revision

Sinking Into The Bog

March 8, 2019 By David Corbett 37 Comments

In my last post (“Inspired to Emulation—or Preparing to Jump“), I talked about The Rule of No Rules, and how reading other writers you admire will provide the best writing advice you will ever receive.

Not long after the post went up, one of my favorite novelists, Adrian McKinty—who writes brilliantly about Northern Ireland during the Troubles from the perspective of a Catholic detective serving in the overwhelmingly Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary—posted the following letter on Twitter. He composed it to an aspiring author who had asked his advice on this whole writing business. This is what Adrian wrote in response (the recipient’s name has been removed for the sake of privacy ):

I’m tempted to end this blog post here, because I couldn’t possibly say anything as perfect, but that would be cheating, or lazy, or both. So instead, I’m going to talk a little about my writing process, and in so doing I ironically intend to prove that Adrian is absolutely right—there are no rules. (Incidentally — for more on Adrian and his truly wonderful books, visit his blog The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.)

[Read more…]

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Inspired to Emulation—Or Preparing to Jump

February 8, 2019 By David Corbett 20 Comments

Leap of Faith–Krabi Thailand (Photo Credit: Christopher Johnson)

One curious consequence of writing a book on writing is the inescapable sense of humility that descends during the process. (I’m under deadline this week for my next book on craft, this one titled The Compass of Character. I’ll discuss it at greater length in the weeks to come, but for now I’m simply invoking it as my excellent and not-to-be-questioned excuse for a relatively brief post today.)

As a teacher and author of writing guides, I’m obliged to present techniques and strategies for successful fiction. Techniques and strategies, however, require a generalized idea of how to go about things. Concepts such as character arc and three-act structure and backstory exploration inevitably conjure guidelines that demand attention if not strict adherence.

This how-to approach can become trivialized into “Five Ways to Make Your Characters Jump Off the Page!” It can also be maddeningly vague because the only rule is there are no rules.

The Rule of No Rules is especially on my mind of late. While collecting examples for the guidelines I discuss in my book, I was inevitably made aware of how any novel worthy of being called good, let alone great, somehow squirms out of the stranglehold of accepted convention like a slimy piglet.

Whether the author was simply following her instincts or observing a carefully constructed plan—usually based on turning some accepted idea of how to write on its head—the truly remarkable books I have used to illustrate certain points all too often reveal themselves to be not just illustrative but sneakily subversive of what I’m trying to say.

This may simply be a reflection of another accepted truth, that the best stories give readers what they want in a way they don’t expect. This in turn echoes another truth, that stories should be both impeccably logical and yet surprising. And yet how does one teach that? How does one teach: Follow the path to the cliff’s edge, then jump?

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Critiquing for Shades of Gray

December 4, 2018 By Nancy Johnson 53 Comments

When Erin Bartels and I agreed to be critique partners, we knew we had similar writing sensibilities and a commitment to telling emotionally resonant stories. Interestingly, both of our debut novels explore race in America. However, as much as we are alike, we approach the world and our characters from vastly different perspectives: She’s white. I’m black.

Erin’s novel, We Hope for Better Things, which releases in January, received a starred review from Publishers Weekly. It takes a compelling journey through the intertwined lives of three women—from the volatile streets of 1960s Detroit to the Underground Railroad during the Civil War—to uncover the past, confront the seeds of hatred, and discover where love goes to hide.

I’m revising my first novel, The Kindest Lie, which tells the story of a black woman engineer trying to reconnect with her biological son. She befriends a poor, 11-year-old white boy. Their mutual need for family collides in one fateful night, exposing the fault lines of race and class in a dying Indiana factory town.

In anticipation of the release of Erin’s debut, we talked about the critique process and how we navigated the weighty, and often uncomfortable, topic of race as we provided our feedback.

Nancy Johnson: I had this huge fear all along about how I would tackle my predominantly black cast of characters. You may think that’s absurd since I’m black. But that’s the thing. I desperately wanted to represent the best of my community since we’re often perceived negatively in literature and media. Then I began to worry that I was over-correcting and villainizing my white characters. You flagged my blind spot on how I portrayed white parents.

Erin Bartels: Yes, I did notice when I read that, while black parents in your book were portrayed as fully three-dimensional, with both good qualities and bad, there really didn’t seem to be any “good” white parents. They were neglectful, inept, or abusive and seemed disinterested in their kids. I flagged it more as an observation than a critique. There are a lot of bad parents out there. But I think what I liked about your black parents was that even if at first Mama seemed harsh toward Ruth, as I read I could see why; I could see where she was coming from and how she thought that it was the best thing to do at the time. She was understandable to the reader.

