The early planning stages of any long writing project are usually when you feel the most wobbly about the whole thing. Novels, of course, but even novellas and novelettes can feel like going off-path into the deep unknown. Sure, you can wing it, or feel your way blind the whole time, but most people seem to prefer having the security of some kind of guide.

This is why the process of outlining exists. To give you a map to follow, a blueprint to show you how to build the thing.

Except I hate outlines. A tool of the devil. I concede their usefulness as a sales aid, but still: If the most buttoned-down middle managers of the world’s dullest corporation got together in a beige boardroom around an unvarnished table to come up with the least inspiring tool to sell to writers, it would be the outline.

The Problem With Outlines

Two big ones, as I see it:

(1) They’re so dismally reductionist. I can speak only for myself, but I’ve never worked up an outline that didn’t make everything sound completely stupid and trivial. I’m left feeling like, Ugh … who would ever want to read THIS? Which has an incredibly dispiriting effect right out of the gate.

(2) Outlining doesn’t work the way your brain does. Outlining is a linear process. Yes, so is prose, ultimately, with one word, one sentence, one paragraph after another. But that’s imposing order on the chaos of raw ideas, and a project’s idea phase is anything but linear. The creative brain rebels against behaving in a linear fashion. It’ll fall in line you force it, but it would much rather run and jump and play. Those puppy and kitten videos that get a jillion hits on YouTube? That’s your brain on creativity.

If an outline is a map, the order seems backwards. How can you effectively map a territory before you’ve even been there? At least that’s the thinking behind the school of thought that a better time to work up an outline is after you’ve done the first draft, and know what you have to work with.

Until then, are you entirely on your own? Not if you don’t want to be. Not if you go Hollywood, with a modified version of a technique used for decades in shooting movies:

Storyboarding.

Of Course, This May Cost You $3.49 For 500 At Staples

I’m sure at some point you’ve seen behind-the-scenes footage of filmmakers consulting storyboards. They’re like comic book panels that show how scenes and sequences unfold visually. They don’t have to be pretty, or great art. All they need to do is succinctly get an idea across.

The writer’s equivalent? No, I’m not suggesting you draw your novel. A few words or lines on a notecard should do it.

That’s right. Notecards. Totally low tech, totally hands-on. You’re gonna get dirty on this.

The method is simple. Whenever you know an element of your storyline, you jot it on a notecard. A scene, a plot point, a revelation, a character entrance … whatever it is, it gets its own notecard.

In my experience, this makes a much better fit with the random access way most writers come to know and discover their own work. At first, we only know fragments. We envision scenes without necessarily knowing how they’re linked, or what order they occur in. We see characters doing things, without knowing when or where. We may know the end, but not what will be going on halfway there. Research may suggest specific events without providing a context for them.

That’s okay. The notecards don’t care. You’ll work it out in time. The notecards just give you targets to steer toward. Beyond that, how you use them is up to you:

• Spread them out on the floor or table, or pin them to a corkboard, to give you a growing overview of your timeline.
• Reorder them as needed to take things that aren’t fixed in time and try them in different sequences to see what feels right.
• Color-code them to denote character points-of-view, subplots, etc.
• Use the backs of the cards to capture finer details: snatches of dialogue, descriptive lines, reminders to yourself, and anything else you want to remember.
• Divide them into two groups: definite inclusions and maybe inclusions.

Whatever fits your way of working. Whatever helps, and keeps things growing, unfolding, moving forward.

Finally, credit where credit is due. I didn’t make this method up, but instead got it from friend and colleague John Skipp. It really did revolutionize the way I approached planning the novel I’m currently working on, and earned a permanent place in the toolbox.

[Photo by Sebastian Bassi]

Awesome people share.

You are awesome, aren’t you…?

[Cross-post with Storytellers Unplugged]

This is for the ones who despair. This is for the ones gripped by the feeling that it will never get better. That they will never get better.

I promise you this much: It can. And you might. That’s the best guarantee you’re going to get. Can and might. There’s only one certain guarantee, and that’s how to make sure that it doesn’t and you never do:

Quit. Whatever you’re doing, just stop right now. I mean it. Put down the pen, close the Word file, toss the notebook in the trash, click that folder full of story files and half-formed dreams and punch the Delete key like you mean it.

There, now. Just relax. Breathe. Doesn’t that feel better?

If it does, if it genuinely does, then go ahead and empty the trash, real or virtual, stop reading right now, and go about the rest of your day, the rest of your life. You’ve just been spared years of toil, doubt, and heartache.

But if it doesn’t feel better, if in fact it feels kind of awful, then you’d better fish those temporary discards out of the trash before something bad happens. Clutch them to your breast and promise to never treat them — or, more importantly, what they represent — with that kind of disrespect again.

Respect is important, because there’s work to do.

The Agony And The Ecstasy. Mostly Agony.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been digging among my roots. I’ve just finished prepping my first two novels for new editions. Both predate my migration to word processing, so I’m working with files generated by OCR scans of the original books. You have to proofread these things. Carefully. Sometimes OCR software has a whacky sense of humor about what it thinks it sees.

I’ve had no need to look at either of these novels for more than twenty years. Now that I have, I can honestly say I would’ve been happy to let them sit another twenty, if only to spare myself the daily torture.

I thought these novels were awesome at the time. And they still have their moments.

But now they’re like that TV show you used to love as a kid. You know the one I mean. The one you were absolutely nuts for, that you couldn’t get enough of. The one you’d run miles to get home in time to watch.

The most merciful thing you can do is never watch it again, ever. It never holds up. Better to leave it alone and let the sepia-toned memories remain intact.

Here’s how I described my reaction to this process the other day, in a new Afterword to one of the novels:

“Here and there are bits that make me glad I wrote them, that wouldn’t look or feel out of place in later work, but mostly I just groan a lot and want to bang my head against the desk, unable to believe that this was the published draft.”

Which sounds polite for general company, but really, it’s more like this prayer:

“Please, oh Odin, god of battle and poetry, please make it stop! And if you can’t make it stop, make it better. And if you can’t make it better, please send your ravens to pluck out my eyes.”

Yeah, that bad. To me they are.

