Tag Archives: Craft & Skills

Rule Six

Craft & Skills Editing First Drafts Ideas & Plotting Rewriting The Writing Process 2 Comments

What do you do when your brainchild is stillborn?  What do you do when the story you’ve spent months-years-in crafting and writing, the story you’ve almost literally sweated blood over, the story you love more than all your other literary children . . .

Just . . .

Doesn’t . . .

Work . . .

Last week I gave another writer a beta read on the second draft of a science-fiction novel he’s writing.  (All third-party pronouns in this post are generic, so don’t bother trying to guess who it was.  Not telling.)  I was able to report that the writing was really good.  I was also forced to report that the novel had issues that I felt kept it from being publishable.  (Said issues mostly lay in world building, but aren’t germane to this discussion.)

My friend accepted my thoughts with grace and class, and agreed that the novel definitely needed more work.  We parted still friends; which, to me, is perhaps the sign of a premier friend-the ability to accept criticism of a personal labor of love and still be warm to the critic.

A couple of days after our conversation, this thought occurred to me:  Should I have told him to cut his losses and move on to something new?

At first I was shocked that the thought had even crossed my mind, but then I realized what had prompted it.

Rule Three of Heinlein’s Rules of Writing states:  You Must Refrain from Rewriting, Except to Editorial Order.  Now most of us understand that rule not to mean that Thou Shalt Write Only First Drafts, but rather, that to spend excessive amounts of time rewriting and polishing a work is ultimately counterproductive and contra-indicated for building income.  (A writer I once read comes to mind who said that after he finished the first draft of each book, he would then spend a year reviewing every single word in the draft, one by one, considering whether it was the best word in that place.  Eep.)

So that was part of what was in the back of my mind, because I knew my friend had already spent a pretty fair amount of time on this work, and I had just indicated a lot of it needed to be taken apart and put back together differently, which would take a lot more work.

But there was something else in the back of my mind.

You see, I finished my first novel in 2002.  Before you congratulate me on that, I have to say I started it in 1977.

Twenty.  Five.  Years.

I was young.  I was stupid.  I was working solo, without the benefit of knowledgeable readers.  I had started it in a fit of temper after finishing a particularly bad SF novel which I threw across the room.

I wrote for a few weeks, then bogged down in the story.  I gave it up for a while, went and read some more good science fiction and fantasy, then came back and tried again.

That was the pattern for the next twenty-five years:  write until I became frustrated, then go away for months, or even a year or so, but eventually circle back to it, frequently starting over again.  By the time I finally drove it to a conclusion, I estimate I wrote over a half million words.  The finished manuscript was well under half that length, and it was too long.

It didn’t sell.

I gave it another full revision/rewrite/polish.

It didn’t sell.

Although I had never heard Robert Sawyer’s addendum to Heinlein’s Laws (Rule Six: Start Working on Something Else), I intuitively knew that I couldn’t just fixate on that novel; I couldn’t just hover over it and continue to try to pump life into it.  That way led to stagnation and sterility.  So I put it on the shelf, and moved on to other things, and before long did find my author’s voice and began selling professionally in 2007.

I still harbor love and affection for that first story, that first novel.  It still resonates in my mind.  But I realized something this week as I considered my friend’s novel:  mine will probably never be published, because I have too much new stuff I want to write to consider going back and trying one more time to build an edifice of words on a faulty foundation.

In the end, I answered my question about my friend’s novel:  “No.”  It wasn’t a warranted question.  It wasn’t my call to make.  And besides, there’s no doubt in my mind he can address the issues and write the story.

In the end, I answered my question about my novel:  “Yes.”   With a certain amount of sadness, I let it go.

Rule Six: Start Working on Something Else.

Tomorrow.

