GENREALITY

Happy Saturday Folks!

We’ve been spending the last month looking at writing your first novel.  Last week, we talked about getting ready for revision — deciding if you need to take an initial pass before your readers and deciding just who you want to read your book.  You’ve sent your book over to them with a deadline as to when you need comments back.

At this point, hopefully, you have several manuscripts in your inbox.  You’ve gotten some rest.  You’ve cleared your head with some short stories.  And now, it’s time to read your own book.

Once again, you have some choices.  You can read it straight up without everyone else’s comments, making your own changes (using track changes ideally unless working with a paper copy and a red pen works better for you.)  It really comes down to how many passes you need to make the story the best it can be…without taking so many passes at revision that you’re never actually done.  With my first novel, I did a bit of both.  One of my readers gave me back a paper copy manuscript with handwritten notes and the others gave me MS Word .docs marked up with the track changes feature.

I decided first to read the paper document that was already marked, making notes and changes as I went and reviewing the recommended changes my reader had written on the manuscript.  Then, after I’d gone through with just his input and marked my own changes, I merged the .docs from my other readers into one document and went through that file with the paper copy in front of me, page by page.

I think the hardest thing with revision when you’re new is knowing which suggestions to accept and which to reject.  I was fortunate — I had written a lot of  short stories and practiced revision with a team of readers.  I came to my first novel having some understanding of what did and didn’t work for me.  But my first time out with the suggested revisions of others…well, it wasn’t pretty.

I had gone to a writing critique group in Seattle, near where I was living at the time.  I brought a story called “Blakely in His Heart” and came back the following week with no small amount of trepidation to hear the comments of the fifteen or twenty people in the group.  The critiques were wildly different and when I went home, I had a stack of marked up manuscripts that I bravely sat down to go through.

And then, I proceeded to make every recommended change.

I met this big fella from Kentucky at the group.  He and his wife had just had a baby and I knew he was busy but we’d also really clicked at the group.  He’d also had really good comments about my story and when I asked if he’d take another look at it, he agreed.  So after I completely turned my story inside out by Frankensteining everyone’s Very Divergent comments together, I sent it over.  It’s the first time I got the “We Need To Talk” call from John Pitts.  It wasn’t the last…but it was the last time I took everyone’s advice at once.

I learned an important lesson there.  Ultimately, it’s YOUR story as the writer.  And the opinions of others — whether good or bad for the story — are just that:  Their opinions.

Still, there’s a balance to find.  My guidelines are pretty simple.

First, know your reader’s strengths and weaknesses.  If Reader A is great at plot and not so great at character, I may lean more on their advice around plot than I do character and pay close attention to what Reader B has to say about my characters if they’re stronger there.

Second, if three out of five of your beta readers think that your novel’s climax lacks oomph, they are probably right.  I keep an eye out for when more than one reader identifies the same problem and, if they’ve suggested fixes, I consider them.  But ultimately, I keep in mind that different writers work differently and it’s my story to figure out.

I’ve learned in my case that I can work under very different circumstances when it comes to revision.  For drafting, I need my music and a sense of detachment from my surroundings or the solitude of the Den of Ken.  For revision (or drafting non-fiction) I can work in a room with other people, with other things going on.  (Even as I write this, my toddler twins are fussing and fighting and playing with one another.)  So find out what your own process requires.  You may need utter quiet and complete detachment from the universe, but find out and then give yourself what you need to get through the process.

Do you see my recurring themes?  Learn your process and then do your process.  Don’t give yourself time to fall into the Second Guessing Pond.  Climbing out, once you’re in, takes a long time.  And every year you spend writing and revising your first novel is a year you’re not spending to continue that education on novels two, three, four, five, six.  This is a numbers game as much as anything else is — under most circumstances,  you have to write, revise and submit a lot of words in order to perfect your writing, revision and submission processes to the point of being publishable.

Eschew multiple passes of revision.  Set a limit and stick to it.  Because here’s another secret:  You’re going to be a better writer next year than you were last year if you grow as a person and practice as a writer.  You can either spend all that growth trying to fix the novel you wrote three years or five years ago…or you can roll all of it up into a new project.  I’m nearly always going to be in favor of that second option because I think you’re nearly always going to get a better return on your investment.

I think that point’s been hammered home now.  Heh.

So, you’ve taken your feedback and everyone else’s, you’ve done at least one really good, solid pass through your manuscript.  What next?

