Tag: Fiction Writing Tips

A Revision Checklist

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

Self-Editing for Fiction Writers — Reference Desk #22

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Renni Browne and Dave King aren’t household names. They aren’t famous authors like Chuck Palahniuk, or Chuck Wendig, or any of your classic famous authorial Chucks. They’re editors. Their advice isn’t wild or shocking, and it doesn’t claim to make writing easy or save you the hard work. It’s just twelve fairly straightforward ideas that can be used to edit fiction and make it better. The result is one of my favorite books on writing.

This book has been on my shelf for years. I have the second edition from 2004, and the original was published a good decade before that. It’s not exactly timeless, but it’s about as close as you can get while including references to a broad swath of literature. I take it out every few years when I’m planning to do a lot of editing, which is why I recently re-read it.

Each chapter focuses on one thing: Show and Tell, Dialogue Mechanics, Interior Monologue, etc. The authors explain a few problems they look for when editing, then provide short examples from published books, workshops, and manuscripts. Each chapter finishes with a bulleted checklist that can be used for your own work. Finally, they provide a couple of exercises that you can try, if you want to use the book as a sort of self-guided class.

After the last chapter, there are two brief appendixes. The first contains the editors’ answers to the exercises. The second is a list of recommended books for writers, split out into craft, inspiration, and reference. Lastly, there is a solid index, so you can easily find that half-remembered advice without needless skimming.

This structure is something worth noting. So many books on writing are meandering or mix anecdotes, ideas, and advice in ways that make them difficult to use as tools. This book has a few anecdotes and asides, but it’s organized so that you don’t have to wade through any of that when you’re busy trying to find some specific thing that resonated. It’s worth reading the book from cover to cover, but it’s also designed in a way that allows it to be useful as a reference.

If there is a weakness in this book, it’s a focus on a modern, mainstream, “popular” writing style. The authors don’t talk much about the exceptions to the rules, or how to make strange and unusual fiction. This is not a guide that will help much if you’re writing House of Leaves, or Poison for Breakfast, or This is How You Lose the Time War.

I don’t think that’s a major failing. Self-Editing for Fiction Writers advocates for clean, concise, clear fiction. That’s a pretty good starting point for any writer. I suspect the authors would suggest that this is table stakes for fiction. If you want to do something more, something wild and crazy that breaks the rules, you will do it more effectively if you have a good grounding in the basics first. This book provides that.

(Don’t) Write Every Day

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.

Reference Desk # 20 — Consider This, By Chuck Palahniuk

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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.

NaNoWriMo 2023 — Day 30 Wrap-up

November is over, and so is NaNoWriMo. If you participated, I hope it was fun and you hit your target word count.

If you’re new to NaNoWriMo, it’s worth noting that it’s more than just the big November event. The “Now What?” Months are January and February, where participants are encouraged to finish, revise, or work toward publishing their NaNoWriMo novel. Camp NaNoWriMo happens in April and July, and encourages pursuing more flexible goals, whether that be starting a new project, finishing an existing one, working on editing, or whatever you like.

There is also the unofficial community tradition of NaNoEdMo, when some ‘WriMo-ers try to get in 50 hours of editing (or however much you feel like) in March. Unfortunately, while there have been several fan-maintained sites in the past, they all appear to be defunct. However, the NaNoWriMo website can still be used to create a new project for the month. Just set a goal of 50 “words” and treat them as hours of editing, or set it to 3000 “minutes” if it feels better to have a bigger, more granular number.

I’m currently thinking I will try to finish my NaNoWriMo 2023 project in one of the Camp NaNoWriMo months, but for now I want to get back to some other things, like revisions on Razor Mountain. I’m also thinking about new big project for 2024.

Thanks for hanging out with me this November. I’ll see you all in December, when I get back to my regularly scheduled programming.

Asteroid City and Excluding the Audience

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.

Editing and Repetition

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 previous posts 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.

Feedback and Critique — User Testing Stories

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.

It’s Not Style Unless Someone Hates It

I recently read The Wes Anderson Collection, and it got me thinking about style.

For the unfamiliar, Wes Anderson is the writer and director of numerous films, and he has a very particular style that can be seen in the art direction, special effects, dialogue, and many other aspects of his movies. He’s a critical darling, and he’s managed to collect an impressive array of well-known actors who are eager to work with him in movie after movie, even in small roles that might seem “beneath” them.

There are also plenty of people who absolutely can’t stand him. They think the dialogue is stilted and monotone, the sets are twee, and the man loves pastels more than the Easter bunny.

Whether you love it or hate it, it’s clear that Anderson has a distinct style.

What is Style, Anyway?

Artistic style is nothing more than a pattern in your work. It might be subtle or obvious, and it will probably change over time.

It’s often hard, as an artist, to be aware of your own patterns—the elements of your personal style. This is one way that feedback can be incredibly valuable. Others will often see patterns you haven’t noticed.

If you have regular readers, ask them about any repeated elements they see in your stories. Those ideas, characters or settings might tell you something about the topics you’re interested in exploring, even if you haven’t consciously realized it.

