After taking a couple weeks off, I’m jumping into revisions on Razor Mountain.
Having done my best to forget everything about the book, I now have to identify all the parts that suck and make them better.
Critique
To get in the editing mindset, I reactivated my account on critters.org, and I’ve been doing critiques on other people’s stories. This is great practice for editing, because I want to approach my own stories in the same way that I’d approach someone else’s: as an objective reader.
The other reason that I’ve been critiquing is because I sent in the first chapter of Razor Mountain for critique. Critters keeps the whole system running by requiring everyone to submit a critique in 3 out of every 4 weeks if they want to send out their own work for feedback.
Critters also has an option to request “dedicated readers,” which flags your submission to say that you’re interested in having people read the whole novel. Unfortunately, about six submissions in a given week are novels, and I don’t think these requests tend to get much traction. It’s a lot to ask of semi-random strangers, even if they do get a bunch of reading credits for it. I haven’t gotten any takers so far.
I’ll be sending the second chapter through in the next couple days, but I haven’t decided how many more chapters to put in the queue. I suspect I’ll see diminishing returns on later chapters. Novel chapters don’t get as much feedback as short stories, and not all the readers will be following chapter by chapter, so the feedback is less useful.
The other problem is that it takes a couple weeks for a submission to reach the top of the queue, and each user only gets one submission at a time. At that rate, it’d take a year or more to get through the whole book.
The Editing Plan
I posted recently about making a novel editing plan, and I’m now doing that for Razor Mountain. I’m looking for big structural changes I might want to make, and trying not to get bogged down in small changes. This is always hard for me, because tweaking words and sentences is easy and satisfying right away. It’s much harder to see possible improvements at the chapter or multi-chapter level, and it’s harder to let the ego go and try a bigger rewrite when the story feels “finished” and set in stone. Even if it will result in a better story.
The only place where I have been purposely doing smaller edits is in the first couple of chapters, because I know I’ll be submitting those to Critters, and I want them presented in as much of a polished state as possible. I’m working under the assumption that better chapters will garner more useful feedback. Of course, the Critters feedback includes plenty of suggestions for low-level improvements, but I’m mostly tucking those away for use in later revisions.
Once I’ve made the big, structural edits, I’ll pass the book to a couple of real-life readers for more feedback. I’ll give them the guidance I outlined in my post about asking for critique. Then I can finally start looking at the smaller edits, cleanup and polishing. At which point I should be on my millionth read-through and ready to never look at the book again.
Making a List, Checking it Quite a Lot, Actually
To quiet down the part of my mind that wants to do little line edits, I’ve been compiling a running list of smaller things to go back and improve when the big edits are done. It’s going to be a long list by the time I finish rereading the entire book. So far, it’s things like this:
Danger Words: I tend to overuse words like felt, seemed, mostly, some, nearly, almost, a bit, like, might
Overused Names: Don’t use a proper name when a pronoun would be just as clear
References to “artifacts”: I originally thought God-Speaker would get his power from some objects that he found in the mountain, but then they morphed into the voices. I’m not certain all the references got updated.
Adjectives and adverbs: They’re not strictly poison, as some writers would claim, but they had better pull their weight if they don’t want to get cut.
More to Come
I’m still not exactly sure how to structure these posts. It’s a lot harder for me to talk constructively about editing than it is to talk about coming up with ideas or writing the first draft. But I think editing is probably not discussed as often as it should be, since most first drafts tend to be pretty flawed, and it’s the revising that makes those mediocre drafts into excellent books.
For now, I’ll continue editing, and post again when something comes up that’s worth talking about.
I would describe myself as a mid-level comics nerd. I’ve subscribed to comics. I worked at a comics store in high school. I still read comics in trade paperbacks, but rarely the ones with superheroes. I’ve seen at least half of the Marvel movies, although I’ve really cut back in recent years. The last DC movies I saw were the Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy. (But honestly, I’ve never been that into classic DC characters.)
In short, I come at this topic as someone at least reasonably informed, but not quite a super-fan. Unfortunately, from this point of view, I think superhero movies as they currently exist are doomed.
The Structures of Comics
For many years, comics have been primarily periodicals. They exist somewhere in the universe of magazines and newspapers, traditionally printed on cheap paper and published in monthly 30-page installments. You can find many examples of other form factors, but this is the standard, and this has had a strong influence on the structures of the comics industry and the stories comics tell.
Comics follow a structure I call “endless episodic.” There may be arcs to the story, but the overall goal is to keep publishing issues, month after month, year after year. If the story ends, it stops making money. “Endless episodic” naturally trends toward a steady state, a cartoon-like existence where the world and the characters are more or less the same at the end of the story as they were at the beginning.
This steady state is death for good storytelling. If nothing changes, there are no stakes. There is no satisfying resolution. The ending is what provides meaning.