Well, we’ll talk about that next week when I wrap up this series.  For now, this is your ole pal Trailer Boy signing off.

NEW RELEASES

Rosemary Clement-Moore has a new release out on July 12! (Look at the Fab cover!)

Texas Gothic — a YA supernatural mystery

Leave The Light On…

The column of light burned blue as a gas flame, and in the incandescent center was a hazy outline of a man… A formless arm lifted slowly, as if pulling against the weight of death to reach for me, and the shade of a mouth worked in soundless desperation as the hollow eyes fixed on my face.

“This engaging mystery has plenty of both paranormal and romance, spiced with loving families and satisfyingly packed with self-sufficient, competent girls.” — Kirkus, starred review

* * * * *

APPEARANCES
Ken Scholes will be presenting at the Cascade Writers Workshop in Moclips, WA, July 21-23. http://cascadewriters.com/

Saturday again!

As you read this, I’m getting ready for my impromptu Little Sister Van Recovery Road Trip Book Tour.  Me and my little sis driving her van from Denver back to the Pacific Northwest.  So if you’re in Denver, Salt Lake City or Boise, you should come out and see me.  Check my Facebook wall for details.

For those of you who are joining us, I’ve spent the last few weeks talking about writing the first novel.  Ultimately, we all have to find our own way as writers but this is a combination of what I did and/or what I learned when I wrote mine.  I hope it’s helpful for you.

So, we’ve finished the first draft of our novel.  Woot!  This is a big deal.  You’ve been out there, I’m sure, to the workshops and conventions.  Everyone is working on a novel.  But very few have finished a first draft, much less completed revisions and put it out to market.  So finishing is a big deal. 

Save and close your file.  Create adequate backups (in addition to this, I send frequent emails of the file throughout the drafting process to some trusted friends so that the .doc can easily be found in my Sent Items and their Inboxes.)

You’ve closed the file.  Now, you leave it closed for a few weeks, maybe longer.  What next?

Well, this is a huge accomplishment.  It’s time to celebrate a milestone. 

First, there are the people in your close inner circle who lived with less of you while you wrote this book – or lived with the version of you that mumbled, muttered and moved throughout the house in a detached way while the Real You lived in another world populated by imaginary people and problems.  That person who lived with that version of you deserves a date.  A nice one.  And if you chose wisely in the partnership department, they’ll be wanting to reciprocate and find some nice way to memorialize and celebrate this occasion. 

If you’re like me, you thought about how you wanted to celebrate before you sat down to start — it gives you a great incentive for finishing.  And hopefully, you’ve thought of other places along the way to celebrate and positively reinforce you’re diligence and persistence. 

Hell, have a little party.  It takes a village to write a novel.  Invite some friends over, break open some bottles of something.   

Do your celebrating soon, though, because within a few days the euphoria of finishing will lighten up a bit and you may find yourself utterly exhausted.  Most of my friends who write novels (including me) get a bit of post partum depression with the birth of our paper children.  It doesn’t typically last long but there’s a distinct bit of ”down” that shows up for most of us.  During this time, beware the resurgence of the Chattering Head Monkeys!  Also resist the urge to open that file and start tinkering.  Or despairing.  You just worked your ass off.  You need a break. 

So be good to yourself those first two weeks after.  Take naps.  Go for walks.  Resume a comfortable intake of Someone Else’s Story.  I don’t care if it’s a stack of books or a Netflix On Demand binge of movies and TV series or twenty hours of Fallout 3 on the Xbox 360.  You need Story…not yours…to get that well filled up again.  And to cleanse your palate.  Typically, I go outside of the genre I write in for this when it comes to books.  Otherwise, I’m reading like a writer instead of like a reader.  And both are fine but after a writing a novel, it’s good to have something engagingly different from what you just got done building yourself.

So binge on Story. 

Do some writing after a few days — jot down the things you learned.  If you’re a blogger, this is a great time to blog your experience.  You never know when it might benefit someone else.

And, after you’ve had a few weeks off from fiction, roll up your sleeves and go write something short.  Let your well-rested brain play in a short story.  Give yourself a week to draft something and then put it away and go find your file. 

It’s time for you to make some decisions about how you’re going to proceed.

Next week, we’ll talk about those decisions in Part 4:  Pre-Revision.

Happy Saturday!   It’s the weekend again!

Last week, I started us down the road of preparing to write our first novel.   Today, we’ll talk about the actual drafting.

