I was already reading The Count of Monte Cristo on a friend’s recommendation when I signed up for a “read like a writer” challenge on Gabriela Pereira’s DIY MFA website. The challenge suggested we dedicate a notebook to the project, and gave us ten prompts for examining our chosen book with an eye towards improving our own writing. CofMC turned out to be a great choice—all except its length, which meant I was nowhere near the end by the time the challenge was over.

Warning – this blog post is riddled with spoilers for the book.

Reading The Count of Monte Cristo

The blurb on the abridged Enriched Classic version calls the story a “thrilling adventure of one man’s quest for freedom and vengeance on those who betrayed him.” The unabridged Penguin Classics blurb suggests a deeper meaning: “On what slender threads do life and fortune hang.”

All-around good guy Edmond Dantès is wrongfully accused of a political crime and ends up in a dungeon for 14 years. After his escape, he tracks down the people responsible so he can get his revenge—not simply killing them, which would be too easy on them, but making them suffer as he did.

As a reader, I was fascinated and drawn into the story, all 1,243 pages of it. I was horrified at what happened to Dantès in the beginning…but once he escaped and began his revenge, I was equally horrified by what he did. Dantès believed himself to be Providence, the embodiment of justice, doling out rewards and punishments. The dividing line between who deserved those fates wasn’t innocence or guilt, but friendship with Dantès. 

My review on Goodreads gives the book 5 stars for readability but discusses at length my disagreement with some of the author’s choices. These weren’t choices about the writing, but about what happens in the story, how it’s resolved, and whether the characters including Dantès deserved the endings they got. The emotions the book inspires, 170 years after it was first published, and the life in the characters, far removed from our own world, suggest that I can learn a lot about writing from Alexandre Dumas.

A character to root for

Gabriella says one of the promises books make in the beginning is a character to root for. Given that by the end of the book, our hero has been responsible for several innocent deaths and a variety of other terrible consequences, how does the author keep us engaged?

• He gives us a thoroughly good character at the beginning. Edmond Dantès is a fine lad in every respect, as shipowner Morrel says.

• He makes us sympathize with Edmond’s plight, accused of a crime and unfairly imprisoned because of one man’s professional jealousy, another’s romantic envy, and a third’s selfish concern for his own position.

• He gives us a ‘moral vacation’ – we can root for Edmond’s revenge, thinking about the people who’ve done us wrong.

• He makes Edmond’s new identity as the Count of Monte Cristo interesting, à la James Bond or Batman. He’s brilliant, invulnerable, admired, confident, and infinitely wealthy.

• He shows us the count helping now-impoverished Morrel and his family, rescuing young Albert from Roman bandits, and saving Valentine’s life when her stepmother tries to poison her.

• He provides glimmers of introspection that suggest in the end, the count will find redemption. 

• He lets us spend time with other characters who are more sympathetic, like Albert and Maximilien, giving us a break from the count’s misanthropy.

• He stays outside the count’s head, for the most part. The narration is omniscient third person, so we do get various people’s thoughts from time to time, including the count’s, but it’s not a steady bitter stream that might turn us off on the character.  

Portraying a complicated world

The book’s setting is complex and unfamiliar. It’s been a couple hundred years, and it’s France. Politics are messy, and the way money works is indescribably foreign.Yet the reader needs to at least have a sense of both to understand why Edmond ends up in prison and how his revenge plots work. How does the author convey these things?

• He drops hints in the dialogue, like when the plotters are discussing how to bring him down: “…if someone were to denounce him to the crown prosecutor as a Bonapartist agent…”

• He includes documents, like the letter the plotters write to the prosecutor, that lay things out more clearly.

• He uses dramatic language to draw our attention. “If a bolt of lightning had struck Villefort, it could not have done so with greater suddenness or surprise. He fell back into the chair and drew out the fatal letter, on which he cast a look of unspeakable terror.”

• He makes the hero as ignorant as we are. Edmond himself doesn’t understand why he’s been thrown into prison; the wise Abbé Faria explains it to him. 

• He uses straightforward summary exposition in the narrative. There’s no need for us to see all the dramatic events that put Napoleon back in power for 100 days and then put the king back on the throne—all we care about is whether Edmond will get out of prison. Dumas gives us a couple of pages of this, keeping it from feeling like a history book by mentioning what the characters we know are doing, and then dives back into the action with a scene showing how Villefort’s refusal to act keeps Edmond in the Chateau d’If.

• He uses dialogue again to help us understand the money. The count has an unlimited letter of credit, whatever that is. The lengthy conversation with banker Danglars shows at least vaguely what that means, while at the same time illustrating how enormously wealthy the count is now: Danglars proposes he could even give the count a million, and the count pulls a million in cash out of his wallet, as though to him that’s just walking-around money.

Juggling subplots

The main plot is easy to summarize: innocent man is sent to prison for 14 years, escapes, and takes revenge on the people who sent him there.

Within that main plot, we have three primary strands—one for each of the people mainly responsible for his imprisonment—and countless others, including the fiancee who didn’t wait for him, the good shipowner who tried to help, and the landlord who saw the whole thing. The primary strands are complicated by the addition of the villains’ children, who are linked by a web of marriage plans and romance. 

And then there are the tangents, the subplots. There’s a story of the Borgia pope, the Medicis, and the treasure, and how that ends up in the hands of the good Abbé Faria. Another story tells about the Roman bandit Luigi Vampa, and how he took over Cucumetto’s gang and became friendly with the count. A third tells how Haydee’s father, the Ali Pasha, was betrayed and killed, and Haydee and her mother ended up enslaved. The political context gives us other subplots, like the story of General Quesnel’s death. Altogether, there are over 100 named characters in this book, many of whom have their own stories.

With so much going on, and particularly since the book was originally published in serial form, how does the author make sure we can keep track?

• He gives us vivid scenes that live in our imagination. Grassy fields of sheep, mysterious caves full of gleaming treasure, campfires surrounded by evil men waiting to take their turn with the captive girl, lavish opera houses full of well-dressed patrons who talk through the first act, bloodthirsty crowds gathering to see a public execution, the lonely telegraph operator in his garden.

• He links everything to the main story, one way or another. Even General Quesnel, who seems like just a bit of historical color, turns out to have been killed in a duel with the prosecutor’s father, and that revelation destroys the prosecutor’s wedding plans for his daughter.

• He explicitly reminds us when he thinks we might have forgotten something important, or might need help to connect the dots. “This man was our old acquaintance, Gaspard Caderousse.”

• He doesn’t use a regular pattern of alternating between the storylines, but he doesn’t abandon any of the primary strands for more than a few chapters. For instance, Danglars (the jealous coworker) is the main focus of chapters 65-66, 70, 76, 81, and 87, among others.

• He connects the characters to each other, so we may see them even in chapters mainly devoted to a different character. Danglars’ daughter is meant to marry Edmond’s romantic rival’s son; the prosecutor’s daughter is in love with the worthy shipowner’s son; Danglars’ wife and the prosecutor had an affair years ago and had a baby who was adopted by Caderousse’s sister-in-law.

