Category: editing

I’ve mentioned once or thrice here that one of the toughest lessons for a writer to learn is that something I wrote just might not be that good. I spent time writing, some more time editing it (hopefully), and now on my third or fourth pass I’m forced to admit it’s just… not good. Maybe it doesn’t really work with the character or this particular moment in the story. Maybe it’s really good but it just doesn’t fit in this book.

But also, let’s be honest. Sometimes… it’s just bad. We wrote something that’s crap. It happens.

When this happens, it’s tough, but we usually need to start cutting. Lines of dialogue. Whole paragraphs. Whole chapters. Subplots. Hell, I’ve cut whole characters out of a book and then stitched everything together again around their sudden absence.

And this is a rough thing, to let go of something that we invested time and effort into. I think that’s why people will fight so hard to keep some things. To rationalize why we don’t need to get rid of it. To rewrite and twist and push and try to find a way that makes it work.

Now, there’s two aspects of this I want to address.

First, like I said, the gut reaction is to fight against pulling stuff out of my work. I know I did for years. But as I kept trying to do this, I realized something. This was a natural part of editing. Things are going to go away. If we can accept that we might need to snip a word or three, then it makes sense we might need to snip ten or twenty. Or a hundred.

This is going to sound weird to a few folks, I know, but sometimes you’ve got to write something out to find out you don’t need it. It’s that thing I’ve mentioned once or thrice, that you can’t fix something that doesn’t exist. And part of fixing something is realizing I don’t need that funny character bit or the flashback chapter or maybe the whole romance subplot. They’re ruining the pacing or changing the tone or breaking the flow.

And again, yeah, sometimes they’re just bad.

So we cut it. Tear it out. Delete it. Good riddance!

Well, hang on.

This is the second aspect of tearing things out. Yeah, some of this can go and we can never think of it again. Like blocking someone on social media. Hit the keys, gone, everything’s better. Again, there’s a chance it’s just bad and not worth the effort of trying to make it good.

I spent an afternoon two weeks back trying to structure a chapter for this funny character bit (oh ho, that sounds familiar) and ultimately realized it just wasn’t going to work. It didn’t make sense for at least one of the characters involved. And it ultimately wasn’t even that funny. Definitely not so much that it was worth all this effort. So… gone. No worries.

But some of this stuff… look, maybe we can seal this in virtual tupperware and stick it in the fridge for a bit. There’s nothing wrong with that. Like I mentioned above, that romance subplot might be good, just not good for this book. So why not hang onto it in case the right book comes around?

And this is where, I think, some folks have issues. Because if we’re talking about art, weren’t these words put together for this purpose? Didn’t I artisanally craft this dialogue to come from the mouths of these characters? I mean, if it’s that easy for me to just pull something from one story and toss it into another… well, maybe I’m just some kind of hack. Maybe I don’t care about art at all?

But this just isn’t true. I mean, it’s true that I can’t take that romantic subplot and stick it into another story unaltered. Hell, if nothing else, I’d probably need to change the names. And probably some speech patterns. And possibly references to where/when this is happening. But really that’s just, y’know, writing. If I was creating the scene from scratch, I’d still have to take all these things into consideration.

Also, if I’ve got something I pulled from a manuscript five or six years ago—like any leftovers that’ve been sitting around for a while—I may want to be extra-sure it’s still good. Dialogue shifts, styles change, pop-culture and tech references can get outdated fast. I’m not saying I should toss anything that’s X years old, just that it might need a little more attention before I offer it to anyone.

Y’see, Timmy, sometimes we write bad stuff. No question, everyone does it. But sometimes, we’re just writing good stuff in the wrong book. And when that happens, there’s no shame in packing it up and saving it for later.

But seriously… you’re never going to eat those noodles on the bottom shelf of the fridge. They’re three weeks old now. And they’re furry! Just throw those out.

Next time, I think I’d like to lighten things up a bit and talk about AI and the assassination of JFK.

Until then, go write.

There’s an idea I heard once or thrice on movie sets. You may have heard it, too. The KISS principle—an acronym for “Keep It Simple, Stupid.” It’s basically a warning to people not to overcomplicate things just for the sake of overcomplicating them. It’s something I’d see a lot in the film industry, usually with less experienced and/ or very stubborn people. The most common example would be directors who tried to do time-consuming, overly complex shots… just so they could do complex shots.

