11/6/2017 1 Comment Trimming the FatPart of the process of growing as a writer is recognizing that writing is so much more than putting words on the page--it's also knowing when and where to take words off the page. This past week, I executed what my agent calls a selective edit. This was a process of combing through my manuscript and cutting several thousand words to bring it down to a particular length. I was looking for superfluous words, redundant dialogue, unnecessary descriptions--that sort of stuff. Now that I have been writing professionally for eight-nine years, I actually relish this sort of activity, but Young Author Me would have cried bitter tears over it.
Part of the process of growing as a writer is recognizing that writing is so much more than putting words on the page--it's also knowing when and where to take words off the page. I think creative writing is such a curious discipline for several reasons, but one of them is because it's a type of creative art where the Creative starts off believing they are experts at what they are doing. Speaking generally, creative writers tend to be resistant to instruction--resistant to being edited, resistant to being told what to do. Birth metaphors are frequently used for the process of producing books (we "birth book babies," as though they are products of our life and blood rather than subcreations of our psyche). Our stories are deeply personal, and this makes any suggestion that we need to change our mode (our words) personal, as well. Whereas I think people in other disciplines tend to recognize their ignorance and start off more malleable, creative writers often start off rigid and only become more malleable with maturity and time. That's certainly been my personal experience as a writer, at least, and my observations of my creative writing students over ten years teaching creative writing have reinforced this opinion. And I will say that I've never been one to write an initial rough draft that I junk entirely, but all writers have to be willing to hold their drafts in an open hand. Unless you self-publish and control every aspect of the process from beginning to end, your story ceases to belong solely to you the moment you sign with an agent, a publisher, an editor, a publicist. Your manuscripts will go through many revisions--many, many, many revisions--before they are ready for publication. If your words are so precious to you that you can't trim the fat--recognize and get rid of those unnecessary words and story elements--where necessary, then you have a lot of growth to go through as a writer (and you may be a little insufferable to work with). Editing is difficult. It is--whether you're editing your own work, or someone else is editing it for you. I'm not trying to say that you will (or should) always feel great about it. But I will encourage you to always enter into the editing process with an open mind and an eye to recognizing that editing is not about butchering your "book baby" or compromising your vision, but it's about clarifying your story, highlighting the very best of your words, and getting rid of the dross. In order to do that, though, you have to be willing to trim that fat!
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8/29/2017 1 Comment Wax On, Wax OffI've felt a little bit like the Karate Kid this summer. I didn't know what it would be like to work with an agent, but I certainly didn't anticipate how much my writing and storytelling would be refined, sharpened, and improved just over the course of a few months.
In the movie The Karate Kid, Mr. Miyagi trains young Daniel in the art of karate first by having him perform a number of chores--usually accompanied by the action, "Wax on, wax off." Daniel chafes against the tasks. He doesn't see the point of the chores--doesn't see that he's building muscle memory and discipline that will serve him to master karate in the future. Now, that's not what my agent, Ben, has had me doing this summer, so this blog post isn't a perfect metaphor. And I'm a generally chill person (and also pretty chill to work with as a writer), so I didn't chafe at the revisions he asked me to make. But there are parallels to the "Wax on, wax off" experience, which is why I bring it up. My point is, when I submitted my manuscript--The Girl in the Sea--for agent representation, I thought it was, well, done. At least as done as a book can be prior to the professional editing process. I had carefully plotted it, and I can produce the ring composition and literary alchemy charts to prove it (I Instagrammed a picture of them over a year ago). I have published eight novels already, won ten awards, and I have never been a careless, "pantser" writer. I have taught creative writing for ten years, and people pay me good money to teach novel writing seminars. In other words, it's not that I don't know what I'm doing. But it's when you are tempted to think you've "arrived" that you probably need someone to step in and force you to do a little, "Wax on, wax off." Ben could see things in my manuscript I couldn't, and he knows the market far better than I do. It's his job. I've always known I need to keep improving my craft (in theory, at least), but for a long time, I haven't had anyone who really pushed me to do so. But working through revisions on The Girl in the Sea this summer with Ben has felt like, "Wax on, wax off." Good. Again. Good--do it again. And as we near the end of this process of revisions and draw close to submission time, I'm amazed not only at how much better The Girl in the Sea is than it was when I signed with Ben, but how much stronger I feel as a writer. If you, like me, find yourself in a position where you are privileged enough to be working with an agent or editor who sees the potential for your work to be better--even if you are a seasoned writer--Don't chafe. Wax on, wax off. 7/31/2017 0 Comments K.B.--Yer a Storyteller.I finished writing my 10th novel early this morning, but as I reflected on that all day, I found myself instead thinking about a boy wizard--the boy wizard, of course--and the fact that today was his birthday, and if it wasn't for him, I'm not sure I would have completed my 10th novel at all. Or perhaps I should say, if it wasn't for the indomitable J.K. Rowling--whose birthday is also July 31st--I wouldn't have completed my 10th novel. In fact, I'm not sure I would have written any of my novels, at least not with any measure of success, because it is one thing to be a writer, and it is another thing entirely to be a storyteller.