This is one of the reasons why origin stories are so important to superheroes. Often, they are the best story about that character, the only one a non-comics-nerd is likely to know. If the average normie knows anything about Superman, it’s probably that he comes from the planet Krypton, that it blew up, and he was adopted by farmers. If they know anything about Spiderman, it’s probably that he was bitten by a radioactive spider, and that “with great power comes great responsibility.” That’s because the origin story is allowed to have an actual character arc. At the beginning, the hero is just some person, and by the end, they are a superhero. They’ve changed. They’ve learned things. They’ve experienced loss.
Of course, comics writers have long understood this limitation of the form, and they’ve come up with many solutions and band-aids. They’ve ramped up the stakes in each subsequent story arc, saving the city, the country, the world and the universe. They’ve written tie-ins that pull in other, unfamiliar characters to provide novelty and sell more books. They’ve killed off the main character and put a replacement in the same old super-suit. They’ve explored alternate realities.
All of these are ways to create an arc while keeping the endless episodic story going, but you can only squeeze so much juice out of each of these techniques. Readers might get excited by the first or second jaunt into alternate realities, but eventually they’ll get bored. Everybody can only get worked up about the death of Superman so many times when you know he’ll be back in a couple months.
Comics will even go so far as to completely reboot their entire lineup and shared universe, and it’s all because they’re fighting against the intractable problem of endless episodic stories.
The State of Movies
The pandemic had a profound effect on movie theaters and theatrical releases, but the truth is that it only accelerated processes that were already in motion.
Movies today are a luxury item. Theaters have more screens, reserved seating, big fat recliner seats, restaurant food and a full bar. Taking my family of five to a movie is a significant outlay even if we only buy the tickets, and it’s very easy to spend over a hundred dollars on two hours of entertainment. Small, discount, and second-run theaters are essentially extinct.
The big studios are bigger than ever, and they’re putting more money into fewer movies. These bigger tentpole movies are designed to be as safe as possible, and are engineered by committee to appeal to a maximally broad audience.
It is in this environment that the superhero movie has ascended. I don’t necessarily think this environment boosted superheroes into pop culture. It may just be coincidence. However, superhero movies are the flavor du jour, and the current environment has resulted in maximum saturation. Disney spent billions to acquire Marvel and has continued to pour billions into it, and Disney will get its money’s worth. Same goes for DC and Warner, although they’re not quite as good at the money extraction process.
The State of Streaming
It’s easy to forget how young the streaming industry is. Netflix started streaming in 2007, and it didn’t really take off until 2010. The industry rode a decade of steady growth and market expansion into the pandemic boom, and now it’s quite possible that we have just entered the era of flat growth that will become the norm going forward. Prices are rising, everyone is adding commercials, and all of this looks awfully familiar to anyone who saw the rise of cable TV. Nobody knows yet how much people are willing to pay (in cash or commercial attention) or how many different services can coexist.
Early in Marvel’s meteoric rise, they released a few limited series on Netflix. These featured characters ranging from moderately popular (Daredevil) to almost unknown (Jessica Jones). These initial forays into superhero TV were largely self-contained, with real character arcs—although the origin story is always a bit of a freebie. The series were popular enough to warrant second seasons in a couple cases, and eventually a tie-in series that featured the whole Netflix superhero crew.
When the contracts between Disney and Netflix ran out, the new home of Marvel streaming became Disney+, and with this, they doubled-down on integrated stories. The movies told an ongoing, interwoven story, so why not include TV series in that and sell some subscriptions? Just as comics love crossovers to sell more issues across different lines, comics movies love crossovers to sell more tickets and subscriptions.
However, this also begs the question of just how many people are willing to see that many movies per year, and subscribe to the streaming service just to get the “whole story.”
The Present Moment
When the movie studios bought Marvel and DC, they bought a massive back-catalog of superhero stories. Decades of content, some of which is effectively modern mythology, it has so permeated modern society. From this huge backlog, they can pick and choose the best stories…for a while.
The studios wanted a return on their investments, and they have kept their foot on the gas for years now. They have burned through some of the biggest classic comics stories. Eventually they will have to look to more and more obscure and mediocre storylines, all that filler that kept those “endless episodic” stories going. Of course, they could take a chance on a brand new story, but big studios don’t like to take chances.
It seems inevitable that comics movies will fall into the same patterns as comics, only faster. The same forces are shaping them. The more history the movie universes accrue, the more is expected of new viewers to “catch up.” Big, integrated universes become weighed down by their history. The temptations of reboots and alternate universes grow ever stronger. Hell, we’ve already had multiple movies featuring multiple alternate-universe Spidermen.
The flavor du jour of movies will change. Just like Westerns, superhero movies will eventually discover that they can’t command the same budgets they once had. There will be less room for incredible effects and star-studded casts, and these are integral parts of the modern superhero movie formula.
