How to write a premise for a novel

Posted on October 16, 2010 by Michael

Atop my smiling face is skin and hair. Below that lies fat, then muscle, bone, and brain. In short, a layered hunk of meat that constitutes my head. If you tease it all apart, you’ll find long strings of molecules that tell the flesh how to organize and maintain itself, and if you step back and watch the whole thing do its thing, you’ll see my smile.

But which is me? The meat? Or the smile? To my way of thinking, the smile that can’t exist apart from the meat is still more interesting than the meat. And more interesting still is the origin of the smile. If you tilt your thinking a little, shift some terms, this relationship exists inside a novel as well. Instead of meat, a novel has narrative structure; instead of a smile, premise.

In approximation, the premise describes what the novel is about and boy, doesn’t that sound simple? Doesn’t it sound like you could whip one out as easily as raising the outer edges of your lips? Well, pause a second to consider the Mona Lisa. It’s just a chick grinning, right? Just a gal smiling in front of a landscape? You bet. And: No. Flipping. Way. There’s a plexus of meaning behind the Mona Lisa’s smile. And a novel’s premise is much more than just a statement of what it’s about.

I may not truly understand this for fifty years, but for now, I think a premise takes a statement of general truth (someone always wants to be boss), overlays it with a more focused and complimentary assertion (somebody else always fights it), and precipitates as a statement specific to the author’s purpose (a slave struggles for liberation). The statement that results is easy to grasp, but offers more detail the closer you look at it. The premise provokes thought. The Mona Lisa isn’t exactly grinning, but something inside her felt nice, made its way onto her face, and has provoked wonder for five hundred years. A novel’s premise promises you something nice, and invites you to come get it. Whether it’s expressed on forty year-old meat, or by five hundred year-old paint, a smile isn’t just a cheek contraction and an elevation of the lips. A smile is the byproduct of deeper knowledge and feeling. Likewise, a novel’s premise is more than a description of plot, more than just what it’s about. A novel’s premise is an expression of why the author is writing the book. A novel’s premise contains character and plot, but its real job is to promise a demonstration of universal truth. Its real function is to incite curiosity, to make the author need to write the book, and to make people want to read it. A novel’s premise is an invitation for everybody to come closer.

So how do you build one? How do you write a novel’s premise? Look for clues in smiles*. The next time you feel one plaster onto your face, follow the emotion down to its origin. Discover its elemental truth. Bring that back and let it react with your thoughts until you see an application in the real world. Then write down what it means to your character. Look for truth at the root, apply it to your character, and express it in real world terms.

And for the sake chocolate fudge and Christmas brownies, smile.

 

* Pick your poison, dude. I happen to like smiles better than screams, but if horror is your thing, follow it down into the dark to see what lurks there.

P.S. Sorry for the multiple times I had to post this. My blogging software went nuts. Well, okay, I went nuts while using my blogging software.

 

Posted in Novel, easier said than done, how-to | Tagged | Leave a comment

Nobody can teach you how to write a novel, but you can figure it out.

Posted on October 10, 2010 by Michael

Before I could read, my family lived in Heidelberg and I was fascinated that the locals spoke a language I couldn’t understand. The first day we walked through town, I asked my mom what the signs said. She replied she didn’t speak German either, and I said I knew, but would she please just tell me what the sign said. We went around and around like that until one of us finally realized what I meant was “pronounce.” What followed was a festival of torture for my mother as I pointed at every sign I could find, and she contended with more Teutonic tongue-crunching than she ever bargained for. We laughed a lot, but neither one of us knew what we were saying, and it was anybody’s guess if we were even pronouncing it correctly.

Likewise, before I had any idea how to write a novel, I asked every novelist I met how they went about writing a novel. Neal Stephenson told me he couldn’t tell me, that he didn’t know, that every book was so different he had to relearn how to do it every time he did it*. William Gibson mused about the process of collecting images and observations, about tossing them into a dumpster in his head, and about rooting around in it when the time came to write a book. He paused a second then, looked over his glasses at us, down-shifted into serious, and warned that when the fun was over, finishing a book could be like trying to land a 747 from the tail section while gripping broken hydraulic cables in each fist. CJ Box said writing a novel started with an intriguing idea, grew from notes to outline to draft, and finished up sometime after the galley proof left his house. I wasn’t so naive as to think they could actually explain it to me, but I still felt like asking: “yeah, but can you just tell me what it says?”

