Category: drafts

November 7, 2014 / 2 Comments

Take It From The Top…

Musical reference. If you were ever in band class, you already have an idea what I’m talking about.

Here’s a quick tip I wanted to toss out for a common problem…

I think most of us have some project—a novel, a screenplay, a short story—that we really loved at one point, but had to put down. Maybe it was because of work. Family stuff could’ve cropped up. Perhaps circumstances forced us to move on to other things. It happens.

Then we go back to it. Not just to dabble with it over a weekend, but to pick up things where we left off. And—no surprise—it’s tough to make things work the way they did before the break.

If you’ve been reading this little pile of rants for a while, you may remember me referencing a novel I started about zombies on the Moon. I began work on it back in late 2009, but put it aside after a few months because my publisher at the time wanted me to try a mash-up novel. When I tried to go back to the zombie idea, he’d just bought another “zombies in space” novel and warned me he probably wouldn’t want another one (I ended up writing a book about a creepy apartment building instead). I even tried to go back to Dead Moon again two years ago, and… well, it was a struggle. I couldn’t remember how the characters sounded in my head, or where some of the plot points were leading. I banged my head against it for about three months and then, well, circumstances required I move on again.

My lovely lady recently had a similar problem. She tried to finish a first person manuscript that was about 4/5 done, but she hadn’t touched it in about a decade and it was very, very voice-heavy with a very tricky plot. That last 20% took her months.

And I made the same mistake again, even after my attempts to get back to the Moon. One of my most recent books began as a different novel back in 2007. It was set aside twice (much like Dead Moon), and I’d kind of given up on it. But then I realized I could salvage a lot of the plot and characters and use them as kind of a spin-off-side-quelto that creepy-apartment story. Which sounded great on a bunch of levels.

Except what really happened was that I tried to pick up right where I left off. I fumbled with it for a long time before I realized I needed to forget X and start writing Y. And I was 2/3 through Y before it hit me that the whole thing was really just clinging to X again. I pulled it apart (now with a deadline creeping close) and finally got Z put together.

Which my editor looked at and immediately caught a bunch of Y stuff.

Y’see, Timmy, if we’re doing things right, we all keep growing as writers. We gain experience (some good, some bad). We learn new things. We swear never to do certain things ever again.

And because of this, we stumble when we try to go back. It’s kind of like bumping into an old ex and pretending nothing’s changed when… well, a lot has changed. There’s skewed memories, things we know that we don’t want to talk about, and experiences that make casual conversations kind of awkward. Because we’ve grown and moved on. There can still be something there, sure, but it’ll never be what it was back then.

Final anecdote. A month or two back I was offered a spot in a high-profile anthology. My first thought for a story that fit was actually an unproduced script I’d written for a television show back in 2001. But this was a themed anthology—my story had to fit this theme and these characters.

So I read through the old script twice to get the story and the beats back in my head. Then I put it aside. Didn’t look at it again. I wrote my first draft in a week (about 12,000 words) and had three more drafts done in the next two and a half weeks. The editor loved it.

So, here’s my tip.

If I’m going to go back to a half-done project that I haven’t done anything with for a significant amount of time, I might be better off just starting from scratch. Don’t try to save or salvage or repurpose. Just start over. This way I’m not fighting with present vs. past experience or voices or plotlines. I’m just writing

Sometimes it’s faster to start over on a project than to pick it up after a long time away from it.

Next time, I’m going to introduce a reader request about characters.

Until then, go write.

August 30, 2014 / 2 Comments

The Plimoth Experience

Very sorry this is so late. I mentioned last time that I was working on a major rewrite of the new book which was due last week. Then I looked at it again over the weekend and asked my editor if I could take another pass at the last fifty pages before he read it. And he said I could, because he’s very forgiving of my screw-ups since I own up to all of them. Which is why I’m late this week.

But enough with the excuses.

Speaking of last time, it struck me a while back that I’ve never talked about why I end every one of these little rants with “Go write.” Is it supposed to be a clever catchphrase or something? Encouragement?

Let me answer that by telling you a funny story about Plimoth Plantation.

No, it’s relevant. Really.

