Guilt is for children with sticky fingers and mysterious stains.
I declare this to be true in defiance of all religious and sociological thought, because I don’t want to mess with guilt today. I haven’t posted for a month, and I don’t even need a reason, never mind a good reason, because I state that I do not.
Ignorance, however, is for everybody.
I am not as clever as God, nor am I even as clever as J.R.R. Tolkien. A couple of years ago I took on a fantasy novel project. After three months of obsessive writing, during which my wife suspected I was no more real than Bigfoot, I produced an 180,000 word story that I adored. To provide a sense of scale, 180,000 words are roughly the length of the New Testament, or The Fellowship of the Ring. What joy to stand among such giants.
God probably didn’t have to impress literary agents. Perhaps Tolkien didn’t either. I do, and agents let me know in a snapping hurry that 180,000 words is an unacceptable count for a novel, no matter how much I love it. If I can’t bring them something about 100,000 words or less, I should just go back to sitting around Starbucks and talking about the book I plan to start writing someday.
I had created a waddling beast of a manuscript.
I’ve met writers who spend years trying to fix their novel, ending up with a book that forever needs one more month of polish. So, I put the manuscript on the shelf like a third grade science medal, and I moved on to more disciplined projects.
This fall, with some of my newer projects floating out to agents, my Godzilla project arose from the shelf and dared me to cut it in half without killing it. I don’t want to get too detailed, but my process involved staring at an Escher print for about a month. Then I irradiated the manuscript for two months like I was a mad Japanese scientist, and I finished with a 103,000 word story. Today I celebrate.
Find everything I love most in the story and kill it. Well, perhaps not everything, but a lot of things. The more I loved it, the less likely it was to really help the story. I silenced clever dialogue, I obliterated characters from the storyline, and I blasted subplots out of the space-time continuum.
With as much objectivity as I can manage, I believe that this version is a far better story than the original. Final editing can wait for my brain to quit vibrating, and anyway, I need to sit and stare at my Escher print for a while to think about the next project.
That’s what I hid in my office and did with my holiday season. I hope yours was just as much fun and just as terrifying.
Artist’s conception of an agent mesmerized by my newly-trimmed manuscript.
Writing brings out the mental illness in me. My wife can testify to this.
I’m in control of my behavior almost all the time. As Mark Twain said, “For business reasons, I must preserve the outward signs of sanity.” If I wake up to find my brain mired like a mammoth in tar, I can trick my brain into sucking itself free and stomping onwards across the plains. I rarely buy extravagant, useless things, because I have a rule. If I want to buy something that costs more than a couple of hundred dollars, I can’t buy it until I think about it for at least six months. I almost always follow that rule. Almost.
Judiciously applied chemicals are my friends. Free range chemicals and alcohol are not welcome in the home of my brain, apart from the occasional tequila shot or pomegranate martini. Come on, I’m not a nun or anything. But my best friend is me acting the way I want to feel, no matter how my brain tells me I feel, or at least doing my best to create the outward signs of sanity.
It works pretty well at this point in my life.
My wife refrains from trying to convince, trick, or bribe me into not behaving like a crazy person. It’s my job to take care of all this. She’s happy to help if I ask, and she demonstrates philosophical acceptance when I suddenly fill up the office closet with 30 gallons of bottled water, or when without warning I decide we need some more cats. Not only is she tolerant, she’s smart. If she tried to manage all this for me, I’d probably explode like a hand grenade.
Writing screws all this up. Well, not all writing causes problems. I can write a thousand words, declare success, and smile as I move on to something else. It’s the big projects that make me crazy. I’ve written three novels in the past three years, and the insanity they create goes like this.
I get an idea for something I want to write. It’s the best idea for a book that anyone’s had in the past 100 years, or maybe ever. I’m so excited that I talk to my wife about it almost every minute we’re together. I lay awake thinking about it and even consider waking my wife up in the middle of the night to talk about the greatness that is my idea. This goes on for about three days.
I begin the planning and research required to bridge the chasm between having an idea and writing words. I realize that my idea is rubbish. It’s less creative than a bucket of vanilla pudding. If brought to reality, it would be less popular than asphalt-flavored baby food. I feel shame. The only reason I keep working is that I talked it up so much to my wife I’d be embarrassed to never write a word of the thing. This goes on for about a month.
I start writing the first draft, expecting that after one chapter I can honorably surrender to the fact that my idea was horrible. After the first thousand words I find that I’m amusing myself, and I start to feel better about the project. I read the first chapter to my wife. She doesn’t say anything bad about it, which confirms my growing suspicion that it’s a work of magnificence. I begin laughing and hooting like a fool as I write, and I find I’d rather write than eat or sleep. This goes on until I finish the first draft, or about two to three months.
