Tag: book

How to Write a Thesis: A Definitive Guide with Step-by-Step Instructions

You are in grad school, working for your M.A. or a Ph.D.

To succeed, you need to write a dissertation or thesis. This is a major project–50 pages or so of dense writing in the hard sciences, hundreds of pages in the humanities and social sciences. Chances are, you’ve never written anything that long. What do you do? How do you start? How do you pick a topic? How do you set goals and organize ideas? How do you write? How do you edit your drafts?

Most programs don’t offer much good advice. Where I went, I heard “Don’t get it don’t right–get it done” and “Say what you’re going to say, say it, and say you said it.” Not terribly helpful.

In this post, I show you ten simple strategies that you can use–starting right now–to get the project done faster than all your peers. The trick is to break the project into manageable pieces, follow the right sequence, and do at least something every day.

(The post is most relevant for work in the humanities and social sciences. But many of these tricks will be helpful for work in the hard sciences as well.)

Start by treating the project as a management challenge. Good managers set a clear goal goal (the whole) and keep track of all the pieces (the parts). In some ways, writing a thesis is no different than running a grocery store or coordinating a lab experiment. To succeed, you need to break projects down, work in a smart sequence, get clear and useful feedback, keep track of all raw materials, and make good final decisions.

And so, without further ado, ten simple tricks for managing your dissertation process.

1. Find a topic that intrigues you–then constantly narrow and expand that topic.

You will live with your topic, 24/7. You better love spending time exploring it.

Yes, love.

Some graduate students select a “practical” topic–one that’s limited, with lots of data, with a clear research question that (might) yield a clear answer. Their “practical” thinking might include the prospect of getting a publication. If you do all that and still find a “practical” topic rich enough to intrigue every single day, that’s great. Practical + Intriguing = Winner.

But do not talk yourself into a topic because your advisor or someone else thinks it makes sense. Sure, explore all reasonable possibilities. But if you feel dread in the pit of your stomach, be careful.

For sure, you need to be able to do the research. You can only write about a topic if you can get access to the data, lab experiments, archives, interview subjects, and so on, depending on your field. If you can’t get the raw materials, you can produce the final product. depending on your discipline, you’d also benefit from colleagues with whom you can share ideas and critiques.

But if you don’t love your topic, you won’t have the zest to do the research and struggle to make sense of it.

So here’s what you do: Make a list of a bunch of different topics, then check them out for their passion and practicality. Look for the sweet spot — the topics that both fascinate you and promise lots of access to information. If you get lots of data, you’ll love the project more than if you can’t find any data. And if you love a topic, you’ll be better at digging for data.

2. Focus, maniacally, on finding The One Idea.

Most dissertations start out as a “topic.” But they need to finish as an “idea.” That idea has to serve as the North Star for everything you discuss. (For a detailed blog post on this challenge, go here.)

Let me explain the distinction. When I began my research, my topic could be stated like this:

Almost every major league city in the U.S. is now facing pressure to build new stadiums and arenas for its teams. When teams threaten to leave unless they get their new palace, mayors and civic leaders cave in to their pressure. And so cities (with state and regional governments and authorities) are spending hundreds of millions to benefit private franchise owners.

That was fine–to start. But eventually, I had to find my ONE Idea. Here’s how I concluded:

In the battle over team location, leagues and their teams hold two advantages: (1) They are part of a monopoly and (2) They can move. They use these advantages to “steer” public dialogue. If everyone in the community got together to decide stadium proposals, they would usually lose. Why? Because they do not improve local economic development. But the sports industry’s unique traits allow them to steer and control the dialogue and bargaining. So they usually win.

The “topic” said: Something happening. The “idea” said: Here’s the one factor that determines the result.

3. Carry (and use) a cheap notebook wherever you go.

Every day, you have 50,000 to 70,000 thoughts. Most of those thoughts are trivial and fleeting. You are happy to brush them aside as soon as they arrive. But you might have (I’m guessing) 100 thought that are worth keeping and developing. Those ideas arrive, unbidden, as we sleep and shower, walk and drive, doodle in a meeting and sit in a lecture.

Unless you capture your ideas when the arrive, you almost always lose them. Some variant of the diea might pop back later, but you can’t count on it.

Notebooking ideas also helps you process them. By transferring an ideas from a shower “aha” moment to ink on paper, you begin to transform those ideas. One idea leads to another. One concept reminds you of another concept.

I suggest getting a cheap and flexible notebook. Too many people spend $20 on a

4. Outlines for dissertations: Yay or nay?

Usually, the first thing your advisor asks you to do is write an outline. Don’t! Outlines can be awful straitjackets that limit your research and creativity and keep you from breakthrough ideas.

