David Alastair Hayden

Do you know pas­sive voice when you see it? Can you pick up on it instantly? I won­der. Because if you’re an Amer­i­can and Eng­lish is your first lan­guage, the answer is prob­a­bly no.1 Though it’s not your fault if you don’t really know. Many times along the path between kinder­garten and grad­u­at­ing high school, in col­lege Eng­lish and Cre­ative Writ­ing courses as well, I was taught that pas­sive voice and to be verbs were essen­tially the same thing. A few books along the way may have defined it cor­rectly, but if so, this was lost on stu­dents and teach­ers. (I had at least one teacher who cer­tainly would have known the dif­fer­ence but it never came up.)

The pre­em­i­nent Amer­i­can book of all things gram­mat­i­cal and fussy, the Strunk & White, doesn’t seem to fully grasp the pas­sive voice either.2 And so many Amer­i­can Eng­lish teach­ers wor­ship this text, per­pet­u­at­ing the problem.

Now if you learned Eng­lish for­mally as a sec­ond lan­guage in a coun­try other than the U.S., you prob­a­bly learned pas­sive voice cor­rectly and the arti­cle I’m about to link to may be sort of duh to you. My apolo­gies. I first learned pas­sive voice wasn’t what I thought it was due to a blog com­ment (not on this site) by some­one who for­mally learned Eng­lish as a sec­ond language.

For­tu­nately, by that time I had already fig­ured out that there wasn’t any­thing wrong with was’s or is’s in my writ­ing. A few years back after read­ing sev­eral Rowl­ing, Gem­mell, and Moor­cock books back-to-back, it occurred to me that with their fre­quent use of was their writ­ing was tech­ni­cally bad. (Based on advice I’ve seen from teach­ers and Amer­i­can fic­tion edi­tors.) I had a good laugh, real­ized that voice and story are far more impor­tant, and over­came much that had restrained my writ­ing style. (We must all come to these points in life, in one sub­ject or another.)

This fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle on Pas­sive Voice from the Uni­ver­sity of North Car­olina will help you fig­ure out what pas­sive voice really is. I’ve excerpted their list of pas­sive voice myths below.

Myths

1. Use of the pas­sive voice con­sti­tutes a gram­mat­i­cal error.
2. Any use of “to be” (in any form) con­sti­tutes the pas­sive voice.
3. The pas­sive voice always avoids the first per­son; if some­thing is in first per­son (“I” or “we”) it’s also in the active voice.
4. You should never use the pas­sive voice.
5. I can rely on my gram­mar checker to catch the pas­sive voice.

All of these are well explained on their site. I highly rec­om­mend it for any­one who spends any sig­nif­i­cant amount of time writing.

Don’t be mis­led like I was. Too many to be verbs may result in lack­lus­ter writ­ing that lacks action and verve, but that doesn’t mean the result is pas­sive or wrong. Pas­sive voice itself isn’t wrong when used appro­pri­ately. And trust me, too many active verbs ends up giv­ing your prose a strained and unnat­ural feel­ing, lack­ing in nat­ural rhythm and style.

Any­ways, you can be the judge of my own gram­mat­i­cal fol­lies and idio­syn­crasies in my books: Wrath of the White Tigress and The Storm Dragon’s Heart. Check them out and just see if you can remem­ber to pay atten­tion to gram­mar all the way through. (There’s no reward if you can. Copy­ed­i­tors need not apply.)

This post was orig­i­nally com­posed by Lind­say Buro­ker.

As authors, we spend a lot of time try­ing to pro­mote our books. Our biggest obsta­cle is obscu­rity because there are a lot of books out there. No, really. A lot.

We like to think that good sto­ries are all it takes to make it (in author terms “make it” usu­ally means “become well known enough and sell enough books that I can quit my day job and write for a liv­ing”), but you can doubtlessly think of mediocre books that are sell­ing bazil­lions of copies and authors you love who never make it out of the “mid-list” category.

Some­times it’s just the author (or pub­lish­ing house) with the biggest mar­ket­ing bud­get who wins, but you, as a reader, have amaz­ing power. Don’t believe for a sec­ond that you don’t have any­thing to do with whether an author makes it, because you do. A lot. No, really. A lot.

