Novels

Salvaging a Fail

It happens. Every novel I start begins in a surge of excitement and a sense of infinite possibilities. Then, as I work, those possibilities start to shrink down with every choice I make. Certain plot twists become impossible, certain characters prove to be less than fascinating and are phased out, certain ideas get pushed aside.

Along with those dwindling options in your story you also start to get a sense of whether or not the story is working. As much as writers are often poor judges of their own material and rely on other people’s feedback, we generally do have a handle on whether the book is even working on a fundamental level. There might be some serious denial going on, of course, but deep down you know. And sometimes you get the ominous feeling that this book you’ve been working on for six months, this book that now has tens of thousands of words in it simply isn’t working. You have a thing that looks like a book but is really a shambolic mess.

Or maybe that’s just me. When a novel that I’ve invested time and energy into starts slipping through my fingers like a castle made of sand, I don’t just give up, because I like to finish things—because you publish exactly zero of the projects you don’t finish. Instead, I try to come up with a solution to save the day.

Finish Him

My choice of solution varies depending on how far along I am.

Almost a Novel. If I’m three-fourths through the plot and the work is already or close to book-length, I just push through. Just because a novel is terrible is no reason to just not finish it—as long as you’re close to the end. If I think I just need a few more weeks to polish this turd into a novel-shaped thing, I go on and put that work in, because at least I’ll have a book at the end of it.

Halfway to a Novel. On the other hand, sometimes you realize that you’re writing something awful much earlier. If there’s a lot of work left to make this into a novel-length story, I’ll usually abandon that goal and focus instead on coming up with a resolution to the story that ties everything up in a much shorter time span. Better to have a novella than nothing at all.

A Complete Mess. If I’ve got a lot of words and not much else, I’ll lower my goals to simply extracting something from the pile. Maybe the first chapter—when I was inspired and focused—could work as a standalone short story. Maybe a middle section could work on its own. If there’s nothing worth pulling out then I’ve really screwed the pooch, because that means there’s literally no contiguous set of a few thousand words worth reading in the whole thing and I should reconsider my application to Clown College.

That last scenario almost never happens, though, because there’s almost always something worth saving. A few years ago I started work on a novel that’s been up and down quite a bit. I originally cut it off and Went Novella on it when the story lost steam, but then I went back and thought I had a solution to the book’s many problems. I doubled the word count and yes, it’s a novel now, but it still isn’t a good novel.

Still, I’d rather have a finished novella and novel out of it than a swamp of messy words. I may never publish either version of that story, but at least with finished, somewhat polished work the possibility of publishing it in some form remains.

Whether or not the world benefits from publishing those stories is an issue our future alien overlords will have to determine when they sift through the ashes of our culture.

The Long and Winding Road

In a few weeks I’ll finish revising the second novel I’ve completed in 2018 (technically they were both completed in 2017 in terms of first drafts, and now they’re both hitting a “presentable” polished stage, meaning I can inflict them on my long-suffering agent). This isn’t unusual for me; since 1988 or so I’ve completed 44 novels, and it’s not at all strange for me to finish 2-3 in a calendar year. Of course, that doesn’t mean they’re good novels; of those 44, after all, I’ve published 10 (one self-published), and at the moment there’s only 3 unpublished novels that have any chance of seeing the light of day (and that number includes the 2 I’m discussing here).

That’s me, that’s my process. I’m a write-it-all-and-figure-it-out-later kind of guy. I draft quickly, pants my way through plot, and as a result I have a high failure rate in terms of having top-notch material ready for my agent. I’m okay with that, because it’s just naturally how I work. By the time I figure out that a novel’s not working out I’m 80% of the way through it and my compulsive need to finish things kicks in.

The two novels I’m finishing up right now are really good, I think. And they’re interesting because they were both born, originally, as short stories written in 1992. Which, if you’re keeping score at home, was 26 fucking years ago.

I am old.

The Glorious Year of Glad

So, 26 years ago I wrote a story called The Hollow Men and a story called The Only Time. One was sci-fi, and one was sort of a dark thriller that wasn’t speculative but felt speculative, is the best way I can describe it.