While I mostly grew up in Maine, I spent my high school years in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Yes, the same Plymouth as the rock and the Pilgrims and the Mayflower and all that. One of the big tourist attractions is Plimoth Plantation, a recreation of the original colony (with original spelling) complete with actors playing specific historical roles. You can walk in and the colonists will talk to you, answer questions, and usually ask about your odd (modern) clothes.
Every year in Plimoth Plantation is 1627. It replays again and again, following the historical record. Births, deaths, marriages, and so on. A friend of mine worked there for a few years with her parents, and because of her age she was assigned a specific role. Part of her role was getting married at the end of the summer to another historical character, Experience Mitchell (ahhh, have to love those Puritan names). The catch was that my friend was kind of interested in another Pilgrim. So on “the big day,” one of her co-workers gave her a wedding gift in the changing room, a t-shirt that said…

Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.

I laughed when she told me about it, but the phrase stuck with me. Mostly because it’s true. If you talk to anyone who’s considered experienced, it’s because they failed or screwed up. A lot.

Now let’s jump forward a bit.

Comic writer and artist Brian Michael Bendis has a new book out called Words For Pictures. We happen to have the same publisher (well, where this book’s concerned) and the director of marketing slipped me a copy while I was at San Diego Comic-Con last month. I read it as soon as I got home. It’s great, you should buy a copy.

Words For Pictures is mostly (as the title implies) about writing for comics. But there’s a lot of solid advice in there for writing in general. In fact, it was interesting to see that Bendis addresses a lot of the same points in his book that I have here on the ranty blog. In pretty much the same ways.

One of them is this. To be a writer, I need to write. I need to write a lot. You’ve probably heard this before. Many people have said the same thing.

Here’s the part you probably haven’t heard.

The reason everyone says to write a lot is that we’re all going to put out a lot of crap.

Tons of it.

I believe it was Neil Gaiman (in one of his books) who said that everyone has at least three great stories in them. While I believe this is true, I think there’s an unspoken corollary there which is just as important. All of us have lots and lots of bad stories in us. Dozens of them. Maybe even hundreds. We have contrived plots, weak characters, awful dialogue, and terrible structure

I wrote a ton of bad stuff that none of you ever have—or ever will—see. I spent about twenty years getting out all my bad stories and habits. My first attempt at a novel (in third grade), Lizard Men From the Center of the Earth. My Doctor Who and Boba Fett fan-fiction. My middle-school sci-fi novel. My junior high fantasy novel. My high school werewolf-detective novel. My college novel, The Trinity. My after-college-moved-to-California novel, The Suffering Map (which went through eight or nine full drafts). Plus a ton of comic scripts, short stories, screenplays, and I think even one or two attempts at stage plays. Thousands of pages. Thousands of hours of work.

Some of you may have noticed I’m in no rush to self-publish these, despite the constant assurances from some quarters of easy money.

Why?

Because, pretty much across the board, they suck.

My early work sucks. It’s bad. I spent days and days writing stuff that should never see the light of day. I have no problem admitting it. In fact, it was being able to admit it that let me move from being a random dabbler to a serious writer. I dug through all the bad stories and found the good ones underneath. Maybe even one or two great ones.

Writing all those stories was my experience. Whenever you hear about an overnight success or an amazing “first” novel, odds are that writer really has a long string of work—and a lot of failures—behind them.

We accept that in every field of work someone needs a certain level of mastery and experience before they’ll be considered a professional. Taking an auto shop class in high school doesn’t make me a mechanic, and taking a CPR class doesn’t make me a doctor. Home Ec didn’t make me a chef, and oddly enough the White House hasn’t called me about any foreign policy decisions, despite my B+ in history.

And these people have screwed up, too, on their path to being a professional. Ask your mechanic and she or he probably broke a couple cars while learning how to fix them. Lots of doctors misdiagnose patients, and some patients die from these mistakes. Your favorite chef cooked a lot of really bad food over the years. Some of the better politicians are the ones who admit they were wrong about an earlier position they held.

And we understand that in all of these fields, these mistakes are part of the learning curve. I don’t get the success, but I get the experience. It’s why it takes so long to become a doctor or a chef or even a mechanic.

Or a writer.

This is one of the reasons I harp on spelling so much. It’s an easy-to-spot symptom that usually implies bigger problems. If my manuscript is loaded with spelling mistakes and misused words, it means I don’t know how to use my tools. And it also means I didn’t really spend a lot of time (if any) on my drafts and polishes.

Y’see, Timmy, at the end of the day this is all up to me. It’s not someone else’s responsibility to make my book good. It’s mine. If I can’t spell, have a weak vocabulary, poor plots, thin characters, flat dialogue… that’s all on me. Which is why I asked my editor to hold off reading this new draft so I could fix some things. Part of being a professional is knowing how to do all this stuff and, well… doing it.