Everyone who loves Harry Potter loves the moment in book 1 when Hagrid proudly says, "Harry--yer a wizard." We've all endured Harry's misery at the hands of the Dursleys alongside him for a good portion of the story up to that point, and when it's revealed that Harry is special, and magical special, and not just magical special, but going-away-to-be-trained-at-a-magical-school, magical special, we the readers feel a collective relief for him. There is a sense of rightness about Harry's situation at that point in the story. Finally, all the dissonance in his life begins to resolve. Obviously there will still be many, many trials for our young wizard, but now Harry has a drive, a purpose, an identity. For me, this was my realization that I was a storyteller. I always knew I was a writer. I'd been writing bits of things for years, going way back to my childhood--far younger even than Harry was when he received his first letter to Hogwarts--but writing and storytelling don't always line up. Many great writers are terrible storytellers, and many great storytellers are terrible writers. It is a select few who capture the magic of being able to do both, or at least, who capture the magic of storytelling well, and then harness the writing as a vehicle to tell their brilliant stories as they need to be told. When I was young, I didn't realize that learning to story-tell was something I had to do. I believed if I had a story in my head, I could write it, and it would make sense and capture people's hearts and imaginations, and wasn't that all there was to it? Obviously I was wrong, but I didn't know it, and if you don't know you are wrong about something, you can't begin to learn how to do it right. There were many authors I admired when I was young (and of course still admire)--authors like Lewis and Tolkien--but it wasn't until J.K. Rowling came along and Harry entered my life that I realized storytelling was a discipline to be learned and harnessed as a skill if I wanted to succeed myself as an author. I knew I loved Harry, and I knew there were big, transcendent themes in the story, but lots of stories contain lovable characters and big themes without ever approaching the success and the widespread appeal of Harry Potter. And it really wasn't that Rowling wrote any better than any other writers out there. One could argue that her prose is not as good as many comparable works. So when I sat down to study the phenomenon that was Harry Potter, the conclusion I came to was that the secret must lie in Rowling's storytelling methods, and that if I wanted to truly ever approach mastery in my writing, then I must study not her prose or her themes, but how her stories are woven together. My studies of Rowling's Harry Potter novels have led me down rabbit holes of literary alchemy and ring composition. They've led me away from Harry and back to ancient, classical, and medieval works, and back to modern favorites like The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia. They've helped me see patterns in films and TV storylines, and they've inspired me to always work harder, to always dig deeper, to never write lazy. When I read Harry Potter for the first time as a teenager, I had no idea where it would take me. I had no idea that, almost twenty years later, I would teach writing seminars based on the storytelling methods J.K. Rowling used to write them, or that I would myself be the author of an award-winning six-book fantasy series that I wrote following her methods. I certainly couldn't have guessed that I would write 10 books in 9 years, but I'm thankful to be where I am, and I'm thankful for the epiphanies I've had from studying her work. I'm a novelist, a writer, but mostly, I'm a storyteller. |
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