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?
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I first began to think about writing while reading science fiction as a teenager back in the 1980s. In the subsequent decades, whenever I dabbled with writing science fiction, I focussed my efforts on coming up with novel ideas, fanciful creatures and exotic alien landscapes. However the results were always dry and boring, even to me. The big breakthrough came when I realized that these otherworldly environments were irrelevant. What mattered were the human stories within them, driven by colorful characters and their interactions. It’s obvious now, and much more fun, but it took me a long time to see this.
A second revelation came after I sent my first scifi novel to an assessment editor. He shocked me by telling me I shouldn’t have sprinkled almost every sentence with adverbs. After railing against this for a while, I did some research online and discovered how right he was. I then began to notice that the most compelling public talks and the most immersive stories were the ones with the fewest adverbs. With that evidence in hand, I spent over a year re-writing my novel from start to finish, using almost no -ly adverbs, except between speech marks, where they give emotional color to my characters’ speech. The result was very much worth the effort.
Right now, as I near the end of my second novel, my latest revelations have been reading about the problems with filter words, and about using free indirect speech to decrease the emotional distance between readers and characters. I am now wondering whether or not to switch to free indirect speech in the final book of my trilogy. In particular, I worry whether such a change in style would change people’s perceptions of the characters they’ve become familiar with.
What mattered were the human stories within them, driven by colorful characters and their interactions. It’s obvious now, and much more fun, but it took me a long time to see this.
Do you know what blocked you from seeing it at first? Was it simply that the novel ideas, alien landscapes, etc. were so loudly present in all the books you read that you simply missed that the characters were holding part of the key to a good story?
Or do you have a favorite author or three that had a style that leaned more on the cool ideas than characters?
I never got into Asimov, for example, because his characters were so boring I never connected to them despite all the accolades he got. (I’m a Heinlein fan, and his characters have charisma for DAYS.)
But I could see how, if an author like Asimov was someone’s favorite, they might come into SFF from the other direction, from the Big Idea and Alien world perspective, and only figure out the character thing later.
I am now wondering whether or not to switch to free indirect speech in the final book of my trilogy. In particular, I worry whether such a change in style would change people’s perceptions of the characters they’ve become familiar with.
Obviously, I don’t have direct eyes on your work, but here’s my opinion, based on what you said.
It isn’t so much the connection to characters that matters with a change like this, IMO. It’s the change of the “formula” of the books within your series that could (maybe) cause problems. I can’t say if it WILL, just that it could be an issue, depending.
A series is branding, a series is marketing. A series says, “Did you like the last donut I baked? If so, here’s another one very much like it!”
If you veer too far off your “formula”, but still put the same series name on it, you risk a situation where a reader thought they were getting formula A, but get formula B instead even though the marketing (the series name) did not communicate that change to them.
Imagine giving someone who asked for a coke a diet coke. Even if they like diet coke, that’s not what they went to you for, and the disruption to expectations is jarring.
Now, I don’t actually know if you incorporating some free indirect speech will change your formula enough to make readers feel betrayed if they pick up that new book. Your change here might actually be too subtle for anyone but another writer to pick up, and it could be that readers will hardly notice the shift in narration.
But it’s worth pondering the ways readers have already had their expectations set by the time they get to the final book in your trilogy, and whether your change will be seen as a breech of your implicit contract with them.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t have much to add or share, but I just wanted to say: Really insightful post, and I appreciate you sharing your experience! Your particular example highlights the importance of a writer building confidence in their own abilities—or at minimum in the fact that simply exerting craft on a manuscript will produce a better manuscript. I think this confidence is important for many writers in the drafting stage too. For instance, it can be difficult to draft if you’re trying to make something perfect instead of having that all-important confidence in subsequent editing and the exertion of craft.
Yeah, confidence is a big factor. But, I think, especially examples from other writers of building confidence, and the psychology of how and why the confidence came to them? So often society talks about confidence as if it’s…the color of your eyes or something, something inborn. And it’s not, it’s a skill, it’s learned. (I mean, some people start with more of a I-don’t-care attitude than others, but even they build on that base.)
I remember getting extremely frustrated at advice that’s just, “Learn to be confident!” Having details, even if they are from a person whose brain doesn’t work exactly as mine does, is the sort of thing that’d be more likely to teach me something.
Totally. “Just be confident” isn’t terribly useful advice. But I’d also suggest that while details on how to get there can be super helpful, there’s also maybe something to be said recognizing that confidence comes in time as you work on your craft. It’s like confidence in your eventual confidence… meta-confidence. Maybe that’s similarly not helpful to a fledgling writer? Or maybe it depends on the writer and their specific hang-ups.
