Six Tips For Surviving Novel Writing

 Somewhat to my surprise, I seem to be writing a new novel.  Given my currently not-so-great circumstances, it's hard to say exactly what the point is, but somehow it seems like the most reasonable of a whole bunch of unreasonable options.  At any rate, that's inevitably got me thinking about the process, and the lessons I've learned over the course of doing this more than a dozen times already.  And since I haven't altogether given up on the pretence that this blog is about my writing, I thought sharing some of that might be worthwhile.

This won't be anything so presumptuous as telling anyone how they should go about writing a book, because there are a million ways of doing that and any number of them are right.  (Also, I'm pretty sure I already did that post way back when!)  The most I can offer is a few conclusions I've come to after having tried numerous approaches to a greater or lesser extent, and given how much nearer I am to the beginning than the end of the process - past the 60'000 word mark, but this promises to be substantially heftier than anything else I've done - there's a definite theme here, centred around how to keep moving as it starts to sink in just what an enormous task you've set yourself.  So, with that in mind...

Don't Rush In

Of everything here, I imagine this is the point most likely to be widely ignored, because many people absolutely swear by rushing in, and presumably it works for at least some of them.  And, look, I'm not saying you have to have a detailed plan, though personally I can no longer imagine how I'd go about writing a novel without one, any more than I'd think of waking up one day and thinking "Hmm, maybe I'll climb Everest today" and setting out in my pyjamas.  Still, not everyone's a planner, I get that, and planning isn't necessarily what I'm talking about.  I guess it's more to do with facing up to those points where whatever concept has you so fired up feels that bit too sketchy.  Maybe they'll have sorted themselves out by the time you get to them, but maybe they won't, and confronting them without the stress of weeks of work depending on the results can be a lot easier.  What I've found is that ultimately I tend to reach a point where I know I'm ready to go, and mostly it's a sense that I haven't left any towering brick walls for myself to dash headfirst into at the worst possible moments.

Don't Sacrifice Your Momentum

This one probably depends on whether you've followed the previous suggestion: if you've charged in without much of a plan, chances are that eventually you're going to run out of steam, and when that happens, your best bet may well be to step back for a week or two and figure out where you're heading.  Planning is always going to happen sometime, and if you'd rather do it in the middle than at the start, or in chunks along the way, then each to their own.  But let's assume for the moment that you do have a plan and that it's basically sturdy.  If that's the case, I've come to think the best approach in a first draft is to keep moving forward for as long as it's remotely feasible to do so, and hopefully right through to the end.  If your plot's absolutely crumbling in your fingers then, sure, stop and take a breather, but if your plot's merely wobbling a bit, that ought to be a problem for the next draft.  And while there's a definite appeal to heavily editing alongside your first draft, my conclusion is that it's better to keep that to a minimum.  This time through, I'm experimenting with starting the day by doing a quick polish of yesterday's work, and that's definitely proving positive, but more than that and I suspect I'd just be trashing my confidence and risking skidding to a halt.

Don't Bore Yourself

This is more of a general point, and applies to all writing, no matter the length, but it's also one of the most important conclusions I've reached over the years, so let's include it.  If there's a type of scene you don't like writing, there's a fair chance you won't write it well; if you find action a slog, or dialogue is something you want to hammer through to reach the good stuff, odds are that a reader's bound to notice that lack of engagement.  And the best way to deal with this is to ask yourself what it would take for you to be excited by those sequences.  Would you get more out of writing that dialogue if it was faster and peppier, or maybe if there were more character beats mixed in?  What if you could shift the focus off the mechanical aspects of the action and onto the psychological effects, or vice versa?  If you're feeling disengaged, it's vital to figure out why and even make that work to your advantage, because the alternative is great swathes of novel that you'll return to and be mortified by how visibly the energy levels plummet.

Avoid Feast and Famine

It's awfully tempting to push your luck when you're on a roll.  Some days, the words won't stop coming, and why wouldn't you lean into that?  Well, there's one reason, and that's how easy it is for your reach to exceed your grasp.  I'm sure there are people whose wells never run dry, but for me, what I find is that a run of prolific days will inevitably result in a harsh crash.  Writing is an enormously subconscious-driven task, and your subconscious can only do so much advance work; I have a theory that getting too far ahead of it is a big part of what people refer to as writer's block, a condition I've mostly been fortunate enough to steer clear of.  But whichever way you look at it, novel writing is marathon running, and too many sprints will burn you out in no time.  Add to that how easy it is to make wild mistakes or churn out seriously unpolished prose if you're caught up in mad dashes and it generally makes more sense to keep to a steady pace.

Don't Freak Out

There's nothing quite like the unadulterated panic of getting deep into a major project only to realise you've got something enormously, irreparably wrong.  Or, I guess there is one thing like it, and that's when the same happens on a smaller, less horrifying scale: you're midway through a chapter and it hits you that this is where you ought to have started it, or that character you've spent three pages introducing is just taking up space and serving a purpose your existing cast were more than capable of covering.  If you're anything like me, your first reaction will be to try and fix the problem as quickly and painlessly as possible, and your second reaction, once it's sunk in that quick and painless aren't on the table, is to run around shrieking and then hide under the bed.  And I'm not saying that's a wrong response (okay, obviously it's a terrible response) but there are better options.  And most of them revolve around hanging onto your calm and, if possible, deferring the problem until you've had time to properly digest it.

Don't Ignore the Small Achievements

Writing a novel is a major thing.  It's easy to forget that, when there are so many trillions of books out there, but producing yet one more is still a herculean task.  And if you're planning to wait until the very end before you permit yourself a pat on the back, you're going to be waiting a long time.  Getting a chapter down is a big deal.  Getting ten thousand words in the bag is a big deal.  Heck, these days, making it out of bed and all the way to the computer without collapsing in a sludgy mound of despair is a big deal.  In one sense, novel writing is very much an all or nothing exercise, in that, unless you're both extremely famous and dead, nobody's ever going to be interested in your unfinished opus.  But in another sense, every step along the way counts toward the total, and you're fully justified in allowing yourself a dash of excitement, or even a small reward, at surviving another lap.

-oOo-

Okay, sure, that was more for my benefit than anyone else's.  But while this might be mostly about me reminding myself that I'm near the start of a long road and need to hold the line for a good while longer without letting those brain-goblins devour my frontal cortex, I hope there are one or two other people out there who might find something useful here!

Writing Ramble: Nothing's Ever Really Finished

 I've been thinking a lot recently about a topic I've often considered over the years, and that I may even have blogged about before now: how there's always room for improvement in writing, however far along your career is and however much you feel you've nailed down a particular piece of work.  Now, that's abundantly not to say you should never let anything go; not putting work out into the world because it's insufficiently perfect is one of the archetypal writer mistakes.  As a wise man once said, if you never get anything a bit wrong, you'll never get to subsequently feel like such a dumbass that you don't make that same mistake ever again.

No, what I'm talking about is more along the lines of returning to work after months or years and really bringing a fresh perspective.  And the reason that's been occupying my thoughts is that I've been spending a lot of my time editing up short fiction.  This began as an attempt to finally start subbing some pieces I've written in recent years and had to step away from to focus on novels - the first of those to see the light being Not Us, coming very soon in Nightmare! - but has since expanded to take in others I've been sending out without success for years and that I felt were too good to give up on.

One such is a story called Compassion Fatigue, which I've long regarded as among my best short work and been baffled and faintly annoyed as to why editors seemed to disagree.  And, look, I'm not going to turn around and say that everyone who turned it down was in the right, exactly - but returning to it certainly was an insight into how I've developed as a writer in the years since I last looked over it.  Yes, the story was good, and probably one of my best, but the execution let it down in ways both big and small.  The theme was obscured in places, where it was evident I'd left in first-draft material that ought to have been excised, attempts to wrong-foot the reader on a crucial plot point were wildly misconceived, and there was enormous repetition and overuse of certain words, something I've become extra sensitive to in recent months.