There are a lot of things about these formative works that should console me: That agents thought they were worth representing. That publishers thought they were worth publishing. That reviewers said good things about them. That there are readers who remember them fondly, maybe even loved them the way I did, and that even now there are publishers who want to bring them back into print.

While I’m enormously grateful for all that, I can’t say there’s much consolation in it.

But then there’s this. This summation of the gulf between then and now, of all that’s come in the interim, and all that’s still to come. This may be the finest thing you could ever say about yourself when comparing where you began with where you are today:

I would never write that now. It would never even occur to me. Or if it did, I wouldn’t write it in remotely the same way.

It’s so clear: Things got better. I got better. Mostly as a consequence of not stopping. Not stopping, and an unrelieved sense of dissatisfaction.

Through The Looking Glass

Pure serendipity. The other day, not even knowing what I’ve been up to lately, my longtime friend Clark Perry cued me into the quote below. Clark is one of the few spawning salmon who made it all the way upstream, past a million belly-up floaters who gave out, to get hired writing for TV.

We were there at the very beginning, for each other’s origin stories. We saw each other through years of the exact process that Ira Glass, host and producer of Public Radio International’s This American Life, describes in this clip from 2009:

“…all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there’s this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase. They quit.

“Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you’re just starting out or you’re still in this phase, you gotta know that it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work … It’s only by going through a volume of work that you’ll close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions …

“It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You just gotta fight your way through.”

Except there’s one thing Glass doesn’t address here: Okay, so how do you fight your way through?

The Good Fight

People analogize the creative process and the crucible of improvement in different ways. Me, I like finding the parallels with, appropriately enough, fight training. It resonates.

If you’ve never done any fight training, just know this much: The bag work, the mitt work, kicking pads and drilling your footwork and head movement … it’s all just theory. True practice comes when you take what you think you know and match it against something that hits back. And when you start sparring, it’s a humbling, humiliating experience.

How did this guy just hit me six times and I couldn’t do anything about it? What openings did he see that I wasn’t even aware of? That I couldn’t see on him?

Simple. Once he (or she) was where you are now. He was the one getting hit six times. She was once the one without the experience to spot the openings.

It’s nothing personal, this pounding you’re taking. Or if it is, it’s personal in a good way. You and your sparring partner are actually there to teach each other. True, it’s a hard way to learn. It’s also the only way.

Your partner got through it by doing what you have to now: find something to love about the process. Something you love more than you dislike the discomfort. Something that never gets old, that keeps the experience alive and fresh for you. Something that keeps luring you back from the pits of discouragement.

You get through it by learning to live for the little victories. Maybe next week you only get hit four times in a row. Or she swings and you’re no longer there. Or you nail him with a sweet counter.

And so it is with writing, with every other creative endeavor.

Everything you think you know from books, from blogs, from classes … it’s all just theory. Everything you work up behind closed doors and leave there in the dark, that’s theory too, just another kind … still something you haven’t yet put to the test.

True practice comes from putting it out in the world, daring to risk the vulnerability that goes with this. Feedback readers, critique groups, submissions. Especially submissions. That’s when the ordeal begins. That’s when you have to find the thing you love enough to keep you going despite the rejections, the cheap shots, the indifference, and the clear-eyed recognition of the gap between your work and your ambitions.

That’s when you have to learn to live for the little victories. Do you know how many successful writers have had their day made, their week made, when a rejection came with a personalized note of encouragement from the editor? All of them.

That’s how better happens. By increments and milestones and thinking in timeframes that most people don’t have the patience or guts for.

So put in the time. Take the hits. Keep going.

It does get better. And so will you.

[Photo by Eric Langley]

Awesome people share.

You are awesome, aren’t you…?

We’re a month into 2012 and I’m coming out of January with the kind of momentum I haven’t felt in years. I hope you can say the same. A number of projects have either wrapped up or are heading that way, while others continue to gel, unfold, and germinate. It’s a good feeling, one I would like to sustain.

But you can’t count on this just happening on its own. I’ve made that mistake before, and have the moss-scars to prove it.

No, this is going to take a new level of attention to detail.

Since We Can’t Really Count On The World Ending This Year

Last time we touched on the fulcrum nature of January — how it was named for the Roman god Janus, whose two faces look both forward and behind, to the past and the future. Along with this went with a look back at the five most useful books I read last year.

And now for the year-to-come.

One of the books in that quintet was No B.S. TIme Management For Entrepreneurs, by Dan Kennedy, which I read in early December. Sometimes we encounter the right ideas at just the right time, and the following is one of them. It seems to have a particular resonance for the beginning of a year, when thoughts naturally turn to matters of change and continuity.

Near the end of the book, Kennedy discusses the principle of massive action: making not just one or two changes, but many changes, putting into motion a lot of acts, large and small, whose effects can tally up to much more than the sum of the parts.

Here’s one quick example Kennedy provides:

“I once had a dentist call me, after having gone home from my weekend seminar, and tell me: ‘I’ve made a list of 300 things to change in the practice.’ Every week he did ten of them. After 30 weeks he had done everything on that list, big and small. And, without a penny increase in advertising, without a dollar’s difference in marketing, in the same office, with (almost) the same staff, his practice had more than quadrupled in volume. … When I tell the story, the usual, predictable reaction is astonishment and dismay — ‘Three hundred changes? I’d never get 300 things done.’”

OK, So Pick Your Own Number

First the obvious: A dental practice has a great deal more complexity and variables than a writing career, let alone a writing sideline.

Still. Consider. How much farther along with your writing, or any other creative endeavor, would you be by next New Year’s Eve if you looked for a certain number of things to do, or do better, or eliminate doing, and then made dead sure that you followed up and did those things?

Say, 30 things. Or 20 things. Or even just 10 well-chosen things.

The holes in your game. The things that don’t feel as immediately rewarding. The stuff that may not be much fun at all. Bad habits, sloppy habits. The things you find easy to put off to tomorrow, and the tomorrow after that. Maybe even a few things you’ve never even considered until you sat down and started brainstorming.

