Nick Mamatas, a wise man, has written of the tiresome advice that writers write for other writers. I am guilty of, in the distant past, writing about these. That’s why I’ve backed off nowadays, declared that I Know Nothing, and am now writing about what I actually have experienced as a writer (a really young writer) or have analyzed through other people’s works.

The “Show Don’t Tell” item is particularly amusing to me, as the authors of Self-Editing for Fiction Writers had to, in their second edition, go back over when to show and when to tell, because people took their initial advice way too strictly. People who claim “show don’t tell” as a strict principle do worse than my own outing in 2008 exploring description and show/tell in a Sherlock Holmes story. And as I know nothing (I was, after all, relying on my own analysis of a story written by someone better than me), while they know things, that’s really saying something.

I’m guessing if a writer has something to say about writing, they should illustrate the point rather than throwing it out there with little context. And through illustrating the point, they can, I kinda hope, figure out whether it applies personally or globally, or whether the point they’re trying to make is actually another point. For instance, “write every day” is actually “practice a lot even when you don’t feel like it”. The terms of practicing are up to the individual temperament and skills of a writer. “Revise, revise, revise” is actually “if your internal and/or external feedback says that you suck, then suck it up and revise, or throw it out and do something else.”

It’s just easier to wrap everything in soundbites, isn’t it, especially the more complex and nuanced something is, and writing is complex and nuanced. I’ve never thought of writing as a “spooky art” before but that particular sound bite fits.

I really… really quite like, possibly to unwise degrees, the admonition that “aiming for the top” isn’t the key to happiness as a writer. You’re better off aiming for what you want. This and other points remind me of Keffy’s post about targeting specific markets rather than aiming at what is likely to be rejection. Working out what you really want is harder. For instance, I have a strong desire for my work to outlast my life because I will leave no descendents on this earth except for the imaginary ones, and traditional publishing is not necessarily compatible with this ideal.

As for most redundant aphorism, “Don’t Give Up” gets my vote. Because the people who won’t give up pretty much won’t give up, because we are insane, and you can’t smack sense into insanity. I should know. I came back to writing even though it eats into my free time outside of a day job that makes me money.

Some young writer somewhere will say, “But then what can I give advice on?”

And I guess the only answer is to admit you know nothing and go on from there.

I know I need to practice. There’s a reason I do the Terrible Minds challenges, but I also need to just start writing short stories (longer than the typical 1000-word flash), and I also need to learn the pace of the longer novella, and the endurance of the even longer novel. Lots of this stuff will be crap, but some of it will be crap with potential. That said….

I know I need to rewrite. I’m not one of those writers who can get something off pitch-perfect unless it’s less than 1000 words (and sometimes not even that). I think there are, actually, very few of those. I’ve seen too many people apparently piss away their early first drafts in onslaughts on agents and editors.

I know that I need to read. That the writer who stops reading, and reading widely, loses something valuable. That includes non-fiction and reading outside of the genres I normally write in. ((If I could be said to have a habit at this point.)) Books about writing go in the next point, actually…

I know that I need to learn from other writers. I said, a long time ago, that writing is an apprenticeship art. Whether it’s through workshops (unlikely!) or groups (unlikely!) or hard study on my own (already doing) and reading other writers’ screeds about writing (and taking the advice with a moderate amount of salt)… there’s a whole lot of experience out there to learn from, and I’d be foolish not to take advantage of it. And finally:

I know that publishing is not the end. Whether I get published professionally or if I publish myself, it’s not the pinnacle of my writing track. I need to keep growing, to go beyond, to not rest on my laurels.

A little while ago I started talking about going from pantser to plotter, or at least leaning in that direction. Now that I’ve had time to hammer out more of the method, or at least my method, I’m thinking I’m not a true plotter, because I really do need to pants.

It’s just now I do directed pantsing, which is what led to the increase in word rate. I usually type at a cool 500 words per half-hour, and usually couldn’t really reach the end of the hour to achieve 1000 words. I’d need breaks, a little while to work out what was going on.

So what changed?

First of all, there’s the outline. Since last we spoke, I not only hammered out a full first-cut outline of everything that happens in the novella, but I started to do an extended outline—blocking in a lot of details without breaking into narrative or dialogue—of each scene. This extended outline currently exists through the first act; the second act and third act remain uncharted.

I kept the outline as a separate document/group of sub-documents. I could have chosen to start incorporating each card into the first real draft, but eh. It’s nice to have a road map that isn’t being torn apart while you write.

But what I found out was that the extended outline didn’t help me speed up my writing. The extended outline for all my scenes so far are about 1/3rd of the final word count, which is a lot to load into memory. I still plodded along, maybe even slower than before.

