Word Limits and Murdered Darlings, Oh My!

If you’re anything like me, few words strike fear in your heart quite like “word limit.” (Okay. There are MANY things that strike more fear into my heart than those two word,s but I digress.) Words are like Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups: the more, the better! Why use two words when five will do? Why limit yourself to one paragraph when you could write three?!

If you write genre fiction, one of the first things you learn, one of the things that’s drilled into your head at conferences and in workshops is the average word count for your genre. And if you’re like me, your knee-jerk reaction is to say You can’t tell me what to do! and then huff off. That’s definitely how I reacted (silently, of course, and I didn’t huff off) at a writing conference I attended last year, when one of the panelists said romance novels shouldn’t run more than 80,000 words because that’s the Industry Standard, and that’s Still What Harlequin Wants, and Harlequin Is Still the Major Romance Publisher.

There’s a problem with this theory, I think: while Harlequin does publish a lot of romances, so do plenty of other publishers, including all of the Big Five, and a few smaller imprints as well, including Hallmark, Entangled and the Wild Rose Press. In other words – it’s not the Harlequin Show anymore. And over the past year, I have read my share of 80,000 word novels – but I’ve also read a LOT that were way beyond that, like Lucy Score’s Knockemout Trilogy (highly recommended, BTW!). A lot of readers are demanding them. The success of Ali Hazelwood, Emily Henry, and Lucy Score (among others) attests to that.

I’ve always been wordy. It’s just how I write. Brevity is not for me. Short stories tend to take on lives of their own and turn into full-fledged novels. Stand-alone novels suddenly become books that need a sequel – or become an entire series. My characters tend to take on lives of their own, and the subplots start to add up, and the secondary characters take on larger roles, and the main conflicts become more complicated, and before you know it, I’m neck-deep in OMG WHAT HAVE I DONE??!!

All of that said . . .

Over the past few months, I’ve taken a huge leap of faith and started to workshop one of my novels. I’ve had beta readers in the past for other works, but those were my friends; they weren’t shy about telling me what didn’t work, but they were also supportive and that helped soften the blows. But I don’t know anyone in my critique group, and each month, there are some different people. If you submit, you also have to critique; no one gets a free ride! And because of that, we’re limited to 5,000 words.

Of course, my novel is . . . somewhat more than 80,000 words.

To be precise, before I started this workshop journey, it was 116,772 words.

I’ve been working on this novel and its rewrites for some time. But generally, like – I think – most of us, I print out the entire manuscript, then go over with my pink or purple pen. And after a few times of that, you kind of stop seeing the minutiae. You see some places where you think yeah, I’m not totally happy with that, but you move past it because, you know, you’ll fix it later. Whenever “later” is.

But to submit only 5,000 words per month – I don’t want to end things in the middle of a chapter, obviously, because that’s not fair to the readers, and it offends my sensibilities. So what I’ve had to do is spend time really focusing on those two or three chapters. Line by line. Word by word. Making myself drill down to the essence of what this chapter is about. Making myself really consider what’s important. Forcing myself to consider if there is another, more concise and more precise, way to say something.

When you’re writing for someone else, you can’t do just anything you want. At least, I can’t. It needs to be as perfect as it can be. So not only am I editing for grammar, punctuation, etc., but I’m also looking critically at each sentence. Each paragraph. Do I have redundancies? Is there a word or phrase I use too much? (Hint: YES.) Do all actions follow each other logically? Can I murder any darlings?

And what I’ve seen, over the past few months, is a manuscript that has lost a little weight. Not a lot – but some. It’s getting toned and tightened. On the average, I’ve cut about 800 words for each submission – so over three months, that’s about 2,400 words cut from the novel.

Of course, for me, this isn’t just about cutting words. This is about having the space to focus on just these two or three chapters. When I can do that, I can really focus on how each sentence works, how each paragraph works. In one submission, I finally had to admit that one scene just did not work, and never had worked. It was wonky and clunky – it was the AMC Pacer of my novel, in fact – so I ended up rewriting it in a way that not only added more tension, but moved the story forward more quickly. Would I have done this if I hadn’t been trying to submit all these chapters at once? Doubtful. Did almost the entire scene end up on the cutting-room floor? Yes. Am I happy about that? Also yes.

Now, is this scene one that I could have let my critique group read and comment on? Sure – but that thought literally didn’t occur to me until I was committed to figuring it out on my own. I know a lot of people are okay with submitting less-than-perfect work to critique groups – in fact, they want to in order to get the feedback! – but perfectionist that I am, I can’t do that!

My inspiration on this journey (besides the word limit) was the book Refuse to be Done by Matt Bell. This is a short, streamlined little writing book that says you can write a book in three drafts. (I can’t, but maybe some people can.) If you’re looking to be at the level of rewrites I’m at, though, the third section of this book offers the most valuable insights, including his method for cutting words by looking at “orphans” – those one or two lines on a page by themselves, or those one or two words on a line by themselves at the end of a paragraph. His suggestion is to become committed to eliminating all of those orphans. And that may take not just cutting, but rewriting to make everything tighter. This is the advice I’ve gone back to again and again as I try to get these submissions down to their word limit.

I also go back to that immortal advice: Murder Your Darlings. Even if it, as Stephen King says, breaks my scribbler’s heart, I have become much more adept at figuring out the darlings to murder.

Another trick is one that actually just goes back to good writing: action. I have gotten pretty bad about trying to get into my characters’ heads and telling things from their point of view, and that’s great, but at the end of the day, it takes more words to say, “I felt his fingers brush my arm,” than it does to say, “His fingers brushed my arm.” Of course, if the character’s eyes are closed, one is totally correct to say. Still. BOTH are correct, regardless.

I had to really focus on this these past two weeks, as I tried to ready chapters for submission to a writing contest. This time, instead of a word count, we got 24 pages, plus a 1-page synopsis. (The synopses are a story for another day.) But it still made me think critically about each word and sentence and paragraph in those 25 pages. Especially for one submission, where I was literally rewriting a first draft to try to make it somewhat presentable.

So. If you’re trying to focus on word count, maybe these ideas can help you out. If you’re trying to just tighten up your writing, I really do recommend focusing on just a few chapters at a time. Make a game of it. Save it as a different file, just in case you don’t like it later. But my guess is that you’ll like it more than you think you will.

Here’s a link for Matt Bell’s book: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/refuse-to-be-done-matt-bell/1139771041?ean=9781641293419

Inner Demons, Your Characters, and You: Making the most of your character’s internal conflicts

Last weekend, I locked my kittens in the bathroom (with plenty of food, water, and toys, yes!) and headed to Oklahoma City for the first-ever RomanceLahoma writers’ conference. Hosted by the Oklahoma Romance Writers’ Guild, this two-day conference brought together more than a hundred romance writers (and those of us who are working on that!) with successful novelists for a total immersion in the craft.