Instead of an outline, keep a running list of problems and ideas you want to explore. You might want to keep that running tab on Evernote, some other notes app on your phone, or your cheap notebook from Staples. Whatever works.

At first, don’t try too hard to organize the ideas. Once you have 20 or so topics, you’ll want to cluster them into different categories. Fine. But don’t think of it as an outline or blueprint. It’s really just an extended log of ideas.

Don’t worry too much about separating Big Ideas from small ideas. They’re all important. My nephew did a dissertation at Cal-Berkeley on robotics. His Big Idea was that nature offers powerful lessons for designing the way robots move and perform actions. But to explain that idea, he had to give lots of definitions, describe the literature on animal movements, explain ideas about miniaturization and batteries, describe distinct coding challenges, and more. You need all kinds of ideas, big and small, to help you explain The One Idea.

Another point: You can’t always know what ideas are Big and which ones are small until you develop them. The Big Idea of my dissertation, many years ago, concerned the structure of dialogue in cities.  That idea started out as a side note. As I got deeper into my research, I realized that it explained the whole issue. It started as a trivial aside and then became my Big Idea. Since you cannot know which ideas will bloom, gather them all. Don’t worry how important they might be until later in the process.

5. How do you organize your notes and research materials?

In many ways, an ambitious project is as much a management process as a creative process. Just as a supermarket manager manages the food deliveries, the departments and aisles, the equipment, the workers, and so on, you as a dissertation writer will manage your books and articles, notes and transcripts, lab results, spreadsheets and other data holders, videos, paper and electronic files, and, of course, fragments and drafts.

Your key tool is the folder, both paper and electronic. Into each folder, you can put all kinds of resources. To make it work, you need the right categories and sub-categories. In my work, I have two kinds of categories–topics and types of materials.

Take a look at the computer folders for my forthcoming book on Woodrow Wilson’s 1919 Western Tour for the League of Nations:

Click the image to get a careful look. The first column shows all of the major folders in the project. The second two columns show what’s in a couple of those folders.

It’s not always easy to figure out the best topics for the folders. They have to be as simple and intuitive as possible. You don;t really know what makes sense until you’ve gotten deep into the work. I renamed and reorganized the folders countless times. Every time, it gets easier to find what I want.

A good organization also makes it easy to get a gestalt view of the project. Any time I want to get a bird’s eye view of the project, I view my folders.

6. Understand the research challenge.

Some research will revolve around one kind of information. Research in biochemistry will revolve around lab work; research on literature will revolve around the text. But many research projects involve a wide range of research challenges. When I wrote Nobody Turn Me Around, a study of the civil rights movement, I used books, journals, and periodical; papers and oral histories in archives, museums, and libraries; videos and artifacts; interviews with both experts and participants in my story; and site visits.

My challenge was to blend together all this information to create a compelling story with a compelling point.

Whats the best way do do this? If you get into the habit of creating fragments, it will be easy. You’ll write about specific moments (scenes) and specific ideas (summaries). Different research materials will be useful for different fragments. Some of my favorite fragments for Nobody Turn Me Around came from videos; others from interviews; others from archives; others from a blend of sources.

Don’t decide to do a fragment based on a single piece of research material (like a great oral history or video). Instead, remember to figure out what One Idea you want to convey in the fragment. Use whatever speaks to that One Idea. It could be obe poece of evidence or it could be many.

7.  Write fragments first–and organize them into distinct categories.

The biggest mistake most writers make–besides using traditional outlines–to to try to write whole chapters from the beginning to the end. It cannot work. Any sophisticated piece of writing is really a collection of smaller fragments. Therefore, write fragments.

A fragment is a short piece about one aspect of a subject. It could be as short as a few hundred words or as long as 10 or 20 pages. It depends on the complexity of the subject, the audience’s knowledge of key concepts, the density of the writing, and more.

I first discovered the fragment idea while reverse-engineering Truman Capote’s true-crime classic In Cold Blood. Capote does not use traditional chapters. Instead, he collects and arranges short fragments into four sections. Each fragment takes the story one step forward–never more.

8. Don’t obsess about its overall structure … but do play around with the possibilities.

Every piece of writing is a journey, which takes the reader from one place to another different place. So when you organize your fragments and chapters, think of that journey. Where do you want to “meet” the reader at the beginning? What does the reader know at the beginning? Then, where do you want to take the reader? What do you want them to know at the end that they didn’t know before?