Here’s my list. Most of it, anyway. 20 things are for public perusal, while the other 10 are for more private contemplation. But 20 are more than enough to convey the general idea. Big broad things, picky little niggly things, they’re all fair game:

1. Refine and keep to a locked-in schedule of block time that will enable me to get the most important tasks done early in the day.
2. Commit to writing a minimum of 1000 words/day, 6 days/week, all projects combined. (Exception: when revisions take precedence.)
3. Watch semi-colon usage; never use when a  period will do just as well.
4. Ration use of ellipses, since I can really, you know … overdo them…
5. Mightily resist the urge to put something in pop culture catchphrase terms. These age badly. (Exception: if I’m deliberately trying to evoke a specific time.)
6. Respond to all blog comments within 24 hours.
7. Respond to all reader e-mail within 48 hours.
8. Commit to posting here once/week. (Yes, I hear that mocking laughter.)
9. Commit to updating my web site a minimum of every 2 weeks.
10. Always be doing something to warrant an update in the first place.
11. Produce more audio stories like “Extract” — maybe 3/year.
12. Continue to fight the good fight against my counterproductive tendency toward first-draft perfectionism.
13. Review, process, and convert one book/month until my entire backlist is converted to e-book formats.
14. Create an Amazon author page.
15. Network and make at least 5 contacts/week: editors, publishers, etc. Track these.
16. Never finish a project without having another cued up, ready to start.
17. Follow up on/look into further opportunities I’ve had for guest blog posts.
18. Keep the current novel-in-progress as the first priority, and do at least as much work on it per week as other, shorter works.
19. Balance my reading list each month so I’m always getting an optimal mix of fiction, research, education, and inspiration.
20. Figure out some way to harmoniously integrate an at-a-glance box into my web site, gathering links to the news posts on all active projects.

Good luck with your own list. And see you for the followup in, oh, 10 or 11 months.

[Photo by bicameral]

Awesome people share.

You are awesome, aren’t you…?

January is the time to limber up your neck and swivel your head, looking both backward and forward. It wasn’t for no reason that the Romans named it for Janus, the god with two faces, who could manage this bi-directional perspective without risking whiplash.

Today’s post and the next will follow Janus’ example, and it seems only fitting to start by looking backward.

These aren’t necessarily my favorite books that I read last year, although in some cases they are. They don’t have to be about writing per se — only one qualifies on that count. Rather, these are the ones that had the most direct benefits to my life and work as an indivisible whole, and how one meshes with the other. The ones that inspired, that got me to think, that got me to reassess, that got me to take action. The ones that did the best job of leaving me better off for having read them.

May one or more do the same for you in the next twelve months. Click the cover image to teleport to the book’s Amazon page. And if you have any of your own to add, by all means, please share. There’s always more room on the reading list for 2012.

The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield

Over at Steven Pressfield’s blog, in terms of coming from the warrior-poet ethos, he makes me feel like an ROTC cadet standing next to a Green Beret. I think that’s why I was almost frightened of reading this, but it actually had the effect of humanizing him. Nobody, it seems, is immune from emotional and psychological blocks that get in the way of doing the work, and Pressfield has a particularly eloquent understanding of this, which he calls Resistance.

Three main sections: defining Resistance, combatting it, going beyond it. Pressfield proceeds through each with a series of mostly short, sharp observations that read like self-contained meditations. The effect is not unlike the Tao Te Ching, or similar tomes that pack an immense amount of wisdom into a minimum of space.

This is one of those books you can pick up, open anywhere, and derive some immediate good. For the rest of your life.

The 4-Hour Body, by Timothy Ferriss

To my way of thinking, a creator who doesn’t have physical goals in addition to his or her creative projects is neglecting the very vehicle these works need to come to fruition. Which goes back to the heart of the warrior-poet ethos: the development of mind, body, and spirit as one.

Tim Ferriss is the ultimate break-it-down, see-how-it-works, test-for-erroneous-assumptions, put-it-back-together-with-just-the-essential-parts guy. This exhaustively researched and field-tested doorstop of a book serves up dozens of self-contained DIY projects in the areas of fat loss, muscle gain, better sleep, boosting strength/speed/endurance, injury rehab and pre-hab, and much more. Oh yeah, and something about a 15-minute female orgasm. Yeehah.

No exaggeration … there’s enough here to keep you in the ascendant for years.

No B.S. Time Management For Entrepreneurs, by Dan Kennedy

Although a bit technologically dated — in Kennedy’s world, the fax machine still reigns — and there’s a goodly amount of chest-thumping over how successful he is, this is still one of the best books of its type that I’ve read.

For me, one of its strengths is that it spends only a token amount of time coming from the assumption that the reader is but one cog in a company office environment, as many such books do. Instead, the main focus is on the solitary self-starter, the — as the title makes obvious — entrepreneur. And what is a working writer if not a creative entrepreneur?

There are lots of good strategies, tactics, and other ideas here, some of which you’ve no doubt seen and heard before. Some, though, I hadn’t, and everything’s wrapped up in the kind of hard-nosed pragmatism, and thoughts on one’s mental game, that should leave you setting the standards you want to live up to.

The Power of Full Engagement, by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz

Then there’s the school of thought maintaing that if you manage your energies right, time takes care of itself. Energy types are fourfold here: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. Sound familiar?

Loehr and Schwartz come into this after a long history of helping athletes perform their best, and make the eye-opening statement, “The performance demands that most people face in their everyday work environments dwarf those of any professional athletes we have ever trained.” One of their keys to getting a handle on this is developing a greater awareness of your natural rhythms, both circadian (24-hour cycles) and ultradian (90- to 120-minute cycles within the day). Thus, you can better optimize periods of expenditure and renewal, stress and recovery, etc.

Loads of insight and actionable stuff here, augmented with numerous case studies, including that of a writer “facing a highly challenging book deadline that he wasn’t sure he could meet.”

In Praise Of Slowness, by Carl Honoré

“There is more to life than increasing its speed,” said Gandhi.

Maybe I read this at the perfect time, but it really struck a chord. Honoré addresses the deleterious effects on mind, body, business, and society of trying to live and accomplish everything at mad velocity, and how this can actually be counterproductive to real-world effectiveness. He also looks at various global movements that have sprung up in opposition to the cult of speed for speed’s sake, and presents case studies of people who decided to dial it back a few notches and are living more satisfying lives for it.