For me, the highlight of the conference was meeting Jodi Thomas, New York Times best-selling novelist and RITA-award winner (and author of more than 60 bestsellers – dare to dream!). She was unfortunately booked at the same time as a session on social media, which most of the writers went to – but about a dozen of us had her to ourselves for an informal round-table discussion of her career and writing advice. It was pretty cool. More than pretty cool, really. 🙂

But I think the best session I attended was one on character development. To be honest, I had qualms about returning on Saturday – a huge storm had blown through our area right after I left home that morning – but this session made it worthwhile. I thought I’d read every book out there about character development, and I think my characters are pretty well-rounded, but this session offered us some additional ways to think about not just our characters, but also their conflicts. And if you’ve ever experienced that Act 3 Slump, the emphasis on conflict was extremely helpful.

We started with the basics – your character can’t be totally good or totally bad; they must have heroic and not-so-heroic traits; they need special skills that will help them obtain their objectives in the end, etc. But then the question arose: who is the most interesting person for your plot? And more to the point, in a romance novel (or even if you have a romantic element in another genre) who is the best foil for your main character? In other words – if you think about the least likely person for your character to fall for, who would that be? That provides built-in tension from the start.

The presenter suggested using Enneagrams to figure out your characters’ personality traits, and how they work, or don’t work, with other personality types. For more about this, you can read this article from Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/health/mind/enneagram-types/

Obviously, your characters have to have problems. But especially in a a genre romance, this is a problem that is ruining their life. Bonus points if it ruins others’ lives as well! This life-ruining problem is that elusive internal issue or internal conflict all characters need. This is the Big One, the one they MUST fix by the end of the novel.

To think about this differently, this problem is The Lie Your Character Tells Themselves. Think about the lies we all tell ourselves, rooted in our childhoods, our middle school or high school experiences, our major break-ups, our family dynamics. I’m a disappointment. I’m not good enough. I’m helpless or powerless. I will always be left by those who are supposed to love me. I am not lovable. I will never be enough for anyone. Everything is my fault. I can’t be forgiven for the things I’ve done. Are these things true? No. Well. Probably not. Do we tell ourselves these things? Of course. Why? Because at some point, we internalized them. At some point, our life-ruining problem, our Lie, was made so crystal-clear to us that it became our truth.

For an example: in a book I just read, Yours Truly by Abby Jimenez, one of the main characters, Briana, has been devastated by two major losses – her father walked out on the family when she was young, and her husband walked out on her after ten years of marriage. The lie she told herself was that men will always leave her. Men don’t want her. Those two things combined became what the presenter called the Dark Moment Story.

The Dark Moment Story is that moment when the hero becomes adamantly, totally convinced that their Lie is the truth. It’s a very specific event that causes them to feel this way. (I suppose the flip side of this is the Villain Origin Story?) This moment occurs. The hero internalizes the Lie. And because of that, everything else occurs.

Take, for example, a boy who comes from a family in which his parents are divorced, and hate each other. The Dark Moment Story might be the moment he overhears them fighting and hears one parent tell the other that they never wanted a child. That child is suddenly faced with the fact that one of his parents never wanted him. Is it true? Maybe. What matters is that the hero believes it. He internalizes it. I will never been good enough; the people who are supposed to love me, don’t. There must be something wrong with me. “I will never be good enough” becomes the lie they tell themselves, and when they embark on a relationship, it’s the thing they continue to tell themselves. “This person can never really love me, because I’m not good enough.” Because of that, they will sabotage the relationship is some way.

The Lie becomes The Fear.

Use the fear, Luke!

Your character’s fears need to be evident from the very start. And they need to affect their behavior from the very start. And they will be evident throughout the story. This Fear is what determines the Dark Night of the Soul/All Is Lost beat (if you’re familiar with “Save the Cat!”). This fear, in a romance novel, is what drives the lovers apart. They see their greatest fear is coming true, and they pull back, run away. Your characters have been wounded by the Dark Moment. Think about a time when you were seriously hurt – maybe you burned your hand, or broke your arm. Think about how hard you worked to protect that wound. We do the same thing with our internal/emotional wounds, too. What will your hero do, to protect themselves? To what lengths will they go to, to protect themselves?

Now, of course, your character has to have a Secret Desire. This is often something they’re not consciously aware they want – but they want it more than anything. They’ve seen it, or they once experienced it, and now they want it. Let’s return to our hero with the divorced parents. During a visitation with one parent, they saw a kid their own age having a huge birthday party at McDonald’s, with both parents and the whole family and dozens of friends – and the normalcy of that, the happiness they saw, the rightness of it, struck a chord deep inside them. They can never have it. But they want it. They want the kind of family that does things like that. The kind of family that’s stable enough for things like that. Who loves their kid enough to do things like that. Instead, they have parents who hate each other too much to ever be in the same room, and their greatest fear is that every relationship they have will be just as dysfunctional. Therefore, there’s no point in having a relationship, is there?

The rest of the session focused on conflict – which I’ll talk about next week. 🙂

Plotters & Pantsers – What’s Right For You?

All professions seem to have rivalries. Physics has theoretical vs. experimental physicists. Historians have Jeffersonians vs. Hamiltonians. And in writing, we have pantsers vs. plotters.

Plotters are meticulous planners, we’re told. They draft a ten-page premise of their novel, including character motivations and tics, subplots, tying them all neatly together in a bow at the end of the book.

Pantsers, on the other hand, are the messy, chaotic ones. If plotters are cats, pantsers are Labrador Retrievers, all goofy, fun-loving things ready to just jump in and get going! While the cats look on in disgust and dismay, the Labs are having a great time wagging their tails, going swimming, and eating whatever they can find.

The fact is, most of us aren’t one or the other exclusively. But people do tend to fall into one of the two categories.

I’m a pantser. Always have been. My earliest stories were simply me, writing in a linear fashion, what the characters were doing. I had a starting place, an inciting incident, rising action – and you know, back then, I think I understood the mechanics of story more intuitively than I do now. I read voraciously, and I think all that reading informed my ability to structure a story, even though i wasn’t conscious of it. I let the story unfold, as it happened. Let the characters dictate what they wanted to do. Sometimes, I hit that magical sweet spot where I wasn’t writing so much as channeling the story. (Sadly, that sweet spot always seemed to occur AFTER 1am.)

Did that get me into trouble sometimes? You bet it did! A lot of those early stories never got past a certain point (but I console myself with the fact that Stephen King also has tons of stories he’s started that never went anywhere). And even those that got finished sometimes had issues with the endings – I remember clearly one novel that sat for MONTHS because I couldn’t figure out how to save my protagonist from being executed for something he didn’t actually do. I finally realized the salvation lay in one of my secondary characters, and once that happened, the novel was finished shortly. But that anecdote only highlights one of the main problems pantsers have: we tend to write ourselves into corners. A lot. Like, A LOT.

Plotters, on the other hand, are probably reading that paragraph and either a.) shaking their heads sadly at nineteen-year-old me and my silly pantser issues, or b.) laughing until they can’t breathe. Because they would have already known the outcome in advance, and how to get there.

But the truth is – a lot of people aren’t one or the other. They’re both.

Another truth? A lot of early plots don’t end up in the final drafts.

Another truth? A lot of published authors don’t plot.

As Stephen King said, “You let the story tell itself.” He admits that he likes to be the first person to read the story, even as he’s writing it. The characters will surprise him. They’ll do things he never expected. He freaking LOVES that.