The rules can be broken

The biggest lesson from The Count of Monte Cristo? You can break the rules, and still write a book people will love.

Plotting rules

Trying to map the book to the plot beats outlined in Save the Cat and other writing craft books was an exercise in futility. Apparently Hollywood had the same problem; all the hero’s journey analyses I found online mapped to the movie, not the book. 

Even something as basic as the three-act structure was a challenge. Here’s how I think it plays out:

That’s one l-o-n-g second act, if I’ve put the breaks where they belong. 

The plot works, though. It isn’t just a series of events, but a unified story. It starts with young Edmond sailing into Marseille, and ends with a bookend image: “on the dark-blue line on the horizon that separated the sky from the Mediterranean, they saw a white sail, as large as a gull’s wing.” In between, even if the character arc isn’t quite what I wanted it to be, it’s a gripping tale.

Style rules

You can’t expect a book written in 1845 to follow the style rules that apply in 2021, and it doesn’t. Info dumping, for instance: chapter 3 starts with three paragraphs of background about the Spanish colonists who settled a little spit of land near Marseille. But I think even in a current book, this might not be flagged for cutting, because of the way it’s written. The language is colorful—“clinging to it like a flock of seabirds,” “this bare and arid promontory,” “these gypsies of the sea”—and personal to the story. It begins, “A hundred yards away from the place where the two friends, staring into the distance with their ears pricked, were enjoying the sparkling wine of La Malgue, lay the village of Les Catalans, behind a bare hillock ravaged by the sun and the mistral.” 

Dumas was paid by the line, and he certainly didn’t try to use three words when seven would do. Even though the prose might be padded, it doesn’t feel that way, except in a few sections where the count is explaining his philosophy. (These are notably absent from the abridged Enriched Classics version.) I think the difference is that things are happening in all those words—Bertuccio is hiding in a closet and the warm rain that falls on him is blood; Mme Villefort is creeping into her stepdaughter’s room to put poison in her drinking water; Andrea is lying in wait to kill Caderousse as he exits the count’s dressing room. 

Give the reader something to think about (and maybe argue about)

The Count of Monte Cristo offers more than a thrilling tale of revenge. At the outermost level, we can imagine what it would be like for us to suffer alone in a dungeon, and then how it would be to have that bottomless treasure, and how it would feel to take revenge on the people who’ve wronged us. But as we see that “fine lad,” Edmond Dantès, become the cruel vengeful count, watch him torment even the people he helps to see if they’ve become “unhappy enough to deserve happiness,” and follow him as he visits the sins of the fathers on their children, claiming to be the agent of God, we begin to think deeper thoughts. What is justice? Can the count be redeemed after he commits so many terrible acts? Could the villains have escaped their fates if they had lived better lives after what they did to Edmond? What about the women—Mercedes, who’s destined for a convent; Haydee, who fell in love with her possessor; Valentine, the ideal woman in the eyes of male romantics; and Eugenie, who got her happy ending with her girlfriend—did they deserve their fates? Did the count do enough to earn his happy ending?

I’m glad to have read The Count of Monte Cristo at long last. There are many more lessons for writers to be found within those pages. If you’ve read it or had a similar experience with another classic, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

I’m still working towards developing a solid habit of writing every day. In January 2019, I wrote about Gretchen Rubin’s advice on habit formation, and Charles Duhigg’s explanation of the neuroscience of habits. I’ve used their advice to help me develop some good everyday habits, like walking, keeping track of my weight, flossing, and making sure the dishes are done before I go to bed.

Writing is a different matter. Today, I’m enlisting the help of Austin Kleon and James Clear.

Groundhog Day

Austin Kleon’s latest book, Keep Going, says the creative life is not linear. It’s more like a loop, or a spiral, in which you keep coming back to a new starting point after every project. 

We need a daily practice that insulates us from the outside world. The only thing we can really control is what we spend our lives on. If you have all the time in the world, a daily routine helps you make sure you don’t waste it.

Observe your days and your moods to establish the best routine. When your days have pretty much the same shape, the days that don’t have that shape become even more interesting. 

Make lists, like David Shrigley who makes a huge “to-draw” list, so he doesn’t have to waste time worrying about what to make; or Leonardo da Vinci, who made “to learn” lists. 

Forgive yourself when the day doesn’t go well. Before bed, make a list of what you did accomplish, and a list of what you want to accomplish tomorrow, then forget about it.

I highly recommend reading all three of Austin Kleon’s friendly, encouraging books on creativity. They’re deceptively small books, jam packed with good advice and inspiration.

Atomic Habits

James Clear is the ultimate guru on habit formation. Between his website, his awesome weekly newsletter, his Habits Academy, and the Clear Habits Journal (suitable for bullet journaling but oriented towards his recommendations), and of course his 2018 book Atomic Habits, he has everything I should need to create that elusive daily writing habit.

His approach is brilliant in its simplicity. He boils the research down to four laws, each of which has a corresponding inversion for habits you want to get rid of.

The First Law: Make it Obvious

Make an implementation intention: “I will [behavior] at [time] in [location].” With repetition, you’ll get an urge to do the right thing at the right time. When your dreams are vague, it’s easy to rationalize little exceptions all day long and never get around to the specific things you need to do to succeed. I will sit at my desk to write at 1 p.m. every day.

Use habit stacking (Gretchen Rubin called this the pairing strategy): identify a current habit and build the new one on top of it. You build momentum and can actually create a chain of multiple habits that feed into each other. I use this for my walks: after I have a cup of coffee, I take the dog for a walk. After I read the comics, I’ll plan my writing session.

Design your environment to create obvious visual cues. Put the book you want to read before bed on your pillow. Make sure the best choice is the most obvious one. It can be easier to build a new habit in a new place, where you don’t already have cues telling you to do what you’ve always done. If you can’t do that, try rearranging your current space. I’ve drifted into a habit of doing other things at the desk where I write—crossword puzzles, taking care of email, paying bills. I’ll do those other things elsewhere. I’ll set up my desk with my favorite writing pen and brainstorming paper, and post my writing plan for the day where I can see it as soon as I sit down.  

Inversion: Make it Invisible

Don’t rely on grit and willpower to break bad habits; create a more disciplined environment instead. Leave the phone in another room, uninstall apps that are wasting your time, take the tv out of the bedroom. It’s easier to avoid temptation than to resist it. I’ll turn off Mail and Discord so I don’t get notifications on the computer, and leave the phone on the charger in the living room.

The Second Law: Make it Attractive

Use temptation bundling: link the new habit to something you enjoy. I listen to podcasts while I walk the dog, for instance. I’ll listen to music and drink tea while I write.

Use the power of fitting in with the group by joining a culture where your desired behavior is the norm. The shared identity reinforces your personal identity as a person who does what you want to have a habit of doing. Imitate successful people.  I’ll meet regularly with other writers, and pay attention to their good habits.

Reprogram your brain to highlight the benefits, not the drawbacks, of the habit you want. I get to make up stories and write them down! Create a motivation ritual, like taking three deep breaths and smiling or lighting a specific candle, to get yourself in the mind-set to perform. 

