I revised The Outerlands again. This time, I went through every chapter, every scene, every sentence, picking everything apart, editing and polishing word by word. I’d never scrutinized my writing so closely before. By this time I had lost count of how many revisions the book had been through, so [...]]]> (continued from Part 1)

I revised The Outerlands again. This time, I went through every chapter, every scene, every sentence, picking everything apart, editing and polishing word by word. I’d never scrutinized my writing so closely before. By this time I had lost count of how many revisions the book had been through, so I referred to what I was doing as the “final polish”. Then I went to the Surrey International Writers’ Conference. There, I once again had the opportunity to pitch to an agent, and this got me a request for the first three chapters of my book. Hours later, my critique group buddies and I went to one of the scheduled workshops, where we had our minds blown by Donald Maass. “Tension on every page” was only the beginning. There was tension, and there was microtension, ratcheting up the conflict line by line. Polishing one’s prose was one thing — changing the fundamental character and power of each sentence was quite another. Equally mind-blowing was the workshop by his wife, Lisa Rector-Maass, which focused on questioning your story and your characters in startling and challenging ways, with the goal of taking the story to a new level.

I came to a realization: all my polishing of sentences was like vaccuuming the carpet and washing the sheets, when what I really needed to do was get rid of that old ratty carpet and that saggy mattress — no, I needed to start ripping out walls and pulling up floorboards. I never sent my three chapters to the agent I met at SIWC. Instead I bought the Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook — we all did — and started flogging the hell out of The Outerlands again.

I made significant progress on the Breakout Novel workbook, but I didn’t finish it, because I was interrupted by a large, time-consuming, work-related project which took months to complete. During that time, I did very little writing. When I resurfaced, I had another realization: “Dude, novel-writing takes a lot of time and work, and there’s no guarantee of any reward at the end. I’d better write some short stories too, instead of just continuing to put all my eggs in the novel basket.”

I put the The Outerlands away, and didn’t touch it for an entire year. Instead, I worked on a short story — flogging it, polishing it, and eventually successfully submitting it. I also wrote a couple more new stories, set in a completely new and fresh universe with brand new characters, and fell in love with those for a while. I felt like writing was becoming, well, not exactly easier — but that my writing chops were becoming more equal to the tasks I set myself. I felt a growing ability to form my stories into desired shapes, to see and create patterns and themes, to push characters hard and make them suffer and change, to look inside myself and see the fear and force myself to “go there”.

The next time I looked at The Outerlands, it was like looking at it with a whole new pair of eyes. I did need to rip out those walls and pull up those floorboards, but it wasn’t just that. There were words, phrases, sentences, events and ideas in there that dated back to the story’s first iteration. Somehow, despite repeated revisions, some of those relict features had continued to be exempt, regardless of whether or not they were pulling their weight. The entire house was a disorganized patchwork of cobbled-together elements — old crap from the past, middle-aged crap from two years ago, and newish, somewhat-better-but-still-not-great stuff pasted bandaid-like on top of it to try to hold it together.

The important thing was, it couldn’t be fixed in situ. It had to be destroyed and rebuilt. The other important thing was that the foundation was still sound. 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. That was still the story I had to tell, and I still felt the compulsion to tell it. That made it worth destroying and rebuilding. And that’s what I’m doing.

So do I believe that I now know everything, and I’ve reached the peak of my writing powers? Of course not. Sure, I know more than I used to. I know just enough to realize that I still have plenty to learn. This learning process is like a logarithmic curve — it leaps up and covers a ton of ground very quickly and then starts getting steeper and steeper, approaching the Y-axis but never, ever reaching it. I don’t know precisely where I’d place myself on that curve, but at least I know that I won’t be languishing at point zero, in dead end spiral notebook land, ever again. The Outerlands is my first novel, and I’ll never again have to go through that first novel learning curve.

So anyway, enough blathering. Time to go nuke and pave. Progress reports forthcoming!

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 [...]]]> 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

The piece is called “He Learned How” and you can read it online here. In the story, A.J. is sixteen and gay [...]]]> As of December 2008 I’m officially a published author. I have one (1) short story out there in the world. I guess it’s a very small thing, but it feels pretty good.

The piece is called “He Learned How” and you can read it online here. In the story, A.J. is sixteen and gay in a nameless small town somewhere in the U.S.A. It could be 1956, or maybe it’s 1982, or maybe even 2009. A.J. doesn’t care what year it is, really. He cares deeply about the person he loves, who has died — but he also cares very much about how other people perceive him, and how he perceives himself. With most of the power in his world being held by others — parents, teachers, church leaders, and his peers — A.J.’s only power is to be in command of himself. In the end he makes the only choice he believes is available to him, so that he can continue to survive in this conservative small town where everyone knows everything about everybody.

This story is actually the backstory of one of the main characters in The Outerlands, my first novel. The Outerlands takes place in the future, in a dystopian upper Midwest which has forgotten it was ever part of the U.S.A.. Here, new societies have arisen, stratified along religious, racial and cultural lines. In order to keep “He Learned How” in the neighborhood of 3000 words, I removed the speculative elements and changed some of the details. But A.J.’s story really takes place in the year 2121, and the setting is not really a sleepy small town, but a small, militaristic country whose inhabitants espouse white supremacy and are locked in perpetual conflict with the equally militaristic, non-white country next door. By the time of The Outerlands, A.J. is thirty-five, a repressed control freak stuck in an unhappy marriage. He’s very good at putting up and shutting up, and he might be the last person who would consider rocking the boat and challenging the repugnant values that his home country is built upon — let alone the lies his personal life is built upon.

Meanwhile, in a nearby third country run as a religious dictatorship, sixteen year old Mercy has fallen in love with a female classmate. Facing an arranged marriage and an assigned job, she at first believes her only option is to put up and shut up. But then, encouraged by a nonconformist older brother, she decides to run away. Eventually, she meets A.J., and not under friendly circumstances. It’s a mental kick in the butt for A.J. He will end up rocking the boat, and so will Mercy. Hell, the boat just might tip over.

And that’s what my book is about. Right now, I’m in the process of revising it — and it needs a lot of work. But I do feel encouraged, because with the publication of my first short story, it feels as if a very small piece of The Outerlands is already out there. The lunar calendar says this is the year 4707, not 2009. Whatever the number, I can’t help feeling that the coming year will be an auspicious one.