment, keeping the reader turning pages, engaging him or her in the plot.

But would you say that John Grisham has a completely different writing style than, say, James Patterson? (We're talking style, not content.) If a page from each writer were spread out before you, with comparable action going on, would you be able to tell which author is which? Probably not. Because that's not the point of genre fiction.

Literary fiction, however, is often more concerned with character, with language and ideas. Authors find a way to explore these things in the style of their prose. There's the stripped down minimalism of, say, Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver. There's the free-spirited conversational prose of Jack Kerouak. There's Alice Munro's restrained, precise style that's also incredibly empathetic, and Joyce Carol Oates's breathless but controlled prose. In literary fiction, in other words, style is part of the content.

There's no doubt that at the hands of a skilled writer, style is more than a useful tool; it's a profound means of expression, a challenge, a way to write beauty or violence or hatred or love or sorrow without actually writing it. But what happens when style takes over and becomes style for style's sake? A way for a talented writer to flaunt his or her skills at the sacrifice of, well, everything else?

Take James Frey, for example. I've been talking about him quite a bit lately because I recently read his new novel, Bright Shiny Morning. For the most part, I thought the book was brilliant. However, there were times when Frey's chaotic, no commas, run-on sentences style of writing was in direct contrast with a particular character or scene. That style works effectively during scenes of chaos--a shooting in Venice Beach, an uncertain, feverish first kiss--but other times, not so much. Not to mention its incongruence with controlled, well-educated characters. This, to me, speaks of Frey's "F 'em if they don't like it" mentality to style. While his could be a powerful tool, it instead becomes an obtrusive, look-at-me-the-author shout to the reader, which distracts from the precision of his observations and frequent beauty of the language itself.

What are your thoughts? Who are some authors whose style tends to overshadow content? Or, on the other hand, whose style perfectly complements it?

Comments (0) 20.07.2009. 12:39

How helpful is exploring new forms of writing?

In a word? Very.

I first realized this when I worked at People magazine. Before then, I had identified myself solely as a fiction writer. I thought there was far more art involved in making up narratives that move people than in simply relaying on paper what you see or hear (which, I regret to say, I ignorantly thought was the extent of journalism). Celebrity "news coverage"--such as, one memorable time, what Rob Lowe ordered to drink at some bar in Louisiana--aside, it didn't take long for me to recognize and be in awe of the art and skill of being a good journalist.

Writing objectively and quickly about events and people in the world is an incredibly difficult thing. Most people insist that all journalists have biases, and of course that's true. But the good ones are able to push past their own opinions to tell a story to the world that is, as far as they understand, true. Not just factually accurate, but true. That involves stripping a story of the devices upon which fiction depends--metaphor, point of view, and embellishment are only a few--to reach the essence of what is happening. I realized that the same stripping down could be very powerful in fiction. (Ever heard of Hemingway?) Pared down isn't my natural style, but it's one I've learned to use to benefit a scene, moment, or character.

Now I'm working on putting together a dramatic screenplay for a client. It's my first foray into this unique form of storytelling, and it's been a learning experience. Talk about pared down! In screenplay writing, the story is all in how characters interact with each other. This means realistic dialogue--not flowery language. This means subtlety and restraint. Some of the most moving films are so powerful because they are subtle. The Reader with Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes is a fantastic recent example. The story is in the fine, shifting, subtle expressions on Winslet's character's face; in the short, almost curt way her lines are delivered, which belies an aching vulnerability and coiled strength. To achieve this in a screenplay is, I'm realizing, extremely, extremely difficult. As in literature, any moment that strikes the reader (or viewer) as true requires an alchemy of luck, intense dedication, and the moments of understanding that come like magic.

What new forms of writing have you experimented with recently? How did the experience affect your other work?

Comments (0) 06.07.2009. 13:43