What was most striking, though, was the amount I cut.  Pro tip: shorter stories are more saleable, and 3000 to 5000 words is a definite sweet spot.  Compassion Fatigue was over 6000, and it didn't take me long to appreciate that there weren't 6000 words of narrative there.  I set out to get it down below the golden 5000 mark, but without much hope, because it was one of my better stories, wasn't it?  And surely I wouldn't have left over a thousand words flopping about when they could have been trimmed with a more judicious edit?  Well, not exactly; there was definitely some killing of darlings to be done to reclaim that lost ground.  And yet it absolutely did turn out to be possible, and more to the point, beneficial.  Some nice lines got sacrificed to the cause, if I do say so, but every one was slowing the pace or repeating points that had already been made or providing detail and texture that wasn't really necessary.  In the end, I broke my target with room to spare, and there was precisely one line I felt genuinely sad to see go, and that got cut simply because other cuts had stranded it between two paragraphs.  These things happen sometimes.

As a commercial exercise, I suspect this is a terrible waste of energy: I'd need a pro sale and then some to pay for all the hours I've poured in, and given that all the pro markets have turned it down, the odds aren't favourable.  But then, with all my major projects handed in and nothing on the horizon - yes, that's as bad news as it sounds, but a topic for another day - I have a certain amount of time to waste, and also an opportunity to decide what matters to me if I can't turn things around in the coming weeks.  Short fiction was always my first love, and I feel less inclined than ever to give up on stories I know in my heart deserve to see some success.  So fingers crossed, right?  Maybe I'll find a good home for Compassion Fatigue one of these days, and if and when that happens, it'll be a damn sight better than it would have been if I hadn't put this extra work in.

Five Things Short Fiction Magazines Might Want to Reconsider

It's fair to say that I've sent off quite a few short fiction submissions in the fifteen years I've been doing so.  Indeed, it appears I've got through somewhere in the region of fourteen hundred of the things, if my trusty spreadsheet is to be believed!  And it's equally fair to say that, while most of those submissions have been at worst a fairly neutral experience, there are those that have been needlessly irritating in one way or another.  And after fifteen years, it gets hard not to notice that those irritations tend to be the same handful of unnecessary slips that market after market makes.  But nobody wants to be irritating, right?  Of course they don't.  So, eternal optimist that I am, I reckon the problem is that nobody's taken the time to put together a blog post flagging up all of these issues so that no-one need ever drop these particular balls again.  I mean, that's got to be it, right?

Pedantic Formatting Requirements

Ugh, formatting guidelines!  This is actually the whole reason for this post, but I figured, why rant about one annoyance when you can rant about a whole bunch?  Anyway, here's the thing: expecting every submitter to reformat their story to suit your specific needs is a heck of a waste of everybody's time.  Has anyone stopped to work out the total hours that go into hundreds of writers changing their work into fourteen point Comic Sans with four inch margins and asterisks instead of quote marks and every third word highlighted in purple just because a particular editor likes it that way?  I bet they haven't.  And is it really so difficult to read subs in standard manuscript format, or even in something that's pretty close to it?  Here's my suggestion: if you genuinely can't be bothered to spend an hour or so per issue reformatting whatever you ultimately accept, why not just specify in the guidelines that submissions will have to be revised once they're accepted?  That way, maybe five people a month are going through this, and with good reason, rather than five hundred people for no reason at all.

Burying Charges

Not really one for the genre markets, thank goodness, but this is a personal bugbear because I have one damn poem that I've been trying to shift for who knows how many years now.  (And yes, I realise it's probably just terrible!)  For those poor suckers over on the literary side of things, submission fees are a standard feature of life, presumably because everyone accepts that the only way literary magazines can support themselves is by gouging their submitters.  But if you're going to charge, have the decency to be upfront about it, don't hide the fact three pages deep into your submission process, presumably in the hope that people will be so excited over the possibility of being paid three dollars for their work that they won't object to paying two dollars and ninety-nine cents to submit in the first place.

Waffly Guidelines

Halfway through the list and it occurs to me that a lot of these points add up to the same thing, which amounts to respecting other people's time.  It's nice when editors are enthusiastic, but when that enthusiasm takes the form of a page-long essay about how a childhood water polo accident gave them the emotional fortitude to, twenty years later, found a magazine, and the crucial information needed to submit is hidden amid the third and fifth paragraphs, that enthusiasm crosses over into being kind of annoying.  In general, submitting authors want to know what a market's after, how they want it, how to submit it, and what's offered in return, and they want that information to be up front and unmissable.

Bafflingly Worded Rejection E-mails

A few days back I got a rejection e-mail that said "We're afraid we're unable to publish your submission" and my instinctive reaction was, Wait, why?  I could totally get that they might not want to publish it, but that they were unable to?  That was a mystery right there.  Had the magazine closed down, or was there some darker possibility?  Maybe their hands had fallen off?  Maybe their office was full of bees?  Ought I to be contacting the emergency services?

Bad rejection e-mails tend to veer in one of two directions, and obviously the flat-out offensive ones are objectively the worst, those that are quite happy to leave a writer with the impression that the problem's absolutely with them and their work.  But sometimes it's easier to dismiss rudeness than e-mails that feel like they're ducking responsibility for the whole sorry business.  Nobody's ever going to enjoy getting a rejection e-mail, but all it takes is to say is that the story didn't quite work for you; it's hard to be offended by the revelation that not every editor in the world likes every story.

Demanding You Buy an Issue

Here's a confession: I've never once bought a magazine to get a sense of what they publish, however many times I've been encouraged to do so.  And while I'm far from being the best-selling short fiction writer of all time, I've done okay.  Obviously it's not unreasonable for editors to push writers toward also being readers, so I'm not at all suggesting that a nudge in that direction is out of order, or that writers shouldn't help to keep the markets they value alive.  But there are always those that take things too far, who spout cryptic nonsense and end with a declaration that the only way to work out their profoundly idiosyncratic requirements is to see what they've picked in the past.  All else aside, this feels like a general red flag, because not being able to articulate what you're after is hardly an appealing quality in an editor, nor is only selecting work that's of a piece with what you've picked in the past.

There!  Hopefully I've fixed the short fiction scene for all time.  Or, more probably, alienated every short fiction editor on the planet.  Then again, most of the markets I submit to regularly don't do most of these things, a big percentage don't do any of them, and in general, my experiences with short fiction editors have been pretty good, so ... hopefully not?  And, you know, I get that these are minor niggles at most, but wouldn't it be a slightly better world if everyone quit doing them?  I think it would. 

Writing Ramble: On Writing What You Know

I've come to think most traditional writing advice is terrible.  This is one of the weirder lessons you learn as you go on: it's largely nonsense spread by liars.  Case in point, that most idiotic adage, which endless authors of countless tiresome, basically autobiographical novels have followed: "Write what you know."

Are you an astronaut?  A ninja?  A rogue brain surgeon who's a secret agent by night?  A super-intelligent orangutan pirate?  Or any combination of the above?  No?  Then don't write what you know.  Most people's lives are boring to other people, which is the precise reason most dinner parties are awful and we had to invent books in the first place.  Even interesting people don't spend the majority of their time doing interesting things interestingly.  The point of fiction is not that we can describe our adventures in doing the washing up and taking the kids to school and that time we got our head stuck in the railings and had to be rescued by the fire brigade.  One of the purposes of fiction is to transcend and so make a modicum of sense of the messy, tangled, nonsensical matter of human existence.

But that's not really my point.  My actual point is, "Write what you know" is dreadful advice, but it doesn't take a lot of tweaking to be make it excellent.  This also took me a while to figure out.  The correct advice, obviously, should be "Use what you know to make stuff up better."  Which is to say, tear your life up mercilessly, since it's your job as a writer is to use every available resource in the service of creating good fiction.  Go at your memories with the sharpest scissors you have, pluck them apart, squash them like plasticine, burn out the ones that don't work with a soldering iron.  Wait, no, maybe not that last bit.  But the rest definitely.

Yet again, it took me rather too long to work this out.  Looking back at some of my earliest work, there are definite absences and vagaries that could have done with a bit of an injection of personal experience.  But I think that's true of most writers, and at least I reckon I'm getting it down now.

