Writing

As writers, many of us turn to Beta Readers to get objective, informative feedback on our work. I don’t use Beta Readers very often, because I dread that moment when someone brings me the slightly damp stack of paper I’ve handed them and starts asking uncomfortable questions, like

Why is this hardcopy in the year 2020?

or

Did you misspell the word ‘calisthenics’ on purpose throughout? Also, do you think calisthenics is a kind of telepathic power, because that’s how you use the word throughout this story.

or

Did you include an entire recipe for goulash in the middle as a metatextual commentary on your main character’s food obsessions or did you accidentally hit CTRL-V and never noticed because you obviously did not proofread this?

You get the point. But I totally see the utility of Beta Readers, and fully encourage their use. Betas can be incredibly helpful in clarifying your weak points — and encouraging you by pointing out what’s working.

In terms of useful partners in the service of improving your writing, something else most of us can use is a Beta Reader for reading.

Let’s Get Weird

One of the most important things a writer can do is read. Reading a lot of books in the genres and styles you work in can help you improve your writing and make it more marketable. Reading outside your comfort zones can improve your writing and make it more interesting.

The latter can be challenging. We all have blind spots, and we all have comfort food when it comes to books and stories and other reading. Even when we make an effort to read authors from diverse backgrounds, or genres we’re not familiar with, we can easily fall into patterns that dilute the effectiveness of the strategy.

Having someone who will gently guide you to books you’d never normally consider reading — a Beta Reader for Reading — can be a tremendous help. My own BRR is my wife, the formidable Duchess. The Duchess reads voraciously, and reads books I wouldn’t normally get anywhere near. But when she really enjoys a book, she puts it on my TBR pile and insists we have a mini two-person book club about it. And because she is The Duchess and she is formidable, I pretty much have to.

The results are good: I read books I wouldn’t normally read, or even glance at. I don’t always love them, but that’s not the point: My world is widened, slightly, but reading them. Having someone who is willing to push my reading boundaries and come at them sideways is a powerful way to do that, to make your reading count more.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to practice using my calisthenic powers to make bottles of beer float over to me, or die trying.

I know this will come as a shock to you, but I have a pretty healthy self-regard. I like myself, a lot. Other people? Not nearly so much. Cats? It’s close … but I still win.

That doesn’t mean I’m not well aware of my flaws, and there are many. Many, many flaws. In fact, it’s probably not crazy to say I am more or less 90% flaw at this point. If I was grading myself as a person, I’d give myself a solid C minus. And yet! I am still my own favorite person. I think this is healthy.

The reason this comes up is because one of my many, many flaws is a tendency to get inside my own head and be a walking Bubble. This means that I sometimes lose objectivity, because I do things a certain way and I’m the only one aware of it, so there’s no pushback. There’s no one there to tell me I’m full of shit.

Which is fine if it’s just me, wearing an old school backpack as underwear and generally living like an animal, as one does. The problem comes when this sort of Bubble Thinking makes its way into your writing, because the worst time to discover you have some very strange blind spots is immediately after you’ve pressed PUBLISH on a story or novel.

AAYAAJ

Here’s the rule: Always Ask Yourself ‘Am I a Jackass?’

Look, we all get some strange ideas, habits, and attitudes. Normally, social interaction will correct these over time. You go out with other human beings and pick your nose at the dinner table, someone will gently correct you. If you go out on a date with someone and tell them that you believe the world is flat and secretly ruled by the Moon Men, they will probably correct you. Or back away slowly while dialing 9-1-1, but either way you at least get the general sense you’ve fucked up, and over a long enough timeline this should lead to introspection and adjustment.

But sometimes we manage to smuggle some serious weird shit into our writing, and if we never question it, it’s gonna get published that way. And you may not even be aware of your odd attitude towards women, or ethnicities, or economics. That is, until you publish a book filled with pervy male-gaze bullshit or elaborate justifications for racism or secret Moon Men conspiracy theories presented as fact, and that correction comes far too late.

This isn’t an endorsement of censorship, self- or otherwise. But when you’re working in the silence of your own brain, it’s easy to sometimes to lose objectivity and believe some seriously Moon Man-esque stuff. The challenge is that when you are your only audience for ideas, it seems like it all makes sense — until you unleash those views and crash into reality.

I read a lot of books. Some for pleasure, some for work. I get sent a ton of ARCs and galleys and such. And I can’t tell you how often a writer — usually, though not always, self-published, because when you self-publish you sometimes lack the people who are being paid by someone other than yourself who will be happy to tell you how full of shit you are — will drop a nuclear bomb of insanity in the midst of their story, and do so casually because they assume everyone shares their serene opinions, or their way of describing women, or their theories on proper behavior. A single conversation with another human being might have demonstrated how wrong they were, and saved us all a lot of trouble.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to finish my story about how everyone is mean to middle-aged white writers because we are universally awesome.

