250 Things You Should Know About Writing (10 page)

You write your first draft however you want. Outline, no outline, finger-painted on the back of a Waffle House placemat in your own feces, I don't care. But you go to attack a rewrite without a plan in mind, you might as well be a chimpanzee humping a football helmet. How do you know what to fix if you haven't identified what's broken? This isn't time for intuition. Have notes. Put a plan in place. Surgical strike.

You write the first draft in isolation. Just you, your keyboard, a story, some industrial lubricant and a handgun. All other drafts are part of a team initiative. SWAT, kicking in windows, identifying perps. Beta readers, editors, agents, wives, friends, itinerant strangers, hostages, whatever. Get someone to read your nonsense. Get notes. Attend to those notes. Third parties will see things you do not.

You get notes, it's tough. It's like coming home and being surrounded by friends and family, and they want you to sit down and listen as they talk about getting you unfettered from your addiction to obscure 80s hair-bands and foul Lithuanian pornography. But listen to those notes. They may be hard but they're both
in
structive and
con
structive. They are a dear favor, so do not waste them.

When someone says "follow your gut," it's because your intestinal tract is home to an infinite multitude of hyper-intelligent bacterial flora. It knows what's up if you can tune to its gurgling frequency. You get notes and they don't feel exactly right, check the gut. Here's the thing, though. Notes, even when you don't agree, usually point out
something
about your manuscript. It may highlight a flaw or a gap. But it can also be instructive in the sense that, each note is a test, and if you come up more resolute about some part of your manuscript, that's okay, too. Two opinions enter, one opinion leaves. Welcome to Chunderdome.

Editors do not exist to hurt you. They exist to hurt your manuscript. In the best way possible. They are the arbiters of the toughest, smartest love. A good editor shall set you -- and the work -- free.

It is the mark of the modern man if he can do multiple things at once. He can do a Powerpoint presentation and mix a martini and train a cat to quilt the Confederate Flag all at the same time. Your story will not benefit from this. Further, it's not a "one shot and I'm done" approach. This isn't the Death Star, and you're not trying to penetrate an Imperial shaft with one blast from your Force-driven proton penis. You have to approach a rewrite in layers and passes. Fix one thing at a time. Make a dialogue pass. A description pass. A plot run. You don't just fix it with one pull of the trigger, nor can you do ten things at once. Calm down. Here, eat these quaaludes. I'm just kidding, nobody has 'ludes anymore.

Story lives beyond margins. It's in context and theme and mood -- incalculable and uncertain data. But these vapors, these ghosts, must line up with the rest, and the rest must line up with them.

Behind, then, the layer cake of editing. Start with content: character, plot, description, dialogue. Move to context: those vapors and ghosts I just told you about. Final nail in the revision coffin is copy: spelling, grammar, all those fiddly bits, the skin tags and hangnails and ingrown hairs. Do these last so you don't have to keep sweeping up after yourself.

Two steps forward, one step backward where you fall down the steps and void your bowels in front of company. Here is a common, though not universal, issue: you write a draft, you identify changes, and you choose a direction to jump -- and the next draft embodies that direction. And it's the wrong direction. Second draft is worse than the first draft. That's fine. It's a good thing. Definition through negative space. Now you can understand your choices more clearly. Now you know what
not
to do and can defend that.

You know how when there's a murder they need to recreate the timeline? 10:30AM, murderer stopped off for a pudding cup, 10:45AM, victim took a shit in the ball pit at Chuck E. Cheese, etc? Right. Track the timeline of your revisions. Keep a record of them all. First, if your Word processor allows you to track changes and revisions, do that. If your program doesn't (Word and Final Draft both do), then get one that does. Second, any time you make a revision change, mark the revision, save a new file every time. I don't care if you have 152 files by the end of it. You'll be happy if you need to go back.

Spreadsheets seem anathema to writing, because writing is "creative." Well,
re
writing is clinical and strategic. A spreadsheet can help you track story beats, theme, mood, characters, plot points, quirks and foibles, conflicts, and so on. Any narrative component can be tracked by spreadsheet. Here's one way: track narrative data per page or word count. "Oh, this character drops off the map for these 10 pages of my script." "This plot needs a middle bit here around the 45,000 word mark." "Not nearly enough laser guns and elf-porn at the turn of the third act."

If you looked at that note about spreadsheets and thought something-something blah-blah-blah about how it will destroy your creativity and ruin the magic of the story, then form hand into fist and punch self in ear. If you need every day of writing to be a nougat-filled boat-ride through Pez-brick tunnels, you're fucked. Rewriting is hard. Creative comes from "create," and often, revision is about destruction. In other words: harden the fuck up, Strawberry Shortcake, 'cause the boat ride's about to get bumpy.

You can't revise if you don't know how to write. Same if you don't know the tenets of good story. How would you fix basic fucking problems if you can't find them in the first place?

Don't misread that old chestnut, "Kill your darlings." Too many writers read this as, "Excise those parts of the work that I love." That would be like, "Beat all the positive qualities of your child out of him with a wiffle ball bat." You should
leave in
the parts you love...
if they work
. Killing your darlings is about that word: "darling." Elements that are precious preening peacocks, that exist only to draw attention to themselves, those are the components that deserve an ice-axe to the back of the brain-stem.

