Category: editing

Looks like no one’s been reading lately. That’s okay. I’m used to people not listening to me.

And now you’re probably all at Horror Realm.

Bastards.

Then again, maybe I just need to rant about better topics.

Speaking of which, we were going to discuss that ever-growing backside of yours. And when I say backside, what I really mean is backstory. They’re pretty much interchangeable, because nobody wants to look at your backstory unless it is just perfect.

A few months back there was a response here from loyal follower #11 (who has since moved on to read Craig Mazin’s very informative blog, The Artful Writer) that rather than getting tighter, he often found his manuscripts growing as he did draft after draft. The characters became more nuanced, the story filled out, and the page count went up. I’ve had this happen, too. I think it was the second or third draft of The Suffering Map that introduced Theresa, the cleaning woman who overheard many things that took place at the Memory Lane antique shop. And I’ve also mentioned police detective Barroll and his partner, Lt. Cheryl Vacha.

Y’see, Timmy, a lot of stories get bulked up on backstory, because people keep introducing stuff in draft four, eight, or fifteen and assume this is essential material simply because it’s in a later draft. After all, I said a while back that by your sixth draft you should be more or less solid, yes? So by my own words, anything in the sixth draft must be essential, right?

Wrong.

What I eventually came to realize was that these weren’t later drafts of The Suffering Map. This was still me working on the first draft. I hadn’t figured out who these people were, what their motivation was, or why they all looked at each other nervously at a mention of Uncle Louis. What I thought was refinement and polish was still just me getting the raw materials together. The serious cutting hadn’t even begun yet.

The real problem with backstory is that it means moving back, and you want your story to go forward. Every page of character history means two pages you have to write to get the story to a new point. God help you if you decide to start with ten or twenty pages of backstory, because that means you’re in the hole on page one.

Not to mention the fact that so much backstory is completely unnecessary. At least four or five of you keep reading this collection of rants even though you have no idea what my brother’s name is, the name of the first girl I kissed, or what the first story I wrote was about. Does it keep any of you from absorbing or mocking what I say here? Not at all. It’s unnecessary.

It all comes down to what the reader needs to know. I gave the example once that no one talks about Masada at any point during Raiders of the Lost Ark because that film has nothing to do with Masada. In a similar vein, we don’t need to know how Ferris Bueller got his two-tone leather jacket, what Atticus Finch’s mother was like, where Hannibal Lecter studied for his doctorate, or which mission the Colonial Marines were on before the events of Aliens.

Keep in mind, I’m not saying that these aren’t interesting stories. In the hands of skilled writers, many of them would probably be very entertaining. The key thing here is all these stories were in the hands of skilled writers, and those writers chose not to include any of this. I was reading a film review a few weeks back and the critic, Nathan Rabin, made the very keen observation that stories like Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings saga succeed despite their elaborate, epic backstories– not because of them. Backstory can be an amazing, powerful thing if it’s used at the right time and in the right quantities.

If it helps, think of being a writer like being a bodybuilder. One of the skills of being a competitive bodybuilder is to develop all of your muscle groups equally. You can’t ignore your shoulders while you do constant abdominal work, and your legs will suffer if you focus too much on your arms. More to the point, we’ve all seen the people with the unusual physiques who do these unbalanced workouts. The folks whose arms hang away from their bodies or whose shoulders always hunch forward. The ones with no neck. These people developed one muscle group so much it overpowers others and distorts the overall image. They’re phenomenal muscles, don’t get me wrong , and they could probably crush my flimsy writer hands with… well, whatever part of their anatomy you picture we’re talking about… but they fail as bodybuilders because they’ve developed things in the wrong proportion.

If Mr. Berenson the grade school teacher suddenly displays an amazing aptitude for wiping out ninjas and hijackers with nothing but a stapler and his bare hands, it might be worth mentioning he spent seven years in the Special Forces and how he ended up teaching kids the right way to use an apostrophe. However, if the PTA meeting got snowed in and they’re just sitting around waiting for a plow, telling that same story is now just a bit of excess padding.