The Third Law: Make it Easy

Don’t get bogged down in a question for perfection: start with repetition. All habits start as effortful practice before they become automatic behavior. Standardize before you optimize. 

Take easy steps (this is the principle behind Katharine Grubb’s book, Write a Novel in Ten Minutes a Day). Use the two-minute rule: instead of vowing to do a whole session of yoga, just commit to taking out your yoga mat. Make starting the habit as easy as possible. I’ll commit to working on my project for 10 minutes at 1 p.m. daily, no matter what.

Reduce the friction that makes the habit harder. At the end of each writing session, I’ll make a note about where to start next time.

Use habit shaping to build on that 2-minute starter habit—add an intermediate 2-minute step, and so on—until you’ve achieved the full habit you intended to form. Once I’ve mastered the 10-minutes-a-day writing habit, I’ll extend the goal.

Use one-time actions with big payoffs: unsubscribe from emails and use email filters, delete game apps, buy smaller plates, set up automatic bill pay. I’ll deal with those nagging technical issues that get in my way when I sit down to write.

The Fourth Law: Make it Satisfying

Add a little immediate pleasure to habits that pay off in the long run and a little immediate pain to the ones that don’t. I’ll print out my written pages so I can admire them at the end of every writing session. 

Use a habit tracker like Jerry Seinfeld does for writing jokes, and don’t break the chain. The tracker gives you a visual cue reminding you of what you want to do, motivates you by showing your progress, and feels satisfying. I’ll use my DIY MFA spreadsheet to track my streak.  Gabriela Pereira’s book, DIY MFA is another great resource for writers looking to build good habits. She recommends collecting data on your writing life—time of day, location, other environmental factors, and what you got done—for 3 weeks, then analyzing it to figure out what works best for you. I did that, and now use a simplified version of the same spreadsheet as a habit tracker.

Just show up—don’t beat yourself up if you miss a day, but don’t skip the second day too.

Get an accountability partner and maybe set up consequences for what will happen if you don’t follow through. 

There’s lots more in James Clear’s excellent book, including case histories and examples of how to apply these principles to all kinds of habits.

There you have it! That’s my plan. It’s almost November, time for NaNoWriMo, the best possible time to experiment with a new writing habit. Wish me luck, and please share your ideas in the comments below!

I first read Salem’s Lot, Stephen King’s vampire novel, in the 1970s, and a couple of scenes—a little boy floating outside a window asking to come in, and a priest confronting his doubts in a kitchen—have stuck with me ever since. This week, I reread it in a version with a new introduction and afterword and a bunch of deleted scenes and early versions of published scenes. 

Pantsers rule

From the 2005 Introduction:

Of course, the writer can impose control; it’s just a really shitty idea. Writing controlled fiction is called “plotting.” Buckling your seatbelt and letting the story take over, however…that is called “storytelling.” Storytelling is as natural as breathing; plotting is the literary version of artificial respiration.

Obviously, Stephen King knows more about plotting a page-turner than anyone, but it’s nice to have the vindication for those of us who’ve tried plotting in advance and failed miserably.

Everyone starts somewhere

This was King’s second published novel, after Carrie, and he was still mastering his craft. He started writing it in 1972, when he was about 25.

The published version isn’t as tightly pulled together as his later works. You can see the seams, the places where he wrote something and liked it and left it in when he probably should have taken it out—as a fellow pantser, I have a hundred things like that in my current project. It’s both a caution and a reassurance to see it here.

Deleted and early-version scenes illustrate other lessons about writing. 

• Don’t overexplain. In several of these, the narrator or a character in dialogue explicitly states the novel’s message. The published version leaves it to the reader, who can read it as a straightforward adventure about vampires or think about what the story says about ordinary people, small New England towns, and the post-Vietnam era.
• Work on the reader’s emotions. Other scenes show how choices about the order of events, the way events are described—more or less detailed, more or less bloody—and the way characters respond to events affect the emotional impact of the story. That scene of the priest in the kitchen that’s stuck in my head for 40 years was different in an earllier version, for instance. As published, that scene kicks the hope right out from under you; the earlier version left some room for daylight.  
• If you don’t need it, drop it. Some of the deleted scenes are just unnecessary, like the one that explains Ben’s financial situation: it’s something King needed to know as a writer, but it didn’t add anything to the story.

Intentions matter

In his 2005 introduction, King says his ambition was to write The Great American Novel by combining the overlord-vampire myth from Bram Stoker’s Dracula with the naturalistic fiction of Frank Norris and the EC horror comics. He might be shelved in horror, but you can see his literary origins in his precise choice of words and images:

• a straw-dry whistle of air slipping from his mouth

• as though a special small slice had been cut from the cake of time

• The town hasn’t changed that much. Looking out on Jointner Avenue is like looking through a thin pane of ice—like the one you can pick off the top of the town cistern in November if you knock it around the edges first—looking through that at your childhood. It’s wavy and misty and in some places it trails off into nothing, but most of it is all still there

• he felt sixteen, a head-busting sixteen with everything in front of him six lanes wide and no hard traveling in sight

• the older people to whom funerals grow nearly compulsive as old age knits their shrouds up around them

It’s okay to take your time

As always, the last page of the book shows when King finished it, and this time it also tells when he started. He wrote Salem’s Lot from October 1972 to June 1975. I plan to remind myself of this whenever I’m tempted to compare my writing speed to, say, my middle-grade writer friend who can have a draft finished in three months or less.

###

What do you think? Have you found writing lessons in an old novel? Please let me know in the comments below!

I’ve always wanted to be a writer, but even now that nothing stands in my way, I’m still struggling to get my current project finished. Can I use the power of habit to help me get where I want to go?

Gretchen Rubin would say yes. She wrote a whole book, Better than Before, about using habits to make your life better. Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit, would agree.

Here’s the thing about habit: it lets you make a decision once and be done with it. No dithering about whether or not to brush your teeth or make the bed; the decision is already made. No arguing with yourself about whether to order french fries or a salad at lunch. No choosing between writing and doing something else.

Once a habit’s established, all you have to do is go with the flow.  

Know yourself

Self-knowledge is key to establishing good habits. If you’re creative at midnight but a zombie before 10 a.m., maybe getting up extra-early to write isn’t going to work for you. If you enjoy starting new things more than finishing what you’ve started; if you like novelty more than familiarity; if you prefer simplicity to abundance – use that knowledge to figure out the best approaches and incentives.

If you’re one of Rubin’s “upholders” you follow through on whatever you expect of yourself, so it’s most important to design your new habit wisely. If you fit her “obliger” category you might need to set up external accountability to keep you on track till your habit’s ingrained. A “questioner” needs a good reason for doing anything, so clarifying your ‘why’ is critical. (Check out her newest book, The Four Tendencies, for more on applying her theory to your life.)

The structure of habit

Habits can be changed if we understand how they work, says Duhigg. It’s pretty simple: cue, routine, reward. When we encounter the cue, our brain checks out, our basal ganglia take over, and we execute the routine and get the reward. Once the habit is established, we anticipate the reward as soon as the cue shows up, creating a craving – this is why it’s hard not to check your phone when it buzzes; your brain is already salivating over the little boost it expects to get.