It’s important to note what this book isn’t: a call to Luddism. Rather, it advocates a better, well-reasoned balance between slo-mo and turbo. Read it, and it will compel you to examine how you pace yourself and why. Just don’t speed-read it.

Bonus Round: Born To Run, by Christopher McDougall

If you read a book and derive just one amazing thing from it, was it worth it? Absolutely!

In truth, there’s probably little actionable stuff that most writers can glean from a book on ultra-long-distance running. And I already covered that One Amazing Thing from this one, in this post on chia seeds. But Born To Run is such an amazing, inspiring book (that can deliver a few lessons on larger-than-life characters) that I’d feel I was cheating you if I didn’t give it one more plug.

[Janus photo by Thierry Ehrmann]

Awesome people share.

You are awesome, aren’t you…?

And you thought it was all over, along with Christmas, New Year’s, and Festivus’ dreaded “Airing of Grievances.”

As the four-part “From The First Draft To The Last” series was winding to a close, reader Turenn, whose request kicked it all off in the first place, came back with a follow-up:

“Is there another danger, though, you can revise too much?”

Funny you should ask. I was already thinking of touching on this very thing.

There’s a great quote by Tom Waits floating around somewhere, whose exact wording eludes me, but the gist of it is this: If you overwork music, if you sterilize and pasteurize it too much, then it loses all its nutrients. And if you compare Waits’ recordings, especially his borderline-primitive stuff from the last dozen years, to the average bright, shiny, auto-tuned, squashed-dynamics shard of pop confection, you’ll understand exactly what he means. One sounds alive and breathing; the other sounds like the sonic equivalent of glare off a windshield.

Now, with the written word, I don’t think of overworking overkill as exhibiting quite the same symptomology. Highly polished work has a tendency to scoot out of its own way and not draw attention to the amount of labor that went into it. But Waits’ point is well taken.

Because, with the revision process, you can definitely hit a point of diminishing returns.

• You’re overdoing it if it grossly interferes with what Seth Godin calls shipping: finishing something up and getting it out the door.
• You’re overdoing it if you’re repeatedly second-guessing yourself over every minuscule detail.
• You’re overdoing it if you find yourself obsessing over what readers might find wrong with your work, instead of what they may find right with it.
• You’re overdoing it if you take a work that in your gut feels more or less balanced, then keep slathering on more words or frantically hacking them away without any clear reason why, other than  that you feel “It needs something, something…”

You get the idea.

Breaking those cycles … knowing when to say when … getting a feel, like a master chef, for the moment the dish has reached its peak … these are mostly matters of instinct and experience.

It takes trust in the process. It takes self-confidence. Sometimes it may even take courage, the courage to tell yourself, “It may not be perfect, but it’s the best I can make it right now.”

This will come. Whether you have sound instincts from the outset, or these sensibilities get honed through practice, it will come.

[Photo by D Sharon Pruitt]

Awesome people share.

You are awesome, aren’t you…?

As we finally bring this behemoth in for a landing, I’m reminded of the old saying: “Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.” What started as a request for a single post turned into … well, you can see how things mushroomed. Thanks again to Turenn for suggesting the topic. Be it hereby known, I’m always open for requests.

In Parts 1 through 3, we began with the misshapen unloveliness of a first draft and put it through an extreme makeover, doing everything within one person’s power to bring it closer to its potential.

Now, finally, comes the time to start letting go…

As in Part 3, there’s some overlap with prior material I’ve written, that can amplify the topic, so look for the Detour link to shoot off on an extended tangent.

The Editorial Process: Angels To Some, Demons To Others

If you’re writing solely for yourself, you can afford to be easily satisfied. If you’re writing for publication, then an editor may be involved. Some editors simply acquire. Others are more hands-on, and give suggestions for revisions. Likewise agents, some of whom initiate an editorial phase of their own. Publication or representation may be contingent on your cooperation.

Personally, I love the give-and-take of the editorial process. If I’ve just finished a piece, I’m too close to it to be objective. A fresh pair of eyes can spot weaknesses I might not see until after a month or more of distance. I find it enormously rewarding to work with a trusted editor to take a work that may be 95% there and bring it the last 5% of the way.

Still squeamish about letting others tamper with your words? Get over it already. To quote agent Donald Maass, he of Part 3’s subsection on micro-tension, from this Q&A:

“Outside readers are needed, critique partners or groups who are at your level or beyond. Professional athletes have coaches. Actors have directors. Rock groups have (for recording) producers and (for performances) musical directors. Why do writers think they can, or even should, go it alone? I don’t get that.”

A few tips on getting the most out of the editorial process:

• Be nice. Be prompt. In other words, be professional.
• Don’t act like a diva. Your every word may not be a precious gem and the editor may actually have a point.
• You don’t necessarily have to roll over on every single issue.
• If you disagree on a requested revision, diplomatically give your reasons why. You may persuade the editor to see it your way.
• Never forget that editors are human. They can get distracted and miss things. If an editor asks for something that’s already there, point out where it is. Just don’t get cocky or contemptuous about it. Be nice.
• If you absolutely can’t live with something an editor demands, cordially withdraw.
• Say thank you, and mean it.
• If you have a conflict with an editor, don’t complain about it on message boards, blogs, etc. Even if it doesn’t get back to the editor in question, it still makes you look like a whiner. EXCEPTION: If an editor and/or publisher has gone to the Dark Side of unscrupulous and unethical conduct. This is fairly rare, but often doesn’t come to light until people start comparing notes.

Some of this seems screamingly obvious. Yet there’s probably not an editor alive who can’t tell stories about the arrogant douchebags who’ve come across their desk. Don’t be the focal point of another such story. Your first encounter can lay the groundwork for a future relationship, or destroy all chances. Ultimately, it’s your work that clinches the deal, but if it comes down to a writer who’s professional to deal with and another who’s a proven pain-in-the-ass, guess who’s likely to get the nod.

Final Draft? There Ain’t No Such Thing!

As my artist friend James Powell is fond of quoting, “Art is never finished. It is merely abandoned.”

Comes the day, then, that I’m forced to abandon a work and let it continue on its way. This becomes, by default, the final draft. This is an arbitrary distinction. The truth is, I can hardly scan through anything of mine without wanting to tweak one more thing, one more thing.