Diana Gabaldon, too, doesn’t plot. She writes a lot like I do – piecemeal. She doesn’t write in a linear fashion, nor does she plot; ideas for scenes come to her, and she writes them. “It’s effective because it works,” she says. “I’m never held up stewing about What Comes Next – I don’t care what comes next, I just care about something I can see happening.” In other words, she has a vague idea for a scene – something in her research may spark it, or she may simply see something in her mind. Around that, she begins to excavate the scene. Sort of like an archaeologist seeing a glint of gold or a hint of a mosaic floor in a dig, then painstakingly uncovering the rest of it, slowly. And then, once the scenes are all written, she begins to figure out the order in which they go. Like Stephen King, she wants to be the first to know what the story is.

That’s how I write.

There are times when I try to plot things ahead of time. I’ve tried it twice now, with both of these romance novels I’m working on, in fact. Know what I found out? I suck at plotting.

Both times, I had an idea of where I wanted the novel to go. Both times, the characters proved to be far more resistant than I thought they’d be to my machinations.

With Alex and Dana’s book, the biggest problem (see previous posts!) was that one character needed to die in order for the book to move forward, because she was TOTALLY taking over the book! I knew how I wanted things to go. But I couldn’t make it work. And know what? Once I figured that out, the entire book became stronger. But this wasn’t something I could figure out ahead of time. I had to see WHY it didn’t work before I could see a solution.

And with the current one I’m working on, about Alex’s brother and his best friend/love interest, I also had an idea for the plot. I drafted it out, in fact, using Gwen Hayes’ “Romancing the Beats” beats for romance novels. But . . . Ace and Beth didn’t quite want to play along. Scenes were stifled, stilted. There was no voice, no beat. No chemistry. Nothing. I was shoving a couple of cars around on the Life game board.

The fact is, like Diana Gabaldon, I often learn about my characters AS I’m writing. I may know them a little before I start, but it’s in the writing that I truly get to know them. Start to hear their voices, learn about their foibles and character flaws, what they do and don’t like. How they talk. Alex, for example, had a syntax that from the get-go was complicated and formal, with complex sentences, owing to the fact that he’s spent a lot of his life reading and studying English literature. Ace, his older brother, is direct, to the point, and if the F-word needs to be used, so be it. Dana tends to babble when she’s nervous. But none of that was planned. It just happened in the drafting, and in the rewrites, I made sure to make their voices resonate throughout the novel.

And I tend to not write in a linear fashion anymore. Instead, I find that a scene comes to me, and I have to draft it then and there, before it’s gone. Those scenes may not make it into the final draft as written. They may only be a starting place for the real scene. But at least I have them. And in those scenes, my characters begin to come alive. Start to voice opinions, develop attitudes. They may react to something in a way I never expected. They begin to direct the story. And as a fiction writer, there’s nothing more exciting.

Is one way better than another? I don’t think so, personally. In the end, pantsers almost always end up going back to the white board so we can plot a little, and plotters often find that their carefully-crafted storylines may not hold up once they really start writing. Their characters may take on lives of their own and take things in a new direction. Stephen King originally planned for the vampires of Salem’s Lot to win. But as he said, the humans proved more resilient and resourceful than he thought they’d be.

Yes. For me, that often means I’m sitting down with a draft, a red pen, and sticky notes, trying to rearrange scenes so they make sense. Writing bridges and adding in things later. But this is what my friend (and published author) Debra Doctker calls “playing in the sandbox.” The initial draft is the sandbox. The rewrites are where you get to play. This is where you get to see what works and what doesn’t. And I’ll bet even plotters reach this point – I’ll bet that sometimes, those carefully-laid plans go awry and they end up needing to scrap scenes (or even characters!) and doing extensive rewrites. J.K. Rowling did this with Goblet of Fire; originally, there was a Weasley cousin who was supposed to play a rather important role, but Rowling scrapped her in later drafts and made Rita Skeeter more prominent.

Now, what plotters will tell you is that if they box themselves into a corner, they can go back to the synopsis they’ve written and figure out where they went wrong. And I admit, I’m kind of envious of that. But. I don’t think I am able to write that way. I’ve tried. I’ve failed.

And that’s okay. I know my writing process. I know what works for me. That’s something all writers need to figure out for themselves.

https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/113937/what-was-the-flaw-in-goblet-of-fire (Rowling discussing her problems with HP #4, including the ‘ghost character’)

https://dianagabaldon.com/wordpress/resources/what-i-do/ (Diana Gabaldon’s writing processes)

Murdering Darlings, Murdering Characters

Last time, I talked about murdering your darlings – those pretty bits of prose, those long gorgeous descriptions, the flowering conversations that you adore, but don’t actually serve your story.

But this past week, I had to take that adage a step further. I didn’t murder paragraphs, or sentences, or entire chapters. No, I murdered an entire character.

Honestly? I should have done it sooner. If you’d have been there . . . you would have done the same.* 😉

When I started this little romance novel last fall, I had this idea in my head that Alex had been married, and his wife had left him shortly after the wedding. That evolved into leaving him on their honeymoon. Left the rings on the bedside table, took the airplane tickets, and left him in a hotel room in Jamaica. Which left him a wreck.

But somewhere along the way, that evolved into something more. At some point, I thought that after some time apart, maybe Madison (Alex’s ex) wants him back. Maybe she never stopped loving him, really. Maybe she was just afraid. Maybe they’d gotten married too quickly; maybe she felt like she couldn’t put the brakes on it, but afterwards . . . she was terrified of being trapped in a marriage she wasn’t sure she wanted anymore. Did she and Alex really know each other well enough? Did they start to grow apart while she was planning their wedding? Did they really want the same things? She couldn’t bear to hurt him by calling things off – but she couldn’t bear to be married to him when she had all these doubts, either.

The problem with this scenario was twofold. One, I had trouble believing, even to myself, that Alex would be so devastated over this that he would basically spiral into a depression. Two, this didn’t jive with what Alex kept saying about her. She was a nurse. Sweet, caring. Open-hearted. He adored her. How could he fall in love with someone who would do that? Yes, people fall in love for weird reasons all the time, but this . . . this made no sense to me. Deep down, I knew it wasn’t right.

But I couldn’t seem to let it go.

I wrote her into the novel. I based Alex and Dana’s breakup on Madison’s return. I had her coming back to Alex’s home town, ready to fight for him. She was snide, bitchy. Again, the little voices in my head kept saying but Alex wouldn’t fall for someone like this! I ignored the little voices, because I was in too deep to listen to them. I wrote Act 3. Wrote the final break-up scene where Alex tells her goodbye for good, then goes after Dana. I liked that scene. Liked it a lot. It completed his story arc.

But it left Madison as a flat, one-dimensional caricature, which was always the problem with her. And that just didn’t fit with what I knew, deep down, she was like. She’d lived through the worst of the pandemic, saw her patients die, feared for her own life. Was this a woman who would leave a man she loved? Having seen so much of death, could she really throw away their future life together?

I rewrote the ending. Made her less bitchy and selfish. Made her someone that Alex could have fallen in love with. Which left me with another problem (and I’m sure you’ve figured it out by now): if Alex loved her, and she was this lovely person, why wouldn’t he want her back?

