How to Rewrite Characters

(Reed’s song of the day: Breath of the Wild “Night Riding” music)

You ever write something, turn around and look at it when it’s finished, think “Well, that was complete shit” and toss it?

I figure pretty much all of us have at some point. And when you’re first trying to sink your claws into a project, it can be extremely frustrating to have it keep slipping away from you no matter how many times you try to start it. Which is why I abide by the “first draft is not allowed to be thrown away, edited, or otherwise touched until the whole thing is completed” policy.

Luckily for me, I don’t usually have problems with first drafts. But recently, trying to edit and rewrite Sleeper or Unrest or whatever it’ll eventually be called, I’ve kept running into the same issues. I write a segment – usually the first third of the first book, so it’s a manageable amount of material – and I don’t like it, so I try again, and I don’t like it, and so on.

What I’ve failed to recognize until just recently, and with the help of some readers, is the core reason behind my frustrations with that draft. I have a few characters that are easy for me to write – their dialogue and tone comes naturally to me and even if it still needs to be reworked, it shows promise from the beginning.

And then there’s my goddamn protagonist.

I have been working, tweaking, and adjusting her story for what seems like forever. I even wrote about her in a previous post about not being able to write a good female protagonist. I tried entering at a number of different points in her story, changing the events that happen to her, even giving her an entire new character arc. Nothing seemed to work.

And that’s because I didn’t do the one thing I really should have.

I didn’t change the character herself.

If you find yourself flying through certain passages, nailing most of what you’re trying to write, and then every time you have to write from a certain character’s perspective, things come to a screeching halt, it’s time to take a look at that character and ask yourself the fundamental questions.

I’ve put a few of them in a (by no means exhaustive) handy list for you!

1. Does this character need to be in my novel? And don’t trick yourself into thinking that, just because they’re the protagonist, they’re automatically safe from this. If your protagonist isn’t working in the novel, you can bet your butt there needs to be an overhaul of that character.
2. What am I trying to express with this character? This has to be asked before pretty much any work can go into rewriting the character. If your answer is “nothing, really”, see Question 1. Each character, like any other facet of a novel, is meant to express something – whether they exist as a foil for another character, or are tied into a theme, or even give comedic relief. Find out what this character is supposed to do.
3. Is my character doing a good job of expressing what I want them to express? Chances are, if you’re having trouble writing them, they’re not. Reexamine how they could be better expressing themselves or tying into the thematic or symbolic content you’re trying to create. Use the following questions to help scour various changes to your character!
4. Is my character’s personality conducive to what I want them to express? If your character is meant to bring some levity to an otherwise serious story, they shouldn’t be terse or sour. If you’re trying to show how love inevitably fades and breaks down, your character better have some obvious flaws that start breaking their relationship apart over the course of things. LET GO OF WHO YOU THINK YOUR CHARACTER “SHOULD” BE and let them be what makes sense.
5. Is my character’s arc perfectly fit to their purpose? If they start off in a place that doesn’t matter to their purpose, start them off a little later. If their arc is too slow or too fast for their purpose, make adjustments. 
6. Is my character’s job/family/role in the story perfectly fit to their purpose? See what happens if your character isn’t a baker, or a natural-born sleuth, or an assassin. This can be a very easy way to envision new possibilities for your character’s personality and arc.

After such a long time fiddling with my protagonist, I’m getting pretty tired of having to rewrite the same section of text over and over again with new changes added. But the thing is, if I can barely get myself to write those passages, how can I expect readers to read them?

You won’t get anywhere as a writer if you’re not willing to be flexible, adaptive, and creative. You have to try out new things constantly. No character, no plot event, no storyline is set in stone. In fact, that’s the beauty and terror of creation – nothing at all about your story is set in stone. You have to try everything, at least a little bit, to find out what will truly work for your story.

That’s today’s tip! Good luck getting those pesky characters to fall in line.

Yours, gearing up for (yet another) rewrite,

-R.R. Buck

A Quick Update

Well, if you can’t tell from the infrequency of this blog recently, I’ve been very busy. Starting a new job is always hectic, but when that job is working with elementary school kids….

Well, I’ll talk about it in a second.

I just wanted to hop on to give a quick update on how things have been going for me, personally and professionally. In a nutshell, things are busy and kind of stressful, but overall much MUCH better than they were during the summer. (Having a steady job can do that to you.)

I started working for STAR, the after-school enrichment program serving LAUSD elementary schools. You’d be surprised, but teaching little kids is almost nothing like teaching college students. I know, shocker, right?

I’m learning so much about the exact things I needed to examine most – classroom management strategies, keeping young kids’ attention, how to speak differently to different grade levels about the materials, and interestingly, the differences between schools in different areas of L.A. county.