Once you know the beginning and end, figuring out the steps gets easy. It’s like taking a trip. When I took a cross-country trip, I could figure out all the middle steps once I knew I would start in Charlottesville, Virginia, and end in San Diego, California. I could break the trip into eight-hour legs, each of about 400 to 500 miles. At each stop I plotted my way to the day’s destination. I even decided when I wanted to take a detour, like my visit to my college pal randy or a few hours at the Grand Canyon.

That’s how writing a big project works. Don’t outline the piece in the traditional way. Instead, break it into mini-journeys. Go to just one destination in each mini-journey. Collect a bunch of mini journeys on different topics. Then when you have enough — it could be anywhere from 20  to 40 of them — see what order works best.

Great writers like John McPhee and Robert Caro create 3×5 cards or sheets of paper that note their books’ many pieces. They tape or tack them on a wall, stand back, and look at the overall shape … then move them around. They spend countless hours, at the end of their process, moving these pieces until they fight the perfect flow from beginning to end, in all the fragments, sections, chapters, and whole work.

9. Edit like a pro.

In every great creative work, the finishing touches can spell the difference between good and great. If you’ve done an amazing job researching and writing, congratulations. You are nine-tenths of the way home. But that last one-tenth can determine who reads it, what kind of respect you earn, and how it might evolve into a book or articles.

I have described a simple and fail-safe editing process in The Elements of Writing, but allow me to sketch out some simple procedures and techniques.

First, go from big to small. You would not begin a kitchen renovation with the detail work on window ledges and plates for light switches; you’d begin with the basic structure–the walls and flooring, electricity and plumbing systems, cabinets and appliances, etc.  After dealing with these big pieces, you’d move to smaller elements like furniture, woodwork, lighting, painting, and window and other details.

The same goes for big pieces of writing. Once you have gathered and organized your fragments into a whole work, start to examine all the elements. Start with the overall structure. Does your ONE Idea structure all the pieces? Do all the sections and chapters take us on a journey to that One Idea? Does each section and fragment explore one distinct piece of the whole? Does it start strong and finish strong?  Then focus on smaller details? Do all these pieces move, like a pendulum, from scenes to summaries? Do all the paragraphs state and explain one idea? Then focus on the granular details: clunky phrases and repetition, words and phrases, spelling and grammar, and of course style and flow.

Start big, go small.

10. Give yourself a productive (not overwhelming) routine. 

Writers give each other all kinds of advice on the writer’s life. Work in the morning. Work at night. Write at least two hours a day–no, four hours. Do research first, then write. No, write as you gather information. Stop in mid-thought. Set an agenda for the next day. Go where your information and imagination leads you.

Look, everyone’s different. You have to find your own routines. But I do have some ideas that everyone seems to accept.

First, write something every day. If you want to set a target, like 500 words a day, great. But write something. My experience is that you should almost always avoid big word targets. Why? Because you’ll usually fail. Better to say that you’ll write something every day than 500 words and miss your target. People tend to abandon goals when they fail to meet them. But you should be able to write something every single day. And here’s the magic: When you write something every day, you will often get into a groove where you accomplish more than  you would have ever imagined. If you can stay in that groove, great–keep going. The next day, just say you’ll write something. You might only write 250 words, but that’s OK. Your work will set you up for bigger days later on.

Second, read something every day. When I was in grad school, my friend Nathalie had to finish her thesis in a year because she was moving back to Paris. But she refused to deny herself fun exploring the U.S. So every day she photocopied and read five journal articles. She set aside time, between classes, to knock off 10 or 20 or 30 pages at a time. These articles accumulated and before long she had lots of information to explore her topic.

What you need to read will vary according to your discipline and topic. But set a reachable daily goal–and meet that goal every day.

Third, schedule your other work. Whether you need to interview subjects, travel to archives, or conduct experiments in a lab, keep some kind of calendar. We tend to do what we put on a schedule.  Again, don’t get too ambitious. But the more explicit you are, the more real these tasks become.

Fourth, avoid all distractions. This might be the most important tip of all. You cannot think if you get interrupted by texts, Netflix shows, noise in the apartment, friends who want to go get a beer, etc. You need total concentration. You will be at least twice as productive with total concentration than with fragmented work time. So when you work, just work. Focus on just one challenge at a time. Turn off your phone. Nobody needs you when you’re working. You’re not the president or CEO; you just a grad student.

Don’t just turn off your phone. Put it in another room. Studies show that a phone is distracting even if it’s off and face-down on the table. The phone’s mere presence is a siren song. Get rid of it. If you really love your phone and all its magical apps, think of it this way. If you remove it during your work time, you’ll have more time to immerse yourself in it later.