The difference of course is that somebody can teach you how to pronounce buchhandlung, but you’re on your own for figuring out how to write a novel. And I guess that’s the good news: if nobody can teach you how to do it, then nobody can snatch up all the teachers and hog the knowledge for themselves. I don’t have to get in line to wait for my share of the Word. I don’t have to sweep some guru’s courtyard for seven years before he’ll even let me pick up a pen. Nobody can teach me how to write a novel, and nobody has to teach me. My only option is to go out (or not) and discover it for myself.

What do you think? Am I offering Cheezewhiz at a débutante ball? CAN somebody teach you how to write a novel?

 

*The implication that Neal and I are pals enough to be having such a cozy little chat will only be disabused if you read this footnote, but for mischief’s sake I’ll let it stand in the text. The bland truth is that Mr. Stephenson was kind enough to point at my upraised, thrashing hand during the Q and A of the Boulder Bookstore stop on his Quicksilver tour. (By the way, if you haven’t read Neal Stephenson, you might check him out. His narrative voice is as distinctive as an Air Force jet buzzing your house: hard to miss or mistake it for anything else.)

Posted in No Night Forever, Novel, plot | Tagged | 2 Comments

Wear a helmet, and write the best book you can

Posted on October 4, 2010 by Michael

Two weeks ago, I attended a lecture given by mystery writer Catherine O’Connell entitled “Page to Published: How to Pierce the Literary Firewall.” Ms. O’Connell not only offered solid advice to new writers on how to make their work stand out to agents, publishers, and readers, but presented some publishing numbers that just about knocked the eyes from my head. Ms. O’Connell graciously allowed me to base my graphs on her numbers and present some of those statistics here, but a warning is in order: grab a helmet first.

The least scary revelation is something I’m sure aspiring authors have heard many times, namely that a small number of titles generate most of publishers’ sales. The narrative that always accompanies this little gem is that publishers are prepared to lose money on your book because they can’t tell if it’s the next Twilight or not*. Ms. O’Connell had hard numbers to back this up, and as you can see, they don’t look very pretty.

Sales of all books in the USA 2007.jpg

Brace yourself, but the first three categories numbered just over one-tenth of one percent of the titles sold, but accounted for well over 99% of all copies sold. In blunt terms, that means of one million books sold in 2007, almost eight hundred and seventy thousand of them were copies of just those ten titles. I think it’s clear to everybody that mystery abounds in publishing statistics, and this titles-to-copies sales ratio is no exception. The Book Expo of America, for instance, estimates that the ratio is closer to 7% of titles generating 87% of the sales. Either way? Dang. When I go to an agent with my book, remind me to duck in addition to wearing that helmet.

Self publishing statistics aren’t exactly scary to me, but I do worry that even a great book can get lost amid the flurry of titles. My concerns are not allayed by Ms. O’Connell’s research, and again, grab your helmet because the chart is not pretty.

Titles published in the USA 2008.jpg

This means that in 2008, readers equipped with an e-book display device had more than half a million titles to choose from, and that we Luddites had to winnow out our reads from more than a quarter million books. And that’s just new books, folks. What about saucy Aunt Griselda who figures it’s time she read Gone With the Wind? (On a side note, in a recent article the Wall Street Journal estimated that e-book sales totaled $313 million in 2009, and could account for up to 25% of book sales by 2012. Those fighting their antediluvian tendencies might want to note this.)

Ms. O’Connell’s most wrenching statistic, though, had to do with the ratio of manuscripts submitted to books published. I didn’t make a chart for this one because nobody has a hard number for it, and because the numbers that are offered would make a dead boring chart: a blank bar on one side, and a tall bar on the other. According to the consensus of an agent panel led by Dominick Abel at the 2008 Mystery Writers of America conference, only one manuscript in twenty thousand will make it to publication via the traditional route. That doesn’t mean twenty thousand manuscripts for every published work per year, it just means that for however long it takes editors and agents to read twenty thousand manuscripts, they’ll only risk publishing one.