I wish I could say I had good news on substitute teaching, but I attended an orientation for a school district yesterday and they said it would be about 4-6 weeks before I could start substituting at their schools. Although the silver lining is, if I were willing to teach any grade level and subject matter, I could pretty much have daily work with them. So that’s a pretty cool thing.

As far as LAUSD employment as a substitute, I call once every other week or so and confirm my application hasn’t been thrown out with HR, but other than that, nothing. The process moves slower than a snail covered in molasses on the back of a tortoise in the middle of the summer in Death Valley.

(Can you tell I had fun with that sentence?)

Writing-wise, everything has slowed to an absolute crawl, which is what I expected. I was able to meet my writing goal for the summer – editing the first eleven chapters of Sleeper, now possibly renamed Unrest, until they were good enough for people to look at. I put out an APB on Facebook, and then when that didn’t work, a second APB all but begging people to look at my writing.

And I am so very, very grateful to say people took me up on it. More than anyone has since I started writing. I got over 25 people to read through my first chapter, and they commented and edited the hell out of it, from sweeping story and character opinions to the minutia of structural and grammatical edits.

If anyone reading this was one of my readers, thank you so much. I can’t express what that meant to me.

But it’s made one thing clear – I need to find a writing group with whom to share my work. My call for alpha/beta readers has gone largely unanswered until very recently, and I can’t expect people to continue to read my work when it starts getting longer than a few chapters.

So hopefully the next time I post, it will be with some research under my belt – and some good ideas on how to find readers and/or writing groups. You can look forward to that.

Anyway, that’s it for me. Teaching is wonderful, but it is ever so exhausting (and I’m only teaching 3-4 hours a day right now). I’ll try to force myself to get back to posting at least once a week from this point onward. Because even if you don’t miss me, I miss you, O Internet Friends.

Take care, and good luck writing!

Yours, doing much better, thank you for asking,

-R.R. Buck

Editing Discoveries [#8 – Characterizing Moments]

(Reed’s song of the day: Time to Wake Up, by Carpenter Brut)

Hi, all. It’s your boy, Mr. Unemployed-and-Struggling, R.R. Buck, with a new writing tip for you.

As I said in my previous post, I’m trying to get back up on the horse as far as motivation goes. Any new writer will know how difficult it is to keep up that good habit of writing every day once you’ve fallen off the wagon (lot of old-timey transport metaphors today), but I told myself that yesterday was my last day to goof off before I got serious about things.

So from today until the very day I have a job, I’m going to get back to writing per diem. And I’m also going to try to get back to posting two times a week, since it’s probably good for my mental health to carry on conversations with myself on the computer.

Well… it’s probably not worse for my mental health.

So if you’re having trouble motivating yourself to write, I think one good thing to do is skip to a scene that will help you establish your relationship with your characters. Writing characterizing moments will help you in a few different ways:

• It will let you really get into your character and understand what makes them tick,
• It will remind you why you love this character and want to continue to write out their struggles, and
• It won’t feel like it needs to be nailed as perfectly as some plot points, at least at early drafts when our characters are still finding themselves

But this isn’t just about motivation, which we all need but which only we can provide for ourselves. This is an EDITING DISCOVERY post, where I’m supposed to be sharing what I learned along the way to editing Sleeper. And what I learned was this:

We tend to look at characterizing moments as being times when a character makes a decision or has a bit of dialogue that reveals something about who they are (or, alternatively, who they are becoming). Oftentimes it’s these big moments like Frodo not trusting Sam with the Ring, or Squidward finally breaking down and telling Spongebob he likes him. (Tears on that last one.)

But what’s equally as interesting, and in some ways more subtle, is characterizing moments hidden in the guise of examining other characters – for instance, the internal monologue that comes with your protagonist interacting with a secondary character. These scenes can be really fun to write especially when your characters have been developing independently from each other and then they finally meet up in the final scenes (I’m thinking Game of Thrones season 7 when all the badasses meet beyond the Wall and you have hilarious side characters interacting for the first time).

Or, as an alternative example, if you have the big burly stereotypical “stoic man” character, how does he interact when he has to take care of someone’s baby for a day? What goes through his mind? (I’m now thinking Dwight saying “hello, tiny one” to the little girl on the “Bring your Kid to Work Day” episode of The Office.)

These scenes can be fun to write, or they can be terrifying. For instance, today I was editing a chapter in which my oppressed lower-class servant character witnesses the first time a little girl starts to understand racial and class superiority. At only three years old, she has the moment when she calls him a racial slur, like she’s seen her parents do, and orders him to do something for her. His internal monologue is heartbreaking (or it will be once I find the exact right words to describe it) as he observes the onset of racism for the first time in a child.