I’d see it in a lot of screenwriting too, especially in the lower budget stuff I tended to work on. The script would be packed with subplots and B-stories and side threads that… didn’t really serve a purpose. If I was in an angrier state that day (and I’ll be honest, I was angry and frustrated a lot when I worked in the film industry) I tended to call it “padding” or “a waste of time.”

Probably the key thing is that more often than not, the final product was uneven. Episodes would have pacing or tone issues. Sometimes they’d just be confusing because the camera was bouncing around for no apparent reason.

And the thing is, a lot of these shots and subplots and random chunks of dialogue weren’t actually bad. It’s just that they weren’t really relevant to what we were doing. I’ve heard a phrase in gardening that a weed is just the right plant in the wrong place. Well in these examples… it was all weeds.

Okay, what’s my point here? Besides making myself grumbly by remembering certain persons and projects and issues…

Allow me to explain. With a sort of follow-up to the explainer, too.

What’s happening here is the storytellers are getting in their own way. F’r example, with the directors, they’re so hung up on telling the story in a clever way (the overly complex shots) that they’re not focused on actually telling the story. Or, in some cases, they’re actually twisting the story to allow for the clever shot.

With the screenwriters, they’d be packing so many subplots or random conversations into a forty-two minute television episode that none of them really got developed in any way. We’d start dealing with one and then have to rush off to deal with another one before people forgot about it. Or the ideas would collide head on, which led to analyzing the story instead of… y’know, enjoying it.

I’ve talked about this problem before—where a plot or story is just overpacked with ideas. And when this happens, the plot will overwhelm the story or the story will smother the plot or sometimes they’ll just collapse into this mess of well… random plot and story points.

This is a tough idea to grasp when you’re starting out, because it just feels wrong and counterintuitive to everything we’ve been led to believe. If the idea’s good, how can it be wrong for a story? I mean, an idea’s good or it’s not, right?

Truth is, I can have a really, really cool idea and sometimes it just doesn’t work in the tale I’m telling. Maybe it doesn’t fit tonally or maybe it slows things down too much or maybe… it just doesn’t fit. If something’s not driving the plot or the story, if it’s pulling us too far off course, or if it’s just filling space I could use for something else… it probably doesn’t belong there.

I’m a big believer in simplicity for, well, a simple reason. And it’s that we’re always going to complicate things. It’s what we do as storytellers. No matter how basic and straightforward a plot is, we’re always going to come up with interesting details and descriptions and clever subplots and little character quirks. And then all that new material inspires some new descriptions and different subplots and suddenly hey, did you know the barista over there was actually Abraham Lincoln in a past life? No, really, she was. It’s a reverse-Zeno’s paradox, where we’re always getting further and further from the end because we’re always discovering new things to flesh out our world and our characters.

Now, granted, yes, some of this is going to get cut. Maybe a lot of it. So on one level it’s easy to say “so what if I decide to do something super complex?” And believe me, I’m a serious fan of wonderfully complex storytelling.

But I’ll point out that when I start complex, I’m not leaving myself a lot of room to explore and grow. If things are dense from the beginning, it’s going to be harder and harder to discover new character facets and justify clever descriptions or go off on little side-stories for a page or three.

Why is that?

Well, that’s my follow-up thing…

If you’ve been doing this for any amount of time, you’ve probably heard someone say something along the lines of “the story is as long as it needs to be.” And to a large extent, this is true. I can make the story whatever it needs to be. Any length at all. Fifty pages long to five hundred pages long. If I need six books to tell this story correctly, then I need six books. That’s how art works.

But…

The rough reality is that there are a lot of limits on how long a story can be.

Let’s put a few feet between us and books for a minute and think about movies again. I think we all agree full-length movies are generally in the ninety minutes to two hours range. It’s just how it is. When a movie’s only seventy-plus minutes… we feel a bit cheated. It can be really good, but we almost always feel like “That’s it? Only seventy-one minutes?” Likewise, when a film stretches out over two and a half hours, it usually feels pretty excessive. There are a few really great three-hour movies out there, but there’s also a lot of really bloated, desperately-in-need-of-editing ones. So no matter how good it is, if my script isn’t in the 90-130 page range… well, I might get some folks to look at it, but not many professionals are going to consider it seriously. It’ll just be one of those “great but unfilmable” screenplays.

