Tag Archives: mistake

Mistake #1: Someone Will Read This

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My first drafts of the novel that nearly wasn’t had the same slapdash sense of panic I felt while trying to get it on the page. The first complete draft took nearly 10 years to get on paper. That’s a lot of anxiety.

One of the common, basic, slap your forehead writing lessons is that every emotion you feel when writing the work will be magnified when a reader reads that work. That’s a LOT of anxiety.

At the same time I was working on turning a book shaped object into a novel, I got fed up with my pretentious self and – there’s no real and. I just got fed up with it. Instead of writing works I wanted to read, I thought I had to be more clever than clever, tricky and suave and intellectual. There’s a place for that kind of work, but when I re-read those drafts I could only feel the same work that went into them, pulling me downward into a slog.

All works are devoured differently.

If I sit down with Terry Pratchett’s anything, I’m not leaving until I hit the back cover. Same with Jim Butcher and Kage Baker. I love Italo Calvino, but I can put his works down in the middle of an essay and come back days or months later. I consumed the Three Body Problem in an evening. If I pick up anything Marie Liu, I make sure I have a seat, snacks, and a drink, because I’m not moving until that final sentence closes. Mo Haydr, for all the wonderful grotesque villains and not-quite-heroes, is very easy for me to put down at chapter two for months. Then I find the book again, open to the bookmark, and devour the rest of it. There are parts of Mary Doria Russell’s Sparrow that I had to put down after each paragraph to collect myself. That’s fine.

Before I wrote Draft 24, the magic draft, the one that just came together, I asked myself what kind of experience I was trying to have. Not create, but to have in creating. Usually I was an anxious mess, clawing figures out of mud with my fingernails. I wanted to have the same fun writing that I had reading my favorite books.

So I peeled the pretentious out of my plot and characters. I analyzed past drafts for payoff moments, humor, fear, grief, anger. I didn’t find many. Most of the wordcount was burned on explaining things, which is great for a textbook, but not for a book I actually wanted to read.

When I wrote out the plot on sticky notes that last time, I included a space for the emotions of the characters, and a space for the emotions I wanted the reader to feel. This helped me get a bird’s eye view on pacing, as well as confronting whether my villains were villainous enough or my allies were too helpful, etc. It helped me space out my payoff scenes and information reveals so that I was no longer lecturing made up history to an uncaring audience of 1 (myself, annoyed and ready to go re-read an actual favorite story).

I took a week off work* and committed to going away from home so that I was trapped with only my story and ideally, a lack of wifi and people who cared if they talked to me. I used a Deskpass trial (highly recommend a co-working space if you need to get out of your head), packed a bag each day like I was going to work, left at 7:30 am and returned after 6 pm. I had two conversations, both with bus drivers. It was glorious.

Every day I sat down, opened my scrivener document, and wrote. The concentrated writing time meant my personal emotions didn’t have time to regenerate and drift away from my story. I careened from mystery to mystery, leaned into plot twists, and by the time I got to the big reveal, I was genuinely surprised as these characters I lovingly, determinedly created spoke to each other without my strict direction. They came alive as I came alive.

If I got to talk to the me who sat down to painstakingly type out draft 3, I would give me the kind of advice I did not have the life experience to appreciate at the time. Be sad. Be happy. Be angry, revel in unrighteousness, be sharply curious, be surprised, be scared, and only after you have earned it, take a deep breath and let it all out. Be at peace.

That’s basically the same writing lesson I got from every teacher, many how-to books, seminars, conferences, friends and mentors. What I didn’t understand all those times before (23 drafts and a few other book shaped objects prior) was that emotions are both complimentary and cumulative. The protagonist is scared, I am worried. The love interest is scared, I am angry. The bully is scared, I am evilly joyful. Those emotions don’t turn off when you hit the enter button for new paragraph or a new chapter. They don’t turn off for your reader, either. Every mystery should make you, the writer, more curious. But if your sense of justice and fairplay has already been elevated through an act of comeuppance, the next comeuppance won’t have the same impact.

Writing the kind of work I want to read was never the first goal, and that was why it took me so long to even finish a work. I was bored while I was writing. I was writing boring things. Or exciting things in a boring way. Even if, by the outline, it should have been an exciting story, I was too wrapped up in being new and special to appreciate the kinds of things I liked to read. And in turn, that meant my reader would feel that sense of boredom in a magnified manner.

Don’t be entertaining. Be entertained.

*Not everyone is lucky enough to have time off from work, but I found myself working for a company that offered three whole weeks vacation annually. Yes, I am in the USA, whataboutit.

Mistake 6: Three Spaces of Story

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One of my favorite comic book series was called Planetary. It’s still called Planetary, I’m just having issues with tenses.