But first publications don’t usually comprise only publications. Novels may come out in new editions. Short stories, novelettes, and novellas get reprinted, some of them several times: in year’s-best round-ups, in later anthologies and magazines. Most eventually get corralled into a collection — my fourth was published last spring, and I’m starting to plan the fifth. Nearly all my books, novels and collections alike, are making the migration into e-book formats.

I seem genetically incapable of letting something go back to print without taking another pass through it to see if anything needs touching up. It’s micro stuff at this point: Word X seems punchier than Word Y; this line of dialogue could ring better; this cultural reference could be updated; and the piece usually sheds a few more unnecessary words. This keeps the work alive and breathing for me, rather than feeling like I’ve only dug it out of a trunk full of mothballs in the attic.

This runs counter to the way some writers approach their work. Once a piece is published, they never touch it again. I have no quarrel with that. It’s just not my way.

Detour: “The Same River Twice.”

Exit Page Right

There are a lot of things that I hope this four-part epic post will be: Helpful. Food for thought. An expanded way of approaching your work. Inspirational. A source for an extra tool or three.

One thing I don’t intend it to be is a checklist.

Format dictates presenting these actions in a logical sequence. In practice, I’m never this logical or sequential. After the first draft, anything can happen in almost any order. Things that may look like distinct stages here more often than not get done simultaneously, in varied combinations, as I go through the novel or story time and again, one pass after another after another.

It isn’t distinct stages so much as a process of continual refinement. To return to the sculpture metaphor of Part 2, it’s chipping away everything that doesn’t look like the horse … and growing new marble where needed.

It’s just my own workflow, no more and no less, and there may be holes in my game. And for closing words, it’s hard to beat these, from Bruce Lee:

“Absorb what is useful, discard what is not, add what is uniquely your own.”

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Our journey until now…

In Part 1, we started big and clumsy, with birthing a misshapen blob of story and getting its core parts in order. Part 2 covered the administrative tasks of internal logic, and the art of language and rhythm.

Now we get into the skills that you can spend a lifetime refining.

More than any other aspects of reshaping a manuscript, these processes rely on sensibilities that develop through experience. They’re about feel and instinct and balance. A sixth sense about the right time and place for something. An inherent grasp of what’s too much and what isn’t enough.

In a couple places, I’ve addressed the topics in earlier posts elsewhere. If you’re interested in burrowing deeper into these subtopics, I’ve linked to PDFs of these essays that will open in new windows. Just look for the Detour links.

The Tangled Web: Better Simplicity Through Complexity

Arguably, this is the trickiest aspect of revising, because it doesn’t involve dealing with what’s there, but instead recognizing what isn’t there and needs to be. I think of it as growing connective tissue throughout the work — a longer work like a novel, especially — providing better meshing between elements that don’t quite hang together yet.

This may include:

Things that seem shallow and need to be deepened. Imagine a novel that heavily relies on an passionate, tempestuous relationship between two characters … but it’s all just smoke and fire, never getting down into the embers that fuel the relationship. If you’re only skating the surface of something that’s supposed to resonate, go deeper. Explore and reveal the why behind the intensity, rather than expecting the reader to take your word for it.

Elements that lack clarity and need further definition. If you’re too close to your work to be objective, this is where a trusted early reader can help. If someone comes back with a report that begins, “But I don’t get why they…”, then that part probably needs another look.

Strengthening story arcs. When a lot is going on, with a disparate cast of characters off doing different things, these subplots often benefit from having their own clear beginnings, middles, and ends. It can help to mentally isolate them and think of them as standalone stories broken up and layered throughout the larger whole.

Foreshadowing and surprise. The farther we get in a work, especially a long one, the greater the likelihood is that we come up with twists and turns that seem to emerge out of nowhere. Sometimes these work as-is. Often, though, they’re outcomes that should be prepared for earlier. If not, it becomes blatant that you’re just making it up as you go along.

Detour: “The Three-Step Process To Surprising Your Readers”

Micro-tension. This is a concept I’ve recently encountered, and it really is a revelation. It’s something that agent Donald Maass discusses at length in books and blog posts. “Tension on every page,” is his mantra, with the end goal being a storyline that pulls you in early and keeps pulling you along.

Think of this as a small, underlying conflict between a character and another character, or himself, or her circumstances or surroundings. Or it may be a prevailing mood, an undercurrent of disharmony. Micro-tension doesn’t remotely imply that you’re writing a thriller. It can be subtle, applying just as well to a romance as an episode of 24.

Enough of my butchery. Seek knowledge at the source. If you don’t pick up Maass’s The Fire In Fiction, at least Google “Maass micro-tension.”

Reinforcing the theme. Sometimes it’s only when we’ve gotten to the end of the first draft that we realize what we’ve really been writing about. A crime novel turns out to be about fractured relationships between fathers and sons; a multigenerational family saga reflects changes in the national character. Armed with this understanding, you’re now in a position to go back through the manuscript and bring out the full potential of the scenes and passages that reflect this unifier.

Cutting: Who Will Survive, And What Will Be Left Of Them?

If you’ve used the gut-dump approach (see part 1) for your first draft, I guarantee you that you don’t need everything you’ve ended up with. And probably with most any other approach as well. The main reason I overstock is to give myself a surplus of raw material to work with. It’s the same principle as censor-free brainstorming: generating 10 ideas to keep the best 3.

Ideally, then, subsequent drafts are going to tighten up and get shorter. While that’s an oversimplification — we’ve seen above that there may be places that need to be further beefed up — it’s likely there will be even more places that can benefit from nipping, tucking, cutting, and compression.

In his most excellent On Writing, Stephen King shares a formula that an editor sent back to him with an early rejection:

Second draft = First draft — 10%

Einstein couldn’t have made that more elegant. And then there’s William Faulkner’s admonition:

“Kill your darlings.”

Not surprisingly, people have floated different interpretations of this. I’ve always taken it to refer to the stuff that’s there for no greater purpose than to tell people, “Hey, look how good I’m writing!”

Detour: “The Delete Key: The Published Writer’s Best Friend”

Just Over The Horizon…

Yup, things have gone fractal again. Two parts became three, and now three have become four.

But there it shall end. With a look at the editorial process and why, for me at least, “final draft” is only a temporary state, Part 4 will definitely bring this series home and put it to bed.