There are even signs that the super-fans are tiring. I wasn’t even aware that there was a Secret War series on Disney+, until a wave of nerd-rage and complaining washed over Twitter. As someone who hasn’t watched these series, it was quite the contrast to the excitement that followed Wandavision or Loki. And even if you ignore bombs like Morbius, people just don’t seem to be talking as much about the current crop of movies as they did in the era of Endgame (or even Justice League).
The Future
People have been debating whether big-budget superhero movies have peaked for nearly the entire time studios have been making them. We could debate whether now is an inflection point, but it doesn’t really matter. It seems inevitable to me that there will be a hard turn sooner or later, followed by a significant decline. Nothing lasts forever.
As a somewhat-invested comics fan who is burnt-out on Marvel and DC, I think I’m a reasonable bellwether for the broad audience. Super-fans might stay invested longer.
On the other hand, the genre won’t go away completely, and that’s a good thing. Projects like the Spider-verse films and “off-brands” like Umbrella Academy or Sandman show the possibilities of less-integrated properties, less focus on classic superhero archetypes, and eschewing the “endless episodic” formulas.
Superhero movies are, in some ways, burdened by the need to be the 900lb. gorilla at the top of the hill. If budgets shrink and opportunities dwindle, it will force some limitations on the genre, and limitations breed creativity. If movies and shows are given smaller budgets, the people in charge of the money may be more willing to dig into the many weird and interesting corners of comics, taking on riskier projects on the chance that they hit big.
I’m hopeful that the future of comics movies will be filled with cheaper, smaller things, and more innovation. I’d love to see more exploration of less mainstream titles. I think the massive shared universes will eventually collapse, although I doubt any media based on comics can completely escape the gravity of cross-overs, alternate universes, and reboots. Even if the number of releases and the budgets decrease, the future of superhero media is bright. In fact, it’s likely to be better than an alternate universe where they remain big-budget blockbusters forever.
Today’s reblog is Lincoln Michel discussing the sorry state of short fiction magazines, which isn’t exactly anything new, but still worth paying attention to.
I’m only just now learning of the fact that Amazon is no longer “publishing” periodicals on their Kindle platform. This seems bad, but they wouldn’t shut it down if it was making any significant money (although who knows where that line is at Amazon). It’s probably more a symptom of shrinking short fiction markets than a cause.
I have a few samples of these magazines on my Kindle. And I’m not subscribed to any of them. So I suppose I’m part of the problem.
When I first started writing, the fiction magazine landscape had already contracted quite a bit from the golden age, but it still seemed fairly strong. Magazines were the place to cut your teeth—standard advice was to submit short stories until you got good enough to publish, then publish short stories to build credibility for getting an agent to sell novels.
That old pipeline of short fiction into traditional publishing isn’t gone, but it seems like the funnel continues to narrow. Meanwhile, indie publishing has become a legitimate alternative for novels and novellas, but it’s no easier to stand out or make money as an indie, and I suspect hardly anyone is making money on indie short stories.
Maybe I should be grateful that I write SFF and there is still a professional short fiction scene at all. Maybe eventually they’ll all be non-paying or barely-paying markets.
Since I started this blog, I’ve done a “State of the Blog” post every six months. This is the sixth such post.
One of the key tenets of this blog is an open writing process. I’ve brought that to my serial novel Razor Mountain with development journals, and I bring it to the blogging process with these posts.
For quite some time, I’ve seen visitors to the blog increase steadily. There might be a month or two where numbers would drop, but they inevitably kept creeping up. In December of 2022, I saw the biggest peak up to that point, as presumably more people who like to read blogs do so when they have some extra vacation time over the holidays.
After that, the graph got weird. Up and down constantly, and not much growth on average. Why? I don’t really know. Maybe I’ve been posting a little less consistently. Not much, but a little.
I have a few regular readers, but more than half of my usual traffic comes from search, and search traffic seems to be more variable these days. I can see why people who obsess over traffic or try to make money at this would get into all the little intricacies of SEO, keywords, etc. It’s strange to see a change in the pattern and not really understand why.
The End of Razor Mountain
Six months ago, I could just barely see the end of Razor Mountain in the distance. This July, I posted the final chapter.
This felt like a turning point for the blog. I’ve been working on Razor Mountain almost since the beginning. Between the actual episodes and the development journals, it accounts for 171 posts, about 45% of the entire blog.
I was so eager to finish the book, I didn’t think that much about what effect it would have on Words Deferred. Sure, I still have to do revisions, but the reality is that it’s going to be a very different blog, now that I’m not posting so much Razor Mountain.
For now, I plan to continue some of my other regular posts—monthly read reports and general writing topics.
Updated Posting Schedule
One of the great things about writing Razor Mountain was that blogging and writing fiction were intermingled. I could do both at the same time. However, as much as I enjoyed the experiment, I plan to write my next novel in private.