Warren Ellis took a world that started with century babies, people born in 1900 with extraordinary abilities, and riffed on the Fantastic Four, martial arts movies, Godzilla, and a dozen other artifacts from my childhood. How could I not love it?

Illustrated by the incredible John Cassaday (just pick up a copy and you will understand), one sequence changed the way I looked at space availability.

In this sequence, a character has to convey a chunk of information via monologue. Usually, as in a Shakespearean (or any kind of) play, the actor will talk a bit and maybe move around onstage. In a movie, maybe they are waving a gun. In real life, you get told “sit down!” as you try to move around while your parental unit monologues about that thing you totally swore you were going to do. And didn’t. Anyway, in this scene, the character finds a camera on the table, takes a selfie, sticks the photo to his forehead and turns around to face the audience and his in-panel listeners.

Boom.

Every time someone had attempted to tell little-me about art, they went on about background and mid-ground and foreground. Every time it went in one ear and out the other. Here, finally, I got it. In comic books, there were three spaces available to tell parts of the story. Background for small characters or something the characters were reacting to, mid-ground for main characters to be speaking, and foreground for small, immediate actions.

These spaces were not interchangeable, but shifting the focus of the space or rotating the camera, would change the meanings of what was happening. The background side story becomes foreshadowing becomes main focus. The foreground small throwaway action is a character trait illustration, or perhaps a hidden action for the audience of the comic but not the other participants on the page.

In terms of dialogue, there were three spaces as well. The character monologues to us in the midground. He performs a small movement in the foreground that illustrates his character. And his audience stares gobsmacked outside of the panel until the very last cell where the view changes and we see them having watched him the entire time. The third space is off the page – what we call breaking the fourth wall – but without the character slyly acknowledging us the audience, that third space is simply the space left for the reader.

Most of the drafts of my first novel type project had all things happening on the foreground. Background information, secret histories, side conversations; everybody knew everything. There was no sense of mystery or in-jokes, or the sense that anyone existed outside of a capital letter at one end and a period at the other.

When I applied forcible separation via spacing, I got something different entirely. I didn’t have the visual space of a comic book. I couldn’t show someone meeting with a suspicious looking character while another oblivious character went about their day. I needed to allude to a shared past, foreshadow danger, and stop making characters so darn helpful. I needed most dialog to be understood in different ways by all characters present in the conversation. Finally, my villains got creepier, my protagonist faced great consternation, and my allies took time and effort to win over. You know, conflict.

Mistake 2: Can You See Your Protagonist?

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I wrote eighteen drafts of my first, real, live, going to finish this sucker if it kills me, novel without ever knowing what my protagonist should look like.

Eventually, I chickened out and drafts nineteen and twenty starred a generic white dude. Except that I didn’t know any. My dad is the closest white person I know well. He’s Cajun and Irish in that grandma immigrated from Ireland as a little girl, and I was called pistach by beloved old people until my twenties*. That upbringing, as a son of a first-generation immigrant and a lower class man who built his own tree cutting business by the skin of his teeth, shaped the man I love and fought with and fought for as an angry teenager.

None of that appeared in my story, because my main character existed no further than the period at the end of the sentence on the page.

Eventually I asked myself about me.

My dad was a big contributor to my upbringing, but so was my mom. She had an immensely different upbringing than I did, as a first generation immigrant from Japan who spent the rest of her formative years in the mining country of northern California.

I didn’t know the words for myself until later in life (hapa, nissei, mixed). It wasn’t until I left the cocoon of home that I understood how alone I was in the world. I had never, at that time, seen myself in a book as a main character.

So I made my protagonist hapa.

Suddenly he gained a history, and I became fascinated by the histories of the people around him. Everyone came to the same small town for a deviously similar reason, many of them from other countries and realms. The how and why of his problem solving motive took notes from my grandmother’s Methodist faith. His parents came into focus. His mother took center stage as a reformed villain, his father turned into a foil for the secondary antagonist. They lived, they breathed. And I got closer to an actual novel.

Mistake 10: Enough – Villains and Antagonists

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In Draft No. 4 by John McPhee, he mentions the process of greening. Greening is what other writers would probably call trimming, or reduction, or editing; the process of reducing a manuscript by a certain number of words. Nearly everyone has done this exercise, whether a paid-for product or just a graded project. Nearly every writing seminar I’ve attended has mentioned some version of reducing your cast list. But that’s not always what my writing really needs.

In an embarrassing number of drafts, my villain was the same. And the antagonist was the same. I had one of each and the story went through a requisite number of hoops before strolling across the finish line.

Remember being fifteen? I bet you can think of one person in every facet of your life who you just couldn’t stand. Band, science class, Girl Scouts, the after school job, the weekend job, your extended family, that person you were brutally forced to share a bathroom with – that’s a lot of antagonists. One or two of them were probably villains.