Why does this mat­ter to you? Well, authors who get to quit their day jobs can write faster and put more books out for you!

The fol­low­ing are some lit­tle things you can do that can make a big dif­fer­ence. Some of them only take a few sec­onds. Your favorite authors will appre­ci­ate the effort. Trust me.

Help­ing out on Amazon

Ama­zon is the big kahuna of book sell­ers, espe­cially when it comes to ebooks, so help­ing an author “get found” on there can give them a big boost. You can cer­tainly do these things on other book­store sites as well (noth­ing against copy­ing and past­ing a review, for exam­ple), but Ama­zon tends to have more cool fea­tures to help an author get found.

Here’s the list (any one of these things can help):

• If you do noth­ing else, con­sider writ­ing a review on Ama­zon, even if the book already has quite a few and/or you’ve reviewed it else­where. There’s evi­dence that rat­ings and reviews fac­tor into the Ama­zon algo­rithms that decide which books are pro­moted on the site (i.e. cer­tain books are rec­om­mended to cus­tomers who bought books in sim­i­lar gen­res). If review­ing isn’t your bag, don’t worry about writ­ing paragraphs-long in-depth stud­ies of the book; maybe you could just pen a few sen­tences with a cou­ple of specifics about why you liked the book.

• “Tag” the book with genre-appropriate labels (i.e. thriller, steam­punk, para­nor­mal romance). You don’t have to leave a review to do this; you just need an account at Ama­zon. A com­bi­na­tion of the right tags and a good sales rank­ing can make a book come up when cus­tomers search for that type of story on Amazon.

• Give the book a thumb’s up. This takes less than a sec­ond and prob­a­bly doesn’t do much, but it may play into Amazon’s algo­rithms to a lesser extent than reviews/ratings.

• Make a “List­ma­nia” List and add your favorite authors’ books to it. This cre­ates another avenue for new read­ers to find books. It’s bet­ter to cre­ate lists around sim­i­lar types of books (i.e. gen­res or sub-genres) than to do a smor­gas­bord, and con­sider titling it some­thing descrip­tion so folks will be more inclined to check it out, ie. “Fun heroic fan­tasy ebooks for $5 or less”

• If you have a Kin­dle, high­light some wise or fun quo­ta­tions from the book and share them pub­licly (if enough peo­ple share their high­lights, they’ll show up at the bot­tom of a book’s page).

Help­ing out with Social Media

If you’re involved with Twit­ter, Face­book, Digg, Stum­ble­Upon, etc., you can give your favorite authors a shout-out when they release new books. If they blog, you can fol­low their site (through Google Reader or other RSS read­ers) and share the link when they post some­thing that may be inter­est­ing to your friends. If they’re on Twit­ter, you can fol­low them and retweet their links now and then.

Authors don’t expect you to fol­low them 24/7 and repeat every­thing they say (that might actu­ally alarm some folks…), but a lit­tle pro­mo­tional help now and then is greatly appreciated.

If you like to be social about books, you can join sites such as Goodreads, Shel­fari, or Library­Thing. You can help your favorite authors by post­ing reviews and talk­ing about their books on those sites, or you can just use those places to find online read­ing bud­dies with com­mon interests.

Help­ing out with Your Blog

Do you ever talk about books or what you’re read­ing on your blog? You might con­sider review­ing your favorite authors on your site (you could even make a few dol­lars if you signed up as an Ama­zon affil­i­ate).

Also, if most of your favorites main­tain web­sites, you could add an “author blogroll” list in your menu with links to those sites.

And Lastly…

These days, most authors have web­sites and con­tact forms so you can get in touch. If you enjoyed their work, con­sider send­ing them a short note to let them know. While it won’t help them sell more books, it’ll make their day.

Thanks for read­ing (this post and books in general!).

This post was orig­i­nally com­posed by Lind­say Buro­ker and is shared with permission.

Here’s an excerpt of an inter­view I did for Dark­cargo. Go check it out!

A com­mon argument–complaint, maybe–that I over­hear is that there’s noth­ing new to fan­tasy, every­thing is either a re-hash of Tolkein or para­nor­mal romance. How would you con­test that?