At this point I’ll ask you to pull the paperclip away from the electric socket and to put down your strychnine-laced tea, because there is good news. It may be sappy, but I’m betting you’ll be with me on this one. Yes, you’re interested in the money; sure, it would be nice to go on a book-tour; and of course I want to buy twelve copies for my mother. But I’m guessing that’s not why you write. I don’t think that’s what drives you to do it. The business side of this is real, but I doubt it is your primary reason for writing. I’ve posted on this before, but for me writing is an activity that allows the wonder and mystery of the universe to flow through me. It is a way to exult in curiosity, a chance to luxuriate in waking dreams, a motive and a reward for exploration. I start out doing the writing at my keyboard, but pretty soon it is happening, and while it is going on, I perceive directly just how connected I am with the rest of the world, how much a part of everything I actually am.

Sigh.

I realize that last bit may have made some of you push the paperclip into the socket and swig that nasty old tea, but I know you have your own reasons for writing, and I’d sure like to hear them. Please use the comments section to let everybody know what you think about these statistics, and how relevant (or not) they are to your writing life. Failing that, put on your helmet, pick up your pen, and go write the best book you can. Good luck!

 

*In May of 2007, I attended a speculative fiction seminar given by Robert J. Sawyer in which he made the following quip: “It’s easy to sell your first novel because publishers don’t know if you’re the next Isaac Asimov. It’s hard to sell your fifth novel because by then they know you’re not.”

(Thanks again to Catherine O’Connell for the fine (if sobering) statistics. Please blame me if you find any errors in the graphs.)

Posted in bliss, publishing statistics, why | Tagged | 2 Comments

My first step in writing a novel

Posted on September 28, 2010 by Michael

I wrote my first novel a couple of years ago, and good lord did it stink. In the same way I know the Earth will rotate me into a good view of the Sun tomorrow morning, I know it will never be published. First, because I’m never going to show it to anybody. Second, because after I die and they pull it from my desk drawer, they won’t bother to read more than a thousand words. I might be exaggerating, but I doubt by much. The thing I love about that book though is that it has a beginning, a middle, an end, and I wrote it.

I’ve started planning another book set in that world with a similar set of characters and a dissimilar set of problems. The working title is No Night Forever, and it’s going to be my writing project for the next year or so. I’m writing this blog as a kind of travel adventure about writing a novel, and I hope you’ll enjoy reading about the things I see and discover.

My first concrete step was to write down my goals for the novel. My darling mother brought this specific point up every time she could, and I finally, finally listened to her. For the record, the goals go something like this:

  1. Specifies word count, genre, and deadline for completion of the manuscript. (This is partly repeated in point 7, but I wanted to set the tone early.)
  2. Specifies when and how many copies of the manuscript will be printed. (I included this because getting nearly 100K words printed will involve some expense and will take awhile.*)
  3. Specifies when research and chapter-level outline will be complete. (For my first novel I was a “pantser,” for this novel I’m going to be a “plotter.” Email me if you’d like my explanation of those terms.)
  4. Specifies the deadline for completion of the first draft.
  5. Specifies the deadline for the second draft.
  6. Specifies when test-reader comments are due. (I did a fellow author a huge favor by reading, editing and providing a chapter by chapter critique of her half-completed manuscript in a 72-hour timeframe, and am planning on calling that one back home. That’s why I can specify when she has to return my manuscript (hee hee hee).)
  7. Specifies deadline for the third (and final) draft.
  8. Specifies the deadline for completing an agent’s query letter and an elevator pitch. Requires that I print copies of the query letter and keep a copy of the letter and the pitch on my iPod.
  9. Specifies the preferred date and time of the agent pitch appointment at the 2011 Colorado Gold Conference. (Do points 2, 7 and 8 make sense now?)
  10. Requires me to take one day out of every seven off from work on this project. Specifies days I know I’m going to have to take off. (This point is in the interests of being realistic. There’s just no way I will work with maximum efficiency for 365 straight days on a single topic.)
  11. Specifies the work requirement for the other six days a week. (For the record, I’ll need to be writing about 540 words a day during the first draft period.)

