After my recent re-read of Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, I decided to create a revision checklist. For this list, I started with items from the book, then added some of my own based on my weaknesses and what I typically look for. I’ve split these into several categories to help focus. If you want to make your own checklist, you can split items up into whatever categories make sense to you.
There is a lot to keep track of when revising a story. Too much, in fact, to keep track of all at once. This is why it pays to make multiple revision passes, working from big to small, and working on only a few things at a time. The checklist is a convenient tool for keeping track of it all.
One checklist like this can’t cover everything. It’s just a starting point. There will be changes that are specific to each story. The “general purpose” checklist can also change with your writing style. As you rid yourself of bad habits, you may find that you don’t need to check for those things anymore. If you want to focus on something new (maybe something that comes up repeatedly in reader feedback), you can add it to the checklist.
Story
☐ Introduce important characters early ☐ Describe character physically when first introduced. ☐ Can any characters be merged? ☐ Avoid using multiple channels to show the same characterization or plot point (dialogue, action, narration, etc.)
Chapter/Scene
☐ New scene or chapter when location/timeframe/POV changes ☐ Pacing - should this feel faster or slower? ○ Adjust scene or chapter length ☐ Focus on important aspects for scene ○ Characters/characterization ○ Physical action ○ Dialogue ○ Background info ○ Tone
Dialogue
Mechanics
☐ Avoid swifties (alternatives to "said," adverbs on "said") ☐ Single attribution per character per POV/scene ☐ Avoid tagging with redundant explanations ☐ Beats (action in dialogue) ○ Do two things at once — illuminate character, reveal something ○ Punctuate an emotional shift
Character
☐ Each line fits character/shows character ☐ Dialect - word choice, cadence, grammar. No phonetics.
Misc
☐ Read aloud! ○ Read each character’s dialogue consecutively, out loud, to hear inconsistencies in voice. ☐ Avoid big soliloquies - back and forth flow ☐ Complexity - misunderstandings, indirect questions, leaving things unspoken
Details
☐ Avoid weak words - seemed, mostly, some, a little, a bit, slightly, somewhat, sort of, kind of, like, as though ☐ Avoid cliches and idioms ☐ Avoid italics and ”emphasis” quotes ☐ Avoid phrasing that draws attention to itself ☐ Avoid description in a dependent clause (accidentally simultaneous actions) ☐ Avoid repetition ☐ Use exclamation points very judiciously ☐ Use brand names judiciously ☐ Use expletives judiciously ☐ Use adjectives judiciously ☐ Replace adverbs with better verbs
Narration
☐ Bad/excessive summary or exposition. ○ Work in exposition along the way ○ Provide information at the point it becomes relevant ☐ Narration follows POV character's focus
Characters
☐ Avoid summarizing character feelings ○ Show through action/dialogue ○ Have a character react to or describe another ☐ Time spent/level of detail on character should reflect importance
Point of View
☐ Establish POV as quick as possible in a scene. ☐ Evaluate POVs ○ What info is necessary? Is an omniscient perspective necessary ○ What perspective is most interesting? ○ More distance makes perspective changes less jarring ☐ Limit interior monologue
Pacing
☐ Should this feel faster or slower? ○ More or less description ○ Sentence and paragraph lengths
I have a day job in software development where I’ve worked with large corporations. Thanks to that job, I’ve had plenty of exposure to corporate efficiency buzzwords and processes, from lean six sigma black belts to leveraging synergies.
While the eye-rolls induced by these terms are often justified, they usually start with a useful kernel of truth before metastasizing into something a VP drones on about in the all-hands meeting as everyone tries not to cringe.
This brainstorming method is based on the five whys, a corporate-speak process for digging a few levels deep to find the real root of a problem. I like it for brainstorming fiction ideas is because it is fast and easy and generates some unexpected connections.
Five Finger Brainstorming
Start with the first premise that pops into your head. It can be almost anything. It doesn’t have to be particularly interesting or story-worthy. However, don’t be afraid to start with something big like a hostage negotiation or first contact with aliens.
Example:
A man kills his neighbor…
Next, ask yourself why that first event happened, or what it implies. Repeat this until you’re at least five levels deep. You can count them off on the fingers of one hand.
Don’t think hard. Just write down the first thing that pops into your head each time. This technique works best if you let your subconscious take the wheel.
A man kills his neighbor…
because the neighbor knows his secret…
his secret is that he is hiding an alien in his basement…
because he is in love with it…
because he is an alien too.
Next, look at this sentence or paragraph as though a breathless child had just run up and told you this story. What questions would you have? I usually have a couple. These questions are natural jumping-off points for expanding the idea further.
Are they the same species of alien?
Why does one need to be hidden? Does one pass for human while the other doesn’t?
What happens after the murder?
Bonus: Story Trees
You can expand on this with a different style of brainstorming—one that is slower and more methodical. Try it with an idea that feels like it has potential, where you weren’t satisfied with your initial blurbs.
Look at each answer as a branching point in a tree. The original idea is the root. Instead of expanding that idea once, expand it in five different ways. Then go down the chain for each of those branches.
(Why yes, my MSPaint skills are incredible. Thanks for noticing.)
Be aware that filling out all the branches results in exponential blurbs. If you don’t want to go that far, just fill in a few branches that pique your interest. Remember, inspiration often strikes when you’re straining to come up with one or two more ideas. On the other hand, you’re under no obligation to stop at five if you want to keep going.