To form a new habit, choose a simple cue. Identify a reward that naturally flows from the new routine – maybe the satisfaction of seeing your word count climb, or the pleasure of reading what you’ve written, or the attaboy your accountability partner gives you – and allow yourself to anticipate the reward, really feel it, to help build that craving.

 You can’t extinguish an old habit, but you can change it: keep the cue and reward, change the routine. If the cue is opening the laptop and the routine is checking social media or reading email, figure out the reward you get out of those distracting activities and find a way to link that reward to writing instead.

In The Power of Habit, Duhigg lays out the neuroscience behind understanding how the brain does this, as well as how habits apply to organizations and societies. I highly recommend reading his book.

Strategies for habit formation

Better Than Before lays out concrete steps to improve the odds that you’ll succeed at forming good habits and changing bad ones.

Monitoring – It’s an axiom: what gets measured gets done. Track your behavior, as in WW where you track your food, or your results, as in NaNoWriMo where you track your word count, and you’re more likely to succeed. I started using a spreadsheet when I read Gabriela Pereira’s DIY MFA. She suggested doing it for a month or so to figure out what time of day, location, etc. made you the most productive, but I’ve kept it up because it gives me a little boost every time I get to say I met my goal for the day. I have columns for date, daily goal, whether I met the goal, start/end/elapsed time, start/end/total words added, location, mood, and notes about who I was with and what I worked on.

Foundation – Good habits related to sleep, exercise, nutrition, and clutter make it easier to do everything else. If you’re chronically exhausted, it’s harder to make good choices. The siren call of unwashed dishes can make it impossible to concentrate (when I was a student, my apartment was never cleaner than during finals week when my subconscious was actively seeking distraction). 

Scheduling – If you can do it anytime, you might never get around to it, but choosing a time and putting it on the calendar gets it done. At the moment, my only consistent writing times are Friday mornings, when I meet some people at a coffee house after my workout. I do much better with exercise, because the yoga class I like is at noon on Mondays, and my strength sessions with a trainer and a workout buddy are scheduled on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

Accountability – Reporting to someone else, or even to something else like an app, helps reinforce good habit formation. My writing critique group meets every Thursday, and every three weeks I need to produce a chapter for them to comment on. The 10 Minute Novelist group on Facebook has a 365-day challenge every year that gently nudges you to keep up the good work.

First steps – Try taking it one day at a time. Take a deep breath and jump in.

Clean slate – Look for a new beginning on the calendar (New Year, first day of school) or in your circumstances (new house, new job) and start your new habit when everything else already feels new.

Lightning bolt – Take advantage of an aha moment, like a book that changes the way you think, to kick-start a new habit.

Abstaining – It might be easier to never yield to temptation than to do things in moderation. Uninstall the distracting game from your phone, for instance. 

Convenience – Make it easier (or make the bad habit harder). Turn off notifications, close your browser and email programs, maybe even use one of those productivity tools that forces you to jump through hoops to open a distracting app. End your writing session in the middle of a scene so when you start next time you’ll have a head start. 

Safeguards – Anticipate and minimize the temptations that will derail you. Put distractions where you won’t see them. Write at the library where you can’t stop to put another load of laundry in. (There’s something about housework that’s infinitely fascinating when I’m stuck.)

Recognize loophole-spotting – I surpassed my goal yesterday, so I can take today off. I had a hard day (I did the taxes, I dealt with the plumber) so I deserve a break. It’ll be easier to write if I take care of this email first. I’m traveling so it doesn’t really count. As Duhigg said, your old habits are lurking under the surface. Don’t give them a foothold.

Distraction  – Give yourself 15 minutes before getting up from your desk, and see if the urge to go do something else fades. At the very least, you’ve spent another 15 minutes on your writing.

Reward – Don’t link your habit to an unrelated reward. You risk teaching your brain that you wouldn’t do the activity without the reward, converting it to unpleasant drudgery. You also risk stopping when you reach the finish line and earn the reward. 

Instead, find the intrinsic motivation that works for you and for the habit you’re trying to form. These might include challenge, curiosity/learning something new, control/feeling of mastery, fantasy/using your imagination, cooperation/working with others, competition, or recognition.

Treats – Allow yourself small pleasures just because you want them. This helps you feel cared for and contented, and strengthens your ability to maintain good habits.

Pairing – Link your new habit to something you already do. I always have coffee as soon as I wake up; I’d write more consistently if I took the coffee into my home office and wrote while I drank it.

Clarity – Figure out why you want the new habit. I have to do this with writing a couple of times a year. Writing a novel is hard; why on earth would anyone put themselves through the agony? In addition to clarifying your why, clarify the specific actions in the new routine. My Friday writing habit is pretty loose – show up at the coffee house and spend a few hours planning, editing, drafting, and/or researching, plus a little mostly-writing-related chatting – but it clearly excludes social media and reading for fun, so it works.

Identity – Defining yourself as a writer makes it easier to maintain writing-related habits. We tend to believe what we hear ourselves say. 

For a quick take on 10 tips for habit formation, check out this video:

Thanks to Gretchen Rubin and Charles Duhigg, I have a lot to think about. I’d love to hear your experiences with establishing good writing habits in the comments below.

The Writing Excuses podcast constantly gives me new ways to think about things that have perplexed me for years. The latest example is the July 1, 2018, episode, in which Mary Robinette Kowal explains six “relationship axes” writers can use to explore how their characters relate to each other. She credits her mother-in-law, who came up with it as dating advice for her son.

Although I plan to put it to use in my writing, the thing that stands out for me just as much is how it applies to relationships in my own life.

The framework

What it means

The more closely aligned two people – or characters – are on these axes, the more compatible they are. It applies to romantic relationships, obviously, but also to friendships, work relationships, and all the other ways in which people interact.

Mind means they have comparable degrees of intelligence. Morals is the sense of what’s right and wrong, while manners is the idea of what’s polite and what isn’t. This is why you might have a person you can’t stand on Facebook, but when you meet them in real life you find you like them – your morals are different, but your manners are congruent.

Monogamy is the idea of what the relationship is. Kowal gave the example of two characters, one of whom thinks of the other as her best friend, while the other thinks they’re just work acquaintances. You can also think of this in terms of position power and personal power in which power can derive from a person’s position in a hierarchy or from the power of their personality and presence.

Money isn’t about how much people have, but what they think money is for, and their goals related to money. Finally, The Marx Brothers is whether they laugh at the same things. I’d broaden this to whether they enjoy doing the same things.