Do something to get into the flow. I often listen to New Age/acoustical music (my go-to site is Hearts of Space). Research shows that the rhythms and wavelengths of New Age music improves concentration. You get lost in time as you move deeper and deeper into your subject. When you need to puzzle out a problem, you can isolate the key ideas and think about their relationships. To me, the key to acoustic music is that I rarely tap my toes. If I listen to Springsteen or Rachmaninoff, I start paying attention to the music. My attention shifts from work to tunes. Somehow, this doesn’t happen with Libera or Andreas Vollenweider or Clannad or Enya.

By the Numbers: Distraction

The hardest thing to do these days is to concentrate. But that’s the single most important skill for writing. Here are some relevant numbers, from Deloitte Global Mobile Consumer Survey’s survey of 1,634 smartphone users in July 2017:

  • 47: Number of times smartphone users in the U.S. check their phones each day.
  • 85: Percentage of people who use the cellphone while talking to family and friends.
  • 80: Percentage of people who check their phone within an hour of going to bed or getting up.
  • 35: Percentage who do it within five minutes.
  • 47: Percentage who have tried to limit their cell use in the past.
  • 30: Percentage who have successfully limited their cell use.

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Tips from the Masters on Writing Your Book

If you want to write a book, you need to establish clear discipline and be ready for everything that could happen. But you can do it.

During November–National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo–400,000 people dedicate themselves to writing 50,000 words toward a novel. Participants get together in bookstores, church basements, coffee shops, classrooms to feed off each others’ energy and write an average of 1,666 words a day. Of course, people also write alone, at kitchen tables, on sofas, in candle-lit garrets, and more.

If they can do it, you can do it.

The important thing is that they write. Every day. On schedule. And at the end of the process, they have 50,000 words.

Here are seven simple tips for getting your manuscript done.

Go Inside the Character

Getting into characters’ heads means embracing all of them, including their misunderstandings, says Gay Talese, author of Thy Neighbor’s Wife, The Kingdom and the Power, and other nonfiction narrative works. Leave it to the story–and the reader—to judge the characters. “I try to see people as they see themselves,” Talese says. “Bill Bonanno was a murderer, as was his father, as were those bodyguards I used to hang out with in restaurants along First Avenue in lower Manhattan. But I didn’t think they were so different from soldiers who are praised by their government as patriotic for committing murder. Protecting your buddies, that’s all it’s about.”

Listen for the Sounds You Create

John McPhee says the ultimate test for a piece of writing comes when you read it aloud: “Certainly the aural part of writing is a big, big thing to me. I can’t stand a sentence until it sounds right, and I’ll go over it again and again. Once the sentence rolls along in a certain way, that’s sentence A. Sentence B may work out well, but then its effect on sentence A may spoil the rhythm of the two together. One of the long-term things about knitting a piece of writing together is making all this stuff fit. I always read the second draft aloud, as a way of moving forward. I read primarily to my wife, Yolanda, and I also have a friend whom I read to. I read aloud so I can hear if it’s fitting together or not. It’s just as much a part of the composition as going out and buying a ream of paper.”

Gossip!

Be a snoop and take notes voraciously, says Jane Smiley, author of A Thousand Acres. “Eavesdrop and write it down from memory–gives you a stronger sense of how people talk and what their concerns are. I love to eavesdrop! Gossip. The more you talk about why people do things, the more ideas you have about how the world works. Write every day, just to keep in the habit, and remember that whatever you have written is neither as good nor as bad as you think it is. Just keep going, and tell yourself that you will fix it later. Take naps. Often new ideas come together when you are half asleep, but you have to train yourself to remember them.”

Give yourself to love

All good writing begins with the heart, says Elizabeth Gilbert, author of The Last American Man and Eat, Pray, Love (pictured). Of course, the heart is hard to figure out, but at least try. “I love this work. I have always loved this work. My suggestion is that you start with the love and then work very hard and try to let go of the results. Cast out your will, and then cut the line. Please try, also, not to go totally freaking insane in the process. Insanity is a very tempting path for artists, but we don’t need any more of that in the world at the moment, so please resist your call to insanity. We need more creation, not more destruction. We need our artists more than ever, and we need them to be stable, steadfast, honorable and brave – they are our soldiers, our hope. If you decide to write, then you must do it, as Balzac said, “like a miner buried under a fallen roof.” Become a knight, a force of diligence and faith.”

Don’t Just Summarize

Too often, writers rush to summarize rather than paying close attention to what actually happens, said Ernest Hemingway. “The greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action–what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced.” Daily journalism is easy because it’s so disposable. “In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another, you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or in ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to get it.”