Two Techniques that Work Great Together
The five-finger technique helps dig deeper into the reasons and consequences of an initial idea or event. The story tree forces exploration of alternatives, which can sometimes get you past easy, tropey explanations and into more interesting territory.
In brainstorming, quantity leads to quality. With these techniques you can generate a lot of ideas quickly, so don’t be precious about them. They’re meant to be quick and disposable. So start counting, and come up with something new!
A close-up of a man’s eyeball. As tense music plays, the eye opens wide, reflecting a canopy of bamboo.
A wider shot, zooming out: the man wears a suit and tie. His face is scraped. He may be in shock.
A sound from the forest. A yellow labrador retriever walks out of the trees.
The injured man rises, finds a minibar bottle of vodka in his pocket, and runs through the trees. He comes to a beach, where the camera slowly pans to reveal the catastrophic wreckage of a trans-oceanic flight, survivors screaming and frantic.
“Who are you?” It’s a tinny, artificial voice.
We look down on a conference room: a long wooden table surrounded by twelve chairs. The carpet forms concentric rings of green and yellow.
There is a woman on the table, wearing sensible blue business skirt, blouse, and beige heels. She is face down, arms splayed as though she fell from above.
“Who are you?” the voice asks again. There is a little intercom box on the table, near the woman’s head. She begins to stir.
“Hello?” the woman asks, looking at the box in confusion. There is a beat of silence.
“I’m sorry,” the voice says. “I got a little ahead of myself. Hello there, you on the table. I wonder if you’d mind taking a brief survey?”
That Familiar Feeling
The first scene was the opening of LOST, the show best known for popularizing the mystery box genre and irritating its fans with an unsatisfying ending. The second scene is from Severance, the new mystery box darling that’s currently rolling out its second season on Apple TV+.
There’s a striking similarity between the openings of these two shows, nearly two decades apart. A person waking up in a strange environment, inviting the character and the audience to immediately start wondering “what’s this all about?” (And as an aside, if anyone ever tells you that you should never start a story with a character waking up, feel free to point them toward these lauded, high-budget shows.)
I have spent a good amount of time thinking about mystery boxes (and writing my own), and the current popularity of Severance provides an interesting opportunity for reflection. After all, LOST was hugely popular and widely praised for much of its run, with many critics and fans souring only at the conclusion or in the last season.
Is a show like Severance bound for a similar fate? Or will it be a shining example of how to do it right?
What’s In the Box?
So what elements contribute to a show like this working or falling apart?
First, it has to be going somewhere. That implies two things: the writers have to know the answers ahead of time, and the answers have to be interesting. If the story is built up by throwing around mysteries too liberally, without careful concern for how it all fits together, then it inevitably won’t. And even if the biggest mysteries manage to get wrapped up, audiences will be frustrated when the path along the way is littered with plot holes.
This was perhaps the biggest failing of LOST. The show runners changed across seasons, and are on record admitting that they introduced mysteries without knowing all the answers or the final resolution of the series.
However, it’s not enough to know what you’re doing. You also need the trust of your audience. A mystery box show can earn that trust in a couple ways. The first is to set up and pay off smaller mysteries. These can be arcs within an episode or questions about a particular character; anything that shows foresight and planning, without necessarily giving away too many major plot points. Bigger reveals are less frequent by necessity, but a steady drip of smaller reveals are what builds up audience trust. Severance has done this fairly well, usually dropping a “big reveal” every couple episodes.
Finally, it pays to reward the audience for noticing the details. Smart writers will leave breadcrumbs and clues for the super-sleuths to find and interpret. LOST fans were known for insane frame-by-frame analysis of seemingly mundane details, including many things that simply didn’t end up mattering.
While there’s no way to prevent determined fans from going through the irrelevant details with a fine-toothed comb, LOST included many details that practically shouted “this is a clue!” but never had a satisfying explanation (like those six numbers that kept showing up everywhere).
Mystery is not Enough
The mysteries are obviously an important engine of the “mystery box” genre, but they can’t be the only thing driving the story. Even the most mystery-centric story must have compelling characters and interesting relationships between them.
One of the greatest insights in Chuck Wendig’s Damn Fine Story is that the inner emotional story should drive the external action. Star Wars isn’t just a story about galactic war, it’s about the Skywalker family drama that will ultimately decide the fate of the galaxy. The mystery box needs to be inhabited by compelling characters, and they should be driven by their own needs to try to find out what is going on.
The characters in LOST had a very straightforward reason to solve the mysteries around them (at least in the first few seasons): they were stranded on an island and wanted to go home. To a certain extent, this is true in Severance as well. The “innies” live their lives trapped within the confines of their underground office complex, even if their bodies and the other half of their brain gets to go home at night.
A more subtle and more powerful way to drive the story is to tie the characters’ arc and growth to the resolution of the mysteries. If the character needs to solve the mystery to mend a broken relationship or understand their purpose, they’ll be driven to find answers.
In LOST, this manifested in the long-running debate between characters who believed in free will and choice, vs. those that thought their experiences were driven by unalterable fate. In Severance, the mysteries are direct impediments to at least four different romantic relationships. If those characters want to be together and be happy, they need to resolve the mysteries surrounding them.