You probably already realize that every writer has their own process.  But before you’ve actually undertaken a novel (or maybe five) it’s pretty hard to know what that process is.  Whatever it is, knowing how you write novels is an important bit of self-awareness.  So I encourage you, as you go through this process, to be mindful of what things do and don’t work for you.  Because there are a lot of different approaches to it.  And keep trying things out — sometimes what didn’t work for you before will work for you under slightly different circumstances.

So, you’ve committed to the task, you’ve done some research into writing novels and into the specific novel you’re going to write.  You have  a workspace and time carved out.  You have a rough idea of how many words you want to write per day and how many days it will be before you finish your first draft.

Now what?

Now, to quote Christopher Moore, “go write like a god!”

If you are an outliner, you’ll have that to consult each day when you sit down to your work…if you need to.  With Lamentation and Antiphon, I had no outline.  With Canticle, I did.  But I also found that after saving and closing the file when I initially sketched that outline, I never looked at it again.  So I don’t think I’m an outliner, but I’m always open to new tools and ways of doing things so I’ll sit down with whatever my next project is and outline it as an experiment.

If you’re not outlining, you’re figuring things out as you go and cleaning up after you finish the draft.  I found parts of this grueling and emotional, especially on my first novel, probably because it was all so new to me.  I also put a lot of pressure on myself to stay on task, meet my wordcount goals each day, because I had a hard deadline that was imposed through the dare that Jay Lake and my wife dared me with.  I needed this first draft by the end of October and I sat down to start drafting in early September.

Yikes, right?  Well, there was a good reason.  Jay was wise enough to see that my fear and trembling around novels was getting in my way and that moving fast, with a big carrot dangling in front of me, was a way to get around that fear.  His dare, of course, wouldn’t have worked if I hadn’t committed to it and forced myself, each day, to sit down for my words.

I’m a big fan of daily production.  Or at least six days per week.  Once you get away from that habit, you lose the habit and you also risk losing the continuity and momentum of your story by becoming too distant from it.  If you have to go back each time you sit down to write and read everything you’ve previously written in order to find your misplaced groove…well, imagine the time you’re spending doing that instead of writing.

So for the next 50 or 100 days you’re going to be sitting down and finding your words.  Ideally at the same time each day, though your process may work differently.  Drafting my first novel, working with a seven week deadline, meant that I was writing in every gap of time  I could find.  In the lunch room at my dayjob.  In the wee hours of the morning.  In the evening and on weekends.  Even in the backseat of the car when we went anywhere more than 30 minutes from home.  It worked for me, but I don’t recommend it for everyone.

Just write.  Write like a god.

As your drafting, you’re going to be presented with a hundred reasons to quit.  Or to take a day off…which sometimes threatens to stretch into a week.  Be a good boss to yourself but do be a boss.  As the senior manager of your writing career, you call the shots.  If you’re too sick to write, do something else writing related that isn’t impacted by the illness.  If you have a family event, flex your writing schedule and your daily wordcounts around it.  Bank some extra words against those things that come up, but again, avoid losing days.

You see, it takes 21 days to build a habit.  If you’re writing 2k words per day, that means you’re nearly halfway finished by the time your body and brain are in the daily groove.  Depending on the kind of career you want, you’re probably going to want to produce at least one novel per year.  I know a lot of writers who produce three or four.  Each book is more practice and, eventually, more money once you start selling.  You have to train to run a marathon and the writing life is definitely a marathon, not a sprint.

As you’re laying down that first draft you’ll be learning a lot.  Don’t be afraid to play with your process to find out what works with you.  I know some writers who just lay down first draft, no corrections or revisions as they go, and they swear by it.  Turning off the internal editor, they say, is a key to getting the first draft complete.  I know other writers who review the previous day’s words, do some minor tweaking, as a way of settling into their current day’s words.  Both of these work.  What doesn’t work is falling into the loop of continuous revision to the point where you have three of the most polished, exciting chapters ever and nothing else.  I can’t stress this enough:  You have to push forward.  It is hard work and the brain will find lots of ways to trick you into not writing.

When I’m drafting, I try to minimize how often I go back to my previous work.  But at the same time, I do polish and make minor corrections as I go.  It slows me down some but I still hit 1k per hour on most days.  And for major things, like information that needs to show up earlier or a change to someone’s scene, I leave a bracket and a brief note right where I’m at.  It looks like this:

[rudolfo needs to know this in chapter 3

That way, when I’m in revision mode later, I can search for those brackets in the document and make the fixes.  So minor fixes along the way, major fixes marked with some kind of searchable symbol.