Explore different worlds

Ultimately, writing is about translating someone else’s life and work to an audience with no real knowledge of either, said John Updike, author of Rabbit, Run and other books. “A man whose life is spent in biochemistry or in building houses, his brain is tipped in a certain way,” he said. “There is a thinness in contemporary fiction about the way the world operates, except the academic world. I do try, especially in this novel, to give characters professions. Shaw’s plays have a wonderful wealth of professional types. Shaw’s sense of economic process, I guess, helped him (a) to care and (b) to convey, to plunge into the mystery of being a chimney sweep or a minister. One of the minimal obligations a book has to a reader is to be factually right, as to be typographically pleasant and more or less correctly proofread. Elementary author ethics dictate that you do at least attempt to imagine technical detail as well as emotions and dialogue.”

Get physical

If a story does not affect you physically, something’s missing, said Susan Sontag, author of As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh. “The story must strike a nerve — in me,” she says. “My heart should start pounding when I hear the first line in my head. I start trembling at the risk.”

Richard Ben Cramer, author of What It Takes, agrees. “I want my books or articles to have the same impact a novel has on a reader,” he said. “Something has to happen to the character during which an emotional truth is revealed.”

Give it to ’em

Kurt Vonnegut, author of Slaughterhouse Five, advised against holding back information. No need to be too cute withholding information, he said. “Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.”

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Follow This Day-by-Day Guide To Write Your Book (Not Just During NaNoWriMo)

The first piece of advice that all writers get is to “write what you know.”

By the time we have decided to write for an audience—to share thoughts, voluntarily, with anyone who will listen—we have developed a whole storehouse of experiences and memories, thoughts and feelings, hopes and fears, and insights and ideas.

The trick is to use this storehouse to inspire and drive your writing—without creating unnecessary barriers.

National Novel Writing Month, a k a NaNoWriMo, offers an ideal opportunity to plumb your conscious and subconscious minds. Day by day, you can make deliberate efforts to understand yourself—and use that understanding to create something new.

But you don’t need to wait till November. Set yourself a goal to get a complete a draft of a novel–or memoir or how-to book or any other major piece of writing–in a month.

Without further ado, here’s your 30-day plan for connecting what’s deepest inside you to the novel you want to write—the novel you will write—this November.

1. “Writing is a code.” That’s what Margaret Atwood says, anyway. We all communicate all whole lives. But to become masters, we need to master specific skills and “tricks of the trade.”

Tasks: (1) Spend 15 minutes brainstorming the codes you’re going to have to crack as a writer. (2) Write 2,000 words describing what challenge your hero faces, how he’s going to crack the code

2. The journey. The ancient Greeks said: “Look to the end.” Every story takes the characters—and the reader—on a journey to some powerful ending. The novelist John Irving actually writes the last paragraph of his books first. He keeps that last paragraph as a North Star for his writing process. So ask yourself: Where do you want your characters to end up? How d you want them to differ b y the time they have experienced their adventure?

Tasks: (1) Imagine finishing your novel—how it all comes out. (2) Write your last paragraph and your last 2,000 words or the first and last paragraphs of many scenes of summaries.

3. The Arc. Aristotle said that great drama resembles an arc, which begins by introducing the characters and their world, then confronts the hero and others with increasingly intense challenges, and finally resolves with a new understanding and significant change in the character’s lives.

screen-shot-2016-10-30-at-9-12-14-am

Tasks: (1) Sketch out an arc for your life—first, as if your life were to end today; second, as if you would live till 90. (2) Write full action passages for one or two of the following points along the arc: Opening scene … The challenge … Crisis 1 … Crisis 2 …  Crisis 3 … Recognition …  Reversal … Denouement.

4. Scenes and summaries. All stories move back and forth between scenes and summaries. Scenes engage the reader physically; summaries allow a moment of respite and an opportunity to explain ideas and background. Scenes show particular people doing particular things at particular times and places, with particular motions and emotions. Scenes zoom in to capture the details of people’s lives, with a moment-by-moment description of action. Summaries offer sweeping assessments of the bigger picture, with an emphasis on what it all means, in order to set up scenes.

Tasks: (1) write does tabloid headlines for as many scenes and summaries as possible. (2) Write one scene and one summary, each 1000 words long. With the scene, just show the characters doing one thing after another—no exposition!

5. The hero. Who’s your hero? What’s his dilemma? All great stories offer the reader a character to root for—often superior in many ways, but still human with a need to deal with flaws and difficult situations. Is the hero young or old, virtuous or troubled, sociable or hermetic, tall or short, dark or light, fit or flaccid, rich or poor, happy or dissatisfied, knowing or clueless, young or old, male or female?

Tasks: (1) Brainstorm the various challenges you’ll face as an author. Make a list. Tack it over your computer. (2) Write one scene and one summary describing the hero’s deepest challenge.