There’s an all-too-common belief that just finishing something means it’s good. That the act of struggling to finish that first novel is the experience I need to call myself a good writer. I mean, I made it all the way through to the end of a novel on my first try. That’s a lot of writing. That novel must be worth publishing and being read, right?

But the truth is, the vast majority of first novels are awful. The second ones are pretty bad, too. The third ones are at least tolerable. Ex-Heroes might’ve been my first novel that was published, but it was my seventh-and-a-half attempt at writing one. And, as I mentioned above, I’m really glad it was the first one people saw.

Because that junior high fantasy novel… man, that was embarrassing. On so many levels.

Next time, I’d like to hit another problem right on the nose.

Until then… go write.

Bendis drafts Ex-Heroes exceptions experience gaiman Lizard Men writing

August 7, 2014

Choose Wisely…

Very appropriate title for this week. If you don’t know it, shame on you.

This may be a controversial post in some eyes, but hopefully folks will read and digest before diving for the comments to make an angry response.

On the first week of the first television series I ever worked on, I witnessed a minor snit between the line producer and the director of photography. The episode was falling behind schedule, and the producer had decided it was the camera department’s fault. He berated the DP for a while, questioned the abilities of the camera crew, and—in a very passive-aggressive way—drove home the need to pick up the pace.

When he was done, the director of photography held up three fingers. “Fast. Cheap. Good,” he said with a smirk. “Pick two.”

The catch, of course, is that it was a very low-budget show (which we all knew). And no one was going to say it didn’t have to be good. So the one thing it wasn’t going to be was fast.

The line producer fired the DP at the end of the week. But the rule held true, and I saw it proven true again and again over my time in the industry. I would guess that four out of five times if there ended up being a train wreck on set, it was because someone was trying to find a way around this rule and get all three choices.
I worked on Bring It On, the cheerleading movie. It was incredibly low budget. But the director had a very relaxed schedule because, at the time, Kirsten Dunst was still a few weeks away from her eighteenth birthday. As a minor she could only work so many hours a day. So the film was inexpensive and good, but it wasn’t fast. I also worked on a bunch of B horror/action movies that were cheap and shot super-fast, but the directors acknowledged they were making straight-to-DVD genre movies so we didn’t waste time with artsy composition or elaborate lighting set-ups. We all went in knowing these projects weren’t going to be winning any awards–they just needed to be competent films that would entertain people for ninety-odd minutes or so. And they were

Are there exceptions to this rule? Yeah, of course. But exceptions are very rare and specific by their nature, so I should never start off assuming I’m one of them. Because we all knows what happens when I assume… And I saw more than a few projects crash because someone above the line kept insisting they could get all three.

The “pick two” rule doesn’t just hold for moviemaking, though. It holds for writing and publishing, too. We get to make the same choices for our work, and trying to find a way around that choice—a way to have all three—almost always makes a mess.

Allow me to explain…

I’m going to go under the assumption most of us here are aiming for good. Yeah, some of you are shooting for great, but for today’s little experiment, that’s the same as good. Which means one of my choices is gone right there.

So the real question is, are we going for fast or for cheap?

Several folks decide to go fast, blasting through drafts and edits like a snowplow through slush. But going fast—and keeping it good—requires lots of eyes and/or lots of experience. And those aren’t cheap. A decent editor is hard to come by, and the good ones aren’t going to work for free—especially not work fast.

If I want to go fast, and I want it to be good, there’s going to be a cost for someone. That’s just the way it it. I know a lot of folks who write very fast, but they realize there’s going to be a big investment after that if they want the book to be good.

On the other hand, I can decide to keep it cheap and good. And this is when I really take my time. I do multiple drafts, going through each one line by line. No spellcheckers or auto-grammar websites. If I plan on doing this for a living, then I need to be able to do this for a living. I can’t pretend I know what words mean or how to string them together. I need to examine each page and paragraph and sentence with my own eyes.

Doing a manuscript this way could take seven or eight months—maybe even more. But that’s how I keep costs down—by doing it all myself and being meticulous about it. And, yeah, meticulous means slow. It means seven or eight pages a day if I’m lucky.
What combination does that leave us?

Fast and cheap. It’s one I’m sure we’ve all seen. The people who aren’t willing to take the time or to make an investment. Fast and cheap means I write one 85,000 word draft in a month, show it to my friend who scraped by with a C in high school English, run it through the spellchecker, and then put it up for all the world to see.

That’s fast and cheap. And odds are it’s not good.

