Kelly McCullough

In his wonderful screenwriting book Which Lie Did I Tell?: More Adventures in the Screen Trade, William Goldman spends more than a little bit of time talking about Late Entry, by which he means starting the camera as late as possible in any given scene. This, like much of the advice in Goldman’s two books on screenwriting–the other is Adventures in the Screen Trade–is absolutely dead on for novels and short stories as well.

So in my class last night (in October 2007, actually) I talked a little bit about this and thought I’d expand and expound on it here. F&SF is the genre of the fantastic. It is defined by the idea of a world not like our own. This can be a world of the future, of the past, of a now that is somehow different from the one we live in, or a world that never has been. We include elves and dragons, cyborgs and star ships, magic, and technology-indistinguishable-from-magic, and we mostly start doing it on page one. This is what our readers expect and demand and yet….

You still have to give your reader banisters–ideas and terms they can hold onto as they ease into the story. Every time you introduce a strange magical beast or a polysyllabic alien name you need to give the reader context, let them know that a gobbledygook is really basically a dragon with the serial numbers filed off, or that Svbuewioboie is really an engineer on a star ship not all that different from star ships they’ve seen in the past. To make a work original and to draw in the reader you have to have gobbledygooks and Svbuewioboie, and whozits and Xzasdxssa as well, but you probably don’t want to introduce them all on page one, because the contextualization you will have to do for the reader is going to kill your pacing.

Spacing out the weirdness is one of the things you can do to help the reader ease into the strange and hopefully come to love it. One other thing you can do is make certain that there’s a good reason that you’re calling a dragon a gobbledygook or a cell phone a WAA (weird-ass acronym) and not do it if you don’t have to. “Dragon” is a fine word with all sorts of wonderful history and built-in associations. A phone is an entirely comprehensible piece of technology and unless the specific nature of the phone is really really important to the story there’s not much point in calling it a WAA.

Like everything in writing it’s a balancing act. You have to decide what strangeness really serves the story and what strangeness is there because it’s really cool, and what strangeness should probably be sidelined in favor of making it easier for the reader. At root it’s learning how to decide whether the glorious history of the gobbledygook species is more important than not calling a dragon a dragon.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog October 5 2007, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Today’s reblog post is a little bit different. I just hit the point in my old posts where I put up A Writer’s Index to Making Light, and A Making Light General Index. which I have now added to my permanent pages over here on kellymccullough.com.

When I wrote the original posts I had just gone through and read all of Making Light to that point as part of my program of ongoing research/writing-education/fun reading in my field. As a way of integrating and digesting the information, I created a couple of topical indexes—yes, I am the sort of geek who finds creating topical indexes to be fun and diverting. Sadly, these days I just don’t have the kind of time necessary to create or even update indexes.

Making Light is an online community founded by Teresa Nielsen Hayden whose current frontpage poster/moderators include: Avram Grumer, Jim Macdonald, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and Abi Sutherland. It is an enormously rich source of publishing industry and writing information as well as a place filled with interesting intellectual discussion on a myriad of other topics. If you’re a writing in the f&sf field and you’re not at least periodically checking in on Making Light, you’re very much missing out.

So, here they are: A Writer’s Index to Making Light, and A Making Light General Index

(As with all my reblogging posts, the originals are still up over at the Wyrdsmiths blog and original comments may be found there. Wyrdsmiths versions: General Index, and A Writer’s Index to Making Light)

Back in 2007 I was teaching a fantasy novels class at the Loft and the discussion led me to put this together for my students. I thought it might be of some interest here.

Revision: What do you change? How? Why? These are big questions and tough to answer.

This is also where you’re going to start getting really sick of reading and rereading your novel. I’m going to list a bunch of techniques for identifying problem spots. This isn’t a sequence and I’m not going to give them to you in any particular order. These are just methods you can use.

1 Read the book aloud. You want to try to get through this in as small a number of reading sessions as possible . Whenever you hit something that bugs you, highlight it. Don’t stop, don’t note exactly what it is that bothers you. Just highlight it. If you get a brilliant idea for the story right it down on a separate sheet of paper, but in as brief a note as possible. At the end of the session write down any ideas you’ve had for changes.

