One of the reasons I love cats is that they never make mistakes. If they’re prancing along the window ledge, misstep and do a belly flop to the floor, they pretend that they meant to do that, dammit. They pick themselves up, lick a paw, and sashay off to the next adventure. As an approach to life, I’ve met worse.

In writing, one has to decide when a mistake is a mistake. I’m not talking about grammar/spelling/punctuation, because when two or more copyeditors are gathered together, there shall be clashing opinions, none of which coincide with mine. The real blunders come on a much larger scale, such as when the plot goes to pieces. I often have a terrific scene in mind and will commit all sorts of logic errors just to get there. Or, I write the book how I see fit and find afterward that the result appeals to me and no one else. Most often, I commit the error of overcomplicating things. I do like my subsubsubplots. I also like shades of grey. I don’t always care about how conventionally sympathetic a character is. I’ll take “interesting” over “nice” every time.

Hence, I do a lot of rewriting.

Why do these things happen? Pull up a chair, would-be writers, and learn from the error of my ways:
1. Think through a scene (and a book) before committing it to paper.
2. Remember your audience. Who are you writing for?

With regard to #1, an outline can look better in a notebook than it does in action. Once you’re into a story, it can become evident that your brilliant plot twist was the product of that third glass of Shiraz. Unfortunately, backing out of a bad idea and slashing gobs of pages is sometimes necessary. Or, you can take the cat’s approach and act like you meant it. After all, stories are all about the motivation. Convince yourself, convince the characters, and sometimes it all works out.

With regard to #2, know the expectations of your genre. I struggle with this because I dislike the entire concept of slotting books into pigeon holes, and yet that’s the reality of the marketplace. Trying to be innovative can work, but it can also mean rewriting the entire book back inside the genre boundaries to make it marketable.

A lot of this stuff I don’t regard as mistakes per se, but as choices. An author can choose to be commercially accessible or not. He or she can choose to adhere to today’s favoured structure of story writing–or not. That doesn’t make it bad writing. Much literary fiction goes in the opposite direction and is well-respected.

The down side of there being so many “how to” resources for writers is that the concept of right and wrong storytelling techniques has become firmly entrenched in the hearts and minds of the commercial writing and reading community. The debate over accepting first person point of view is a typical example. It’s not exactly radical stuff, but it’s been a hard sell with many readers. Experimentation is rare. Have we, as writers, followed “the rules” to the point where we’ve trapped ourselves?

I checked the Web for some Valentine’s Day fun facts. Here’s a few things I found:

• About 1 billion Valentine’s Day cards are exchanged in the US each year, second only to Christmas
• About 3% of pet owners will give Valentine’s Day gifts to their pets.
• Approximately 110 million roses, the majority red, will be sold and delivered within a three-day time period.
• In the Middle Ages, young men and women drew names from a bowl to see who their valentines would be. They would wear these names on their sleeves for one week, giving rise to the expression “wear your heart on your sleeve.”
• Richard Cadbury invented the first Valentines Day candy box in the late 1800s.
• The oldest surviving love poem till date is written in a clay tablet from the times of the Sumerians, inventors of writing, around 3500 B.C

It seems to me, though, what really matters are those unique traditions that spring up between couples. Y’know, the things that mean something to those two people but no one else. Stupid jokes. A favourite brand of coffee. Remembering to tape the other person’s favourite show. It’s the fact that your loved one is remembered, considered, and cherished that matters. The commercial holiday is lovely window dressing that can never, ever replace the real thing.

I always try to remember that when I get grumpy at someone for forgetting significant dates. Did they remember the important stuff, like my TV show, to feed the cats, or to send words of encouragement when life got rough? If they’re truly in the trenches with me 24/7, does the sparkly card matter?

To me, Valentine’s Day is a great excuse for a celebration in an otherwise blah month, but not much more than that. But, don’t get me wrong–I always accept chocolate.

And, BTW, if you’re looking to send an e-card, I have one here. For every one sent, a donation goes to the Animal Crusaders to cover the medical costs of the rescued strays.

Any amateur can slack off, but fine procrastination is an art. Social networking, blogging, family visits, and housecleaning are obvious slacker favorites. Pausing to do laundry because your lucky writing shirt—the only one that can possibly be worn for the next scene—is in the hamper? Coming up with something like that requires a little more thought. It’s incumbent on us as professionals to hold a higher standard of work avoidance.