Case in point #1: My story The Only Way Out Lies Farther In*, recently published to a surprising (for me anyway) degree of acclaim in top horror market The Dark.  An awful lot of personal experiences went into that one: the maze and country house setting that open it were drawn from a recent holiday, the overriding theme of believing a childhood rupture has left you adrift in a broken reality pulls on a nasty bit of trauma from after my parents' divorce, and there's plenty more in there as well.  But getting it to work as narrative, and a narrative I personally could tell without my brain exploding, meant mashing a lot of elements together from all across my life, then mixing in a good deal of fiction, and most importantly, taking it all out of my own head and stuffing it into that of someone I'd made up.  It sounds simple put like that, and actually it sort of was.  Sometimes things make a certain intuitive sense, even when they don't make much actual sense.

Case in point #2: I've said in various places that my just-out novel The Bad Neighbour contains a lot of autobiographical components, and that's true, but it's also a lot less based directly on my own life than people have occasionally assumed.  There are bits and pieces aplenty, but crucially they're mostly not the bits and pieces anyone would assume.**  There are, I think, only two elements that are drawn unedited from personal experience: one is a catalogue of house-hunting horrors, all of which are described exactly as they happened, and the other is a fairly minor detail that was the genesis for the whole book.  Spiraling out from those ingredients, everything is a mishmash of my experiences and those of friends and those of friends of friends and total fabrication, in no clear order.  It's all grist for the mill, as they say.

I guess I should finish up by admitting that I'm not being entirely serious.  Obviously we'll always need writers who can make the mundane fascinating, who can conjure up the minute and intimate in a way that makes us feel understood.  That's yet another of the amazing things fiction is capable of, and sometimes that means sticking awfully close to personal experience.  But on the whole, for most people writing most kinds of fiction, I do think my version's better: those personal experiences are great material, but they're only a fraction of what's out there for you to draw on.





* Another bit of awesome writing advice no-one ever gives you: making up absurd titles is weirdly therapeutic.

** Interestingly, most of what the one or two more negative reviews found implausible was basically true.  It turns out that people with not a lot of money to spend really do buy houses they know have problems.  Who'd have thought it!

Writing Ramble: On Invisible Words (Pt. 2)

I talked last time (and a very long time ago it was!) about why I'm not convinced that invisible words - that is, words so common that the reader's eye skims over them, effectively rendering them impossible to overuse - are really a thing, and how, even if they are, there remain good reasons to keep an eye out for those words that you're prone to over-favouring.

This is a dangerous topic to discuss too much, of course; I'd much rather readers don't go through my books with a fine-toothed comb hunting for all the instances of lazy word over-use, because I know damn well they'll find a few - and that despite the very best of efforts of me, my beta-readers, proofreaders, editors and copy editors.  Mistakes always slip through, and eventually you have to reconcile to the fact that every book needs to be called finished at some point.

Nevertheless, by the same measure you can but try, and with the second of the Black River Chronicles - and even more so with my work-in-progress White Thorne - I've been mixing up my approach in the hope that new tools or techniques might shed fresh light on the problem.  The degree of success hasn't been everything I might have hoped, and I still feel there must be a piece of software out there I don't know about that would make this job a thousand times easier.  (I've heard Scrivener suggested, but no-one seems altogether sure.)  At any rate, this is where I've got to so far...

I began with word clouds.  You know word clouds, right?  If not, here's one I made for The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories.  Because it turns out free word cloud generators are awfully easy to find on the internet (this came from WorditOut) and a useful side effect of their functionality is that they list words in order of usage.  Plug your novel in there and, hey presto, you've got an insight into the frequency of your word usage, and from there it's just a matter of figuring out what you're okay with - eliminating every instance of "the" is likely to prove a tall order! - and what you hadn't realized you'd been doing and are ashamed about enough to address.

Only, the word cloud solution has its limits, and one of them is that the data it throws out, not being at all intended for fiction-editing purposes, isn't that well-suited.  So I moved on.  My next port of call was Edit Minion, which I'm a lot more inclined to recommend; maybe not so much for this precise problem but in general it's worthy of a gander, and where else are you going to find out if you're overusing Shakespearean quotes?

The problem remained much the same, though: trying to use a bit of software for a role it was never really geared for.  And by then I was running out of time to waste on hunting for solutions, and in need of something guaranteed to do the trick.  So in the end, I went old-school; like, really damn old-school.  And the tool I've ended up relying on most in recent weeks is the humble Find and Replace function in Word, which has a great deal more depth and functionality than you might ever have realised; I know I hadn't a clue until I really started playing.  But if you want to, for example, highlight every single instance of a word throughout your manuscript, then that's chump change for Find and Replace.  Or how about highlighting every different form of a word?  Or homophones?  Once you dig into it, Find and Replace is kind of awesome.

Anyway, the battle continues.  I've a long - and ever-growing - list of words that I know I use too often, and I'd heartily recommend to every author that they start developing one too, because it's steadily training me to vary up my vocabulary, and to seek out the right words rather than the obvious ones.  It's tough work, frankly, it's no fun and it's certainly not the sort of playful creativity that we all imagine writing's supposed to involve - but it does the trick.

Then again, maybe there's an even better way to be found.  And if I ever stumble across it, I promise to share in part 3!

Writing Ramble: On Invisible Words (Pt. 1)

A few weeks ago, I was discussing editing with a couple of writer friends, and the conversation came round to the topic of overusing common words.  The consensus seemed to be that such words were effectively rendered invisible, and so it didn't matter how frequently they cropped up; their very familiarity would let them slip under the radar.

Now, I won't say that's not true; for many readers, I'm sure it is.  Get engaged enough in a story and it'll take more than an overabundance of speech tags to drag you out of it, or even eight uses of a word like "look" or "then" or "but" on a page.  But it's certainly not universally true, and I say this as someone who was taken to task by an editor last year (quite rightly!) for abusing a certain popular pronoun - or, more recently, by a reviewer for over-reliance of a word just uncommon enough to stand out.

The lesson I learned the hard way was, however invisible you might think a word - or phrase, or stylistic tick - is, if you overuse it enough, there'll always be someone out there who'll call you on the fact.  So, in honour of that eagle-eyed reader, here are four reasons that overusing words, even ones so common that they hardly register, may not be such a great idea...

- If They're invisible, Why Have Them?

Look, I don't mean to be invisibilist here, I've seen enough movies to know that invisible people can make meaningful contributions to society.  But I'm not convinced that's so true of words.  "Said" is a fine example here: I've heard it claimed that no matter how many "he said"s and "she said"s you throw at a reader, they'll never tire, purely because the phrase is so fundamental that it goes ignored.  I beg to differ - in fact, I'd argue that ending every line of dialogue with a speech tag makes your writing look like it belongs to a five year old! - but that's beside the present point.  If the reader's going to ignore those speech tags, what are they doing but taking up space?  If you're getting paid by the word then fair enough, but if not then maybe they'd be better stripped down to a point where they're actually serving some useful purpose.

- Bad Habits Become Worse Habits Become Bad Writing

Nine times out of ten, you overuse a word or phrase because it's easy to do so; that's the first word or phrase that comes to mind in a particular context, and you're rushing, and there it goes, the fifth "only" or "even" or "however" of the page.  But good writing and easy writing are in many ways polar opposites, and the habit of accumulating favourite words and even sentences may give you a recognizable style, but it'll be a recognizably crappy one.  Soon enough you're writing everything according to the same rhythms, with similarly shaped paragraphs and dialogue that follows the same patterns and not a jot of energy or variety left anywhere.  Of course, you're probably hugely successful, because I've just described every hack writer ever, but who cares about that, right?  Formulaic writing might put food on the table, but challenging yourself - um - probably feeds the soul or something.

- My Invisible Isn't Your Invisible

Okay, so this is basically the point I made in the introduction, but it bears repeating: reading habits vary wildly, and what you think is perfectly fine might be just what's guaranteed to leave an editor frothing at the mouth.  Here's an example: I recently read a story where the author leaned heavily on comma splices; you know, those sentences missing a crucial coordinating conjunction that Word loves to stick green lines under.  One or two, or even one or two a page, would have passed unnoticed, but once I noticed that they were cropping up like clockwork they became so hard to ignore that they were all I could see.  And really, the last thing you want as a writer is to have stylistic ticks that are so obvious they're all the reader notices.

