My editor father was a great one for quotes of value.  Living in his non-fiction world, he once said, “Good writers know what to put into a story.  The best writers know what to leave out.” – J. W. Kizzia.  He was right, and as I have grown older, and now having lost him more than a year ago, it is remarkable to me to realize how often he was right.

To that end, whenever I finish a story or book, after running through spell check and whatever, I first return to see what I can cut out.  What is extraneous?  What does not advance the story?  What is repeated?  Because of the way I outline before I begin, I have never discarded whole chapters, but I know some who have.  (I actually added a chapter once when I needed a more direct confrontation to build the suspense).  But I have discarded many sections, paragraphs and innumerable lines and bits of dialogue where they do not contribute to the development of characters, or to the storyline.

Next, I look for the obvious storytelling flaws, the most obvious probably being where I explain rather than show.  If it is important for the reader to know (and often it is not) I determine when the reader needs to know it and then I try to design a way to show the information in an active scene, or dialogue, or (as a last resort) through introspection.  I always read the omnipotent author stopping to explain something as an interruption of the story and it turns me off.

Finally, I consider the words.  I admit that I am not good at worrying about whether “flying” or “soaring” would be a better choice for the passage.  Some people are, but it seems to me that would take forever (that may be why I am fairly prolific but consider myself a pedestrian writer).  I do consider the flow of the piece, however, and especially where I become repetitive, using the same word too many times or repeating the same phrase or descriptive bit.  I take Dickens as my lead on that.  

Dickens got paid by the word, of course, so he was inspired to draw things out, and yet he could take three pages to say it was snowing and get away with it.  The thing was, Dickens wrote those three pages brilliantly, using parallel constructions and without ever repeating himself, exactly, so his readers were captivated and never realized that all he was saying for three pages was it was snowing, and perhaps cold.  With that inspiration, I figure that surely I can find a different way to say essentially the same thing (like “flying” or “soaring”).

Once I have cut out what I can, resolved my storytelling flaws and assured myself that the story flows well, I type THE END and then the most important part, I don’t look at it again!  BAEN publishing, one of the few publishing houses that currently has a set-up to receive over the transom manuscripts via the internet has an automatic response that every writer should seriously consider.  “Your manuscript has been received.  It takes 9-12 months to review a manuscript so while you are waiting, go write your next book.”  Don’t look at it!  Go write the next one.

Remember Robet Heinlein’s rules of writing:
1. You must write
2. You must finish what you start
3. You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order
4. You must put your story on the market
5. You must keep it on the market until it has sold

Writing Tip 12:

My wife likes things clean.  Normally, I don’t mind, but we have a table that got a stain on it from a wine glass.  She tried everything to get that stain up and finally rubbed the finish off, cleaning it right down to the wood.  The whole table had to be stripped and refinished.  Was it worth it?  Don’t do that to your writing.  You may see the wine stain, but an agent, publisher, reader may not, or they may feel it gives the work character.  Don’t second-guess,  Instead, take a deep breath, recognize that no story is ever going to be perfect and go write the next one.

            The one time I met Kurt Vonnegut, he was having a bad hair day.  To make matters worse, he just finished addressing an auditorium full of people and he confided to me that he thought he was invited to address a small class and if he had known he was going to have to give a lecture, he wouldn’t have come.  (I think I got that bit of confidence because I was Mount Everest to his Hillary:  I was there).  But it was a double-whammy.  A bad hair day and a bad mood!  Still, I was determined to mine this mind because I had a drawer full of started stories, started novels, started plays even, and nothing finished.  My great ideas always seemed to rise to the level of inefficiency and petered out (The Peter Principle)?

            I asked him.  “How do you finish?”  He stared at me with those droopy eyes and almost smiled while I frantically tried to rephrase the question so he would understand what I was really asking.  Fortunately, he smiled and spoke first.

            “I never think about finishing.”  He said.  When I was clearly stunned, he explained:

            Whenever he got a good idea, he would climb up into the attic room in his brownstone and lock the door.  People knew enough to stay away from him at those times.  He would stay up in that room for a long time, working.  Once, it was almost six months.  He said he spent all that time working on the first sentence.  (I translated that as the opening of the story), but he said, once he got the first sentence right, the rest just poured out of him.

            I nodded.  “So while you are working on that first sentence, your subconscious in the back of your mind is busy plotting out the story, characters and all.” 

            He frowned before admitting, “Probably, but I try not to analyze it too much.”

