It’s Not The Quality, it’s the Quantity

Someone from my writing group recently asked me to look over the beginning of their manuscript and give my opinion as to whether or not the story was “working”. They are nearing the end and, as most writers know, the end of a story is very much tied to the beginning. If your ending doesn’t work, it usually means there’s something wrong with your beginning or vice versa.

Beginnings are vitally important to stories because they set up something called Author/Reader Trust. It’s in those first twenty pages or so that you, the author, convince the reader that you’re capable of being trusted to take him on a three or four hundred page journey and that it will be satisfying in “expected” ways.

Am I implying that this Trust thing means you have follow some sort of pattern and make sure nothing surprising happens?

Not at all. What I am saying is that the reader is trusting you not to use your power as a writer in ways that behave beyond certain contracted guidelines. Guidelines that are unwritten but come into existence very early on in the reading experience.

Let me give you an example.

I love Quentin Tarantino movies. Always have. I also really like Robert Rodriguez movies. So, it was with great anticipation that I went to see From Dusk Till Dawn.

Now, I have a weird rule when it comes to movies: I try desperately to avoid any advertisements, trailers, commercials, reviews. . . absolutely anything that will tell me anything about the movie before I go. I just feel they give too much away. I like to go in blind. In a perfect world, I would rather not even know the title. Especially if it’s something cool like a new Tarantino film.

So, in hindsight, really I got what I deserved. But let me continue.

Another weird thing with me is that I absolutely detest vampire movies (Buffy excluded). They just don’t click with me. I find them far-fetched and almost laughable. I would never knowingly go see one. I spent ten minutes in Interview With a Vampire before I got up and left the cinema.

Do you see where I’m going with this yet?

So I sit down with my super-sized popcorn and giant Diet Coke trying to avert my eyes from the trailers before the movie, anxiously awaiting the next Tarantino masterpiece and it opens on that gas station out in the desert (if you haven’t seen it. . . the movie’s worth seeing, just for the opening sequence. Even if you hate vampires). And I’m watching and waiting for the cool Tarantino spin, because you just know it’s gonna be there.

And of course it is. They come out of the washroom with the hostage and I’m on the edge of my seat. This movie rocks. This movie is great. This is the best movie ever.

It stayed the best movie ever for another fifteen minutes. Tarantino had me. In my mind, in those fifteen minutes, we had formed a contract: he was going to give me a movie full of surprises with guns and chicks and cars and violence and it wasn’t going to slow down until the clock finally hit that hundred and five minute mark.

Well it sure turned out to be full of surprises. Not good ones, though. Not for me, at least.

When they’re in the bar and suddenly that girl jumps on the table and flashes the fangs and tears open that guy’s neck, I was like: “What just happened? That can’t happen. We had a deal. Vampires weren’t part of the deal.”

I felt gypped.

Everyone else in the theatre loved it. Of course, everyone else watched reviews, commercials, trailers, and ads like normal people.

Anyway, books are like this. You make a deal with your reader that you are going to give them a fair shake. If you’re going to tear the throat out of a girl’s neck at the top of Act II, you better have a vamp on your cover or some indication that it might be coming up in your opening twenty pages, or you’re going to lose your audience.

If Arnold Schwarzenegger dropped out of a helicopter with a machine gun in the middle of Steel Magnolias and started gunning down everyone over seventy, people would feel let down by the writers of the movie. But if Arnold had appeared in the first five minutes and shown to be back from the war with a piece of artillery in his head and unbalanced and had somehow gained possession of UH-60 Black Hawk, it may have actually worked. It wouldn’t have broken the audience contract at any rate.

So, getting back to the manuscript I reviewed. The ending isn’t finished yet, but the writer is close enough that I can see where it’s headed. There’s some good writing in this book. It’s got some great scenes that rise in tension and it’s an adventure mystery book that manages to continually push the plot forward.

All this is fantastic.

Having read the beginning, though, I found some problems. And they are common problems I think everyone encounters.

One has to do with the contact with the reader, which right now remains undefined because I can’t tell what it is. There is one scene of action but it’s fully encapsulated, meaning it can stand-alone by itself. It doesn’t have any ramifications outside of the beginning of the story. This may be interesting, but it doesn’t give the story anywhere to move from.

There’s also either no inciting event or the inciting event is pushed so far back I hadn’t got to it yet after reading the first two chapters. This is a YA book so it’s shorter than a regular novel. YA books are fun to write because they’re short. They’re like mini-novels, but with YA it’s even more vital that you get to the inciting event as quickly as possible. You haven’t got time to walk the reader to the story.

Now this is in no way a slam to the writer in question because everyone walks the reader to the story on their first drafts. And I mean everyone. I do it all the time and don’t even realize I’m doing it (isn’t it funny how we can see things in other people’s work so much easier than our own?). I only recently figured out that the new YA title I’m working on has three entire chapters that happen before the inciting event that aren’t just in the wrong spot. . . I don’t think they’re even needed! That’s like fifty pages.