6. World of the Story. The setting not only offers a “container” for a story, but also reveals much about the characters and their community. The setting is rich with clues about the characters, their struggles, their ideals, and their capacity to act.

Tasks: Describe your situation, your setting, a “day in the life,” and how it affects your work. (2) Describe one or two settings, in a total of 2000 words, by showing the characters moving around. Have each one of these as the openings of a chapter or scene. Example: Herb Clutter’s promenade.

7. The Crisis or Call. Every hero needs to face a crisis or call to action. In the midst of living a settled life, something happens to challenge the hero. Something internal (unresolved feelings and relationships, goals and ambitions, memories from the past) or external (an economic, romantic, social, professional, or other upheaval) takes the hero out of her comfort zone. Or some event issues a challenge. At first, she refuses to answer the challenge. But over time, she realizes she has no choice to do so.

Tasks: (1) Write down three times when you have faced a new, unexpected challenge in your life—and how you responded. Note how you felt physically amidst these challenges. (2) Describe the moment when your hero was first introduced to the challenge that he must face—and how he responded. Include denial and selfmisunderstanding. 2000 words.

8. The hero’s dossier. To tell a satisfying story, you need to know your hero—and other characters—inside and out. Who are these people? What do they look like? Where do they come from? What do they want? What have they done? Who do they spend time with? What do their mannerisms and habits betray about them?

Tasks: (1) Brainstorm intensely on your life and values. (2) Fill out a “character dossier” and write one scene and one summary to show that character to the reader. 2000 words, 1000 words for each fragment. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. The wheel of character types, Part 1. The best stories use action to reveal something about the hero and other characters—especially what those characters repress. Every character has an opposite. These opposites resist each other, but they’re also drawn to each other. What’s different in the opposite character is something that exists in all of us, but repressed. Start by considering the most consequential of character types—the hero and villain.

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Tasks: (1) Think of your biggest rival at one or two specific moments in your life. (2) Show the first interaction with the hero and villain (1000 words). Show a later interaction that reveals something totally surprising—but not, in retrospect since the hero and villain contains parts of each other.

10. The wheel of character types, Part 2. Other characters help to draw push the story forward. The pairs of opposites include the mentor and tempter … the sidekick and skeptic … and the mind and heart. Each one of these three pairs of types represents something in all of us.

Tasks: (1) Brainstorm for 15 minutes, feverishly, about two character types in your life. (2) Create scenes two characters—besides the hero and villain—acting or speaking with reference to the hero. Could be mentor, tempter, sidekick, skeptic, heart, or mind.

11. The wheel of character types, Part 3. Things get really interesting when three characters are part of a scene. Whenever two characters develop a relationship—of alliance or opposition—a third party lurks to scramble that relationship. Two lovers, for example, encounter a past lover. Two business partners encounter a revolt among workers. Parents encounter the demanding desires of a child. And so on.

Tasks: (1) Brainstorm about the dynamics of the triangles in your life—what make them stable, what made them volatile and changing. (2) Create scenes with interactions of TWO triangles. By now, make sure you cover all of the character types in the last three days. 9. 10. 11.

12. Act by Act. Give your story three distinct acts, using the narrative arc: The World of the Story, rising action, and resolution. In the World of the Story, show the people and places in a state of calm and order. Think of this as a settled status quo. Then show the hero confronted with something difficult—something so difficult, in fact, that hero cannot bear to face it head-on. Show that hero slowly, painfully, dealing with different aspects of that challenge, one by one. Show the character change with these encounters. Finally, give the hero an “aha”: moment, when he begins to understand the true nature of his life and world—and the need to change for his own survival and wellbeing.

Tasks: (1) Think about your life as a three-act play. How satisfying is the “conclusion”? Sketch your story on a sheet of paper. Ask what you need to reach your own “resolution.” (2) Review your story to date. Write opening and closing paragraphs for each part, making sure that you start and end strongly. Write a total of 200 new words, however distributed.

13. Dialogue. People’s language—their choice of words, their use of slang, how quickly they speak, their conversational tics— reveal much about their character. How they interact with others—whether they listen, interrupt, stay on the subject, show respect—reveals even more. And of course people speak differently in different places with different people.

Tasks: (1) List three important conversations you’ve had in your life. Show how you connected—or failed to connect—with the other persons. Try to understand what made the conversation work or fail. (2) Write three scenes, 750 words apiece, with only dialogue.

14. Parallel arcs. The best stories are really two or three stories rolled into one. Besides the main plot, which involves the hero’s journey, there are two or three subplots involving other characters or ideas. These plots and subplots intersect at critical moments in the story.

