Writing

The first time I wrote a story, I was probably eight or nine years old. It was a school assignment that, bizarrely, involved bookbinding; our assignment was to write a story, lay out signatures, create hardback covers, and bind it all into a book by hand. I have no idea why someone thought this was a useful skill for kids in Jersey City, New Jersey to have—but it was fun. I wrote a story about how the planet Earth was created by aliens who had this huge pill, like a Tylenol rapid-release capsule, they launched into space.

What I remember from my early days of writing was the sense of limitless possibility. Every book I read offered something I could steal and try out for myself. Every idea I had seemed incredibly new and original (spoiler: they weren’t, but they felt that way). Every time I sat down to work on an idea, I had this rush of exploratory joy—I was venturing into fresh snow every single time, and it was mine to mark up and shape.

These days? Much of that thrill is gone. And that’s something all creators have to deal with.

Three Chords and a Beat

I wasn’t really aware of this curse of experience until I began learning how to play guitar a few years back. I’d always wanted to play, and finally learning how was a lot of fun—and in those early days when every new chord or bit of music theory knowledge was a revelation, I felt like every song I put together was a major creative breakthrough. Looking back, those songs are terrible—but at the time I had that sense of excitement that I once had with writing. It made me realize how I’d lost some of that in recent years with my writing work.

Don’t get me wrong—I still feel vital and creative. I still get excited about writing something new and I still push myself to experiment and try new techniques. But the excitement is tempered by the knowledge that what I produce probably isn’t going to be a world-shattering new idea. I’ve been at this too long. I know my own limitations too well, and I am much more familiar with the body of work produced over the centuries, so I can no longer fool myself that I’m doing anything seismically new.

That’s the curse of experience: The knowledge that you’re not as smart as you once thought you were.

Still, we beat on. Knowing your limitations doesn’t mean you don’t still have a fire in the belly for creating something awesome. It just means you don’t fool yourself quite so much. There’s a sadness in that, but also power. It’s like my knowledge of the capabilities of my liver: Limiting, sure, but also kind of comforting to know where your line is.

There’s a persistent myth that your first effort on a manuscript will be terrible. That a good book or story requires dozens of revision cycles, endless routing through beta readers, and wordsmithing until it’s almost unrecognizable when compared to the first draft.

This is what scientists call horseshit.

Hole in One

Some stories require that kind of massive effort, it’s true. And some writers like to work like that, which is fine. But neither of those facts means that your story isn’t actually kind of great in its initial draft form. There’s a sort of understandable instinct to distrust things that seem too easy, and when you bang out 80,000 words in 3 months and actually love everything you did, it’s natural enough to feel like you must be missing something.

But, hey, it happens, so why not to you? In other words, don’t start tearing your first draft apart and jump into a heavy revision just because. Consider the possibility that your first draft is actually great, and maybe all you need is a polish?

Of course, I say this as a writer who tends to be very satisfied with my first drafts, or, you know, completely unsatisfied. In other words, I either like my first draft enough to polish it and do something with it, or I despise it and want to bury it in the back yard and never admit it existed. For me, personally, there’s nothing in-between.

But assuming your first draft is trash just … well, just because all first drafts must be trash? That’s crazy. In fact, I’d encourage the opposite: Assume your first draft is fire, and then try to find reasons why it isn’t. Because I firmly believe most first drafts are actually pretty good, and most revision is kind of unnecessary in the sense that it doesn’t actually improve things, just re-arranges them.

Of course, what do I know. I’m sitting here wearing a cardboard box as pants as I write this.

Let us pause for a moment and consider the joy and genius of the Unreliable Narrator, a literary trick that offers a way to forgive a multitude of sins. Plot makes no sense? Character inconsistent? He’s unreliable, natch!

I kid, of course (mostly). The Unreliable Narrator is a super weapon when writing a story, because when handled well it offers the chance to truly surprise and shock your readers. Handling it well isn’t always easy, though, especially when you’ve got a first-person narrator. Making a first-person POV unreliable is so challenging some newbie writers wonder out loud if it’s even possible, and you’re forced to direct their attention to The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Fight Club with a sad shake of the head.

Writing an unreliable first-person narrator is challenging, but it’s not that hard. You just have to remember George Costanza’s advice to Jerry on the subject of lying: It’s not a lie if you believe it’s true.

This is Fine

The key to an unreliable narrator is that they have to be simultaneously aware of their own chicanery and yet unaware of it. If you think about it, we’ve all elided a few white lies or poor decisions from our personal recollections, we’ve all convinced ourselves that something was fine when it clearly wasn’t. Whether it was a relative benign self-deception like convincing yourself a certain job was okay even when it was stressing you out or something meatier like telling yourself that a romance was fine even though you were miserable, we’ve all lied to ourselves. On some level we know we’re lying, but it’s not always a conscious level.

That’s how an unreliable narrator works. They keep all their self-knowledge buried so they can believe their own lies. And convincing themselves that what they’re thinking—essentially, what they’re saying to the reader—is the key. Your narrator has to believe what they’re thinking. And you know exactly how to do that, because you’ve done it yourself. Don’t deny it. Denying the obvious is a dick move.

Of course, before figuring out how to make an unreliable narrator work, ask yourself if your story is well served by having one in the first place. Just because you can do something cool doesn’t mean it will work, and making your narrator an unreliable jerk only makes sense if it serves your story.

Plot twist: I’ve never seen an episode of Seinfeld.