As a result, I can’t continue to dedicate so much time to the blog if I want to keep up with my actual writing. As a result, I plan on cutting back. The fact that I’ve been posting 2-3 times per week for so long is shocking to me, considering how challenging it seemed when I first started.
I’m still committed to posting at least once per week, so it’s not like I’ll be disappearing. I have quite a backlog of topics I’d like to write about.
Next Time
Speaking of cutting back—now that I’ve done six of these on a bi-annual basis, I’ll be switching to once-per-year assessments. I still like having this chance to look back at what I’ve done and think about what’s next, but the blog isn’t young and new anymore, and I don’t feel the need to do it quite so frequently.
The next few months will be a change, but hopefully a good one.
This is the monthly post where I talk about what I’ve been reading. As usual, if you’re interested in any of these books, please use the included Bookshop.org links instead of Amazon. It helps independent bookstores, and I get a small affiliate commission.
I was surprised how quickly this volume rushed into the plot that would drive this entire arc. For the first time, we see Dream meet with all of the other Endless, except for the still-unrevealed “prodigal.” His elder brother, Destiny, calls them together for a meeting, because his book (which describes everything that will ever happen) tells him that’s what’s he’s going to do.
In previous volumes, it was revealed that Dream was once in love with a mortal, and when she rebuffed his advances, he got very grumpy about it, and threw her in hell, where she’s been for a few thousand years. For some reason, Dream’s siblings bring this up, and amazingly, for the first time, he realizes that this was a pretty shitty thing to do.
He embarks off to Hell, and Gaiman cleverly sets us up to think that Lucifer is going to fight Morpheus, but when Dream arrives, he finds the Lightbringer shutting everything down. He gets his revenge on Dream by giving him the keys to an emptied Hell.
The rest of the book follows Dream as various old gods come to his kingdom to ask for the keys to Hell, a piece of prime psychic real estate. We see him for the first time as a royal figure, with these mythological figures seeking his favor. He turns out to be adept at navigating the politics of the situation, and he manages to get rid of the key and free his former girlfriend in the process.
I think this might be the first volume that is completely free of any superhero references, which is no big deal in modern comics, but was probably a rarity when it first released.
Volume 5 revisits Barbie (no, not that one), who was first introduced in Volume 2, The Doll’s House. She’s split with Ken (no, that that one either) and now lives in New York, in an apartment building with a whole new set of interesting neighbors. In Volume 2, we saw bits and pieces of Barbies dreams, which were an ongoing fantasy tale where she was the protagonist. Here, we find out that she hasn’t been dreaming for months, and when her dreams return, they bring some very real nightmares with them.
I’m hardly an arbiter of wokeness, but I will say that this story was written in 1991, involves a lesbian couple, a trans woman, and a homeless person with implied mental illness, and feels surprisingly modern and respectful in the way it treats all of these characters. The world around them doesn’t always treat them kindly, but the narrative explores them honestly as people with good aspects and interesting flaws, rather than caricatures.
This volume also barely involves Morpheus. The apartment building crew venture into Barbie’s strange dreams and confront an invading creature. Only at the very end does Dream show up, giving us a few tidbits of info about his past.
I have to say at this point that I had forgotten how meandering the series is. There are certainly bits and pieces of connective tissue: characters that keep coming up, and the ongoing theme of Dream learning how to be more “human” and a bit less of a stodgy, immortal curmudgeon. And hints of a feud with Desire. I’m now halfway through the original run, and there’s no clear overarching conflict apparent. Yet. Luckily, the world, the characters, and the writing are so good that I don’t much mind.
The city of Ambergris left a strong impression on me, and I decided about a year ago that I needed to explore more of Jeff Vandermeer’s work. So I picked up Dead Astronauts, only to find it almost inscrutable. Then I discovered it was actually the second book in a series. I finally got back around to picking up the first book, and that is Borne.
Vandermeer has once again created an amazing setting in the confines of a city. We learn that the Earth has been ravaged by environmental catastrophe and bioengineering run amok, but apart from this, very little is revealed beyond the City. The City has no name, and it is a ruin surrounded by harsh desert. It is inhabited by scavengers, and by Mord, the kaiju-esque 3-story-tall bear. Mord and many other creatures were engineered by the also-unnamed Company, which exists as a huge, white building at the edge of the city, abutted by the holding ponds where the bio-waste and failed experiments are dumped, to eat each other and be eaten, and sometimes to escape into the City.
Borne is about a scavenger, Rachel, and her partner and lover, Wick, a sort of freelance bioengineer who once worked for the Company. They protect and defend their base of operations, a half-ruined apartment building, from scavengers, from another Company alumn called The Magician, and from Mord and his monstrous bear minions. Rachel discovers a piece of biotech, which she calls Borne, who turns out to be a sentient shapeshifter and becomes a sort of surrogate child to her.
