Writing

There’s often a disconnect between the Exciting Idea and the Good Start to a novel (or story). As in, you have the Exciting Idea and stand up in a crowded movie theater in the middle of a film and shout “JEBUS CRISTUS THAT’S AN AMAZING IDEA” but when you get home and start working, you suddenly realize you’re 560 words in and this is nothing like the amazing idea. It’s crap.

So, you start over.

I don’t know about you, or other writers, but I save my iterations. I start with a file called AmazeballsNovel.odt and when that fails—as it usually does—I save it as a new file called AmazeballsNovel2.odt and start fresh. It’s not uncommon to have a lot of these false starts littering my hard drive.

I think my personal record is 73. Which means I started a novel 72 times—sometimes writing tens of thousand of words—before getting it right. Or as right as I’ll ever get it, which is not the same thing at all.

AMAZEBALLS IS A FUN WORD

I save these iterations for a couple of reasons. Number one is the same reason I have every email I’ve ever received since 1999: My feverish hoarding brain. The fact is, I’m going to be found dead under a pile of trash someday, because we Somers’ were born to keep everything we’ve ever touched, seen, or experienced. The second reason is because I often raid those older files. Sometimes there’s a line, or a description, or a whole chapter that is Aces (a technical writing term) and so instead of re-creating an ersatz version, I simply go back to a previous iteration and re-use it.

The biggest mistake you can make when trying to get a novel off the ground (and a mistake I’ve made numerous times) is to keep pushing when you know on some level that it hasn’t caught fire yet. Eventually, if you push hard enough, you might get that boulder up the mountain and have so many words committed that you’ll finish the book (at least that’s true for me; I am a sucker for a Fallacy of Sunk Costs in a novel) but it won’t be great. I don’t know about you, but I need to feel a certain sense of loose freedom, an exhilaration in those early chapters that tells me the story is singing and the words are flowing. If I don’t get that, I’ve learned to cut my losses and start over.

Once I get past the first few thousand words, it’s different. A story that goes haywire after the beginning can be saved in multiple ways. The key, for me, is to at least get that beginning going. And sometimes that takes, like, 73 tries.

Something else that takes 73 tries is me waking up in the morning. Whoever invented snooze buttons is a saint.

My personal theory on description in your writing—of characters, of settings, of just about everything—is that less is most definitely more. I’ve always been worried about my characters being a bit too similar to myself (white, male, pudgy, prone to lectures) and my settings a bit too similar to whatever room I’m sitting in at the time (though as I point out in Writing Without Rules, using my first adult apartment as a template/floorplan for every fictional apartment I write about is actually a great tool). It’s kind of natural to, as the graybeards say, write what you know and what I know is being a cis white guy in New Jersey, natch.

I have also tried to get away from the Male Gaze a bit in my writing as I’ve gotten older. There’s always a tendency for men to describe their female characters in sexualized ways; we love to describe bodies and tresses and such like a bunch of leering old geezers, while our male characters are more often described in less pervy ways. A lot of my juvenelia is afflicted with that—every female character is described physically, every male character is, basically, blessed with my own rich inner life.

Getting away from that can be tough work, but there’s a simple solution I’ve evolved into: I don’t describe things or characters as much as I used to.

The Mind’s Eye

There’s a trick that filmmakers use, most often in the horror genre, where the monster is kept out of sight for most of the story. A huge example would be the original Jurassic Park, where Spielberg keeps his dinosaurs obscured for much of the film, showing us an eye here, a claw there, until he decides to pull back the curtain in spectacular fashion. But you see it a lot, and not always because of budget issues that reduce your scary monster to a guy in a mask. It’s an effective tool, because it forces the audience to imagine things. And what your audience/readers will imagine will always be better than what you can possibly describe.

So, these days when I write I stay away from lush descriptions of characters and places. I offer as much detail as is necessary, but I ask myself what’s important about a character. Broad strokes go a long way, and your reader will fill those strokes in according to their own experience and sense of the world. And that’s fine. In short, unless a physical trait is important to the story or to the understanding of the character, leave it out.

Of course, determining what is important is your job. Maybe it’s important to the story or the character that your female detective is beautiful. Or hideous. That’s up to you. My point is, think about that before you spend six paragraphs writing about her admiring herself in the mirror and thinking that men are always telling her how pretty she is, for some reason.

Sure, I mean, I do that all the time, but then I’m spectacular looking.

Most writing advice, if you think about it, is pretty obvious stuff. This isn’t an arcane art, this is telling stories to entertain and affect. In a fundamental sense writing is a skill everyone can hone—just about everyone has told a story at some point in their lives, and thus have engaged in plotting, character development, and pacing. Whether or not they did a good job is something else entirely.

Developing as a writer often boils down to equally simple stuff. Read a lot of books, steal and emulate to your heart’s desire, tell stories you’d like to read. Everything else usually involves repetition and the ability to process feedback. But that means it often hangs on the writing part—which means you have to get over that initial hump and actually start writing a book or story. And getting started is sometimes the tallest mountain you’ll have to climb when beginning a new writing project.

Something New

I recently started a new novel. As I write this I am 1 day and 1,000 words in, which means this could all amount to nothing or it could be the next novel I sell; all of that remains to be seen. Those 1,000 words are essential, though, because for a few weeks now I’ve had a few scraps of an idea—a setting, an exchange of dialogue, a title—and nothing else. And I didn’t know how to start.

Knowing the meat of your story but having no clue how to start it is more common than you might realize, because beginnings are where a lot of hard work comes in. I often want to race forward to the epic twists and amazeballs setpieces I have in mind, and the quiet world-building and character introduction of beginnings can seem less sexy in comparison. But I’m also a linear writer who likes to start at the beginning, so I have to nail those early words or nothing else happens.

My trick isn’t all that brilliant or mind-blowing: I start with a short story.

My Chapter 1s—at least in the Draft Zero stage—are usually self-contained stories with beginnings, middles, and ends of their own. They could be torn out of the larger novel and published independently. This takes some of the pressure off, because I’m not going to have to plot out 100,000 words—I just need to plot out 5,000 words.

Another advantage to starting with a cohesive, standalone story is that it takes a lot of the world-building confusion off my plate. I only have a few thousand words to work with, so I know I can’t explain my entire universe in huge detail. I sprinkle in only the essentials and leave everything else off until later, because I have to tell the story I’m telling now. Any time I’ve tried a more open-ended start to a novel I get mired in detail because I don’t have the forward thrust of a focused story keeping me moving, so I wallow.

Will this approach work for you? I don’t know. I do know that if I finish this story (a.k.a. Chapter 1) I’ll have a clear path forward, a solid foundation to build on—and if the novel ultimately fails, if nothing else I have a story I can try to publish.

Also, failed novels give me a perfect excuse to go on a 3-week bender, so really it’s a Win-Win.