Using the framework

As a writer, you can use any of these as a source of conflict between your characters. Think about buddy cop movies, for example. They might be aligned on the morals axis – they both want to get the bad guys – but maybe their manners are completely different, like Eddie Murphy and Judge Reinhold in Beverly Hills Cop. Or think about the relationship between Meg Ryan and Bill Pullman, the guy she’s with at the beginning of Sleepless in Seattle, or Meg Ryan and Greg Kinnear, the guy she’s with at the beginning of You’ve Got Mail. They seem to be aligned on every axis except monogamy – Meg Ryan’s character isn’t as happy as she thinks Pullman and Kinnear are with where the relationship seems to be going – but as the plot unfolds, we discover differences on some of the other axes, and (is a spoiler alert necessary for movies from the 90s? If so, consider yourself warned) we find out they’re actually aligned on monogamy, too, since the guys are also happy to split up and let Meg Ryan fulfill her destiny with Tom Hanks.

This framework is also helping me think about why some of my own relationships work and where the tensions come from. My husband and I come from totally different backgrounds in many ways, and we definitely aren’t in alignment on some of those axes. But on others, we’re in sync, and we’ve found ways to manage (usually) our differences on the others. Looking back at my career, some things weren’t as important in work relationships, but others were critical. Manners were key; people tended to either adapt to the way we interacted with each other or leave. Morals were often a source of conflict, where team members would see things through different lenses – although that actually strengthened the results of our work, even if it made work challenging at times.

What do you think? If you try this framework for your characters (or your life), please share in the comments.

Not everything has to be geared towards achieving a specific future purpose to be worthwhile.

Let me rephrase that:

Don’t try to live in the future. Appreciate the present.

My dad was a storyteller. He grew up on a farm in Saskatchewan, and he had a great fund of stories featuring hard work, honesty, thrift, and generosity. The theme, in addition to whatever specific value was being imparted, was that living by that value would pay off in the end. Hard work pays off in a satisfying career. My dad’s thrift as a child enabled him to lend his parents money when times were tight in the Depression. His honesty in remembering all winter that he had to repay a penny as soon as the roads cleared earned him a whole bag of penny candy from the surprised storekeeper. His mother’s generosity to a band of traveling Cree people was repaid with moccasins for him and his brother every year.

The corollary my subconscious pulled out of Dad’s stories was that you shouldn’t waste time on things that don’t have a purpose.

Or, as that annoying student used to say (there’s one in every class): will this be on the test?

This isn’t fair to my dad, who was great at having fun for the pure joy of it. But – you know how it is with your subconscious. It thinks what it thinks.

Work hard. Enjoy it.

In An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield proposes a different approach to thinking about what you’re doing. An astronaut who gets all his or her job satisfaction from space flight is going to be a miserable astronaut, because space flight is such a small and uncertain part of the job. For one thing, there are years of training for one day of space flight. For another, many factors outside your control determine whether you’ll actually go to space. When the U.S. space shuttles were retired, astronauts who were too tall to fit in Russian ships had no chance of space flight. Congressional budgets, disaster investigations, illness, family events – all can mean you miss your window of opportunity.

Your sense of self worth, identity, and happiness can’t be tied up in an ultimate goal that might never happen. The training and everything else that goes into the job is hard, fun, and stretches your mind. Space flight is a bonus. You don’t determine whether you arrive at the desired professional destination, but you can determine your own attitude. Work hard and enjoy the process.

Chris Hadfield is the astronaut who recorded David Bowie’s Space Oddity IN SPACE, so it wasn’t a surprise to hear him talking about learning Rocket Man before he met Elton John, just in case. He pictured the most demanding challenge he could imagine – being asked to perform on stage with Elton John – then determined what he’d have to do to be ready to meet the challenge, then practiced until he was ready. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t actually asked to perform on stage. The important thing is that he was ready.

You might learn things you’ll never use, but it’s better to know them and not need to than the reverse. You’re getting ahead if you learn, even if you stay on the same rung of your career ladder. Learning is the point.

What does this mean for writers?

A writer’s chance of getting a book published and having it succeed with readers, like the astronaut’s chance of spaceflight, is affected by a whole range of things that aren’t in the writer’s control. Writing, studying the craft, writing, researching, writing, connecting with other writers, and writing (not to mention querying, networking, developing an author platform, etc.) are hard, fun, and stretch your mind. Don’t base your sense of self-worth and satisfaction on the end result. Challenge yourself, work hard, and enjoy the process!

Watch this!

After you read the book, check out this little video that sums it up nicely. I’m listening to the audio version of the book, which is especially wonderful because it’s narrated by Colonel Hadfield himself.

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

I’m lucky to live a couple of hours’ drive from Tucson, home of the country’s second largest book festival. This year was the 10th annual event, which comes around on the second weekend in March while the University of Arizona students are away on spring break. Over a hundred thousand people show up to honor authors as rock stars – literally this year, when the Rock Bottom Remainders (Amy Tan, Dave Barry, R.L. Stine, and Scott Turow, among others) performed on Saturday night.

The festival takes over the U of A campus, with hundreds of tents on the grass, and a wonderful Science City at one end. (Check out this video to get a flavor of it.) For me, though, the juicy part is the array of panels and speakers in the classrooms. I try to get to as many writing craft sessions as I can.

Choice quotes

• Write what you want to read but can’t find. (Fonda Lee, author of Jade City)
• “Hard fantasy” in which magic follows rigid rules is just science under a different name. (Ken Liu, author of The Grace of Kings and translator of The Three Body Problem)
• Every book is different. It’s like raising children: you only learn how to write that book. What keeps you going is knowing you did it before. (K Arsenault Rivera, author of The Tiger’s Daughter)
• I’m a collector of life stories (Katayoun Medhat, author of The Quality of Mercy)
• I channeled the simmering rage from my own life into my 20-year-old female character, so she’s closer to me than any of my other characters. (Riley Sager, 40-year-old male author of Final Girls)
• People who make notes of their ideas as they come up have ideas they can work with when they’re ready to work. (Windy Harris, author of Writing & Selling Short Stories & Personal Essays)
• Reading can be a way of avoiding writing, escaping the difficulty of finding and listening to your own voice. (Ron Hogan, founder of Beatrice.com)
• We become authors by authorizing ourselves. (Stuart Horowitz, founder of Book Architecture)

World Building from Ken Liu

The hands-down best session I attended this year was Ken Liu’s presentation, in which he shared ten tips for compelling world building. Whether you write fantasy, science fiction, or historical novels, you need to construct a sense of place so the reader feels immersed in your story. Ken’s own website describes the talk, and incidentally serves as a great example of an effective author website.