Tasks: (1) Write down the essence of the “plotline” of your life. Then write down the various subplots, involving friends and family and others, that intersect with your story at critical times for both. (2) Sketch out two subplots of your story. For each, describe the main character, the journey, barriers along the way, moments of intersection with the main plot, and how the journey ends.

15. Denial. Most stories are about one thing: How the hero and other characters deny some essential reality, and then struggle because of the denial. When the hero is first presented with his challenge, he does everything in his power to avoid confronting the truth. And for good reason: Change is painful, emotionally overwhelming. But a series of events force the hero to deal with pieces of the challenge.

Tasks: (1) Honestly, with no self-editing, make a list of the problems in your life that you avoid and try to deny. (2) Write a scene in which another character confronts the hero about a problem that he has been denying. Then write the background summary that shows the origin of this denial, with reference to past events—and try to build scenes into that summary as much as possible.

16. The Time Element. “Nothing concentrates the mind like a pending execution,” Samuel Johnson once said. Time pressures force characters to think, act, respond energetically—making more mistakes, but also discovering more things. Suspense begins with a ticking clock. TV shows like “Mission: Impossible” and “24” explicitly race against time. Even stories that suspend time, like Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov, create tension about the question: Will the hero reenter the real world in time for a decent life? =

Tasks: (1) summarize all the tasks still ahead to finish your novel draft. (2) Write TWO scenes, 1000 or so words apiece, describing the hero or other character racing against the clock.

17. Taking Risks. The “Hail Mary” is one of the most exciting plays in football. With the game at stake, the quarterback launches a long pass with the hope of scoring big. But it’s also a risk—the other team could intercept the ball. Life is like that too. Sometimes we have to risk losing a lot to gain a lot.

Tasks: (1) Make a list of the riskiest things you have done, either on purpose or by neglect or recklessness. (2) Write a scene in which the character takes a big risk, then write a scene where his villain takes a big risk.

18. Beats. Every scene is a series of actions, one after another. Characters constantly thrust and parry, sometimes dramatically and sometimes subtly. To give your scene pacing and meaning, you need to make sure that every moment advances the story.

Tasks: (1) For ten minutes, write down everything that you said with a friend in a recent conversation. Show a constant move back and forth from positive to negative values and back again. (2) Write two scenes of about 1000 words apiece. Make sure that every moment produces some reaction and/or advances the story. Take out all details and actions that do not move the scene toward a memorable conclusion.

19. Suspense. Engage the reader best by creating a sense of uncertainty, which gets the reader guessing, and then solve that uncertainty. Cliffhangers bring the story to a point when something important is about to happen—and then break off the action.

Tasks: (1) For ten minutes, write down the moments in your life when you know something big was about to happen—but you didn’t know what. (2) Write two 1000-word scenes that do just this. Move the scene forward, beat by beat, and then end with an almost-dramatic conclusion. Save that conclusion—the answer to an important dilemma for the character—for the next section.

20. Senses. People— even reader—are physical creatures. So you need to make your story crackle with physical details. Make sure you use specific, precise words to evoke sights, sounds, and feelings.

Tasks: (1) write down as many sensory words as possible. Make as many observations as possible about the sights, sounds, and tactile qualities of people and things in your vicinity. (2) Go over all your fragments so far and replace all general descriptions with something visual, auditory, or kinesthetic.

21. Sentences. If you can write a good sentence, you can write anything. All too often, we get lost in long and meandering sentences. It’s only natural when you are engaged in such a creative process: one idea prompts another idea, then another and another.

Tasks: (1) Write down, one sentence at a time, all of the writing tasks you need to finish to complete your novel this month. Use full sentences. (2) Go through your drafts so far, sentence by sentence, and make sure that each one takes the characters—and the reader—from one place to another, different place.

22. Shapes. Writing uses three basic shapes—a straight line, a circle, and a triangle.

Tasks: (1) Sketch out your life, so far, using a line, circle, and triangle. (2) Write three separate passages of about 750 words apiece, either scenes or summaries. In one passage, take a straight, linear path. Don’t double back, don’t skip off to provide background; just show one thing after another. In the second passage, show a character or idea begin one place, develop, and end up where you started. In the third, depict the interaction of three characters and/or three ideas. Show how, when two interact with each other, the third has the potential to change their interactions.

23. Numbers. All good ideas can be expressed as ones, twos, threes, or longer lists of things. Ones put a person or place, hope or fear, thought or idea, front and center. You look at that one thing from different angles, as if inspecting a diamond. Twos present complements and oppositions—sidekicks and enemies, reinforcing or opposing ideas, consonant or conflicting feelings. Threes present the opportunity for real complexity. Think of the lover’s triangle. Whenever two sides bond, the third party lurks nearby, ready to upset everything.