It also left me with another problem: Dana.

The ending was rewritten. Alex broke up with Madison, went to Dana to make the Grand Gesture. And instead of saying, “Of course I forgive you, you idiot,” she said, “Are you freaking kidding me?!”

So I paused. Waited for her to do what I wanted her to do in order to have a happily ever after. She refused. And after a few days, I understood why. How could she ever trust that Alex really wanted her? How would she ever know for sure that she was his first choice? Could she ever believe that, if Madison wanted him back again, he would stay with her? He’d broken her trust. She couldn’t forgive him for that, or forget it. That was a hells to the no.

I wrote more of Madison into the book. Wrote her text messages to Alex, explaining why she left, telling him she loved him. Those told me a lot about her, and her state of mind at the time. Still didn’t solve any of my problems. I had dozens of pages that tried to make her into a.) someone Alex would actually want to be with, and b.) someone he could look in the eye and say “I’m over you and I’m in love with someone else.” I even rewrote what was the midpoint to be a tipping place near the end of Act 2, where Madison came back and saw Alex and Dana together, and Alex was now forced to choose between them.

Madison started to kind of take over the book. Like kudzu.

I wondered if Alex was even still in love with her. Wrote long notes to myself, trying to sort it out. Notes that went like this:

Someone, at some point, has to ask Alex if he still loves Madison.

He’s hurt. Angry. Betrayed. But is he still in love? Everything he tells me says no. Everything I feel from him says no. Everything I feel from him says he’s 100% committed to making Dana stay . . . except that he’s afraid she won’t. Which leaves us with the question, still:  is Alex still in love with Madison? If she came back to him, begged him to take her back, would he? Is he still in love with the idea of that future? Is he still in love with her?

In the meantime . . . deep, deep down . . . I was starting to form a theory I didn’t like.

I was starting to think that Madison had to die.

It wouldn’t be the first time I’d eradicated a character from a work in progress, but those characters just got written out, forgotten. This would be actually murdering a character. Not because they were superfluous or because the plot had changed . . . but because doing so would actually serve the book. Because doing so would solve 99% of my problems. Because the Madison I knew, and Alex knew, wasn’t the girl who came tramping back in Act 3 to steal him back from Dana.

So a couple of days ago . . . I did it.

And oh my goodness, I can feel that I made the right choice. Alex’s inner demons and conflicts are greater now, the threat they pose to his relationship with Dana more real. Madison can be the perfect girl in his memory, because she kind of was. And more to the point, I can get back to the way Act 3 should go in a romance novel – it’s the characters’ inner conflicts that drive them apart, not something external. Madison gets to be the funny, sweet, bubbly girl Alex fell in love with, and we know why he’s depressed as hell when we first meet him. Doing that automatically added depth and tension to the novel that it was frankly lacking. Or rather, added real depth and tension to the novel, rather than the forced stuff I was foisting onto it.

All the space that Madison had filled can now go to the actual story, to developing Alex and Dana’s relationship.

And I can tell I’ve made the right choice because the writing is so easy. It was like Alex and Madison were waiting for me to get it right. I can’t wait to write again. Rather than beating my head against the proverbial brick wall, I’m seeing exactly how scenes need rewritten, how to chart Alex and Dana’s story arcs. Even that bloody Act 3 is coming together, finally. Without Madison there to throw a monkey wrench into everything, it’s down to Alex and Dana and the question of will they be able to move past everything and get together?

It was a tough choice. But it was the right one.

So don’t be afraid to murder your darlings. Even if those darlings are characters.

* Lyrics from the amazing “Cell Block Tango” from the musical Chicago. Yes, I can quote something other than Hamilton! Haven’t seen it? Please do yourself a favor and watch one of the Miscast Broadway performances. No, actually, here you go – what I think are the two best Miscast versions of “Cell Block Tango.” Enjoy!

Murder Your Darlings. Seriously. Murder them already.

Generally speaking, murder is wrong.

But sometimes, it is necessary.

In writing, “murder your darlings” isn’t just an adage; it’s practically a commandment. It’s been attributed to Faulkner, who said “In writing, you must kill all your darlings,” but he probably got it from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who, in his 1916 book On the Art of Writing, said:

“Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.”

And if you need someone more recent, and perhaps more published, to tell you this, here’s Stephen King from his book On Writing:

“Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”

Not only can it be really hard to murder your darlings, it can be really hard to figure out what a darling is, let alone how to murder it! Do you stab a sentence? Poison a paragraph? Choke an entire chapter? Is this entire paragraph a darling to be murdered? Maybe! But I’m going to leave it, because I like it.

And that, my good people, is how you figure out what darlings need murdered!

How many times have you edited and rewritten and edited a short story or novel, or even a blog post, and eventually your eyes start to skip over certain lines or paragraphs? Every time you do, there may be a tiny voice in your head saying wait a minute! Does this really do anything? Could it be merged with that paragraph on page 74, or maybe even cut completely? And you immediately become affronted. Of course you’re not going to delete this! It’s fantastic! It’s funny/witty/evocative/sexy/suspenseful . . . you get the drift. In other words, it’s too something to cut.

This is something I’ve found myself wrestling with as I write this little romance novel I’m working on. (I’m even doing it now; I just deleted “more and more” after “wrestling.” Why? Because it wasn’t needed, that’s why!) I’ve known these characters for a long time now, but they have changed and seeing them change as I write has been fun and challenging. Some things, I admit, I’ve become enamored of. Certain lines, or jokes. Yes, descriptions. Certain plot lines, though most of those got the heave-ho before I ever really started writing.

And as I edit and revise, I find myself becoming more scrutinizing. Reading every line. Judging whether they’re necessary or not. When deciding whether to cut something or to keep it, I ask myself several questions.

1.) Does this paragraph or sentence (or chapter!) move the story forward?

2.) Does it give us information we need?

3.) Does it ask a question, or make the reader ask a question?

4.) Does it provide characterization, or enhance a character in some way?

5.) Does it increase the tension?

6.) Does it fit the story, or has the story evolved past it?

7.) Is it actually a darling? Or is it integral to the story?

8.) And maybe most important of all: Will the reader miss it?

In other words . . . am I hanging on to this bit of writing because it truly adds to the book – or because I like it?

One should never murder pretty prose just because some dead guy (and the author of like 10,000 best-selling novels) tells you to. One should never murder a character or plot point just because you like it, and that makes you think it doesn’t serve the story. It’s up to you to figure out if it fits the story or not. If your character likes to speak in long, rambling, descriptive paragraphs that bring to mind the writings of Alexander Hamilton, by all means leave them in, because that is how your character speaks. (A funny aside: while one of Washington’s aides-de-camp, Hamilton once had to write to a girl that no, Washington wouldn’t give her a pass to come through the lines to see someone. All he had to say was, “Sorry, but His Excellency will not allow it.” Instead, he spent two pages letting her down easy. Could I have murdered this darling? Sure, but wasn’t it fun to learn that?!)

Think about how many novels contain paragraphs of descriptions that set the mood and tone. Imagine The Lord of the Rings without descriptions of – well, everything. If your novel is set in a place that requires intricate descriptions, those are probably darlings you won’t murder, because they’re not really darlings. They’re an integral part of the story.

