Creepy monkey. Creepy, creepy monkey.So I’ve finished up the writing of the first draft of a current project, which ended up about 90k words. By first draft, I mean all of the scenes are at least 75% complete, with most of them completely roughed out. The next stage of the process will follow what I did with the previous two books, which worked fine. Because I am a writer, I am fascinated with process. We all constantly wonder if we’re Getting It Right, a state which I can neither confirm nor deny. Hence this post, which anyone is welcome to skip.
As part of my process, which is perhaps overly paper-intensive, I’m printing out a copy right now, at a line and a half spacing so there’s plenty of room to write on it. I’ll go through that with my colored paper tags, marking the places where there are things to be fixed or done or included, including notes ranging in magnitude from “this needs to be foreshadowed in previous chapter” to “check street name.” I’ll read through the manuscript, tinkering at the paragraph and sentence level while answering each of those tabs so I can remove it from the manuscript.
When they’re all answered, I’ll print out another copy and read that aloud with pen in hand. That may happen more than once.
I’ve polished the prologue and first chapter a couple of times, so I’m running that past one writing group, and will be looking for first readers when I get to the read-aloud stage – if people are interested, please drop me a line in the comments.
Is this the only way to write a novel? A thousand times no! But it’s worked for me, and if there’s any part of it that’s useful to you, seize it freely. The single wisest thing I heard at Clarion West, from Syne Mitchell, was, “Try different things and find out what works for you. Then do that. Lots.”
By paper tags, do you mean sticky notes? That’s an awesome idea, I believe I’ll steal it.
Re: reading aloud, if you have a Kindle you could send the ms to your Kindle (there’s a way to do this, I can look up the info if you like) and then use the text-to-speech to make the Kindle read it out loud to you. Just an idea to save your voice.
I’ve also heard people say that reading it on an e-reader helps them find typographical problems because the different line length makes it harder for errors to escape in peripheral vision.
That’s a great idea about sending it to the Kindle, I’ve done that with some review pdfs I’ve gotten in the past.
The thing about reading aloud is that you catch stuff that you wouldn’t notice otherwise – repeated words, for example, stick out like a sore thumb in this process. It’s worth a raspy voice for a couple of days. 🙂
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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
~K. Richardson
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The Writer's Toolbox: What Goes In It?
A metaphor that I was exposed to at Clarion West (now nearly a decade ago) still works beautifully for me, and it’s one I use when teaching: the idea of the writer’s toolbox.
In my mind’s eye, it’s a big red metal tool chest, small enough to be carried around, large enough that you wouldn’t want to HAVE to carry it around all the time. Inside, drawers lift out to reveal neatly packed devices and tools, each in their own padded slot.
There’s a blade capable of lopping off awkward paragraphs, and sharper, tinier words designed for work at the sentence level, trimming beginnings till they catch a reader like a fish hook and pull them into the story. There’s a box of punctuation marks, with a special slot for the semicolons. There’s the intricate device of an unreliable narrator, calculated to wobble like a gyroscope yet still remain true to the story’s course. There’s a set of filters, each one a specific point of view, each letting you cast a section in a different light. And a layer of ornamental gadgetry: epigraphs and scraps of poetry. And a valuable gimlet, capable of drilling down to a character’s motivation: the question, “What does s/he WANT?”
I’ve been thinking about it in going over notes for the class on Literary Techniques in Genre Fiction, because my aim in that is two-fold: to give students not just a whole bunch of new tools, but some sense of when to use them and a chance to experiment with them. Because a device shouldn’t be separate from a story, but an integral part of it, something that adds more to it than just a chance to see the writer being clever.
To push the metaphor a little further, stories are like furniture, only without the useful part, like being able to sit on them. You want them to feel like a single piece, not a table with some drawers and ornamental hinges glued on it. In the class, I try to introduce new tools students may not have (consciously) worked with before, including defamiliarization, hyperbole, synthesia, and a lot of other fancy words. And I also try to expand a drawer they’ve already got partially filled: sources of creative inspiration.
Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.
Someday I hope to have my students greet me with tiny classroom dioramas too. Perhaps not as many dinosaurs as Connie merits.Gads, that sounds like a pompous start to pontification. But I wanted to talk about something that I often say in class. It’s something Connie Willis told my Clarion West class, and which I repeat, but don’t explain as thoroughly as I should, because it’s so clear in my head.
But words are imprecise things, and so I’m a-gonna do what we used to call “unpacking” back in grad school and even provide some useful examples.
What did Connie say? She said, “Good fiction teaches us what it means to be human.” As good f&sf writers, I would argue that we might change “human” to “self-aware being,” but that is picking nits.
So what does that mean? It means we’re all faced with this common problem: life. And we want to know what we’re supposed to do, and what we can get away with, and what to do about all that hardcoded primate behavior that keeps popping up from time to time, and stuff like that. Sometimes the message features a universal human, sometimes it is a human shaped by particular circumstances, such as race, gender, class, sexuality, disability, etc. It’s why we like to read fiction. It’s why we like gossip. We want to know what other human beings do.
And here’s why this is important: Sometimes thinking about what a story is trying to say is a good way to complete, rewrite, or sharpen it. Doing this at one of those stages can move a story from good to excellent. Do I start a story knowing the message? Hell no. It emerges (hopefully). Sometimes I have to coax it out of its hiding place in the prose. Sometimes I have to go in with a club.
But what are some examples of messages? This is my blog and so I am going to be lazy and pull examples from my own work. Here’s some easy ones:
Worm Within – Sometimes people go crazy and can’t trust their own perceptions.
Whose Face This Is, I Do Not Know – Sometimes we take our cues to appear a certain way from other people and it’s not usually a survival trait.
Bus Ride to Mars – What’s this dying thing all about and will stories carry us through?
And the current piece I’m finishing up – Addiction will twist your life in strange ways.
Can you do this with every story? Maybe. There’s some of mine that I’d have a hard time doing this with, but I don’t know whether the problem is my own blinders, a lack on the part of the story, or just something that happens sometime.
Thoughts? How easy is it for you to figure out what your stories want to say? And when you find that out, what do you do with it?
(And shouts out to my peep Ann Leckie, who also edits the fine online fiction magazine Giganotasaurus, on the book deal!! Go Ann, you rock!!)
Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.
4 Responses
By paper tags, do you mean sticky notes? That’s an awesome idea, I believe I’ll steal it.
Re: reading aloud, if you have a Kindle you could send the ms to your Kindle (there’s a way to do this, I can look up the info if you like) and then use the text-to-speech to make the Kindle read it out loud to you. Just an idea to save your voice.
I’ve also heard people say that reading it on an e-reader helps them find typographical problems because the different line length makes it harder for errors to escape in peripheral vision.
That’s a great idea about sending it to the Kindle, I’ve done that with some review pdfs I’ve gotten in the past.
The thing about reading aloud is that you catch stuff that you wouldn’t notice otherwise – repeated words, for example, stick out like a sore thumb in this process. It’s worth a raspy voice for a couple of days. 🙂
I’ve just found you through Twitter and finding your posts SO helpful. Thanks!
You’re quite welcome!