In moving from point to point in my story, my protagonist needed a motivator to either get away from the current conflict or move toward a new conflict. Eventually, I adjusted my cast list. I added two new villains to create a two-pronged headache for the protagonist with two plot goals instead of one. I allowed two other characters to evolve in their positions to become antagonists. I also took the reins off the supporting characters. With hidden motivations and secret histories that have existed long before teenage protagonists, supporting characters became antagonists to each other and accidental supporters of the protagonist, until my casual straight line narrative turned into something of a chaotic grudge match.

Which was an issue for the next draft.

Mistake 8: Talk Smart

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There’s the work and then there’s talking about the work. I knew an artist who dropped out of her graduate program because she hated talking about her work so much. Her love for her art became littered with think-piece-like witticisms until her passion evaporated. I know that tiredness. Most artists probably do.


If you take seminars and attend conferences to learn about marketing your work, sometimes people will say they want high concept. Or the elevator pitch, or comparables, or the brutal “but what’s it really about?”


In high school English, there were two teachers. You either got the sex fiend or the death obsessive. I got death. Once we had a poem about – well, something – and one student really nailed what the teacher wanted. She said death. We said music and autumn and rebirth and can’t it just be a walk? And she sat there and chanted death death death.


He pointed wildly and shouted, “Yes. Death!”


He did let us spin for a good three minutes first.


There’s two points I’d like to make here. Firstly, your work boils down to a single sentence just for you. Secondly, people will take away what they want to take away.


I didn’t know how to talk about my work for the longest time. If some poor soul asked me, I would launch into a plot summary, the query pitch, a rattle fast recitation of the cast list. At a party filled with not yet published writers, one told me about his coming of age story with two made up genres and a neat slotting into place in current events that was so glossy that I opened my mouth to say, “You got that out of a magazine!” Luckily, total sobriety grabbed me by the throat and I did not.


Point being, there are no rules. Mashup the genres. Tick the buzz word boxes. The only one you must know by heart is the one for you. That single sentence will be the reason you wrote this book. The real reason you turn back to it until its messy potential matches the shining promise of that neat, square, written on your heart concept.


Draft 23 approached the concept because I sat down and wrote it out first. I wanted to know what if the chosen one was trapped with the monsters. I wanted to explore prison and games and outplaying the game makers. Draft 24 was a series of tweaks to make the nearly there draft into a novel that was about something, instead of just a series of things that happened.


There’s a small chance I could have done that exercise around draft 3, but I didn’t.

Mistake 7: Three Levels of “About”

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Every story that sticks with you has the same three layers. The first layer is the story the character is living. This action layer has the plot problem, the real world, face-to-face, the antagonist and protagonist locked in struggle. This layer is the action and reaction.


The second layer is the inner journey of the character as influenced by the antagonist (or any cast member, really), subplot, secondary theme. It’s the one taking place inside the character’s head, the layer where we watch this person become someone new by the last page.


The third layer is the one where you say something about the world or the reader or the way the reader sees the world. This is the theme layer, the crawls-under-your-skin layer, the connection to the conversation happening in books and media and world events outside of the world in the story.


Without that third layer, you can still have a story. I had a story. I had things that happened and a character that realized he needed to change and the change that he made. And when you finished reading, it all went away.
One of the genres that does the third layer best is horror. Really good, crawl into your skull, and whisper hello, weeks after the fact, horror. Take Hereditary, which is about witchcraft, but also saying something about families, and well trod paths and those unavoidable destinies. Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark (movie version) had a horror story around each character such that the ending of each story was truly delightfully frightening.


I didn’t understand the third layer of story until I read Lisa Cron’s works, Wired for Story and Story Genius. Though the example story she develops is a little Hallmark (in Story Genius), there’s a reason Hallmark sells. And the concepts are easily illustrated so that you can apply them to your own work, big or small.


So about 22 drafts in, I had a character. I had a supporting cast. I had a villain and a couple antagonists and a wider world. And it didn’t mean anything. I hadn’t truly nailed down the why of the story and how that why fit into the world I live in.


You ever see Buffy? I am devastated to declare that it’s a classic, because I am now old enough to call things I saw as a teenager “classics”. Sure, she’s the chosen one. In the world of Buffy, it means she protects humanity from evil monsters. But what if your hunting territory is much smaller? And no one can leave? Then we would call your territory a prison. And the chosen ones serve an entirely different purpose. That wasn’t the third layer. The third layer went a little something like: if you are going to play a game, forced or not, and you play against the gamemakers, can you ever truly win? Can you dismantle the system once you’re inside of it? Once you win enough to make real change, you’re a part of the system. And that makes you part of the problem.