The Danger of Success
The biggest threat to quality on a mystery-centric show is runtime, and there is an obvious impulse to drag out a successful story to maximize its money-making potential. Unfortunately, the longer the story goes on, the harder it is to maintain the tension. It’s difficult to keep the audience’s interest across seasons without moving the goal-posts or introducing long digressions.
Even worse, stretching out the development increases the likelihood that the outside world will intrude: from writers’ strikes to key actors and personnel leaving, to network executives foisting questionable demands onto the creatives responsible for crafting a good story.
Every episode or chapter is another opportunity to accidentally introduce loose ends, red herrings, and irrelevant details. There is a constant danger of diluting the elements that make the story exciting.
Gravity Falls — A Mystery Box that Delivers?
While Apple slowly releases new episodes of Severance on a weekly cadence, I also happen to be watching another mystery box show with my kids: Gravity Falls.
Admittedly, Gravity Falls is a slightly different beast. It’s first and foremost a funny cartoon for kids, even if it does have some jokes thrown in for the parents and those unexpected tonal shifts that define a good “dramedy.” However, it is a mystery box, and the slightly simplified formulas of a kids’ show help to show off how a mystery box can be done well.
The show follows the classic “monster-of-the-week” formula, with stand-alone episodes that add depth to the characters, interspersed with key episodes that advance the bigger, ongoing plot. Having originally run on TV before the rise of streaming, the show limits itself to two seasons, but these are old-fashioned TV seasons, totalling 40-episodes. It’s a run that might still outdo a show like Severance, with seasons under 10 episodes. Regardless, it’s fairly tight compared to LOST.
The show builds mystery in a lot of small ways: secret codes in the credits, callbacks and background details, and generally rewarding the fan base for digging deeper. And mystery isn’t the sole draw: there is character building and tension in the relationships, with overarching themes of siblings growing apart, and the challenges of maintaining ties in the face of growing up.
Gravity Falls does a fantastic job spreading out the clues and resolutions across episodes. It doesn’t try to save all the secrets for a huge ending. In fact, most of the mysteries are resolved before the end, with a finale that focuses on defeating the big villain and answering the ultimate emotional question of the show: will the two sets of sibling relationships (adult brothers and kid brother and sister) survive and thrive, or end in estrangement?
Don’t Let me Down, Ben and Dan…
Back to the original question. Will Severance satisfy, or will it be another LOST?
The answer, of course, is that we won’t know until the final episode. There is still plenty of time for the people behind the show to make bad decisions. I have reason to be hopeful though.
So far, Severance hasn’t been overly stingy with clues and reveals. While certain plot points (cough-cough-goats-cough-cough) feel worryingly LOST-esque, I’m still willing to believe the show-runners’ claim that they have a clear ending in mind.
The characters have had fantastic arcs so far, and they’re tied nicely into the central mysteries. But we’ve seen this before. They need to stick the landing.
I’ll be watching the season two finale with fingers crossed.
Last week, in the second post of my series on writing short stories, I had already missed my weekly goals. Hardly the end of the world, but I was still a little disappointed in myself.
I have a notebook from NaNoWriMo that says “Write Every Day” on the cover. It’s exactly the thing that NaNoWriMo advocates. It might be the most commonly given writing advice. After all, if you want to be prolific, you’re going to need to write a lot. Right?
Well, yes and no.
The reason we have this mantra is because it’s hard. Most of us don’t write every day, even if we aspire to. However, simple aphorisms usually obscure a more complicated truth. Writing every day doesn’t guarantee success, and success doesn’t require writing every day.
The Self-Designed Job
Most of us who write fiction on spec are writing entirely on our own. There is no job description, no education or work history requirements. Nobody evaluated our resumes. We woke up one day and decided to write. Even those of us who have more formal writing jobs are often freelancers or contractors.
It can be powerful to choose your own goals and working hours. It can also be difficult. It’s not as simple as going into the office 9–5. It’s not as easy as having work handed down from a boss. Being self-directed means there are no defined boundaries to the job. You can work too little, or far too much.
I realized a few years ago that I was always setting goals for myself, and almost never satisfied with my own achievement. My performance reviews for my self-defined job were consistently bad. But this is really just my own personality issue. It doesn’t actually reflect my performance. Understanding that, I can more easily recognize that feeling and let it go.
Writing is More Than Writing
It’s not surprising how many writers hate talking about their own work, or trying to sell it. We write because we love writing, not because we want to do writing-adjacent business stuff. Unfortunately, that’s not the real world. If you want people to read what you’re writing, there’s probably some amount of business and self-promotion that needs to be done.
Beyond that, writing is more than putting words on the page. There’s work to be done before the first draft, coming up with ideas and refining them. There’s work to be done after, revising and editing. There are classes, books, and blogs about craft.
There is even the undefinable work of being out in the world, observing people and things, having the experiences that will inform the work. Fiction can only be as interesting as the inner world of the author. That stew of ideas requires ingredients and time.
I’ve even found blogging or journaling to be incredibly useful for my writing. Sometimes experience isn’t enough; it takes reflection to unlock that understanding. I can’t count the number of times that writing about my process resulted in exciting new ideas.
