There are like…ten gazillion books, guides, posts, comments, podcasts, videos, etc. out there covering basic things like grammar and punctuation and spelling.
But I always found, when trying to hone my skill as a writer, that barriers arising from my way of thinking were the things that actually held me back. I could look up spelling. I could look up grammar. I could carefully examine characters I loved and ones I hated, and come to conclusions on that.
But the psychological stuff—silent assumptions I had that weren’t actually correct, unspoken fears I had which were difficult to verbalize --were the things that seemed to provide the biggest breakthroughs in my Craft once I worked through them.
Let me give you an example. Editing.
Everyone talks all day long about how editing your work is really, really important. And I could see–logically–that it was. Logically. It seems SUCH a basic thing, right?
Still, for years I had an emotional block. I had this really strong visceral hatred of editing. I knew logically I should do it, but intuitively I had a great deal of hostility towards the idea. It made me really, really MAD and I got pretty hostile and grumpy when confronted with the idea that I needed to edit my work.
Eventually, I worked through all these loud negative feelings though, and you know what I discovered?
I hated editing because I was not yet in control of my Craft on a conscious level. Meaning–I would get really into writing this scene or story or whatever, and the words just flowed out of my fingers like magic, and I could tell if this scene or that scene was kinda good. From time to time, I would have things just pop out of my fingers that just seemed like diamonds falling from the sky. It was like conjuring something really awesome out of nothing. One moment it didn’t exist, and then it did and I had MADE it…but it came out of nowhere and seemed so fragile.
The creation process at this point of my journey was a black box to me. It was still half-unconscious. Things just happened, and I couldn’t tell you for the life of me why the thing I just wrote worked. I could see that it did–but I couldn’t tell you WHY. I was just conjuring the occasional jewel out of the ether, and I didn’t want that magic to go away.
So the reason I reacted so negatively to EDITING was because I did not trust myself to replace a scene I was editing with one of similar quality. I was not in full control of the quality of my output–my quality was still very up and down. I wrote things based on intuition.
And I KNEW if I decided to edit one of those things, and got in there and started messing with a scene I liked, there was good chance I would break it completely and would be unable to replace it with something just as good or better.
That’s where my instinctive hatred of editing came from. The certainty I felt that I would break whatever made the first draft of the scene work, and all the magic smoke would escape.
The thing that put to rest my fears about editing was watching my own skill increase over time. I started to establish a pattern with my past writing, where I could see a consistent repeating quality of output with my own two eyes. I had ten examples of a scene I wrote working, then twenty, then a hundred. Being able to use this past output as a touchstone reassured me that even if I had to edit a scene I really really liked, I WOULD be able to replace it with something equally good or better. Why? Because I had created a history I could refer back to, a history made up of hundreds of similar and dissimilar scenes, and I could see most of them had a pretty solid foundation.
I learned my Craft, and proved to myself that a good scene wasn’t magic, wasn’t a fluke. I could nuke whatever scene I wanted from orbit (even if I LIKED the scene and it just didn’t happen to work with the rest of the book) and replace it with something just as good—and I KNEW I could because I only had to look back on my own past writing.
And once that fear was gone, the fear that I’d break the magic genie bottle and never be able to repair it, editing became a breeze.
In fact, I shocked myself when I realized I enjoyed editing a lot. When you edit, the hardest part is already done. I had already bush-whacked a path through the jungle. The second/third drafts already had signposts on where to go–I just had to work on making everything work BETTER, while following the path I had established earlier.
(I should perhaps note that I am 90% pantser—also somewhat related to me not trusting my own skill, but that’s a post for later.)
Anyway–I wanted to share this experience because so much writing advice drones on and on about the nuts and bolts of spelling and grammar because it’s easier and more objective and concrete to talk about that. But I feel the psychological growth and hurdles a writer has to overcome to move forward are just as important, if not more so.
Not everyone is going to share my experience above with editing. It very much arose from a distrust in the overall quality of my output, and whether I could maintain a given standard reliably, and not everyone wrestles with that sort of fear. I had a fear of breaking the magical scene-making box and letting the magic smoke out. You might not have that sort of fear.
But I’m sure you guys have had similar trials to overcome.
Do you guys want to share?
I’m not sure why I failed to see the importance of characterization in scifi stories for so long. Perhaps it was because, for years, my experience of reading sci-fi was dominated by library books of short stories, which tended to focus more on ideas than character development. And yes, that included a lot of Azimov’s stories with their paper-thin characters. On the other hand, once I could afford to buy novels from bookshops, I did become a big fan of Heinlein and other excellent authors, so I’m not sure why I didn’t notice the importance of characterization. Maybe they did it so well, that it looked easier to write characters than find fascinating new ideas.
Speaking of Heinlein, one thing that always amazed me about his books, was that the very first paragraph of every book somehow managed to drag me right into the thick of the story, complete with the feel of its environment and the tone of the rest of the book. I think he did that better than any other author I have ever read.
Regarding my question about switching to free indirect speech in the final book of my trilogy, I think you are right. I experimented with this a bit in the final few chapters of my second book, only to abandon it and rewrite those parts, because it jarred with what came before.
He unashamedly took from his own lived experiences–even when he lampshaded it and called out in the text that he was a product of his environment.
I think that might have helped make things pop? He has his characters do things that he has likely done in the past (like place an ad in a paper, or respond to one), and adds details to them that comes from personal experiences, instead of some far-away imagining of what someone doing that MIGHT have done. He grounds characters in their environment and in the institutions and choices available to them in that environment. I think a lot of authors are less aware of the interplay between a person + environment, and that lack of confidence comes through when creating scenes and setting a stage?
But he also seemed very aware of how molded he was by his own culture and past. I think characters like Lazarus Long and Baldwin and Jubal Harshaw are variations of author-avatar for him, and most or all of those characters admit straight out that they are products of the time they grew up in and have eccentricities due to that which they can’t shake.
So there was this double awareness–putting his lived experience into the book, which has the effect of making scenes come alive, while also being aware that his experiences shaped him, and calling that out explicitly.