THE BAD FIRST DRAFT

They say Shakespeare never revised, nor did Mozart. But the rest of us will have to slave over our work once it’s "finished" to get it in shape to be published. Writing a novel is a little like riding a wild horse bareback. You’re astraddle of all that energy, and you get thrown now and then. The horse never wants to stay on the trail, and much of the time you can’t see it yourself. So you panic, knowing it’s all slipping away. But writing a novel is also a little like preparing for a Broadway play. You’ll have a lot of rehearsals, so maybe you’ll get it right.

The first time through, you work to find the story. In spite of all the plotting, developing the Premise, Geometry and narrator, you still struggle through the first draft. Here you’re working with caterpillars, backhoes, tractors. You move earth around, create gullies, hills, move mountains. It’s ugly, dirty work. You turn your chapter summaries into narration, setting, and scene.

Though you try for brilliance with all your might, the first time through is always a rough draft. Allow yourself the freedom to write that bad first draft. Be fearless in your pursuit of storyline using the central conflict as your guide, and let nothing slow your pace. The most important thing about it is not to be brilliant but to get through it. Write fast, and don’t look back. As Annie Dillard put it in The Writing Life:

The reason not to perfect a work as it progresses is that … original work fashions a form the true shape of which it discovers only as it proceeds, so the early strokes are useless, however fine their sheen. Only when a paragraph’s role in the context of the whole work is clear can the envisioning writer direct its complexity of detail to strengthen the work’s ends.

The more you work the words, the more they become cast in concrete. You may not be able to change them later regardless of how badly they fit. Leave it loose so that on the next pass you can work it in with the context.

During this initial period of discovery, you do have your planning to guide you, but the energy in the story will constantly lead you astray. Pull it back in line as best you can and keep going. You may even be writing several chapters at once. While writing one, you’ll realize how it affects another and you’ll be skipping back and forth scattering words like seeding a field of alfalfa. Keep from looking back as best you can. When you do, it’ll be a horror show but don’t let that discourage you. The real writing is yet to come. If you keep going over it, polishing, you’ll have difficulty swinging the ax later on. The less you like your work the first time through, the better off you are.

THE SECOND PASS

Now you go to work with the shovel, pick, hammer, chisel, the ax, maybe even a chainsaw. The rewrite will tell the real story. You look again at structure, select which chapters fit, which should change place, which you have to cut. Use the Premise and Novel Geometry as a guide.

The author’s attitude for the second pass: courage, ruthlessness, heartlessness. To really do some good, according to Eudora Welty, you have to "kill all your darlin’s." In a similar vein, Samuel Johnson is supposed to have said, "Read over your composition and, when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out." Though I don’t totally agree with this, realize that this is a process of getting rid of the fool’s gold. The author’s attempts at brilliance are generally disruptive to the story. You can feel yourself trying to be a great writer instead of simply telling the story. Avoid the metaphysics. Hemingway said he always left the metaphysics in but the publisher always took it out. The "metaphysics", as Hemingway termed, it is where you talk directly about the premise. Don’t do it.

CHARACTERS

Look at each character, even minor ones, to make sure a change has occurred in each character, that each has an "arc" that spans their full place in the story. Examine them to see if some are actually the same character. You can tell this because two characters may never appear in a scene together and one may be present in the first half of the novel and the other in the second half. This can come as a great surprise. These you can combine to great effect. You can do this arbitrarily to make your characters more multi-dimensional. If you have a character who’s not working, change the gender. This can really breathe life into not only the character but also the story.

The novel has to be written at least three times. The first time through yields raw material that has to be shaped into a more solidly constructed novel, insuring you have found the premise and fully explored the subject. The second pass provides the novel with its proper shape.

THE THIRD PASS

Now you’ll work with screwdrivers, pliers, tin snips, and wire-cutters. This is the tinkering stage, when you focus on paragraphs, sentences, and words. Research has brought material from a lot of different sources, and you’ll have to erase all the seams, smooth over the narrative voice. Everything must undergo the conversion so that it will fit into the fictional world. Remember that the craftsman is ever the enemy of the artist in that you can tinker it to death, yet art only shines through the use of craft.