The benefit?  I have ridiculously clean first drafts and do very little major revision after the draft.  That works for me.  It wouldn’t work for everyone.  The idea of having to go back and gut 30k words from my novel in revision makes me shudder.  But I already know about myself that I’m a putter-inner rather than a taker-outer and the wordcount of my final manuscript is usually not more than a few thousand words different from the wordcount at the end of my first draft.  So figure out what works for you and do it.

As your drafting, there may be places you find yourself stuck…even if you’re using an outline.  Learn the tricks that work to get you unstuck.  For me, it’s pausing to think, finding some protein, getting some fresh air or finding some hot water — a hottub is preferred but a shower or tub will work in a pinch.  I’m not sure why, but it loosens up my brain a bit.  And as you move forward, you’ll figure out the places you stick and what helps get you unstuck.

For me, I struggle more (and move more slowly) with my first act.  I also slow down during the transition between the second and third acts.  But on the tail end of it, when I’m solidly into the last act, my wordcount per day shoots up.  I literally race to the finish, sometimes with 25k words drafted in the final week.

When I’m writing, even without an outline, I know exactly how the story ends typically and reverse engineer that ending back to the beginning of the book.  It’s a bit like that Stephen Covey habit of beginning with the end in mind.  I usually also have the bones of the story in my head and I find the meat and muscle as I go.  But when I get stuck, it’s time to find a sandwich or a shower or pause to think in my Thinking Chair.  So far, leaning into that stuckness by taking a brief break to think it out, has always served me well.  The danger is…yes, you guessed it…taking too long a break.

A lot of writers also bog down in the middle.  It’s so prevalent that they have a term for it — “the muddle in the middle.”  For me, the muddle middle is usually a product of the story having played out in my head and me having spent so much time with it that the idea feels flat and boring.  My Chattering Head Monkeys get loud.  And the trick?  Just keep pushing forward.  Put your characters into new trees and throw bigger rocks at them until they either learn to catch ‘em and hurl ‘em back or until they’ve been knocked from their perch.  Tell the monkeys to shut the frak up and keep going.

Because here is the biggest secret, I think, to finishing your first draft.  Make it your mantra.  Practice it now.

It doesn’t have to be good; it just has to be done.

There will be time enough for fixing it later and since you’re the worst judge of the quality of your work, especially at this stage in the process, just let go of that internal editor as much as you can with promises that her turn is coming later.

So there you go.  Stay hydrated.  Get up and stretch.  Take care of your wrists.

Write like a god!

Next week, we’ll talk about post-draft.  Trailer Boy out.

Happy Saturday folks!

I recently ran a question through my Facebook wall calling for Genreality blog topics and writing the first novel came up as a topic of interest.  So I thought that I’d tackle that topic over the next few weeks.

This is post is aimed at the folks who’ve never finished a first novel but hopefully there will be residual benefit for those who have.

Anyone who knows me knows that I came to the novel with fear and trembling.  I was literally terrified, for no good reason, of committing my time and energy to anything longer than 15,ooo words.  Until 2006, the longest piece of fiction I’d finished was “Last Flight of the Goddess,” a 15k D&D tribute/romance that you can read here.

Oh, I had reasons.  They just weren’t good reasons.  I’d fallen under the belief that the skills to write a novel and the skills to write a short story were so different that my first 3-5 novels would be about as saleable as my first 3-5 short stories had been.  I’d fallen into the myth that it would take me six months to a year to write each of those novels and, for a guy who was selling a good amount of short fiction at the time, that looked like a learning curve of years and years and years to get good enough.

You know the story.  I was wrong.  I churned out my first novel in 6.5 weeks and was under contract for a five volume series within 13 months of starting the book.  Imagine my surprise!  Hell, I’m still surprised.

So here’s the first thing:  You have to decide you’re going to do it and make the commitment.  Writing that first novel (and probably all the ones that come  after) is largely a product of stubborn, unrelenting persistence.  It’s tricking, conning, bribing yourself into doing the work.  Don’t ask yourself if you’re ready.  You are and you aren’t but ready doesn’t come into it.  You only get more ready with practice.  To learn how to write a novel, you must…write a novel!