Research. Some writers love research, and dive into it with relish, excited to learn everything they can about whatever subject they’re digging into. Some hate research and its superficial similarity to schoolwork, finding it more fun to just make stuff up. And many of us writers fall somewhere in the middle, moving up and down on the spectrum depending on our goals for the day and our level of hungover-ness.

And that’s fine. Like everything else in writing, there’s a spectrum. Sometimes research is the key ingredient to verisimilitude, sometimes you can get by on a fine mist of bullshit. Sometimes you start a book thinking you can get by without research and then have to shift gears halfway through when your bullshit fails you, and sometimes your research into a subject actually kills your interest in writing about it.

The only reliable way to screw up research is to show your work.

S-M-R-T

Research can be hard work, and invariably your research will lead you to knowing way more about a subject than your story probably requires. But that’s how it goes: You’re writing a story with a character who is a beekeeper, and you realize you need at least a passing familiarity with beekeeping to pass the smell test. So you start reading, and three weeks later you emerge visibly thinned and malnourished but just bursting with beekeeping knowledge.

After your stay in the hospital, you come out better able to write that story. But suddenly the three or four passing details that give your beekeeping character a sense of realism seems kind of a waste. You are, after all, now an expert. You worked hard for this knowledge. You want to get it all in there.

Or, perhaps, you really are an expert, and you’re writing a novel based on your own personal and professional experience. The research isn’t really necessary, then, of course — but you still might be tempted to make an effort to pack in all of your expertise.

Please don’t.

Verisimilitude is a delicate thing, and it’s very easy to drown it in detail. When you experience the urge to gin up endless lecturing exposition and whole scenes dedicated to demonstrating how much your characters (and thus, you) know about a subject, take a step back. Your readers will know when they’re being lectured, and they will keep receipts. If you force them to read fifteen pages about beekeeping trivia and none of it pays off in any way in the story, they will not forget. They will not forgive.

The question you should always ask is simple: Does my reader need to know this, or am I just showing off? There are plenty of reasons information is necessary for your reader, and you as author get to decide what is and what isn’t. But for the love of god, ask yourself this question before you have your POV character lecture me on Bitcoin for 4 pages for no reason other than to impress me with your vast knowledge of cryptocurrency.

Of course, in real life none of this applies. I am a popular dinner guest, for example, because of my exhaustive knowledge of Weird Songs Jeff Put on a Mixtape in 1990.

No, this will not be a post about whiskey. At least not directly. I mean, in a sense every post on this blog is about whiskey, because whiskey is like The Force: It surrounds us and penetrates us, it binds this blog together.

No, this post will about writing a novel, because that’s one of the four or five things I have anything intelligent to say about (the others being myself, baseball between the years of 1978 and 2010, yarn, meatballs, and your odds of ever winning the lottery). Specifically, this post is about the process of writing a large portion of a novel — sometimes the entire novel — only to realize what the damn thing should actually be about.

I’m not saying this just happened to me. But it has happened.

40,000 Words of Hot Garbage

Whether you’re a Pantser or a Plotter, there’s always a point when you think you know what your book is about. And sometimes you discover that you’re wrong about that, and sometimes that moment comes when you’re already significantly along in the novel-writing process. Like, tens of thousands of words. And then you suddenly realize that your focus is off — you’re using the wrong POV, or concentrating on the wrong character, or cutting out the wrong stuff.

Whatever the reason, this is okay. This is a process of literary distillation. You just steamed off tens of thousands of the wrong words. The worst reaction you can have is to view this as wasted time. That’s totally wrong — sometimes you have to write those wrong words to figure out what the right ones are.

That’s the lesson here: When you’re writing a novel, any work you do is worthwhile. There’s no such thing as wasted time. Even if you don’t actually complete this novel, chances are the work you put into it will pay dividends later, either in ideas, or material you can re-use, or simply a better understanding of your craft and your best way of working. Once you boil off the stuff that’s not working, you might be left with pure gold.

Although, full disclosure: I do like to play up the despair when a novel collapses, just to have an excuse to drink heavily for a while and pretend I’m F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Writing is either the greatest and most satisfying adventure in existence or an ongoing existential hell akin to having your paper cuts soaked in rubbing alcohol for ever, I can’t ever decide which. Some of that ties into where, exactly, I am in terms of the writing process. Just finished a story I’m very excited about? Writing is a joy. Mired in month 15 of struggling to force some coherency into an otherwise doomed narrative? Writing is torture.

One scenario that is particularly painful is when I’m making progress on a story but it’s slow, and I keep having to add material to apply new ideas or understanding. The result is what I call the Frog in the Well: Two steps forward, one step back.