Moving Toward the Mountain
If you’re like me, and you have that voice in the back of your head that complains when you’re not writing “enough,” there are a few things you can do to address it. Make a list of all the things that contribute to the writing. Include things like ideation, editing, and critique. Include that fun business stuff, whether it be sending work to traditional publishers, working on self-publishing, or something as mundane as accounting for taxes. Include reflection, like blogging or journaling.
Ask yourself honestly if you’re allocating enough time to rest, recharge, and feed that stew of ideas that will, in turn, feed your stories. Don’t be afraid of taking a break, or even a vacation. If you want writing to be a “real” job, it should come with sick days and vacation time.
When pursuing goals, there are a lot of different ways to move toward the mountain. Sometimes the path isn’t straight. We have to put words to paper if we’re going to be writers. But not necessarily every day.
I’m always on the lookout for good books on the craft of writing. Over the years, I’ve discovered that there are actually quite a few of them. I have at least a dozen on my bookshelf at any given time, a selection that morphs slowly, like the ship of Theseus. In fact, there are probably hundreds of good books on writing. These books have a tidbit here or there that will lodge in your head, only to pop up at an opportune moment, leading to some small improvement. Or they’ll provide some high-level idea that inspires an adjustment in your way of working.
Consider This is something else. Having just read it for the first time, I think it’s safe to say that it is one of those rare great books on writing. There is an easy way to tell if you are reading such a book. It reads like an autobiography. Writers see the world through writing, and it is only natural that we should get to know each other best through our writing philosophies. A great book on writing feels like you’ve cracked off a little piece of a writer’s soul and slipped it under your ribs. A warm little splinter next to your heart.
The subtitle of this book is, “Moments in my writing life after which everything was different.” I suspect a fair number of writers will count this book as one of those. This is not a book about how to write well. It’s a book about how to write when you are Chuck Palahniuk. And really, what other book could we possibly expect from him?
Postcards From the Tour
If you’re not familiar with Palahniuk (pronounced “paula-nick”), he is the author of Fight Club. He has written more than twenty other successful books and comics, a good amount of short fiction, and a few non-fiction pieces, but if you know him from anything it’s probably Fight Club. His writing career spans over thirty years.
Much like Stephen King’s On Writing, the book is half advice and half anecdotes from the author’s life. Unlike King, whose book is more or less neatly split into the writing parts and the biography parts, Palahniuk’s is a mish-mash.
Each chapter focuses on a particular broad topic: Textures, Establishing Your Authority, Tension, Process. Between these sections are Postcards from the Tour, vignettes from Palahniuk’s life that may or may not directly relate to what comes before and after. He wraps the thing up with a list of recommended reading, and an interesting, brief chapter called “Troubleshooting,” which is essentially a list of problems that you may run into with your work and his suggested solutions.
There are motifs that span the book, like the favorite quotes from authors Palahniuk has known, inscribed alongside tattoo art. “For a thing to endure, it must be made of either granite or words.” “Great problems, not clever solutions, make great fiction.” “Never resolve a threat until you raise a larger one.” And, of course, “Readers love that shit.”
Palahniuk makes it clear that much of the advice he’s providing is not his own. It was given to him by others. He may have taken it to heart, tweaked it, and made it personal, but it is really a collection of advice from all of the people who helped shape him. When Palahniuk makes a point he wants you to remember, he says, “If you were my student, I’d tell you…,” but this is not workshop book. It is not a syllabus to be followed. It’s a conversation between fellow writers.
If You Were My Student
Consider This is packed with small pieces of good advice; so much that it is impractical to dig into all of them here. In fact, I kept running into things that made me pause to consider how they would help me in one way or another with the stories that I’m currently working on, and made me wonder if I needed to revise some pieces I thought were done.
He tells us there are three textures for conveying information: description, instruction, and exclamation. A man walks into a bar. You walk into a bar. Ouch!
He tells us attribution tags can provide a beat within a sentence. Use quotation marks for detail and realness, paraphrase for distance and diminishment.
He tells us the Little Voice is objective and factual. It is unadorned description, the documentary camera. The Big Voice is explicit narration, journal or letter. It is opinionated. Intercutting Big Voice and Little Voice can convey the feeling of time passing.
Palahniuk also makes more than a few suggestions that made me think, “That’s all well and good for Chuck, but what about the rest of us?”
He suggests that each chapter should be a self-contained short story, to the point that it could be published independently.
He suggests a liberal mixing of first, second and third person points of view.
He says we should create a repeated “chorus” to break up the story parts, like the rules of fight club. Use lists, ritual and repetition.
I have an unsettling suspicion. The parts that feel wrong to me—the parts that seem too unique to Palahniuk—might be just as useful as the parts I found immediately helpful. I just haven’t quite grasped them yet. Maybe in five years or a decade they’ll hit me like a lightning bolt and I’ll feel the need to revise all my works in progress yet again.
Readers Love That Shit
If it’s not obvious, I think this is a book on writing that most writers should own. It’s raw and personal, often strange, and very particular to Palahniuk. That’s precisely what makes it work. It’s a collection of writing advice from many writers, all channeled through Palahniuk over a decades-long career. I took copious notes on my first read through, and I have confidence that I will find an entirely new selection of things to consider when I read through it again.
As I mentioned last week, I’m hopping back onto the NaNoWriMo bandwagon this year. I’ve participated quite a few times, but for those who are participating for the first time, I thought I would give you some advice and resources for NaNoWriMo newcomers.