Still, when I was in the pre-draft stage, before I took the plunge and committed to the novel I was going to write, I did take a bit of time to study up.  I limited myself to two books on writing and then I studied the storytelling of others.  The books I chose were Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass and Story by Robert McKee.  I recommend them but I also recognize that you have to pick the books that resonate with your tastes and needs.  But here’s the deeper recommendation:  Limit how many.  One or two books.  Otherwise, you run the risk of spending all of your energy reading about writing novels instead of actually writing one.  And you will learn more from writing the novel than from reading about novels.  Trust me.

Now, I’m going to assume that you’re already writing at some level and have a space set up in your home where you can work comfortably.  But if you haven’t, this is the time to decide where that space is and put the things there that you need in order to keep you going.  And since novels are a longer time investment you may want the occasional change of scenery so you may want to identify a pub or coffee shop where you’re comfortable working.  Maybe not…some folks need their solitary cave to find words in.  But location — where you’re going to write — is important to figure out.  Along with the when.

Figure out when your best, brightest, freshest time of day is, brain-wise, and try to make that your when.   Add to your when this bit:  To stay on task and focused, you are probably best served to write every day.  But taking days off here or there due to illness, vacation, family needs, dayjob needs is probably important to factor in.   Just realize that the longer you’re kept from your words, the harder it may be to maintain momentum as you build the story.

Okay, next up:  What are you going to write your first novel about?  This is an area where I used to bog down.  I’d turn ideas over and over and over in my head and my brain would say “No, that’s just stupid” or “That idea is way too small for a big book.”  At some point, you just have to commit and tell the Chattering Head Monkeys Shut the Frak Up.  Pre-emptively dismissing the quality of a house before it is even built is…ridiculous.

So where to find that first novel?  Well, a lot of us find them in our short fiction.  That’s where I found mine.  If you’ve ever had a first reader or workshopper tell you that the short story would be a really excellent first chapter to a novel (I heard Dean Wesley Smith tell my friend John Pitts about his short story, “Black Blade Blues,”) then listen to them.  Especially if it’s Dean!  My muse tricked me into a five book series through a quiet little short story that I really wasn’t all that excited about.

Now, here’s another deeper recommendation:  Think but don’t think too long.  If you’re like me, you’re looking for any excuse possible to not start that first novel and you’ll gladly spend a year or two just trying to figure out what to write about…after spending a year or two reading books on writing novels or taking classes.  Stop it!  You’ll be in a nursing home before you finish at this pace and if you wanna shot at the major leagues you need to get to the drafting stage.

So, once you have the seed of an idea, you have to decide what kind of writer you are.  Do you need an outline?  Do you need to fly by the seat of your pants?  Maybe either works for you.  Maybe some combination of the two.  Whatever it is, you really can’t know for sure because you’ve never done this before.  For some, having an outline gives them a great big bunch of help when it comes to the drafting because they know where they’re going.  For others, the outline is stifling.

I say:  It’s your first time out.  Try the outline but don’t be afraid to toss it and fly by the seat of your pants if it feels more natural to your process.  Sketch it out in bullet points and if it feels like you need more, do more.  But set a limit to how long you will spend outlining your novel.  Because, again, it’s easy to distract one’s self from doing the work by pretending to do the pre-work.  At some point, you have to say “It’s time to sit down and write this book.”  So set a limit.  Give yourself no more than a month.  And every every day of that month sit down in your thinking chair and make notes about your characters, their problems (both internal and external), the world they live in, what they love and what they fear.  Look into the things you need to know about for this book — and set limits on how much reseach you’re going to do, as well.  And don’t sweat what you don’t know yet — you may be the sort of writer who discovers as you go.  That’s what I seem to be.  And don’t sweat what’s broken before it’s actually broken.  In other words, if you haven’t done your first draft you can’t really know for sure what’s broken or how to fix it because it only lives in your imagination at this point.

Last up, look at how long of a novel you want to write (most folks aim for about 90-100k words) and do the math.  I recommend at least 1k words per day.  It was good enough for Bradbury, King and a host of others.  2k per day will get you there faster.  And that means you can look ahead on your calendar and mark the day you plan to finish your draft.  50-100 days…you can do that.  Decide the way you’re going to measure, open up that file on your computer, set up your manuscript the way you work best (to this day, I still draft in New Courier 12, double spaced, with my document set up the way I intend to submit it), and then…start drafting!

Next week, we’ll talk about the drafting stage of writing your first novel. 

Until then, this is Trailer Boy signing off.