- Just Because A Word Works That Doesn't Make it the Right Word

The more you favour certain words in the assumption that they'll slip under the radar, the more likely you are to try and fill square holes with round pegs.  There's a lot to be said for taking extra time to really dig through the thesaurus in search of that word that actually means what you're after, instead of making do with one that's more or less in the right ballpark and hey no-one's going to notice anyway right?  Making the quick and easy choices can leave a reader puzzled, and trust me when I say that as a slush-reader it's a colossal turn-off to realise that a writer's gone for the lazy word choices every time at the expense of clarity, detail and complexity.  Once you're tuned into that, it gets really hard to miss, and all those supposedly invisible words that are either doing nothing or taking up space that could go to really useful words begin to stand out like so many sore thumbs.

Now, this is obviously all just my somewhat warped perspective, and I'm conscious that a lot of that warping was done by the fact that I seem to have spent most of this year editing rather than writing, and now I can't read a license plate without hunting for typos.  Still, I think that the basic points are sound: overusing words, especially because you've persuaded yourself that no-one will notice, is a risky business, and one that's sure to bite you in the ass.  Or see you landing a multi-million pound contract.  But definitely one or the other!


And in part two, if and when I find the time and energy to write it, I'll go over some of what I've personally been up to track down those darn invisible (and not so invisible) words...

Writing Ramble: How to Criticize Your Friends

On the face of things, criticizing your friends may seem straightforward enough.  But think for a moment: do you really want to criticize them over just anything?  Sure, you could point out that their hair is too long or their pets are too smelly or their house is too mauve, but wouldn't it be better to come up with some really significant character flaw, all the better to...

Wait, wait, wait.  That wasn't what this post was meant to be about.

How to criticize your friends' writing, that's what I was going to talk about.  Just randomly pointing out your friends' flaws is mean, but pointing out the flaws in their writing can be one of the most useful forms of support you can give.  That is, if they ask you to; randomly deconstructing the characterization missteps in that novel they just had published probably isn't going to be so well received.  But a great many writers, regardless of experience, will always be on the lookout for a friend who's willing to read over early drafts with a critical eye.  Yet such people aren't always easy to find, and even when they're available, they're far from guaranteed to respond with anything really useful.

Personally I've been really lucky on that front, and a couple of recent responses, as well as my own efforts to help others out, got me thinking.  What's the difference between useful amateur feedback and the sort that leaves you feeling crushed but none the wiser?  What sort of criticism do I wish I got more of and why?  Having done all that thinking, I thought I might as well share my conclusions here with a little advice for anyone who wants to support the token writer in their life...

- Find the Positives

Criticism can be hard to take, and it's nice to be told that you've got a few things right amid all those mistakes.  But this isn't just about ego management; as a writer, it's not always any easier to know what is working than what isn't.  Sometimes being told that, yes, that section plays the way you hoped it would is every bit as useful as discovering that you need to rip up half a chapter.  In fact, often having an idea of what is succeeding can be the most useful thing, offering a benchmark to aim to get the rest of the work up to.

- Hear What's Being Asked of You

All readers have their reading habits, but not all reading habits are useful to the writer in need of feedback.  Most writers will have at least a reasonable idea of what's wrong with their work, and the kind of criticism that's useful on a first draft won't have half as much value on a third.  If you really want to help, try and understand what sort of response you're being asked for; if the writer doesn't know, probing with a few questions might save you both from wasting your time.  Is it the plot they're trying to figure out?  The structure?  The characters?  Or are they just after someone to hunt typos?  In this, knowing how far on a given work is can make all the difference: is this raw material or close to the point of being finished?

- Don't Kick the Foundations

Unless a story is really broken, "this story is broken" isn't useful feedback.  And yet it's easy to give, even if not deliberately.  "I think this would work better if instead of being a middle-aged housewife the protagonist was a ninja assassin" is, to all intents and purposes, suggesting that the writer scrap whatever they've done and do something else instead.  Saying "the plot didn't really work for me" falls into the same category.  But there are more subtle variations; adding and deleting characters or major narrative points can often add up to the same thing as starting afresh.  Would making the change you're suggesting bring the whole story tumbling down?  If so, it's probably not going to come over as a useful suggestion.  It's always better to try and help a writer to find the best version of the story they're trying to tell than to suggest that it isn't worth telling in the first place.

- Be Constructive

This is a lot like the above points, really, but I mean it literally: try to add more than you subtract.  Sometimes, of course, an early draft of a story really will have superfluous elements; sometimes two characters fulfill such a similar purpose that they might as well be one, and sometimes a subplot would be better off excised.  But more often there'll be at least something there that can be salvaged and improved.  It's a great deal harder to identify how that can be done than to point out that an element is rubbish and would be better off gone, and it's generally too much to ask of people.  If everyone knew how to fix complex plotting mistakes then it would be a weird old world!  Still, even identifying aspects that are ripe for improvement is more useful than simply pointing out what's worthless.

- Read Deeper

I'm assuming here that you're not a professional editor; chances are, then, that you're more likely to focus on certain aspects of what you read, ones that might be grouped under a term like "storytelling": the characters, the big events, the overarching plot.  Most readers are at least a bit oblivious to the more technical aspects of fiction: the fashion in which words are combined and used to achieve particular effects.  This is all fine and good and no writer in their right mind would expect more, but that's not to say a little insight can't be helpful.  So after you've read through, why not delve more analytically into a paragraph or two?  Is the language telling the story as well as it could be?  Is the pace too fast or too sluggish?  Are the choices of words repetitive, or needlessly obscure?  Even just digging into one isolated passage can identify wider problems.

Last up, I'll just sneak in the fact that I'm always on the lookout for good beta-readers!  With at least three novels on the go at any given time and a dozen short stories waiting for attention, I can never get all the help I need.  So if the above has inspired you, do feel free to get in touch...

Trying to Make Sense of Twelve Years of Short Story Sales

One thing about doing anything for a long time is that it's easy to lose sight of the bigger picture.  After over a decade of selling short fiction, I had only the barest sense of how well I'd done overall.  In terms of profit, some years had been startlingly successful, where others had been more or less disastrous; there were stories I sold to major markets on the first or second attempt and others, in my opinion no less good, that I eventually had to let go for a few bucks.  Really, the only way to make sense from such arbitrary-seeming peaks and troughs, let alone to gain an impression of whether all the effort I'd put into writing and selling short fiction had been warranted, would be with a ton of data and the obsessive-compulsive nature to dig through it.

Wouldn't you know ... I have both of those things!  And just recently I also had the time and incentive to sit down and figure out what stories I've sold, for how much and how often, and then to stick all of that information into an easily interrogated spreadsheet that I could prod for some answers.

The main question I was eager to solve was to what extent all those highs and lows had balanced each other out.  But before I even began running numbers, I was conscious of a couple of significant distorting factors.  I definitely learned to write and sell short fiction the slow, painful way, by spending a long time producing work that wasn't quite up to scratch or else was wildly ill-suited for professional sale, and then refusing to give up on any of it.  The upshot was that, in the early years, I ended up getting paid not much at all for a fair proportion of my output, or even giving stories away for free - which, of course, skews the data dramatically.  Then, as a wrinkle in the other direction, perhaps the majority of my sales these days are reprints, which means more money for stories I've already sold once (or, increasingly, more than once.)  Thanks to Digital Fiction Publishing, I also now have short stories earning royalties; and thanks to both Digital and NewCon, I have further royalties coming in from my short story collection The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories.

Taking all of that into account left me with a few potential numbers.  Based on the raw data, my average pay rate for the eighty stories I've had published would be somewhere around three and a quarter cents per word, or just over half of current professional rates.  Add in the Sign in the Moonlight royalties and that rises past three and a half cents.  Disregard all of those unpaid publications and it nudges up past four cents.

On the one hand, when you consider the hours I've put in - approximately seven trillion by this point - even an average rate of four cents a word would be paltry.  On the other, given the extent to which that's being dragged down by those early low-earning sales, it suggests that in fact the stories that have been successful - whether through getting into well-paying markets or reprint sales or royalties or a combination of the three - have down rather more than I'd ever have guessed towards balancing things out.