I never sold either story as a short, but they lingered with me. The Only Time I tried to work into a novel in 1999, and to be honest I really liked that book at the time. A few years ago I was thinking about my journey with The Electric Church (which was originally written in 1993, then revised in 2004 into the version that sold to Orbit Books), so I dusted off that 1999 draft of The Only Time to see if similar magic might be done, but I wasn’t too happy with it in the cold light of middle age, so I started re-working it entirely in 2016, combining it with another concept. I finished that draft in 2017 and, frankly, hated it. The mixture of concepts didn’t work, and the earlier chapters had a different tone and feel because they hued closer to the earlier draft.

The Hollow Men just sat on my hard drive for decades. I always liked the core story, but even shortly after finishing it I realized it was juvenelia—one of those stories you write as a kid because you think it’s “cool” and “edgy” when it’s really just pointlessly nihilistic. But the basic concept stayed with me, and I finally decided in 2015 to try to expand the story into a novel. 60,000 words later, I had a hot stinking mess of a story. There was some great stuff in it, but one of the big reveals in the latter part of the plot turned out a bit more ridiculous than I’d expected.

I worked on it again in 2016, changing the big reveal to something more speculative and out-there. This didn’t work either.

Finally, I started revising again last year. The book had bloated up a bit, so I started cutting out unnecessary stuff, shifted a few parts around, and removed all explicit references to the speculative aspect while leaving it in invisibly—in other words, I know what’s behind everything, but it’s no longer stated in the story, and that works so much better y’all.

So: I wrote two shorts stories in 1992. In 2018, I’m finishing up novel-length versions of each and you would be hard-pressed to see the connections between them. The novels are so different from those original stories you’d never guess in a million years th related in any way.

And that’s writing, sometimes. The evolution of ideas is harsh. You cut ruthlessly. You sand and hone endlessly. Details erode away to reveal new details. Characters and entire subplots get deleted, shifted around, rendered invisible. And sometimes it take more than a quarter-century to take an idea and make it into a book.

Never Bulk Up

So you have an idea for a novel. You carve out some time to work on it, you put thought and care into the story, the characters, the setting. You diligently pound out words. And when you’re done, your story is 25,000 words long. It’s clearly not a novel. What do you do?

a) Go back and start ginning up material to bulk it up into book-length proportions

b) Accept that you’ve written a novella

Neither of those choices is going to be correct 100% of the time, but in general I’d argue that you’re almost always much better off choosing option B. Because bulking up a story is usually a very easy way to wind up with a really, really terrible novel.

No More Words

Let’s backtrack a bit and admit that there are scenarios where bulking up a manuscript makes sense. For example, if you have something that’s borderline when it comes to word count and your agent or publisher says they think they can sell it except it needs 5,000-10,000 more words to make publishers see it as viable in the market, that’s a good reason. Or if someone whose opinion you trust says that the book needs something that naturally adds bulk, that can be a good reason too.

In both of those scenarios, the novel is almost there and adding material isn’t a Herculean task, and arguments can be made that the bulking up is beneficial. But when you’re just pouring in words like so much concrete just to hit a random word count you’ve decided is important—well, that’s everything that’s wrong with using word counts as a literary metric in the first place.

Because sometimes when you hit THE END and you’ve got a novella, that’s because your story should be a novella. And yes, novellas are hella hard to publish unless you’re already somewhat successful, and yes, maybe you’re disappointed because you wanted it to be a novel. But some of the best stories of all time were actually novellas—and even some books marketed as novels are really novellas. Point in fact, my first novel, Lifers, is borderline: It’s about 40,000 words. Would it have been improved if I wrote an additional 30,000 words? Absolutely not. It would have become the go-to example whenever writers were discussing noodling.

Now, if more story occurs to you naturally and you want to revisit a short work with more material, no reason not to. But dumping in words just to bulk up a story is a terrible idea. Don’t do it.

Unless someone’s paying you to do it. My advice is to always do things you’re paid to do, no matter how ill-advised, illegal, or ill-conceived.

The Dystopian Shock

Dystopias are always popular in science fiction, for a variety of reasons. Number one, of course, is that there’s depressingly little play in being optimistic about the future. People who go around talking about how the future will be awesome and all our problems will be solved get derided as soft-headed hippies, while people who are all doom and gloom about our fate are taken very, very seriously. Number two, dystopias are fun. Utopias are boring. Which is also why we immediately become suspicious whenever a SFF book depicts an apparent utopia—because we figure it’s got to be a ruse, and thus actually a dystopia. Otherwise, why write the damn book?