Nothing Really Matters Except for the Writing
Let’s get this out of the way up-front. All you need to do is write. Write 50,000 words of a single novel in the month of November, and you’ve won NaNoWriMo. And if you don’t want to do “traditional” NaNoWriMo, set yourself whatever goal you want.
NaNoWriMo is all about writing, so write in whatever way works for you. That said, most of my advice here assumes that you’re doing the standard event.
Set up Your Profile
NaNoWriMo started as a fun challenge among friends, and slowly expanded into the huge event it is now. Likewise, the NaNoWriMo website has evolved over the years to have quite a bit of functionality.
Once you’ve created a login, you have access to your personal profile and a few tools. None of this setup is really necessary to participate, but I find that it helps me to get excited about the event if I set up my profile.
First, under “My Nanowrimo,” you can create an “About me” section and select favorite books and authors. If you have friends doing NaNoWriMo, you can set them as your buddies. Under the “Groups” section, you can join your local writing group. There are groups for most decent-sized cities. If you’re in a rural area, there is probably a group that covers that part of your state. (If you’re not in the US…I’m not actually sure how good the international coverage is. You’ll have to search and find out.)
Create a Project
Under the “Projects” section of “My Nanowrimo,” you can enter some info about the book you plan to write. If you just signed up, the default settings will be for NaNoWriMo, but you can adjust the settings to whatever you want.
Picking a working title and an image to represent your project can be a fun non-writing way to get excited about your project. You can also look at the “Badges” section and award yourself personal achievement badges. There are badges to identify yourself as a planner, “pantser,” or something in-between, and a bunch of other badges for various little actions and achievements.
The badges under “Writing Badges” will be automatically awarded based on the word counts you upload to the site. If you enjoy earning badges, you should glance over these before November starts. To earn them all, you’ll need to write at least 1667 words per day in November, and you’ll need to update your stats on the website each day to earn credit toward badges.
Connect
There are forums under the “Community” section of the website, where you can chat with other participants and find like-minded writers. If you’re interested in meeting up and writing with people in real life, check out the section for your geographical region. People will often schedule events and get-togethers, although what’s available is going to depend a lot on the amount of participants in your area.
Offers
Since NaNoWriMo has become a big event, many companies that sell tools for writers will provide discounts or coupon codes for participants. You can check “Writer’s Resources -> Offers” to see what’s available.
These are typically not amazing deals, but if you’ve been thinking about buying a writing tool like Scrivener (a product I personally like a lot), you can get it a little cheaper by using these codes.
Preparation
While futzing around with your profile on the NaNoWriMo website can be a fun way to procrastinate, you’ll eventually want to get into the actual project. If you’re participating in the traditional NaNoWriMo, you can’t start actually writing until Halloween midnight, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do some preparation before November.
If you’re the sort of writer who likes to outline, this is the most obvious way to prepare. Knowing what you want to write will allow you to hit the ground running. Whether you’re a planner or not, you’ll probably want to think about your characters’ personalities, your settings, and at least a starting point for the plot. NaNoWriMo is mostly about writing a lot of words in a short amount of time, and you’ll have an easier time writing a lot of words if you don’t have to regularly stop and figure out where the story needs to go next.
The most important thing is to find the aspects of the story that excite you. Why do you want to write this story? The more excited you are to write, the less grueling the process will feel. Most writers will regularly encounter frustrating sections in their work, but that excitement is the fuel that can keep you pushing forward when you’d prefer to close the laptop or notebook.
Apart from story considerations, you may want to think about writing logistics. If you don’t already write on a regular basis, it can pay to think about where you’re going to set up shop for the month. Do you plan on writing at a desk at home? The local coffee shop? Will you write on a computer, tablet, or notebook? When will you have time to write each day? Do you need to make adjustments in your schedule during November to ensure you have the time set aside?
If you haven’t been writing on a regular basis, you may not have a good idea of how long it will take you to write 1667 words. If you have the time and inclination, one or two practice sessions might give you a better idea of what you’re capable of. For some people, writing 6-7 double-spaced pages is no big deal. For many of us, it’s hours of work.
You may want to give a heads-up to your family or the people you live with. The event is a lot easier if they are aware of the time commitment you’ve made. These people can also be your biggest cheerleaders, even if they aren’t participating. And if they are participating, then you can support each other.
Psyche Yourself Up
At the most basic level, the strategy for success in NaNoWriMo is simple: start strong, and try to not miss any days.
To start strong, many participants like to join a midnight write-in or local event on November 1st. Late-night diners are common venues, but you can always attend a virtual write-in at the place of your choosing. The more you can boost your word count in the first couple days of the event, the more wiggle-room you’ll have for days where you struggle.
If you have days where you know you won’t be able to write (Thanksgiving is a common one for writers in the USA), you may want to try to write extra beforehand, so you won’t fall behind.
Don’t Forget to Have Fun
NaNoWriMo is a challenge, but it’s meant to be a fun one. If you’re anything like me, it’s easy to fall into the trap of worrying about the goal and forgetting to enjoy the actual experience. Writing can be tough, but we do it because we get something out of it: self-expression, self-understanding, or the simple joy of bringing something new and unique into the world.
Are you participating in NaNoWriMo this year? What are you doing to prepare? Let me know in the comments.