There is a flipside to this, of course. To stick with the bodybuilder analogy, it’s when the writer doesn’t put in anything and the characters are left looking like anorexics. The readers are left wondering who all these characters are, why this action is happening, and why everyone speaks cryptically about “The Omega.”

Your characters need a backstory, believe me. It has to be there, and you as the writer should know it backward and forward. But that doesn’t mean you need to tell all of that backstory and nuance to the reader. A lot of it’s going to be irrelevant. Some of it you’re going to want to keep shrouded in mystery.

And, yes, some of it you’re going to need to tell.

Next time, it struck me that I’ve been ranting for ages about stuff that goes into stories, but I’ve never really said anything about the stories themselves. So let’s hope the deadline gods are kind to me so I can pontificate about that for a bit.

Until then, go write.

Again, if you don’t get the title reference—expand your horizons.

So, a phrase you may have heard echoing about now and then is “killing your babies.” It’s just as gruesome as it sounds. Honest. I just heard it from a friend of mine a few weeks ago as he gutted the opening of a script he’s been working on for almost a year. One fellow brought it up when I interviewed him last week about his new film.

Many folk have heard the phrase, but how many understand it?

In every piece of writing, there’s at least one thing the author is extremely proud of. A clever line of dialogue, a character nuance, a dramatic moment or reveal that just could not be any better. We’ve all had them. A place where the language and the creativity and the skill all hit that perfect point where it’s hard to believe we created something this good. I usually fret over them for hours, convinced I must’ve read it somewhere else before and unintentionally copied it. After all, there’s no way I could’ve written something that good…

Perhaps it’s not even necessarily high art, just something the writer’s very fond of. Maybe it’s a clever reference you know a handful of friends will get. A loving tribute to someone special. A sly wink at some other book or movie. Heck, it could even just be something silly and pointless the writer got obsessive about. As a not-so-wise man once said, “the alien love-child stays in no matter what!”

The problem is, while these bits often are very well-done within their own limits, they don’t always work in the larger scope of things. As a writer, your loyalty has to be to the big picture. Not to individual scenes, but to the story as a whole. We’ve all heard awful cases where firefighters have to cut off someone’s leg to save them from a burning wreck. History tells of us brave generals who lost battles so they could win the war.

Y’see, Timmy, what it comes down to is… writers need to make sacrifices sometimes. And the gods of storytelling are ancient, dark gods. So when they call for a sacrifice, they don’t want to see a small tithe or minor inconvenience. They want something big.

They want something you love.

A story…

Submitted for your approval is San Diego Police Officer Andrew Barroll. He was one of the supporting characters in my oft-exampled first attempt at a novel The Suffering Map (now on sale absolutely nowhere). He first appears in a flashback one character has as a uniform officer she met almost a year ago. Halfway through the book he reappears, now a detective assigned to investigate the series of horrifically mutilated corpses that are being discovered around San Diego because of… well, let’s just say it’s part of the story and leave it at that. For the second half of the book, five different plot threads are getting wound tighter and tighter, and Barroll and his partner get closer to discovering who’s committing the brutal murders. He was the good cop. The solid, dedicated, everyman character. The kind of character where you knew he’d just have to get a bigger part to play in a later book.

Alas, the first draft of The Suffering Map was just over 150,000 words. Somewhat huge for a first novel from an unknown, completely uncredited writer. The second draft was even longer. It wasn’t until the third draft that I began to snip those words I thought might be excessive, and it wasn’t until the 4th draft that those cuts were noticeable.

In the fifth draft, a little over 90% of Barroll’s thread of the story vanished.