And there are lots of reasons for this. How long a movie is will affect how long it takes to make the movie, which will affect how much it costs to make the movie. Plus, longer movies can’t be screened as many times at a theater, which means money’s going to be slower coming back in. And let’s be honest—how many of us have time to watch a really long movie? No matter how good I hear it is, if I see something’s three hours and twenty minutes long… I’m going to be hesitant to sit down. Hell, I friggin’ loved Avengers: Endgame, but I still haven’t even rewatched it at home. I just don’t have the time.

And if I’m talking about publishing… well, there’s a lot of publishing limits. Paper costs money. And shelf space in book stores is precious. Most publishers don’t want to see a massive, beef-slab of a book unless they know they’re going to sell a lot of copies of it. Even if we’re talking about short stories, most markets only have so much room in their magazine or anthology. If someone’s asking me for three-to-six thousand words, I can’t offer them nine thousand and expect to get an acceptance letter.

Now, I’m sure all that makes a few folks eager to talk about the wonderful freedom of self-publishing. But as I’ve mentioned before, self-publishing means I’m the one making the publisher-level financial decisions. A lot of print on demand sources work off page length to calculate costs, and they’ve got very firm price ranges. Just a few pages this way or that can mean a difference of three or four dollars per copy. And somebody’s got to eat that cost. And it’s not going to be the printer. So it’s either me or my readers.

Some of you may recall this is why I had to cut almost 30,000 words out of my original manuscript for 14. It was with a small press, and the publisher just couldn’t afford to have it stretch into the next page-range. That’s all there was to it. Lose 30K words or it doesn’t get published.

Heck, even if I give up on print and just go with epublishing, check the numbers. Shorter books do better as ebooks, especially from self publishers. The vast number of folks who’ve had any degree of success with ebooks are doing it with books under 100,000 words. I think many of them are under 70,000. The “why” of this is a whole ‘nother discussion we could debate for a while, but for now we just need the simple numbers. Ebooks tend to do better as shorter books.

Y’see, Timmy, storytellers have limited space. Those pages are precious. My words are precious. I don’t want to waste them on irrelevant things. I want them to be moving things along for the plot and for my characters. I want the ideas to work for my story, not to be flexing and contorting my story to accommodate some random ideas.

There’s another phrase you’ve probably heard—kill your darlings. This is kinda like that. I may have the sharpest comeback, the neatest way to explain something, or the most fantastic description of a werewolf, but if it doesn’t work in my story…

Well, then it doesn’t work.

And if it doesn’t work, it probably shouldn’t be there.

Next time, unless someone has a question or request, I’m probably going to talk about leftovers.

Until then… go write.

Okay, I want to bounce one of those “seems obvious in retrospect” things off you. Some of you may already understand this. For others this may be a bit of an “Ohhhh…” moment.

I’ve talked here a few times about drafts and different ways to approach them. One thing I tend to do in my first drafts—and maybe you do, too—is to skip over things. Maybe it’s a story beat I haven’t quite figured out or a plot point that needs some more research. I freely admit, every now and then it’s just that I know the next bit is going to be really fun to write so maybe I’ll just skip ahead a little bit. It’s 100% okay to write this way. It’s a first draft. Nobody’s going to see it.

But at some point I need to go back and fill in those blank spots. For me, it’s usually what I call my second draft. It’s my cleaning-up to make a complete manuscript pass. Some basic edits and tweaks. Weird notes to myself get answered (“WOULD this work like that???”). All the gaps get filled in.

There’s also another point stuff like this gets added in, and that’s during/after edits. I realize this chapter needs a little more description. This fight needs a few more beats. This conversation should be a lot longer. Hell, maybe I need a whole new chapter. All of this would honestly work so much better with a big flashback right here. Or maybe an interlude to see how Phoebe’s doing with that ancient translation.

That’s what just happened with GJD, the book I just finished a second round of editing on. I cut four whole chapters out of the book—pretty much a whole day of story I realized was ultimately just slowing the whole thing down. But I also realized there was stuff the story needed. So I wrote three all new chapters and worked them in.

Where am I going with this?