Asteroid City is the latest movie by Wes Anderson, released this summer, but written and filmed during various stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. I’ve touched on Wes Anderson once or twice before. He’s a divisive figure who makes movies with a very particular aesthetic. Some people revere him, some can’t stand him.
Asteroid City is, in many ways, just another Anderson film, with many of his usual virtues and foibles. However, I can’t help but feel there was one way it diverged significantly from other Anderson movies, and it was not a positive change. The problem with Asteroid City is its ending.
What Works
Like so many Anderson movies, Asteroid City starts with a frame. The main story is supposed to be a famous play, while the frame is a documentary about the author and the creation of that play. The brunt of the movie follows the plot of the play, with small asides back to the documentary.
In a pastel pastiche of the 1950s, a young scientist convention brings a number of children and their families to the small desert town of Asteroid City. The festivities are interrupted by the brief arrival of a UFO, and the government puts the town under quarantine. However, the children work together to get news of the situation to the outside world, and this results in public pressure to drop the quarantine. The various people who have come together in this strange situation then leave the town and return to their separate lives.
There are a whole host of fairly obvious correlations to the pandemic quarantine in this plot, and the bonds and romances that develop among the characters in a stressful situation. These are all relatable themes; perhaps the most universally relatable themes available to a storyteller in 2023.
I was a little leery of Wes Anderson delving into science-fiction when I first saw trailers for this movie, but the actual sci-fi elements are quite slight, and mostly played for humor. This works well enough in the Andersonian medium, and there’s even a funny little call-back in the “documentary” portion of the movie, where it’s revealed that the alien in the stage play is a masked Jeff Goldblum, the only scene he appears in.
Where it All Falls Apart
As the plot of the convention and the short-lived quarantine wrap up, the movie shifts back to the documentary. In an acting class taught by Willem Dafoe and populated by most of the cast of the movie, there is a discussion about sleep and dreams. Then the group begins to chant, over and over…
“You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.”
It is this chant that ends the “documentary.” When I talked with my wife afterward, this was also the exact point where she said that she gave up on the movie completely.
It’s Weird, So What?
I think it’s safe to say that the average moviegoer finds most Wes Anderson movies to be weird. These movies usually don’t see wide distribution, and they don’t make blockbuster money; they exist on the edge between Hollywood and low-budget art film. They’re not trying to be a realistic depiction of life, and they’re also not full of bombastic special effects like the typical Hollywood blockbuster.
In my opinion, Anderson movies occupy an interesting niche. They’re clearly on the hoity-toity, film festival end of the movie spectrum, but they’re usually plotted in a straightforward way. They’re open to interpretation, but they’re not inscrutable.
Grand Budapest Hotel is partly a love story, and partly about a man who inherits an expensive painting and earns the ire of a the deceased woman’s murderous family. Moonrise Kingdom is about a pair of kids who run away together in the face of an impending hurricane. Isle of Dogs is about a kid looking for his lost dog. The Anderson movies that appeal to wider audiences are the ones with a surface-level plot that is easily understandable. They contain quite a bit that you can appreciate in a single viewing, even if you’re not worried about the vagaries of cinematography or frame stories or aspect ratios.
These movies are still “weird.” They’re still arty and invite all sorts of deep reading. You just don’t need those things to have fun watching the movie. This is where Asteroid City fails its audience.
Most of Asteroid City follows the ethos of an interesting surface layer on top of deeper weirdness. The parts that take place within the play are straightforward, bright, and funny. The parts that take place in the frame story are less straightforward, but they have their share of jokes, and they take up much less screen time. It’s only at the end where this spirals out of control.
The chanting actors are not at all straightforward. Their mantra, “you can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep,” has almost nothing to do with the movie on a surface level. It demands that the viewer try to make some non-obvious interpretation in order to square this ending with what they just watched. Anyone in the audience who merely wants to watch and enjoy a movie is immediately excluded.
Even worse, this phrase is chanted over and over and over. The viewer is bludgeoned with it. The movie literally shouts out the importance of this singular phrase. It shows a complete lack of trust in the audience, a fear that we might miss this vital thing if it wasn’t so explicitly spelled out.
You Choose Your Audience
If the movie had ended with the temporary residents of Asteroid City saying their goodbyes and driving away, it would have worked for a “surface-level” audience. It would have welcomed the average moviegoer along with the cinephiles. Instead, it ended with an event that demands interpretation and demeans the audience with a complete lack of subtlety.
And I know, at least anecdotally, that parts of the audience felt excluded. They decided this was not a movie for them.
I don’t know what Anderson was hoping to accomplish with this ending. He may very well have been happy to make something just for the ardent fans. But he made a choice that profoundly affected who can enjoy his movie. These are the kinds of choices we all make in our work, either purposely or by accident.
It’s also worth noting that you can cater to a variety of overlapping audiences. It’s not always a zero-sum game. You can provide an entertaining surface-level plot, with readable character motivations, and still embed deeper ideas, complex metaphors, or mysterious events that are never adequately explained. Nothing can appeal to everyone, but you can make choices that widen or narrow your audience.
There’s nothing wrong with choosing to write something that you know will have a limited audience. If that’s the story you want to tell, then tell it. But think about what you’re doing, and do it as purposely as you can. Make sure you’re not excluding the audience by accident.