Stay tuned.

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First the bad news: If you thought we were going to be able to wind up this reader-request post today, it looks like we were both mistaken.

The good news? Well, I should hope that the prospect of a Part 3 doesn’t make you peevish.

To recap, Part 1 looked at the process of simply getting down the first draft of a work, warts and all, followed by various broad-stroke troubleshooting that gets the whole ready for more closely focused revisions. Maybe you’ve heard the formula for carving a marble statue of a horse: Get a block of marble and chip away everything that doesn’t look like a horse…? Part 1 is akin to getting your block of marble.

Looking ahead, Part 3 will tackle higher-level refinements.

Here and now, though, we bridge that gap.

This can be a time for courage. Courage, faith, and possibly some potent anti-depressants. One of the hardest things to do as a writer can be to give yourself permission to make a complete hash of things the first time. I know this on a head-level, and on a heart-level still struggle with it.

Fortunately, we’re not working in marble here. Words are endlessly malleable, and there’s nothing about them that can’t be fixed later.

Drudge Report: The Niggly Bits

This is the stuff that isn’t fun, doesn’t feel creative, and isn’t even particularly rewarding. It’s like middle management. But it has to be done, or your work risks coming off like it was written by a mental patient.

Maintaining consistency and continuity. You know how jarring it can be in a movie when, say, a character is handcuffed by the left wrist in one shot, and in the next, he’s cuffed by the right?

Don’t do that.

The longer a work is, and the longer it takes to write, the harder it can be to keep track of every little detail. Sometimes you change things, sometimes you just forget. In the first hundred or so pages of the initial draft of my novel Mad Dogs, the main character’s name kept toggling from “Jamey” to “Jamie.”

Names, spellings, places, colors of hair/eyes/clothing/etc, dates, pieces of backstory … these are just some of the details that can trip you up. Maybe, midway through, you changed the name of the main character’s brother-in-law from Mike to Marc. Maybe you sent your characters north early on, then, for logistical reasons, later decided it would be better to send them west.

Your word processor’s find-and-replace function can help with some of that, but not everything. Don’t trust yourself to keep it all straight in your head. If you need to, keep a master list of details. Map things out, create a day-and-date timeline of events.

Scouting for word repetitions. Without even realizing it, you can get much too fond of a particular word during the initial draft or subsequent layerings. And suddenly there it is, making 4 or 5 appearances on a single page. Prune 3 or 4 of ‘em, or swap ‘em out and give thanks for the thesaurus.

Reading for clarity. In the thick of writing, we know perfectly well what we mean. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always come across on the page. So try reading from the perspective of someone who’s coming at the material without the benefit of living inside your head. Watch out for things like this, when specificity gets lost:

• Who do “he” and “she” refer to, when you’re moving 5 characters around a scene and it’s been a few paragraphs since you ID’d anyone by name?
• What is “it” when your character is juggling 3 different items?
• Where is “there” when you’ve referred to 2 different locations?

And watch for muddled thoughts, especially with characters’ interior tangents. A few years ago I was going through my novel Prototype in preparation for a new edition, and to my withering shame encountered a couple of places where even I couldn’t figure what I’d been trying to say before. If I couldn’t, for sure I couldn’t expect readers to divine the meaning.

Language And Rhythm: Float Like A Butterfly, Sting Like A Bee

For me, at least, this is where the real fun begins. This is where the generic starts evolving into the personal, when you really start leaving your fingerprints all over your own work. You can think of it as developing your own style. I mostly just think of it as working on the things that make you sound more like yourself.

Crafting the flow. Do you read your work aloud? I do. There’s no better way to gauge how dialogue flows, and to pick up on the cadences imbedded in your prose.

For a guy who loves drone music, I’m awfully obsessed with the rhythms and poly-rhythms of language, particularly when it comes to descriptive passages, reflecting states of mind, and so on. It isn’t appropriate for every project, or every page, but when it is, syllables can be like drum beats: one too many or one too few can throw an entire passage out of balance. When I’m focused on rhythm, word choice often comes down to how things flow and sound together. Reading aloud tells me when it’s time to let it keep rolling, and when it’s time to drop the hammer of a period.

Obviously this emphasis on rhythm is going to be more apparent in an oral presentation. Even so, I’m convinced that it infiltrates the subconscious of a reasonably attentive reader; that the voice in her head that follows along picks up on the cues.

For a seasonally appropriate case study, track down a recording of Dylan Thomas reading his story “A Child’s Christmas In Wales,” and listen for the way he turns prose into music. Beautiful.

Punchier choice of words. The world is full of prose that reads as if it has as much enthusiasm for language as a technical manual for repairing an ATM. Actually, I shouldn’t slag off ATM tech manuals with reading one. Maybe they’re riveting.

Still, I don’t think the point is lost. You know the kind of prose I mean: Line after line, paragraph after paragraph, It just lies there being functional, like a beige rug. Do you want to read a beige rug? Neither do I. But it’s easy in the first draft, when you’re focused mainly on getting the story down, to relay it in a pedestrian way that lacks the arc-welding flare of real inspiration.

Some writers stop there, and get away with it. Personally, I’d rather keep working to change the beige rug into a multicolored flying carpet.

The arsenal starts with, but is far from limited to: Unique turns of phrase. Original metaphors and analogies. Dialogue that reads like it came straight over the teeth of real, live people.

Bottom line, I look for more interesting ways to say things.

For a book-length exploration of the subject that’s as entertaining as it is useful, I heartily recommend Spunk & Bite, by Arthur Plotnik. It’s an affectionate rebuttal to Strunk & White’s venerable The Elements of Style, complete with evidence that even E.B. White ignored his own advice on occasion. Here’s part of what I wrote about the book elsewhere, a few years ago:

Plotnik’s assertion is that, in a world increasingly full of distractions, with attention spans as fragmented as cable TV bandwidth, it behooves savvy writers to amplify their signals to better compete with the noise. To use language in ways that will surprise and delight the reader…

…Plotnik covers around 30 elements of language use, and cites examples from a panoply of writers and sources — effective illustrations of the chapter’s topic, usually, but he tosses in the occasional clunker, as well, so one can learn from the toppled face-plants of overreaching writers.

