Lilith Saintcrow

I see a lot of young writers doing this, and I thought I’d just drop a quiet word. You all know how I feel about timesuck, right? And then there are those seductive things that keep us from writing, from finishing the work, and from submitting. Most of this comes from fear. And why not? This is something to be afraid of. It is an uncertain career at best, fraught from the beginning of a work to the end when the book is (hopefully) on the shelf.

Here are a few things I see young writers doing (and by “young” I mean “just starting out writing” instead of “physical age”) that probably aren’t helping. Number one among those things is romancing deletion.

I see a lot of young writers who have a WIP that they’ve probably written 100K words for, or something close to that. The trouble is, they’ve deleted 98K or so, thinking it’s “false starts” or unhappy with how the work’s going. And so they’re left with the Manuscript of DOOOOOOOM, this thing that they think they’ll never finish.

I’ve said it before: get the whole corpse on the operating table before you cut it up. If a scene doesn’t “work” right when you get it out, just slap its ass and leave it there as a placeholder. Chances are when you go back, you’ll find out it does work after all and you were just tired, or punch-drunk, or too scared to see that it was working before.

Of course there’s a place for deleting–I’ve done it myself. I made numerous false starts in the last third of To Hell And Back; most of those were because I had this vision of where I wanted the book to go, which wasn’t where the book wanted to go. (All right, if you push me–I wanted a Traditional Happy Ending. I was close to breaking one of my cardinal rules to get one, too. Fortunately the Muse is wiser than me.)

But deleting over and over again is an avoidance mechanism, and a seductive one because it feels like real work.

It’s not. If you’ve deleted more scenes than the work actually has in its most recent incarnation, STOP. Take a deep breath. Keep a slush file for the WIP (work in progress) where you put the bits you’ve chopped off. When you get stuck, go back and look at those bits. It’s like a Choose Your Own Adventure. I had trouble with two scenes in the current work (Flesh Circus) before I realized they actually went 20K in instead of 10K in. The Muse had just gotten ahead of herself. Saved myself a lot of work by rat-holing those scenes.

Don’t get sucked into the “this is a false start, I hate this scene, I better delete it.” That’s a good way to end up working on the same book for all of your writing life, which will be prematurely shortened as a result. You can always stop writing that scene and jump forward to the next. There’s no law that says you can’t go back and surgically remove a scene once the work is finished, either. Just try to ignore the siren song of timesuck so you can finish the work.

If you do manage to avoid this pitfall, don’t worry. There are others–chief among them the ever-popular flogging of just one manuscript.

So you’ve finished a book. That’s GREAT. Celebrate in whatever way you like best. Go out, get laid, get drunk, get a mocha, get a new pair of socks. Whatever (within reason) works.

Then, get up the next morning and do it again. No, not the hangover-inducing part. Start working on something new–a trunk novel, something in the slush pile, a totally new WIP. It doesn’t have to be real work–if you’re anything like me, the emotional snapback between novels is immense*. It does feel like someone has scraped the inside of one’s brain dry. But try to get into the habit of at least thinking about another work during that time, even when you’re lying on the floor drooling after the immense effort of pushing the novel out into the world. It’s critical to try and stay in the habit of working even during the snapback. Don’t push yourself, though–don’t try to force another work out and strain your mental and emotional “muscles”. Strike a balance between giving yourself enough time to recover and not getting bogged down in a slough of feeling sorry for yourself because you’ve worked so bloody hard.

This isn’t as difficult as it sounds. The important thing is not to fall into the trap of thinking that your work is done just because you’ve finished a draft zero of one manuscript. It’s GREAT that you’ve finished at least one–that already puts you in a top percentile of “writers”–but don’t stop there. There’s still revisions and other works to be written, especially since you have a greater chance of getting published if you submit widely.

I see a lot of “young” writers obsessing over one finished manuscript, endlessly polishing without revising, endlessly revising without submitting. Yup, you’ve guessed it–that’s an Avoidance Mechanism. Another very, very cute and seductive one because it feels like actual work.

Don’t worry. There will be time and to spare for revising. There always is. It’s actual creation that is the kicker, and it’s the habit of healthy, sustainable creation that we want to inculcate in ourselves–old hacks and young writers alike.

The last thing I see young writers doing to shoot themselves in the foot is overplotting. Getting so wrapped up in plotting out the world, drawing pictures of the characters, doing outlines, and role-playing that they forget to write.

Yes, a little bit of this is good and informs the world you’re building. It makes your world and imagination that much richer. But it is a thin line between this and avoiding–the seductive timesuck, again. You should never spend more time dreaming about your world than you do writing about it. Believe me, when you’re sunk in the process of writing an organic novel in a whole new world the world will crawl into your head and stay there. You’ll see it everywhere. You don’t have to pursue it. It will hunt you down and corner you.

Now, the joy of a creative lifestyle is just that–creating cool things for your WIP. Just mind that you work on your WIP more than you sink into the soft embrace of timesuck. I’m not saying that you can’t do these cool things–I am a big fan of thrift-store shopping for my characters and I also do collages for books, you have no IDEA. But the book comes first. It always must come first.

Those are the biggest things I see young writers doing to spite themselves. There are other things–try out my Letter To A Young Writer–but I just hate to see beginning writers shooting themselves in the foot. It’s painful to watch.

That’s really all the advice I can give. My dearest younguns, you’re really on your own. It’s you and the keyboard (or pen and paper) and you must find your own way of wrestling it into submission. Or just enduring enough to get it all out.

Good luck.

* Sometimes that thing you work on while in the snapback period turns into a Work in its own right, once you’ve recovered. That’s a whole ‘nother blog post.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 15th, 2008 at 12:28 pm and is filed under Writing (About). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.