On Writing

Shade’s story is finished—for real this time. I wasn’t wholly happy with the ending of the first draft, so I gave it a few days and finally accepted that it needed more work. I did the hard copy edit at the same time and played with titles, none of which I liked until I glimpsed one this morning. I’ll wear it for a day or two and see if it fits as well as I think it does. If so, yay. If not, sigh.

In his most excellent book On Writing, horrormeister Stephen King dispenses a trove of advice on, well, the obvious. I generally shy from how-to books on creativity, since I believe that creativity has no boundaries and so many of these manuals state hard rules as the only way to success. While that may be true in the intellectual world, in my heart, I believe that the artist must follow her instinct and develop her own style unhampered by the fear of not following the formula. I once tried to write a formulaic romance. Into the third chapter, the characters were running off the page in all the wrong directions and I was bored enough to let them. Needless to say, it went no further than those 2.5 chapters. That’s when I decided to write what I want to read rather that what others may want to read. The formula romance market is huge and I could make a killing in the genre, except that I don’t want to write stuff that makes me roll my eyes. When I read a few romance novels in preparation to write my own, my eyes behaved like drops of spilled mercury. I knew what I had to do, and I had a template to ensure that I did it … but I couldn’t make myself or the characters do it.

I have great respect for romance writers. It’s way harder than it looks.

Anyway, On Writing is more autobiographical than instructional, which makes it far more helpful to me than any of the “How to Write Whizbang (Insert Genre Here) Fiction” manuals. One of the hints within is to drop a “finished” project into a desk drawer, ignore it for six weeks, then go back and look it over. If there are flaws—and there will be—that’s when you’ll be able to see them.

Naturally, I don’t wait that long. I buff and polish as I go (big mistake), and if there’s a structural problem, I usually know it right away. The end of Shade, for instance. I had promised myself to get it finished by the end of my Christmas vacation, so at 5:45 p.m. on January 10, 2014, I typed “The End” and breathed a big sigh. I had done it. The story was told.

Liar, liar, pants on fire. It was mostly told. I knew the ending was too abrupt and needed more work to tie up the loose ends—that means more envisioning, imagining, and composing—but I wanted to be finished by the deadline. A stupid self-imposed limit could have resulted in a sub-standard product. As it happens, it only needed half a page more, but I wanted so much to meet my goal (I hate that word except in hockey, and then only when it’s my team scoring one) that I ended the story prematurely. And I knew it. And I tried to deny it. During the course of last week, I made myself feel better by rephrasing the original commitment from “finishing the story” to “finishing the first draft”. It satisfied my ego, which is now only mildly miffed at a short delay in the cool inspection. Ego appeased, I was free to add a couple of vital paragraphs and now I can honestly say:

Shade’s story is finished.

I think.