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let me urge that you take your story through at least two drafts; the one you do with the study door closed and the one you do with it open.
This first draft—the All-Story Draft—should be written with no help (or interference) from anyone else.
If you’ve never done it before, you’ll find reading your book over after a six-week layoff to be a strange, often exhilarating experience. It’s yours, you’ll recognize it as yours, even be able to remember what tune was on the stereo when you wrote certain lines, and yet it will also be like reading the work of someone else, a soul-twin, perhaps. This is the way it should be, the reason you waited. It’s always easier to kill someone else’s darlings than it is to kill your own.
Hitchcock didn’t argue any more than I do when Tabby points out one of my lapses. She and I may argue about many aspects of a book, and there have been times when I’ve gone against her judgment on subjective matters, but when she catches me in a goof, I know it, and thank God I’ve got someone around who’ll tell me my fly’s unzipped before I go out in public that way.
Pace is the speed at which your narrative unfolds. There is a kind of unspoken (hence undefended and unexamined) belief in publishing circles that the most commercially successful stories and novels are fast-paced.
Like so many unexamined beliefs in the publishing business, this idea is largely bullshit… which is why, when books like Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose or Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain suddenly break out of the pack and climb the best-seller lists, publishers and editors are astonished. I suspect that most of them ascribe these books’ unexpected success to unpredictable and deplorable lapses into good taste on the part of the reading public.
Forgot an entire character, as Raymond Chandler once did? (When asked about the murdered chauffeur in The Big Sleep, Chandler—who liked his tipple—replied, “Oh, him. You know, I forgot all about him.”)
In the spring of my senior year at Lisbon High—1966, this would’ve been—I got a scribbled comment that changed the way I rewrote my fiction once and forever. Jotted below the machine-generated signature of the editor was this mot: “Not bad, but PUFFY. You need to revise for length. Formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%. Good luck.”
What the Formula taught me is that every story and novel is collapsible to some degree. If you can’t get out ten per cent of it while retaining the basic story and flavor, you’re not trying very hard. The effect of judicious cutting is immediate and often amazing—literary Viagra.
Probably J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter stories, is the current champ when it comes to back story. You could do worse than read these, noting how effortlessly each new book recaps what has gone before. (Also, the Harry Potter novels are just fun, pure story from beginning to end.)
The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting. Stick to the parts that are, and don’t get carried away with the rest. Long life stories are best received in bars, and only then an hour or so before closing time, and if you are buying.
When you step away from the “write what you know” rule, research becomes inevitable, and it can add a lot to your story. Just don’t end up with the tail wagging the dog; remember that you are writing a novel, not a research paper. The story always comes first.
In truth, I’ve found that any day’s routine interruptions and distractions don’t much hurt a work in progress and may actually help it in some ways. It is, after all, the dab of grit that seeps into an oyster’s shell that makes the pearl, not pearl-making seminars with other oysters.
June 19, 1999 Dear : I am a young writer, twenty-eight years old, in search of an agent. I got your name in a Writer’s Digest article titled “Agents of the New Wave,” and thought we might fit each other. I have published six stories since getting serious about my craft. They are: “The Lady in the Trunk,” Kingsnake, Winter 1996 ($25 plus copies) “Two Kinds of Men,” Jackdaw, Summer 1997 ($15 plus copies) “Christmas Smoke,” Mystery Quarterly, Fall 1997 ($35) “Big Thumps, Charlie Takes His Lumps,” Cemetery Dance, January–February 1998 ($50 plus copies) “Sixty Sneakers,” Puckerbrush
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In the end it was Tabby who cast the deciding vote, as she so often has at crucial moments in my life. I’d like to think I’ve done the same for her from time to time, because it seems to me that one of the things marriage is about is casting the tiebreaking vote when you just can’t decide what you should do next.
Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.
Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.
In On Writing, I suggested that new writers try for a thousand words a day. I usually manage about twenty-five hundred (when I was young and my kidneys were strong, I might do five or even seven thousand). Sometimes those words come hard to begin with; it’s like exercising with stiff muscles. You have to loosen them up, and then you’re fine.