There’s a frequently-recurring joke in Hollywood– “we’ll fix it in post.” Sometimes used to lighten the mood, sometimes used… a little too seriously. The idea is that if we can’t make something work here on set, we’ll make it work in the editing room with a few careful cuts. Or maybe CGI. Or in reshoots. Or maybe… look, did we actually need that shot?

Now, the reason this is a joke is because most filmmakers (above and below the line) realize you can’t fix something that doesn’t exist. If I didn’t get the shot I needed on set, it’s not going to magically appear in the editing room. If I don’t have the shot, my options for fixing the shot are very limited.

And the same holds for writing. I can’t tweak and clean up a chapter if I haven’t written the chapter. I need to have it all there, on the page, for me to be able to work on it.

BUT… here’s the catch.

When I go back through during that second pass or maybe even later in the process, I need to be aware that I may be editing everything else, but I’m creating this. In the middle of my second or third draft chapter is this first draft page. Or maybe a whole first draft chapter in my fifth draft manuscript (like I was just dealing with). I can tell myself I just finished the fourth pass, but really some of this is first-pass material.

Y’see, Timmy, if I wait until the very last minute before scribbling out that transition or that action scene or explaining exactly how Phoebe figured out that ancient translation… there’s a chance these bits aren’t going to get all the attention everything else did.

And I want to be sure they still get the same amount of love and polish the rest of the manuscript did.

Like I said, might be obvious to some folks. Might be a lightbulb moment for others.

Next time, I’d like to talk about some of that stuff you were going to throw out

Okay, one last start-of-the-year post. I promise. I won’t ask you to think about anything else writing-related.

Well, not until next week. But that’ll be different stuff.

Last week I talked about process and diminishing returns. That maybe the way I’m doing things right now—no matter how long I’ve been doing them—might not be the best way for me to do things. Maybe just for this project, maybe… overall. Sometimes we just need to look at what we’re doing and how we’re doing it and figure out if there’s room for improvement.

The catch here, of course, if I have to be willing to improve. I have to acknowledge there’s a problem that needs to be fixed. Or at least a rough spot that could use some sanding or lubrication or something.

And like I mentioned before, that can be tough. Nobody wants to admit they’ve been doing things wrong or that they’ve possibly wasted a lot of time beating their head against a wall when the door was right over there. I mean, it even had a bright red exit light over it.

So look… here’s four things I should be willing to graciously acknowledge about my writing.

1) My first attempts at writing aren’t going to be good
When we first start writing, it’s tough to admit something we wrote isn’t good. We put in the time and the effort (okay, maybe we only put in one of those) and ended up with a solid three pages that were… mediocre, maybe. Possibly just bad.

But this isn’t anything to be bothered by or ashamed of. It’s normal. You didn’t expect to make a perfect three-layer cake the first time you tried. Didn’t think the first time you started jogging it’d be as effortless as some runners make it look. Why would writing be any different?

None of us like to be the clumsy rookie, but the fact is it’s where everyone starts. Especially in the arts. People love to tell stories about those gifted prodigies who won awards and prizes with their first attempt at something, but the truth is most of them are just that—stories. It’ s folks cherry picking (or ignoring) the facts to create a narrative that helps them push an idea. Sure, there’s a few actual gifted amateurs out there—very, very few—but the vast majority of us have to work at something to get good at it.

You noticed I said “us,” right? Lots of folks think of Ex-Heroes is my first attempt at a novel, but it wasn’t. There was the very clumsy early work Lizard Men from the Center of the Earth, a super-derivative sci-fi novel called A Piece of Eternity, a puberty-fueled fantasy novel (embarrassing on a number of levels), some Star Wars and Doctor Who fanfic, The Werewolf Detective of Newbury Street, The Trinity, The Suffering Map, about half of a novel called Mouth… and then Ex-Heroes.

And I can tell you without question that most of those sucked. In many different ways. It doesn’t mean I didn’t try to sell some of them (we’ll get to that in a minute), but I couldn’t improve as a writer until I accepted that I needed improvement.

2) My first draft isn’t going to be good
There was a point where I ‘d fret over my writing. I’d worry about individual words, each sentence, every paragraph. I’d get halfway down the page and then go back to try to rewrite the first paragraph. And then I’d get to the bottom of the page and rewrite it again. My productivity was slowed to a crawl because I kept worrying about what had happened in my story instead of what was going to happen.