PARAGRAPH STRUCTURE

Just like chapters, paragraphs give the reader breathing space. Most large paragraphs are actually multiple paragraphs and should be broken down. Don’t think brilliance comes from writing long ones as did Russian novelists 150 years ago. On the other hand don’t use the carriage return as a substitute for inspiration, even though a short one–sentence paragraph may add emphasis.

Craft your paragraphs with attention to reader needs and according to the topic at hand. You don’t construct paragraphs as rigidly as you would in an essay (topic sentence, exposition, etc.), but you’ll still find that frequently they’ll have the same characteristics. The writer of fiction is much more attuned to the flow of emotion, and emotional content will frequently determine a paragraph’s structure and length.

SENTENCE STRUCTURE

Sentences are about thoughts. One that goes on too long can confuse the reader. On the other hand, long meandering sentences can be a part of the voice and give it an ethereal or even some other unimaginable quality. Consider Moly’s monologue from Ulysses by James Joyce. It’s the last chapter in the novel, and comes as one paragraph thirty-six long pages without punctuations marks, apostrophes or any other niceties of the English language. It’s written in what’s known as “stream-of-consciousness”. Here’s a bit at the beginning:

Yes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs since the City Arms hotel when he used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice doing his highness to make himself interesting for the old faggot Mrs Riordan that he thought he had a great leg of and she never left us a farthing all for masses for herself and her soul greatest miser ever was actually afraid to lay out 4d for her methyladted spirit telling me all her ailments…

And here a little from the end:

…and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kidded me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

As you can see from these excerpts, let nothing stand in the way of what you’re doing if you know your business and are good at it.

No "false subject" sentences. They start out, "It is…" or "There is…" These are generic openings and will put your reader to sleep for the first two words. They are also statements of existence and will lead to a static narrative. Example: "There is a church on the hill overlooking the town and its people." Change this to: "The church on the hill overlooks the town and its people." Of course exceptions to this abound. Consider again the opening paragraph of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…"

Minimize passive voice. Example:

    The book was put on the shelf.

Note that we don't know who performed the action; therefore, the action has lost the human element. Correction:

    James put the book on the shelf.

Now we have a character in the story, and the difference is crucial to good storytelling.

WORDS

Keep it simple. Use "use" instead of "utilize," "to" stead of "in order to" (has nothing to do with ordering), no "suddenly’s," and don’t use "very" very often. The most profound statement in all English literature consists of only six words, all of one syllable, only one of them more than two letters. "To be or not to be?" Words gather importance through context. Don’t be pedantic. View every word with suspicion. Remember that the reader isn’t interested in you, he is interested in the story. If you want to be really smart, just tell the story!

Use the skills of the poets. Most of us are aware of rhyme but it should be minimized in narrative fiction. On the other hand, some of the more obscure techniques are the prose writer’s bread and butter:

Assonance: Repetition of vowels without repetition of consonants (as in stony and holy).

Alliteration: Repetition of initial consonant sounds in two or more neighboring words (as in the terrible twos).

Rhythm: An ordered recurrent alternation of strong and weak elements in the flow of sound and silence in speech. Consider the opening to Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls,

He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees.

The natural "beat" of the individual words accompanied by assonance and alliteration create the rhythm in this sentence.

Editing is itself a skill and must be continually developed. A highly skilled author can slave over his novel for months to good effect while a less skilful one will perhaps even do it damage. Work on your writing skills every day of your life. You never become so proficient that you can’t improve. The way you use words is your bread and butter. Don’t become arrogant about it. Your writing should grow every day until you die.

Though you probably don’t want to hear it, you’ll have to edit your novel again sometime in the future. But first you should let it set a while to gain distance, perspective. You can gain distance from a work by letting it set for a day, weeks, months, years. Some authors say jokingly that they paste it on the wall, back up and reading it through binoculars. A gestation period is required to gain distance. It must ferment. You must push with editing, acquire persistent, but some parts of it are time dependent, as is a fine wine. Unfortunately sometimes it’ll turn to vinegar. Well, at least you’ve learned the truth before you put it out there.