For tonight, this is all the detail I’m going to provide. As the project moves forward, I’ll start putting dates in. But for now, my intuition says keep some things quiet.

Anyway, there it is. Hope it’s helpful in your particular quest. I would love to hear what your first steps in writing a novel are, so please feel free to utilize the comments section.

And to my wonderful mother: Mom, I’m sorry I wasn’t able to put your words into action sooner, but I do thank you for them, and I do love you. (Isn’t it grand to have a mother? Isn’t it wonderful to know that she at least will always think your writing is marvelous? Mom, you rule.)

*I saw William Gibson on the Idoru tour and he mentioned that he is superstitious about printing his manuscripts. That he always goes to the same Kinko’s in Vancouver even though he lives a ways away from it now and it’s in a bit of a cruddy neighborhood. Said it brought him luck with Neuromancer and he didn’t want to jinx himself.

Posted in No Night Forever, Novel, learning how to write a novel | Tagged | 7 Comments

How to write a short story, part 4, “Submissions”

Posted on September 25, 2010 by Michael

Submitting for publication has never been very fun for me because most of the time my stories get rejected. I won’t tell you to get used to it, but I will say that every piece of advice I’ve read about submitting for publication says to get used to it. Rejection, that is. I’m sure you’ve read about the nail in Stephen King’s wall–the one on which he impaled something like five hundred rejection slips. Or perhaps you’ve heard about Frank Herbert’s experience with Dune–twenty or more publishers turned it down before Chilton’s accepted it (yes, that Chilton’s, the one who prints car repair manuals). It’s probably naive to think you won’t get a few rejections on your way to being published, but take a lesson from the redoubtable misters King and Herbert, and don’t give up. Not every editor thinks alike, and as long as you’re producing something that can be published, there’s at least a chance it will be published if you continue to submit.

The first thing you need is a completed manuscript formatted according to your market’s guidelines. More on markets in a minute, but for now understand that editors are looking for a reason to reject your work. They get more submissions than they could ever print, and have the luxury of choosing only the pieces they want to print. If they ask for a double-spaced manuscript and you send one that’s single-spaced, they’ll probably click “delete” without reading a single word. I talked to editors who said those very words: “If it’s outside my guidelines, I don’t even read it.” They’re not all that persnickety, but do yourself a favor: read and follow their submission guidelines before you send something in. For general advice on standard manuscript formatting, check out this article on the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America website.

The next thing you need is a market. Who is looking to buy what you’ve written? I think submitting to magazines you read is worthwhile because you have some idea of what those editors want. Whatever your personal views, the Writers of Future contest certainly brings its winners plenty of attention, and the top prize is nearly as fat as an advance on a first speculative fiction novel (also, their editors are nice). The venerable Novel and Short Story Writer’s Market is always a good bet. My favorite source for finding markets though, is Duotrope’s Digest. I like that it’s online, lets me filter exhaustively, provides a submission tracker, aggregates the community’s results to give you an idea of how often the market accepts/rejects, how long they take to respond, and whether or not they’re currently accepting submissions. Also, (for now), Duotrope is free.

The next thing you could use is a plan, or failing that, a list. Decide which markets and in which order you are going to submit your piece. Do you think it is the best thing ever written? Honestly? Then send it to the markets with professional pay scales. Do you think it’s just about the best thing ever written? Then send it to the pro markets. Do you think (with work) it could be the best thing ever written? Then go back, do the work, and send it to the pro markets. I don’t know if this advice is worth so much as a squirt of Doctor Pepper, but it seems to me that if you are shooting to be published in a professional market, then you might as well send your work to them. After all, you don’t know if they’ll like it, and you won’t know unless you ask them. There’s a good chance they’ll reject your work, but there’s also a chance they won’t. Sometimes, if the editor has a sweet heart or thinks your work “has something,” rejection letters will contain handwritten comments with quick insights as to why the piece wasn’t right for them, and while that isn’t a check you can take to the bank, it is gold you can take back to your revision efforts. If you become certain a particular piece will not be published at pro rates, then send to the semi-pro markets. If that effort fails, send to the token-payment markets. If your piece doesn’t find a home there, send to the “for the love” markets. Using this method is going to take a long time, but it will give the pro markets first chance at your work.*

