The Fourth Screwup

Yes, we've arrived at the fourth place a novelist is likely to screw up.  This is at the end of the book.

I don't want to write a whole post about all the horrible things that can happen at the end of the book, but I do want to touch on one problem that happens at the end of nearly every project (book or not).  You're sitting at 97% complete and... you die.  I don't mean you literally die, but you die.  You've got like two chapters left to finish and you're scared, bored, and itching to move onto a new project, nothing looks right, you think you're stupid, and the last little bit is this unbelievable grind.

I find the only way to conquer this is to just sit down one day (without planning it) and just say, "Today, I'm finishing this!  If I get nothing else done today, that's fine.  Today, I'm finishing this!"  I sometimes accompany that wild declaration with an actual roar, but that's what I need to do to get pumped up.  So, sneak up on it, and don't let it go until you break its neck.

You are not to be trifled with.  You won't even be defeated by yourself.

But that's not the problem I wanted to address today.  The main purpose of this post is to talk about what happens after you've finished writing your first book.  In order to finish the book, you have used some time that you don't usually use to write, and that means that some of the things you usually do are lagging behind.  You write the glorious words The End, set down your manuscript, and abruptly realize you need to go make muffins, run a list of errands, follow up with other projects, and basically live your life the way you were leading it before the writing bug ate your heart.

It's quite some time before you make it back to your manuscript.  You have plans to submit it to an editor or a publishing company, but before you do either of those things (editors are expensive and there's a lot of stiff competition for publication), you decide to read over your manuscript to see if there's anything you can do to improve it by yourself.

Very wise.

Except you're about to get dropped on your bottom.  Psst!  It's going to hurt because your manuscript is not going to be as brilliant as it was when you left it.  When you get a bit of space from your project, you start to notice a few mistakes.  Scratch that... a lot of mistakes.  There are typos, to be sure, but there are also foundational mistakes.  Your writing style is not consistent.  You have not maintained reader sympathy with your characters.  Parts of the story are missing because they seemed so obvious in your head, so you didn't spell them out to the reader and on the re-read, you have no idea what you're eluding to with your careful prose.  And more.

It's very discouraging.

I recommend reading the manuscript again and writing two wish lists.

One list is about things you can see that are obvious fixes for this particular manuscript (cut this out, add this).

The second list is things you wish you did better generally.  This list refers to mistakes in your book that are so large, you can't possibly fix them without starting your manuscript over (things like voice or losing reader sympathy).  The thing is, no matter how brilliant your original idea was, by this point, you're done with it.  So, if you're going to correct this manuscript, you need to have written nothing on your second wish list.  If it's your first whack at writing a novel, you have to set this manuscript aside and label it as practice.  Then you have to start again with a new idea.

Coming up with a new idea terrifies some authors.

There is nothing to be afraid of.  As you get better at this, ideas will come easier and in larger quantities.  Sometimes people who approach me with an idea for a novel have no intention of writing out their idea themselves.  They want me to do it.  I always find it amusing that they think I'm starving for ideas.  I have made myself into an idea factory.

Your second attempt at a novel with a new story will be better than your first.  You'll figure out how to solve some of your fundamental problems while at the same time, correcting your writing style as you go so you don't keep making the same technical errors every step.  Don't be afraid.  You don't get something for nothing and the price of admission is practice.

The Third Screw Up

Of all the screwups, this one is my least favorite.  For all you novelists out there, this is not going to be news.  For everyone else, please know that bringing this up brings me no pleasure.  Remember that I was once a lowly writer who wanted to be a novelist... so, yes, the thing I am going to mention has happened to me.

Sometimes, someone tells me they've written a novel and they ask me to have a look at it.  They send over the electronic file and I open it.  Before I read any of the text, I check the word count because I'm concerned about this problem.

It's 15,000 words.

I write the author back and ask them where the rest of it is, hoping that there's more they haven't sent me for some reason.

There isn't more.  That's all of it.