Some favorite pieces of wisdom:

• Read outside your comfort zone and pay attention to movies, tv, video games, and even cosplay and larping (it means live-action role playing – who knew?), and learn how others evoke a sense of place.
• If you only read secondary sources, like a science journalist’s summary of a research paper or a historian’s account of events, you’re getting someone else’s narrative. Go to primary sources, and go in person to see physical artifacts. Tour a battleship, look at original art.
• Use “incluing” – Jo Walton’s term – instead of explaining everything. Readers can figure out more than you might think, and figuring things out makes reading more fun.
• Study nonfiction to see how to make infodumps compelling to read.
• Make your prose more dense. Each sentence can do more than one thing – show character, advance the plot, describe the world.
• Think through all the implications of your ideas. If your world has flying cars, it’s not going to be just like our world but with flying cars added.
• Give your world a history and different cultures, with all the complexity and inconsistency that comes from the way things evolve. Who knew that samurai culture in Japan came after gunpowder and firearms were available? Technology doesn’t determine everything, and stories told in other cultures are very different from the ones you grew up reading.
• Technology is invented by tinkerers trying to solve a problem. It doesn’t come from higher level scientific principles in an orderly manner. Read The Nature of Technology by W. Brian Arthur to understand how technology creates our world. And technology isn’t just mechanical things – bureaucracy, organizations, and laws are also technologies.
• The one thing you care about, that excites you, will lead you to the rest of your world. It isn’t photorealism, but impressionist painting. What you’re doing is world conjuring in collaboration with the reader.
• Think through your own assumptions. Someone asked whether you have to include realistic elements like violence in your imaginary world, and Ken Liu pointed out that the question implies assumptions about what reality is like.

Idea to novel

Linnea Hartsuyker, author of The Half-Drowned King, led a workshop on turning your idea into a novel. She gave us lots of opportunities to practice developing our what-ifs, and shared a bit of her own wisdom along the way, like:

• Plot doesn’t just happen to your characters, but because of them.
• Different characters relate to the theme in different ways. If the theme of The Hunger Games is “how does a person navigate a world in which cruelty is necessary for survival,” the answers are different for Katniss, Haymitch, and President Snow.
• Visualize the end. The end is where the reader sees that you’ve made your argument and something’s been settled, and it will help you along the way as you’re writing if you feel you’re writing towards something.
• If you get stuck, think about the chapter questions to get back on track:
  • Summary
  • Central conflict
  • Decision
  • Plot purpose, character purpose, and theme purpose
• Start on an unsteady equilibrium (the cliche is “start as late as you can get away with”).
• Her own process is iterative. She writes the important events, a high level summary, and a few chapter questions, then writes as fast as she can till she hits a wall, then goes back and does more outlining and thinks about the three questions: what the character wants, what they need to do (what’s their primary malfunction), and what’s standing in their way.

Finding and pitching an agent

In an information-packed session, two agents (Claire Gerus and Katharine Sands) and a developmental editor (Ron Hogan) shared their sometimes-contradictory wisdom on getting an agent. Sands followed up with a whirlwind solo presentation on perfecting your pitch. In addition to common sense advice like “don’t be bridezilla, even though you’ve been dreaming of this since you were seven,” a few highlights were:

• You’re looking for someone who believes in your work.
• Seduce agents by showing them something that makes them want to see more, and that you can deliver.
• Do your research, i.e. in Publishers Marketplace, look carefully at the contract, and talk to their other authors.
• You have to kiss a lot of frogs. Don’t limit yourself too much. Bigger agencies hire new people all the time, so even if they don’t specialize in your genre, their new agent might love your work.
• Publishers are looking to minimize financial risk; agents are looking out for your interests. In self-publishing you keep all your rights but you’re probably not putting the best version of your book out there.
• Have a social media presence. Publishers want to know if you already have a following. Develop a relationship with your readers online. Don’t post too much in your blog – your contract will stipulate how much of your book has to be original.
• Rehearse your pitch. Think of it like gossip, when you tell your best friend about the crazy thing that happened today: you’re animated, with drama, charm, and humor. Practice till you always have it ready to go.
• Your pitch needs place, person, and pivot so the agent knows who the character is and what they’re dealing with. It doesn’t need backstory, theme, or how the story ends. You’re not telling the whole story, just enough to spark interest.

Tucson is for foodies

I stayed with my friend Kat, who lives walking distance from the university, and we had lunch on Saturday at the wonderful B Line on 4th Avenue. If you’re familiar with Tucson, you already know 4th Avenue is the hub of all kinds of independent shops and restaurants. I’m a vegetarian so I never get a chance to order tortilla soup, which is usually made with beef stock. The B Line had a delicious version that’s all vegetarian, and can even be made vegan if you ask them to. Yum!

If you don’t want to leave the festival, you don’t have to. You can get anything from tamales to gelato in the food tent area.

This was my fourth time at the Tucson book festival, and I’m grateful to young adult author Tom Leveen for mentioning it in a class. I’m slowly getting the hang of it – the festival is FREE and with so many book loving attendees, it can be a challenge to get into some of the sessions. If you have any tips on successfully navigating a big book festival, or if you went to this one and care to share some of the insights you gained, I’d love to hear about it in the comments!

I’ve been using Scrivener for a few years now. I wrote a post about it in July 2016, in which I raved about some of the basic features that I love about the software. Literature and Latte came out with a new version for Mac a few months ago, and it’s even more awesome now. It’s called Scrivener 3, and they haven’t released a PC version yet.

Bookmarks

There are 5 little icons at the top of the inspector column: synopsis/notes, bookmarks, metadata/keywords, snapshots, and comments/footnotes. If you click on the bookmarks icon, it opens a little panel and you can drag other documents from your binder into it, so you can refer back to other documents without losing your place in your current document!

My current project has dozens of documents in it, including text, character sheets, places, and research notes. Plus, I have a memory like a steel sieve, meaning I’m constantly going back and forth to remind myself of what I said last time I wrote about a particular character, or whatever.

The screenshot below shows the bookmark panel at the right. I’ve just put a couple of the character sheets in there as an illustration.

The screenshot also illustrates another awesome new feature:

Linguistic focus

This feature is under the EDIT/WRITING TOOLS menu. It grays out everything except the kind of text you ask for. You can just look at your verbs, to see if maybe you’re overusing passive voice; you can look at adjectives or nouns to see if maybe you can inject a little more variety or elegance into your writing; and you can even look at dialogue to see if your character voices are consistent and distinct (the direct speech option highlights everything that’s inside quotation marks).

Tabs

I usually have multiple Scrivener documents open at the same time. There’s my current project, of course. I also have a catch-all called “how to write” which has my notes on everything from the 3-act structure to how to take a screen clipping, and I usually leave that one open. I keep a copy of my blog posts in a Scrivener project, which helps when I want to look up something I wrote a long time ago but am not sure when; that’s also usually open somewhere in the background. In the past, I’d have to shuffle the documents around to find the one I wanted somewhere buried behind everything else.

The new WINDOW/MERGE ALL WINDOWS feature creates tabs in your header bar, one per open project, so you can see them all nicely laid out and switch between them with ease. You can see it in my screenshot above.

Along the same lines, if you have projects you might not open very often but want to find them easily, you can add them to your favorite projects list (FILE/ADD PROJECT TO FAVORITES). I don’t know if this is a new feature, but I just learned about it.

Arrange by label

This is a feature I think has huge potential for helping to see the flow of your story, or figure out if you have the right balance of different points of view, or identify what stage of drafting and revision your pieces are in.

When you’re looking at your document in group mode (the cork board with index cards), there’s a group of icons at the bottom of your document that looks like this:

If you click on the one that looks like little tadpoles, it shows you a diagram like this:

The way it works will depend on how you set up your labels. In the illustration, mine are set up for where the scene takes place. You can zoom out to see more of the diagram at a time (VIEW/ZOOM/ZOOM OUT). A neat thing about this is you can move the cards from one line to another and it will automatically change the label.