Besides “do it,” the most useful advice I’ve heard about submitting your work is to send the piece to the next market on the list on the same day you receive a rejection for it. Unless you’ve gotten one of those nuggets of editorial advice on the bottom of the rejection letter, don’t got back and revise the piece. It’s already as good as you can make it, so invest your time in your current work in progress.

The thing you’re going to need through the whole effort of writing and submitting your work is guts. Translate that to “thick skin” or “persistence” or “determination” or “grit” or “I gotta get me some” or whatever your personal mantra for never giving up may be. Remember that everybody has different tastes, and even though Stanley Shucklepuff at Stupendous Stories says your story stinks, Gloria Gladheart in Goodville USA is even now stamping her Mary Janes at the local Barnes and Noble because she can’t find a story she likes. Maybe your story is what she’s been waiting for, and maybe there’s an editor out there who knows it. Offer him an opportunity to buy your work. Give her a chance to read it.

* There’s optimism for you.

Posted in how-to, publication, rejection, short story | 2 Comments

A reasonable price to pay for all the fun

Posted on September 14, 2010 by Michael

I attended the Colorado Gold writers’ conference this weekend and drove away from its first night feeling a little blue and a lot lonely.

The “blue” I can understand: being in a room with people who make their living writing, who have published 65+ books, and who have won several handfuls of Nebula and Hugo awards could dampen the spirits of any writer who hadn’t had that kind of success.

But lonely? Man, there were over three hundred and fifty people in that building who were working toward the very thing I am. A veritable battalion of people looking at the same dream, feeling the same hope, driving themselves for the same goal. I saw folks in wheel chairs cruising between workshops, senior citizens exchanging personal meishi, girls singing, men opening doors, kids trailing quietly along behind their moms, and smiles on about ninety percent of the faces. With the exception of two sour-pusses, everybody I interacted with wanted to talk about their projects and to hear about mine. Beyond the “what,” people wanted to discuss how, when and why projects got written. They wanted to hear my thoughts and to tell me theirs, and though the genre of everybody’s project differed slightly, the common ground was passion for what we were doing. The common factor in the interactions was love of the craft. So how in-the-name-of-Pillsbury-Toaster-Strudels could anybody feel lonely when hanging out with so many like-minded people?

My answer is that behind all the passion, beyond all the camaraderie, the main reason I attended that conference was to increase the probability of my work being published. What I saw that first day is that there are rules to commercial success, and if you don’t follow them, your odds of attaining it are very slim indeed. Good commercial fiction, fiction that is marketable, has characters who need something, and who get into to trouble trying to get it. They run, wheedle, fire, blast, connive, thump crump bang and steal, and the author stands them up against a wall to chuck rocks at their heads until they bleed. There is goal, motivation, and conflict, and you must pay attention to log-lines, pitch paragraphs, author-editor-publisher-reader relationships, and the need to build a platform from which to promote your book. You must never linger in the mid-list, and one-book-a-year is good, but two-a-year is better. What I saw that first day was that the activity I love–writing–has another side, a commercial side, and that if I don’t learn about it and make some kind of obeisance to it, I’m probably not going to get published. And that made me lonely. Because I liked the friendly stuff, the chatty, happy, ain’t-this-a-great-ride stuff. Not the actuarial percentile sell-through first North American serial rights kind of stuff. The business side of the business made me feel as if my freedom had been curtailed, as if the trackless expanse of creative territory in my head had suddenly been surrounded by pill-boxes and barbed wire. What had formerly been a place of limitless skies was now just a really (really) big room.