I remember feeling a dreadful churning in my stomach as I was highlighting and deleting entire chapters out of my first completed novel. A great end-of-the-chapter button vanished. Two carefully thought-out characters ceased to exist altogether. If you worked it out time-wise, probably about eight weeks of writing was deleted over the course of half an hour. Freddy Krueger aspires to be the slasher I was that afternoon. It took a few days of work to patch up the loose ends after the slaughter.

That’s what “killing your babies” means. It means doing things you hate to do. It’s when you’re willing to take huge swaths of your writing, hours and hours of work, and send them to the bin for a tighter, stronger story. You do what needs to be done, even if it means trashing your absolute, favorite part.

Alas, some folks just can’t bring themselves to make these big sacrifices. They can’t bear the thought of omitting the character they based off their high school sweetheart, refuse to admit the story doesn’t need that brilliant monologue on capitalism, and can’t figure out why the beautiful seven page description of a forest brings their story toa crashing halt. Which is a shame, because it’s the only way someone’s writing can get stronger. If you can’t look at your work objectively and see the difference between what needs to be in there and what you want to be in there, you don’t have any chance at improving.

In the end, detective Barroll appeared in one chapter of The Suffering Map. A morgue scene as the body is examined and a gruesome clue is revealed, more for the readers than for the investigators. That’s it.

And, while it pains me to this day, the story is much stronger for it.

Next time, I’d like to talk a little bit about basic concepts.

Until then… get back to writing.

One of the contests I was reading for recently is not anonymous. That means quite often I could see the screenwriter’s name on the script he or she had submitted. And the next script they submitted. And the one after that. And the one after that.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with multiple submissions, but what struck me was how many of these people were consistently just above average. Not enough so that they’d make the next cut, but enough that you could see a seed of actual talent. Alas, none of them bothered to focus or polish that talent—they just pounded out a screenplay and then moved on to their next idea.

On a similar note, I visit a few message boards run by different publishers. It’s not unusual to see people talking about their latest trilogy or the epic series of novels they’ve written over the past year. They haven’t even sold their first book, mind you, but they’re already working on the fourth or fifth sequel.

Now, logic and statistics would seem to tell you that multiple manuscripts means multiple chances to advance. Which would be true if getting a screenplay or story selected was just random chance. Granted, with some of the stuff in theaters and on shelves these days, it’s understandable that people would think random chance was a major factor…

The reality is, out of more than a dozen screenwriters I saw who submitted more than one script to the above-mentioned contest, only one went forward to the next round. And did so with both of his scripts.

One writer out of fourteen (to make it simple) is a little over 7%.

Those are not great odds.

There’s a publishing fact I mentioned a while back, and I personally think it holds with screenwriting as well. Only one out of 100 people who call themselves writers ever finish something. Yep, out of all those folks who are working on a novel or beating out a screenplay on the weekends, only 1% of them will actually produce a completed manuscript.

So if you’ve got the enthusiasm and ability to write over 2000 pages of anything a year, you have a better-than-average shot at making it as a writer. Probably not a Stephen King/ William Goldman/ David Koepp level writer (there’s only room for so many of them), but there’s a definite chance of you being published or produced.

So, here’s a suggestion. Next time you’re thinking of multiple submissions to a magazine, a screenplay contest, or an anthology, stop and count them up. For every additional submission you plan on making, put your favorite manuscript through another draft. Don’t just run it through the spellchecker and call it a draft. Take your time and do it right. Then submit it, move on to the next one, and repeat.

For example, if you were planning to submit four screenplays to a contest (not as unusual as you’d think) take the main one and take it through three more drafts. Look at some of the random hints and tips I’ve posted here over the past few months. Go through your manuscript and tighten up dialogue. Then get some feedback, go through it again, and cut a bunch of those excess words. Maybe triple-check all your spelling line by line or polish your characters on the third time through.

Once you’ve done all that, submit it. Then look at the second script. Well, there are still two more past that, so this one has to go through two more drafts. Tighten. Polish. Feedback. Cut. Check. Submit. Repeat.