There are lots and lots of other cool features in Scrivener, but I’m most excited about these right now.

Happy writing, everyone! If you use Scrivener and have found other neat things to share, I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

I HATE this advice. I know myself well enough to know that probably means I need to pay attention when people say it about my writing. If you ask me about it, I’ll probably say something like “I’m skeptical; it’s a newfangled notion and I’ve read plenty of books that have stood the test of time while telling mercilessly.”

Honestly, though? I hate this advice because I don’t understand it well enough to heed it.

This blog post is my attempt to come to grips with this confusing notion.

It’s in the prose

Show, don’t tell, isn’t an aspect of the storytelling side of writing. You can have a terrific plot, compelling characters, and a meaningful theme, and still struggle with telling. Show, don’t tell happens in the prose you use to tell the story.

Do you see what I did there? Storytelling. Prose that tells the story. This is probably a big reason I find this concept so vague: it’s a catchy phrase that doesn’t convey enough meaning to be helpful.

Dramatization versus exposition

The fabulously informative K.M. Weiland explains the phrase as code for mastering great narrative and allowing readers to fully inhabit the story. In the old novels I sink into when I have a bad day, I’m observing a character who’s watching something happen; the “show versus tell” goal is for me to watch something happen myself.

Weiland recommends examining every paragraph of your novel for the proper balance of showing, using a list of checkpoints.

1. “Telling” verbs

These are verbs that put a layer of distance between the reader and the story. Weiland’s list includes ask, begin, feel, hear, look, see, smell, sound, taste, think, touch, and wonder. These words distance the reader because instead of engaging the reader’s own senses, you’re telling them what the narrator is sensing. It’s the difference between “Sally heard a lark singing” and something that describes the plaintive, desperate cry of a lark looking for a mate.

My impression of lark song from a hundred literary references was completely off base. There are no larks where I live, so I looked it up on YouTube to help me write that sentence. From reading all those old “telling” narratives, I imagined a beautiful melody, like the mockingbird outside my house sings. Now I know it’s more of a call, not very musical at all. If the way a lark sounds was important to a plot, I’d never have gotten the point.

2. Dramatize, don’t summarize

You can think of showing as dramatizing, and telling as summarizing. It’s the knife plunging into the victim’s heart versus the assassin killing the victim. Joe Bunting calls this being specific, and he says it’s the secret to showing, not telling. He recommends interrogating your story to reveal the hidden depths, and compares a summary to a closed accordion. The music happens when you pull it open and show the folds.

3. Balance

Don’t try to eliminate all the telling in your novel. You can use it to summarize tedious or extraneous events, remind readers of what they already know, and transition between scenes, times, and settings. Most of your writing should be showing, but there’s a place for telling. As a reader, I’m fine with a summary that says the second week in the new job was just like the first. Writer’s Digest says be brief, and make sure whatever you’re summarizing is really necessary for advancing the plot by developing backstory, establishing mood, or describing the setting. The flip side of adding specificity is that you’re adding length. Don’t bore the reader.

4. Show the one right detail

Find the one thing that will bring the scene to life, and let the reader’s imagination fill in the rest. Brandon Sanderson talks about this in his BYU lesson on world building: he says if you go deep on one little thing about your fantasy or science fiction world, it creates the illusion of the iceberg beneath the surface. Weiland says that trying to dramatize everything, so the reader sees exactly what you see in your imagination, doesn’t usually work, and adds unnecessary clutter. Along the same lines, Tom Leveen reminds us that everyone knows what bacon smells like, so you don’t need to waste a paragraph describing it. He says make that one right detail concrete: it’s not the length of the description but the specificity. You can choose to leave other things ambiguous.

The camera trick

The Writer’s Digest recommends Jeff Gerke’s idea from his book The First 50 Pages, to help you identify whether your prose is telling, not showing. Ask yourself, can the camera see it? “It was a peaceful land and the people lived in harmony” is telling because the camera can’t see peace and harmony.

You’ll have to imagine a camera that picks up things from the other senses. Also, interior monologue isn’t telling, even though the camera wouldn’t see it.

Showing better by stirring emotions

Another way to think about it is to say that showing is the ability to stir readers’ emotions, says Abigail Perry on the DIY MFA website. Using the courtroom verdict scene from To Kill a Mockingbird, you can see how three techniques heighten the reader’s connection to the character’s emotions:

1. Metaphor and simile

Using vivid images and precise words pulls the reader in better than vague adverbs and adjectives. In Mockingbird, Scout says “I saw the jury return, moving like underwater swimmers.” She could have said “the jury returned, moving slowly” but that wouldn’t have conveyed the agonizing pace. The metaphor also helps to show how Scout is perceiving the moment, in a dreamlike, time-stretched, somber way.

Metaphors and similes make scenes easier to imagine. Watch out for clichés, though – I know the first simile that comes to my mind is usually something that was overused a hundred years ago.

2.  Verbs to trigger the senses

Scout notices that Jem’s hands are “white from gripping the rails.” From this image, we know Jem is upset, and we can feel the tension in his body. Atticus “pushes” his papers and “snaps” his briefcase. Using verbs instead of adjectives and adverbs is a stronger, more direct way to describe what and how the character sees, smells, hears, and feels. Tom Leveen says we can use more than 5 senses in our writing. The senses of temperature, pain, balance and acceleration, and where our limbs are in relation to ourselves can all help deepen the reader’s connection to our work.

3.  Interweaving dialogue

Dialogue is another way to show a character’s feelings and emotions. There’s not much dialogue in the Mockingbird  scene but what little there is pulls us in deeper. Not exactly dialogue, but description of dialogue – “Judge Taylor’s voice came from far away and was tiny” – conveys that same slow-motion unreality as the “underwater swimmers” jury motion. At the end of the scene, as Scout is watching from the balcony as Atticus exits the courtroom, Reverend Sykes says “Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father’s passin’…” The short statement conveys the respect the community has for Atticus, and supports the visuals.

How to show in four easy steps

The Daily Writing Tips blog summarizes the concept briefly:

1. Use dialogue
2. Use sensory language
3. Be descriptive (but don’t go so far as to write a “police blotter” description)
4. Be specific, not vague

The great lie of writing workshops?

Joshua Henkin has a different perspective on the “show don’t tell” advice. He says there is a kernel of truth in it – fiction is a dramatic art. However, a novel is not a movie. Movies are better at certain things, but they aren’t as good at others as novels are, like conveying what’s going on in the general sense that doesn’t fit into a specific scene, or more importantly, describing internal psychological states. A movie can suggest emotion by dialogue and gesture, or borrow from the novel with a voice-over; a novel can straight-out tell you what the person is feeling.

Henkin says “show don’t tell” can be a lazy way to say something isn’t working in a story, when the teacher and the student need to dig deeper to figure out what the problem is and how to fix it. It’s easier to fiddle with the description so the reader can see the torn vinyl couch than it is to describe internal emotional states without using cheesy clichés. “Show don’t tell” can provide cover for writers who don’t want to do the hardest but most crucial work.