As far as basic story struc­ture goes, noth­ing is new. I’ve stud­ied a lot of mythol­ogy and sto­ry­telling and… I don’t want to bore your read­ers. Suf­fice to say: Every­thing is new; noth­ing is new. Orig­i­nal­ity is over­rated. I think sci-fi and fan­tasy fans tend to worry about this a lot more than most read­ers. I mean, there’s noth­ing new in thrillers or mys­tery or romance either, so why should fan­tasy be any dif­fer­ent?
On the other hand, the details and specifics of every story are dif­fer­ent and fre­quently highly orig­i­nal. Every author mixes the basics dif­fer­ently and brings new things to the table because every writer is intrin­si­cally dif­fer­ent.
And I have yet to see as many Tolkien clones as some read­ers like to claim. I have only seen two or three close copies, and even those didn’t have the same tex­ture as LotR.

And for the record, a read­ing of North­ern Euro­pean mythol­ogy will dull one’s view of Tolkien’s orig­i­nal­ity. Not say­ing he didn’t cre­ate a lot or orig­i­nal mate­r­ial, but he also bor­rowed a good bit himself.

Under­wood No. 5 in the REH Museum

You might think the new Conan movie inspired this arti­cle. Alas, you would be wrong. Its source is my immense appre­ci­a­tion of Robert E. Howard’s work and my love affair with vin­tage man­ual typewriters.

To under­stand the blood and thun­der style of REH, indeed all our clas­sics of swords, sor­ceries and hero­ics, I think you need an appre­ci­a­tion of the man­ual typewriter’s effect on the craft of fiction.

There’s this great scene in The Whole Wide World where Robert E. Howard pounds away on his type­writer, dic­tat­ing to him­self with the pas­sion of the pos­sessed. That machine, which Howard pur­chased in 1928 and used till the very end, was the clas­sic Under­wood No. 5.

For decades, when most peo­ple thought “type­writer” this 30 lb. desk­top machine was what they had in mind. Mil­lions were pro­duced between 1901 and 1932, so even today the Under­wood No. 5 isn’t a rare find, nor par­tic­u­larly valu­able unless in mint con­di­tion. When Howard bought one of these machines, he knew he was get­ting a reli­able com­pan­ion for his career. Think about the invest­ment value. Many of these machines still work now. Think your Dell Insp­iron or Mac­book will be work­able in 80 years? Me neither.

You can get a No. 5 on eBay for $50 or less, non-restored. (For restora­tion you’d need a type­writer repair place, which is becom­ing increas­ingly rare.) You’ll pay almost as much for the machine as for ship­ping. Sadly, I don’t have one myself. Yet. I own ten type­writ­ers already and my wife scowls when I men­tion a new one… I do have an L.C. Smith from the mid-30’s and a Royal Portable from 1929 (mint con­di­tion and ever so pre­cise), so I can well attest to the action and expe­ri­ence of these old machines.

Many of you have likely never used a man­ual type­writer before. Per­haps an elec­tric, per­haps none at all. (I touched my first com­puter in 1983, resented the elec­tric type­writ­ers we learned to type on in school, and didn’t expe­ri­ence the true plea­sure of the man­ual type­writer until early 2010.) If your expe­ri­ence is lim­ited to elec­tric machines, then you only know half the story. It’s just not the same.

There’s an almost pri­mal expe­ri­ence to using a man­ual, like a sculp­tor chis­el­ing or a car­pen­ter ham­mer­ing. The strik­ing of the keys, the smell of oil and metal, the gun­fire stac­cato of strik­ing keys (the sharp feed­back as they rebound), the bell ring warn­ing the end of the line approaches, the scrap­ing return of the car­riage, the scroll of paper. It is a thing of art and beauty.

As for the effect on writ­ing… Take a look at some books from the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s. Notice some­thing? They got big­ger with each decade, huh? There was a mar­ket­ing dynamic, sure. But com­put­ers allowed writ­ers to match the dynamic. Allowed us all to eas­ily become messy and long-winded.

REH Bed­room with Desk and Typewriter

You don’t often see writ­ing with the fast-paced, blaz­ing action you find in old pulps. Some of that is style, but when you type on a man­ual machine the very writ­ing of the story has an imme­di­ate phys­i­cal­ity to it, not unlike the fast-paced action in REH’s work. There is sound and action.