            I thought this was great advice at the time, and I soon added page after page of great opening sentences to my drawer of the unfinished.  Then I read Camus’ “The Plague,” and recognized the character who spent his whole life trying to write the perfect opening sentence, and he died, the plague of course, without having written a thing.

            It was not long after that I read an article about how a writer should always have an ending in mind before they ever start.  I thought that made sense.  Years later, I understand J. K. Rowling had the gist of the end in mind before she penned the first “Harry Potter.”  It is not a bad way to go, and given my imagination, I came up with all kinds of great endings.  The trouble was for some, I couldn’t find the beginning.  For others, the trail veered off and no matter what I did, it was determined to go nowhere near the end.  For still others, I could see the end on the horizon, shining like the proverbial city on the hill, but I was stuck in the swamp (bogged down) and could not find the path at all.

            Grrr!

            So someone told me I needed to outline the whole thing before I wrote a word.  We even worked with storyboards so the outline turned out to be 15 pages for a 10 page short story.  I finished it!  But it read like it was encased in a straight jacket.

            Grrr, again!

            After several variations on the theme, I finally ended up with what I call the skeleton.  One paragraph (no more) describing the whole piece – a good thing to have later for promotional purposes & book covers.  Characters are often noted with just names, sometimes age or other important characteristic is given and a word or too summarizing temperament or personality is jotted down, but that is it.  Then a sentence or two, perhaps just phrases but no more than a paragraph describing what needs to happen in each story scene or novel chapter.  Such an outline might be 6-8 pages maximum for a 300 page novel.  I have found that this works for me.  I keep on track, I look forward to the next scene or chapter rather than the blank page, and I can breathe and move freely right to THE END.

            This works for me.  What works for you?

 

Writing Tip 11:

I feel there may be as many ways to THE END as there are writers; but there are four things to consider here:  1)  Don’t let the unfinished works steal your time, attention or energy.  2)  Don’t worry about what so-and-so recommends because it might work for you, but it might not.          3)  Don’t assume that all roads lead to Rome.  Some will peter out, some may leave you in the swamp, and some may leave you so exhausted at the end you can hardly breathe.  4)  Don’t give up.  Keep looking until you find YOUR path and then head for home.

 

            My Dad used to tell this story about a frumpy, old woman that came into his office one day.  He was editor of “Railway Age Magazine” at the time and the woman apparently had some railroad questions.  Now, he was a kind soul, but he had work to do so he said he would be with her in a while if she cared to wait.  She did not mind. 

            Dad described the woman as five-foot nothing, rather round, not anything to look at, and she wore a crumpled dress and an apron that made her look like what he called a “Woolworth’s Lady.”  He watched her for a while.  She sat quietly, occasionally scribbling a note or two in a little notebook, but otherwise she appeared to be a happy wallflower.

            At last, he made the time and invited her into his office.  She was grateful and as she waddled in and sat, he noticed the small suitcase for the first time and wondered if she needed a few dollars.  The woman pulled out her notebook and began to ask her questions.  Dad answered as well as he could, pointing out one historical point where she was mistaken.  That was when she looked terribly frustrated and shook her head in despair.

            “What is it?’  Dad asked, kind soul that he was.

            “Well, I was wondering if you would read my manuscript.  I am afraid I may have made terrible mistakes and I really want to get it right.”

            Dad was an editor, you know.  He said later that he imagined the manuscript was some historical article on railroads, and while his magazine did not publish those sorts of things, he said, “Sure.”

            That was when the woman opened her suitcase and pulled out a massive number of pages which she plunked, ker-thump on Dad’s desk.  “Thank you.”  She said.  “I will be forever grateful.  Should I call back in a month?”  Dad could only nod, grimly while the woman left.

            The woman was not known at that time.  She became very well known.  It was Ayn Rand, and the “little” manuscript was Atlas Shrugged.  I say she became very well known, but I doubt anyone would have picked this frumpy wallflower out of any lineup and say, “Surely this is the person who wrote that rich and powerful tome.”

            On the surface I might say don’t worry about what you look like.  Your readers don’t know and likely don’t care if your self-esteem is high or low.  I have never gotten with this author picture on the book jacket business.  I would rather not know what the author looks like because if it is a really good story, I am probably inclined to imagine the author as richer, more successful, more beautiful and wiser than they really are, and that is how I would like to be seen.

            But let’s not stop there.

            One layer under we come to the question of “Write what you know.”  (Surely you have heard that before).