Fortunately, Plotnik never forgets there’s an appropriate time and place for what he advocates, and realizes there’s a fine line between energy and obnoxiousness … should inspire you to take a fresh look at your style, and if it’s been feeling anemic lately, suggests how to furnish it with a shot of adrenaline and a tank of nitrous oxide.

And that’s it for now. Back early next week, to answer the nagging question: Will this really wrap it up, or will it all spawn a Part 4?

[Photo by Casbr]

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And so it came to pass, this past Thanksgiving Day, that reader Turenn asked, “How about a post explaining what you do between your first draft of a story and your last? I would find it helpful, and I think a lot of other writers would, too.”

How about two posts, then? Because (A) I have a feeling this is going to run a tad long, and (B) I’m in a cluster of deadlines at the moment.

So, half now, half in a few days. And first, we begin with a disclaimer…

Why Word Processing Makes The Concept Of Drafts Arbitrary

To be honest, I’m not sure what a draft means anymore. For me, at least, when it comes to what constitutes a draft, the lines got blurry the day that I unboxed that shiny new Mac Classic (2MB memory! 40MB hard drive!) and installed Microsoft Works.

Before then, my earliest works were done on typewriter. Actually, no, they were done in longhand, until I trained myself to start composing directly at the keys. Either way, the concept of draft was more clear-cut then: one complete pass through a story or novel, with minimal tinkering along the way. After which I’d go back to the beginning and run through it all over again.

Drafts, back then, were circular things, like running laps on a track.

Now, though, a passage that used to stand as-is until I circled back around to it might get a dozen reworkings before I get to the end of the whole. Because something about it irks me and doesn’t feel right and I can’t turn loose of it. Or because I tweak it every time I reread it to get back into the mood of the section. Or because I’m in the shower and a new and better way abruptly occurs to me.

Meanwhile, another passage might come out right the first time, and I know to leave well enough alone.

How does twelve drafts of one and a single draft of the other tally up? As long as the seams don’t show, I don’t really care.

The First Draft: The Gut Dump

Informed wisdom says the best way to approach your initial draft is to stampede through it and get the thing down in its entirety, warts and all. Whatever comes to mind, throw it in there and move along. It’s like an argument with someone you love, when you end up dumping everything on them that’s been bugging you.

Despite my sub-draft tendencies mentioned above, I do strive to follow that. Sometimes I prevail. Other times my perfectionist anal-retentive doppelganger takes over and rebels against going ahead to Point E when Points C and D seem so wretchedly warty. We fight a lot.

At any rate, this is a time for not sweating the small stuff. Of not idling at a green light, trying to think of the perfect zingy metaphor or just the right name for a new character entering the picture. Details may be omitted because they rely on research still to be done, or retrieving research that’s already been catalogued. Thus, I leave a lot of holes, and create a lot of placeholders (a simple XXX, usually). Better this than breaking the flow.

Microsoft Word makes it easy to work this way. The highlighter and insert-comment tools are quickly accessible, and help me return to problem areas, and keep track of my in-the-moment thoughts of what will need to be done later.

I may also, in longer works, write stuff out of order. I frequently did this in my crime novel Mad Dogs, which had a lot of intercutting between parallel storylines. Because I tend to write differently from different character viewpoints, it was easier to follow one viewpoint through multiple scenes; then, when I’d exhausted that viewpoint, move to another, rather than continually shift gears.

Triage: Stopping The Hemorrhages Before They Get Worse

It’s done. Somehow. The first draft.

You ever see a movie called Galaxy Quest? It’s a great spoof on the whole Star Trek fan geek culture that follows the cast of a cheesy TV show as they’re forced into genuine interplanetary adventure. There’s a scene where they’re trying to get the hang of operating a teleportation device and, before using it to zap their commander out of danger, test it on a creature that looks kind of like a bulbous, two-legged hippo. Which, on arrival, gets turned inside-out. It’s formless, it’s quivering, it’s squealing, it’s spewing green goo and waving God-knows-what in the air.

The first draft is done! Time to celebrate!

That image has always reminded me of my first drafts.

At this point, the next draft consists mostly of broad-stroke items, much of it structural:

(1) Reordering. If sections have been written out of order, now’s the time to chop up those singular-viewpoint marathon stretches and put them in the proper sequence.

(2) Smoothing the joints. As a consequence of this reshuffling, I may need to smooth out the transitions at the new sectional junctures. While the parts may have flowed together well before, their lead-ins and lead-outs now have a new context, so I may need to tweak the feel of them.

(3) Bust-ups, breakdowns, and liposuction. I may also need to break up things I hadn’t intended to earlier. A chapter may have gone on too long, and feel lopsided compared to the others. If it has an internal cliffhanger or other natural cut-point, or the potential for one, then that’s where I bring down the cleaver. If it doesn’t, then I may start looking at ways of extracting some of the content and relocating it elsewhere, like a plastic surgeon siphoning off fat from someone’s rump and injecting it in the (upper) cheeks.

(4) Plugging the holes. If I’ve left holes for research or other details that weren’t handy at the time, this is the point I’ll start plugging them. While first writing, there’s no good reason to jam on the breaks to track down, say, the distance on the Ohio River between Louisville, KY, and the point it meets the Mississippi (378 miles). Yep, that came up this week.

(5) Fact-checking. Sometimes I’ll spout off with some fact or other that I think I remember correctly, but wouldn’t bet my life on it. Good thing, too. If I did make that bet, I’d’ve been dead years ago. This primarily cosmetic breather between hardcore drafts is a good time to go back and use Google and my reference and research texts to avoid unnecessarily embarrassing myself.

Now The Real Work Begins

So now the tale has form. It doesn’t squeal or quiver as much. The green goo has been mopped up and the waving is starting to look friendly.

None of which means it’s anywhere close to being ready for the eyes of the world.

Back in a few days, when we’ll finish the journey from raw potential to vibrant life.

[Top photo by CLMinc]

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Imagine, for a minute, that you’re in the middle of an expedition through some of the most remote and unforgiving country on the planet. Specifically, the Copper Canyons in Mexico’s Sierra Madre mountains. By late afternoon, under a pulverizing sun, you’re done in. You’re toast. Hungry, thirsty, barely able to put one foot in front of the other…

And you’re still looking at a 2000-foot climb just to return to the safety of your camp before nightfall.