I notice the sounds more in older books. The brevity of the words. The rush of the action. Com­put­ers, gods know I love them, sim­ply don’t have this kind of soul. And writ­ing with them, I think, becomes more cere­bral and less a phys­i­cal act of cre­ation. And it shows. Our books today tend towards lengthy descrip­tion and intro­spec­tion far more than the thun­der­ing heroic fan­tasy pounded out on the old manuals.

When you write some­thing on a type­writer, you have to mean it. Remem­ber, if you mess up or change your mind, that’s the whole page to retype. There’s no time for ram­bling and dither­ing along through a story. You get to the point. You say what you mean. And you say it right the first time. And, I think the nature of the machine itself changes how you write. For bold pulp action, I think it changes it for the better.

Note: I have thus far writ­ten one novel on a man­ual type­writer, a 1955 Her­mes Rocket. I plan on com­pos­ing all my future works on var­i­ous type­writ­ers. Nat­u­rally they will get scanned in and edited on the com­puter. There are advan­tages to our mod­ern world.

This arti­cle orig­i­nally appeared on Rogue Blade’s Home of Heroics.

This is excerpted from my inter­view with David Wise­hart on Kin­dle Author.

DAVID WISEHART: What is your writ­ing process?

DAVID ALASTAIR HAYDEN: These days, I get up, climb the stairs to my office, and begin bang­ing out a tale on one of my vin­tage man­ual type­writ­ers, prob­a­bly the Her­mes Rocket or the Olympia SF or the Olympia SM-3, all from the 1950’s. (I have a lovely, mint-condition 1929 Royal Portable that’s beg­ging for some story work as well.) At some point I will scan in those words, using some OCR soft­ware, and edit them in Scrivener on my Mac­book. From there, I will gen­er­ate an ebook using Scrivener and Cal­i­bre. This week, I just did the lay­out for the print edi­tion of Wrath of the White Tigress in QuarkX­press 9.

On the artis­tic side of things, I have com­pleted five nov­els and my writ­ing process seems to change with each one. To fin­ish my first book, I had to break down and plot every step my char­ac­ters took. I needed to see the whole struc­ture of the thing to com­plete it. I had so many aborted starts before that. The sec­ond and third books didn’t need quite so much sup­port. I did a more basic chapter-by-chapter out­line for them, but ended up devi­at­ing off in more inter­est­ing direc­tions as I explored their sto­ries. My fourth book com­pletely ignored the plot I made for it, so I didn’t bother to plot the fifth one at all. I just devel­oped a basic con­cept and started writ­ing seat-of-the-pants style. Next time, I think I’ll write a one-page sum­mary and then go from there.

Read the rest of the interview.

The power went out here after a storm yes­ter­day after­noon. A small storm. We live deep in the woods. Lots of places where a tree could strike the lines along the way. We were sup­posed to have power back on at 6 pm. Didn’t hap­pen until 12:30 am. Grumble.

Nat­u­rally, the bat­tery went out on my Mac­book, delay­ing com­ple­tion of the ebook I was work­ing on. (I unplugged the Mac­book dur­ing the storm.) And I hadn’t charged my iPod Touch in a few days, so I couldn’t read any books or write on it.

The solu­tion?

Why pull out a type­writer, of course. Specif­i­cally, my gold-speckled Olympia SF from the 1950’s (?). Lap-sized with the sweet action you’d expect from an Olympia. And of the ten type­writ­ers I own, it has my favorite font. (I’m a 12 char­ac­ters per inch kinda guy.)

The rub, of course, is that I’m not work­ing on com­pos­ing any­thing new at the moment. I have two nov­els in first draft state that I’m work­ing on revis­ing. I’m gen­er­at­ing two ebooks. I have new things planned, but I don’t want to start them until I take care of the afore­men­tioned projects.

I could have read by my bright LED Cole­man lantern. (A Hunger Games reread is next up.) But I wasn’t in a read­ing mood. I wanted to work damn it.