2.Read the book silently and follow the procedure in one.

3. Read the book as you would read a book from the store. As close to straight through as possible without making any notes. When you’re done, right down what did and didn’t work for you.

4. Build a chart or spreadsheet. Read the book, making notes on the spreadsheet of every scene and chapter. What does the scene do? What should it do? Plot. Character. World. Mood. Theme. Why did you write the scene? What can you do to it to make it serve more than one purpose.

5. Create a duplicate document of your novel. Open it. Read through and smooth out the prose, but don’t do any major reworking. When you hit something that needs work, make a note of what and why, but don’t actually do any of that.

6. Build a revision plan, or list of things that need changing. You will probably need to use some of the techniques above to create the plan. Make it into a set of bullet points. Think about how each of those changes will echo forward and back through the book in terms of consequences and needed foreshadowing. Add those to the plan. Plunge in.

7. Open the book up and just change everything you don’t like. This one can be dangerous and should be approached with caution.

8. Get another set of eyes, preferably several.* A couple of writers and a reader or two who doesn’t write is ideal. Listen to what they have to say about the book. Decide where they’re right, where the things they note point out stuff you should have put in that you didn’t. Where the suggestions diverge from what you want the book to be.

Revision resources:

Wyrdsmiths Index—Category: Revision and Multiple Drafts.

Miss Snark Index—Category: Revisions

Making Light revision oriented comment thread.

David Louis Edelman on line edits:

Thoughts, comments, suggestions?
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*Important note: always remember it’s your book and you ultimately are responsible for it. Don’t make changes that don’t work for you. Be certain it’s your sense of the story that’s telling you they don’t work and not your ego.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog September 27 2007, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

One of the hardest things for me as a writer was learning to accept thinking days. I was raised in North Dakota and Minnesota both of which have a strong ethic of “never complain” and “if it’s fun it’s not work” and “if you’re not accomplishing something at this very moment” you’re lazy. Garrison Keilor’s takes on the subject are deadly funny if you were raised as I was.

A writer has a lot of jobs that look and feel like work, and a couple that don’t. The writing itself is easy to see as work. If I’m writing I’m working. Likewise sending stuff out to my agent or publishers, dealing with same either via phone or email, revising, editing, reading galleys, etc. There is obvious work happening in all of those situations. Research is a little bit less clear. If I’m looking up a detail of Greek mythology that’s relevant to the story right now, that’s certainly work. If I’m reading mythology looking for stuff for the next book, that’s still pretty obvious, but it’s treading dangerously close to fun.

Reading widely because that’s how I find new ideas—can I really call that work? I can and I do, but my inner Minnesotan does more than a little hmphing at the idea. Self-promotion? Ooh, that’s a hard one, mostly because I don’t actually believe that most of it works (see not accomplishing things above). However, since it’s an expected part of the industry, I can squeak some out without guilt.

All of that is nothing, nothing at all compared to thinking days. Tuesday was a thinking day. I did a lot of stuff around the house. I wandered around the internet and wrote on blogs. Every twenty minutes or so I’d stop back at my working plot document and put another bullet point into the “stuff what has to happen” section. I got maybe 300 words down. If this was a writing day a 300 word count would be a catastrophe. I can do 300 words standing on my head in a bucket. A normal day when I’m fully into a project is 2,000+ and I’ve gone as high as 6,000. However 300 is pretty good for a thinking day. Sometimes no words actually make it into a document on thinking days.

I just wander around and think and don’t actually write at all. And despite the very grim look my inner Minnesotan is giving me about this, it’s still working. In fact, it’s critical. The reason I had thinking day Tuesday was that I hadn’t done a scene-by-scene outline for this book yet—in part because there were several significant decisions that needed to be made and I still wasn’t sure which way I’d go on them. Making the wrong decision and writing it into the book can be quite costly to fix (in terms of time). A day spent thinking about story and structure now can save me ten days later on. It’s still frustrating.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog September 17 2007, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)