This is not a hypothetical situation. This was a day of the life of Norwegian explorer Carl Lumholz, in the 1890s.

Back to your plight: When hope seems lost, salvation comes in the guise of a woman of the Tarahumara tribe, whose cave you chance across. She whips up a citrusy, kinda goopy concoction that you pour down your parched throat. And then:

“I at once felt new strength, and, to my own astonishment, climbed the great height without much effort.” (1)

Modern day. You’re you again. Assuming you could even find out what the basis of this miracle drink was, how hard would you try to locate it, considering its potency? How much would you pay for it?

Here’s what I pay: $5.99 a pound from the bulk bin at our local Sunflower Market. Some weeks, $3.99 on special.

Rescuing Ancient Wisdom From ‘80s Kitsch

What Lumholz discovered that day was a drink known to his hostess as iskiate. In Spanish, a chia fresca. Nothing more than water, a splash of lime juice, maybe a bit of sweetener, if you insist, and a healthy dollop of chia seeds.

Chia Bart. Don’t ask why.

Now, if chia has any association to you at all, it’s more likely as a punchline. This would be due to the kitschy, it-came-from-the-‘80s Chia Pet, a terra-cotta planter meant to be slathered with wet seeds. Before long, the sprouts look like a green afro. Don’t ask why. There is no good why.

A shame, really. This goofy knick-knack obscures chia’s multi-millennia legacy as a nutritional powerhouse.

It was all green afros to me, too, until a few months ago, when I heard author Christopher McDougal interviewed about his book Born To Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen. It’s an amazing book, full of larger-than-life characters and gob-smacking evocations of what human beings are capable of. Early on, McDougal paints an eye-opening portrait of this dietary staple of the Tarahumara, some of the most impressive runners in human history:

“In terms of nutritional content, a tablespoon of chia is like a smoothie made from salmon, spinach, and human growth hormone. As tiny as those seeds are, they’re superpacked with omega-3 [fatty acids], omega-6s, protein, calcium, iron, zinc, fiber, and antioxidants. If you had to pick just one desert island food, you couldn’t do much better than chia … after a few months on the chia diet, you could probably swim home.

“Chia was once so treasured, the Aztecs used to deliver it to their king in homage. Aztec runners used to chomp chia seeds as they went into battle, and the Hopi fueled themselves on chia during their epics runs from Arizona to the Pacific Ocean. The Mexican state of Chiapas is actually named for the seed.”

As very few of us here are likely to sprint across state lines for the nearest ocean, what’s the connection? So glad you asked…

Creative Work Demands More Than Time

Chia seeds (middle). Nature’s way of saying, “Red Bull? We don’t need no stinking Red Bull.”

Of course you’re busy. I know, because I’m busy. We’re all busy. I know only one person who isn’t busy, and wouldn’t have his life for anything. Even when your art is your primary occupation, unless you’re a total hermit, the world is not your friend when it comes to accommodating your need for time devoted to creating. Often, this is time you have to fight for, like your life depends on it … because in one sense, it does.

Yet doing the work is a factor of more than effective time management. It’s at least as much a factor of effective energy management. One more time, with feeling:

Doing your creative work, and living the life you want around it, is at least as much a factor of effective energy management.

Balance can be a tricky thing to achieve; trickier still to maintain for very long. It’s sooo easy for one thing or another — family, job, art, name your own — to suffer a deficit of quality attention. Something’s always at the end of the line, getting the scrappy leftovers.

So anything I can find to give myself more of an edge in that area, without a downside, is worth exploring.

• Sugar? Downsides.
• Coffee by the gallon? Downsides.
• Methamphetamine? Major downsides.
• Chia seeds? No downsides.

To the contrary, only more upsides. Here are some additional benefits of chia that McDougal lists: “building muscle, lowering cholesterol, and reducing your risk of heart disease.”

Okay, maybe one tiny downside. Dry, chia seeds are crunchy, with a nutty taste. But left submerged for a while, they absorb 7 — 10 times their mass in liquid, so they get to looking a bit like frog eggs, and the concoction turns gelatinous.

For a medically-approved crash course, here’s Dr. Mehmet Oz endorsing chia for energy.

And here’s Dr. Nicholas Perricone succinctly explaining why it works so well for long-term results.

Energy For Your Life = Energy For Your Art

I first began putting chia seeds to the test with the Saturday morning conditioning classes that supplement my practice of Krav Maga. It’s a grueling hour of circuit training that usually involves some combination of aerobics; running; strength, cardio, and plyometrics stations; and heavy bag work.

A chia fresca. No worries, it only looks like pond water.

Two tablespoons in a bit of oatmeal makes a noticeable difference … and not just with the energy level during class, but for the rest of the day, as well. Recovery time is cut down to almost nothing, and I’ll graduate to the rest of the day feeling little or no drain.

The same quantity in a chia fresca prior to two hours of Krav training — which routinely uses exhaustion drills — is the best fuel I’ve found.

And if your energy demands aren’t quite this aggro? Chia could well have you covered anyway.

I find that on my more sedentary days, one or two tablespoons in a midday smoothie pretty much eliminates afternoon slumps.

Ashley Kumpula, an editor I sometimes work with, balances office life with distance running. Here’s her workday experience with chia seeds:

“I learned about them about a month ago, and I absolutely love them. I’ve been throwing them into Greek yogurt for breakfast every day. It keeps me full for hours. I can’t believe how nutritious they are.”

Everything takes time. Everything takes energy. We all get the same 24 hours, but we don’t all have the same energy reserves. Fortunately, that’s something you can tweak. And deeper reserves means more for everything that matters … including your art, regardless of whether it’s one of the main focuses of your life or has to wait for other things that come first.

Life is rarely a literal 2000-foot climb at the end of a long, hot day. It only feels that way sometimes.

And if a handful of seeds can help you ascend your heights, who cares if other people abuse them for the sake of green afros?

(1) Carl Lumholz, Unknown Mexico: A Record of Five Years’ Exploration Among the Tribes of the Western Sierra Madre

[Top photo by John Fowler]

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