            On a mico-level, “Write what you know” makes great sense.  By drawing on your own experiences and the information stored in your brain you can turn characters into people, make potentially stilted dialogue flow with realism, and transform your scene and scenery from cardboard to real, living trees.  Like Pinocchio, you can make real boys even as J. K. Rowling, welfare mom did when she wrote about a real boy in a special school fighting an evil wizard.  But wait, J. K. Rowling never experienced being a boy, and while she may have imagined all that other stuff in her head, she certainly did not “know” it.

            Well, you see, that is because on the macro-level, as far as the overall story itself goes, “Write what you know” takes on a whole different meaning.  The little frumpy old lady in my father’s office certainly never experienced the life of a rich and powerful industrial giant.  So can it be said that she wrote what she knew?

            Yes.

            Very simply, this level of knowing has nothing overtly to do with experience (that is micro-instructive), and it has nothing to do with what is in your head (you can always find some hapless magazine editor to check your facts) it has everything to do with what is in your heart.  In that sense, rather than saying “Write what you know,” we might say, instead, “Write what you believe.” Or as I have said many times, “Write what you know in your heart.”  Ayn Rand did, and I am sure J. K. Rowling did, too.

Writing Tip 10:

What do you believe?  What is important – vitally important?  What are you passionate about?  Write what your heart knows, because passion is the essence of a good story – the best stories.  When you write out of your passions, the reader will get it and you know, they just might become passionate about your story in return, and they might even believe you are richer, more successful, more beautiful and wiser than you really are.

            What is your character’s worldview?  What is yours?  Do you know?  Do you know what a worldview is?  Basically, a worldview is the lens through which we see the world, and often, like fish in water, we are unaware that our perceptions of reality are being colored (rose colored glasses) or even distorted.  It is essentialy an unconscious thing having to do with the way we were raised, things we were taught when we were very young, and the pervasive view of the word as exemplified in the culture around us.

            Right now in America we are transitioning between two competing worldviews.  Most people over, say, 40 are moderns.  The key to understanding modern thinking is to think of the word “progress.”  Modernists see the world as progressing on all fronts, particularly in science and technology, but not exclusively so.  Religious thinkers of the past 400 or so years of modern thinking have talked of moral progress, for example.  Evolution is a very modern idea.  Karl Marx imagined society and politics as progressing in a certain order; but so did Thomas Jefferson.  I have always thought of the modern worldview in relation to Isaac Newton.  He discovered the laws of gravity and motion and invented calculus to prove his theories.  Thus the world advanced.  How very Newtonian of him.

            If you are under 30 though, you are likely to be what they are calling a post-modern thinker.  Here, I think of Einstein, because one of the key words of post-modernism is “Relative.”  Everything in the post-modern mind is at least potentially relative.  Cultures?  Relative.  Western Civilization is no “better” than any other.  For the modernists, a tribe of hunter-gatherers in the jungle were “primitives” (not progressed), but for a post-modernist they are simply different without regard to such terms as better or worse.  Cultures, civilization, morality, truth, it is all relative, opinion, preference, subjective.  Even science and the very laws of the universe are not spared.  Nothing is considered absolutely true.  According to Einstein, the very fabric of time and space are relative.

            Why does this matter?  Well, because you don’t want your characters behaving in a way that doesn’t make sense.  An old person is not going to be a radical post-modernist unless they are trying to be young and cool.  A young person who believes in absolutes and the universal nature of things (generally) and in making appropriate and reasonable judgments between better and worse as opposed to simply having preferences, is probably going to need some explaining.  Behavior, and in particular dialogue is going to be determined to a large extent by the character’s worldview.  That is where they are coming from.  That is their point of view.

            You know, the last time there was this kind of clash of worldviews, one fellow took a long hard look at the medieval view (the medieval ideals) of chivalry, damsels in distress, love conquering all, nobility and the whole social structure.  He wrote a book called “Don Quixote” which made a mockery of that whole old way of seeing the universe!  It bores almost as many people today as Moby Dick, but in its time Don Quixote was a radical, mind boggling commentary of life, the universe and everything.

            This is important, now, in our place and time, but also if you write historical fact or fiction.  It is important. as far as possible. to see things through their eyes – through the eyes of history.  If you write science fiction, well, how will the human race view the universe and our place in it 400 years from now?  Then again, our whole worldview might change in only a hundred years given the way we are progressing.  (Oops!  I’m showing my age).

Writing Tip 9:

What is your character’s worldview?  It is the point of view that will motivate and drive behavior and color dialogue.  And I didn’t even mention the religious worldview – the joker in the deck – where millions of people (sincerely) try to view life, the universe and everything through God’s eyes.