Now, I can already hear the low rumble of complaint. How’s the writer supposed to get all this done in time for the contest? Script number four’s never going to make it in time. Heck, there’s a chance script number two won’t even be done in time. Following this advice means most of the other scripts won’t make it into the contest.

That’s right. They probably won’t.

The point here is to focus your efforts. You don’t want to submit a double- handful of rough drafts. Quantity is not the key here, quality is. You want to put out a single, polished, meticulousy-revised manuscript that you know beyond a shadow of a doubt cannot be improved. If you had the time to submit four mediocre, second-draft scripts, what you’re really saying is you have time to submit one phenomenal one.

So go write. Write a lot. Just try to focus some of that writing.

A common mistake I see from a lot of people is length. It does matter, but not in the way you’re probably thinking right now (pervert). People produce things that are just too big, be it novels, screenplays, even short stories and short films. This can be especially deadly in genre fiction, where publishers and producers have a lot of expectations—and limitations—about what they want.

For publishers, word count translates to page count which translates to the size and cost of your novel. Size tells them how many copies of it will fit in their limited shelf-space at Borders (and how many other things they can’t put there). Cost tells them how many they can hope to sell, as folks tend not to choose a $9.99 paperback when they’re just looking for something new to read. Series books (like mysteries or epic fantasy) tend to be smaller, too, to encourage readers to buy more of the series.

For film producers, a long script means a long production time, which means keeping cast and crew on payroll longer. It also means more raw expenses. One second of 35mm film costs about two dollars. A longer film means the thousands of prints that go out to theaters will each cost more to make, and it also means theaters don’t have time for more screenings. One huge weakness of Peter Jackson’s King Kong in theaters was while Kong ran once most other films had two shows—they were pulling in ticket money twice as fast.

As always, I’m sure there’s a bunch of folks reading this and saying “Oh, but what about…” Yes, there are always exceptions to these rules. Stephen King’s The Stand or Desperation easily go far beyond what would be expected for genre horror novels. J.K. Rowling wasn’t mincing words on those Harry Potter books either. I think we can all agree, however, that the Man from Maine and the boy sorcerer have shown a certain degree of strength in the marketplace. Publishers are probably not gambling too much by taking on their latest double-sized novel.

When any of us are selling like King, break out that 150,000 word mystery.

Speaking of the King, in his excellent book On Writing he states a simple rule for revisions. If you’ve read this page more than thrice and you don’t own that book, stop now and go to your friendly neighborhood Borders or Barnes & Noble. No, seriously, go right now. The internet will be here when you get back. Heck, take your laptop and mooch free wireless up in the cafe. It’ll make up for the price of the coffee.

Anyway… that rule…

Second Draft = First Draft – 10%

Couldn’t be simpler, right? If you scribble out a 5000 word short story, trim 500 words before you show it to anyone. Your 120 page screenplay could probably get cut down to 108 pages without too much trouble. And that 100,000 word novel? Odds are there are 10,000 words you could lose.

While this sounds ruthless, brutal, and perhaps even a bit arbitrary, there’s solid experience behind it which is worth at least considering for a moment. Since seventh grade you’ve had composition teachers telling you to remove unnecessary words. There’s a reason tight writing lasts and purple prose—no matter how popular it is at the time– gets forgotten.

So, a few easy ways to cut some of the fat from your writing…

Adverbs— These are the most common sin (not original at all). As most of us get caught up in the flow of words, the impetus of a scene, and the thing that slides by most often is the all-but-useless adverb. For example…

–She ran quickly.

–He excitedly tore open the package, and happily said “This is the best Christmas ever!”

–They shouted loudly.

—“Maybe I saw something, maybe I didn’t,” Slim said coyly.