I find Vandermeer fascinating because he is frequently riding the very edge of the Principle of Least Necessary Information. This book and the Ambergris stories are all a kind of puzzle that manages to propel you forward through the story while scrounging for hints and clues about what exactly is going on. I devoured this book in a day, because I couldn’t stop reading.
The Strange Bird is a hundred-page story set in the same world as Borne. It starts with some tantalizing bits outside the City, as the titular Strange Bird escapes from a bio-engineering lab and sets off in search of…something…it’s not sure what, but it knows it’s got to find it.
After a series of adventures that leave it considerably worse for wear, the bird arrives in the City and is captured by The Magician. This middle part of the story covers some of the same events from Borne from a different viewpoint, providing more context around the events toward the end of that book.
Eventually, the bird escapes once more, in an entirely new form, and continues its journey. When it finally arrives at its destination, it discovers that the thing it was looking for is long gone, but the ending is bittersweet and it still manages to find some peace at the end of the road.
I was excited to return to Dead Astronauts, now that I had the first two stories in the series fresh in my mind. If Borne rides the edge of Least Necessary Information, Dead Astronauts jumps head-first off the edge. It is experimental in the extreme, living somewhere between poetry and novel. In my original reading, I was lost. With the added context of Borne and The Strange Bird, I was able to follow the story, but I’d be lying if I said I understood everything.
Dead Astronauts has four parts. In the first part, we follow the three “astronauts.” They are Moss, an ever-changing plant creature in the form of a human, Grayson, an actual astronaut with a robotic eye, and Chen, a former Company bio-engineer who sees the world in equations. These three have made it their mission to destroy the Company, and to this end, Moss shunts them between parallel universes to try to find a version of the City and the Company where they can gain an advantage. The Company, however, also coordinates between parallel universes, and in the end, the Company seems to overcome them.
The second part shifts perspective (and uses the rare second-person!) We follow a character who remains unnamed for almost the entire section, living homeless in a city that may be a past version of the City, or may be another place entirely. Creatures from the Company begin to appear , followed by the Company’s agents, biological and robotic. There are pale men who may have some relation to Wick from Borne, and a duck with a broken wing, an innocuous creature that turns out to be a horrible monstrosity.
In the third part, we learn more about what goes on inside the Company. We learn about Charlie X, a character who has appeared in the first two stories in smaller roles, and how intertwined he is with everything that has happened. While we get more information, the origin and the nature of the Company are never entirely explained. Is it responsible for the ruination of earth? Or did it merely take advantage of it? And just how many of its tentacles did it send out across parallel universes? Vandermeer gives plenty of tantalizing clues, but no clear answers.
The final part of the story follows the blue fox, another bio-engineered creature that has appeared here and there in the other stories. The fox shares a connection with Moss, and it can also cross between parallel worlds. In this final part, the different storylines become intertwined across time and the different versions of the city. Causes and effects are all mixed up in twists and loops.
Reading these three books in order, I enjoyed them immensely. If you can accept that not everything will have a clear answer, and you’re interested in puzzling through some of the mysteries, I would highly recommend the series. This is pretty much the pinnacle of literary science-fiction.
I’ll continue The Sandman series, and pick The Witcher series back up as well (in fact, I’m already halfway through the next book). I’m also eyeing some unread books on my bookshelf by Terry Pratchett and Andy Weir. See you in a month.
…just days after I finished posting Razor Mountain.
This was a seriously overdue change, and hopefully it’ll be good for all the writers with stories in progress. I sure would have liked to have it for the past two years.
As far as I can remember, this is only the second Neal Stephenson book I’ve read. The first was Snow Crash. As you’d expect from books written twenty years apart, they’re quite different. From this admittedly tiny sample size, I get the impression that Stephenson has undergone the same transformation as William Gibson, from cyberpunk science-fiction to stories that interpret current technology through a futurist lens: stories that say, ”it’s hard to believe it, but these things could happen today.”
Reamde is a book about ransomware, money laundering through MMORPGs, the Russian mob, and Islamic terrorists in China.
1. Style is an Engine of Story
Sentence-to-sentence, Reamde is a fantastically well-written book. Stephenson’s prose reminds me of literary fiction, because it was just as critical to my enjoyment of the book as the characters or plot. However, the style is very different. It’s not lyrical, it’s clean and precise, but that doesn’t make it any less captivating.
The best way I could describe it is that it feels like walking through the story with Terminator vision—everything overlaid with little details, and targets zooming in to focus your attention on important things.
There are many engines that can power a story, and a strong style like this is a great one, if you can manage it. Since it’s all about how you say it, not what you’re saying, it layers nicely with other engines.
2. Eschew Unnecessary Detail
The level of detail used to describe something—a place, a character—can be an important cue to the reader. Describing something in detail indicates its importance, and explicitly limiting that detail shows a lack of importance.