So I started a new story: THE BONES OF KAZARDAHL. Novel, short story, nov­el­ette, novella? I don’t know really. Though I’d wage money on novella. It’s adven­ture fan­tasy. Not too seri­ous or grim, though that might change. I have barely an inkling of where it will go. Just the notion of a few char­ac­ters. Should be fun.

How it starts:

With fire and sword and a thirst for some­thing, any­thing but the relent­less cold and howl­ing winds of the North Mark, the reavers descended on the sleep­ing town of Kazardahl. Sleep­ing save for one man who had retired there. One man, but not just any man. Once he had been the great­est wiz­ard in the King­dom of Bregh. And awake this late at night he was because retired or not, it is not the habit of a wiz­ards to sleep at night.

If you are going to offer authors copy­edit­ing or other pub­lish­ing ser­vices, please don’t quote prices in terms of pages.

I have no idea what the page-length is for any of my nov­els. I’m cer­tain I don’t care. I’m cer­tain that if I knew it would tell me noth­ing of value. Yes, if I for­mat the work for a stan­dard sub­mis­sion, I will know how many pages there are, if I bother to look at the total. (Never have before.) Assum­ing every­one uses the same beau­ti­ful Courier font and mar­gins, though…

But if I’m look­ing to pro­duce an ebook myself, I’m never going to use stan­dard sub­mis­sion for­mat­ting. Why would I?

And if you quote your by-page ser­vices along with spe­cific for­mat­ting require­ments, that would work. How­ever, the mes­sage it sends to me is that you’re stuck in the past.

Pages are vari­able in the 21st cen­tury. Stick to word counts.

(Yes, I could tell you how many pages are in any of my new short story drafts because I do those on man­ual type­writ­ers. How­ever, those are only rough drafts, not even close to fin­ished works. Plus, the pitch sizes and line spaces are very dif­fer­ent on the ’29 Royal Portable, the ’56 Olympia SM-3, and the ’55 Her­mes Rocket. So that doesn’t tell you much, either. And really, this bit here is beside the point. I just wanted to talk about typewriters.)

Some peo­ple need to chill out about it. By some peo­ple I’m mostly refer­ring to writ­ers and hard­core readers.

• The world will not end if you write a story in the present tense.
• The world will not end if you read a story in the present tense.
• No story will, in fact, ever end the world.

I’m bring­ing this up because I men­tioned writ­ing in the present tense in my pre­vi­ous post on Fast Writ­ing. I find it easy and nat­ural to write in the present tense. Doesn’t bother me to read it, either. But I have never used it in a story because of all the don’t-do-its I’ve heard over the years, start­ing in cre­ative writ­ing classes at university.

So I thought I’d google it and see how things have changed?

Well, it seems that it is both more accept­able and more vil­i­fied than ever before. Sigh. Life in the mod­ern world. Or is it only mod­ern Amer­ica with our increas­ing love of polarization?

The amount of vit­riol some spew over present tense writ­ing would make you think there is a short­age of past tense books they could pick up for their enjoy­ment. It makes some peo­ple irra­tionally angry. Fine, you don’t like it. It pisses yel­low in your mel­low. Okay, sure. Not your thing. But it is not kick­ing your kit­tens. It won’t hurt you. You don’t have to read it, or attack oth­ers over it.

I also saw numer­ous claims about its use hurt­ing sales. Well, I’m sure it wouldn’t help you get an agent or get your first book con­tract from a pub­lisher. It’s also killing Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Game tril­ogy. No one is buy­ing those books because…

Oh wait, peo­ple ARE buy­ing those books in mass.

Maybe the aver­age reader doesn’t give a shit about tense so long as the book is cap­ti­vat­ing and enter­tain­ing. This is prob­a­bly the case. Your aver­age reader doesn’t go online and bitch about writing.

Maybe she’d sell a few more copies, but I doubt it. First per­son present tense seems nec­es­sary for those books. And yes, one can find plenty of Hunger Games men­tions spread amongst the vit­riol. Often as an exam­ple of a book they liked despite the poor choice of tense. Took them so long to get used to it. Threw them off. Etc.

There are many argu­ments for and against present tense writ­ing. I will not recount them unless asked. I do not find them per­sua­sive in general.

What about you, dear reader?

Have a sane opin­ion on present tense writing?