Mostly show but sometimes tell

Hannah Collins neatly straddles both sides of the question with this less catchy but more accurate phrase. She compares writing to music, where composers include silence to give the listener a rest from all the sounds. If you do nothing but show, your writing will be long and exhausting, and some things are better conveyed by simple telling.

Because telling comes naturally to writers, we need to learn to show, which is why the “show don’t tell” advice is so prevalent. Collins recommends practicing by writing a scene in simple “telling” style and then rewriting it to show, sprinkling in more details and context than the straightforward telling conveyed.

Ultimately, knowing when to show and when to tell comes from experience, practice, instinct, and feedback.

The brilliant Susan Spann (website and Amazon page) generously shared her editing process last month (Sept. 2017) with us lucky attendees at the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers conference in Denver. Susan is an attorney specializing in intellectual property – another of her conference sessions focused on what to look out for in an agent or publishing contract – and an author of a mystery series set in 16th-century Japan starring a master ninja and a Portuguese Jesuit priest.

She stressed that this is her process – it works for her; if it works for you, great; if not, don’t do it this way. Before she starts, she spends 3-4 months reading and researching the world of the novel, and creates a brief outline of the 5-act structure and the events that occur on-stage and off.

Her process resonated with me in part because it ‘s similar to what I used to do while writing government reports in my previous career. We called it multi-pass editing, and the idea was that you’d:

1 – Get words on paper. If you don’t have anything to work with, you can’t make it better.

2 – Review the draft for content. Is the right information in the report, is there anything in there that doesn’t need to be, are the ideas adequately explained, using clarifying examples where needed, and is the information presented in context?

3 – Do another pass for organization. Does the report use headings and good paragraph structure, and does the information flow logically; can a reader skim the report and get the gist?

4 – The next pass was for style. You’d look for connections and transitions, active voice, clarity, conciseness, and any jargon that had snuck in.

5 – The last pass was for mechanics, like spelling, punctuation, grammar, and any errors you tend to make.

After we’d done everything we could to make it a good report, we’d pass it along to our in-house reviewers, editors, and quality control people, similar to fiction writers’ alpha and beta readers.

Susan’s approach seems familiar:

First draft: 

• Unfiltered draft, written with the aid of a 3-page bullet point outline. She looks at the outline at the beginning and end of the day, but not while writing.
• She writes on a device called an Alpha Smart Neo that only lets her see three lines at a time, for distraction-free writing; she downloads to Word every night.
• No deleting anything till the draft is finished. Fix in editing is the mantra.
• Set a word count goal.  Figure out your baseline – how much you’re currently writing in a day. Make that your goal till you can do it consistently on however many days a week you write. Then reset your goal to something attainable but that will push you, and stick with that till you can meet it consistently. Repeat. Using this approach, she went from a goal of writing 15 minutes a day, 200 words, to her current 6,000 a day in 4-5 hours.
  

  You have to touch the wall every day.

• Don’t measure your speed against anyone else’s. She does her first draft in about 10 days now, but see above bullet for where she started out.
• Write every day. She requires herself to write an hour a day, although she usually does more.
• Stop for the day right before the cool thing happens, not at the end of the scene.
• If you get stuck, think “what’s the least plausible, but possible in this book’s world, thing that can happen here?”
  

  Celebrate everything!

Second draft: 

• She spends 2 1/2 months on this draft, editing 2-3 pages a day at a pace of about 2 hours per page. She doesn’t do a complete read before she starts; just starts at the beginning.
• Focus on structure, plot/subplot, world building, big inconsistencies.
• Remove unnecessary characters; maybe combine characters who fill small roles
• Remove scenes where nothing’s really happening, it doesn’t advance the plot, or it duplicates another scene. Think about what information was gained in the scene and where else it could go if you delete it. Save deleted scenes in a separate file.
• Make sure the character’s actions make sense. Is there a good reason they’re chasing down a killer instead of staying home and eating tacos?
• If you notice a grammar mistake, typo, etc., fix it, but don’t look for them.
• Put a square bracket where you need to research something, figure out how to fix something, or check internal consistency.
• Make notes at the end of the manuscript of things you need to think about more. If she thinks the reader would have a question, she puts it at the end.

Third draft: 

• Research and detail insertion. Take care of all those square brackets.
• Make the characters distinct.
  • Every character gets something that sets them apart, as recommended in Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat. This could be a physical characteristic, a typical gesture, etc.
  • Make them sound distinct. Add their inner dialogue. With every line of dialogue, ask what they’re feeling (or what they want others to think they’re feeling), and how their gestures or movements convey that.
• Triple verify everything you find on the Internet. Email experts; go to the place, stay there, and talk to people
• If you have characters from a different culture than your own, research until people in that culture say you got it right. If you can’t do it justice, delete it.
• Reverse engineer any subplots. Fill any holes in the plot.

Fourth draft: 

• Add the chapter breaks.
  • Put the break where the reader will want to turn the page, not where they’ll want to put a bookmark in and go to bed.
  • She goes to the 5th page, scans the action to see where a break should go. If there isn’t a good place, she keeps reading. If the natural break isn’t till page 8, she cuts 2-3 pages out of the chapter so she can break it on page 5 or 6. Whatever chapter length works for you, be consistent.
• Look at the chapters individually:
  • is there a beginning, middle, and end?
  • is there conflict on every page? You can add tension by making a character obstreperous, not necessarily related to the master story arc.
• Make sure the dialogue is snappy.
• Make sure the changes you’ve made haven’t messed up something else

Fifth draft:

• First polishing draft
• From here on, read the draft out loud. You want it to read smoothly, and reading out loud will also help develop your writing voice and lyricism.
• Look for grammar, sentence structure, and voice.
• Look for echo words that you’ve repeated over and over. Use the thesaurus to fix this, but watch out – some words are so high-impact you can only get away with using them once in the whole book.
• If you fix something in a scene, go back and start reading 2 paragraphs earlier. It’s like smoothing a tablecloth, where you can create more wrinkles.

Send the draft to your alpha and beta readers. Her alpha reader is her son; her beta readers are her critique partners. None of them sees the draft until this point. Tell your readers to crush the manuscript with a mighty hammer. There’s nothing they can tell you that will be as mean as what someone will post on Amazon.

Sixth draft:

• Integrate your readers’ comments and do a second polish.
• Pay attention to the comments:
  • Even if reader has it wrong, there’s a reason they had the question, so look at why they had that reaction, and figure out how to change.
  • The change needed may not be what the reader suggests. Their question might be triggered by something you did earlier. Talk to them, ask why they had that reaction.

This is where she sends the manuscript to her agent. She has an editorial agent, so her seventh draft is integrating her agent’s comments.

If the process sounds grueling, I’m sure it is, based on my past experience writing and editing reports. But it makes sense, and I believe if I try to follow Susan’s process for editing my novel, I’ll end up with a much better final product than I’ve ever accomplished before.

What do you think? Do you have an editing process that works for you? Please share in the comments below!

Website image photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash