The Upside of Fooling

When publishing a writing advice post on April Fool’s Day, the obvious temptation is to make the whole thing about fools or foolishness, playing on the theme of the day.

I’m not going to do that.

Fooled you! Yes, I am.

Heh.

Anyway, I was thinking about giving writers advice on how not to be foolish. Don’t do ridiculous things like review-bomb your peers on Goodreads or make vast pronouncements about The Right Way to Do Things or send angry emails to agents who reject your work, telling them they’ll be sorry one day. Sadly enough, people do things like this all the time, and those people probably not the ones reading Writer Unboxed on the daily. Plus, there are always more ways to be foolish. I mean, the tag on your hair dryer probably says “Do not use while sleeping” because somewhere, sometime, somebody did.

So you know there are plenty of ways for us to put a foot wrong as far as our writing goes. What I thought I’d do instead is look at it from another perspective: are there any upsides to being a fool?

Turns out, I can think of a few.

Fool yourself into progress. Writing a novel is, more often than not, daunting. It’s a whole book! Tens of thousands or even a hundred thousand words! Phew, that’s a lot of words. But you don’t have to write them all today. Set yourself little goals. Can you write a few hundred words this morning? A few thousand? A scene, a chapter? Three paragraphs in the car? Five pages at your kid’s hockey practice? Make it a game. As the E.L. Doctorow quote goes, “Writing a novel is like driving a car at night.  You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” You’re not writing a novel. You’re writing bits and pieces. It’s just that when you add those bits to those pieces, eventually, alakazam! Novel.

Fool yourself into confidence. Many of us are introverts, which can work great during the text generation and editing portion of the writing life, but tends to cause problems when you get to the publication part, where you’re supposed to a) tell people about your book or even b) stand up in front of gatherings of people and read from and/or talk about your book. The best trick here? It’s not about you. Pretend someone else wrote the book. What great things could you say about this book if your best friend wrote it? You’d rave, right? Even if it’s you, you can rave. And to get a bit more abstract about it, are you even you? You are Author Self now. Maybe Writer Self would rather crawl under the blankets and mainline that new Mandy Patinkin murder show on Hulu instead of going to a book event and facing down a crowd, but Author Self? She’s on fire. She’ll go do her thing.

Fool around with ideas. For you, idea generation might be the easiest part of being a writer or the hardest, but either way, jumping into a new idea with a sense of playfulness can really move you forward. Before you’ve written the book–before you’ve even outlined or written a synopsis of the book, really–is the best time to go hog wild creatively. Take that idea and spiral it off into a zillion directions. What if you approached it from a different character’s perspective? Is this idea really only half a book and if so, what makes up the other half? How are you going to crank the pressure up on your characters until they explode? Can you play around with timeline, tense, genre? Go completely off the rails in the brainstorming stage and you’ll be much less likely to have an epiphany (oh, this is about all three generations of the family!!) halfway through the first draft.

Q: Can you think of any other good ways to be a writing fool?

Greer Macallister

Raised in the Midwest, Greer Macallister earned her MFA in creative writing from American University. Her historical novels have been named Book of the Month, Indie Next, LibraryReads, Target Book Club, and Amazon Best Book of the Month picks and optioned for film and television. Her latest novel, The Thirteenth Husband, is inspired by Aimee Crocker, the Paris Hilton of the Gilded Age. Macallister also writes the ongoing Five Queendoms epic fantasy series as G.R. Macallister. A regular contributor to Writer Unboxed and the Chicago Review of Books, she lives with her family in Boston, MA. www.greermacallister.com

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