I always draft my plots on large pieces of newsprint. I can say with some pride that I successfully wasted at least an hour wrestling the roll out from the back of an overpacked closet. The fact that my cat was helping accounted for twenty of those minutes. Pets are some of the best procrastination tools ever, and I’m not too proud to employ every strategic advantage.

And then there’s the research excuses—every so often a chapter can’t possibly progress until you ferret some obscure fact out of the ether. When things aren’t going well, those occasions usually become too numerous to mention. I mean, I really needed to know every how many buttons an eighteen-century infantry captain’s coat had, right?

Why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we do this especially when we can’t afford the time?

Elaborate procrastination schemes can be part of writer’s block, or caused by something as simple as a bout of laziness. More often than not, I find it’s due to being a) tired and bored or b) the story’s stuck. Discipline can solve the first. The second is most often a symptom of sloppy thinking. The story gets vague and hard to manage, and I’m not quite sure why. When that happens, there’s usually something I haven’t thought through—either character or plot. That’s when it’s time to back off and do some basic writerly homework. A solid ten minutes of diagnosis and repair can prevent days of dancing around the problem.

Unless, of course, a vacation is the point. When that happens, I think it’s better to just admit you’re going AWOL and ditch the guilt.

What are your best procrastination techniques? How do you break through them?

Every so often, I come across a news item that’s sufficiently cool I think it must be a fake. It’s just too good to be true.

Here’s one for you – a 3D bio-printer has been developed that “prints” organs on demand for organ replacement surgery. It uses the patient’s own cells, so there’s no risk of rejection.

The article says, “The 3D bio-printer allows scientists to place cells of almost any type into a desired 3D pattern. It includes two print heads, one for placing human cells, and the other for placing a hydrogel, scaffold, or support matrix.” The device already “prints” arteries and could be used in a heart surgery near you within five years. More complex organs aren’t far behind. Units are already being shipped to research institutions working on tissue construction and organ replacement.

With any luck, organ donor cards will soon be relics of the past.

Getting stories from my head onto the page is a bit like sitting on the couch trying to describe a movie as it runs on TV. That’s how I see books: as a film. I can start and stop and re-direct parts, but it’s always a case of trying to capture live action on the page.

The goal is always to try and crawl into that movie and participate: To feel what the characters feel, to use all the senses, and to never, ever skip over part of the scene just for convenience. Trimming can come later. It’s all about faithful recording. The better recorder I am, the better book I write.

This has its drawbacks. For one, I may not feel like getting gnoshed on by a vampire that day. Or crawling in slime. Or losing the love of my life to a demon-driven pestilence. It’s exhausting. It’s also part of being a writer, so Plucky Author just has to suck it up and feel the pain—‘cause if the author doesn’t, neither will readers.

The other difficulty is, no matter how good one is at slinging adjectives, translating what one sees on the mental screen is never seamless. The perfect, ideal book I imagine is always more fabulous than the reality of the book I write. So how do I combat this?

Experience generates knowledge, so I look for appropriate tactile adventures. Perhaps I should say adventure equivalents, since I don’t actually know many werewolves and slime demons. So, I bumble about studying the viscous qualities of household cleaning products, considering whether toilet bowl cleaner would drip the same way as ectoplasm. Ditto with half-melted jello, cake batter, and the stuff that goes into the car radiator. Anything is fair game when researching something that doesn’t actually exist.

As far as demon-driven pestilence goes, I’ve always imagined flu season combined with a really bad hangover. Zombification might be equivalent to an all-day policy development meeting. I know I’m ready to eat brains by five o’clock.

All that being said, it’s gratifying when a scene finally comes out really, really close to the mental movie. When I’ve got the atmosphere, the emotion, and the sense of urgency just right. That’s when I do a happy dance and thank the Word Gods for their inspiration.

Written language is a medium, to translate the movie from my head into yours. The better job I do, the more information you have to recreate it. Of course, your experience will influence the translation on your end. No two people experience a book exactly the same way. That’s part of what makes the process so interesting.

When you read, do you see it as a movie, or do you experience the story some other way?