You’re story doesn’t start until your inciting event happens, so I was going to have the reader go through fifty pages plus my setup before my story even started. Well you know what? That book would never get published. And I didn’t even notice it until I woke up one morning and it just occurred to me that it was all messed up.

So, if you can’t see these problems in your own work, how do you ever get to the point where you’re improving as a writer? Do you have to rely on other people to critique you?

Other people’s critiques are good, especially when you’re starting out, but you can’t rely on them. You have to develop some sort of intuitive instinct that tells you when you’re writing crap and when you’re writing quality. It won’t always be right, but you can sharpen it, like any other skill. And the way you sharpen it is with practice.

How do you practice? You write. Like anything else, the more you write, the better you get.

When I reported back to my writing group friend with what I thought of the beginning of their story they told me I am very good at this. My response was that I’m not so good as I’ve had a lot of practice. I was very lucky early on in my career to meet Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch. They became my mentors and I spent many weeks at their house down on the beach in Oregon in very intense writing workshops.

They taught me not to love my work and not to be afraid to throw things

out; they drilled into my head that at least eighty percent of what I write is going to be crap. And you have to learn to be able to tell the difference because you can’t rely on other people to tell you. No offense to mine if she reads this (because mine is actually pretty good) but as a general rule: agents are useless. Editors are useless. Time and time again, you hear of books like Harry Potter that get turned down by twenty-eight literary houses or something like that before going on to outsell the Bible.

And the industry is completely flaky right now and getting flakier all the time. Agents are supposed to be working for the author. All money should flow to the author (this was the Gospel according to Dean–I believe he’s an advocate of self-publishing right now, so his stance on how money flows may have changed a bit, it’s been a while since we talked), but when you talk to the people in New York, you would think, given the balance of power between agents and writers, that writers work for agents. It’s crazy. Again, I want to point out that there are exceptions. If you get a good agent, consider yourself blessed. I do.

The best thing you can do is control the things you have control of, and the main thing you have control of is the writing. Get good at it. Dean and Kris (Dean in particular) taught that the best way to get good at writing was to write as fast as possible and to put out as much product as possible. Don’t worry about quality because quality has nothing at all to do with how much time you spend on a book. I’ve written sixteen novels. Some really suck. Some, I think, are far better than the one I have being published (although they are part of my earlier oeuvre and probably appeal to a less diversified audience–I was a bit odd back then with what I wrote. It didn’t pigeonhole well). For two years running, I managed to write a million words. That’s two million words in two years. I’m not awfully good, I’ve just written two million words in two years. You can’t help but know what you’re doing if you put up those kinds of numbers.

These days, I don’t hit anywhere near those totals. I like to write two

adult novels and three YA books a year and maybe four or five short

stories. I’ll probably also outline a few things and tinker with some

other things. But I don’t try to knock myself out. I took a hiatus from

writing for three years. Ironically, it was during that hiatus that my

agent sold my book (it wasn’t quite a hiatus… I did write a few things, but from the output I was experiencing I was definitely considering it a hiatus).

Anyway, the point of this story is that writing is a very harsh

mistress and it can be the most disheartening thing in the world. And I

know as much as anyone that it’s very hard to remind yourself of things

when the darkness comes swooping in, but if you can, try to remember

that there are no wasted words. Every single keystroke you type is

important and teaching you something.

And writing is like anything. The more you do it, the better you get. Sure, some people are born better than others–Stephen King probably has an innate talent that allowed him to start at a level I will never hope to reach, but the nice thing about writing is that I just might. I could. Possibly. Because it’s not an art. It’s a craft.

And it’s fine to learn about grammar and usage. In fact, if you’re an Indie publisher, it may be vital if you’re doing your own copyediting. But you can’t be thinking about those things when you write your first drafts. You can’t think about usage. You can’t think about grammar. You can’t think about structure, even (you can before you start, though, and it might do you well to do just that). For me, the key is, when I’m writing, I don’t think about anything. My head just goes into that far away place and I listen to my characters and try to keep up while they talk to me.

That’s when it’s good. When things are great, I just type until four in

the morning and have no idea what the next line of text is going to be

or what’s going to happen next.

Then there’s those times when it’s bad. When it’s bad. . .

Well, I may as well go do the dishes because I tend to write one line

of prose every hour and it sucks hind you-know-what because the left

side of my brain refuses to let go and just let the right side do what

it’s meant to do. That’s probably the biggest value I got from writing

a million words in one year: the ability to just shut off the analytical part of my brain and not care what comes out of my fingers.

Read the books on structure and grammar and usage and story construction and then forget it all. Your subconscious will absorb it. Let the right side of your brain sop it up so that it can deal with it in its own way while the left side goes to sleep.

Relax.

Trust the process. The process works. As long as you’ve gotten to a certain level of quality, that is. In the beginning, you can’t just shut everything off. You do need to do some work. But it doesn’t take long to get to the point where you’re writing decent prose. You’ll know when you’re there. Nobody else can tell you.

It’s something you feel in your gut.

Michael out.