Did I say I was revising The Outerlands? What I should have said was: I’m rewriting the entire thing from scratch.
The first couple of times I tried to write this story, I didn’t get very far. Sure, I knew what the story was about. There was a female protagonist who was more or less a version of me that had grown up in a repressive near-future, and her brother who was smart but self-destructively crazy. They weren’t like everybody else in the conformist society they lived in, and they knew it, and so they decided to run away. I would open up a spiral notebook and start writing, but eventually I would always come up against the dead end of “what happens next?” I literally didn’t understand that in order to keep telling a story, you have to have some idea where it’s going next. I also didn’t understand that if you don’t know where the story is going next, then you have to figure this out, and that sometimes it’s hard work. I understood perfectly well how to write down all the things that naturally and easily came to me. But the hard work was the stumbling block. I didn’t know yet that if you learn the mental processes required to do the hard work, you can then push through the wall and continue telling the next part of the story. So I ended up with quite a few dead end spiral notebooks.
The next step in my learning process came one day when I was standing in line at the grocery store and the cashier had a Nanowrimo t-shirt on. I asked, and got an answer: National Novel Writing Month. I went home and looked on the web site and discovered a whole new world, and I wanted to try it. I did not finish 50,000 words that November, but I wrote about 35,000 words — which was more than I’d ever written. It felt like a lot. But it wasn’t a book. It wasn’t anywhere near to being a book. And it wasn’t finished.
But it wasn’t a dead end spiral notebook either. Sometime during that November, or maybe it was in the months afterwards, I’d begun to learn just what it really took to keep pushing against “what happens next.” I kept writing, kept reaching walls and pushing through them to get to what happened next, and eventually I wrote the ending. Maybe it sounds cheesy, but writing the ending made me different. I was now somebody who understood what it took to get to the end. It was an accomplishment.
Meanwhile, I had discovered Livejournal, and made some online friends who were also interested in writing, and joined a group where we all posted responses to weekly writing prompts. Some of us discovered a particular affinity for each other, and eventually we formed a small writers’ group and began to read and critique each other’s work. The Outerlands was the first piece that went up for critique. Not all of the feedback was positive, but it was all constructive — it was a very supportive group of people. Having other people read my writing was another step on the learning curve, and so was reading and critiquing other people’s work. I started to appreciate that it wasn’t just about writing down the facts of the story — telling the reader that A happened first, then Joe did B, then Mary did C. It wasn’t just characters and a plot. There were all these other considerations: setting, structure, dialogue, action, style, point of view. I remember the first time I tried to figure out what some of those terms even meant. It began to sink in for me that it wasn’t just what you wrote, it was how you wrote it, that made all the difference.
Things started to snowball. I discovered that there were books for writers who wanted improve their writing. The first one I read was Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. Then one of my critique partners turned us all on to Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass. The phrase “conflict on every page” became part of my vocabulary. I went to a writing conference where we had an opportunity to pitch our book to a real live editor or agent, and that began another process of demystification for me. I learned about hooks and query letters and the importance of first pages. I discovered Miss Snark and Flogging the Quill and Evil Editor. I began to think, “Hey, what if I actually seriously tried to get something published?”
Of course, having all this new knowledge didn’t mean I had acquired the writing chops to match. Like Elizabeth Lyon said in this interview, there’s “know of” and then there’s “know how”. Not only did I not “know how”, I also didn’t know I didn’t know how. I revised The Outerlands and sent it off to, oh, only the biggest and award-winningest SF publishing house ever. I really thought that it was my best work, the very pinnacle of what I was capable of. At the time, perhaps it was. After months of waiting (during which I kept working on other stories and learning more about writing and publishing), I received a very nice form letter rejection. At that point, I read through the manuscript again and realized that it was crap. How did I ever think that this was as good as I could do?
continued in Part 2