I put the manuscript aside to cool, planning to begin editing in about six weeks. Within 24 hours I realize that I was engulfed by irrational euphoria this whole time, and in fact my manuscript isn’t fit to wipe the ass of a sweaty heroin addict living in a ditch in Bangkok. I try to put this debacle behind me and concentrate on ideas for my next project, but I can only generate enough motivation to watch Saving Private Ryan and eat pie. This goes on for about two months.
Some grisly sense of obligation forces me to open the manuscript and pretend I’ll edit it before I trash it and funnel my creative urge into learning the ukulele. After reading three pages I can’t believe I’ve forgotten how brilliant it is. I perform several rounds of edits like one of those yipping dogs that never stops to sleep. I’m afraid that if I take a day off then the magical spell will be broken and I’ll once again see that the manuscript is just a snap-toothed yokel with mismatched shoes. This goes on for about six weeks.
The manuscript is finally as good as it’s going to get without an editor. I begin writing query letters, synopses, overviews, biographies, and the other artifacts that agents and publishers want to see. I become profoundly convinced that any agent would be more impressed if I just sent her an envelope full of fish guts. I grit my teeth and push on. I’ve come too far now. I’ll just send out the queries and then take my beating in cowed embarrassment.
Then it’s time to start a new project. And even though it means starting the cycle of crazy all over again, I don’t mind all that much. Not everybody get to experience three days of knowing that their book idea is absolutely the most perfect and radiant idea of the last century. It feels great. It’s entirely worth the subsequent months of the despair when you understand just how appalling your idea in fact was.
I gouged out part of my soul and hurled it into a wood chipper the other day. It was no fun, although I did get to eat pie while I did it. It happened because I’m trying to write something longer than the instructions for assembling an armoire made in Korea, and hopefully with better grammar. I’ve been racking up the word count, developing characters and making them suffer, and following my plot storyboard. Then a few days ago I wrote a scene that I adored, and I read it to my wife. That’s when it happened. After I was done, she paused and said, “It doesn’t really add anything, does it?”
Writers, like all artists, are by definition insane. They don’t perceive the world the way other people perceive it. People may or may not agree that I’m a writer, but I do have a piece of paper that says I’m crazy, so there. My wife had spoken the evident truth, which forced me to do the crazy thing and destroy those words, each one a child of my creative spirit. I wanted to make a surgical excision, but in the end I slaughtered them with all the finesse of a mustard gas attack.
I found myself a bit unmotivated after that. But motivation and inspiration should make no difference to writers. You write unless your hands have been crushed and you’ve been kicked in the jaw by a horse. So I sat at my keyboard, Diet Coke at my left hand, and discovered the Five Good Reasons Not to Write.
My tools are defective. My monitor is dusty, and it’s giving me a headache, so I’d better get the Windex. I should wipe down the kitchen counters while I’m passing through the kitchen with Windex in my hand. Oh, and Windows is telling me to install a security update, so I should do that to avoid losing all my work through insecurity. I’ll defragment my hard drive too, just to be safe.
My work environment is oppressive. The jumble of picture frames on my desk is breaking my concentration, so I should organize them. But I need to find places to put half of them, so I have to rearrange the bookshelves and move the printer. I’ll have worked up a sweat by then, so I should install the ceiling fan that’s been sitting in a box since I bought the house nine years ago.
My thinking apparatus is under-fueled. I have a headache from staring at the screen in impotence until my blood sugar drops to single digits. I need a sandwich. However, I only have ham in the fridge and am trying to watch my cholesterol, so I have to go to the store. I should also get everything else on my weekly grocery list since I’m already there.
I need to document my life. My cat’s sleeping amongst the orderly picture frames and looking cuter than any creature on Earth, including bunnies. I have to take a picture because this will never happen again. When I reach for the camera, my cat moves, so I have to wait until she reassumes a cute pose. It may take a while.
There’s this thing called the internet. For my story I need to research how expensive bribes should be in Bangkok in 1948. Wikipedia has an invaluable entry on Southeast Asia, and on Google I find a photo of elephants dressed like panda bears. That has to go on Facebook right away, and while I’m there I like a bunch of posts, wish I could dislike a bunch of posts, and post about my sandwich. Now I’m hungry for Thai food.
I cannot testify that writing a book is like giving birth. I’m a guy, and I’d sound pretty dumb saying something like that. I will say that it’s like pushing a living thing out of you, despite the fact that you don’t have any exits that a logical person would think right for the task. And I won’t presume to talk about what happens after the miracle of childbirth, other than I hear that it’s hectic. But on the literary side, once you’ve finished writing a book you can then relax, have couple of drinks, and look at your family for a few days. Then the real work starts, because the book you just wrote is an abomination that would make any reader weep acid and bite off his fingers so he’s never again tempted to turn a page.