Character development doesn’t just have to happen in the big moments. It’s wonderful to see it occurring in more subtle, interesting ways throughout a novel. And if you’re having difficulty investing yourself in the stakes of the novel, try this exercise – take your protagonist and write out a list of situations. Grandma moves in; meteor coming to destroy the city; tempted with illegal drugs; just sharted in the middle of class…. Ask yourself how your character would respond to each of your situations, not just in actions, but in internal monologue. Better yet, write it.

That’s all for me, folks. It’s not even 2pm and I’ve finished all my writing for the day, which makes it a pretty damn good day. I hope yours is going just as well.

Yours, writing racist little girls,

-R.R. Buck

Editing Discoveries [#6 – The Dialogue Checklist]

(Reed’s song of the day: We Built This City, by Starship)

Hi friends!

Before we get started here, I just wanted to give a quick shout-out to my friend and fellow writer Audrey Miano, who’s started her own blog. She’s a great writer and I can’t wait to see how her blog develops.

You can find it here: https://www.audreymiano.com/

Enjoy!

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Aight, let’s be real for a second. At the four-month mark a few days ago, I was mostly through editing the seventh chapter of my novel, Sleeper.

Not even seven chapters in four months. Suffice to say, editing is going terribly.

But when I think back to my first attempts at writing and how long it took to get good at that, I feel like I need to relax a little bit and let myself be terrible for a time. I’ve not ever really tried to self-edit before, and I’m going at it blindly for the most part. (If you recall, I’m really bad at researching writing advice.)

Well, it should be a mark of how badly it’s going that I actually went out and bought a self-editing book. It’s called Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, and I now own both versions of it. I would highly recommend it for anyone who’s having difficulty editing, as it breaks down the process into a few easy-to-manage steps. It even has practice exercises at the end of each chapter which I don’t do because, as we’ve established, I’m a little bitch.

BUT I’M GETTING BETTER!

Anyway, I wanted to take some insights I’ve had from dialogue editing (of which I’ve been doing a disgusting amount) and combine them with what Self-Editing teaches to give you a little dialogue checklist for each scene. Hopefully it helps!

Let’s dive in:

1. Strip adverbs and emotional language from the dialogue mechanics.

This is something we all do as new writers. “What the hell are you doing here?” does not require she shouted angrily to be understood. We can tell from the dialogue itself that this person is upset – that’s what makes it good dialogue. So if you’re leaning on props like adverbial descriptions or different ways of saying “said”, stop. Instead, make the dialogue completely clear and powerful and it’ll speak for itself.

Here’s an example of dialogue I’ve written where (I hope) the characters’ opinions towards each other come across without one single “she shouted” or “she whispered forcefully”:

“So then what would make ‘em move down there?” Lena played with a coin, rolling it between her fingers. One of the nonpareil rounds from the initial payment.

Damn, but she was good. And a liability. Still, she was one of the best in New Tix, and she had been able to find out where Orrie had kept her incoming messages. Without Lena, Melira wouldn’t have been able to steal this client in the first place.

“Lena, put that down and let’s speak seriously,” Melira said.

“Right,” Lena said, tapping the coin against the edge of Melira’s desk – but not quite putting it down. “Actually, we haven’t had us a serious chat about my fee.”

“We agreed ten percent off the top, withholding any bonuses.”

“Right, but that was before I ended up doing all the work besides wringing the poor sod’s neck myself. The way I see it, I should be getting half… including the bonuses.”

2. Adjust interior monologue as necessary.

One of the helpful tips from Self-Editing was the other half of the ’emotional language’ question – if I remove emotional language from my dialogue mechanics, where do I put it back in? Besides the obvious answer (the dialogue itself), you can also add it back in using internal monologue. Of course, you have to strike a good balance; doing it too much will make a reader feel as though they’re being handed a character’s emotional state, whereas doing it too little will leave the reader feeling disconnected from your characters entirely.

Let’s look again at the example dialogue snippet I provided above, but specifically at Melira’s internal monologue:

Damn, but she was good. And a liability. Still, she was one of the best in New Tix, and she had been able to find out where Orrie had kept her incoming messages. Without Lena, Melira wouldn’t have been able to steal this client in the first place. 

This text tells us a decent amount about both Melira and Lena and helps to establish the power dynamic in the conversation which sets up for the later dialogue about payment.

 

3. Adjust beats as necessary.

Beats are the bits of action that occur during a scene. Someone pausing to walk to the window, light a cigarette, or toss their hair – these are all beats. I’ve noticed one of the most subtle problems in my writing is that I lean on beats far too much in dialogue instead of just letting the characters talk. Self-Editing helped me remember beats are supposed to be just frequent enough to break up multiple lines of dialogue and give the reader a jump-start to their imagination while still allowing the reader to draw up most of the scene.

So let’s take a look at the beats in my example:

Lena played with a coin, rolling it between her fingers.