Anatomy of a Collaboration

Craft & Skills The Writing Process 5 Comments

I recently passed a milestone in my professional career as a writer.  I collaborated on a novel with Eric Flint, and the manuscript (well, the Word file) was just turned in to the publisher (Baen).  Unless the publisher changes the title, it should see print as 1636: The Devil’s Opera.  I’ve made professional level sales of several shorter works, but that’s the first full length novel (165,000 + words) that will come out with my name on it, second billing though it will be.  To say I’m somewhat exhilarated about this event would be a serious understatement.

When will it come out?  I don’t know for sure; possibly in late 2013, more likely in 2014.  There will be both a hard copy edition and an e-book edition from Baen.

What’s it about?  Well, there isn’t a short answer to that.  It’s a new alternate history story in the series that began with 1632, the first novel in the Ring of Fire series.  There are over five million words in print in that series right now, between the novels and the anthologies and the Grantville Gazette e-magazine issues, all dealing with how approximately 3000 residents of a blue-collar West Virginia town survive and thrive when they somehow get dumped back in 1631 Germany in the middle of the Thirty Years War.  This is just another episode in that extended story.  Most of the novels in the series roam all over Western and Central Europe:  large canvases, in other words, with correspondingly large time frames.  1636: The Devil’s Opera will be somewhat unique, in that it’s focused in a single location-the German city of Magdeburg-and it only covers a time frame of maybe four months.  And there’s something in it for everyone:  murder, music, boxing, financial irregularities, taverns and dives, tragedy, guns, humor, skullduggery and skullthumpery, more music, police procedural, a dog . . . oh, and a little romance as well.  If you like video allusions, there are resonances with Rocky, On the Waterfront, Wall Street, The Sound of Music, and NCIS.  Stay tuned; as soon as I find out, I’ll tell you when it’s going to be published so you can check it out.

Okay, enough about the book.  I want to spend a little time talking about what I learned during this collaboration.

Why authors collaborate should be a separate post, I think.  I will note that there are a number of different methods for collaboration in writing.  Almost all of them start out with the collaborating authors doing any requisite world building, outlining the story to be told, agreeing on major characters, etc.  Once all that preparatory work is done, the writing can progress in several different ways.

  1. For example, if sections of the novel require certain knowledge or expertise, one author may write certain parts while the other writes the remainder.  This approach seems to be most commonly used when both authors are of similar levels of skill.
  2. More commonly, one author will write the first draft, while the other author will do the second pass.  If one author is newer to the craft (like me), he will usually write the first draft while the more experienced/skilled writer (Eric) will do the final polish/draft.
  3. And sometimes one author will look at another and say, “You start,” and the story is built somewhat like a tennis match, with no prior planning to speak of and the authors volleying responses back and forth.  A lot of “letter” stories are actually written that way.

And all of those approaches require that one of the authors then do a second pass to tighten up the prose and smooth out any cracks or joints or bumps in the text.

So, yeah, I’m not ashamed to admit I was the junior author in this collaboration.  I’ll play second fiddle to Eric Flint any day.  And yeah, we used option 2.  I wrote the first draft.  I had a small group of alpha readers who I asked to give me feedback as I wrote it during a really rough spell in my life.  It took over a year to write a book that should have taken me no more than four months.  But I finally drove it to a conclusion, and gave the results to Eric.  There was some back and forth between us-he fixed some issues, I fixed some others- plus a final polish pass by Eric, and a round of beta readers in there somewhere.  I think it was the fourth draft that went to the publisher.

Now I definitely learned some things during the writing of the first draft.  I learned a lot more from Eric in the weeks that followed; watching over his shoulder as he worked and reworked the subsequent drafts.  I have a tendency to overwrite, so I expected him to throw away whole scenes and passages, but he really pitched very little, comparatively speaking.  Eric did add some new material, as well, but what he did a lot of was rearranging of the text:  moving blocks of text around, changing scene progressions and chapter structure and sequences.  For example, theoretically I knew that chapters don’t all have to be about the same length.  Eric made it real to me when he carved out single scenes from some of my existing chapters and made them chapters on their own.  Five hundred word scenes became chapters.  A single telegram became a chapter.  And along the way, I discovered this was a technique that would make a particular scene or elements in that scene stand out and be more memorable than they would have been had they been buried in longer chapters.  Just watching that exercise was worth the price of admission.

