CONSISTENCY

because it's important to maintain your style.

There comes a time when every writer takes a break. Now, when I say 'break' I don't mean an hour or two while you go grab some lunch. I mean right smack in the middle of the most profoundly entertaining novel you've ever been inspired to write, you walk away for a month, two months, a year. 

What I'm getting at here, is not that you have to keep yourself writing, because that's another lesson entirely. No, what I'm talking about here is what happens during that stretch of time where you abandon your work. You change. You change as a person and you change as a writer. This change isn't always for the best; sometimes you have the gift and you lose it or get rusty. It's a sad moment when you realize you're not as good as you used to be, or not as driven.

Focusing on your work here, when you return to it, you may just pick up where you left off. This is a no-no. The way I can best describe this is with a personal example. I am left handed and have a tendency to turn my paper when I write and take notes with a pen or pencil. My writing will start off with smooth, cursive, upright lettering. As I go on and the subject matter that I have to write about changes, my paper turns a little more and my handwriting becomes quick and jagged, but most of all very slanted. Sometimes I end up writing with my paper a full 90 degrees to my body.

What happens in writing is that your style will change given enough time. That stretch of time varies from person to person, but eventually the you who wrote those first three chapters last week is not the same you who wrote the next three chapters. There's something noticeably different, tangible even. To a writer looking to be published, this is not your worst nightmare, certainly, but it is definitely a bad dream. Editors look carefully at the consistency of your style, as do publishers. If your writing to be published, your finished work needs to look like you wrote the whole thing in one sitting.

This is not easy. Not by a long shot. You may think you have your consistency down, but chances are, there will be slight differences from chapter to chapter--things no non-professional would be able to catch. That's why it's important to find a legitimate editor to look at your work, not your friends or your family.

What do you do? There is no sure fire way to guarentee that your work will be 100% consistent. It is entirely up to the author to ensure this. But my advice is to construct a skeleton. Now, what is a skeleton? A skeleton is a body of writing that is the bare minimum of writing. An entire novel should have around ten pages max of a skeleton. There is no detail, there are is no character depth, and there certainly is no dialogue. There is only the bones to be built off of. Really, it should look more like notes then a summary of your book. Character A does this and this happens. Character B does this because that happened. This happened. That happened. Nobody ever needs to see this so write down only what will help you. It shouldn't take much time, so do it before you start any work. Once you have the skeleton, make the mannequin. There is skin, there are features, but there is no personality. At the mannequin stage you have detail, plot, dialogue, but no depth. It's a structural foundation so that you can build off your novel no matter what stage of the game you're at. The mannequin is your safety net should you abandon a project and return to it months later. In this process, instead of writing a novel from start to finish, you can build it from the center out: adding layers until the final product gleams like a brand new car.

It is up to you to be consistent. The most I can do is bring up the issue so that you go back through your work and make sure of it yourself. It is imortant, so do not blow it off.

Any questions, you know what to do.

Comments

Kevin

Posted 10 Years Ago I get up and write in the morning for an hour every day before I go to work. This is the only way I've found to truly stay consistent. I've been doing it about a year and have missed maybe three or four days. I have time in the evenings, but it's just too tempting to skip. And once you've skipped a couple nights it's easy to just not write for weeks or even months. I also find that I get momentum from my morning writing. I'm far more likely to write in the evening for having done it in the morning, particularly if I came up with a good idea I want to finish. I'm not super prolific, but it has definitely helped. In the past three or four months I've written a 75,000 word rough draft of a novel which is a feat I never could have pulled off with my old write-when-I-feel-like-it method.

Alexander Cairns

Posted 12 Years Ago I have a big problem with consistency, since I have a habit of drifting from project to project. I'll come back to something I haven't touched in months or years and think, "Who wrote this?" Sadly, a lot of the time it's the final nail in the coffin for many promising projects. I'll consider the skeleton technique in future, but for now its enough for me to simply read through what I've already written, altering and re-writing as I go.

Erika Jones

Posted 12 Years Ago I actually know what you mean in this one. I have terrible consistency in my writing and sometimes it actually happens as I'm working on it. I'll try your skeleton theory in part two of my series :) If I have questions, I'll either come straight here or send you a message!