Again, that isn’t an absolute. There are a few books out there that managed all three. If I choose to go fast and cheap, though, good is definitely the exception, not the rule.

So be honest with yourself and choose your two.

But choose wisely.

Next time, on a related note, I’d like to blabber on about some words every writer should know.

Until then, go write.

art drafts editing exceptions focus

April 24, 2014 / 2 Comments

Draft Bored

See what I did there? A clever play on words. Not quite a pun, definitely not a pop culture reference, but… well, it’ll do.

It’ll do, pig.

Also, random note—I set up a Tumblr a while back. If you ever want to ask a quick question, send anonymous insults, or whatever, please feel free to stop by.

Anyway, I’m about to wrap up this draft of my current project and it struck me that I haven’t blabbed on about the drafting process, so to speak, in a while. A lot of folks hate doing drafts. Some folks skip them altogether, convinced their words are gold the minute they’re set down. And a few folks get caught in an endless loop of writing and rewriting and rewriting and rewriting and…

So, here’s a basic step by step of how I go from bare idea to something I’m willing to hand to an editor. And when I say editor, I mean “someone who will pay for these words I’ve written.” That being said, this is also a good time to bring up the ever-popular golden rule.

What works for me might not work for you,

and it almost definitely won’t work for that guy.

I’ve mentioned once or thrice before that we all have our own way of writing. Working through drafts in this way helps me a lot, but it’s not a guarantee of success for anyone except me. You might need to modify these steps a bit, or maybe a lot. But I think this is a good baseline method.

To begin…

While I’m working on a book, I usually scribble down notes and thoughts about the nextbook. Characters, dialogue, action moments, reveals… all sorts of different elements. I’ll shuffle these around into more or less the order I think they’ll end up. These notes serves as a very, very rough outline, just enough so I can start writing on page one and go when it’s time to start…

The First Draft—In my mind, this is the “just finish it” stage. I just want to finish this draft with a beginning, an end, and the majority of points in between. I don’t worry about catching typos or crafting every subtle moment in the plot.

Consider this… diamonds don’t come out of the earth as clear, faceted gems. They come out as ugly blobs that need lots of cuts and polishing. So if I dig up a ten-gram diamond, I can’t expect it to make a ten gram gemstone. If I’m lucky, I might get three or four grams out of it. It’ll shrink as I work on it, because that’s how I improve it (see below). So if I’ve got a ten-gram diamond and I’m insisting on a 9.9 gram gem… well, that’s going to make a pretty crappy engagement ring, yes?

At this early stage, I don’t hold anything back. I let dialogue, descriptions, and action scenes run on a bit longer than they probably should. I know I’ll be cutting eventually, so there’s no reason to worry about length now. For this stage, it really is quantity over quality.

If I get stuck on something (an awkward conversation or complex action scene), I’ll just skip it. Things might not be perfect right now, but I know I’ll be able to go into the exact details of that conversation or this sequence later, so I’d rather keep moving forward and leave that stuff for Future Peter to deal with. Again, for me, the most important thing is to get the overall frameworkdone. It’s a lot easier to think about the little things when the big things aren’t looming over you.

Depending on the book, this process takes me anywhere from two to three months. I had one book take about six weeks, but that was pretty rare for me.

I don’t show this draft to anyone. I may take a night off, work on something else for a day, and then it’s right back for…

The Second Draft— Remember all those problems I left for Future Peter to deal with? Those need to be dealt with now. Gaps get filled in. Characters get fleshed out a little more, and sometimes renamed. All those awkward knots get worked out. Because I can see a lot of these elements in relation to the whole story now , I’ll usually find the answers to these problems are more apparent.

The goal with this draft is to have a readable manuscript. No more little notes to myself or trailing paragraphs that need to get connected somehow. Someone should be able to pick this up and read it start to finish without thinking they lost a few pages or only got my notes on a chapter.

Keep in mind this doesn’t mean I do show it to people. It just means I should be able to. Really, the only person who might see this is my lady-love, and not even her always. Usually she has to wait.

For some folks, this stage would really be the first draft. Those people have nice pages of their own somewhere out there on the web. This isn’t one of them. Plus, breaking it up like this takes a lot of pressure off, which I think is a good thing when you’re trying to treat writing like a real job. No one likes a high-pressure job.

Okay then, so… now I step away for a couple of days. Maybe as much as a week. I’ll watch movies, work out a little, or maybe even scribble up a few ranty blog posts in advance. The goal is to push the manuscript as far out of my mind as possible. Don’t look at it, try not to think too much about it.

