Once More into the Breach, Dear Friends!

“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”

Stephen King, On Writing

And here we go. I'm at the scary moment. I'm going to post this, then I'm going to start writing Who Is Brainiac Kapow? – an adventure for readers roughly middle school age.

I know how the story begins, I know the characters, I kinda know what's going to happen. But of course, they'll surprise me and change my plans, so I can't let myself get married to the plot I think I'm going to be following. At least I sure hope they surprise me. Because if they don't surprise me, they probably won't surprise the readers either, and then what do you have?

So here we go. Same rules as always. Shoot for 1,000 words a day. Don't judge it until I finish the first draft, because it's going to suck. First drafts always suck, everyone's, and that's a gift. Just get it written down, and fix it later. But you can't fix it if you don't write it first.

If it sounds like I'm trying to boost my ego a bit, give myself a "St. Crispin's Day" speech, that's because I am. The question, as I set out, is, can I do it? I mean, sure, I've written three other novels I think are quite good. But can I do it again? When you start the next one, the fact that you've done it before only gets you so far. It is, as Stephen King said, the scariest moment. But as he also said:

"You can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.”

Paradigm Shift

Talking recently to an acquaintance who had just written an article. In the course of the conversation he said something along the lines of: "I always enjoy writing WHILE I'm writing, but later when I look at what I've done it looks stupid. I start second guessing myself hating what I've done, and that spoils everything for me."

Time for a paradigm shift, my friend!

Don't throw down your first draft and think, "Man, this really sucks. I should never write again." No! The aftermath, as you call it, isn't a time for self-loathing. It's a gift! It's a second chance!

The second draft is your opportunity to say, "OK, that's a start (good start, bad, indifferent, doesn't matter. It's a start.) Now what can I do to make this EVEN BETTER?"

It's an unbending, unavoidable fact of life. NOBODY'S first draft is good enough. Even if it's pretty good, it can be better, and that means it isn't good enough. My first draft isn't good enough. Yours isn't. Dave Barry's and Neil Gaiman's aren't. Not even Bill Shakespeare's first draft was good enough. And he didn't have the luxury of a word processor to fix his. It was back to the quill and inkpot for him.

That doesn't mean that no one should ever write. On the contrary, it means writing is one of the more forgiving of the creative arts.

When you cook, if you make a mistake there's no going back. You've blown it. You eat the burned meal or you get out a box of mac and cheese. When you're a sculptor and you slip, there ain't no gluing that chunk of marble back to where the horse's tail was supposed to be. It's gone, baby. Painters can slop more paint over their mistakes, but they can't make them go away in the way hitting the delete key can.

Actors, and singers and dancers can practice and practice and practice, but if they make a mistake in performance the audience sees it in all its gory glory.

But when you make a mistake writing, no problem. First of all, it's private. No one will ever see one word you've written unless you want them to. So that's a start. One of my all-time favorite phrases is "I'll fix that in the rewrite." Aaahhh! God, I LOVE that phrase.

After all, that's what rewrites are for. The chance to make it closer and closer to perfect. Shit, even God didn't get it all right the first time. He needed six days.

A Writer's Greatest Gift

I'm struggling a bit with The Bones in the Closet. It's okay, I like the characters and general situation (three siblings and a computer nerd friend + dog on a secret road trip to break a family curse) but - well, like I said, I'm struggling a bit.

I find myself worrying about it, especially when I sit down at the computer and nothing comes. But then I remember one of the most important things about writing, and I start breathing again.

Writers get a gift. They get the luxury of writing a shitty first draft.

I don't know why, but some people think writing should be easy. It's not like it's work, is it? It's not like you're digging a ditch or selling insurance. It's just writing.

Well, sometimes it's hard bloody work, and nobody writes a good first draft. And that's okay, because no one but the writer will ever see it. That's not me talking. That's every writer I've ever heard talk about writing. In his outstanding On Writing, Stephen King talks about writing the first draft, then sticking it in a drawer and forgetting about it for a month. Then he picks it up and reads it to find out what he's been up to. Sometimes you don't know what the book is about until then, and with a little luck and a lot of humility, you see what you have to do to fix it.

As writer Anne Lamott says, you can't fix it until you've written something to fix. If you expect to dash off a first draft, send it off to a publisher and have them fall all over themselves to make you rich, well that's a nice fantasy. But it doesn't work that way. The first draft, Lamott says in her outstanding book, Bird by Bird, is "the down draft." You get it written down. The second is "the up draft." That's when you fix it up. And the third is "the dental draft." That's when you check it, tooth by tooth, to make sure everything is healthy, that it all works.

But even knowing that, you still worry all the way through the first draft. "Have I lost it?" "Am I completely wrong about this story?" "Is it too late to find a career as a paralegal?"

I do have a secret weapon that has proven enormously helpful in combatting the worries. Not, it's not rum, although that can be very nice too. But it still doesn't change the facts – the first draft will not be good enough. It will be shitty. I don't care who you are or what you're writing. Romance. History. Mystery. Adventure. A kids book. (Those are actually much harder. There are so few words, every single one has to count. But that's a different rant for a different day.)

I do have characters and a general story I like, so at this stage I'm actually way ahead of the game! But I will worry about it until I finish the third (or more) draft and realize, "Hey! The Bones In the Closet is damn good! This has a chance!"

And then 'll start another one, and I'll worry all over again.

But at least I'll still have my secret weapon. Which I'll write about next time.