Though it's tough to draw conclusions that would be useful for anyone but me from a career that's followed no clear trajectory or logic, let's at least try.  I already knew that, in the long term, you can routinely make decent money from selling short fiction, and on rare occasions you can make extremely good money; it's also become more and more apparent that, if you're careful with what rights you sell and for how long and if you're aggressive in seeking opportunities, the most successful stories will keep being successful time and again.  What my new data adds is a sense that my early misjudgements, or for that matter the occasions that still sometimes happen when I end up letting a story go for less than I'd like because I'm eager to be involved with a particular market or editor, aren't the big deal I've sometimes felt them to be.  While of course it would be lovely to have every piece end up with the likes of Clarkesworld or Lightspeed, the impression I have now is that maybe the scatter-shot approach I've taken makes more sense than at times it's felt like it was doing.  I've never made things easy for myself by writing in such a variety of genres and styles, but it's reassuring to discover that the results, on average, have been at least a qualified financial success.

Writing Ramble: Making the Most of a Second Draft

Since I happen (for reasons best not discussed!) to have an unused article lying about, and since it's a while since I posted anything on the actual business of writing, I figured I might as well share this here.  It's on a subject I hopefully know a bit about: after a dozen or so novels and novellas and a hundred and some short stories, I've seen my share of second drafts - and picked up a thing or two about what you can and can't expect to achieve with them.

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For most writers, the first draft is the most fun: that's where the ideas come out, where the characters are born, where the wild sentences are spun.  The first draft is the raw joy of creation; everything after that can feel like nitpicking.  But, as you dig deeper into the craft, you may find that - for all the giddy thrills of a first draft - it's the second that turns work you're excited but a little embarrassed by into fiction you're eager to show off.  For every writer that gets a story mostly right on the first attempt, there are a hundred who need to come back after time away before they can really draw out its virtues.

So here are a few areas where you might find your perspective is that bit clearer the second time around...

Precision

One of the advantages of writing in a language as gloriously messy as English is that you're never confined to saying something only one way; the flip side is that it's easy to get away with conveying an approximation of what you mean.  More than ever here, you need your reader head on over your writer one, and this is something most people will find difficult without the emotional distance a redraft provides: you've the chance to back off and question whether what you said is what you meant.  That character, that scene, do they come across just as you imagined?  Does that dialogue convey the information you need it to?  Are those descriptive passages full of insightful details or are they flabby and rambling?  If the words you chose are being vague or flavourless then here's the chance to replace them.

Subtlety       

Conversely, you're not always obliged to spell out every small detail; in fiction, less is often more.  And another question better suited to a second draft than a first is whether you've said too much.  Again, bring out that reader head, and ask yourself, have points that only needed to be made once been made half a dozen times?  Do you feel patronized?  Are there aspects of your characters you wanted to imply without necessarily stating outright?  It's often a good idea to be verbose in a first draft, when you're trying to ensure that no vital information gets missed; that doesn't mean you can't roll back some of that exposition now that you have the chance.

Concision

In a first draft, it's all too easy to devote the same attention to every detail, to establish single scene characters with the same loving attention you've devoted to your protagonists or to detail every inch of a room your characters see for all of ten seconds.  The second time around, it's easier to ask: is the level of detail proportionate to the significance of the material?  And is it enriching your story or sucking away momentum?  Ultimately, the question here is whether individual elements - be they words, sentences or whole paragraphs - are adding to rather than subtracting from the story.  Viewed that way, decisions that seem merciless on a first glance can look awfully necessary on a second.

Rhythm

The pace of an action scene shouldn't be the pace of a leisurely conversation between two old friends, which in turn shouldn't be the pace of a description of a country garden.  While rhythm is tough to impose in a first draft, it's easy to identify in a second.  You may find, too, that you spot it (or its lack) more readily by reading from a printout than a screen, or in a reduced font, so that it's easier to judge how those blocks of text are fitting together.  But, ultimately, the question you're asking is the same however you approach it: do all my sentences and paragraphs look the same, or are they adapting to the story they're telling?

Variety          

There are almost always synonyms for any given word of phrase, but when you're in first draft mode, your natural inclination may be to use the same handful of words time and again.  This is hard to avoid, and isn't even easy to spot on a second draft.  One trick is to use your word processor's find function: if in doubt, run a search, and if the word you suspect you might be overusing crops up twice on ever page then you are, indeed, overusing it.  And if that sounds like pointless effort then the way to look at this is that, rather than obeying an arbitrary rule, you're exploiting an opportunity to squeeze in more richness and detail: every time you reintroduce a character or an object and every time you return to an idea, you have a chance to reveal some fresh aspect, and that means taking advantage of fresh words.

Brevity

However to the point you try and be in your first draft, cutting out the waste is infinitely easier in the second: for that matter, few things will teach you as much about the craft as trying to cut ten or twenty or fifty percent of your word count without infringing on the sense.  Which, really, is the crucial point, and why brevity is better sought in a second draft: you can cut a great many things, but the one that has to survive is meaning.  If you can't strip out another word without turning a sentence into nonsense then you've definitely trimmed enough; if you could rewrite a sentence with half the words and it will say precisely the same thing then you're not even close.

Richness

Nevertheless, there are definitely times when your language needs to be lovelier than others.  In a first draft, you often have to be workmanlike just to reach the end; in a second, it can be clearer where letting in a little poetry will serve some actual purpose.  This is one of the trickiest things to spot yourself, and one of the main reasons why giving yourself a good long gap between drafts is crucial.  The time to come back is however long it takes for you to stop being in love with the language itself and to consider what function it's serving: sure, that description of a sunset is lovely, but does it belong in the middle of a helicopter chase?  And, to return to the point, if you can go a couple of pages without any sense of physical space or of what characters look like, or if scenes that should have emotional heft feel flat and lifeless, then those are the points when you can let yourself loose with the pretty words.

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One last thought: it's entirely okay to work through as many drafts as you need to, at whatever speed feels right.  That said, a draft will go better if you have a sense of what you're trying to achieve; you may find, for example, that hunting for typos is a job you need to separate out from spotting continuity errors.  And you may also find that it helps to have a checklist like the above to remind you precisely what you're looking for, or even to treat each point in its own mini-draft.  Perhaps the hardest lesson here is that there's no one-size-fits-all solution to editing. and getting it right requires at least a little understanding of the particular ways in which your unique brain works.

Writing Ramble: Why It's Okay to Question Contracts

You know, I could give you a dozen reasons why it's okay, as a writer, to question contract clauses you're unsure of.  And then I could give you a dozen more why it's not only okay but something you're being remiss if you're not doing.  While 'contract lawyer' may not be there in your job description, it should absolutely be in your personal list of auxiliary jobs that you've picked up at least a passing knowledge of.  Because if you're even a little bit serious about being a writer - or, for that matter, a professional creative of any sort - then you're going to find yourself signing contracts.  And if you don't read them, and in reading understand them, then there's a fair old chance that somewhere along the line you're going to get screwed.  Because that's what bad contracts are designed to do: to rip off one party in favour of another.

But I don't want to talk about bad contracts, at least not the kind of bad contracts that are written by the kind of publishers that deliberately concoct bad contacts, because in my experience they're by far the minority and that's a whole different discussion.  What are far more common, and sadly perhaps a little more insidious, are largely decent contracts written by genuinely well meaning publishers, which nevertheless contain some wholly crappy clauses because writers don't ask enough questions.  And by bad I mean here needlessly prejudicial - usually because they ask the writer to make unrealistic guarantees for unlikely worst case scenarios or because they tie up rights in ways that make reselling them in the future all but impossible.

Bad contract clauses, I've come to think, are basically viral.  They get repeated either because a publisher has cribbed them from another publisher or because they've splashed out on lawyers, and a part of the job of lawyers is to protect their clients while stripping as much as possible from those they're dealing with - which they generally do by regurgitating old contracts that did those things.  In my experience, it tends to be the case that the publishers in question generally don't even realise they're asking anything unreasonable because no one's ever stopped to point that out.