Then I have the very non-fun job of informing them that their novel is not a novel.  It's a short story.

The author is confused.  There are chapters.  There are over twenty of them.

I get to explain that it doesn't matter that they cut their writing into chapters.  It's still not a novel.  To help explain, I start at the beginning.  500 - 20,000 words is a short story.  20,000 words to 40,000 words is a novella.  40,000 words to 60,000 words is a lazy man's novel (a lot of Harlequins are written in this range).  60,000 - 100,000 is a perfectly respectable novel with the sweet spot being at approximately 86,000 words.  100,000+ is for high fantasy authors who have really decent publishing companies backing them.  Independent authors can't market books of that length.  The word count is too large and there ends up being too much paper involved in the production of the book for it to be profitable. 

The author is embarrassed because they thought they'd written a novel.  Not only that but cracking out those 15,000 words was really hard for them.  I know.  Like I said, I've had this happen to me as well.

Getting past this problem requires a two-prong strategy.

First, you should think about the fire in your belly.  That fire inside you needs to burn long and hot.  Basically, this means that you have to angry.  You need to feel like books and their authors have let you down.  You need to want to make something different than anybody else.  If all you want to do is write the sorts of things you enjoy reading, you may not have enough fire to power your dream.  You need to believe that you have something to offer than no one else does, that your contribution to the writing world is INDISPENSABLE.  You need to be on fire.  If you feel this way, this setback will be nothing more than a blip and you'll soon pass over any embarrassment you felt writing a short story and trying to pass it off as a novel.

The second thing to note is that you are only at the beginning of your journey.  I'm an old hag and as an old hag, who has been doing this for twenty-five years, I can tell you, you're going to get better.  Things will flow better as you get more practice.  I can write 15,000 words in a day if I'm left alone to do it.  What was once rough will become smooth.

The Second Place a Novelist Screws Up

In my last blog, I talked about how even really good ideas have challenges attached to them.  I'm going to talk about that a little more today.

One time, I heard someone's idea for a novel.  It was an erotica parody and the idea itself was pretty entertaining, but the second I heard it, I knew the person who had that idea could not do it justice.  In order to write a successful parody, you can't just make fun of the genre.  That's not good enough.  If someone is familiar enough with a genre to get all the jabs, then it means your audience likes the genre.  You can't just slam it through a wall.  At the end of a successful parody, you finish with a love letter to the genre.  To pull it off, you have to love that genre.  I was betting that the guy with that hilarious idea for an erotic parody had absolutely no love for erotica, and thus would be unable to pull off the necessary second half.  Start with the jokes; finish with a kiss.

The disaster happens when the author sits down and starts writing.  They finish to the end of their introductory plot arch and then they're left scratching their head.  What are they supposed to do next?  They don't know.  They think they're blocked, and they are.  They aren't writing.

Writers get blocked when there's a disconnect between their expectations and their ability.

Sometimes it's because a writer notices a gap in popular storytelling, and they wonder why no one has written a story that follows the missed pattern.  They think that because they spotted it, they're the one to write it, but finding storytelling ideas this way does not account for a particular author's skills.  It's like applying for any job that's available, not your dream job.  You can plod away at it, but it might be like climbing a mountain with toothpicks.  It's going to take forever and it won't be very much fun. 

Other times, it's because an unpracticed novelist expects that because they have been writing adorable little projects for years that the skills they learned writing those can easily be transferred to a larger project.  They're going to find out that that isn't necessarily the case.  I always say that a novel is 60,000 words, but you can easily make more than 60,000 mistakes.  That's because it takes skill to manage multiple plot lines, character arches, ongoing themes, foreshadowing, and provide consistent writing throughout a piece.  Sometimes people who only write tiny pieces do not have a regular voice they write with.  They read back their writing and oops!  They're discouraged because when they read someone else's book, it looked so effortless; they thought they could easily write a novel too.

Those are just two ways that our expectations can murder us.  We want to be smart.  We want others to think we're smart.  We want to be creative about what we write about and how we write it.  Yet that is not coming through on the page.

