Writer’s Toolbox

A writer’s tool is a way of thinking.

I think writing can be taught. 

I’m a teacher. I have taught writing to students in middle school, high school, college, and graduate school. My students are awesome. Everyone practices. Everyone writes. Everyone improves. There. Done. Writing can be taught.

People who tell you writing can’t be taught are not trying hard enough to teach writing. Get creative, for crying out loud. I often say that you don’t really know something until you can teach it to a seventh grader. I learned an immense amount about myself, about writing, about stories, and about teaching by showing up every day for twelve years with my students.

And one of the ways I teach writing is that I remind students that all the stuff we’re talking about — the tips, tricks, and templates; the props, plots, and strategies — they’re all ways of thinking. They don’t demand or require or insist. They’re not straitjackets or prisons or ruts in a road. We’re not talking the equivalent of a prefab home or a bookshelf from IKEA. We’re just talking tools in your writer’s toolbox. And all those tools: they’re just ways of thinking.

Read. Take advantage of what other people have shared. Take from them as many tips and tools as you can.

You wouldn’t criticize a hammer for not being a screwdriver. People would think you’re crazy.

Yet writers do this all the time.

You can’t understand a tool unless you’ve used it. So use it before you criticize it. After that, you can drop that tool in your toolbox for later. Maybe you use it. Maybe you don’t.

It’s not any more complicated than that.

And yet writers, maybe more than people in any other craft, get super uptight and twisted up and ambivalent and self-defeating when it comes to using tips, tricks, tools, forms, formulas, advice, templates, guidelines, loglines, storylines, acts, arcs, scenes, beats, graphs, charts, tables, outlines, sequences, structures, whozits, hootyhoids, floofahs, whapdods, and whatever other words people use to talk about elements of The Story.

Don’t, don’t, don’t fall into the trap of being the kind of writer or teacher who’s too good to read how-to books on, say, screenwriting.

Dare to read. Dare to admit you don’t know how to structure a scene or what three-act structure is. Dare to learn something. Dare to keep reading.

Read The Cat before you judge The Cat. I love it. I make it work for me. No one told me about Save the Cat until very, very, very, very late in my writing career. Don’t wait. There’s so much more to come after it.

Screenwriting books saved my life as a novelist.

I’ve learned so much about writing fiction, especially novels, from reading books on screenwriting.

And one of the lessons I learned is how to think about the tools of the trade.

Don’t judge them. Learn them. Practice with them. Whether or not a particular tool works for you, you should always keep reading, keep learning, keep practicing.

If I give you a bit of advice on, say, writing a logline, I’m not giving you a hammer so you can whine about hammers. I am giving you a tool. That’s it. You’re wasting your time if you stand there criticizing a tool before you’ve picked it up and tried it. Tools aren’t here for you to insult. They exist with or without your permission.

You don’t open a toolbox and pick up a hammer and complain that you can’t use it to measure something or unscrew something or sand something. Yet writers critique their tools for NOT being another tool. It seems like only writers have such unreasonable expectations about the tools of their own craft.

Only writers dismiss something like, say, three-act structure as formulaic without knowing what it is. Shakespeare used it. So did Nathaniel Hawthorne, Jane Austen, John Steinbeck, and JK Rowling. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty cool with learning about how these folks did stuff.

And if it works . . . for . . . me, that’s what I care about.

It’s just too easy to imagine how a tool can fail you. Tools don’t write stories. Writers do, and they use tools to help them in this effort. And I think if writers used the same tool to develop, say, The Godfather and Finding Nemo, Harry Potter and Hamlet, I think it’s safe to say the tool does not determine the construction.

Tools don’t write stories. Writers do.

You have a hammer, and you can build a doghouse, birdhouse, White House, bathhouse, or treehouse. It’s up to you.

So imagine how a tool might help you. You don’t have to commit to using one tool for every fix-it job you encounter in your writing life. Drop these tools in a toolbox and hang on to them. You may need them. You may not.

You may need a tool at the beginning of your creative journey, in the middle, or at the end. Writing a story requires a lot of looping around and up and back, continually reimagining the characters in your world until you have built that world in your mind. Who knows at what point you will need a particular tool to help you imagine that world more fully?

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve written half of a novel and gone back to the logline to rework it and wrangle with it and rediscover what my story is really about.

Ways of thinking are useful at different stages of the process to give you different levels of perspective. 

You might want to back way up and take in the big picture of the total arc of the storyline. You might need to zoom in a bit to tighten up the break into the second act. And you might need to adjust the knob on that microscope in order to focus on that single word on page 55.

And so what could it hurt to collect tools in your toolbox — to grab telescopes and microscopes, wide-angle lenses and zoom lenses — to expand the mastery of your craft, to appreciate as many ways of thinking about stories as you can?

Don’t reject the tool as if the tool were an affront to your creative ego. 

Accept the tool lightly for what it is and what it may be: something that will help you out of a jam later, something that will help you fix the defect you have not yet encountered or perhaps not yet even imagined.

Whatever tool works for you is the tool you should use in that moment.

But you need to know as many tools as possible, because no single tool or trick or tip or template, no single way of thinking, works for everyone, for every story, for every moment in time, forever and ever.

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PHOTO: A photo of a spread from one of my favorite series of screenwriting books, Save the Cat