Category: editing

I’m a bit under the gun right now, so I don’t have time to rant on and on like I normally do. But I wanted to toss out something for this week.

The late Michael Crichton has a book called Travels which is more or less an autobiography of his early life. How he entered (and eventually left) medical school, selling his first few novels, and getting involved in the great, grinding machine of Hollywood. It’s a bit dry at points, but there’s some pretty interesting stuff in there. Including a fun story about how he once almost killed Sean Connery with a speeding train. Also how he and his girlfriend were molested by an elephant while camping in Africa.

If those last two sentences don’t make you want to buy that book, you have no real business being here.

For our purposes today, though, the important thing is a piece of writing advice young Michael got from his dad. If you want to know the full story behind it, again, grab the book. I’ll give you the short form.

Be very careful when you use the word obvious or its adverbial kissing cousin, obviously. It’s one of those words that should always get a second look in fiction, nonfiction, email, random message board posts, and so on.

If something isn’t obvious, it sounds arrogant to say it is. Think of all those times you’ve asked someone a question and they’ve answered you with “Isn’t it obvious?” If it was obvious we wouldn’t’ve asked the question (actual or implied). What the speaker or narrator is saying is, effectively, “I know I’m way smarter than you idiots and want to gloat about it.” So, if this is the situation, don’t use the word obvious, because the character or narrator in question is going to look like a jerk.

Unless, of course, the character saying so is supposed to be a jerk.

On the flipside, if something really is obvious, then you still don’t need the word. Things that are obvious are… well, obvious. The sky is blue. Sugar is sweet. Ninjas are cool. Expensive things cost money. Oxford is a good school. Nazis are bad. Colonel Hans Landa is very bad. Car crashes hurt, especially if you’re outside the car. All these things are, in fact, obvious to everyone, so it’s just wasted words for a writer to tell us so.

Try it. Use the “Find” feature to look for obvious or obviously in your latest manuscript and see how often you really need it.

Except for that one guy from Pod Six. He needs it. He’s a jerk.

Next time, by request and also by a series of conversations, let’s have a little talk about God and other gods.

Until then, go write.

First off, my apologies for running late. Lots of work on the new book.

Second off, a bit of shameful self-promotion. If you haven’t picked up my “debut novel” Ex-Heroes, the publisher’s put the ebook version on a fantastic sale right now. $2.99 for the next week (starting today). Kindle, Nook, Kobo, whatever. If you haven’t grabbed it, now’s a great chance. If you’ve been pushing a friend to get it, tell them about it now. Or just buy it for them. After all, the sequel’s out in about four weeks.

And now, with that ugly bit of capitalism out of the way…

If you’re a big fan of Doctor Who (like me), you know the sonic screwdriver is about the most useful tool ever invented. It opens and closes locks, takes readings, repairs barbed wire, gives phones universal roaming, acts as a TARDIS remote control, and hundreds of other things. Put simply, it’s the greatest all-in-one tool that has ever existed.

Alas, most of us just have to buy a whole tool box worth of stuff. Hammers. Wrenches. Pliers. Tape measures. And of course, screwdrivers. But it’s not enough to have all this stuff. You can only really work on something if those tools are handy.

For example…

Let’s say your significant other comes home from the market and says “Hey, the flux capacitor on the car isn’t fluxxing. You might want to check it out.”

So you go out to the car and see you need a screwdriver to open the housing on the flux capacitor. So you go back inside, dig your toolbox out of the cabinet under the sink, and get a screwdriver out. Then you go back out to the garage and discover you needed a Phillips head screwdriver, not a flathead. Head back in, grab a Phillips, back out to the garage.