Some might say that what I call order is the rear­rang­ing of deck chairs on the USS Total Chaos. One man’s mad­ness is, well, mad­ness. Any­way, as a reminder: I have dreamt up a bet­ter way for me to write my rough drafts, which I’m call­ing “fast draft­ing” because I like giv­ing things names. (I also love cre­at­ing systems.)

I’d like to clar­ify one point. This new sys­tem of my devis­ing can­not replace that most impor­tant and uni­ver­sal require­ment of writ­ing any sig­nif­i­cant work: Butt-in-Chair. You can­not escape this require­ment with any system.

Before get­ting into the details, I offer this excerpt from Ian Flem­ing, cre­ator of James Bond:

The whole of this four hours of daily work is devoted to writ­ing narrative.

I never cor­rect any­thing and I never go back to what I have writ­ten, except to the foot of the last page to see where I have got to. If you once look back, you are lost. How could you have writ­ten this dri­vel? How could you have used “ter­ri­ble” six times on one page? And so forth. If you inter­rupt the writ­ing of fast nar­ra­tive with too much intro­spec­tion and self-criticism, you will be lucky if you write 500 words a day and you will be dis­gusted with them into the bar­gain. By fol­low­ing my for­mula, you write 2,000 words a day and you aren’t dis­gusted with them until the book is fin­ished, which will be in about six weeks.

I don’t even pause from writ­ing to choose the right word or to ver­ify spelling or a fact. All this can be done when your book is finished.

This is basi­cally what I’m talk­ing about when I describe my needs and prob­lems, except I lack Mr Fleming’s dis­ci­pline. And I am cer­tain that I write a far messier draft than he ever did. I’m just not a clean writer. Not my strength. Also, let’s be hon­est. Flem­ing didn’t have the temp­ta­tion we mod­ern writ­ers have with the back­space key, sav­ing mul­ti­ple drafts files, and so forth.

But yeah, if the sys­tem doesn’t work, I’m back to the dis­ci­pline method. And some dis­ci­pline will prob­a­bly still be required.

So, what are my require­ments for fast drafting?

• To effi­ciently cap­ture the basics with­out wasted words. No fluff!
• Speed! Speed! More speed!
• Min­i­mize rewrit­ing on the sec­ond draft. I pre­fer to add good writ­ing rather than sub­tract­ing then adding.
• To see the rough draft as raw story and not shitty, dis­cour­ag­ing writing.

An addi­tional ben­e­fit to this sys­tem is that I can quickly scan through the dia­logue and actions to be sure that what I’m writ­ing is log­i­cal. Why work my ass off on a piece of dia­logue only to dis­cover the char­ac­ter should not have said that? Maybe not nec­es­sary for you, oh gen­tle and more log­i­cal reader, but for me…

I have a ten­dency to get so caught up in the lan­guage that I sort of for­get about logic and con­sis­tency. And some­times I will bend the uni­verse to pre­serve what I’ve already written.

The abil­ity to scan mate­r­ial quickly would lead to even more writ­ing speed. Also, when I go back to do the sec­ond, fill-in draft I can scan for logic and story prob­lems and see the flow of the story with­out hav­ing to dig all that out of the muck that I used to write.

So you feel teased by now, and you say: “Get on with it, man! Let’s see your lat­est and per­haps great­est crazy scheme.”

So I present to you my new fast draft process which was inspired by screen­plays, comic scripts, and the like. But with­out the crazy for­mat­ting those media need. It is essen­tially my own method. Other for­mat­ting could work. I went with what I find most com­fort­able because it is, after all, just for me. (Some years ago, I wrote a half-dozen or so unpub­lished comic book scripts.)

First, I will present an exam­ple. Then I shall explain the rules.

TOMAS STRIKES OUT
– Bad­lands east of For­bid­den
– Tomas, Lidia

Scrub­land stained red by a sun set­ting into wispy clouds.
No one within sight.
Impos­si­bly dry. Wind kick­ing up dust. Hot as balls.

Tomas kicks the dirt off his boots and climbs into the sad­dle.
Whips his head east and west look­ing for his ene­mies. Finds none.
Flicks the reins and heads off to the north.

Tomas
“We’ll be there in three days.”