Paraphrased observations from Eric along the way:

  1. “If you’re going to write a murder mystery, it’s best to have the body on the first page if you can manage it.  It makes a great hook.”
  2. “For a modern mystery, if you want a gritty tone, the city needs to be one of the characters.”
  3. “For modern mysteries, tone down the melodramatic descriptions.  Modern mysteries work better if the descriptions and the speech tags are a little flatter than, say, fantasies.”  (I mentioned I tend to overwrite.)
  4. “You’ve crossed the line with this hero-he’s getting way too hard.  You’ll lose reader sympathy with him.”  (That one was about balance of characterization.)

Eric once told me that a novel collaboration requires almost as much work from him as if he had written the entire novel himself.  Because he’s the senior partner in most of the collaborations I’ve seen him do, that’s probably true.  However, I suspect the nature of his work in a collaboration is very different than when he is working a solo project.  From what I could tell in this collaboration, Eric spent much less time and energy in the creative part of the process and much more in the editing and revising part of the process.  And I suspect that, overall, he spends less personal time in arriving at the final product.

Setting aside polite modesty, my first draft was good.  Eric made it noticeably better.

1636: The Devil’s Opera by Eric Flint and David Carrico.  A novel that is different than either one of us would have written alone.  I’m proud of it.

In Praise of the Queen’s English

Craft & Skills First Drafts Narrative Voice The Writing Process 7 Comments

First, a PSA:  Grantville Gazette VI, edited by Eric Flint and published by Baen Books, is on the stands now.  It contains my story Suite for Four Hands, which is part of a series of stories exploring how musicians of the early 17th century might react if the music of the late 20th century was dropped in their laps.  Check it out.

Now, on with today’s post.

What do the following words have in common?

Slept, dreamt, leapt, burnt, dwellt, swept.

They are all representatives of a class of irregular verbs.  Four of them are also examples of a trend by American publishers to ‘regularize’ many irregular verbs in American usage.  You’ve seen it, even though it may not have registered with you.  Dreamed instead of dreamt, burned instead of burnt, dwelled instead of dwellt.  (Slept and swept have somehow managed to avoid being replaced with sleeped and sweeped.)

This is apparently an American movement.  The rest of the English-speaking world seems to be doing fine being irregular with irregular verbs.  Now, I am not particularly an Anglophile.  (But I’m not an Anglophobe, either.)  Outside of Charles Dickens, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien, I’m not especially fond of English writers per se.  (And I’m not sure why I like Dickens-I just do.)  Most of the ‘classics’ of English Literature leave me in a state of vast ennui.  I will even admit to having successfully managed to avoid reading Shakespeare throughout my high school and college careers.

That said, I must stand up and shout against this trend in American publishing.  Author C. J. Cherryh probably described the background and circumstances better than I can in a post a number of years ago.  But regardless of the whys and wherefores of the trend, the fact remains that by removing the usage of these irregular verbs, publishers and copy-editors are removing tools from our writers’ tool chests.  They are removing richness and flavor from our writing.  They are, in fact, reducing our ability to write in distinctive styles.  And I find that deplorable.

When I write, I quite frequently use particular words to create specific effects in the reader; ‘aural’ effects, for lack of a better term.  In my mind, and to my ear, ‘dreamed’ has a different effect than ‘dreamt’.  And I’m not rigidly locked in to one form or the other, although I have noticed that I tend to use ‘dreamed’ forms more in science fiction and ‘dreamt’ forms more in fantasy.  But regardless of the genre, if I use one over the other, it’s because I want the effect of that specific word in the passage at hand.