Enter the miracle of editing. I think of it as teaching my book to walk, to play well with others, to tie its shoes, and to stand up for itself. Maybe a little orthodonture if it’s lucky. Killers might chase the hero of my book a thousand miles, and in editing I realize they have no reason to chase him past the first hundred yards. Perhaps I use the word “macaroni” three times in the same paragraph. I might have written some stuff that’s just plain dumb. A few determined rounds of editing can transform my book from a wretched semi-hominid into a respectable literary creature.
Truman Capote said that “finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.” Give me an amen, brother. After all that editing, I feel like my book and I have spent a year together in a trench across from the Chinese army. I don’t want to let go. I dread saying, “I’m finished with you, you’re as good as you’re going to get. Let’s send you to agents and publishers who don’t care about you at all, and who may even hate you worse than smallpox.” My first novel is now being shopped to some fine agents, and every time I send out a query a sliver of my soul withers.
To distract me from my grief, I now spend my evenings editing my second novel. I’m on my third round of edits, and I hope it’s the last until some editor at Del Ray tells me my plot sucks and I need to fix it before they publish me. I hope for this even though no one at Del Ray is even aware I exist, so I think I deserve points for optimism. Anyway, this edit has taken a while because my book is long.
My first novel was 80,000 words, which is a respectable length. I figured I’d push myself with my second novel and go for 100,000 words. When I realized I needed another subplot, I cranked my estimate up to 120,000 words. When my hero told me he didn’t want to fall for that blond girl and to go screw myself, I gave up on estimating how long this thing would be. I finished at 180,000 words. As a point of comparison, that’s about the length of the New Testament. My novel has funnier dialogue than the New Testament, and fewer lepers. They each have the same number of world-shattering cataclysms.
I’m 150,000 words through my edit, and my fiercest enemies have fought me through every paragraph. They are the evil “adverb” and the baby-murdering “dialogue attribution.” I use these when I’m lazy, and they advertize my laziness by making my writing lame and squishy. And what are they?
Think about your meanest English teacher, the one who made you read The Scarlet Letter, and remember the things she told you. At one point she said that an adverb modifies a verb, or sometimes an adjective. In the sentence below, the word “confusingly” is an adverb:
“He confusingly explained to his readers what an adverb is.”
Why is that adverb bad? It’s not bad, it just turns the sentence into a blundering literary rhino. Try this:
“He baffled his readers with a lousy adverb explanation and an obscure rhino reference.”
“Baffled” does a better job than “confusingly explained.” At least I think it does. I’m not alone, since that literary heavy hitter Stephen King said, “The road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the highest rooftop.”
All right, let’s move on to this dialogue attribution business. When a character speaks dialogue, you have to let your reader know who said those amazing words that will soon appear on t-shirts and a Facebook meme. You can do that with the reliable “he said.” But you have so many alternatives from which to choose. You could write: he uttered, he grunted, he howled, he moped, he exulted, he agreed, he snorted, and many more. Aren’t these cool?
Well, maybe not. When I use them I’m just avoiding the work of explaining in detail what’s going on. For example, I may write:
“My dialogue attributions are awful,” he groaned.
That’s literary laziness. It’s the equivalent of tossing in a clump of dishwasher soap and flushing instead of scrubbing the toilet. By the way, I like to describe writing it relation to common household tasks. I think it puts all of this writing bullshit in the proper context. Here’s an alternative dialogue attribution:
“His forefinger punched the backspace key a few dozen times. Then he snatched his Red Bull and hurled it across the room, missing the cat by a foot. Dropping his head to the desktop with a smack, he said, ‘My lousy dialogue attributions are kicking my ass.’”
The lesson for me in all this is to not spend my time coming up with fun alternatives to “he said.” I should just use “he said” and instead spend my energy on real writing.
So, how does that play out in the book I’m editing, the title of which is No Good Deals, by the way? Here’s an example of a sentence that tortured me last night:
“’I’m bloody tired of you talking obsessively about monuments!’ Stan yelled angrily. ’I totally hate the idea of you finally getting a monument!’”
You can see that some of the characters in my story might or might not have monuments built to them. That’s got to be good. When No Good Deals is published, as I’m certain it will be someday, monuments are a good reason to hurry out and buy a copy. However, here’s the edited version:
“’Damn you! I don’t even want a monument. If you’re having a monument, that’s the last scum-flicking thing I’d want,’ Stan said. ‘I’ll pay children to throw shit at your monument after I’m dead!’”
I think that’s a decent edit and also a good example of my character’s level of sophistication. I already feel one step closer to getting this baby published.
All the reason I need to eliminate adverbs from my life.
Photo courtesy of cutedogs.com via 