Dystopias also give the writer a junkyard sandbox to play around in; world-building is tough because you have to figure out how everything works and trace the development of concepts and traditions. But in a dystopia, the world is broken. Things aren’t working correctly. You can smash stuff and leave things unexplained, you can shrug and leave a mess behind and your readers will just assume it’s part and parcel of a broken world (to an extent—there’s always a limit to stuff like this).

Dystopia Now!

But another big reason dystopias are effective is the shock factor. You’re going about your day, living in a world that is far from perfect and which is filled with injustice, but isn’t precisely a dystopia—yet. And then you start reading and suddenly you’re faced with a world where everything has been perverted and ruined, where basic human rights are discarded and everything is terrible. It’s like walking into WalMart.

Because in real life, dystopias happen gradually. You’re not going to wake up tomorrow to find fascist troops outside your door instructing you to donate your mandatory spittle quota to the Great Leader. That’s the end of a decade or three of slow frog-boiling. In real life, you never notice the dystopia you’re living in because it just creeps up on you. When you crack open a book, suddenly you’re dropped into a dystopia and it’s a shock. A horrifying shock that transmits power from your story directly to the reader. When handled well it’s an incredibly effective moment.

The difficulty comes in maintaining that shock and channeling the energy of it to the plot. When a reader starts your story and experiences that rush of virtual anxiety that comes from experiencing a dystopian society, you’ve got to take that response and use it to push them forward in your story. If you don’t get them involved in the story quickly, the shock dissipates. They get used to the horrorshow of a society you’ve presented them with. This happens in real life, too; even when society’s decline happens in a fairly sudden, stomach-flipping lurch, people find ways to define a new normal and get their sea legs, and the frog boiling begins again.

Please note I don’t encourage you to actually boil any frogs. Even in the name of science! that’s kind of horrible.

The Elevator Pitch Test

One of the most sobering and terrifying moments for first-time novelists is when their agent or publisher demands a synopsis of their book. Boiling the story down to a very, very short but coherent synopsis is much harder than you might think, and if you polled a room full of writers about their least favorite aspect of professional fiction, the synopsis will absolutely be in the top three.

If you think it’s easy, try it on any novel you’re familiar with. Go on, we’ll wait.

The thing is, the synopsis is a useful tool, and not just for marketing purposes. In fact, one of the best things you can do for any steaming-fresh manuscript is to sit down and try to work out the “elevator pitch” for your plot.

Thirty Seconds to Glory

An Elevator Pitch is a fast, effective, razor-sharp description that can be rattled off in the time it takes for an elevator ride. The basic idea is a salesperson or other employee who finds themselves riding the elevator with their boss or a potential client—they have thirty seconds to pitch them, so they need to have that pitch ready to go, written, practiced, and perfected.

One thing you need to know about the book you just wrote is whether or not the plot works, and unfortunately you’re probably too close to it to truly know the answer to that question. Letting your book sit for a while will help, because time will erode your memory of it and you’ll come back to it a bit fresh, but working up an Elevator Pitch for your plot—basically, writing the plot synopsis long before anyone actually asks you to do so—is even better. It offers up three distinct benefits:

1. It will reveal plot obscurities: If you can’t find a simple way to convey a concept, chances are no one will understand what you did there.

2. It will exposed logical fallacies: Sometimes we’re so intent on getting from Plot Point A to Plot Point C we overlook the fact that Plot Point B makes zero sense—or simply doesn’t exist.

3. It will give you a hint as to the marketability of your book: Even if you don’t care about commercial success, if you can’t give potential readers a short, punchy reason to read the book, you won’t have any readers.

So, start boiling. The fewer words you need to convey the basic spine and tone of your novel, the more successful a novel it is. If you find yourself writing a second novel to explain your novel, something has gone horribly wrong.

Surviving a Novel: Diversionary Tactics

In a lot of ways, Plotting and Pantsing aren’t such different approaches to writing a novel. Really, they’re just time-shifted ways of doing the same thing. Plotters try to work it all out in advance, Pantsers try to just let inspiration be their guide, but either way you find yourself at the same plot moments, and you’ll struggle at similar points when you’ve written yourself into a bit of a corner.

Every writer, whether staring down at a neat outline or riffling through hundreds of pages of already-completed manuscript, has hit that moment when they don’t know what happens next in their plot. Sometimes you’ve maneuvered your characters into a spot you can’t get them out of, sometimes you just don’t know what to throw at them next, or how to get from A to B.

