Privately and some in the public posts after my last Killing Sacred
Cows of Publishing chapter, I got comments about redrafting a manuscript, so thought it might be worth a story here.
When I was starting out, I mailed anything I finished, as I said, even before my workshop saw it. I never rewrote because I had learned that many pro writers didn’t rewrite much, and I wanted to be working forward, creating new stuff and practicing. I figured editors would be the best judges to tell me if something worked or didn’t work.
So I did my three-draft method and mailed everything.
But then along came a story idea I really liked. We all have them, the idea that grabs us and won’t let go. This idea was my time-traveling jukebox idea. I wrote a story about it and when I mailed it, I knew, without a doubt, that I hadn’t dealt with the idea correctly. The manuscript didn’t work. I still mailed it.
But then I decided to write another story with the same idea. Without looking at the first story that was piling up rejections in the mail, I wrote the idea again and mailed it. I still wasn’t happy with the result.
So a month or so later I went at the idea again with yet another story. This one sold to Twilight Zone Magazine and came out eventually in its sister magazine Night Cry. But I still wasn’t happy with the story or what I did with the idea.
So I wrote the story again. This one sold to F&SF Magazine, it got award nominations, and has been reprinted four times, but I still wasn’t happy.
So again and again and again I have gone at the idea with a different redraft, a new story, trying to get it right. As of this point I have sold seven jukebox stories and I know I still haven’t written the story I really want to write about the idea. Often the same characters are in each story, often similar events happen, but the are all very different attempts at the idea.
If I had gone down the rewrite hole with this story, I never would have created the different stories, never made the sales, never let myself explore the idea as only years of going at it can explore.
So if you believe that every story you write must be perfect, my suggestion to you is run from this business now. It won’t happen, and New York will screw with your brain more than you will ever be able to stand. But if every story is just practice as you work to get better, and you let editors decide if the practice session is worth publishing, you will be better served.
And with that kind of attitude, your words are no longer gold that should be treasured. They are simply your tool to transmit a story from your head to a reader’s head. And if a tool is broken, go forward and just write it again from scratch. Just a suggestion that very few newer writers will be able to do.
Follow Heinlein’s Rules and go forward.
Cheer, Dean
WHOA! Dean, that’s just…. Wow.
I think you’ve helped me see a major problem of mine. For the first time, with clarity.
For my entire time as an aspirant, I have operated (mostly) on the model: now that I have told That Story, I shall not touch it again. For having written That Story I must(?!) move on to a Different Story about Something Different.
Not to say that moving on is bad, but I think I’ve been unconsciously blocking myself, in that I’ve never really looked at it the way you’ve described: story as mental object, words as tools to merely describe object in terms other people can read and understand.
If the first tools — ergo, first story — fail, I’ve tended to just consider the project a bust, and have moved on. I’ve never really disassociated the words from the actual STORY as it exists in my head — replete with images, sounds, feelings, etc.
Hmmm, dots connecting here… You know I’m a Trekkie — is that still a Naughty Word in Trekdom? — and when I was a young teen in the mid-80′s I began constructing my own scratch models of the Enterprise from scrap cardboard, paper, white glue, etc. My first attempt was pretty crude. I eventually did a second version. Then a third. And so on. Each time I used the lessons I learned building the last one, to make the next one better. More true to what I was seeing (‘mental object’) on-screen.
I’m due to build yet another one — I have lost count of how many I have done — because my daughter wrecked the last one. (Click here to see it.) That should have pissed me off, because the most recent iteration took more effort to complete than all the previous iterations put together. It didn’t matter to me though, because I’d long since concluded I could still do a better job, and once I realized that, the last iteration ceased to matter.
OK, not a perfect analogy, but this is setting off some lights and buzzers for me. If I treat each story in my head as a mental object — which the words on paper describe imperfectly, no matter how well I write them — then the story-on-paper becomes independent from the idea. I can do as many iterations as I want, hopefully getting better at it as time goes on, essentially describing the same mental object, without the futility of rewriting, and all the benefits of homework — just like with the cardboard scratch ships.