Lena said, tapping the coin against the edge of Melira’s desk – but not quite putting it down.

See, this is one of the few times where my beats were actually good for multiple purposes. They broke up lines of dialogue and gave a hint of what was happening without being overbearing, but they also served another purpose in showing us Lena’s greed and distrust/disrespect of Melira.

If only I could write good beats more often.

4. Read it aloud and see if it sounds right.

Ah, the one I never do. I keep telling myself I will, but I don’t. Even though literally every book I’ve read on writing says I should read it aloud.

The reason we have to do this is to see whether the conversation sounds realistic and is achieving the tone we’re trying to accomplish. Oftentimes things come out when we’re reading aloud that seemed to make sense in print but don’t really sound very good.

We can also hear how characters’ voices sound aloud. If we read through my dialogue scene, we can hear Lena’s more rough word choices – for instance “poor sod” – next to Melira’s more cultured voice – as in “withholding”.

So, to recap:

1. Strip adverbs and emotional language from the dialogue mechanics.

2. Adjust interior monologue as necessary.

3. Adjust beats as necessary.

4. Read it aloud and see if it sounds right.

If you go through all four of these, you’ll probably catch most errors in juvenile dialogue writing. Whether or not it will actually make your dialogue incredible… well, probably not. It certainly hasn’t to mine. But it will put you on the right path, and that’s the place to start….

And I say hey! What a wonderful kind of day….

Okay, reference over. Have a good day everyone!

Yours, dia-lagging,

-R.R. Buck

Dialogue Scene from “Sleeper”

(Reed’s song of the day: High, by Sir Sly)

Hi all,

Just wanted to share some dialogue I just wrote and thought turned out pretty well for a first attempt. For context, Melira (the daughter) was caught talking to a member of a different race and social class during work, something Benn (the father) forbade her to do.

Enjoy!

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The Government Ordinance building was a long rectangle, forming one of the five sides of the pentagonal middle sector of Kalin. Both the external facade and the internal decor were constructed from Renewal oak and pine, lacquered to a dull shine under the light of massive Hilan crystal chandeliers. The majority of the building was an indoor atrium, open and echoing, but there were also thin corridors running the outer perimeter at each floor and connecting to small offices.

From where Melira stood on the third floor, she could see all the way across to the opposite side of the building where managers and higher-level government workers paced these corridors in quiet conversation. But she ignored them for the frenetic pace of the Ordinance ground floor, or just “the floor”, as the workers called it.

Here, in the bottom of the atrium, desks and cubicles were crammed into the space with hardly a thin dividing wall between them. Workers scribbled frantically on paper or parchment or vellum; peelees scurried in between hurrying operans, carrying notices and requests; and every once in a while, a person would stand triumphantly, clutching a paper, and hurry towards the nearest staircase to the upper corridors.

These lowest level workers mostly gathered data on the workings of the city. They collaborated with the Cityscaping Ordinance and to some extent with the other three Ordinances to collect information which they then passed on to employees at the analysis level to ultimately bring to the Head Governor. They were exclusively middle-tier operans with dreams of glory and putting their family’s name on the list for a barony. Their determination and dedication could be felt in the energy of the Ordinance floor.

“Orderly chaos, isn’t it?” Benn said, leaning against the rail next to her. He offered her a tired smile.

Melira nodded, still watching the workers below. “All those people pushing themselves to their utmost, just for a chance at being where we currently stand.”

“It’s humbling.”

“It’s irritating.”

Benn raised an eyebrow.

“Why can’t they have aspirations beyond this?” Melira swept her hand over the Ordinance floor. “Why does it all have to be so rank-and-file? They could be doing anything, achieving anything, with the kind of tenacity they have. Instead they sit here and wait for someone to notice them.”

“Maybe they don’t mind operating through an established path. Perhaps it gives them comfort. After all, it is jarring to everyone involved when someone suddenly stops doing what is expected of them.”

Melira finally looked at her father. He was watching her with one elbow leaning against the railing. “You mean what’s expected of me,” she said.

“I thought I told you to stop meeting with the other races in public.”

“You didn’t tell me anything, Dad. You made a request, which I took into consideration.”

“Mel….”

“Look, how was I supposed to know Hugo would come in? No one saw her enter, no one would have seen her leave – ”

“He’s your supervisor, Melira. It would be folly not to check in on you every once in a while. And you’re ignoring the fact that you specifically disobeyed me after we spoke about this.”

“How many times do I have to tell you, it’s not disobedience. It’s open-mindedness!”

“It is both. And there are reasons rules have been established – ”

“Seriously, have you ever tried to consider that they might be due for a change? That perhaps your precious rules might be outdated, inapplicable, or just foolish?”

Melira’s shout echoed out into the open space of the atrium. One or two workers on the Ordinance floor glanced up at the two of them before hurrying on their way.