When that happens to me, I save my file, close it, open a blank file, and start a short story.

Outfoxing Myself

The brain is a wonderful thing, and it’s going to keep working on your story even when you’re not consciously thinking about it. Sometimes, though, when you’re staring at a problem you get in your own way. The best thing to do is to trick yourself.

When I start a short story in the middle of a novel, it’s like hitting the reset button, because my brain shoots back into Beginning Mode, where the blank page is all possibility, instead of Problem Mode, where the blank page is all block and confusion. I get back to that crazy energy at the beginning of any story, when you’re excited and the story could branch off into any of a zillion possible routes. It’s very cathartic when I’ve been stuck on a plot point for a long time.

It doesn’t matter what the story is about, or whether it turns out to be any good. All that matters is that I take a break from my current plot problem and think on something else for a while. Just about every time I try this technique, I come back to my novel with a new idea for solving whatever plot problem I’ve been wrestling with. It’s basically tricking yourself, but it works.

Plus, you get a bonus short story that maybe you can sell somewhere. Or, sometimes, a rambling short story that ends with everyone dying in a plane crash because that story also led you to a maddening dead end. In writing, it’s often turtles all the way down—or, you know, instead of turtles, failed stories. I need a drink.

Surprise Yourself

One mistake a lot of writers make is to forget to look at their work like a reader. Writing requires a certain mind-frame, a distancing from your subject matter. You have to be a sort of dispassionate god of your fictional universe, moving chess pieces around and casually destroying villages and slaughtering populations, putting your hero in jail or murdering their wives.

But you can take that distance too far and get lost in your own references, your own cleverness, your own intricate technique. And you can get too attached to the plot you think you’re writing, and ignore the fact that it’s not working and getting less and less interesting, because you’re thinking too much like a writer, impressed with how you’re solving plot problems that a reader would never even see.

If you’re finding the book to be a bit of a struggle, if you’re less and less excited about what you’re doing, it’s time to step back and think more like a reader—and surprise yourself with a plot move that even you weren’t expecting.

When I was a very, very young novelist I wrote a sci-fi novel—the first novel I sold, technically (there was a contract, but the company went out of business before it could publish)—and I got bogged down halfway through, uncertain of where I was going. So I suddenly had the main character arrive at a planet where magic appeared to work in a standard sort of epic fantasy setting. And it was delirious and insane, but it got me super excited about how to tie everything together, and that’s what led me to finish the novel.

The Crazy Ivan

This sort of out-of-left-field plot device is a bomb that blows up your narrative, of course. You were writing a police procedural thriller, and suddenly vampires show up and start tearing people apart. You were working on an epic fantasy about a religious war in a universe where the gods are alive and involved like the old myths, and suddenly it’s revealed as a holographic illusion that’s contracted a computer virus. All your careful plans, ruined.

But ruined in an exciting way, because for a moment you’re just as amazed and stunned as the reader would be—and that’s powerful. You get a glimpse of what it would be like to actually read your novel without any idea of what’s coming.

And, sure, it’s probably disaster. Those kinds of crazy swerves can destroy the clockwork of your universe, undermine characters, and generally sow nothing but chaos. But if your story isn’t working anyway, why not? Throw some magic into a hard-sci fi world, and see what happens.

Or get really, really drunk. That sometimes works too.

Doing NaNoWriMo? Don’t Look Back

So, it’s once again National Novel Writing Month. I’ve never personally attempted NaNoWriMo; my personal best for writing an entire novel is about three months, but that was back in my youth when my brain was more plastic and I had more of it, and also not coincidentally back before I had the Internet and enough money in the budget for decent whiskey. These days I’m not sure I have enough of either to write a book in a month.

That doesn’t mean I have no advice for you if you’re attempting NaNoWriMo yourself. Because that’s sort of what I do these days: I write novels, I wrote about other people’s novels, and I write about how to write novels. So here’s my advice for anyone attempting NaNoWriMo this year: Don’t look back.

Head Down, Hands on Keyboard

That means don’t revise. Don’t reconsider. Don’t think too hard. The NaNoWriMo train only goes in one direction: Forward.

The moment you start to wonder if the scene you just wrote matches up with what you wrote two weeks ago, you’re lost, bub. If you’re going to end the month on THE END and 50,000 words, you’ve got to just keep writing. Get to the end. Place scene after scene until you have a plot.