I mention all this because earlier in the year I found myself having to ask for changes on contracts from two different publishers.  And the reason I thought the subject worth posting about was that they both in wholly reasonable fashion, and really couldn't have been much nicer.  In the first instance, the contract had lawyerly fingerprints all over it and all in all was a bit of a monster; when the publisher realised just what they were asking they came back with something four pages shorter and about a thousand times more reasonable.  The second instance came down to worries over one specific clause, and we got round that with a bit of tweaking.  But the crucial point here is that both experiences were entirely pleasant.  Most publishers are decent folks who have no desire to rip off or even inconvenience you.  Raise polite concerns and you'll get polite responses in return.  And if that's not the answer you get then you may have stumbled across one of those rare publishers who genuinely are trying to exploit you, in which case, far better to learn before there's ink on paper.

As a closing note, and for anyone who doesn't feel they have the knowledge or confidence to go negotiating contract terms, here's a link to a model contract from the SFWA, who are fantastic for this sort of thing.  There are tons of similar resources out there, both from the SFWA and elsewhere, and if you have worries then it's not hard to confirm whether they're justified and to find something you can point a publisher to that explains your position.  It might take a little time and effort, but that's sure to be worthwhile for a contract you won't regret in a few years' time.

How Much is Too Much Planning?

I talked a while back, here and to a lesser extent here, about how my novel writing process has gone from being a fairly laid back and make-it-up-as-you-go-along affair to a current level of preparation that could justly be compared with that of minor military campaigns.

And honestly, I'd come to the conclusion a while back that I was preparing as much as anyone reasonably could: plotting out the entire novel as a detailed synopsis and then breaking it down into a chapter plan before a single word hits the page, that's pretty organised, right?  And it seemed to be working, too: with the skeleton of a plot in place, I was freer to focus on characters, dialogue, action, all the fun stuff that can sometimes end up being two dimensional in a first draft when simply keeping everything rolling becomes the overriding impulse.

Then I got to my current work in progress, and everything exploded.  The thing is, it's a book that requires an astonishing amount of world-building - the world-building, really is what it's all about - and not having that ready in advance has been disastrous.  I mean, not disastrous, I'll get it figured out, but right now I'm thinking that'll mean an entire draft more than I'd normally do, which is hardly a good thing.  Plus, the writing's been like pulling teeth, and then putting those teeth in a sock and hitting myself in the face with it, because it's not fun at all knowing you're doing a rubbish job of something and I've been doing a really rubbish job of inventing a complicated alien society and ecosystem on the fly.

At the same time as that was sinking in I was talking to people about my synopsis for the next book in line, and the feedback that came from a couple of readers was that they weren't clear on how the central relationship was supposed to play out.  As we discussed it, my writer friend Charlotte Bond suggested I should try putting together some character profiles.  My first reaction was one of wariness, since that sounds awfully like a writing exercise and writing exercises are one of the many things I classify as people who claim to be writing doing something else instead.  But I didn't have any better solution, and I really did need to get this stuff worked out.  So I've been giving it a go, and, what do you know, the results have been surprisingly great so far.  Looking at the characters in isolation is pushing me to delve into their motivations and backstories in a way that I know I'd struggle to do if I was worrying about having to keep the wheels of a plot spinning.  Minor characters are developing a level of complexity I'd normally reserve for my leads.  And now I'm thinking that I really need to do something similar for the world: the major locations, the major systems, perhaps even the major events of its history.

I've always been distrustful of this sort of my approach, too, and for the exact same reason.  If I'm honest, whenever I hear fantasy writers (it's always fantasy writers) talking about how they map out every last corner of their world before they begin, down to what rodents like to eat each other and who cleans out the privies in that tiny village the characters won't ever visit, I tend to assume that they are in fact prevaricating.  Because, you know, they are.  But I'm telling myself that this feels different: I already have the novel planned in its entirety, so I'm not trying to craft anything extraneous; the character traits and relationships I'm figuring out will almost certainly find their way into the final book, and I have faith that so will the world-building, once I get to that.

But where will this all end? I have no idea, though it's easy to start imagining nightmare scenarios where advance plotting means writing the entire novel before I ever start writing the novel, trapping myself into some kind of weird Möbius reality in which planning only ever leads to more planning.  And wait, there's a word for that, isn't?  I'm pretty sure it's called prevarication.  So let's not do that.

My PayPal Policy (And Why I Hope You Might Consider Adopting It Too)

If you write short fiction for money, you almost certainly have a PayPal account.  That's a given.  The vast majority of markets will only pay via PayPal, especially if they're in the US and you're not, as it's invariably the cheapest and most straightforward alternative for them.

The point where this becomes problematic, as with so much in life, is charges - specifically, the sizable charges that PayPal places on transmitting and / or receiving funds.  They vary from country to country, but in the UK you're looking at 3.4% of the initial amount, plus 20 pence.  Only, it doesn't stop there.  Because, despite PayPal's grammatically dubious assertion that their fees "...are simple, straight forward with no surprises," the amount of money you actually receive is likely to come as something of a shock if you follow exchange rates even slightly - because PayPal's are lousy.  You can expect to get a couple of points below whatever the actual exchange rate is, which may not seem like a great deal, until you realise that you're effectively being charged another one to two percent.

All of that means that if you regularly sell short fiction, and depending on where you live, you can expect to lose between 3.5% and 5.5% of your income right off the bat.  That's potentially more than a twentieth of your income, charged just for the privilege of being paid.  And, sadly, none of this is likely to change any time soon.  PayPal have huge market dominance, and on the occasions when I've approached publishers with alternatives - on the face of it, Transferwise seems like a far more attractive proposition all round - I've been politely declined.

Which is understandable, of course, because I'm just one person and setting up your bank details with a new service is both a hassle and conceivably a risk.  Still, the fact is that the current situation remains unsatisfactory, and it's hard to imagine it being considered acceptable in any other field.  Just in case you doubt that, here's an imaginary scenario.  You're working in another job - let's say alpaca farming, because why not? - and when payday comes around you notice that your pay packet is light to the tune of five percent.  Let's say you earned two thousand dollars, that means you're short by a whole hundred.  When you question your boss about this, they explain that a cash machine charged them those hundred dollars to withdraw the money and so they've decided to pass that charge on to you.  Would you a) nod and smile or b) completely lose your shit?

Yeah, that's what I thought.

Now, to be clear, I'm not blaming this situation on publishers.  They have no choice but to work with the tools they're given, and frankly I suspect that many are simply unaware of how they're disadvantaging writers by relying on PayPal and not taking into account transaction costs.  There is in fact an easy, built-in means for the sender to cover costs, but since for some bizarre reason PayPal describes it as "friends and family", I imagine that many people assume they can't, or shouldn't, use it.*

Anyway, here, as promised, is the policy I've decided to instigate, and that I hope very much you'll consider too if you sell short fiction.  From now on, whenever I work with a new publisher and they ask if I'm happy to be paid via PayPal, I'm suggesting that they consider either covering or splitting the charges.  They of course have the option of saying no, and I don't intend to press the point; I'm not in a position to be passing up sales here.  My hope is that it's simply the case that no one has thought to raise this before, and that a little gentle nudging is all that's needed.  And given that I've noticed an upswing in the percentage of markets that do cover costs of late, I think there's some evidence for that theory.

Anyway, it's a safe bet that my doing this alone is going to achieve a great deal of bugger all.  But maybe if a lot of us were to start asking the same question then things might go differently.  So I'm putting this up here in the hope that maybe my fellow writers would be interested in taking up the initiative - or at least sharing this round a little.  For that matter, if publishers who already cover PayPal charges were to state that explicitly in their guidelines, that would be a big positive move, too.  Basically, my hope here is to start a discussion on a topic that I've never seen talked about anywhere else.  So please, discuss!  And just maybe we can make the industry a little bit fairer.

* Postscript: they shouldn't, because PayPal reserves it for non-commercial transactions.  There is, as far as I can tell, no way to pay someone via PayPal that doesn't charge them a ton of money, and since I wrote this post, the company has also started going to great lengths to bury its crappy currency conversion rates and changes.  People, seriously, we need a better alternative!

Writing Ramble: In Defense of Second Drafts

Recently my friend Andy Knighton wrote an excellent blog post titled Surviving the Second Draft, which did exactly what it said on the tin, offering some sensible tips on how to struggle through that fearsome first redraft.