Benn let out a long sigh. His one hand went to the side of his face, scratching at his hairline. “Mel,” he said softly. “Why do you think everyone is trying to control you?”

“Sun, I don’t know, Dad. Perhaps it’s all this talk about blind obedience.”

“And is there ever a reason?”

“A reason to what?”

Benn turned back to her, and she was astonished to see tears glinting in his eyes. “A reason to obey. Even if it were absolutely the wrong thing to do, or if it were silly. Would there ever be a case in which you would just obey? If it were for the sake of your father’s peace of mind? For stability?”

Melira’s stomach turned inward. His every word was like a little barb in her skin, inevitably pulling her towards what he wanted for her. “Dad, you don’t get to say that,” she muttered.

“So now you’re telling me to obey you?”

“Look, can we not talk about this now? We were going to have a nice lunch in the Sprawl.”

“We never talk about this, Mel. At least not in a way where a conclusion is reached.”

“Well, I’m done talking.” Melira turned on her heel and started walking down the corridor towards the staircase.

Benn hurried to catch up. “Fine,” he said. “We don’t have to speak of this today. As a matter of fact, we’ll never speak of it again. Instead, here’s what I’ll do. The next time I find out you’ve been meeting with a tixan or kudran friend – in any capacity – I’ll have Orrie step in and have a chat with them.”

Melira spun around, feeling the guilt in her stomach twist into something else. “Is that a threat? Are you threatening me?”

“Not you, certainly. I couldn’t say the same for your friends.”

A bark of angry laughter came from her throat. “And you think Orrie is just going to respond to your beck and call like a bitch?”

“We have a preexisting arrangement that covers matters like this.”

Melira gripped the railing with one hand until her knuckles turned white. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see down below the workers writing and walking and pushing themselves. And in front of her stood Benn, his arms folded across his chest, his expression cold.

“You know, I suddenly don’t feel very hungry,” she said. “And I had a report that was supposed to be due before we left. So if you’ll excuse me, this obedient daughter is going to go back to her office.”

Benn said nothing, allowing her to brush past him. It was only when she was halfway down the hall that his voice came echoing after her: “It’s what’s best for you, Melira. Perhaps someday you’ll see that.”

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Hope you liked it! And have a great Tuesday.

Yours, making slow improvements,

-R.R. Buck

Editing Discoveries [#5 – Filler Chapters]

(Reed’s Song of the Day: Purple Rain, by Prince)

Hey HEY folks! Coming to you from (finally) rainy Los Angeles, it’s yet another blogger who thinks he can tell you how to write better!

I’m using this post to stall for time while I try to figure out what content I want in my next chapter, so let’s get right down to it. Let’s talk about those “filler chapters”.

You know what I’m talking about, right? Those beloved chapters with a really great character moment or some awesome banter between your protagonist and antagonist, but very little happening in the way of plot? Maybe there’s a really cool specific part of your world you wanted to include to spice things up, but other than that, nothing’s happening? Sound familiar?

It does to me, sadly enough. In my earlier projects – of which Sleeper is one – I used to spend months writing out my world. I would gather information about society and culture, arts, money, politics, gender roles, character backstories as they applied to their home cities, flora and fauna, travel routes, seasons, time dilation, et cetera, et cetera. I would build so much world that I could barely fit it into my books.

And that was the problem – all my worldbuilding would make it into the book, but far too much to be interesting to a reader. It would come out as these long chunks of expository text – because how else are you going to explain the nuances of the world that your characters wouldn’t ordinarily pay attention to? – sitting dense and fat in the middle of my books. When I or my readers would go through them, it would simultaneously feel like nothing was happening, and too much was happening.

I bet you think I’m going to tell you to cut all those unwieldy filler chapters, right?

WRONG.

See, that was how I used to edit, before I really examined what editing was supposed to do. I would ruthlessly cut away everything that didn’t push the plot forward or compel characters into the next scene. I did this for one of my projects last year, Symphony of Legend. Guess how it came out?

Like a pancake to the face. Like a scrunchie made out of plot points.

It hit so fast, readers (including myself) were left disoriented, still trying to understand the basic concepts of the world while already getting into the higher-level complicated magics. It was a pretty big turnoff, and I pulled off on having people read the second and third parts of the novel for that reason.

So I’m not here to tell you to remove your filler chapters. Because honestly, in genres that take a lot of worldbuilding like science fiction and fantasy, you need to slow down every once in a while and let things sit. Let your audience absorb some of your amazing creation when there’s not a battle going on or a character about to die. Give them some time spent staring at your world.

Brandon Sanderson does it. Patrick Rothfuss does it. Most other notable fantasy and sci-fi authors do it (and it even happens in a lot of other genre fiction).