Of course she ran quickly! Have you ever heard someone shout quietly? Three out of five times if you’re using an adverb, you don’t need it. The fourth time odds are you’re using the wrong verb, and once you find the right one, again, you won’t need the adverb. And that fifth time… well, maybe it’s only one in six. If you’re using your vocabulary well, there aren’t many times you need an adverb. For screenwriters, adverbs are the parentheticals of prose (which means you should be stomping out parentheticals, too).

Adjectives—These are the deadly ones, as people create compound adjectives from hell to describe things that tend to be pretty mundane when you think about it. We all do it now and then, however, because we’re convinced this person, this place, this thing needs more description.

–He had sky-like cloudy dark blue eyes.

–She wore polished glossy black designer boots.

—The tall, majestic, awe-inspiring cliffs of weatherworn, charcoal-gray stone loomed over them.

There’s an odd habit I’ve seen among fledgling fantasy writers to use dozens of adjectives per page, if not per sentence. It’s part of that purple prose I mentioned above. Writer/ Editor/ Publisher Pat LoBrutto tossed out a great rule of thumb last time I heard him speak—”One adverb per page, four adjectives per page.” It’s only a rough guideline, of course, but if you’re averaging six or seven adjectives in each paragraph maybe you should give them all a second look…

That—This is a new rule someone introduced me to just a few weeks back, but I’ve already fallen hard for it. That is a word people tend to drop into their writing a lot, and a good four out of five times their writing would be tighter without it.

—He believed that once the button was pressed, the world would be saved.

–She ran off in the same direction that John had.

–George knew that once Jane saw the puppy that she would want to take it home.

Just use the Find feature in Word (it’s up there under Edit). Search for uses of that and see how many of them are necessary. Odds are you’ll find at least half of them aren’t.

Appeared to… – This is one of those phrases people see used, latch onto, and use all the time—without understanding it. It tends to be used as an introduction of sorts, leading the reader into some purple-prose description. This phrase sometimes disguises itself as looked like or seemed to be or some variation thereof.

The thing is appeared to… doesn’t get used alone. It’s part of a literary construction where the second half of that structure is either an implied or actual contradiction. So when you’re saying…

–She appeared to stand just shy of six feet tall.

–His eyes seemed to be burning embers in his skull.

What you’re actually saying is…

–She appeared to stand just shy of six feet tall, but she was actually closer to five foot five without her monstrous boots.

–His eyes seemed to be burning embers in his skull, but really they were just catching the light.

And what you mean to be saying is just…

—She stood just shy of six feet tall.

–His eyes were burning embers in his skull.

Note that clever metaphor you just used in the second example. Nobody is going to think this poor guy has actual glowing coals in his eye sockets. They’ll understand the visual image, honest.

Long Names – The King himself offhandedly suggests this rule in the above-mentioned On Writing. If you’ve got a lot of characters named Vandervecken, MacMortimerstein, or Bannakaffalatta, they’re going to take up a lot of space as their names get used again and again. Not only that, several of them will die as other characters rush to blurt out “Dear God, Doctor MacMortimerstein, look out for that… ahhhhh, too late!”

Try using simple names like Vander, Mort, or Ban, which are easier for readers to keep track of as well. True, this will not lessen your word count, but it can shorten your page count, which is the next best thing. Of course, if there’s a solid reason for alien cyborg billionaire midget Bannakaffalatta to be called Bannakaffalatta and not Ban, stick with it. But if it’s just a background character you’re using for two chapters or three scenes…

Somewhat Syndrome — This one’s the albatross I bear, and one of my friends points it out to me all the time. Symptoms include littering your writing with somewhat.., a bit…, slightly…, and other such modifiers. Nine times out of ten they’re not doing anything except adding to your word count and slowing your story. Use the Find feature again, see how many of them are necessary, and look how much tighter and stronger your writing is without them.

So, grab your manuscript and snip, slice, and cut a few dozen words. See if you can make those sentences leaner and meaner. Suggest some of your own easy ways to trim if you’ve got them.

Then come back next week and I’ll rip apart your characters.