At one point in the book, some characters meet the pilots of the private jet they will be riding on. The pilots’ introduction is sparse: “He greeted the pilot by name.”
The pilots are necessary to the plot, so they have to be mentioned. Stephenson could have come up with a throw-away name, but this gets across the message just as well. It’s a clue that the pilot will only be relevant for a short while. The reader doesn’t have to worry about remembering the name of yet another side character.
When characters are going to be important (or at least stick around for a while), Stephenson makes sure to introduce them in a way that reveals one or two interesting physical characteristics and something that reveals a bit of their personality. This makes them instantly memorable.
The other great use of this technique is to add detail to accentuate things that will be important to the plot. It’s like a miniature “gun on the mantle.” If you spend time describing a key and a padlock, that lock ought to be important. If you leave garbage out in the forest to attract dangerous animals, some dangerous animals had better show up at some point.
3. Coincidences Strain Believability
Incredible coincidences or lucky breaks aren’t unusual in action/suspense stories like this, but they have to be used carefully.
Reamde’s plot really kicks off with one such coincidence, and it results in several characters getting mixed up with the Russian mob. To me, a crazy coincidence works great as an inciting incident.
Where coincidences start to chafe is when they’re used to repeatedly ratchet up the tension, or even worse, to resolve a problem.
There’s an egregious example of this at the end of Act I of Reamde, where everything that happens in the latter 2/3 of the book hinges on a group of hackers who just happen to live in the same run-down tenements as a terrorist cell. In a city of millions.
There are other examples as well, including several chance meetings among the large cast of characters that end up being vital to the plot later on, and many of the characters being players of the in-story MMO, T’Rain, so that there’s always someone available to log on when it becomes relevant to the plot again.
When I got to the part where bad guys were killed by a cougar, I had to stop reading and look up the stats on cougar attacks. Then I just threw up my hands and accepted that this is what I signed up for. That’s not the kind of reaction you generally want from a reader.
4. Beware Pet Characters
Stephenson is deeply in love with Richard “Dodge” Forthrast. He’s the cool, smart guy who gets along in any social strata and knows all the things. He’s a former pot smuggler turned Silicon Valley CEO. He’s bored of being a billionaire, because he’d rather be out solving some new earth-shattering problems. He is the Golden Boy caricature that people like Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos try to project.
Even in a life-threatening situation, he’s having fun, practically on vacation. It’s really only at the very end of the book where he shows any amount of fallibility. Of course, he makes up for it by being the guy who saves the day.
The strangest thing of all is that this is really not his story. Although the perspective jumps around, the bulk of it is from the perspective of Zula, his niece, and she’s the one with a character arc and the most to lose. Yet the story starts and ends with Dodge.
Because Stephenson is a great writer, Dodge is still a fun character, but I’d like him more if he was a little more human and fallible.
5. Structure is a Double-Edged Sword
Like most suspense stories, Reamde has constantly escalating stakes. Every section is essentially “out of the frying pan, into the fire.” Things could always get worse (or worse in a new way).
The danger of this constant escalation is that it can quickly ramp to extremes (and well beyond). It’s easy to jump the shark.
In Act II, Reamde splits many of the characters up into separate groups in their own bad situations. I realized pretty quickly that the rest of the book was going to be about how everyone long journey to end up back together in one place, for the final showdown.
However, wrangling everyone back to the same place, at the same time, requires introducing another round of characters and another handful of helpful coincidences.
This made the second half of the book feel considerably more meandering. When everyone finally arrived at the final showdown, there were so many characters involved and so much to resolve that there were literally 100 pages of running gunfights.
By that time, the story had escalated to such extremes that my reaction to the bad guy’s final defeat was a combination of exhaustion and relief that it was done.
Bookends
It’s been a while since I read a book that was such a mix of joys and irritations. I love Stephenson’s prose, but this book did not need to be a thousand pages or finish with a novella-length series of shootouts.
Reamde was released in 2011, so I’m thinking I’ll pick up Stephenson’s latest novel, Termination Shock, sometime soon, just to get the full “bookend” experience of his career so far.
Previously, I talked about using reader feedback and critique to gather information about what needs to be improved in a story. Right now, I’m in the process of gathering that feedback for my novel Razor Mountain.
Today, I’d like to dig into the next part in the process, taking that feedback and deciding what to revise.
Deciding What to Edit
There are two parts to editing: deciding what to change, and making those changes.
Feedback and critique from readers is a great way to get fresh eyes on a project that you’ve been working on for a long time. It’s easy to develop blind spots when you know the story so well, and others can help you find the parts that exist in your head, but not on the page.
The most obvious source of feedback will be your own notes when you re-read your story. It’s important to read as an editor, looking for problems, and you may want to make multiple passes to really focus on different aspects of the story.