We need to let go of our expectations.  Forget about planning a manuscript you think will be profitable.  Instead, write something from your heart, and don't worry about writing well.  For your first book, just try to make it to 40,000 words.  In your next manuscript, focus on getting to 60,000.  You'll be so much smarter about how to craft a plot after your first two attempts.

And I know no one wants to 'practice' writing.  Everyone dreams of getting it right the first time and being a huge success.  That's something else you're going to have to let go of.  No one writes their best stuff at the beginning of their career.  If you analyze why you're writing and it's because you want a ton of attention, fame, and money... maybe find something else to do.

The Very First Place a Novelist Screws Up

Conception.

You wouldn't think that a person could screw up on their writing before they've written a word, but I've found that that is the most likely place for a person to screw up.  Let me explain why.

Sometimes, I have people approach me and ask me if I'm a writer.  I reply that I am a novelist, and they proceed to tell me they have a great idea for a book.  At this point in the story, I'm inwardly groaning because there is no right way for me to respond to them.  Without having heard their idea, I know it's good.  People are smart, inventive, and creative.  A person would not sit a novelist down and tell them an idea for a book that wasn't going to appeal to someone.  They tell me their idea and it's great.

But even great ideas have challenges attached to them.  If I tell this aspiring author the troubles attached to their idea, they are going to feel deflated, defeated, and they'll give up. 

If I tell them their idea is great without attaching a specific warning, something else will happen that is equally bad.  They'll get really excited and they'll tell me a lot more about the story than the simple premise.  The creative pistons in their head will start firing and they'll tell me every part of their story that they've worked out.  This is a mistake, but I let this happen many times before I realized how big of a mistake it was. 

You see, talking is a form of expression.  So is writing.  If you performed an experiment by writing a fresh draft of the same short story every Friday for a month, then read them over to try to choose the best one... I bet you'd pick the first one.  I don't know why your first half-brained attempt is usually the best one, but it is.  I have written many things that were excellent, but for some dumb reason, I lost my first whack at it.  I've had to pick up the pieces and replace it with other text which isn't as good.  It's a second try instead of a first try.  Back to the aspiring writer, they've had their first whack at their story talking to a woman in a park, not on a page where it can be recorded, studied, and possibly improved. 

Months later, I run into this person again.  I slap them on the back (if they make me listen to their idea for a novel for more than five minutes, I reserve the right to slap them on the back), and I ask them how their novel is coming.  They look at me like I'm the body they buried in the woods last summer because they thought they were never going to see me again.  They choke their response.

They haven't worked on their book since we last spoke.

I slap them on the back again and remind them that there are lots of things in life that are more important than writing novels.  They shouldn't give it another thought... but they do.  A little later in the conversation, they'll sidle up to me and ask me timidly if I have finished writing the novel I was working on when we talked last.  I'll tell them I have, and they will be reduced to ashes at my feet.

You see, when we had our conversation about their perspective book, they felt a surge of validation as creative energy flowed through them.  They felt like they were a writer (without actually having any idea how much unpleasantness that word carries because all they can see is the elusive glamor attached to any artsy pursuit).  After all, they were having a conversation with a writer who was acknowledging them as a writer.  They felt talented, appreciated and their brain sealed the idea as fulfilled and finished because they had received their reward.

When I confronted them about the status of their project, I stripped them of all those lovely feelings about their idea, but also about themselves.  I've made them into a person who only knows how to run their mouth without actually buckling down and writing.  They're embarrassed.

I'm unhappy too because it was not my intent to embarrass them.  I was trying to be supportive and friendly.  Back in those days, I didn't yet recognize the cycle of people who like cornering authors in public and begging them for feedback on work that doesn't exist. 

The solution?  For me, I try to pull the plug on writers telling me their ideas.  I remind them that if they like their idea for a story, that's all they need.  Someone out there will like it.  They don't need anyone's permission to write.  Neither do I.  Neither do you.  So, go write.