While writing the novel over and over, the author builds on the material and provides clarity and preciseness. He also finds the hidden significance of events and uncovers unintended relationships. This "worrying" until the story fully exposes itself is a necessary part of the craft. Some elements will be hypergolic, igniting on contact. Other elements will be synergistic, become more than the some of the parts.

THE SENSES

I’ll make one last attempt to get you to work the five senses. To do it, I’ll show you the power of evoking one sense, the sense of feel, in a passage from Hemingway:

They were walking through the heather of the mountain meadow and Robert Jordan felt the brushing of the heather against his legs, felt the weight of his pistol in its holster against his thigh, felt the sun on his head, felt the breeze from the snow of the mountain peaks cool on his back and, in his hand, he felt the girl’s hand firm and strong, the fingers locked in his. From it, from the palm of her hand against the palm of his, from their fingers locked together, and from her wrist across his wrist something came from her hand, her fingers and her wrist to his that was as fresh as the first light air that moving toward you over the sea barely wrinkles the glass surface of a calm, as light as a feather moved across one’s lip, or a leaf falling when there is no breeze; so light that it could be felt with the touch of their fingers alone, but that was so strengthened, so intensified, and made so urgent, so aching and so strong by the hard pressure of their fingers and the close pressed palm and wrist, that it was as though a current moved up his arm and filled his whole body with an aching hollowness of wanting.

This is an astounding piece of writing, and all of it evoking a single sense, feeling, that connects the reader not only with the outside world but also with the internal landscape of his character. It makes the work instantly accessible. No wonder Hemingway won the Nobel Prize.

During all the rewriting, find ways to integrate the senses into the narrative, all five senses. Note that this passage is devoted entirely to feeling. Hemingway is setting up a love scene. Concentrate on those senses that are critical to the POV character at the time. This connects the character to the reality of her/his world. One last passage from Hemingway:

Pablo had gone in out of sight in the cave. Robert Jordan hoped he had gone for food. He sat on the ground by the gypsy and the afternoon sunlight came down through the tree tops and was warm on his outstretched legs. He could smell food now in the cave, the smell of oil and of onions and of meat frying and his stomach moved with hunger inside of him.

The senses are so difficult to deal with that you can never be too complacent about them. Always keep them in the back of your mind. I’ll say it again. The reader suffers from total sensory deprivation in the fictional world. Without the character’s feelings, he has no contact with that world.

GETTING IT CRITIQUED

Unless you’re in a writing group, the first to see your work will be family and friends. This can lead to all sorts of strange responses. First of all, be assured that if you’ve written it in first-person (POV) they’ll believe that you’re the character doing the talking and that the story is about your family. After reading the first chapter of my novel set in my hometown, my mother called me and bawled me out saying that none of that happened. I’ve talked to many other writers who’ve had similar experiences. Generally, I say don’t give it to anyone, particularly a family member. You don’t need the grief.

Another problem is that family and friends will always read themselves into the novel. There’s no way to keep it from happening. Even if you’ve written someone into the novel, they’ll key on someone else, probably the character with the best moral image, and believe that’s them. Or they’ll pick the sorriest character and believe you’ve done them a dirty turn. Perhaps even sue you. They’ll hate it and hate you for writing it.

But still, some will love it, and perhaps their approval will make it worthwhile to pass it around a little. The choice is yours.

WRITING GROUPS

I continue to be amazed at the subtlety and complexity of a novel. A friend of mine in Colorado has a degree in creative writing and whines that it doesn’t help him at all. The founder of the Rocky Mountain Writers Guild in Boulder is fond of say that the reason he’s never been able to get a novel published is that he is too educated. He has a PhD in literature.

To bolster my writing skills and confidence, I’ve engaged in a wide array of activities. I started out by taking creative and critical writing at the University of Colorado, took classes in the American novel. I attended both the Aspen Writers Conference and the Sierra Writing Camp. While living in Boulder, Colorado I was a member of the Rocky Mountain Writers Guild for seven years. I served on its Board of Directors, attended its novel workshops and was a member of its Live Poets Society. I was the founding member of the Guild’s Literary Society and chaired its meetings. I also supervised the publication of and provided articles for the Guild’s newsletter. I also founded an independent writing group that consisted of six members and lasted for eight years. All this helped me to feel like a writer, and I’d advise you to become a member of some group that will help you think of yourself as one.