The days are getting colder and the leaves are changing. It’s fall, and we all know what that means for writers: NaNoWriMo is coming.
If you’re not aware, NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month, both an event and the organization that runs it. NaNoWriMo happens every year in November, and everyone is invited to try their hand at writing a 50,000-word novel in thirty days.
I’ve talked before about my mixed feelings toward NaNoWriMo. Years ago, I used to feel like missing a NaNoWriMo was a little bit of a shameful thing for an aspiring writer. These days, I’m juggling many writing projects (and the rest of my life), and I know that writing 1667 words per day isn’t always practical or even beneficial.
On the other hand, I haven’t participated in NaNoWriMo since 2019, and I spent over two years working on Razor Mountain, writing only 2-3 chapters per month. As November gets closer, I’ve been thinking that it might be fun to really jam on a different project and get a lot of words written in a short amount of time. I’m glad I spent the time and effort on Razor Mountain, but that’s a damn long time to be mostly working on one big thing. NaNoWriMo could be a nice palate cleanser.
The Prep
I’m a planner at heart, and I’ve found through brutal experience that if I want to succeed at NaNoWriMo and not burn myself out, I need to have a halfway decent outline ready before November. I want to be able to just write, without having to sit and work out plot points.
I don’t have any shortage of ideas for books, but some of them are much more fleshed out than others. I started Razor Mountain with an idea I had already thrown some words at, and I’m planning to do something similar with this year’s NaNoWriMo project. I don’t have a good title yet, so let’s just call it NaNo23.
I didn’t know NaNo23 was a novel at first, but then I went and wrote 10,000 words, and it wasn’t even close to being done. The upside is that I have a great beginning, with characters, setting and plot to extrapolate. The downside is that I’m not sure what exactly the middle or end will be. That’s what I’ll be working on in October.
Despite a good starting point and some time to plan, I expect to have much less of a detailed outline than I did with Razor Mountain. I’m actually looking forward to that. NaNoWriMo ought to be a little messy. I also don’t expect that I’ll actually finish the book in 50,000 words. That’s fine too. I’ll at least come out of November with a good chunk of something new.
The Project
My NaNo23 is an urban fantasy story in a Victorian England-esque setting. (I haven’t decided yet if this is actual England in some alternate history, or a fantasy homage.) The protagonist is Edward Argent, a man who has worked as both soldier and spy, and has seen a great many things he’d rather forget. He’s a little bit Sherlock and a little bit James Bond (or he would be if he wasn’t drugged up and miserable, haunted by his own past).
The magic of this world is very particular: anybody can do it, but it only works with physical objects. By using a particular object repeatedly, it becomes bonded to a person, and it gains power from use. A chef might use a magical spoon to enhance their cuisine. A soldier might imbue his sword with power. These objects are called “totems,” and a person can only have one. It takes time and effort to imbue a totem with power, and it’s a severe blow to anyone to have their totem broken.
There is another class of magic, however, and this is much more rare. Certain people find that they have the ability to create a totem that is not simply an object, but a living creature. These people are known as hexes, and they are so uncommon that the average person isn’t entirely sure they really exist. If they do exist, their power is far greater than ordinary people. They don’t just make a good soup or fence well. They do proper magic: fireballs and invisibility and even changing people’s thoughts. Hexes understand that their power comes from their animal, their familiar, and two minds focusing on the same magic are far more effective than one.
Then there is Edward. Edward is a special kind of hex. As far as he knows, he’s unique. When he wants to use an item as a totem or an animal as his familiar, he thinks about it and it happens. No great effort, no weeks and months of hard work. He can pick up new skills and new animals whenever he has need. He doesn’t advertise this ability. There are dangerous, powerful people who want to use hexes for their own ends. How much more dangerous would the world be for a hex with special abilities?
The Plan
One thing I learned while blogging through Razor Mountain was that some introspection really helps me stay focused and learn from my writing experience. I’d like to do that here, as well. Unfortunately, NaNoWriMo word goals tends to be a slog for me, and I’m not sure how much I’ll want to be blogging on top of those 1667 daily words.
I’ll probably post at least one more time as I do my October prep, and then a few times about the process throughout November.
If you’re thinking about doing NaNoWriMo this year, let me know in the comments. It’s always more fun to do with others.
I’m still working on revisions for my novel, Razor Mountain. As I read through the chapters, looking for possible improvements, I’m constantly on the lookout for repetition, repetition, repetition.
Is it bad to do the same things over and over? That depends. There’s a lot of rhythm and structure to writing, and repetition can be an important tool if you’re doing it on purpose. It can be an element of personal style or provide structure to a piece. Unfortunately, repetition is often accidental: something you naturally do without realizing, a literary crutch or a sign that you haven’t put enough thought into some aspect of the work.
This is one of those cases where reader feedback is extremely useful. It’s hard to see these problems without an outsider’s perspective, because they naturally live in our blind-spots. When a reader notices repetition, you should scrutinize it.
Shortcuts
Writing fiction is an incredible challenge, because there simply aren’t enough words to fully describe a complete character, setting, or event. All writing is inevitably cutting out information; choosing what is important and what is not. It’s not surprising that writers take shortcuts. We’re constantly looking for things like a phrase that implies a character’s entire thought process, or a description of a smell that transports the reader to a location in the story.