Finally, it’s important to pay attention to your personal foibles. Every writer has at least one or two bad habits. These could be broad things like letting your dialogue meander, or specific things like “danger words” you tend to overuse or use to bad effect. For example, I’ve recently caught myself overusing words like “seemed” and “mostly” and “felt,” words that make a sentence less precise.
You might notice these foibles yourself, or a good critique may point some out to you. Either way, it’s good to keep track of them so you can excise them from the current manuscript and work on avoiding them in the future.
The first step in editing is to create a list of things that need fixing. The items on the list can from any or all of these sources. Don’t worry too much about listing every single thing. Editing is an iterative process.
Editing Big to Small
The line between deciding what to change and making those changes can be blurry. When the issue is a typo or grammatical error, the fix is often obvious as soon as the issue is identified. This kind of editing can feel deceptively easy and productive: you just have to read and fix these obvious errors as you come to them. However, some issues are larger. If chapters or scenes need to be rearranged, or a conversation needs to be rewritten, there may be several complicated choices that need to be made.
Different types of edits affect the story at different levels of abstraction. The chapter that needs scenes rearranged might also include a dialogue that needs to be rewritten, which includes a typo or grammatical issue. In this case, fixing the typo may be a waste of time, because it will be deleted when you rewrite the dialogue. That may also be a waste of time though, because in rearranging the scenes, you find that you no longer need that conversation.
The ideal way to address this problem is to identify and fix the big-picture issues first, then systematically drill your way down into smaller and more detailed aspects of the story until you get to the individual sentences and words. Of course, the creative process is rarely that organized and straightforward, but it’s a good ideal to keep in mind.
By trying to address big problems before smaller problems, you can avoid a lot of wasted work. There will always be problems that you discover while working on something else, and that’s okay too. You can always back up to higher levels of abstraction to fix something before diving back into the nitty-gritty details.
The Editing Cycle
While the process I just described may sound totally linear (start big and work your way down), it’s really more complicated than that. Editing is iterative. A change in one place may necessitate an adjustment in another.
Feedback may not all come in at once, and you may discover high-level changes that need to be made when you thought you were down to line edits and little changes to word choice. These are the challenges and frustrations that are part and parcel of editing, especially in large projects like a novel.
The reward for these challenges and frustrations, however, is the transformation of a rough draft, with all of its flaws and blemishes, transformed into a sleek and polished work of art.
Editing Razor Mountain
I suspect I’ll continue to post here and there about editing for the next couple months, since a lot of my writing time and thought will be devoted to editing Razor Mountain. I plan to write at least a couple journals with specifics, but these will be more sporadic than the previous journals.
I recently posted the last episode of my serial novel, Razor Mountain. Finishing a novel is a fantastic achievement, so the first thing I did was congratulate myself and take a little break from the book. However, the work isn’t done yet. I still need to edit and polish it to really call it finished.
Writing is often thought of as a solitary process, the lone writer hunched over a keyboard in a dark basement. It can be that way sometimes, but editing is much more effective if it incorporates reader feedback.
User Testing
In my day job as a software developer, we are constantly creating, changing, or improving features in our software. Those changes then go through a gamut of testing, with developers, with quality assurance, and with users. This process gives us feedback to understand whether the people who use the software understand the new features, and what they like or dislike. We can take that feedback and make features easier to use, less confusing, simpler, or more powerful, depending on what the feedback tells us. While there are best practices, acting on feedback like this is equal parts art and science.
Game makers (video games, board games, and table-top RPGs) also often incorporate this kind of user feedback into their creative process. Where business software is all about maximizing efficiency, ease of use and costs, testing and feedback in games is usually about maximizing fun. That might entail fixing bugs or broken rule sets, but it often involved blurrier concepts, like balancing different factions or ramping up tension from the start to the end of a match.
It may seem odd to apply these ideas of testing to a story that you’ve slaved over and poured your heart into, but feedback can be just as valuable for fiction.
Auteur or Aoidos?
There is a popular conception these days of movie directors, show-runners and novelists as genius auteurs who produce intricate stories all at once, from whole cloth. In that worldview, the story is an artifact handed down from author to audience. The audience appreciates the work or dislikes it, and that’s the end of the interaction.
On the opposite end of the spectrum is stand-up comedy. Successful stand-ups often do many shows per week, trying out different jokes in different sets, changing or throwing away what doesn’t work and polishing what does. Some will take their best material and craft a broader story as a through-line. Material may carry through hundreds of performances, with each one being unique. This kind of performance-first attitude isn’t so different from the ancient oral poetry performed by Greek aoidos thousands of years ago.
Both kinds of artists have a story that they want to tell to an audience. The cloistered auteur firmly believes that they are crafting the one, true version of their work, and will brook no other opinions. If the audience doesn’t connect with it, that’s the audience’s problem. The advantage that the performer has over the auteur is that the performer can see exactly what effect their work has on the audience. They can improve and adjust the bits that don’t connect with the audience.