But writing groups can also be problematic. When you walk into a bookstore, in all probability 99% of everything on the shelf won’t interest you. Don’t think that when you walk into a critique group that all those there will be in tune with what you’ve written. They won’t. You’ll get a wide variety of opinions about it. What you should look for is that one special reader, who understands your work as you do and can provide valuable insight into its shortcomings.

Realize the limitations of writing groups. Rarely can anyone in a writing group help you with the overall novel because they see it in bits and pieces. Besides, rarely does anyone know anything about the overall structure of a novel. The good critics provide support and creative criticism. The bad ones stifle originality and critique toward the stereotypical. The ugly ones harbor harsh criticism and jealousy.

The first law of getting your work critiqued is:

It’s your job to protect your work from criticism.

The second law is:

Criticism cures delusion.

By not accepting criticism you tend to live with a false reality about how good your writing is. My advice is to put your work out there to good critics for a while, perhaps even a couple of years, but eventually you should quit. Writing tends to correct itself if you do it long enough because it matures.

CRITIQUING

Everyone, who engages in this activity, should remember that critiquing is by its very nature illicit. It’s a violation of the author/reader contract. The reader and the author have an agreement. The first law of imaginative literature is that the author writes fiction as if it is the truth, and the reader SUSPENDS DISBELIEF. That IS the contract. So the one who critiques violates that contract because they cast a suspicious eye upon it under the pretext of judging its merits. If you talk to a psychologist, he’ll tell you that along with the critic’s best intentions they always comes to the process with a touch of anger, just a smidgen of irritation at the edge of the mind. That’s the nature of critiquing. The critic should keep this in mind while reading the work.

What can we as critics of our peers’ work do to redeem the situation? Several things. The first law of critiquing is the same as it is for doctors.

First and foremost, do no harm.

This is a great deal more difficult than you might think because the inclination is to critique toward the stereotypical and stifle creativity. The reason for this is that we have developed, and legitimately so, standards for writing. But the rules all go out the window with fiction. The work establishes its own standards and the role of the critic is then to judge the effectiveness of the writing, whether it impacts the reader. All of us will have different opinions on that. Critiquing is subjective. We all have different tastes in fiction. Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren starts this way:

to wound the autumnal city.
So howled out for the world to give him a name.

The in-dark answered with wind.
All you know I know: careening astronauts and bank clerks glancing at the clock before lunch; actresses cowling at light-ringed mirrors and freight elevator operators grinding a thumbful of grease on a steel handle…

What would you do to this in a critique group? Yet it passed the scrutiny of world-class editors at Bantam Books.

The second law is: Praise the art and critique the craft.

But can art and craft be separated? Here are some definitions I find useful:

Art: (1) the conscious use of skill and creative imagination, (2) the application of skill, knowledge, etc., in a creative effort to produce works that have form or beauty, esthetic expression of feeling, etc.

Craft: (1) skill in planning, making or executing, (2) skill or ingenuity in any calling, especially in a manual employment.

As you can see, art and craft tend to merge. I would prefer to define them as follows:

Craft: That element of the work under the control of the author.

Art: That uncontrollable element of the work that comes from inspiration.

Thus the two are Siamese twins, inseparable but somehow distinguishable. Learn to recognize the difference and critique with a planned, compassionate strategy instead of "shooting from the hip."

Don’t critique toward what you like, but toward strengthening the elements already in the work. Hemingway would be shredded in a writing group. His prose is too stark and sparse. Faulkner would be laughed out of one because the opening to The Sound and the Fury is practically unreadable if you don’t realize right away that you’re in the head of a thirty-three year old mentally retarded man. If we could have gotten our hands on that before it was published we could have "straightened" it out.

The third law of critiquing is:

It’s not your job to save the author from himself.

Unburden yourself. Realize that the author is responsible for his own work and that if you don’t get your say, if you occasionally or even repeatedly pull your punches, the world may be a better place for it.

The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote to a young admirer:

Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and be just toward them.