Click! Pop! I love this blog!
Yeargh, sorry about the endless italics. I should have checked my formatting codes better.
Brilliant! (Smacks self on forehead.) Why didn’t I think of that?
Particularly timely advice because I’ve got two stories ready to go out and had second thoughts about how to handle a couple of aspects in each. And of course overthinking that is interfering with me getting anything new done. Time to put them in the mail.
One in particular I was struggling with because it continues the story of a character I’ve used in a couple of stories, and “it wouldn’t make sense” to have two versions of that story. But you know what? Larry Niven sold three versions of his “The Soft Weapon”: one as the original Known Space short story, another revised as “The Slaver Weapon” for the Star Trek animated series, and finally with Edward Lerner as a chapter in “The Juggler of Worlds”. If it works for Niven and you, Dean, then I’ll make it work for me.
Cheers!
Hi, Dean and all–
I thought I came off a bit like a troll with my last comment, so I will try again, this time in explanation-question:
Explanation: I write like a pachinko machine.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgjcW8o36oo
(late-60′s pachinko machine)
And yes, sometimes my right and left brain will fire a few each simultaneously, and then I have to deal with multiple balls bouncing around.
I tried writing sequentially. It was like waiting for a ball to hit pin #1 out of the 300 pins, then wait for one to hit pin #2–meanwhile about a hundred balls have dropped. Slow writing?
I tried freewriting. This was as if I just grabbed and recorded each ball as it dropped into the tray at the bottom. Incomprehensible metafiction?
Then last year I hit the jackpot. I used an outliner program (it’s a free one called Treepad Lite; Keynote works as well)
As each ball drops, it gets its own unique pocket. Doesn’t matter if it’s only 5 words, I put it into the pocket. I quickly label it and go to the next ball. After a few hours, the machine warms up and each pocket will start to contain 300-600 words. Then someone knocks on the door and I get 20 words per ball, until it heats up again.
At the end of the day, when the balls stop dropping, I go into the outliner program and sort the balls into type, (worldbuilding, character, scene sequence, beat outline, cool description, thing to research) and back up the file.
Balls randomly drop until I’ve noticed that a complete beat outline has taken shape. I pull out balls that don’t fit, don’t match, shine a few up, see if anything will fit the holes from other sections of the outlining file.
Then I alpha-state write that outline (which already has significant amounts of draft text in it), shake it a couple of times, polish it till I’m bored, and Shin’s-your-uncle-Kyoko’s-your-aunt, story.
So….is that additive? Subtractive? Circular?
(oh and hey! Here’s a short story I can write with the leftovers!)
So, apologies for the last troll comment. It’s been a frustrating journey coming up with what works for me.
c.
Carolyn,
As long as it’s working and you are selling where you want to sell, then don’t fight too much. But the key is not to go into every story expecting it to be that way and come out that way every time. I have gone through periods when I wrote patchwork and right now Kris is doing the same thing about half the time, writing something with no clue where it goes and where it will fit later, but she fits it later when the other parts are done as well, sometimes parts ahead of a written piece, sometimes not.
Again, the key is keep letting each story be different, each story arrive the way the story wants to arrive. Sounds sort of woo-woo, but alas, it works that way. If this was science, we all could take pills and be perfect writers. No right way, just the way that works for you on that story.
Pushing edges as you will push at the master class is the fun part. Sort of “Let’s wonder into this dark cave and see what we find.” At the master class, we push you into caves you would never have thought to enter. It might not work for you, and that’s good to know, just as finding what does work for you is good to know.
No one writes in the same fashion, no one should be forced to think they should, which is why I go after these myths so much. The myths force writers into thinking there is only the one way. Nope. A billion ways. Including yours.
Cheers
Dean
Wow, this might very well be a ‘road to Damascus’ moment for me. There have been so many projects that I’ve put on the back burner because I haven’t been happy with the way I dealt with the idea. Nothing says I can’t keep coming back to it.