I’m just into this now with The Albuquerque Door, for those who care about such things.

The Third Draft—Time to make like a slasher and cut, cut, cut. Two great rules-of-thumb I’ve mentioned a few times—

one adverb per page, four adjectives

2nd draft = 1st draft – 10%

Yeah, the second rule goes off the previously mentioned assumption that my first clean, readable draft is my first draft.

I spend this draft tracking down adverbs, adjectives, pointless dialogue descriptors, and so on. If they can be cut, they get cut. One thing I also go after here is common padding phrases that don’t really do anything (sort of, somewhat, kind of, more or less). One of my regular readers dubbed this somewhat syndrome, and I still call it that. I like to tell myself I’ve gotten much better about it now that I’m aware of the problem.

Sometimes I also like to tell myself that I haven’t gained that much weight since college…

At this point I’ve gone through the whole manuscript at least twice, so a few larger cuts should be apparent, too. Overcomplicated descriptions that slow down the narrative. Awkward sentence structures. Extensive character moments that really add nothing to the character, the story, or the plot. Many of these things get tightened or cut altogether.

I spend a week or two doing this. This is usually when I let my lovely lady have a look. She’s my first set of eyes and lets me know I screwed up and I’m too close to see it.

The Fourth Draft–This is the first big polish. I go through sentence by sentence, looking for words that come up too often or stilted dialogue. I also make sure all the cuts and swaps from the last draft haven’t messed anything up. Are the logic chains still complete? Did I forget to change Pash’s name to Veek anywhere? Does Arthur still have time to get that pistol? Are there any odd character tics that I forgot to remove or add? Does the whole thing have a good flow to it?

This draft doesn’t take long. Just a day or two. It’s just one slow, careful read of the story.

Once I’ve got a solid fourth draft, I send it off to folks to get fresh eyes. I generally use four or five friends I’ve know for years. All of them are all professional writers and editors who know how to give useful criticism. Not to beat a dead horse, but by professional I mean they get paid to do this for a living. They have actual credentials.

Speaking of which, some folks might hire a professional editor at this point. Nothing wrong with that. The important thing is to get an opinion I can trust to be honest, even if I have to pay for it. A few folks might argue that this is the publisher’s job, but I need to get a publisher first, and why are they going to bother with my crap manuscript?

Anyway, this draft goes off into the world and it may be two weeks to a month before I look at it again. The challenge is to resist messing with it while those people are looking at it. I try to spend the time relaxing a bit, scribbling down ideas for later books (see above), or flexing different mental muscles.

More than once, I’ve cleaned my office.

The Fifth Draft— Now I’ve gotten notes back from the folks I begged/ blackmailed/ paid to read this thing. I go through the whole manuscript page by page with their comments. If you’ve got multiple monitors, this is a great time to use them.

Page one… what did everyone think? What about page two? How’s page three look? As I’m doing this, I’ve also got my own copy of the fourth draft that I’m using as a “master document.” This way I can see all the notes and make whatever changes are required.

I mentioned that I ask four or five people to make notes for me. That gives me a broad sampling on each note/ issue that comes up. If four people like something but one doesn’t, odds are I’ll call that good. Nothing’s going to work for everyone. If three don’t and two do (and of course I do, or I wouldn’t’ve written it), I’ll sit and give it a good look. If nobody likes it, well… I’m smart enough to admit when I’ve screwed up and something doesn’t work.

This draft can take another two weeks or more to finish with a full book manuscript.

The Sixth Draft— This one’s another polishing draft, just like the fourth. I need to make sure everything still works now that I’ve made those changes and tweaks from my reader’s comments. So, yet another line by line reading, adjusting as I go.

And at this point… this is when I’m done. There’s only so much a given writer—in this case, me—can do with a given story. There comes a point when further work accomplishes nothing and I’m just rewriting for the sake of rewriting. I’m sure we all know someone who’s just been working on the same manuscript for years and years because they’ve got another one or two drafts to put it through. If my manuscript’s not ready for a publisher (or film producer) by now, it probably means I screwed up something big right at the start.

Maybe with my initial idea of rebooting the Laff-A-Lympics as a medical drama starring a gender-swapped, alcoholic Captain Caveman.

Next time… well, if there’s anything next week it’ll be really quick. I’ve got a flight on Thursday. If you’re in Dallas next week, please swing by Texas Frightmare and say hi. I’ll be in the Made in Texas room.

Either way, go write.

adjectives adverbs criticism drafts editing feedback golden rule

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