Just this week, I’ve murdered several darlings. One was just today, and it was from one of the few scenes that actually made it from the original book to this one. Dana has been invited to dinner at Alex’s family’s house, and there, sees a portrait of one of Alex’s ancestors. In the original (and up until this morning), she commented on how much Alex looks like him; Alex is taken aback, and says he’d never noticed it before. Originally, it was meant to comment on Alex’s self-consciousness and the family dynamics, but all of that had changed with this new book, and I kept cutting it down, until finally today I just looked at those few lines I had left, and thought: “Does this still serve a purpose? Will any reader ever miss that?”

The answer was no.

So it was cut.

Tonight, I cut an entire chapter. It conveyed information, but that was all it did. I moved some of the most important conversations to another scene entirely, where it could create a little more context and tension, and what was left over wasn’t important enough to keep. Voila! Chapter gone!

Last night, I rewrote the ending to another chapter that lacked tension. Actually, that meant rewriting about three pages, but in the end, the chapter is much stronger, and those things I cut and changed? No one will ever know they were there but me.

And that’s the thing I keep returning to. The one benchmark I keep in the back of my mind. Will the reader miss it? And let’s be honest: the answer is almost always going to be no, isn’t it? Unless you have some beta readers who might have seen an earlier draft, no one but you will ever know what you cut. No one but you will ever miss your murdered darlings! Isn’t that freeing? Isn’t that empowering?!

None of this is to say that you can’t write darlings that you might murder later. You should never censor yourself in those first few drafts. That’s not what ‘murder your darlings’ means. But when you’ve finished those first drafts, and you’re starting rewrites, that’s when you start.

That’s what first (and second and third and eighteenth) drafts are for. That’s when we’re exploring our world, getting to know our characters, getting everything down on paper. Even Quiller-Couch said “whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it whole-heartedly.” Write it, get it out of your system. You might end up keeping it! You might end up using it in a different book. And even if you don’t, it’s never truly gone. It’ll always be there in old drafts (that is, as long as you save your old drafts!).

This is also why Stephen King advocates that once you finish that first (or second or, ahem, twentieth) draft, you put the novel away for a good long while – at least 6 weeks – before you choose a night to print it, sit down, and read it through. As you do, you’ll become aware that “It’s yours, you’ll recognize it as yours . . . and yet it will also be like reading the work of someone else . . . This is the way it should be, the reason you waited.

“It’s always easier to kill someone else’s darlings than it is to kill your own.”

So go forth. Commit murder.* You have my blessing.

* on your manuscript. Anything else is wrong and illegal. Yeah. That’s it. Wrong and illegal.

Writing Every Day: Why We Should Try!

There are several axioms of writing, trite sayings and ‘rules’ that we should all know by heart by now. Write what you know. Don’t use adverbs. Show, don’t tell.

There’s another one, too: write every day.

Several years ago, I wrote an entire blog post railing against this piece of writing advice. I said that sometimes, we simply don’t have the time; we don’t have the energy; sometimes we even need a break from that novel or story or essay we’re working on. This advice of writing every day is often paired with the adage that you should write even if it’s total garbage, because eventually the garbage will give way to the good stuff – but, I pointed out, what’s the point of writing garbage to begin with? It put too much pressure on new writers, I said, who are often told that they need complete X number of words or pages per day; that kind of pressure might induce some new writers to give up, convinced that if they can’t comply with this advice, they’ll never get anywhere. Like Indiana Jones in Temple of Doom, I thought this was a legend, a fable, a fantasy. Just as the sankara stones surely weren’t responsible for bringing life to that village, this ‘mandate’ couldn’t possibly be responsible for better writing.

I still maintain that I was right, to an extent. There are days when we do need to take a step back, for whatever reason. When we’ve had a totally sucky day and the work has piled on, maybe that’s the day we take a break from writing. When we sit down at the laptop and we re-read what we did yesterday, and the words won’t come and we just stare blankly at the screen, maybe that’s a day we take a break, knowing that tomorrow may be better. When we do write those 500 words or whatever, and nothing else is pouring forth, maybe that’s a day we take a break.

But.

There is a lot of truth in this advice, too.

In her book Write Naked, author Jennifer Probst says, “. . . our work is different from other people’s work. We . . . try to create imaginary worlds strangers want to live in. We need to consistently discipline ourselves to begin writing each and every time we sit down. It’s exhausting to have to make a clear intention to write every single day.” Her advice? “Treat writing like a muscle.”

Liken it, she says, to working out at the gym (or running, if that’s your thing). We know that to stay fit, we have to work out X days a week. We have to stretch and warm up. We have to do the hard work. Sometimes, we do need to switch it up – weights one day, treadmill the next – or in writing speak, maybe we write one day, maybe we edit the next. But we’re still showing up. Editing or writing, we’re still working.

The novel I’m currently working on, this little romance novel (which I’m now glad couldn’t be submitted last year, because holy crap on a cracker, it would have been AWFUL!), takes up far more of my daily time than sometimes I’m comfortable admitting. But what I’ve discovered in the process is that writing every day is just plain necessary.

I mean yes, there are days when I sit down, I try to write, I edit a few paragraphs, and then . . . I walk away. But I make it a point to at least reread what I did the day before, to remind myself of where I was heading. Some days, I don’t write at all on my laptop – but later that night, something, some little kernel – a sentence, an idea for a scene – will occur to my tired mind, and I’ll open my iPad instead and use the Notes feature to write. Some days, I will draft an entire scene; other days, I tweak existing ones. This past week, I spent an hour jotting down a revelation about one of my characters, who, as it turns out, isn’t quite the heinous bitch I’d been trying to bring out on paper. (I’d been wondering why it was so hard to write the scenes with her in them! Turns out when you have a completely one-dimensional character, writing them IS hard!)

But it’s all still writing.

Writing every day, or as close to it as you can get, is necessary to keep you in the world you’re creating, and to keep you in touch with your characters. As Liz Gilbert says, the story wants to be told! The characters want to be heard! The work wants to be made! But you have to show up! Once we start to let the ‘real’ world interfere with our fictional worlds . . . they start to collapse. Slowly but surely, you lose the thread of the plot. You forget your characters’ problems. Your characters stop trusting you – this idiot can’t even show up? Why stick around? And soon, you’ve completely lost the story. You think Lin-Manuel Miranda took breaks from writing Hamilton? If he had, odds are I wouldn’t be seeing it for the fourth time live this coming weekend!

Don’t let that happen.

I know there are days when I don’t even open my laptop – yesterday was such a day. This past week has been horrible, and I was so busy last night that I simply didn’t have time to do anything like writing.

And I missed it.

I’m making up for it tonight, yes, but it took a bit to remember where I left off, where I was going, and what I needed to do today. At the moment, I’m in a place where I am reorganizing a few key scenes, which is requiring a lot of rewrites. I’ve also been cutting a lot of redundancy and tightening up the narrative, So it’s really important that I write every day – or almost every day – just to stay on top of all the changes. When I stop writing for the night, I leave myself notes that I can delete later – this is what’s coming up; this is where I should change X, we should move X scene to Y. That way, I’m not floundering the next day. And that’s especially important when I have to miss a day.