The key to a good filler chapter is not in pushing the plot, but rather the story. You don’t need to have a major plot point every single chapter, or even most chapters. But what you do need to have is something compelling the audience forward. A conversation that leads into the next chapter, maybe. A period of observation where a character is allowed to sit back and enjoy the world, but in the end they notice the thing they were looking for. A simple character-establishing scene where a minor decision reveals something about your protagonist, but also comes back to affect the plot later.

Unless you’re an incredible writer with a ridiculously deep world (read: Tolkein), you won’t be able to captivate an audience just with your worldbuilding. But what you can do is give them a taste of it in these every-so-often filler chapters while also keeping some sort of a progression. Not necessarily a plot progression, just… a progression. Of some kind.

Of course, it’s one thing to remark upon this in your blog. It’s another to sit down at your computer and try to write a chapter of just filler to input between major events. I’m having difficulties with it right now, and you may have those same difficulties. It’ll be okay. I promise. We’ll figure something out.

And the best part is, if we can get the flow right – that waxing and waning of tension and progression – we find ourselves with an exciting, very readable project. So, like all annoying parts of the editing process, it’s worth it in the end.

Hopefully I’ve stalled for enough time to form a latent chapter storyboard in my brain. I’ll keep my fingers crossed (for me and for you!)

Yours, with his numb little toes in his wet little shoes,

-R.R. Buck

Editing Discoveries [#4 – Research Details]

(Reed’s Song of the Day: Dirty Harry, by Gorillaz)

I am freaking exhausted, so I’m going to go ahead and make this a short one.

Shout out to my man Theo who showed me the YouTube channel that inspired this post. See, as I’ve been going through editing Sleeper (I now have 3 chapters, woooo….) I’ve been trying to analyze what I’m doing differently this time than all the other times I’ve “edited” a novel. That’s kind of the whole point of this “Editing Discoveries” series.

And that mindfulness might honestly be a tip in and of itself. I think that writing first drafts for me, and even editing those things, would always occur on default. Kind of like writing this blog, it just happens and I don’t really think too much about what needs to occur or what tone needs to be set. And I think that works fine for a first draft because, like I’ve said countless times before, it’s about momentum.

But the second draft is about mindfulness. It’s about taking each and every scene and saying, “What needs to occur here, and why?” If you don’t have an answer to the “why”, the scene shouldn’t be in your final project. If the “what” can be a few different things, you should try a few different things (which is one of my previous tips). You have to examine what kind of image you’re trying to present in each scene and choose language perfectly crafted to convey that image.

Of course, while you’re doing that, you’re also trying to build your world. Most writers will agree you should do your research before you start your novel, both to give yourself ideas about the novel itself and to be able to speak effectively about whatever field or areas of study coincide with the topic of your novel. The most notable example I can think of right now is in Red Seas Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch, in which the author clearly took some sailing classes or learned in some way about all the marine jargon, which is then included (in… so much depth) in his book.

I’m pretty bad about doing research for my books, just like I’m pretty bad at researching stuff in real life. It’s not so much that I don’t have the skills as that I’m lazy as hell and just try to invent fantasy worlds where I can make everything up from scratch. But some things, whether it’s government structure, history, or even combat styles and fight scenes, can’t be made up without seeming dubious and unrealistic.

So, while research should ideally be done before starting the project, I do believe research should be incorporated in different amounts during the project. For instance, in Draft 1, I feel like research shouldn’t be overtly placed into the writing – whatever comes out of your mind, in that intersectionality of your own creativity and the information you’ve stored about the subject, should be what goes on the page. I wouldn’t worry too much about trying to force your research material in there.

Then in Draft 2 you should actually make a concentrated effort to include details, scenes, and backstory/worldbuilding that reflects the research you’ve done. Make the ideas in your head come to life with realistic situations and infrastructures. Don’t bog the reader down with absolutely everything you’ve studied, but consciously choose details that add to the sense of realism.

And in Draft 3, make sure the shit you said is actually correct. Go back through your research sources and ensure that you haven’t misperceived or incorrectly written anythign. If you have people as your sources, have them read through the relevant materials and make comments on them. Perfect your blend of real and imagined into something that is better than either on its own.

Those are my thoughts, at least. What do you think about research and incorporation into writing? Hit me with it, if you feel like it. God knows I have a lot to learn.

Yours, writing and rewriting and rerewriting away,

-R.R. Buck

Editing Discoveries [#3 – Double Writing]

(Reed’s Song of the Day: Love in Vain, by the Rolling Stones)

I now have two (count ’em, two) chapters from Sleeper in a pretty good place. This has been the work of just over one month, which bodes badly for the next 35 chapters. At this rate, I’ll have the entire book edited to Draft 2 in about a year and a half.

But it’ll be a pretty damn good book, and ready for Draft 3 edits.

