Write Like Hyde, Revise Like Jekyll

The two sides of the creative process can behave like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Jekyll is nervous, cowed by bad reviews and mediocre sales. He is convinced the work stinks, that it should probably be deleted or put away, in fact. Hyde, on the other hand, is a creative beast who tears through the streets, trumpeting obnoxiously about his abilities and willing to knock into the mud anyone who dares contradict him.

Neither of these men should escape the confines of your own head. If Jekyll is pathetic, Hyde is a jerk. But working in the subconscious, what Stephen King calls "the boys in the basement," they come together to produce one's best work.

For me, this comes when I alternate between two contradictory opinions:

1. My stories are so interesting that the whole world should read them.

2. My writing is dull, uninspired, and lazy, and needs a good flogging simply to struggle to its feet and drag my plot cart around the block.

The self-doubt and fear sounds self-defeating, but is quite useful in two stages of the creative process. First, when I'm brainstorming, trying to figure out how to make this book better than the work I've written in the past. I need to be critical, to toss aside dull ideas and to find something unusual in the pile, something that won't be the same, tired story. This is how I came up with the original premise for The Righteous. In fact, I was so deep in critical mode at the time that I almost tossed it to the rubbish heap. The polygamy angle was close enough to my own childhood that it felt mundane and not fresh, at least until I discussed it with a couple of writing friends, who grew excited by the idea.

The second time when a critical eye is useful is during revisions. I give everything a hard look. Are my characters as strong as I can make them? Is my villain a real person and not a caricature? Do I fall into lazy scene setting, with characters chatting in diners, living rooms, or city parks instead of somewhere active and engaging? How are my hooks at the beginnings of chapters and my read-on prompts when they end? Finally, I pick apart individual sentences, to make them active and not passive, to eliminate weasel words and reinforce with strong verbs and well-chosen details.

But as useful as the critical eye can be, there is a time when it needs to cower in a corner so that Mr. Hyde can come out and tell his story. This is during the rough draft stage. Don't think, just write. Let the first draft emerge in a flurry of words, one sentence piled on top of the next. Of course I use skills earned during the Jekyll stage of other projects, but any craft emerges subconsciously. As soon as I start to fiddle with individual sentences, Dr. Jekyll starts whining from his cage and the project bogs down.

And I have to write every day or the story goes cold. Heaven forbid three or four days go by without producing anything new. The book starts to feel like someone else wrote the darn thing and suddenly I can see all the flaws.

And that's the easiest way to kill a promising story.

Over the Top

I've scaled the heights this week and finally have a view of the valley below. Yes, I have firmly passed the midway point of my new historical thriller, Wolf Hook, and finishing the darn thing no longer sounds like hiking a mountain, barefoot, with a fifty pound pack of research books strapped to my back.

Still a long way to go, and I've got some distractions to deal with over the next few weeks: a visit from the in-laws, a trip to Utah for my niece's wedding, and contract negotiations with my publisher for some more books in the Righteous series. Good distractions, but still the sort of thing that can puncture the tire of my writing progress if I'm not careful.

Writers Write

I've been thinking lately about the long and strange trip from when I submitted my first short story while I was still in high school until I took the plunge last year and became a full time writer.

I'm a slow learner, and I didn't have much success in the early days. It took three years before I placed my first short story in a small press magazine and seven years before I made my first professional sale. I wrote either thirteen or fourteen novels (depending on how you're counting) before I published my first. You can read more thoughts about my persistence here.

At what point did I consider myself a real writer? From the moment I started working on my first, abortive attempts to complete a story. At what point would I say now that I became a real writer? The answer is 1995, when I sold my first professional short story to Kris Rusch at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

It was not the selling of the story, however, that turned me into a real writer. It was a change in attitude that occurred earlier that year. That attitude had been slowly turning more professional over the years, starting with my volunteer work at a semi-professional science fiction magazine, and progressing through the six weeks I spent at Clarion with seventeen other aspiring writers. I recognized early on that most of the people I knew who said they were writers or wanted to become writers didn't actually write very much. They loved talking about writing or attending writing conferences and sitting on panels. They might knock out a story or two a year and maybe even sold some of them. Some of these people were better writers than I was even though they wrote less. Did I mention I am a slow learner?

I found this enormously frustrating, but I consoled myself with the fact that I was producing much more, at least eight or ten short stories a year. Practically one a month.

It was only when I attended the Kris and Dean Show in early 1995, a workshop given by two professional and very hard working writers, Kris Rusch and her husband Dean Wesley Smith, that I realized how I was falling short. I shouldn't be comparing myself to other aspiring writers, they pointed out, I should be comparing myself to professionals. How much did professionals produce and how did I expect to join them if I didn't produce as much?

Dean said that if we wrote a short story ever week(!), we could almost guarantee that we'd sell a professional short story within a year. For the next fourteen weeks I wrote a short story every week. And it worked! A Dog's Night was picked up for publication in F&SF. I sold several other shorter pieces, mostly to semi-pro magazines, but also to The Atlantic.

It turns out that I'm not a short story writer, I'm a novelist. But those lessons held for novels as well. Once I realized that I was more suited to the long form, I committed to write a new novel every year until I got published. I didn't quite make it, but from 1996 until I achieved success in early 2011, I wrote eleven novels. Some of those books will never see the light of day, but some are pretty good. Thomas & Mercer has picked up some of them, publishers have expressed interest in others (although I like being an indie writer so much I doubt I'll turn them over for the modest advances on tap), and last month I crossed the 300,000 sales threshold for my combined indie and traditionally published novels.