In that other blog post, I wrote this: Writing should be a joy, not a chore. It should be the place we go to express ourselves, to find an outlet for our creativity, to give our characters voices and lives and beating hearts. And I totally stand by that. That’s what it should be.

But even on days when it’s not . . . if we’re writing to be published, ‘joy’ is a luxury we don’t have.

If you’re writing just because you love to write, and you don’t have any expectations of being published right now – maybe the novel you’re working on now is destined to live in a desk drawer forever, as so many early novels do – then writing every day may not be totally necessary, but it’s still something to aspire to. When I was a teenager, I wrote almost every single day. I wrote longhand in a notebook specially set aside for whatever novel I was working on at the time. That notebook went with me to school; I could write during lunch, on the bus home, after a test, during study hall, and yes, even at night. When I got my first computer (no, I’m not telling you how old I am, but the fact that it was a Packard-Bell should clue you in) and my first job, I would often come home after closing at midnight, and write until 2 or 3am. None of those novels were really much good, and please God, never ever let anyone else read them!, but they let me practice the craft – and more importantly, I learned the art of writing every day. I did that mostly because a.) I was bored, and b.) I wanted to know what happened next, but still. The lesson holds.

But if writing is your job – if you hope to be published – then you have to treat it like a job. I don’t always want to teach. There are days I drag myself into the classroom and almost can’t stand the idea of lecturing yet again. But it’s my job. So I do it, and I do it to the best of my ability. Writing is the same way. If it’s your job, or if you want it to be your job, then you have to show up and do it every day.

So while I once railed against the mandate of “write every day,” and while I still think there are exceptions to it, I see why it’s become a mandate. Like Indy and the sankara stone, I understand its power now.

Getting Back Into Writing

The past months have been a whirlwind for all of us. We’re getting back to normal, but it’s that ‘new’ normal we’ve been warned about for the past two years, where every cold is a reason for a COVID test and every sneeze is suspect. We have a new Congress, and God knows what that will bring. The rules are changing fast, and it’s pretty scary.

I love writing, but I honestly haven’t written much since the pandemic started. I’d try, but I’d look at those manuscripts that were so beat-up already, filled with edits and comments in purple and red ink . . . To be truthful, I didn’t even remember which copy was the last one I’d worked on. I didn’t want to write more about Erin and Kai, because there was no way to know if I’d ever get to travel to England to do locale research. I didn’t want to write about Nicky because, well, there are lots of reasons why. I know a lot of people found time and space during the pandemic to focus on creative endeavors, but I wasn’t one of them.

But this summer a couple of things happened. The first is that I finally admitted I had a problem, and sought help. It’s hard to write those words, honestly – it was scary to admit, and scary to try to find someone who would help. But I reached a point shortly after the fall of Roe where I couldn’t go on. I will be eternally grateful to the doctor who met me via Zoom on the Fourth of July. I’ve been on anti-anxiety and anti-depression medications since, and those – along with a few other things – have cleared my mind tremendously. I’m not 100%, but in this world, who is? I’m better. And that’s what matters.

The other thing that happened, about two months after that, was that I started writing a new novel.

I watched an inordinate amount of the Hallmark Channel over the summer. And for some reason I ended up on their publisher’s webpage and saw that they were going to have open submissions in October. At that time, I had two months, and something lit up inside me. I could do that! I’d seen how many Hallmark movies in the past three months? I knew the formula! I knew they wanted sweet romance! I knew I could do it!

And so . . . I started.

A very long time ago, I drafted a novel which featured two protagonists that I’ve never let go of, not really. I loved them both, and though that novel will never see the light of day, those characters needed to. The basic premise of that novel could be tweaked, and a major storyline could be cut, and I had a feeling that they would work well in this new project.

Well, they’re not quite the same two characters I fell in love with. But that’s okay. And the novel’s not quite drafted, which is also okay because Hallmark Publishing pushed that open submission back to November, and then indefinitely suspended it. But it got me back to writing. I lifted probably 100 pages from the old novel to ‘tweak’ for this one, and ended up using almost none of it. There are a couple of scenes that are similar, but heavily rewritten. In truth, this is nothing like the original – and almost every word of it is brand-new.

But the most amazing part of this journey has been that heady rush, that all-encompassing, soul-lifting, head-in-the-clouds first love that you get when you start a new novel. I haven’t felt that in years! I found myself thinking about Alex and Dana all the time. I found myself imagining scenes at odd times, having to find envelopes and scraps of paper on which to write them down. I found myself listening to them, figuring out their new backstories, their family dynamics, the conflicts that will drive them apart in Act 3 so they can be back together for their Happily Ever After.

I had to do research. One small idea – is there a fountain in Central Park where you can make a wish? – became, in one night, the framework on which to hang the narrative. Reading about other towns on Virginia’s Eastern Shore gave more depth and shape to the fictional town I had created.

I am still writing – Act 3 is giving me fits, but mostly because I have to murder some darlings – but in the space of four months, I’ve gone from nothing to a 102,000 word sweet romance. Actually, the sweet romance part is a little hard for me; I like to write ‘closed door’ romances, and Alex and Dana kind of wish I would . . . But there’s something rather freeing about knowing how your novel has to end up.

Romances are formulaic. There are certain elements that must be included. One of those is the happily ever after, or the happily for now. Endings can be hard for us all, and knowing that your characters must end up together with the promise of a bright future is so nice. It gives you carte blanche to focus on the rest of the book. It gives you wide range for creating conflict, and then figuring out how to resolve it. In fact, the most difficult part of writing this book has been that Alex and Dana dislike cooperating with me on that conflict thing! Perhaps it’s because I’ve known them for so long. Perhaps my conflict isn’t deep enough. In fact, as I struggle with the bridge from Act 2 to Act 3, I’m convinced that’s exactly my problem. But I can fix that. And I will.

I’m just having fun with this one, for now. I’m not going to overthink it. I’m not going to over-complicate it. At least, I hope not! I just want to see what happens, and go from there. I already have an idea for a sequel, focusing on Alex’s great-grandmother.

Romance is a departure for me, and it’s not easy. In fact, there’s quite a challenge to it. But that’s also part of what I like. There are rules to follow, and if you follow them right, you might be rewarded with something people will love. That’s a radical departure for me; normally I write things that may never be finished because of subject matter or inability to do the research. But this? This has been a great way to get back into writing.

“What you don’t know and need to find out . . .” Research and Writing

A lot of people think fiction writers have it easy. Pick a plot, have a set of characters, go for it.

Having written fiction, I know better. But somehow, people do think it’s easier to write fiction than nonfiction. Having written nonfiction, I think so, too.

I’ve written before about my obsession with the disappearance of George Kimmel (see past posts ad nauseum; I’ll post links at the end of this one), but in the past few months, I’ve actually started drafting some chapters. It’s not that I’m done with the research; not by a long shot. Never, in fact, probably, will I be done with the research. But it’s because of something historical writer David McCullough said in the introduction to his book The Johnstown Flood.