Because that’s what revision is for—that’s what National Novel Editing Month is for. Your NaNoWriMo book might be a hot mess, but if it’s recognizably a book you win The Internet and get to go back and spend the next month (or year, or years) fixing it up and making it into something great. But to get there you can’t get bogged down in details like, Does my story make sense?, or, Do my characters read like real people instead of Internet contraptions? Those kinds of questions will kill your forward momentum and leave you with 20,000 words that filter through your fingers like sand.

Plus, that sort of writing is fun. Even if you’re an inveterate Plotter, just saying yippee-kay-yay, motherfuckers and tapping away at the keyboard while giggling like a Batman supervillain is invigorating. No, it doesn’t always mean great writing, but it does give you a chance at finishing your novel.

Although I’d keep the cursing and giggling to a minimum if you’re writing in a public space, he said from no personal experience whatsoever.

Keeping Right in Sight

I’m a shaggy, ragged, disorganized Pantser of a writer, usually. I like to take a red-hot idea, still glowing from the forge and dive in, making a mess. If a draft gets to a point where it’s clearly going somewhere but I’ve lost my through-line, I’m happy to step back and apply some serious Plantsing to the story, but my preferred way to write a novel is to just dive in without any prep or research. Like they say in the movies, if there are any problems we can fix them in post.

What this means is simple: The joy of the first draft is that you don’t have to get it right. You just have to keep right on the map.

A Room with a View of Right

Some writers are perfectionists, of course; some don’t even start writing words until they’ve planned out every detail. And bully for them, but I’ll never be that, no matter how attractive it is in theory sometimes (usually when I’m halfway through a fifth of bourbon and weeping openly over my keyboard because I just realized even I don’t understand my plot any more). And you know what? It’s okay to realize in the middle of a first draft that you’ve made some serious errors, and nothing is quite right with it. Because you can fix it all later.

The key though is to keep right in sight. There is a point where a story is so screwed up, filled with bad writing and poor plot decisions (and possibly a lot of notes that say [FILL IN LATER]) where you’re better off just giving up on a draft. That point is different for every writer, and it’s kind of a personal thing you have to figure out for yourself. Just know it does happen.

Short of that, though, you don’t need anything close to good in a first draft. You just need to be able to see good from the hole you’re digging. As long as you can, you can eventually map out a route to it.

Sometimes this will involve cutting thirteen chapters and introducing a new character. Sometimes it just requires line-by-line adjustments to eliminate references. And it almost always requires liquor. If you don’t indulge in substances, friendo, I don’t know how you write novels. I really don’t.

The Less is More Approach to World Building

I’m a writer who believes fervently that less is more in just about every aspect of writing a novel. Nothing you write will ever beat the magic movie machine that is your readers’ imaginations, and the more you let your reader infer, imagine, and guess at what lies behind stuff, the better your universe, characters, and mechanics will be.

Not every writer agrees, of course, and some of them are extremely successful. Some writers want to invent languages with complex grammars and extensive vocabularies. Or write book-length histories that will never be published. In other words, some writers are Method and want to have all this stuff under the surface that informs their work. That’s fine, but it’s not me, and if it’s not you, you have to be honest with yourself. The problem we all run up against is that the folks who believe more is, well, more are often the ones that get all the attention.

Seems Like Work

I’ll admit to being jealous of the folks who can invent languages and adapt existing religions into a wholly new form for their novels, but I’m also not very interested in doing so—unless those things are the point of the story I’m telling. When it comes to languages, specifically, I prefer to invent a few words, hint at a grammar, and leave it at that. In fact, for almost all the details of world-building I prefer to use hints and shadows instead of details and pages and pages of detail.

Part of this is admitting that you have to write the stuff that excites you and not the stuff that bores you, because your attitude towards your own material will come off the page like radiation. The other part is the diminishing returns of details: At first your reader will be excited to learn about the fundamentals of your universe, but familiarity breeds contempt, and if you don’t withhold some of the information you run the risk of your reader seeing you behind the curtain madly pulling levers, and the magic is gone.

The TL;DR version is: Don’t force yourself to do world-building work you don’t want to. It’s never worth it.

This applies to household chores, too, which is why I turned my crawlspace into one huge cat litter box. It’ll be years before I have to burn this place down, change my name, and start over.