Lidia
“Four. At least.”

He imag­ines Lidia’s mock­ing smile.
He kicks the horse’s flanks. The beast gallops.

Tomas shouts
“By God, I’ll make it in two now.”

You will note what I wrote is in present tense. I find it dif­fi­cult to write sum­mary mate­r­ial in the tra­di­tional story past tense. Hon­estly, I think I write bet­ter, more imme­di­ate prose in present tense any­way. I tend to use a far more active voice, bet­ter verbs, punchier nouns. Not sure about the rea­son for this. Note, I have not com­pleted any sto­ries in present tense.

If I plan on sav­ing writ­ing time, though, I must learn to write these in what­ever tense I plan to use for the story.

Keep in mind that I’m work­ing from a plot frame­work. What I’m doing here, in a way, is an exten­sive frame­work for the entire story, as with a comic script for instance. But instead of tak­ing this script and telling the story with art, I will go back and com­plete the story with pol­ished prose.

So, what are the rules for what you just saw?

• Scene Tag/Name in ALL CAPS
• Loca­tion: if it is new or has changed. Oth­er­wise, set the scene as it begins. Details may be fil­tered through­out the scene and not just lumped into the start.
• No unnec­es­sary or involved descrip­tions at this stage.
• List char­ac­ters present.
• Describe a char­ac­ter suc­cinctly when they appear.

• Use sin­gle spac­ing for each char­ac­ter or set­ting segment.
• Block para­graph spac­ing between segments.

• For each char­ac­ter seg­ment: Feel­ing, action, and dia­logue each get a unique line
• Actions are done in bursts with each sequence of action get­ting its own line.
• Dia­logue writ­ten out with quotes as nor­mal but no attri­bu­tions or inter­rupt­ing “beat” actions such as: “Write some dia­logue now.” Lidia picked up the knife. “Or else.”

• Don’t waste time find­ing the per­fect words or images.
• Write briefly with evoca­tive nouns, evoca­tive verbs.
• Tight, focused writing.

• Don’t choose these rules over a piece of inspired, per­fect prose that jumps out of the aether. Embrace the moment and keep mov­ing. The rules can be bro­ken as needed.
• Zen.

Titanic Deck Chairs

A future post will give a more exten­sive exam­ple. And if requests are made or con­fu­sion ensues, I will attempt to clar­ify and extrap­o­late on the rules I’m using in case all that only made sense to me. I am excited about this process and I will keep you all updated on how it goes. Whether I suc­ceed, whether I fail. Should be fun!

I like my first drafts rough, exquis­itely rough. Brillo pad. Chin of Chuck Nor­ris. First sea­son of Star­gate SG-1.

I know most writ­ers have to get things writ­ten up mostly right before they can move on. I get that. I wish I could do the same, but that’s not how I work best.

Too often I try to be like most writ­ers and I just end up edit­ing and revis­ing as I go. Now, that can be a prob­lem for any­one if over­done. But it’s a huge prob­lem for me.

I have to keep my momen­tum and enthu­si­asm. Espe­cially since I really like revis­ing and edit­ing and can spend a long time doing it. If my enthu­si­asm dimin­ishes too much, I’m going to lose weeks of work to Dofus or Ancient Empires Lux or Mad­den or ennui.  Self-doubt will kick in. I will start won­der­ing if there’s a bet­ter way to han­dle a char­ac­ter, back­ground details, plot points, and so forth.

The story bogs down, the pac­ing slows because my writ­ing slows. All my energy is lost.

This I do not like.

So maybe you’re won­der­ing how rough, because maybe you write a rough draft like every­one else and you think I’m a lit­tle crazy. I’m not kid­ding about the chin of Chuck Norris.

Once I start rolling, I try to type as fast as the story comes into my head. I don’t worry about using the best words, proper gram­mar, cliches, appro­pri­ate dia­logue. Some­times I don’t make full sen­tences, and I’m not talk­ing inten­tional frag­ments. I just slop down what­ever so I can keep mov­ing with the story play­ing in my head.

For me, a rough draft is like try­ing to tran­scribe a movie as it plays.