I say, "fearsome first redraft" - but second drafts are my absolutely favourite part of the writing process.  I commented to that effect on Andy's post, smugly pointing out that "you take something that’s kind of a mess and make it into something really good, what’s not to like?" and Andy made the sensible point that not everyone likes to admit they messed up the first time, never mind having to think about setting right what once went wrong.

This is very true.  And if I think back, I know full well that there was a time when I felt the same.  First drafts were sacred brain-goop, the raw outpourings of an unfettered subconscious.  Second drafts were weird and icky, a process of picking over something best left unpicked.  And third drafts were - well, why would you have a third draft, when you'd nailed it the first time, then made yourself miserable trying to find faults in something that was just fine to begin with?  As much as I might not want to relive such early writing traumas, I understand.

Still.  The fact remains that I was wrong.  Seconds drafts are awesome.

I guess that when you're starting out, the first draft has to be fun, otherwise there'd never be any end product.  And second drafts are the natural antithesis of that; they're about conceding your mistakes, which is not generally considered an enjoyable act.  Still.  If you're relatively new to writing then I promise you, second drafts are where it's at.  And not only is that the case but it's a good thing.

Why?  Partly because it takes away some of that awful, mind-crushing fear that first putting finger to keyboard - and then doing the same again and again and again until you actually have something resembling a story - involves.  Embracing second drafts is to admit that your first drafts aren't perfect, and never could have been, were never meant to be.  It's to accept your own fleshy weakness, your flimsy-brainedness, and to comprehend that human beings create processes for a reason.  The reason  second drafts exist is because you will never, ever get everything right the first time.  Maybe you'll make a million typos.  Maybe you'll settle for third person when your protagonist needed to be telling their story themselves.  Maybe you'll fling about adverbs with wild abandon and forget that speech tags are a thing.  Or perhaps it will be a combination of all those failings and more.

But it's okay.  The second draft is your safety net.

Here's the thing: second drafts are the point where you get to get things right.  Inevitably my first drafts disappoint and unsettle me.  There are nuggets of awesome, but they're hidden amongst great swathes of mediocrity, not to mention clunky language and inexplicable spelling.  They're the point where I wonder if I haven't maybe found myself in the wrong business, when after all I'd be much better suited to interior design or inventing new breakfast cereals.  But then I remember that clunky language can be tightened, spelling mistakes can be spotted, and really, just about any other first draft mistake can be fixed too.  Sometimes it's a matter of tidying and sometimes it's a matter of immense effort - I say this as someone who not so long ago changed the tense of an entire novel! - but the crucial point is that the end result is always better.

And that, ultimately, is the joy of the second draft.  The first time around you get to be intermittently good, maybe even intermittently great in small doses.  The second time around, if you're willing to put in the same level of energy all over again, you can nail it.  And then there's the third draft, which in my head is usually called the polish draft now, for obvious reasons: that's where the story begins to genuinely shine.  But the first step, I think, is just to get past that hurdle of thinking of the second draft as a chore, a hardship or some assault on your artistic integrity.  You want to tell a story?  You want it to be amazing?  Then the biggest advantage you have is that you don't have to be perfect the first time through.

Writing Ramble: Is Writing Fun?

Recently I had an interesting discussion with a couple of author friends, Andy Knighton and Charlotte Courtney-Bond, that began from my admitting I don't find writing to be all that fun.

When Andy and Charlotte very sensibly asked why I'd do it,  I explained that there are plenty of things I do get out of writing.  I love the constant challenge, the intellectual stimulation, the way no two projects are ever even slightly the same, and the fact that I'm always learning, be it real-world knowledge to enhance my work or just how to be better at what I do.  Writing is always interesting and sometimes thrilling, but that's a different thing entirely to being fun.

After consideration, Charlotte decided that she largely felt the same way; Andy wasn't convinced.

But is writing meant to be fun?  Perhaps when it's purely a hobby, and I certainly remember getting a certain enjoyment in the early days just from the sheer act of flinging words together in interesting and unlikely combinations.  Yet the minute you start doing something professionally, in however small a way, that inevitably changes.  Writing becomes a job, and though jobs can and probably should be fun, they also need to be other things: productive, profitable, demanding.  And even if you're not aiming to make money, most people write with the intention of producing something worthwhile, which implies a certain level of graft.

In fact, I'd suggest that it's dangerous even to expect that writing should be fun.  Because, as we hinted at in our discussion, the minute you bring those expectations, you put it up against many other fun things: playing games, watching TV, ten pin bowling, shark wrestling.  And writing is always going to struggle to compete, because when done seriously and well, it's bloody difficult.  (Admittedly, the same can be said for shark wrestling.)  If you expect writing to be stimulating and emotionally fulfilling then it will rarely let you down, but when you're asking it to be fun you're bound to be disappointed, because at its worst it's a process of beating your face against the keyboard until a load of stubborn words that would rather you sod off and die than come out finally agree to play ball.  In fact, at its very worst, writing can mean dredging through experiences you'd rather not imagine or relive, and then trying to transfer those shattering emotions onto a blank page.  Whatever the word for something like that is, it surely isn't fun.

Is that to say I don't enjoy writing?  Not at all, and I do, maybe more so now than ever.  My point is just that there are plenty of different ways in which to enjoy something.  To use a tenuous metaphor, for me it's been a bit like the development of a relationship.  At the start everything was crazy and exciting, every moment was precious and every slight crisis felt like the end of the world.  These days it's more like being comfortable in the company of a clever, knowledgeable, witty companion ... maybe me and writing don't hit the town so much, but that's not to say we don't get plenty out of our time together.

Of course, no amount of writing experience has weened me off my fondness of crap metaphors.

Anyway, I'd be intrigued to hear other writers' thoughts on this one.  Do you find writing fun?  If so, is it always fun?  Would you give it up if it wasn't?  And if not then do you get the same things out of it as I do or something altogether different?  Have I just been going about it wrong all this time?

Old Dog, New Ticks

I was reading an article recently which suggested that it was a mistake to imagine you were ever too late on in life to master a new skill, or that having mastered one you were shut out from learning others.  The author's logic was that if it takes, say, eleven years to get really damn good at something then that's theoretically eight things you can get really damn good at in the average lifespan.

Given that most of us spend the first of those age-blocks grasping the basics of being a functional human being and the second trying to gain control of our rampaging hormones, and taking into account that you're unlikely to become, say, a world-class ballerina in your seventies, I'd have to dispute both their logic and their maths.  There are also some pretty obvious cultural assumptions in thinking that the average person is likely to live for eighty-eight years!  On the other hand, eleven years seems a bit on the pessimistic side; there are surely things you can become astonishing at in less time than that.  So by way of compromise, let's say that if you're fortunate enough to be long-lived, you should have ample time to train up kick-ass skills in at least five disciplines.  That's still pretty cool right there.  I mean, that's a good way of looking at life, isn't it?  At my current age of thirty-mumble-mumble-something, that leaves me a whole lot of learning to do yet.  Compared with the perspective that society generally encourages - you get tolerably good at one thing and then do it until you die or it becomes redundant - this feels a whole lot healthier.

But that's not really what I wanted to talk about, though obviously it is a bit.  It certainly ties into the subject I wanted to touch on, which is that if you intend to be a writer in this day and age, you have to expect to get competent at an awful lot of things that have only the most tenuous connection with writing.   You may well find yourself speaking in public, or doing other things that are outside of your comfort zone.  The necessities of research may turn you into an amateur historian, criminologist, astrophysicist or insect wrangler.  Unless you have the absolutely best agent and publisher in the world, you're looking at developing skill-sets like editing, web design, blogging, accountancy and publicity.  And if you're going the self-publishing route then feel free to add cover design, marketing and a whole host of other things to that list.

This can appear horribly intimidating and unfair, and it's easy to look at those people who only have the one thing to do - like, um, nail technicians and professional shot putters - and feel deeply envious.  Turn that on its head, though, and aren't we writers an hellaciously lucky bunch of folks?  Not only do we get to do something fundamentally awesome and creative, we inevitably acquire a whole host of new abilities in the process.  The more you go on and the deeper you get into those eleven years you've set aside in which to become a world-class author, the more you discover that you've inadvertently picked up a raft of skills that you never expected to have, some of which require every bit as much imagination and inventiveness as writing itself.