I owe a good deal to Kris and Dean for their great advice, but especially to Kris, who was also the first professional editor to put faith in my writing.

When someone tells me she's a a writer, I don't accept or dismiss this based on professional qualifications or whether or not she has an agent. After all, I was a professional for sixteen years before I started earning a living. What I want to know is this:

1. Do you write? Writers write, they don't talk about writing. One story a year does not make you a writer. I'd say fifty thousand words is a bare minimum.

2. Do you submit what you write? These days this can mean self publishing or podcasting, or any number of things that don't necessarily mean "pursue an agent and a publishing contract with a leading house," but it does mean getting your work in front of readers and seeking to earn an income.

Back to 1942

I started my new book yesterday. Technically, I haven't finished the last one, as I'm still working on the final draft of book #5 of The Righteous series, before sending it to my agent and editor for feedback. But it's close enough that it's a mop up effort at this point. I'm quite pleased with how this one has turned out and feel like books 4 (The Blessed and the Damned) and 5 (Destroying Angel) are the strongest of the series, with enough resolution to hopefully satisfy readers looking for closure of the main plot, but enough left at the end to pull us into the next series of three books if we can come to an agreement with the publisher about an extension. I think we will; sales have been strong. But back to 1942. I'm starting in Amsterdam this time, not Occupied France, like in The Red Rooster, but I'll probably venture across Occupied Europe as the story plays out. I'm drawing on my recent travels to Holland and Italy as well as a pile of memoirs and historical non-fiction about the war years I've been reading lately, including a compelling, but awful book about Himmler. Digging so deeply into these stories is troubling, and the entire milieu weighed like a shadow on my mind while I was writing The Red Rooster. I expect more of the same, for better or worse. It's certainly a palate cleanser from the cloistered community of Blister Creek. Here is my blurb, although I should warn you that it will be some time before you can read this. First, I have to write the darn thing, and then I have to get together with Thomas & Mercer and decide if they want to tackle the project or if I should publish it on my own. I wouldn't mind doing that; I enjoy the direct connection with readers and the ability to find my own cover artist, editor, etc. Jim Heydrich is the Canadian-born nephew of one of the most feared men in the Gestapo. When his mother dies and his father returns to Germany just before the war, Jim arrives in the Third Reich as a young, sensitive theater student, both protected by and encumbered by his famous relation. Resisting an invitation to join the Nazis, he instead finds himself a member of an English-language theater troupe working in Occupied Europe. Unbeknown to Jim, the leaders of the theater troop, Nigel Burnside and his daughter Margaret, are not the English fascists they appear, but members of the British Secret Service, using the theater troupe to recruit spies from among the Anglophile German officers who come to their productions. Disillusioned with both sides of the war, Jim is trying to defect to neutral Ireland when he stumbles into one of Nigel and Margaret’s most closely held secrets—a Hungarian physicist they are smuggling out of Europe. While trying to extricate himself from this unwelcome knowledge, he manages to both draw the attentions of the Gestapo and to convince the British Secret Service that he is a Nazi spy, a threat to their plans who must be eliminated.

The Blessed and the Damned Back Cover Text

SPOILER WARNING: Do not read unless you've already read book #3, The Wicked. Here is the back cover text from the publisher for book #4 of The Righteous Series.

For years Jacob Christianson struggled to reconcile his faith with his skepticism about the fundamentalist practices of his polygamous community. Nevertheless, whenever his family and neighbors in Blister Creek were threatened, Jacob always stepped up to join the fight against those who would destroy them. Now Jacob is facing his greatest challenge yet. Taylor Kimball Jr. has returned, and he wants to take over as prophet of Blister Creek—and claim Jacob’s sister Eliza as his unwilling bride. To protect his family and neighbors, Jacob forms a tenuous alliance with his father, the reigning prophet, and the FBI. But Taylor is as crafty as he is brutal, anticipating Jacob’s plan and descending on Blister Creek with a horrific new weapon capable of annihilating the town. If Jacob is to win this battle, he must rise above his thirst for personal vengeance and become the leader his people so desperately need.

A Curious Reluctance to Finish

I finished my first draft of book #5 of The Righteous series, Destroying Angel, several weeks ago, and have been puttering around with rewrites ever since. I feel like a runner at the end of the marathon who has decided to slow down and walk the last half mile, not because the tank has run dry, but because he has been training and running for so long that he doesn't want it all to be over. It's the last book of the series (with a possible extension on the table), and I've lived in this world and with these characters for so long that I'm reluctant to say goodbye. Or at least that's my excuse. The other answers are less satisfactory. There's no hard deadline to face--I'm ahead of the terms of my contract with Thomas & Mercer--and there's a certain reluctance to finish this book and move on to my next, which is the WWII thriller. I'm both excited by and terrified of that project. More stretching of the writer muscles, and I don't to pull anything. And then there's the excuse of my recent vacation, followed by a week of house sitting for a friend, with the distractions of spring all around. Or maybe I'm just procrastinating. The answer to that is always more butt in chair, fingers on keyboard.

Discovered a Great New Book

I don't usually mention other people's books on this blog, as I feel funny enough about pimping my own books, and I don't want this to be a forum for selling, selling, selling! However, I read a funny, engaging fantasy novel that was recently released for the Kindle that I wanted to share. It is The Wrong Sword, by Ted Mendelssohn, and it's a great combination of laugh-aloud humor, page-turning plot, and great historical detail. I highly recommend it. As I was reading it, my wife grew annoyed not just with my frequent laughter, but with my desire to read passages to her because she quickly decided she wanted to read it too. Pick it up, I think you'll like it.