He said: “At the beginning of the work, I had thought the best procedure would be to do all the research necessary, then write the book. Quite soon I had come to realize that, for me at least, it was best not to put off the writing, but rather to begin sooner than later, because it is then, in the writing, that you begin to see more clearly what you don’t know and need to find out.”

Also in his introduction, McCullough discusses his research, noting that it’s a dangerous downhill slope sometimes. “The more you know, the more you want to know. So the research went on right to the end.”

After reading this, I suddenly realized that I had two shelves full of research – and that’s what I had printed out; that didn’t include what I still had on my computer, or the newspaper.com articles I had yet to print, and the hundreds I had yet to even look for – and every time I put this project down and picked it back up again, I was retreading the same territory over and over.

It was time to start writing.

So I started. The first chapter, as it turned out, wasn’t even about Kimmel; it was about another banker, a guy named Stevenson from Nebraska, who disappeared about a decade before George did. Because the similarities were so striking – a bank president who takes out insurance on his life, then disappears – I wanted to follow it, especially since it was cited by the insurance companies in their arguments. Like George, Stevenson was never found. So I spent abut a month researching and drafting that chapter. It turned out well, so I turned next to the chapter that most fascinated me, the one about John Boone Swinney and his fantastic tale of gold and murder along the Oregon coast. That one isn’t done yet – it’s based on Swinney’s deposition, and since he also gave testimony in court, I want to be sure to add things from those articles – but it is drafted.

Then, I drafted another chapter, and . . .

Now, there’s about 40 pages that didn’t exist eight or nine months ago.

Of course, I’m starting with the easy things. As I explained to a friend last night, I had to start with the things that I didn’t have a ton of research for. For the early chapters about Arkansas City and George Kimmel’s life here, there just wasn’t that much information. I had a limited number of newspaper articles that detailed a little about his movements (a buggy wreck; starting a new grain elevator; Masonic gatherings), and bits from depositions and affidavits from his friends and family that talked about his life here. Pulling together that information into a coherent chapter was tedious, but not that difficult. It would obviously be better if I had more sources. It would obviously be fantastic if I had letters from George to his family, for example. But as I don’t, I have to make do with what I have. If the universe decides to be kind and let me find them one day, I will certainly add them in!

It’s the later chapters that will be the toughest ones, but I am not thinking about them quite yet.

But as McCullough said, you don’t know what you don’t know until you start writing. For example, today I wrote about the Midland Hotel in Kansas City, which was the hotel George always stayed in while in Kansas City, and the hotel from which he disappeared. I wanted to describe it. There are very few photographs of the Midland available online (as it was in 1898), so I went down a bit of a rabbit hole. I found an article about its design and building. I found a huge article from the Kansas City Times detailing every single amazing thing about the hotel, from when it first opened. Do I need all of that? No. But I can pick and choose my details now. I can talk about the pure white marble columns and floor that would have greeted George every time he walked into the front lobby. I can talk about the shops that occupied part of the first floor (including the Palace Diamond Parlor, which sold diamonds that cost “from $10 to $5,000”). If I pick the right ones, readers should figure out quickly that this hotel was not just expensive; it was exclusive. Now. I spent so much time researching that today that very little writing got done. But. Again, like McCullough said, you don’t know what you don’t know until you start writing.

Fiction writers need to do this, too. Some novelists think they need to have all their research done before they start writing. WRONG. Sure, there are some novelists out there who can probably do that – the ones who write from formulas, the ones who know from the time they first put fingers to keyboard what will happen on every single page. For the rest of us, figuring out what we may need to research ahead of time is difficult, if not impossible.

Start writing.

Will it be good? Well, maybe not all of it, not at first. That’s what rewrites are for. And you may put things in those drafts that are erroneous. You may think one thing is correct, then find out later it isn’t. Been there, done that. But you can fix it later.

The one bit of advice I have is to be sure to cite everything in that draft! Don’t think you’ll remember where that quote or information is from. You won’t. Cite it in the text (or if you prefer, in end notes or footnotes), but don’t leave a single paragraph without citations. Believe me, you will not magically recall where you got it from later! If you have a lot of different sources, you can create shorthand for them (NYvR is New York v Rankin 1908, for example, so a shorthand citation for me might look like this: (NYvR MH testimony 83). That tells me it came from Margie Hunt’s testimony, in that case, on page 83. Don’t stray too far from MLA or Chicago (or AP) formats; know what you’re talking about.

Just start writing. Until you do, you don’t know what you don’t know.

When a (historian’s) dream comes true

When a Historian’s Dream Comes True, part 2

When Research Becomes Obsession

Finding Inspiration for your Characters

Inspiration can come from the most unusual places.

This week, I’ve been reading a book by Malcolm Gladwell, David and Goliath:  Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants. I picked it up mostly because it was .99 at Goodwill, and also because it sounded interesting – I feel like a misfit most days, and I have my share of giants to take down! (Don’t we all, though?)

In this book, Gladwell discusses why the epic battle between David and Goliath is often misunderstood. He argues that you need to look at it in the historical context. David, a shepherd, was used to taking out would-be predators with his slingshot. It was not only the preferred weapon for defending your flock; it was the only weapon! So for him to walk out onto that field and take out Goliath – who anticipated hand-to-hand combat – in such a way shouldn’t actually surprise us at all. All David did was use Goliath’s own skills and assumptions against him.

That’s interesting, obviously, but Gladwell goes deeper, looking at famous people – some you may have never heard of before, like Jay Freireich, who pioneered the use of extra platelets to stop leukemia patients from bleeding to death, and developed the cocktail we now call chemotherapy. He argues, in part, that sometimes great adversity – losing a parent, having dyslexia, etc. – can actually fuel greatness in a person, because they learn to compensate and then succeed in spite of that.

But that’s not what got me totally interested. No, what had me reaching for my pen to scribble, in great big blue ink letters THIS IS NICKY!, was the idea of hits, near misses, and remote misses.

To explain, imagine you’re in the London Blitz of 1940 – 41. The German Luftwaffe is dropping bombs on the city almost every night. But night after night, you don’t get hit. Maybe the neighborhood over does. Maybe you know someone who was killed. Or maybe your house gets hit, but you survive without a scratch. You start to think hey, this is all right, it’s not great but I’m still here, so why bother worrying about it? And eventually, depending on your mindset, you might even start to think of yourself as invincible. Freaking Germans couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn, let alone my bloody house! Lousy shots, the lot of them. 

It sounds crazy. Totally crazy. But the reason I scribbled OMG this is Nicky! on pages was because it totally IS Nicky.

Nicky is my little 14-year old rumrunner. And he fits the entire profile of this book. He lost his dad at age 8. He had to support his family because his mother totally checked out. He’s the smallest kid in his class and is constantly being bullied, and has to learn to defend himself. And then there’s the rumrunning!

One thing I always sort of struggled with in my mind was the question of how likely it was that Nicky could/would survive so many go-rounds with the law and the Klan and still get away with it. I mean, he’s good enough to not only get away from the Klan/law in one scene, but also to make sure their cars go off in the creek; he eludes the Feds; he evades them again when he’s set up by a rival.