And here we are towards the end of a particularly rambling post, and I still haven't even touched on what first made me want to write it, which is that over the last month or two I've been learning to letter comic book pages, and just last week I finished my first attempt.  It wasn't something I ever anticipated needing to do, and there was a steep, steep learning curve - just getting my head around a professional art package took some serious doing - but it was also a little bit thrilling, and I'm proud of what I've accomplished.  I won't pretend I've come close to mastering it, and maybe it will take me another eleven years to do that, but I'm hopeful that I can do it well enough to not completely embarrass myself.  Whether I'm right ... well, if everything goes to plan, that will be for others to judge when the time comes!

Writing Ramble: How I Write Novels Now, Part 2

So at the end of part 1 I'd got to the point of being about to start some actual writing, which depending on your perspective will probably seem either very early on or quite late, but in my case is about a third of the way through the novel-crafting process.  As I explained last time, by this juncture I'll likely have done at least some preliminary research, I'll have a detailed chapter plan based on my own synopsis and feedback from as many helpful friends as I can muster, and it will probably be in a spreadsheet because I have an obsession with spreadsheets that's all shades of unhealthy.  Seriously, if you ever ask me to my face I'll explain how it's actually the clearest way to represent all that information, how it's great for keeping track of word counts as I go and, oh, a whole host of excuses.  But the truth is, I have a problem and I know it.  I mean, right now a part of my brain is thinking about how much better this blog post would look in a spreadsheet.

This is not how I write novels.

(It really would.)

Um.  Right.  I was talking about novels not spreadsheets, which are two entirely different things, more's the pity.  Now I don't want to discuss the actual writing part here - and yes, that post title was perhaps ill-chosen, thinking back.  Suffice to say that I'll have a fairly good idea from my chapter plan of how long my planned book is going to be, and based on that I'll have allocated a set amount of time, say two hours a day for five months, that should get me through.  If that sounds a bit formal, it at least makes long-term planning a heck of a lot easier, and perhaps makes the creative process less stressful too; there's a lot to be said for knowing that if you consistently knock out a thousand words a day then in five months time you'll have a finished novel that looks something like the one you've intended.  Things will inevitably go wrong along the way, dates will get juggled and there'll be days when it all seems doomed, but so long as I get my words down I know I'll make it across the finish line.

Therefore, x number of months later I'll have a finished first draft.  It would be nice to forget about it for a while at this point - taking a break from any project once you've completed a draft is absolutely vital - but before I do that, I make sure to get it sent off to whatever wonderful folks have agreed to act as advance readers, and knock up a couple of print-on-demand copies for anyone, including me, who prefers to read the old-school way.  (Just how and why I find this useful is something I've discussed here in the past.)

A couple of months later, at the very least, I'll come back to that print copy, and over the course of about a month I'll work through it with my reader head on.  This serves at least three purposes; it re-familiarizes me with the book, gives me a chance to try and pick out some of the flaws I was blind to while I was putting it together, and last up allows me - hopefully! - to spot any typos.  (This, by the way, is the main reason why I prefer to work off a print copy; I find I skim over mistakes too easily on a screen.)  In that same month, I'll also hopefully be getting feedback from any advance readers and taking the opportunity to talk through any problems they've identified.

All of this feedback, my own and other peoples', will go into the second draft.  The aim this time through is to fix any plot issues, to polish, generally to cut - I usually aim to trim about ten percent - and generally to reach the point of having something that, while it will still contain mistakes and clumsy sentences and the odd bit of crap writing, looks basically like a finished work.  And around the same time, I'll be trying to wrestle my preliminary synopsis and chapter plan into a formal synopsis that's suitable for any publishers, editors and / or agents to read, this having the added advantage that it gets me thinking about the plot from an overhead perspective, yet another thing that can potentially highlight flaws.

Once that's all done - it generally takes two to three months - I'll let the manuscript sit again, for at least a month and more if I can afford to.  Then I'll go back for the final round.  The goal here, needless to say, is to produce a book that's as finished as I can make it.  This last draft is the quickest, and depending on how well the previous one went, might be very quick indeed.  Certainly if it takes more than a couple of months then something's gone badly wrong.

This is how I write novels.

I suppose that the obvious question at this point is, how useful would this approach to be to another writer?  To which the answer is, of course, that I've no idea.  It's certainly never been intended to be a catch-all solution, and I'm absolutely not presenting it as such here; like I said right at the beginning, I just happen to find these things interesting enough to think they're worth discussing.  I know, for example, that some writers only ever produce the one draft, and some write many more than I do.  That said, there are elements here that I'd have no hesitation about recommending.  If you're enough of a planner to go with an initial synopsis then getting feedback at that stage is a huge help; it's intimidating to let other people that close to your raw ideas, but it's worth it.  Reading through the previous draft in its entirety before you start the next one is invaluable, and as much as the environmentalist in me hates to say it, working off a dead tree copy reveals more typos that reading from a screen.  And preparing a formal synopsis while you're redrafting is actually much easier than trying to do it afterwards, counterintuitive as it might sound.

So what do you think, fellow novelist folks?  How different is your own approach to mine?  Am I making work for myself?  Or cutting corners?  Is there anything you think you might adopt, or anything you'd recommend that I'm not doing?

Writing Ramble: How I Write Novels Now, Part 1

This is not how I write novels.

It's an obvious point that no two people write novels the same way, and an even more obvious one that there's no right way to go about it - though it's surely the case that there are all manner of wrong ways!  At any rate, even within the space of one career-so-far and a few short years, my own method of going about such things has changed completely.

That change was started by chance and necessity, as I realised after Giant Thief got signed that I had exactly two years to write exactly two books and then flailed around trying to figure out some way to make that happen when my first novel had taken something like five years and more drafts that I'd been able to keep count of.  Out of that flailing, though, came the beginnings of a process that worked for me, and that's worked ever since - ever since in this case meaning, for my recently completed fourth novel To End All Wars, two more books currently midway through redrafts and another that I've just begun.  It's seen some refinement over that time, and there's undoubtedly room for more, but it definitely has its virtues too.  And so, because I find this stuff interesting and therefore conceivably other people out there do too, I thought it would be worth sharing here.

Skimming lightly, then, over the very early stuff - an idea that digs in like a tick, that comes to feel like it has meat enough on its bones to stretch to novel length - we get to the preparation stage.  Before even a word gets typed, there's a period of planning, floating ideas around, and depending on the subject matter, of research.  So far this has varied from a few weeks to a year, (that being the book I just started, White Thorne, which is set in the Middle Ages, a time period that turns out to be even less like the current day than you might think.)  The aim here is somewhat hard to define, and equally hard to set a timescale on, but basically involves reaching a point where the next stage feels like a practical possibility.

This is not how I write novels.

For that next stage is writing the entire plot out in synopsis.  By this point I'll at the least have a few major scenes in mind, characters, an idea of the tone I'm aiming for and the mental outline of a beginning, middle and end.  In small snatches over the course of perhaps a month, I note down what I have and work to fill in the gaps, figuring out significant plot mechanics as I go.  The end product here is a document of somewhere between five and ten pages that tells the story crudely but coherently from start to finish, that contains all the characters I'm likely to need - though not necessarily by name - and which another human being can read and take away a solid sense of the story from.  In fact, that's one of its main purposes; with White Thorne especially I jumped on the opportunity to get feedback on plot mistakes before I made them, and it was such a huge help that I rewrote the synopsis heavily on the back of the feedback I received.

Either way, once the synopsis is at a point I'm happy with, it will get broken down into a chapter plan - this being the key reason why it needs to be so detailed.  This stage generally only takes a day or two, and basically involves figuring out all the little climaxes that would make for suitable chapter end points and then balancing that against what I can realistically cram into, say, five thousand words.  One of the reasons it's a valuable process is that it flags up the structure, in so much as there is one at this point, and emphasizes any weaknesses.  If there's a leg of what might be three chapters where not much happens, or a stretch of constant action without much exposition, say, it will definitely show itself here, and with luck I can juggle scenes accordingly.

Which feels like a sensible place to break, if only because all this talk of writing novels is making me stressed about all those novels I should be writing.  In part 2: all of that stuff!  And everything that comes after...