As an author, it’s hard to test your work against a mass audience like a stand-up, but getting feedback from beta readers can achieve some of the same effects at a smaller scale.
Understanding Readers
One of the advantages of a smaller pool of feedback readers is that you can better understand them and categorize their feedback. Not all readers are the same.
Many writers will have family members or friends who are happy to read for them, but will thoroughly sugar-coat any feedback they give because they don’t want to hurt the author’s feelings. Readers who don’t often read your genre may offer to help, but will have a hard time grasping genre conventions that a reader deep in that genre would breeze past. Fellow writers in a writing group will likely have a much better idea of the kind of feedback you want, because it’s the same kind of feedback they want on their own work.
When gathering potential readers, segmenting your audience can be very helpful. It may be useful to adjust what you ask of different types of readers, and it is absolutely necessary to adjust your own expectations. If a random family member wants to read, but you know they’ll only say nice things, feel free to let them. They’ll feel like they’re helping, and you may still get some tidbits out of it. On the other hand, a writer friend in the same genre might be happy to take a list of your concerns for a story and provide a detailed and harshly honest response.
Preparing Readers
You may want to give your readers a set of questions to inform their feedback, especially if you know their particular strengths and weaknesses. You may also have different concerns for different stories.
The good folks over at the Writing Excuses podcast suggest a set of general questions that can apply to any story:
What parts were especially awesome, boring or confusing?
Were there any parts where it was difficult to suspend disbelief?
When did you feel most absorbed in the story?
Often, readers will offer possible fixes for the problems they perceive. It’s up to you whether you want to solicit that kind of feedback, but it’s likely to happen anyway. However, the reader’s feelings are more valuable feedback than their suggested fixes. The reader is always correct about how the story makes them feel. They know exactly where they got confused or bored or excited. They’re just not usually very good at figuring out what to do about it.
Don’t feel obligated to accept a reader’s suggested fix for a problem. Firstly, you may not think it’s a problem. Even if it is, the source of that problem may be somewhere that the reader doesn’t understand—this often happens when different readers point out different issues that stem from the same root cause. You, as the author, have the best understanding of the story your trying to tell, and that expert view will help you triage any problems.
Making an Editing Plan
Soliciting reader feedback is just one of several ways to decide what to change in the edit. In my next post, I’ll talk about making an editing plan and tackling actual changes to the story.
This is part of an ongoing series where I’m documenting the development of my serial novel, Razor Mountain.
You can find my spoiler-free journals for each chapter, my spoiler-heavy pre-production journals, and the book itself over at the Razor Mountain landing page.
The End Is The Beginning Is The End
This final chapter comes full-circle in a lot of ways. First, it was an experiment where I wrote the first chapter and the last chapter before writing the rest of the book. To do that, I obviously had to know the ending I was aiming toward. Luckily I am a planner, and I outlined this story in more detail than I ever have before.
The benefit I saw, which I didn’t expect when I originally wrote the ending, was that it gave me an emotional and tonal target to aim for, along with an end to the plot. Because I had this ending chapter, I had a good idea of how the chapters leading up to it should feel.
I also assumed that I would have to make major revisions to this chapter when I actually reached the end of the book. When I arrived, I didn’t end up making very many changes at all.
Since there were really no downsides and multiple upsides, the experiment was a clear success. I am planning to do this for every book going forward.
Tragedy or Comedy?
The classic definitions of tragedy and comedy hinge on whether the ending of the story is sad or happy, whether the protagonist gets what they ultimately want. If I had to pick, I am more drawn to tragedy. I don’t think anyone will accuse me of a happy ending here.
Like most dichotomies though, it’s a false one. I believe that the best stories have to incorporate both elements into their conclusion to feel satisfying. Life is never purely happy or sad, and going too far one way or the other makes a story feel artificial. Life is tragicomedy.
In Razor Mountain, the protagonist and the villain end up being the same person, and the tension comes from having multiple goals that are in conflict with one another. Christopher has all the power, but he still has to choose, and no matter what he chooses he will lose something significant.
What Comes Next?
The story is finished! You can read it from cover to cover. But it’s not done yet.
I started this project of blogging through the process of writing an entire novel because I wanted to document everything. That process won’t be complete until we dive into editing.
I’m going to take a couple weeks away from Razor Mountain to give myself some editorial distance. I’ll to try to forget everything and come back in the mindset of a reader and editor. I’m also going to bring in other readers to get feedback and critique. I’ll build a list of things that need to be changed and improved, and then I’ll do the actual fixing and polishing.
Thank you to all of my regular readers, whether you followed Razor Mountain from the beginning or only found it partway through. I do recognize those names that pop up in the Likes every week. I hope you’ll stick around for this last part of the process, and whatever comes next.
Words Deferred 