I guess I’m funny that way.  People can criticize my plots or my characterizations and I’ll listen with an open mind.  And most of the time I’ll take criticism of my narrative and dialogue without getting particularly upset.  But for some reason, if after due consideration I choose a specific word to create a particular effect, to have someone object to the use of that word really rubs my fur the wrong way.  Of course, as a new author, the state of my fur may not be the copy-editor’s highest priority. Which, while probably appropriate from the consideration of publishing as a business, is unfortunate from the consideration of the craft and art of writing.

But today, the rise of e-publishing and the freedom it provides for self-publishing is creating changes in the traditional publishing models, and some of these arbitrary rules may not be a factor much longer.  One can only hope.

So I sing the praise of irregular verbs!  Join the chorus when it comes around.

On the Fictorian Art

Craft & Skills Narrative Voice Reader Investment & Empathy Suspension of Disbelief The Writing Process 3 Comments

The truth is, writing fiction is hard.  No, correction, writing good fiction is hard.  This is borne out by the fact that the majority of new books in any given year are non-fiction.  The last statistics I remember seeing were that three out of every four new books published in the U.S. were non-fiction.  And if you removed elementary children books from the mix, the proportion would be even higher.

At first that seems counter-intuitive, doesn’t it?  I mean, when I look at a thick history of World War II, or a 500 page comparative theology book, or a multi-volume biography of someone like the Duke of Wellington, I am (reluctantly) impressed, and I think to myself that I could never do that.

Well, that may or may not be true.  But let’s look at this logically for a moment.

What is required to produce a work such as one of my three examples?

1.      The non-fiction author must do a lot of research and fact-gathering in order to lay the foundation for the book.

Does a fiction author have to do research?  If he’s any good, you betcha.  Why?  Because an author has to know the milieu/universe where his story is going to be laid, whether it’s historical, current, future, or fantasy in nature.  (See the posts about world-building.)

2.      The non-fiction author has to organize the researched material to support the thesis of the book.

Does a fiction author have to organize her material?  Yep.  She has to make sure that her story is consistent and has continuity.  Otherwise, people won’t enjoy it.

3.      The non-fiction author has to present the information well to make his case, and to tell the story he wants to tell.  (And yes, many non-fiction authors do tell stories.)

Does a fiction author have to tell . . .  Of course a fiction author has to tell a story!  That’s what writing fiction is all about, isn’t it?

So if the general skill set and methods appear to be so similar between the non-fiction author and the fiction author, what’s the difference between the two disciplines?  Getting back to the initial theme of this post, what makes writing fiction hard?  Or harder than writing non-fiction?

I would submit that it lies in the goal of the writer.

The non-fiction writer writes to impart information.  That’s pretty much it.  Oh, maybe she wants you to adopt a philosophical/political position based on her presentation, but it still comes down to imparting information.

The fiction writer writes to tell a story.  That’s the difference.  But more than that, the fiction writer writes to entertain, to enthrall, to enlist, to elicit, even to addict.  That requires something unique, something not ordinarily present in non-fiction:  the creative voice.

I’m sure there are people who will argue with me, but to me, the level of creativity required to write good fiction takes us out of the realm of craftsmanship and into the realm of art.  No matter how good our writing skills are, no matter how polished our authorial technique may be, if there is no creative voice in the story, it’s a flop.  And not everyone has the creative voice.

That’s not to say that skills and craftsmanship are not important.  They are.  After all, we really should know what the rules are before we can understand when it’s appropriate to bend or break them.  But there must be more than that in good fiction.  And it is the learning to apply the creative voice to the results of the research and the organizing of the material and the presentation of the material/case/story that makes fiction hard.

I’ve read a ridiculously large number of books in my life.  I can tell you with some assurance that I have never finished a non-fiction book, then turned back to page 1 and started over again.  I can, on the other hand, point to a number of fiction books where I have done exactly that.  I can even point you to one novel that I read cover to cover eight times in the first eight days I owned it.  Those authors’ creative voices entertained me, enticed me, drew me into their stories so profoundly that I didn’t want to let go.

That is the Fictorian Art.  And that is what we as Fictorians aspire to-are driven to, in most cases.

Welcome to the Fictorian world.