I feel like each time I edit a book, I go into a greater depth, always thinking I’ve done the maximum amount I could do, only to find out later that I could have actually gone deeper. I mean, I suppose I knew that some authors spend years and years getting their books ready for publishing… it’s just more that when you actually put in the effort yourself, it seems so, well, effortful.

It sounds dumb, I know. But previously when I would tell people that I’d written books and they would be impressed, I would always say, “It’s not actually that difficult – anyone with enough time and determination can shit out a terrible book.” And I really felt that way.

Now I think when I’ve finished Draft 2 – and definitely when I’ve finished Draft 3 – I’ll actually feel some sense of accomplishment. Where before I couldn’t really take pride in my work other than its existence (like a spectacular cooking failure that you have to eat but you’re not gonna like), I now will have a book I can be stoked on.

Just seventeen more months to go, I guess… or hopefully it’ll get faster at some point.

But enough blabbing. Today’s editing tip is something I didn’t realize I was doing until halfway through editing my last chapter. I know it’s not original – none of these so-called “discoveries” are original – but it’s new to me, and so it might be new to you.

I’m talkin’ bout double writing.

You ready to hate me? I am!

You have your Draft 1, and it’s nice and unpolished. You pick it up **after the appropriate waiting period** , dust it off, and get out that red pen. Right?

Wrong.

Don’t so much as look at it – unless you don’t even remember what the original chapters were. Instead, pull up a brand new Google Doc or sheet of paper and try to rewrite the first chapter. Except this time, be really conscious of your writing. Try to pay attention to the things you’ve identified as your biggest editing needs as you write. Watch your character interactions; analyze whether your dialogue is according to tone. Check your descriptions to see if they elicit a clear image of what’s happening.

Write that chapter as though you’d never written it before – using your old chapter as an outline, but nothing more than that.

And if your old chapter is shit, or if it doesn’t make sense in the context of your new draft, throw it out completely and try again with this chapter. Write your entire book another time, chapter by chapter.

And when you’re done, pick up both versions of your book – Draft 1 and the version I’ll call Draft 1.5 – and compare them. See if the language you used in one version was more consistent or more impactful than the other. You might be inclined to think that Draft 1.5 will always be better than Draft 1, but that wasn’t the case (at least for me) in some chapters or sections.

What you will have is a previous iteration, one you may have polished and polished without realizing it was utter crap at its core. And in that previous iteration you might find, hidden like nuggets of gold in a pig trough, a few incredible descriptions or bits of prose. Take those hidden gems and sprinkle them into your Draft 1.5. Make a hybrid of those two chapters. The best of both worlds.

Then come down on that motherfucker like Mjolnir.

Don’t worry about line edits, little grammar issues, or anything like that. Tackle bigger stuff – like your editing needs, the immersiveness and grip of the words you write. Because you’ve just done a comparison of two versions of the same chapter, you’ll be in a great position to be able to note where you’ve done a really bad job of accomplishing what you’ve set out to accomplish. Dig away at those things until there’s nothing left but the strong backbone of the chapter or scene. Then start layering it on with buttery strands of fat, glistening prose.

I gross myself out sometimes.

But seriously. It sounds like a lot of effort, I know. And if you’re anything like me even six months ago, you probably won’t be ready to do this. Just know one thing – any editing you do to your novel is bringing you in the right direction. It may take a lot more effort to edit the “wrong” way, but there is no “bad” editing.

Still, if you’re able, try this method. It has brought me some incredible results so far.

Now, I’m halfway through Draft 1.5 for my third chapter, so if you all don’t mind, I’ll be bidding you adieu until Thursday.

Stay squishy, homies.

Yours, with his nose to the editing grindstone,

-R.R. Buck

Oh, and P.S. I consider rewriting to be a different thing than double writing. In case you think I’m stupid and don’t know the word “rewrite”… you’re not entirely wrong. But in this case, yeah.

Editing Discoveries [#2 – Motivational Shifts]

(Reed’s song of the day: Should I Stay or Should I Go, by the Clash)

I’ve been having the best week.

It feels like things are really coming together. I got approval on a new project I’ve been chipping away on at work; I get to watch my girlfriend’s reactions to the last few episodes of Westworld (she’s watching it for the first time); and I get to go to Disneyland with her family this weekend. Plus I have D&D after this tonight.

But one of the best things that happened to me this week was, ironically, a rejection email.

August 2015 – an optimistic and naive Reed Buck sends off a completely unpolished, totally shitty version of Sleeper to about eighty different literary agencies. He gets back a whole bunch of form rejections, one revise and resend that turned out to be a scam, and nothing else.

Now skip forward to Monday, when I received an email back from one of those publishers after one and a half years. The agent apologized for being so late, explaining that they had been overloaded because they responded to each and every query letter with a customized email instead of a form rejection.

