Writing

Writing is a funny thing, a private act of artistic invention whose endgame involves trying to convince everyone in the goddamn universe to read your words. You sit for years in a lonely room, typing away, and then you run around all crazy-eyed begging folks to read what you’ve done.

And then they do, and immediately get it all wrong and subvert your vision.

You people have stood in my way long enough. I’m going to clown college!

If you’re writing a novel, you must on some level expect and desire it to be read. If not, if you’re planning to write THE END and then burn the manuscript (and then the computer, and then the printer, and then the server farm where your cloud files were stored) then you’re either insane or the baddest badass performance artist of all time, badder even than the guys who literally burned a million pounds a few years ago.

The rest of us write believing that someone’s gonna read it. But we also write in an attempt to control that experience, don’t we? We intend the reader to see certain things, to take away certain things.

The problem? Once we hit PUBLISH, we lose control over that. And you have to be good with that.

Sure, you could get into endless arguments with folks about their interpretations of your work. You could berate people for not “getting” it, or lecture them on how to read your work, but ultimately, that’s supposed to be baked-in. Ultimately, people get to own your work and decide what they think of it. And ultimately, let’s face it: Someday you won’t be here to argue or lecture, and your work will mean whatever the fuck the future literature students of the world think it means—and as a former literature student, I can assure you some of those ideas are gonna be crazy.

And you’re going to have to just take it, because that’s how all of this works. You send out ideas, people ruin and destroy them, and hopefully some tiny kernel survives.

That’s why I plan to be frozen when I die, so when they cure death I can come back and lecture everyone about what my books really mean.

If you’re pursuing any sort of professional writing career, kids, there’s something you need to get used to right now: The infinite nature of feedback.

When writers discuss feedback they often fixate on the immediate kind—the kind you seek out from beta readers, the kind you expect to get from an agent or editor. And those forms of feedback sure do exist and dealing with them in a reasonable manner is absolutely an essential part of writing professionally, but if you think it stops there you are fooling yourself.

Kids, feedback is forever.

Infinite Seas of Feedback

I wrote the first draft of my novel The Electric Church in 2004, and submitted it to a website that agreed to publish it. My wife read it, and offered me her assessment, so I revised it using some of her notes. I was assigned an editor, who worked on each chapter discretely, giving me oodles of great feedback.

I revised.

When the website crumbled, the book got picked up by Orbit books. Before sending it off, my agent had a gander and gave me feedback.

I revised.

My editor took the new draft, reviewed it, and sent me a 10-page edit letter.

I revised.

The book got published, and the revisions stopped … but not the feedback. First, there were reviews. Then there were personal notes from readers.

To this day, I get feedback on that book. We’re talking ten years after publication. People still occasionally review the book or send me emails telling me what they did or did not like about it.

Nothing wrong with any of it, of course, but you have to get ready for it: Feedback is forever. People will never stop telling you what you did wrong with your book, or what you did right. You simply have to get comfortable with criticism, because there is no discrete end to it. None. It’s forever.

Sort of like my epic guitar solos, which I routinely beam into space to greet alien races.

No one ever said plotting is easy. Telling a story that has truth and power as well as internal consistency and logic is something that every writer fails at more or less constantly; it’s part of the job. Your first, second, and possibly tenth draft of a story may not necessarily be airtight when it comes to plot and plot holes—or even coherent.

Sometimes what happens, of course, is that you reach a fork in the old plot and you have to decide what happens next. And this is where more than one talented writer has paused for several years or even decades, frozen in terror, because the next step in your plot might destroy all that has gone before if you’re not super careful about it. You have plenty of ideas, each of which takes your story in a different direction. But which one is right? Which one to choose?

Here’s a thought: Don’t choose. Write them all.

Pick-a-Path

You might have encountered a “pick-a-path” adventure book, otherwise known as “choose your own adventure” books. These tell a story that pauses at regular intervals to let the reader choose the next plot event. At the end of each chapter the reader has a choice: open the door, turn to page 34. Answer the phone, turn to page 109. Set the place on fire and hum a Van Halen song as you slow-walk away from the fireball, turn to page 344.

Sometimes the choice put you on the path to a “good” or “bad” ending. Sometimes it killed you. Part of the fun was trying to make your way through all of the possible plots—but the point is, the hard-working authors of those stories had to come up with all possible plotlines. So why not do the same?

If you’re having trouble seeing the next step in your story, you can Plot your way through it, Pants your way through it—or go with some Extreme Plotting and literally develop every possible branch of your story, all the way down to the ending. This can be a clarifying exercise that reveals the hidden weaknesses of some of your ideas, and it can also lead you to some surprising brilliancies that wouldn’t have occurred to you otherwise.

And if it still doesn’t help you get to the end, you can always set the place on fire and walk away humming a Van Halen song. Personally, I recommend Running with the Devil.

Time, as they say, is one thing no one’s making nay more of. Well, they also say that about land, but as a sci-fi guy I’m pretty certain someday we’ll either terraform another planet or find one we can live on, so that possibly won’t be true forever. Time? Well, we might find a way to slide along the timeline a bit, sure, but at some point the Heat Death of the Universe is going to arrive and that’s all she wrote.

Writers know the icy touch of time better than most, because we’re almost always struggling to find time to work on our genius fictions in-between a day job, raising a family, staying out of jail on bogus public urination charges, and other annoyances like eating and sleeping and playing video games 16 hours a day. Writing a novel within one normal lifespan is hard enough. Writing more than one is mega-difficult, and writing novels on a regular basis, especially if you’re under contract, can be maddeningly difficult.

Writers try a lot of different approaches to achieve the disciplined productivity that requires. I’m always dismissive of word counts, of course, though I freely admit that forcing yourself to write a certain number of words every day works for a lot of people when it comes to productivity. My complaints about word count are out there; let it drift. Here’s another strategy that works for me: Microbursts.

Float Like a Butterfly

The Microburst is grabbing any extremely short period of time and writing. Five, ten minutes, scattered throughout the day. Sitting on the bus to work. Waiting for the boss to arrive at a conference call. Waiting on friends to arrive, or your coffee to be served—basically, using all those wasted moments that everyone’s life is cluttered with. We all get robbed of moments throughout our day, empty spaces in-between the bigger tasks. The Microburst approach simply makes use of those small periods of time to get a sentence, two sentences—a paragraph!—written.

It’s worked for me in the past, mainly in the zero-draft stage when having a 100% coherent plot isn’t always required, because it does mean there’s no time for reading back and checking notes. You find yourself with five minutes before lunch, you dive in and write whatever comes to mind for five minutes. If you pause to check your notes for the spelling of that character’s name, by the time you’re done your five minutes are gone.

It can be a hectic, crazy way to write, but that energy sometimes translates into the story, giving it a crackling sense of urgency otherwise lacking. And during periods where finding a solid hour or two to write involves staying awake for 72 hours straight and realizing everything you’ve written appears to have been poorly translated from the secret language you invented as a child, the Microburst approach adds up. Think about all the wasted time in your day, and whether it might just combine into a solid hour of writing.

Or, if you’re me, you might realize that more writing time probably just means less drinking time, and then you get sad.