Sure. I set it up. Nicky’s a damn good driver, and his car is one of the best in the county. He should know – he helped build it. He’s got the skills. He’s got the guts. And he knows how to use his knowledge. Furthermore, he knows how to use the ‘knowledge’ of the Feds and the Klan against them. Who would think a runty 14-year old in a souped-up Model T could do all the things they do? But he does.

And there was tiny part of me that questioned if people would really believe it.

But, according to the Misses Theory above, if you have enough near and remote misses, you start to believe nothing can happen to you. And, the more trials and hardships you endure in your life early on, the more likely you are to take risks normal people wouldn’t take, simply because you have no other options. Nicky 100% fits that profile. He lost his dad, he could barely earn enough to make ends meet, he basically raised his twin siblings. By the time he’s forced into becoming a rumrunner, he has no other options. So between these two things – feeling invincible and being forced into a corner – it all makes perfect sense to me.

So if you’re struggling with character motivations,  you might want to see if there are any books out there that cover that character’s issues. Characters with issues are characters we care about, after all. We root for the underdog. Harry Potter should have died as a baby, but he didn’t – so he went into that final battle with Voldemort as the clear underdog, and yet (spoiler alert!) he still won. Seabiscuit was the underdog of the 1930s – there was no reason a small horse who’d never won a race in his life ought to be able to be a great racehorse, but he did it. A few years ago at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, a German Shepherd captured everyone’s hearts because he’d been rescued from an abusive situation in which he almost died – and yet went on to win Best in Group.

Underdogs have reasons for winning. Take inspiration from them. Take inspiration from psychology books, from self-help books, from everything around you. I had no idea David and Goliath was going to help me be more at peace with Nicky’s exploits – but it actually helped me understand that in truth, Nicky’s story is actually, already, the only way it could ever possibly be, because of who Nicky is.

Inspiration. Go get some!

 

Link to David and Goliath at Barnes & Noble:  https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/david-and-goliath-malcolm-gladwell/1115837698?ean=9780316204378#/

 

Are You Tough Enough . . . for Rewrites?

Rewrites are really tough.

I don’t mean the nit-picky line edits to catch grammar and spelling errors. I mean the kind of rewrites that require you to rip apart entire scenes and stitch them back together, then rewrite the segues between chapters. The kind that make you look at characterization and character arcs.

We always draft our novels, hesitate over things that don’t seem quite right, and say ‘Well, that’s what rewrites are for!’ but the fact is – rewrites are bloody hard work. 

But. If you ever want your manuscript to see the light of day, you have to do them. Seriously. Think about it. How many times have you read a novel where you threw it across the room because it a.) was poorly edited, b.) had major plot holes, c.) characters did things out of character, or d.) ___ (insert reason here). This is why YOU have to do them – so no one, hopefully, throws your book across a room.

I just finished rewrites on the first novel in my urban fantasy series (which – I am hoping – may actually meet an agent this year), and now that it’s off to my beta readers, I’ve started re-reading and editing the second book.

Here’s the thing:  in my mind, that book was already done. In fact, that book was originally Book #1 of the series, but – well, I discussed this in another blog post ( https://kswriterteacher.wordpress.com/2017/09/06/wrong-path-wrong-focus-whats-your-novel-really-about/ ). It had issues, I knew, but nothing on the scale of the one I was currently working on. Suffice to say that for the past few months, while I’ve been frantically editing and rewriting on Book #1, I’ve been consoled by a single thought:  Book #2 isn’t as bad. In fact, it’s really good. I remember it flows well and the characters do great things and it’s funny and full of tension. It’ll need a few tweaks, is all. 

HAH!!!!

OMG. I long for those halcyon days. They were what, four days ago?!

I’m about halfway through the first read of the draft of Book #2, and I can’t believe I thought this was anywhere close to being done. It’s not. It’s SO not.

I suppose every writer goes through this. Neil Gaiman, when he came to Tulsa, told us that there’s a point about halfway through his books where he calls his agent and tells her he can’t do this and the book sucks and he’s a horrible writer (and his agent says “Oh, you’re at that point in the book.”). In her book Write Naked, Jennifer Probst talks about her rewriting woes as well (in fact, she tells a story about her editor calling with a bombshell:  the book sucks, and you need to rewrite the entire thing in seven days. Probst told her editor that she had two small children, and rewriting an entire book in seven days would be problematic – to which the editor said, “Well, you’ll just have to give your children away for the week.”).

And it’s not even so much that I have to do the rewrites – I knew that was coming – it’s the fact that I could be So Freaking Wrong about how good I thought this manuscript was! The book I have in my memory was 85% complete. It needed tweaked. I remembered a couple of scenes that needed some work, and a few that I wanted to move around for better flow, but after that . . . in truth, I was thinking I’d have this thing wrapped up in a week or two.

Yeah. Well. No.

Maybe this is like when you break up with someone, and after a few months, they want to get back together, and you’ve conveniently forgotten why you broke up with them in the first place. You forgot the hideous laugh, or the crude humor, or the way he strips his transmission rather than go into the proper gear, or . . . whatever it is, you forget it. Then, when you’re back together, poof! You remember!

Like I said, I’m about halfway through that first read-through, making notes and sticking turquoise Post-It Notes to nearly every page. Sometimes two or three per page. Realizing, as I go, that this isn’t a quick fix, and it’s not an ‘edit the existing manuscript’ thing, even.

It’s a let’s rewrite this entire manuscript thing.

As I’m reading, I’m struck by several factors that I can’t believe I forgot about. They must have been there – and not lurking in the shadows, either, but right there out in the open. Nearly every page has entire paragraphs that are circled, with a big black REWRITE next to it. A lot of things that were changed in Book 1 need to be addressed – new events, thing that got switched out between Books 1 and 2, motivations. My entire Chapter 1 has to be trashed and redone. Scenes don’t flow – in fact, they don’t even go together in some cases! It’s confusing, convoluted, and crap.

I have the glimmer of some goodness. Some scenes are okay. Some paragraphs are all right. Some sentences can even be left alone. If I can figure out how to fit them back in and where they go, anyway. But overall? IT’S CRAP!

I’m tempted to start rewrites right away, but I need to finish this re-read first. I know it will be a total rewrite. I also know I can do it – but I feel so blindsided! How the hell did I think this was any good?! How?!

My saving grace, I think, is that since I just finished the rewrites to Book 1, I’m in the right mindset to be brutal for these. With Book 1, I was downright brutal – I cut entire scenes! If a scene didn’t propel the story forward, ask or answer questions, and hold my attention, it got cut. By the time I was done, I  was so close to it that I don’t know if I accomplished that or not. We often refer to books as ‘babies,’ but the fact is, when you reach a certain point in the writing/rewriting cycle, that ain’t your baby anymore – it’s the freaking enemy, and all you want to do is defeat it, by any means necessary!

And since I’m still in that ‘it’s the enemy!’ mindset – I’m ready to be brutal!

Yes, rewrites are tough.

We, as writers, have to be tougher.

 

My blog post about seeing Neil Gaiman in Tulsa:  https://kswriterteacher.wordpress.com/2015/03/13/a-magical-evening-with-neil-gaiman/

And Jennifer Probst’s website:  http://www.jenniferprobst.com/