Digging Into Your Own Head

Style doesn’t have to be entirely subconscious. You can probably identify some elements of your personal style without a reader’s help.

Look at the things you’ve written, and the things you’ve thought about writing. Past writing is a map of the places you’ve been, stylistically, and brainstorms, journals, or half-baked ideas will tell you more about where you might want to explore next.

Know Your Influences

It can also be valuable to look at the work that inspires you. What were your favorite stories growing up? Which books on your bookshelf are well-worn? What about other media?

The most fertile ideas are often the ones that you see in your own work and your favorite stories. You might also find inspiration in non-story pursuits, hobbies, and even “regular” jobs. Life and art often intersect in interesting ways.

Follow Your Interests

The reason it’s valuable to think about your own style is because it will help you shape your stories to be exciting as possible for your primary reader: yourself. It’s a bit of common advice that you won’t get anyone else excited about your work unless you’re excited about it first.

Understand as best you can what thing you want to make, then make deliberate choices that project or communicate that to the reader. Depending on what you like, these choices might be intellectual (references, tropes, allusions, subtext), or emotional (feeling, sound, resonance).

Most importantly, make honest work. It’s easy to shy away from the parts of ourselves we don’t like (or the parts we think others won’t like). But those thoughts and emotions are important aspects of style too.

You have to be true to your thoughts and experiences. Don’t shy away from the unpleasant bits, the cringing embarrassment, the weaknesses. Good characters are usually flawed characters, and authors often need some insight and sympathy for the darker sides of our shared humanity.

Writing With Style

Style often plays out in the choices we make without realizing it. If something feels right, interrogate it. Look inward, and understand your loves, hates, influences, and fears. Play to an audience of yourself.

If you’re honest about the things that fascinate you most, it will help you to write stories you love. And if someone out there decides they hate your style, then at least you know you have it.

Becoming a Writer – Reference Desk #21

Becoming a Writer is a slim volume written by Dorothea Brand in 1934, based upon her experience as a creative writing teacher. As Brande is quick to point out, this is not a book about stylistic technique or story structure. She’s happy to guide readers to other books for that (and there are far more now than there were in the 30s). This book is exactly what it purports to be: a book about how to become a writer, and not necessarily how to write well.

The intended audience seems to be college students or post-school adults who want to get into writing, but aren’t quite sure how to start. Rather than get into all the technical details, Brande suggests what they need is an understanding of how to get into a writer’s headspace, to learn how to think and work like a writer.

While some of the language feels outmoded and there are one or two references to streetcars, Brande’s book stands up well almost a century after its original publication.

Writing Practice

As a first task for a writer to tackle, Brande suggests getting used to writing daily. The prospective writer must embark on a plan of writing immediately after waking up in the morning, before doing anything else. Once this has become habit, she advocates setting specific writing times based on each day’s schedule, and varying them to get used to writing at any time of day.

As a night owl, I am already fairly miserable in the mornings, even when I do get enough sleep. I’ve tried “morning pages” with mixed success in the past. I’ve decided that this is advice I can follow on the weekends, but I’m hit-or-miss during the week.

On the other hand, I have recently tried scheduling mini writing breaks in the middle of my day. It works surprisingly well, and increases my output a small but noticeable amount.

The Mindful Author

Brande is of the opinion that most writers spend too much time discussing the conscious work that a writer has to do, and not enough on the unconscious part of the writing brain. She believes that much of what makes for great writing comes from this unconscious well of ideas, and that great writers learn to effectively use and cultivate it.

To this end, she offers a series of exercises that sound an awful lot like mindfulness and meditation to the modern ear, but must have seemed rather “out there” when the book was first published.

She encourages writers to pay attention to the world around them, observing it with as much child-like wonder as they can muster, and avoiding distractions. This observation, however, should be followed by carefully describing the exciting bits with exacting and detailed language—practice for the unconscious brain in observing, coupled with practice for the conscious brain in relating the raw experience through words.

She also believes that consuming stories while working on a story of one’s own will contaminate it with other authors’ voices. Instead, to release a writer’s inner genius, she suggests some mostly-mindless, hypnotic activity to help free the unconscious—whether that be walking, cleaning, sewing, etc. She essentially recommends cultivating a meditative state with the story as its focus.

Here There Be Writers

A short book with strong opinions, Becoming a Writer tackles the task of writing in a surprisingly wholistic way. On the other hand, it makes sweeping generalizations about artistic sensibilities in almost every word, and I can’t bring myself to believe that those kinds of generalizations ever apply to everyone. But it’s a unique take on the writing book, with ideas that kept me thinking well after I had finished it

Despite being a book of concrete ideas about how to cultivate a good writing process, it is surprisingly romantic—and even borderline mystical—about writers and their art. It treats us as dragons and unicorns, imbued with a certain amount of innate magic, but also gets detailed about the practical care and feeding of these creatures to get optimal results.

If you’re looking for a writing book that is more about getting in the writing headspace, and less about rehashing the hero’s journey for the umpteenth time or tightening up your first five pages, Brande’s book is a good choice.