That was when I realized that the abbreviated outline was useful after all. So for each scene that I was working on, I did the following:

1. Duplicate the scene card in the outline, and move the copy to the Manuscript folder.

2. Open the copied scene, and write down in the document notes an abbreviated version of the extended outline of the scene. Just several sentences, nailing down key beats. This front-loads the details into my head, but gives me a reference I can skim over.

3. Clear out the extended outline from the scene. (That’s why you make a copy of the card, to preserve the original outline text.)

4. Get into compose mode, note in the document notes the start time, and then pants. Throw myself on the page, pour myself there. No hobbling along with an extended outline, and the barest of glimpses to the scant document notes to keep myself on course.

5. End up with a first draft that actually feels like a pants’d version, instead of something stuck-up to an outline. And end up with it quickly.

It’s like having my cake and eating it too! I both know where I’m going and I’ve dropped enough baggage to actually sprint. This meant the words came out as fast as I could type them, about 35 wpm, or optimistically 2100 wph. My first two scenes written in this way were both roughly 1500 words each, and both done in less than 50 minutes.

With less fear and nervousness, I could have probably done well over 2000 wph. As it is, in less than 2 hours I’ve done 3000 words, when my current aim is 1000 words per day, so it’s a win. It’s a NaNoWriMo-level win. And it wasn’t torture to get the words out.

I’ll note that while I was writing, more ideas came into my head, which I quickly incorporated, since I now had a structure into which such new ideas could be plugged into. You really never do write the same draft twice.

Outlining! I think it’s great. But take that with a grain of salt, because I know nothing, and there are 33 more scenes to go. So far, though, I highly recommend reading Outlining Your Novel, by K.M. Weiland, if you’re looking to get into the head of an outliner and see that it’s not all spreadsheets and charts. (Far from it, in fact.)

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a whole rest of a day to do… sigh, chores, and probably more outlining.

One of the hardest things for me to accept was that, once I got past the first few bits of flash fiction or first short story or the start of my series of trunked novels, the only thing between me and the page were words.

I didn’t truly understand what this meant until today. Every time I forge my way into the depths of Seal Tales, whether it’s outlining or writing real words, I have ended up peeling back layers of myself. I had no idea that every time I dipped into the virtual inkwell, what I was writing on the screen was in my own blood.

That is, to put the feeling in entirely overblown and melodramatic terms at which others may laugh at me (and certainly will, you can count on it, with justification).

And yet at the same time, it doesn’t feel like I’m exagerating at all. In fact, I may be triggering myself as I explore what it means, really means, to suddenly end up with a bartered freedom from a nightmare, a freedom that will surely expire. You’d think I’d already know, having lived that life, but I tend to be oblivious to my own past, a way of mentally surviving what a lot of people would call awful times.

The times of Zorn and Tharn, torn open and bleeding on the page like so many dead rabbits.

I was asking for it when I put a facsimile of myself on the page, to engage in fun adventures, and now that’s no longer the case—or at least, if that will be the case, it’ll take a while to work all the way there.

There’s another part of me on the page that’s the research student who chose a dead-end path, but that’s nothing compared to what the other character is going through.

And of these two parts of me, I’m asking one to eventually love the other. This is something I’ve never managed to do for myself.

You can bet there are more issues, since the villain is basically how I see my father, an internalized version of him that is likely more monstrous and powerful than the real thing (not that my father wasn’t a monster; he was just less of one). When he appears in my outline, the pace skyrockets and the stakes go higher as he turns up the pressure and time, slivered by the very forces who were supposed to help, runs out.

Therapy on the page, some say, is not good for readers or writers. You should keep your problems to yourself and write the marketable stuff. It’s better for your sanity, your readers’ sanity, and the sanity of any agents or editors you may stumble upon on the way. More dangerously, it can lead to a preciousness about your text that can only be detrimental when you deal with others.

But I can’t help but think about the times when it seemed like other authors were working out issues of their own, and done in the right, non-self-absorbed way, made for interesting reading.

I can only go onwards, despite my growing fear of my own manuscript. Tonight I spent quite a while procrastinating; this week, that will continue, since I need to finish several thousand words of performance reviews for me and my peers.

But I’ll be back. A break is not fatal; never returning, on the other hand, is. Obviously.

And perhaps when it’s all done, I can be mature enough to find that distance necessary from the text, to keep this novella from being trunked for the greater good. Even if I don’t, it’ll have given me the backstory I need for one of my otherwise shallow characters for The Pantheon Plot, which is much more light-hearted.

Gods, I hope it is.

It’s been a long, long time since I thought I could write about writing fiction. It’s a stage of hubris in my young writing life that I wish I could forget, hence why I suppressed the writing category for so long.