In no particular order: Awkward and unclear language. Malapropisms. Punctuation abuse. A lack of variety in sentences. A lack of variety in the structure of the page. Plot holes. Inconsistency (John has a porkpie hat on page 70, but a ferret coiled around his head on page 75). Passive language. Wishy-washy writing. Purple prose. An excess of adverbs. Bad or broken formatting. Clichés. Wobbly tense and/or POV. Redundant language. Run-on sentences. Sentence fragments. Junk language. Cold sores. Mouse turds. Light switches that don't turn anything on. Porno mustaches. Dancing elves. Or something. I need a nap.

Poetry gets a bad rap. Everyone always assumes it's the source of purple, overwrought language, like it's some kind of virus that infects good clean American language and turns it into something a poncey 11th grade poet might sing. Poetry lurks in simple language. Great story does, too. You don't need big words or tangled phrasings or clever stunting to convey beautiful and profound ideas. In subsequent drafts, seek clarity. Be forthright in your language. Clarity and confidence are king in writing, and the revision process is when you highlight this. Write with strength. Write to be understood. That doesn't mean "no metaphors." It just means, "metaphors whose beauty exists in their simplicity."

I don't care if the dog is looking at you like you're crazy. If you're on the subway, hey, people think you're a mental patient.
Oh well
. Seriously though, I hate to repeat myself but I am nothing if not a parrot squawking my own beliefs back at you again and again: Take your work -- script, fiction, non-fiction, whatever -- and read it aloud.
Read it aloud
. READ IT ALOUD. When you read your work aloud, you'll be amazed at the things you catch, the things that sound off, that don't make sense, that are awkward or wishy-washy or inconsistent. Read it aloud read it aloud read it aloud read that motherfucker aloud.

Ultimate lesson: clinging to a first draft and resisting revision is a symptom of addiction -- you may be huffing the smell coming off your own stink. The only way you can get clean is when you want to get clean, and the same goes with revisions: you're only going to manage strong and proper revisions when you're eager and willing to do so. Relax your mind. Loosen your sphincter. And get ready for war. Because revising and rewriting is the purest, most fanfuckingtastic way of taking a mediocre manifestation of an otherwise good idea and making the execution match what exists inside your head. Your willingness to revise well and revise deep is the thing that will deliver your draft from the creamy loins of the singing story angels.

Publishing should never happen quickly. If it does, get worried. You know how in stories a character experiences a false victory and is all like, "That was too easy?" Yeah. This is like that. Publishing anything takes effort, and effort requires time. Drafts and editors and beta-readers and agents and submissions and such. Even self-publishing needs a heavy foot on the brake. Take time with it. Make sure it's right before you ejaculate a bunch of nonsense into the eyes of readers. Let your work -- and its emergence into the world – come low and slow until it tastes so good you can't feel your legs.

This probably sounds dismissive, until maybe you realize I like dogs. Either way: "legacy" publishing is about being a kept dog. A pet, of sorts. You're cared for and fed, and as long as you perform as expected, nobody's taking your ass to the pound. The self-published dog is on his own -- free to roam alone or form packs, free to hunt up his own food, free to pee where he wants to pee. This sounds like an easy decision, but keep in mind: many kept dogs are quite happy, and many free dogs go feral or get dead.

Like it or not, they call it "legacy" or "traditional" publishing for a reason: because this is the system that's been in place since Jesus came down from space and taught the Egyptians how to make toast. Or something like that. Point is, this remains the primary path. Has many advantages. Your mother will buy it. It'll be in bookstores (all seven of them). You'll get to have a hardcopy. Someone will pay you an advance. You're also likelier (though not guaranteed) to end up with a more professional, polished product. But this path has disadvantages, too. You lose control over the product. You also lose control over the timeframe -- legacy publishing moves with all the get-up-and-go of a glacial epoch. Your percentage per book is likely worse, too.

Self-publishing is, well, duh, when you publish something yourself. Did I really need to spell that out? Some call it "indie," but others hate that because "indie" indicates a publishing company not owned by a Big Wordmongering Biblioconglomerate (aka "The Uber-Pubs" or “The Big Six”). I think of it as micro-publishing. It's you, the story, and an outlet. It's both easier and harder than you think. Easier because, in the time it takes to move your bowels, you could upload something,
anything
, to Amazon and put it in the Kindle Marketplace queue. Harder because, here you are thinking you're a writer but now you're a publisher with all the burdens of
being
a publisher. There's your disadvantage right there. But if you're willing to dance for your dinner you can start earning out faster than with traditional publishing. Maybe more money. Probably less respect. For now.

Which path to choose? That's between you and your heretic gods, but if you subscribe to my gospel, you'll do both.
One for you, one for you
. Self-publish one thing. Reserve another thing for the legacy route. Some material just won't sell well to publishers, and that's what you put out there yourself. Some stuff is primed for the bigger market, and that's the meaty gobbet that goes to the bigger dogs. The great thing here is, the legacy publishers are no longer bulletproof and the micro-publishers are no longer a crap-stink of tangled pubic hairs wadded up in the bathroom drain. Both are legitimate paths. So walk both to gain the advantages of each.