Sure, I slow down at times and have to think through a scene. I may need to reflect on a character’s choices or what have you. But I find I do that a lot less when I’m rolling on the fast draft. (I do most of my story pon­der­ing while lying in bed falling asleep or avoid­ing get­ting up. Though I have been known to spend 15 min­utes wash­ing my hands a few times a month with­out any sense of the pas­sage of time.)

My nor­mal pro­ce­dure for a novel: Write first two chap­ters and a one page gist/synopsis of some sort. Then write out a plot, the sort you might put on note cards (as I do vir­tu­ally). No way I’m fly­ing blind. I’ve tried that. Doesn’t work for me. I run into prob­lems about 10,000 words in. Hap­pened to me all the time before I plot­ted and sub­se­quently com­pleted my first com­plete novel. Hap­pened to me this year as well when I tried to dis­cov­ery write again. Same ceil­ing, ten years later.

So, first I must set my basic frame­work. (I don’t plot with any detail.) Then I mas­sively diverge from said plot as I go. Some­times enough for me to have to go and alter the plot, but usu­ally I just leave it sit­ting there in case I need it. I think the way it really works is that my gist/synopsis, how­ever long it might be, is the first telling of the story. The plot is the sec­ond telling. The rough draft is the final telling, which must be cleaned up, of course.

As I go, I con­cen­trate on writ­ing out all dia­logue and basic actions. (Oh, the dia­logue is awful!) I will describe scenery and set the atmos­phere. But some­times, I’ll leave scene descrip­tion out to be added later. Or I’ll just write a quick list of phrases or objects: David entered the dark room, roses strewn about, can­dles, a music he’d never heard before. Demons, red scales, wings of Span­ish moss. Then later I will make this into a good descrip­tion of the scene. Hopefully.

It often turns poetic. Some­times, I’ll thrown down some beau­ti­fully writ­ten lines. But most of it is just really messy and writ­ten with­out care.

“So what’s the prob­lem?” you say. “Just write in your fast, messy style and get on with life. Get some work done.”

The prob­lem is two-fold.

First, it can be dif­fi­cult psy­cho­log­i­cally to write a bunch of pure crap. You look at what you wrote yes­ter­day and you think: “Them words is shit, man. They shit.”

Ennui sets in. Depres­sion. Fatigue. What have I done!? I am a fool!

Sec­ond, when you write a rough draft like a four­teen year old writ­ing his first novel, maybe his sec­ond, you’re going to have to spend a lot of time revis­ing when it comes to the sec­ond draft. Well, not so much revis­ing as com­plete rewrit­ing. A lot of wasted time. This is why I try to slow down like other folks, but then my story goes nowhere. So rock, hard place, my balls crushed.

All I’m really doing is draft­ing story. I’m not draft­ing my final presentation.

You can­not know this if you haven’t played role-playing games with me, but my off the cuff imag­i­na­tion is .… off the cuff. I think best when I mov­ing fast. I just let loose and then the good stuff comes out. Char­ac­ters become cooler. Sit­u­a­tions and set­tings deepen spon­ta­neously. And so forth.

All my nov­els have required cor­rec­tion for slow begin­nings because in the past I have writ­ten up the first sev­eral chap­ters just right to get a feel for the writ­ing before cut­ting loose (with more or less suc­cess). Cut­ting loose, as I said, can be tricky and I usu­ally fail to do it con­sis­tently until the last third at the book. When I sense the end is near the crappy writ­ing starts fly­ing like a tor­nado in the sludge field of a CAFO.

So, I must write a fast story draft. It will be rough. For years I just accepted this is how it would work. Sure it would be nice if I could go even faster and didn’t waste time rewrit­ing the story to remove all the bad sen­tences and bring order. If my rewrite was more addi­tion and less sub­trac­tion fol­lowed by addi­tion. Also, would be nice if I could read back over what I’ve writ­ten with­out deal­ing with the cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance of my bad writing.

For­tu­nately, at last the idea for a new method has come to me like Jesus with a box of choco­lates ask­ing for a sec­ond date.

A plan, alas for you, which I will not describe until Part 2.

Hope­fully, you have found this amus­ing. (I think all writerly quirks are.) More so, if you are wired to write like I am in any way, per­haps you will find this inspir­ing or helpful.