But the fact that writing is a business doesn’t change that it is also fun. It doesn’t change that writing is like a deep dive to the bottom of the ocean, and how many people ever get to go there? In one way or another, you have to pay for everything you do, and if having to bow to the demands of commercial fiction allows me to indulge my own need to express the flights of my imagination, I guess I can put up with a little loneliness.

Plus, I did meet a lot of really cool people. Greetings to A.W., D.C., B.E., B.A., D.H, J.K., M.H., and J.L.!

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Funny how the mind works

Posted on September 2, 2010 by Michael

My latest WIP is called “Feast for the Ages,” and today I think it’s all right. Yesterday I thought it was garbage. The day before I wouldn’t even look at it. While I’ve been working on it I either felt like it was the best thing I’d ever written, or that I just wasn’t going to be able pull it off–that I would fail to bring the story to life.

What amuses me is how much like a little kid I was with the story: I hate it. Well, it’s stinks, and I don’t like it, but maybe “hate” is too strong. It’s not that bad, I guess. Actually it’s got some good parts. There are a few things I’m really proud of. You know, it is a complex tale for a short story format. It does deal with some pretty sophisticated themes. Huh. I guess I kind of like it. Let me read it again… Oh my God that’s terrible. Eeew! Get it away!

Sigh.

I am satisfied though that this version is as good as I can get it right now. I see that I’m too close to it for any objectivity. I can’t even tell if some of the sentence transitions are choppy or smooth. I’m going to let it sit for at least a week before I move into the final draft phase. I just hope the psycho-girlfriend* dialog in my head stops.

Funny, the things that go through your head.

 

*With apologies to all you girlfriends out there. Truly, men are just as bad, we just hide it better.

Posted in internal censor, short story | Leave a comment

Publication of my short story has made me nervous

Posted on September 1, 2010 by Michael

I quite pleased to say that my short story, “What the Emperor Wants,” has been published by Reflection’s Edge.

I’m not so pleased to admit how nervous I am about it. I didn’t expect that. When the editor, Sharon Dodge, sent me the acceptance letter, I smiled for days. But now that she’s put it up on the site, I’m very definitely feeling stage fright. I tell myself I’m worried about what people will think of it, but what I’m really worried about is what they will think of me.

In my last year of college, I asked pretty much everybody I knew what their favorite art form was and why. One of my buddies at the time can best be described as a professional flake, but he was very charming and once in awhile would get a deep look in his eyes as he thought about something, so I tried the question out on him. He said literature was his favorite because it got looked at the hardest. He said books that had been around for awhile had been thought about and discussed by a lot of people, and so the likelihood of something interesting and worthwhile being there was high. You didn’t know how it would make you feel or what it would make you think, he said, but if it had been around awhile, it was probably capable of doing either.

The cause of my stage fright can be seen in my buddy’s answer.  I don’t want to waste anybody’s time, and I’m not too keen on making people feel or think bad things. And, what I really don’t want is to stand on the stage and duck flying lettuce and rotten tomatoes. But I suppose that’s what every performer feels.

Anyway, the story is published, I’m happy it is so, and I hope if you read it you enjoy it.

Posted in publication, short story | Leave a comment

Reading other writers’ work

Posted on August 31, 2010 by Michael

Some time ago I got over the feeling that I was the best writer in the world. I always knew I wasn’t, but it seemed like a good piece of internal monolog to keep around, if only as a motivational tool. I had read in some how-to book that in order to keep writing, authors needed to feel like they were Kwisatz Haderach and that their work was just what the world had been waiting for, even if it didn’t know it yet. If you’ve ever lost a battle to your internal censor, you can see how those particular notions would, in fact, be of some use, no matter how ridiculous they seem. So I kept them around for awhile until it became apparent that they were doing more harm than good. Even though they acted like a motivational force to keep me writing, they rang false, and never stuck around when the going got really tough, like when it was clear my fiction had more in common with crap than it did with gold.