It was a very freeing moment for me when I realized my first draft was pretty much always going to suck. And that’s okay. Everybody’s first draft sucks. We all have to go back and rework stuff, no matter how long we’ve been doing this. Everyone. I’ve seen some folks argue that they don’t technically do drafts, per se, but if you look close even they admit they rewrite a lot.

Once I could admit that and shrug off all those worries about word choice and sentence structure and dialogue and everything else… well, it became a lot easier for me to finish a first draft. Which meant I could do a second draft and a third draft. And then maybe even sell something.

3) My writing’s going to need editing
Okay, this seems like an obvious second half of the last admission, doesn’t it? If my first draft is bad, clearly it’s going to need some editing. Thing is, there’s a lot of folks who hear “it’s bad” and immediately move on to the next thing (I’ve got a whole school of thought about why this is, but that’s a different topic). Because my writing is perfect, so you saying it’s bad must mean there’s some inherent flaw in the plot or the characters that would mean rewriting the whole thing and who has time for that?

Look, we miss a lot of stuff on a first draft. On reflection, that character may be a bit of a stereotype. That dialogue could be a little sharper. I use that one turn of phrase a lot. I mean, seriously, it’s in every chapter.

And holy crap. Chapter nine? What was I even thinking? That’s just gone. Deleting the whole thing. Best if nobody ever sees that. It seemed like I needed it at the time but now that we’re doing this whole “admitting” thing… yeah, it should go. Doesn’t matter that I spent three days writing it. Gone. Remember to fix all those chapter numbers now…

Truth is, the editing is where we actually start to get better. It doesn’t happen by going to seminars or reading how-to books, it happens by sitting down and working on the writing until it’s better. And sometimes, yeah, it takes time and effort and multiple tries to make things work. Worse yet, no matter how much we learn, we’ll always find new mistakes to make and new things we can mess up.

Ha ha ha, you say. Well, only for so long, right? Eventually I’ll hit the point where I’ve figured it all out and writing holds no more mysteries. I will solve writing, yes?

Ehhhh, not really.

One of our goals is to come up with something new. We’re going to try these characters in that setting, this plot with those characters, maybe even some types of characters I’ve never tried writing before. And all these new combinations mean new things to learn and new mistakes to make in my early attempts. Running some quick and kind of horrying numbers, I can safely say I’ve been trying to tell stories for over forty-five years now (which is really weird when you consider I’m definitely still in my late thirties) and I really wish I had this down to a science. But the truth is I just finished a major rewrite on a book that’d already gone through four drafts. Because… well, it needed the editing.

4) My writing’s going to be rejected
Look, not everything’s going to appeal to everyone. Doesn’t mean it’s bad, it’s just that people have different tastes. They have different moods. No matter how hard we try to be fair, we like and dislike things for random reasons. Maybe it was a good story but the main character has the same name as an ex things ended really poorly with. Maybe I’d just seen one too many journal-style stories that week. Heck, maybe I had mild food poisoning at the time.

Good stuff gets rejected sometimes. It’s just a fact of life. Heck, even with the list of publishing credits I’ve got now, I’ve had short stories rejected, book proposals, comic proposals, all sorts of stuff. Rejection got less painful once I realized it wasn’t some personal attack, just a person who didn’t connect with my story at that moment for some reason.

Also probably worth admitting the ugly truth. Sometimes we also get rejected because… well, our stuff’s just not that good. Two agents asked to see The Suffering Map and both sent me a polite “sorry, not for me” letter. And they were (in retrospect) 100% right to do so. It wasn’t a great book and it had a lot of problems.

Oh, and please don’t fall into the trap of thinking something’s automatically good because it got rejected. We’ve all seen the folks who see rejection as proof their book is too good for those agents and Big Five publishers. We’re being honest here and admitting the truth, remember?

Y’see Timmy, if I can admit some of these things to myself, it can only make me a better, stronger writer. These aren’t flaws I have to wear forever like a big red letter A. Really, if I look at the above statements and my gut reaction is “Well, yeah, but this doesn’t apply to me,” it’s probably a good sign I’m not admitting some thing to myself.

So as you step fully into this new year, take a good look at your writing, and be willing to acknowledge what’s there.

Next time, I may blather on about first drafts a little more. Or tabletop games. Or maybe something else, if anyone has requests.

Until then, go write.