Writing in the moment

Once you start writing a book, it’s easy to jump ahead of yourself into the future of the story where you imagine all the truly interesting things will be happening. I used to wish I could skip the “connective tissue” (those paragraphs that link all your scenes together, giving them context etc.) and jump ahead to a riveting dialogue scene, say, or a particularly adventurous part of the plot. How impatient I was to get to the really interesting parts of the story!

However, I finally realised that you need to take your book one day at a time. You have to allow for those bits that serve a purpose other than pure entertainment. There is no way that you can write a series of riveting scenes without ensuring that each scene is connected correctly to the next, and this is where the less glamorous aspect of writing a book comes into play… you need to focus on how your characters get from one place to the next, what the scenery looks like as they’re moving along, and how they navigate through the ordinary everyday aspects of their lives.

This doesn’t mean that the connective tissue should slow the story down. A good storyteller will avoid writing prose that a reader feels she has to wade through. The story should always be exciting to read, and it should move along at a decent pace without the reader getting stuck in a quagmire of unnecessary details. However, the art of writing well, I believe, is to acknowledge the fact that there will always be parts of a book that you’d rather not have to write, but to write those parts in such a way that the reader isn’t bored by them. 

As you write, you need to ensure that a logical sequence of events take place, while avoiding any unnecessary details which could make the story dull.

I suppose this could be applied as a life lesson. Often (especially in winter) I’d like to jump out of bed, skip the part where I shiver as the cold air hits my feet, and immediately find myself in my office, without having to go through the early morning rituals of washing, dressing, and driving myself to work. But life doesn’t work that way… I have to get through the more mundane aspects of my day in order to arrive at my destination. And if I try to take short cuts… well, I’ll simply come up short.

Read The Dashing Debutante, Lord Fenmore’s Wager and Send and Receive