There are also gaps in our thinking. No writer can think through every single detail of a story. There are always shadowy areas of uncertainty lurking around the edges. Even in the areas that we do put thought into, there can be dangers.
The human mind is a little bit like a hive of bees. Sometimes all those buzzing little thoughts work in concert toward a common goal, and sometimes the subconscious goes and causes problems while the conscious mind is not paying attention. We see this every day when people over-use favorite words or insert their verbal tics without even realizing it.
The Process of Noticing
The easiest way to find these troublesome repetitions is by outsourcing the job to others! Readers who aren’t familiar with your story will have a much easier time taking it at face value. After all, you have the best version of the story in your head, and that version will get mixed up with the words on the page, no matter how much you try to keep them separate. Readers have to suss out that story from mere words on the page.
There are also ways of getting more outside your own head. Reading the story out loud is a classic trick for changing your mode of thinking and catching problems that you wouldn’t otherwise catch. Reading out-of-order, a paragraph or sentence at a time, is another trick for assessing the words without getting lost in the flow of the story.
Danger Words
I’ve already mentioned in previousposts that I’m making a list of individual words and phrases that show up too frequently in my own work. For me, many of these words are “softening” or “weakening” verbs and adverbs; words like seemed, mostly, some, early, almost.
Interestingly, you might be able to discover something about yourself and your process by catching these issues. I suspect that I use these kinds of words reflexively, as a way to avoid fully committing to a description or idea. If I’m not entirely happy with the way I’ve described something, I use these words as a way to distance myself from my own description. Of course, that reflex doesn’t make the writing better, it makes it worse.
Luckily, as I notice these words, I can now reassess the description. If I think it’s actually good, I can remove the wishy-washy language and fully commit to my original intention. If I think it’s bad, I can change it.
Another common repetition I’ve found are vague adjectives, like little or flat. These words can add some value, because they refine the reader’s mental image of an object or idea. A little door is certainly more specific than a door, and a flat boulder is more specific than a boulder. The problem is that neither of these descriptions are very specific (how little is a little door), and they’re not as evocative as other adjectives or phrases I could use.
Opinions differ, but I’ve always felt a complete ban on adjectives to be stupid and reductive. They can be useful, but they also bloat a story. They are often “unnecessary” in the sense that they could be removed without breaking the meaning of a sentence, but they add nuance and impact the feel of the story, and that can have value. I personally think that judicious use of interesting adjectives can be the frosting that makes the cake. Depending on how you write, they might even be the cake.
Bigger Problems
Not all issues of repetition exist on the level of individual words or small phrases. Bigger issues can arise on the level of paragraphs, and even chapters. These are often more difficult to identify, because they can’t be confirmed with a simple word processor “find” function, like repeated words.
The simplest kind of repetitive sentences use an identical structure over and over. This often arises in long stretches of dialogue or action:
He said, “No.”
She said, “I think you’re wrong.”
He said, “I don’t care.”
She said, “I don’t, either.”
He swung his right fist. She dodged it. He swung his knee up. She brought her hand down to block it. He jabbed with his left hand. It struck her right cheek.
These are contrived examples, but they show the kind of painful writing that comes from overly-repetitive sentence structure. These are all short sentences, but even long and complex sentence structures can feel repetitive.
Sentences have a rhythm. It can help to visualize more complicated sentences by focusing on their punctuation and conjunctions, because these are the connective tissue that combine individual phrases and clauses into a complete sentence. A series of sentences with a single conjunction (“This and that,” “That but this,” “This or that”) can also create a dull rhythm.
Even consistently long or short paragraphs can be a rhythm that readers notice, sometimes subconsciously. Lengthening or shortening sentences and paragraphs can be a useful tool for speeding up or slowing down the pacing, but when similar lengths are used consistently, regardless of the intended pacing, it can throw off the feel of a scene.
How Often is Too Often?
It’s a unreasonable and counter-productive to suggest that we should completely remove repetition from our writing. After all, it’s a useful tool for style and structure in a wide variety of contexts. I suspect there are no rules of thumb about the “correct” amount of repetition that couldn’t be taken down with a counter-example.
So, as is usual with writing, the answer to the question is, “It depends.” (Yes, I’m aware that I’m repeating the first part of this post.) There are two criteria worth thinking about: when to take a closer look, and when to make a change. It’s easy to make rules of thumb for finding potential issues, but it always pays to look at the specific context when it comes to making changes.
When I’m looking at repeated words in my own chapters, my personal warning alarms go off when I find three or more examples in a single chapter, or examples in almost every chapter. However, just because I find four instances of “nearly” in a chapter doesn’t mean I’m going to change or delete them. To decide that, I look at the specific sentence and paragraph surrounding each one. If I can think of an equally good or better word to use, I’ll change it. If I find that the word isn’t pulling its weight, I might remove it entirely. Sometimes, it’s the perfect word, and I leave it alone.
The Power of Repetition
Repetition can weaken or strengthen your writing. Repetition makes writing weaker when it’s accidental, filling in details that the writer hasn’t thought through, or revealing subconscious processes that the writer hasn’t even noticed. Repetition makes writing stronger when it’s purposeful, to achieve a stylistic effect or provide a particular rhythm or structure.
That’s why repetition is a great target for revisions. Changes can simultaneously shore up weaknesses and create new strength.
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.
Words Deferred 