It’s time to get back to putting those in the mail.
Thanks, Dean!
Ahhhh!!! (light goes on over head)
I think you just saved me thousands of hours of unproductive rewriting over the next ten years. This is such a better way of dealing with the story that refuses to stop nagging.
Looking forward to meeting people at the Kris & Dean workshop this weekend.
Loved this post Dean.
I’ve actually been wondering about this sort of thing myself. A lot of times when I get an idea I’ll see several different ways it could be approached, not necessarily endings to the same story but different ‘takes’ so to speak.
This is awesome. I’m totally doing this now. One question though, Did anyone care that you had similar stories out there already? You said that the characters and situation were very similar is why I ask.
Oh, and I just wanted to say that I’ve read at least one of the versions of the time traveling jukebox, “The Ghost of the Garden Lounge” and it’s a great story. I think that and “Call of the Track Ahead” are my favorite stories of yours. These are two of the stories that sold me on studying with you (I don’t know why to be honest. Some part of me just said “I want to write stories like that.” )
Alright enough for now. Thanks. These posts rock.
Steve
Huh. The “patchwork” approach isn’t something I’ve really thought about, but reading descriptions of it, I realize I do some of that too. I try write a certain number of words every day. Preferably on a particular story, but even if not, I try to keep the words flowing. And I save all those files.
More than once I’ve started something, then gone and dug up one or more of those incomplete pieces and stitched it all together into a complete story. My first sale (in July) was one such–I cobbled it together from several different pieces, smoothed out the transitions and sent it off. It worked. I’ve done a couple more that way and sent them out into the world, hoping for the best.
I’ll be in Lincoln City tomorrow by noon, with my wife. We’re taking a four-day weekend. She’ll play on the beach while I’m workshopping. I look forward to meeting the other workshop folk too.
Thanks, Steve, for the compliments. Those are always much appreciated by any writer. Actually, the two stories were written completely differently, yet very much the same in strange ways. Ghost was the forth or fifth attempt at getting the jukebox story I wanted to tell.
No one seems to mind that there are series characters popping up along in my stories. I tend to do that all the time. For example, I’ve now published three or four Poker Boy stories and written one novel I haven’t started marketing yet. And I wrote a dozen stories around a character named Stephen C. Armstrong. Sort of the Gracie Allan of meeting aliens. And I can’t even begin to number the stories I have sold set in a nursing home as I try to figure out the best way to write that story. So no one minds. The key is come at the idea with a different slant. Can’t just type the same words, you have to say “Well, not happy with how that turned out. The story I told didn’t really do the idea justice.” And then come at the idea from a slightly different slant.
Why The Call of the Track Ahead was written differently is that I wrote that as a literary story. (My normal drafts and all.) It’s a giant metaphor about taking chances. I liked the story and it worked for me and I kept it in the mail for years and years, getting rejection after rejection. Then one day I got an invite to be part of the Toy Box anthology and it suddenly dawned on me that what was keeping that metaphor story from selling was that I didn’t have the surface level of the story in place to draw the reader through. So I changed the guy’s dream to running a toy store, put the toy train in the window going around and around. I think I added three paragraphs on a touch-up fix on that to make the story on the surface fit the book and it made the story work on all levels. Funny how in writing sometimes we can’t see the obvious until years and years later.
Thanks again.
Mark, if you are at the Anchor this evening (Friday) stop upstairs in the big building. A number of us will be up there just talking for a few hours. Safe trip.
Cheers
Dean
I’ve actually done this with a story, and will probably continue to do this. I just wasn’t sure if it was the right thing to do. I really want to get the story out, but each time, I don’t feel like I did justice to the tale. I think I’m getting closer. Let’s see what happens when the letters come back.
Looking forward to seeing you as well. 10 am Saturday morning, upstairs in the big building at the Anchor. It’s going to be a fun workshop. Friday night sitting around in the room after 7 PM if you come in early.
Cheers
Dean