You get the housing open on the flux capacitor and it looks like the problem’s really in the plutonium intake. So, you head back to the kitchen, grab a pair of pliers, and go back out to the garage. Alas, that feeder tube is on a little too tight so you’re really going to need a crescent wrench for this one. Walk to your apartment again, grab a crescent wrench, one more time to the garage and start to—dammit, that intake valve is just too big for a 5/8” wrench. You’re going to need the full 1” to take it off. Back inside to the kitchen…

I’m sure you can all see what’s going wrong here. It’s not that we’re trying to fix the plutonium intake when the problem’s clearly in the flux dispersal array. The problem is that we’re attacking this project piecemeal, trying to solve it a single element at a time, and in doing so things are dragging out far longer than they need to. Unless you’ve actually got a sonic screwdriver, you can’t grab one tool out of your toolbox and go see what the problem is. You also don’t go check the problem, walk back, and grab the next item you need at this particular stage.

No, you take the whole toolbox. You bring everything. Because it’s worth the little extra effort to have it all handy and there to work with if you need it. Yeah, you’re not going to use every single tool you brought out there, but the amount of time you save is worth that initial extra effort.

For the record, my friend Laura got me a sonic screwdriver for my birthday.

But that’s not important right now.

How many of you have figured out the point of this little scenario…?

A lot of people take forever when they write. Years and years. Sometimes it’s basic procrastination, yes, but sometimes it’s just that they’re trying to get every single element right before they put it down on paper (so to speak). They won’t write one word unless they know it’s the word they’re going to have in the final draft. So each sentence takes hours and each chapter can take weeks.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to get things right. That’s the whole point of feedback and editing and doing multiple drafts. Thing is, you can’t do a second draft until you have a first one. Which means the entire process is really at a dead halt until that first draft is done.

When I sat down with my new project, -14-, I spewed out pages and pages of stuff over three months, and soooooooo much of it got cut in later drafts. A lot of it got reworded and some of it got completely rewritten. But I was able to keep working because I had stuff to work with.

Y’see, Timmy, it’s always better to have something to work with than to have nothing to work with. Don’t be scared to put everything in your first draft. Bring it all. Don’t hold back because you think you might not need something or it might not work. Write bits you know you’re going to cut and characters you know are going to be trimmed out. Because you can’t edit or rewrite a paragraph that doesn’t exist.

Next week, unless I get a really cool request or suggestion, a little free verse love poem about the Oxford English Dictionary.

Until then, go write.

No, it’s not what it sounds like, or even pop culture. I’m just trying to boost the hit count a bit. Of course, some of you read this at work, so I probably just got half of you blocked.

So, two weeks back I mentioned an online conversation I had with a friend of mine. At least, the first half of it. I wanted to ramble on a bit now about the second half of that conversation and expand on some of the thoughts and ideas it sparked.

The topic is, what do you write?

There’s two ways to read that question. One could be reworded to that ever-popular, where do you get your ideas? I’m sure most of you reading this have heard a few of the punchier answers to that query. Some people want to sit down and write, but have no idea what to write about, while other people polish off a new screenplay over a long weekend.

There’s one very important thing any writer needs to understand if they want to be successful. Ideas are cheap. Ridiculously cheap. They’re a dime a dozen. I would guess on an average day I have at least ten ideas for books, short stories, screenplays, or television episodes. Last year one blogger (and for the life of me I can’t recall who) posted an idea on her page every day for the entire year, just to demonstrate how simple and cheap ideas are.

Now, from where I’m sitting, there are two issues beginning writers often hit when it comes to ideas, and they’re really two flipsides of the same problem.

Some folks lament that they never have good ideas. Yeah, they have a couple clever thoughts, but none of them are on that high level like Jurassic Park or American Gods or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The ideas these people come up with are… well, kind of pedestrian. They’re not worth writing about, so these folks don’t write. They hold off and wait for the good ideas to strike.

The second group has too many ideas. They’re barely done writing their fourth screenplay this month when they get an idea for a series of epic novels. And they’re only on the second one of those when they think up a hit television series (which, naturally, leads back to a movie franchise).

Both of these groups are suffering from the same misconception. They think anything that goes on the page has to be pure, award-winning gold. The difference is that the first group won’t put anything down because they know it isn’t gold, and the other folks are assuming it must be gold because they got it on the page. Make sense?

The catch, of course, is that most of the stuff that you put down isn’t going to be gold. It’s going to be rewritten and edited down and polished. Don’t think of story ideas as gold, think of them as diamonds. When a diamond first gets discovered, it’s a black, crusty, misshapen thing. Its got potential value, but not much past that. Diamonds need to be cut and recut, measured and examined, cut one more time, polished, and placed in a setting. Then they’re worth something.

The first group is tossing out all those black, coarse stones because none of them look like engagement rings. The second group is sticking the little lumps on gold bands and asking three months salary for them. Hopefully it’s easy to see why neither of these is the right approach.

So, once you’ve got an idea, it needs work. It’s not ready to go as is. Which brings us to the back half of this week’s rant.

The second way to read “what do you write?” is to ask which of these ideas do you pursue? If you have three or four solid ideas, which one do you start working on? How do you pick the idea you start with?

Well, first you need to keep in mind that one idea all on its own rarely translates to a story. “Some kids go to a haunted house,” is an idea, yes, but there’s not really a bestselling novel there. Likewise, you can’t do much if all you’ve got is “a girl who wants to build a time machine.” Just like cooking, you can’t make a story with only one ingredient. An egg on its own is an egg. An egg with cheese (and maybe a little turkey and a dash of pepper) is an omelette.

Once you understand this, then it just comes down to writing. How do the kids going to the haunted house and the girl who wants to build a time machine intersect and overlap? Is the girl one of the kids? Is the haunted house her secret lab? Is she going to rescue them? Is she hiding there after being made fun of and they’re coming to save her? Is anyone going to die in this house? Will anyone make it out? Is it just part of a plan cooked up by Mr. Haversham, the carnival owner?

Is that a hand in the back? Ahhh, yes. The question is, but what if the idea leads to a dead end? How do you know it’s a good idea until you actually sit down and write it? This one’s easy to answer.

You don’t.

Again, this kind of thinking goes back to that “it has to be gold” mentality. Sometimes you work your way through a hundred pages and discover there’s just nothing there. You wrote a chapter (or a bunch of chapters) that don’t work for one reason or another. Maybe more than one reason. Sure you could cheat a bit, tweak a few things, maybe toss out a deus ex machina or three, but in the end it doesn’t work because it doesn’t work. There’s no clever phrase or substituted word that’s going to change it.

I know a lot of people have trouble accepting this, even though it’s something we’ve all seen in other jobs. Chefs come up with recipes they never use. Architects design buildings that are never constructed. Hell, how much money does the auto industry spend on concept cars each year?

Consider this…

Once or thrice here I’ve mentioned a rule Stephen King talks about in his phenomenal book On Writing (there’s a link to it in that carousel at the bottom of the page). Said rule is–

Second Draft = First Draft – 10%

You remember that one, yes?

Well, if Mr. King follows his own rule–and we’ll assume he’s not a hypocrite–lets do a little math. The final version of Under The Dome is 1072 typeset pages. Even if we say there weren’t any other cuts in later drafts, that implies he cut just over 119 pages from his first draft. In standard manuscript format (Courier, double-spaced), that’s closer to 240 pages. Heck, that’s almost half of Ex-Patriots. It’s almost 2/3 of Ex-Heroes. Think about that. He typed up 240 pages of character and plot and description… and then tossed all that work.

Y’see, Timmy, almost every writer puts out a fair degree of material that’s never going to be seen by anyone. Again, don’t get paralyzed wondering if the next words on the page are going to be gold. Odds are they aren’t. But you will find some diamonds in the rough, and once you know how to spot them it’ll be an easier (and quicker) process to find them.

For now… take what you’ve got and work with that. There’s a good chance there’s a diamond or two in there somewhere. If you really put the work into it.

Next time, on a somewhat related note… well, contest season is lapping at my ankles. Which means more bad scripts to read. So we’ll talk about some of those.

Until then… go write.