When I chose to stop buoying myself with those notions, I found I could once again delight in the work of other authors. I no longer carped about things I would have done differently, or cackled with glee whenever I found the tiniest error in the work. I approached their writing with humility instead of arrogance and hoo-dang! Guess what I found out? A lot of people know a lot more about writing than I do. I know a lot, too, but there’s so much more I can learn, and that becomes possible after you admit it.

Admitting I was parsecs away from being the best writer in the world also allowed me to approach the “great” writers with a more critical eye. The curious psychological contortion that allowed me to fool myself that I was the best writer in the world while all the while I knew I wasn’t, also had the effect of making me very timid when reading anything by past or present masters. I would recognize how wonderful their work was and just kick the living doo-doo out of myself for not being as great. I guess it was a bit like being a dog chasing its own tail.

Dropping my arrogance allowed me to approach the work of my peers with humility and the work of the masters with confidence. Some day, I now tell myself, I’ll be as good. Some day, my monolog says, my own writing will bring me just as much satisfaction as theirs does.

And who knows? That day might be today.

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How to write a short story, part 3, “The Second and Subsequent Drafts”

Posted on August 30, 2010 by Michael

I lied.

I hate revising.

Some of it is easy — picking better verbs or planing sentence transitions, adding fizz to dialog, or shimming up uneven logic. Making writing more beautiful is fun, and that part I do like.

But fixing stories stinks.

I always walk away from a completed draft feeling like I just poked my enemy in the eye, like my dream girl hollered yes, like I’m standing directly beneath the moon and there’s nothing but insignificant space between me and it. My shoulders let go of their hunch, my focus softens, my breath deepens, and I feel as if today at least, I’ve done all I could and all of it was right. Mmm-hmm: Completed drafts! May everybody know that joy over and over. I’ve learned to give myself that day and usually another to bask in the feeling of accomplishment, and to insert a little space between what I think I’ve written and what I actually wrote.

Because they’re never the same. There is correlation on a sentence level, yes indeed, but all too rarely within the piece as a whole. My first drafts manage to capture the essence of what I had in mind for the story, but sometimes inelegantly, and always incompletely. When I read a completed first draft after having given myself a bit of time, I am always shocked at how badly the piece represents me. How could I have felt that good about something this bad? Where is the loveliness, where is the mystique? Why does this look like a statue sculpted by a chainsaw? Reading first drafts is often traumatic because much of the beauty I held in my head while imagining the story didn’t make it past my fingers as I was writing it. And when I’m close to the story, when I’m deep into writing it, my imagination glosses over the imperfections that make their way onto the page. I see the story so clearly in my mind that I don’t notice the flaws as they get written. Taking time between the completion of a draft and the reading of it allows that glow of imagination to fade, and puts me more in tune with what a reader experiencing the work for the first time will see. Gaps in logic, unsupported emotional transitions, and plain old narrative flaws are highlighted, and what once brought so much satisfaction now brings anxiety and the need for more work.

In the days of Web 1.0, designers included low resolution graphic files that would load (and look ugly) while the rest of the page came through the telephone wire. After the text was in, browsers would continue to redraw the graphics in higher and higher resolutions, progressively making them look less cruddy until the final detailed image could be displayed. I have no idea what this process was called, but this is what I try to do with each successive iteration of my drafts: get closer and closer to what I think the final story should be. It hurts, I always reach a point where I want to give up, and it usually feels like I can’t make it or that there isn’t any point.

I get through those moments with native personality characteristics, dogma, and bald-faced lies. I’m persistent by nature, unfinished business rankles me like grit in my bed, and I dislike giving up. I have a least a dozen “win one for the Gipper” lines in my head (Heinlein’s second rule of fiction writing: finish what you start; Kwai Chang Kain or Spock or some other wizened old fart: a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step), and they sound so good I find myself believing them. And if I have to, I just lie to myself: oh man this is going to be reprinted in a dozen anthologies if you just finish writing it. The key is to endure the emotional pain and just put my head down until I finish the thing.

It’s painful, and I do hate it, but if fixing stories stinks, then fixed stories smell like rain.

I hate revising stories, but I do love the revised ones.

And that’s the truth.

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