I think it’s natural for us to make those characters we feel we know better more three-dimensional. One of the things I worried about in We Hope for Better Things was that some of my black characters would feel two-dimensional, that they would seem like they were only there to serve the storyline I had set up. Especially characters in the most historical of my three storylines, the 1860s. I just have zero real idea what life was like for them and research can only take you so far.

And though I’d had three black friends read the book before you did, I was worried that they weren’t saying everything that was on their minds as they read it. You mentioned that you struggled to know what to say and what not to say in your critique.

NJ: Yes! As I was writing my critique notes for you, I kept deleting the difficult parts. I agonized over whether to bring up the problematic white savior tropes. Still, it had to be said. In both the Civil War era and the 1960s, black people didn’t have much agency at all. That’s why I was sensitive to the depiction of white folks rescuing hapless blacks. Also, I wanted to see the black characters fleshed out more, fully realized as characters and not just a device to serve the interests of good white people in the narrative. What were your initial thoughts when you read what I had to say? [Read more…]

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On Revision as a Form of Reimagining

October 5, 2018 By Natalia Sylvester 6 Comments

I had the chance to visit a class of undergraduate advanced Fiction Writing students this week. It was delightful—I remember being an undergrad, having authors come into our classroom, sit at a desk, and just chat with students. It always felt like such a privilege to gain insights into their writing process, and it was absolutely a privilege for me (some 13 years later) to be able to share my experiences with them.

These being writing students, their questions were so different from those I get at Q&A sessions with readers. They were incredibly specific and craft-focused.

Here is a rendering of me every time I am initially asked a craft question:

Shrug emoji. That’s all that goes through my mind. Because at first thought, I don’t really know how I did xyz in a specific scene or throughout the narrative. I know it was difficult. I know it didn’t just happen. I know I knew enough to sense something was off on the page and that I needed to fix it until it was right. Craft is hard work, but it can also feel like magic. It’s subtle enough to feel instinctual, when it’s really the deeply engrained benefits of practice and experience.

In other words: when I’m asked a question about craft, I inevitably end up describing revision. Because I’m not a writer who gets everything right the first time. I’m not even a writer who gets everything right the second time. Except for the occasional scene that has manifested more or less in its true, final form (again: magic!) I am very much a reviser.

When I was an undergrad, my Creative Writing teacher once told us: the first draft is self-expression, the art is in revision.

I embrace that wholeheartedly in the writing process. I write a first draft with no real plan or outline, then I step back halfway through and try to piece together what I might be saying. Sometimes at that point, I’ll outline the rest of the story, but it’s only once a first draft is done that the real work can begin.

For me, revision starts very organically and gets progressively more strategic with every subsequent draft. But in the beginning, I just feel my way through a story. Some ways I do that include: [Read more…]

What to Do When Your Creativity Hits The Wall

January 31, 2018 By Tracy Hahn-Burkett

Trying to solve a problem in your manuscript and you just can’t figure it out? Just say you don’t care and move on to something else.

Yes, really. Stay with me on this one. Let’s say you’ve been working on a problem in your manuscript for hours, days, months, or a lifetime in dog years. You’re trying to write a new piece of it, or you’re trying to solve an old problem in a new way, or you’re working on any scene that requires some creativity on your part. But you’re tired. It’s draft 37 and you’re burned out. You don’t really care how the love interest dies anymore; you just know he needs to be dead in a way that gets to the next plot point and isn’t inconsistent with three other conditions already set up in the rest of the story. Frankly, if you could make him appear to you in the flesh for a moment, you’d hone one of your chewed-up pencils to a super-sharp point and just do the deed yourself. That would feel so good right now.

But that’s not how this works. Now, you’re seasoned enough to know that you can’t wait for your muse to show up before you start to write, so you sit down in your chair, lift your fingers to the keyboard, but…nothing. You can’t figure out the problem. You eat chocolate, and…nothing. You drink copious amounts of coffee. Nothing (except an urgent need to pee). You stare out the window, walk the dog, clean the house… All the usual prescriptions for jogging a writer’s brain add up to you being no closer to accessing the necessary creativity than you were at the beginning of this effort.

So give up. Turn your attention to writing something else.

I’ve discovered that sometimes, when I’m having trouble working through a problem or a scene, I can jog my writing brain into action by metaphorically walking away from my problematic manuscript and instead writing in the form with which I began my writing journey: [Read more…]

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