To Infinity and Beyond

What happens in this scenario is that the end of the book never seems to be any closer. Even though I’m doing good work, even though I’m eating up plot and moving characters along, there always seems to be a static amount of work to do. And when I do make measurable progress, it usually sparks a new creative line that requires some backtracking and back-filling of the story to shore up.

None of this is bad, really. Progress is being made and I’m generally happy with what I’m producing. But it’s frustrating as hell because I can never seem to see the end. So if you’re dealing with something similar — the apparently endless project — what can you do?

One thing that works for me is to go back and re-read what I’ve already written. I’m often surprised at how much I’ve already forgotten, and sometimes it’s comforting to see how much progress I’ve actually made.

Sometimes I actually jump ahead and work on the ending. Why not? I’m a god here, I can do what I want. This can get messy, because inspirations that occur while writing the ending can require more back-filling, thus extending the length even further. But if I can flesh out the ending at ll it helps me feel like there’s a plan, at least.

Of course, then I finish the story and after three seconds of quiet satisfaction I will panic at not working on anything, and it all begins again. Which, come to think of it, is very similar to my hangover cycle. Food for thought.

So, maybe six months ago I started a story. It doesn’t matter what the story’s about; it’s not finished yet anyway, because as I’ve aged things just take longer, probably because of my slow slide into senility and death. The reason I mention this is because when I wrote the opening lines all that time in the past, I had the characters use the term ‘karen’ in its current memey definition of a privileged jerk thinking demanding special treatment. At the time, the term was still kind of bubbling under and felt very inside baseball, at least to me.

Yeah, it’s going to come out.

The thing about cool, topical slang and stuff is that it really appeals to writers. We’re Word People. We love to discover a new expression or a bit of jargon that not everyone knows. You slip it into a story and instantly it feels like you’re part of a Mystery Cult that worships your story.

But there’s a problem: What seems like Inside Baseball for the Cool Kids can suddenly become an overused piece of pop culture that people roll their eyes about.

Streets Ahead

You’ve got to think hard about any cultural reference you make in a story. Something that seems fresh and subversive in January might seem old and dated in March. I mean, there was a time when inserting a reference to Where’s the beef? or Wazzzuuuuuuuup! would instantly get a hearty laugh out of your audience.

Not familiar with those? Exactly!

Of course, this goes beyond language — you generally have to worry about how any pop culture reference will age, and I’ve written about that before. But I’m pretty settled with movie and TV references. I rarely include them, even in my contemporary fiction, because I’ve drilled it into myself that this is a fast ticket to Dated Town, Population: Streets Behind. Language is trickier. Some jargon and slang remains underground more or less forever, and sometimes including it seeds your story with the precious resource known as verisimilitude. As with all Literary Science, your mileage may vary and you may be capable of pulling off some shit I shouldn’t even attempt.

Still, next time you decide to include some current meme flavor in your writing, take a moment and imagine how it’s gonna play next year.

For writers, making up stories is the fun part — but there’s a lot of daylight between the fun, free-association process of being inspired with an idea for a story and then actually writing that story. There’s a lot of work involved in plotting it out, making sure the logic works, building a universe for it all to happen in — and crafting characters to populate that universe and perform the actions that move the plot along.

For some, characters are the hardest part, because people are unpredictable chaos machines. You can imagine a building, or a magic system, and they will follow some basic rules you can rely on. People don’t so that, and if you create characters that follow a blueprint they won’t feel particularly real; part of what makes people people is their inherent randomness, the way they do things that surprise and frustrate and amaze you. Capturing that vibe on the page is hard work.

But it can be easier than you think. Just try modeling.

Dammit, Jim

I spoke at a college writing class a few months ago, and one of the students asked me about figuring out their characters’ voice. I suggested they try this one weird trick:

1. Think of a celebrity with a distinctive communication style. William Shatner as Captain Kirk, or Jay-Z with that weirdly compelling coughing noise he uses to punctuate his lyrics.
2. Imagine your character is speaking in the same way as you write their dialogue.

To be clear, do not try to convey Captain Kirk’s oddball rhythms. This is something you do in your head, while you’re writing. What happens, though, is that your character’s lines subtly take on those rhythms. You shape the phrases to them. It all comes alive, and if you resist the urge to make it too explicit your dialogue will have a bit of dance to it that isn’t obvious.

If you match the voice you’re using as a model to the character as closely as possible, this will also help you ensure that your characters don’t all talk with the same rhythm and phrasing, which is one of those subtle problems that are easy to overlook right up until someone points it out to you.

Of course, you have to be careful not to slip over into parody — and you don’t have to use celebrities. Have a friend or family member with a distinctive speaking cadence? A character in the neighborhood with a recognizable style? That’ll work just as well — perhaps better, since there will be no chance of your model’s subject being recognized.

Me, I just model every character on myself, since I have a such a beautiful speaking voice. Which I know because of all the hours I’ve spent talking to myself.