I decided to stop writing and get serious about my day job. The problem was that I got a little too serious. Loving where you work is great and all, but identification can only go so far, and if there was ever really an age where corporate was family, it’s a long bygone era.

So I needed to balance myself. I needed to find something other than work that I really loved, and for some reason that ended up not being boardgames. ((I love Eurogames, I love Ameritrash games, I love the monstrous offspring they sometimes breed. Mostly.))

The reason I chose writing probably has a lot to do with the narrative in Blade off the Feather, a true story. It’s the same reason I <3 the immersion of the adventure game genre: writing allows me to enter another world. Often that world is as abstract as a mathematician’s, where words take on almost dream-like meanings—and the “zone” of programming and that of writing are surprisingly similar.

But when I started to write fiction again, things were different. For the first time, I ended up constructing a world that I liked to walk around in. I wrote characters that I actually liked and weren’t simply interesting constructs to pose and play.

Neither of these existed for most of NaNoWriMo 2011, despite all that I built up a heavy word count, but I learned the meaning of Draft Zero and used the time to, basically, romp and play like a kitten surrounded by glitter balls. What would happen when gods went to college? It’s a bit skimpy, like a subject that would be picked up by a stereotypical shoujo manga or anime. And that was November.

In December, I started to read about Plot & Structure, and things began to click. And I wanted to keep on with my writing habits that I’d picked up from NaNoWriMo, so I decided to write 500 words a day. They had to be fiction words, not blog words. They had to be story words, not outline words (or at least, if they were outline words, they needed to be something more than X crosses the street to Y). 500 per day was achievable after the holy-shit-I-need-15,000-words days of NaNoWriMo.

They say that you shouldn’t write about your world again after you’ve set aside Draft Zero, but I often don’t follow instructions and so decided to write a short story, covering the back story for one of the more shallow characters. Easy, because the character needed just a little deepening. How deep could his back story get?

Yeah, that short story? Currently at over 11,000 words and not stopping any time soon. (I did end up writing over 7000 additional words of uselessness that I threw away, but kept towards the monthly word count.) And at a pace of 500 words a day (and often more if I could manage it), I discovered many things. They are too many to count, and some of them are rather abstract.

Here’s a couple of things.

I’m currently revising my apparent novelette/novella, and it’s not even halfway finished. They say to never do this before you finish the thing because it’s all too easy to not finish. And hey, I haven’t finished yet, so this may yet hold true that I’ve committed a fatal error.

But when I went back and revised the opening scene, I discovered a lot of hidden story between the existing lines. This is because when I wrote the scene, I didn’t think through all the details of the narrative. I originally had one trajectory: the villain had to be killed by the hero because he was evil. ((Yes, that’s my first scene. Gods, fortunately, or unfortunately, don’t often stay dead for long. It’s just a way to piss them off.)) I didn’t think about how the hero would feel about this—the giddiness of sudden freedom, the uncertainty of the next step to take, the desire to return to a home that never existed—none of that was in the original scene, even though those feelings were ones I could identify with.

From a practical standpoint, I didn’t think about how the hero got from point A to point B, or why the hero would even be where he was when the trick turned. I didn’t think about how the hero actually gotten originally to point A and left it as an unimportant detail, when it actually had narrative weight in terms of callbacks and echoes that could be inserted in later parts of the story.

Basically what I learned was this: milk a scene for all it’s worth. I don’t mean that you pad out the scene with description (unless that’s really your thing). When you write that character X does Y, think about the following:

• Why is X doing Y, beyond the plot demanding it?
• How does X feel about doing Y?
• How does X react to having done Y?
• How did Y come about, cause-and-effect-wise?

Also I learned that it’s easier to think about this stuff during the revision of a scene, not during the scene’s creation. When you first write the scene, you need to pour yourself onto the page, with the understanding that future-you will need to come and mop up later. To do otherwise risks what they call analysis paralysis.

Call it iterative writing. You can only refactor/rewrite when you have an actual prototype.

My intimation is that as you get more experienced, it becomes easier and easier to think of these things automatically as you write. Somewhat like learning to walk, a complicated process when you think about it, full of on-the-fly judgements and complex calculations and such. Revision probably doesn’t get any easier, though.

You might think that another lesson I learned was that villains shouldn’t be all-around evil. Wrong! I mean, that might be a lesson I learn later as I figure out how to handle villains. It’s not the lesson I learned right now.

And that’s really the only way I can write about writing when I know nothing: I write about what I’m learning now. Attempting to go beyond that tends to be, well, embarrassingly full of hubris.

Sincerely,
Arachne Jericho
which only rhymes with Jen Snow ((I’m waiting for The Wolves of Winter with baited breath.))