Tasks: (1) Write down the most important idea in your life, something about your relationship with one important person in your life, then the most dynamic triangle in your life, and finally the five most important people, events, or values in your life. (2) Write four fragments of 500 to 750 words. In one fragment, focus on one person, thing, or idea. Make everything else revolve around that one person, thing, or idea. In another fragment, show two people, things or ideas competing with each other— and, below the surface, reinforcing each other. In the third passage, show a triangle of people, things, or ideas. Show how any two corners of the triangle can get stabilized or destabilized by the third. Finally, create a passage that explains or shows the complexity of things by listing a whole bunch of things—people, events, things, tasks, debts, fears, etc.

24. Discovery/exploration of sketchy places. Steven King says he writes scenes by imagining places and events that would scare him. Scary places are all around us—roads and highways where we can crash or get hit by a car … pools where children can fall and drown … parking garages or alleys where we can be mugged … hospitals where we can be mistreated or even tortured … taxis where drivers can take us to dangerous places … even offices where nightmare bosses and colleagues torture us emotionally.

Tasks: (1) Describe the freakiest place you’ve ever been in your life, with as many precise details as possible. (2) Create one sketchy place—a place that’s weird, gross, dangerous, sickly, otherworldly, creepy, Disneyesque, or otherwise alienating—and make something consequential happen to your character there.

25. Love. What captures the heart—the emotions, longing, deep and abiding interest or even obsession—of the hero or other characters? How the hero encounters and responds to love defines that character like nothing else.

Tasks: (1) Make a list of the loves of your life, with specific details about what was good and what was bad— and what were most moments in these relationships was most revealing about your character. (2) Write two scenes. In the first scene, show the moment when the hero meets his or her love interest for the first time. Show the character surprised by his or her interest—and holding back for some reason. In the second scene, show a major conflict between the two lovers. Don’t explain the conflict—show the conflict, so the reader can make sense of it on her own.

26. Failure and Frustration. Nothing matters more to a story than failure and frustration. How a character fails—coming up short in an honest effort or neglecting or denying something important—reveals something about his self-mastery. And how he responds—whether he learns and grows or rigidly rejects opportunities for growth—reveals his character.

Tasks: (1) Write down three moments of failure in your life— with as many details as possible about how you responded. (2) Write two short scenes—anywhere from 250 to 500 words—describing the moments when a character experiences failure. Try to show how their expressions and body language change at the moment when they realize they have failed.

27. Not What It Seems. The best stories operate on at least two levels—the level of the obvious and the level of the meaningful. Characters carry out different tasks, interact with others, make mistakes and grow—but underneath, they are really struggling with deeper challenges.

Tasks: (1) Think of three times in your life when you worked or played hard to achieve something (e.g., success in school, sports, work, love)—when something larger was really at stake (e.g., pride, dignity, revenge, honor, vindication). (2) Create two scenes of 1,000 words apiece in which your character strives for one thing, obvious for all to see—but gets his or her motivation from a deeper psychological yearning.

28. Powers. What are the hero’s greatest powers— and how does he deploy them? Does the hero possess extraordinary physical might? Intellectual powers? Emotional insight? Social wherewithal? Or does he possess some supernatural connections to other beings?

Tasks: (1) Make a list of people you know with the greatest physical power, intellectual power, social power, financial power, and moral power. (2) Write two scenes, each 1000 words, describing clashes of characters with different powers. Show how these characters attempt to use these powers, and how they respond to each other. For example, show someone of great wealth interacting with someone with social charisma or someone with a strong moral compass.

29. Surprises. What surprises can you sprinkle throughout the story? Above all, good stories show us things we cannot imagine without some prodding. If everything is predictable, after all, why bother reading? Storytelling is a two-way process. The writer offers a series of moments, with just enough details for the reader to add her own memory and imagination. Think of storytelling as a relay race, where the writer offers something surprising, then the reader adds her own thoughts.

Tasks: (1) List the ten most surprising things to happen in your life. Looking back, identify the missed signals that would have made these events less surprising. (2) Create two scenes in which important surprises happen to the hero and one other character, either together or separately. Then write scenes or summaries that provide the backstories, setting up those surprises.

30. Recognition and Reversal. Great stories end with a new level of understanding—for the story’s leading character’s and for the readers.

Tasks: (1) Make a list of three times in your life when you came to a brand new understanding of yourself, your values, and how the world works. Write down what caused you to gain this new wisdom. (2) Write the climactic scene of your novel. Show the character saying and doing something that he would not have been able to say or do before. Show how this new wisdom changes everyone around him.

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