They then went on to tell me no, but in one of the nicest ways possible, and even better, they gave me feedback on why it wasn’t working for them, which is like a gold mine to a new writer. I was so stunned, I sent an email back just thanking them for taking the time, after over a year, to respond to me personally.

And then they responded back to that email, telling me that they were happy to hear I was coming back to editing Sleeper and wishing me good luck on my future endeavors. It was so opposite of what I had come to expect of interactions with literary agents. Especially at a time where I was exhausted of spending weeks on editing a single chapter, it gave me a much-needed feeling of connectivity with the writing community.

So what was that one bit of feedback? It was only a sentence, but it’s a sentence I now have written in the Google Doc for Sleeper as a comment when I first open the document. The agent said that they didn’t connect emotionally with my characters, which ultimately prevented them from connecting with my work.

Sounds like a generic line of bull, right? Wrong.

That may be the go-to for literary agents, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad feedback. On the contrary, when I examined all of my main characters in isolation, thinking about their motivations and internal struggles, I realized that so many of them had nothing actually driving them forward besides curiosity and, in one character’s case, a penchant for causing chaos. Those are the makings of something flat on a page. I wanted a person who felt entirely real, so that when you read their very first lines of dialogue you could see them almost as an acquaintance.

So here’s Editing Discovery #2: If you’re not getting a lot of headway with your writing because your characters seem dull… if your alpha readers can’t finish reading your work and you suspect it’s because they can’t get into it… if you just feel like something is lacking in the story or plot….

Try changing your character’s core motivations.

My main protagonist in Sleeper is Melira Canton. She was a new adult who hated her father for reasons unknown and was driven by curiosity to inspect strange events occurring in the city. She could literally have been anyone.

I spent so long in my first round of edits, two years ago now, trying to perfect her dialogue and interactions with other characters. But it’s like Gordon Ramsay trying to make a pie out of pigshit and grass – if the source material isn’t good, it doesn’t matter how good you are at your craft.

And that was when I thought of something. What if I changed Melira’s motivation around? What if she were to keep having strange flashbacks of a memory she knows is not hers, which plague her at the most inopportune times? And what if, when trying to figure out what these memories are, she stumbles upon the main plotline – a thing she doesn’t really care about in and of itself, but needs to solve in order to understand what’s happening to herself? (We all know how I love an anti-hero.)

Suddenly Melira’s curiosity is well-founded. She has violent, terrifying memories of things that haven’t happened. When she starts pulling threads, she realizes her parents may be lying to her – hence her hatred of her father (which also now makes sense in context). And it provides juicy character moments later on that I won’t reveal in case this is finally the round of edits that makes Sleeper marketable.

I guess my point is, if you keep trying to make the world more realistic or the plot more gripping or the magic more intricate, you may not be getting to the root of the problem. No other element of a story can exist in isolation – you can’t just have a world or a plotline. But if you write a really good character, a character that feels so consistent and true that it’s as if they’re standing right in front of you while you’re reading… people would read any story about a character like that, and damn the content.

Yours, one more step down the road in the journey into writing,

-R.R. Buck

Reed’s Top 3 – Editing Needs

(Reed’s Song of the Day: Low, by Todrick Hall)

You know, I was going to write this long post about something I talked with my girlfriend about last night, and the realizations I’ve had about how I operate as opposed to normal people. But right now I’m pretty tired and looking at a three-day weekend after I finish this post, so I’ll save the heavy emotional stuff for next week.

Instead, let’s talk about the top three things I’ve identified as important for me to keep in mind while editing my novel. It’s both similar to and different from my top 3 list of writing shortcomings I put on this blog a little while ago. And if you’re doing editing, these are good things to keep in mind too!

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NUMBER THREE: SENTENCE VARIETY

Good writers have this way of crafting sentences that always seem new and interesting. They can interweave short, pithy statements with longer, more grandiose descriptive sentences, all the while keeping the tone consistent. This serves to emphasize what’s important while also driving the reader forward to the next sentence without an obvious drain on their energy.

As you may have noticed, I’m not exactly great with sentence variety. Luckily for me, I have a few alpha readers who are lovely at picking out when I’m using the exact same sentence structure over and over again. You know, the run-on sentence that has a series of phrases barely held together by commas?

He looked at her, saw the way that her hair floated in the wind, the way her eyes watched him even as he watched her, the way the smile tugged at the corner of her lip, and he knew.

Yeah, I do that a lot. And it’s kind of taxing on the reader, having to read those sentences again and again. The number one thing you don’t want to do as a writer is make it difficult for your reader to get through your work, even if they like it; I’m afraid I’ve done that. So I’m keeping a special eye out for sentence variety!

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NUMBER TWO: CHAPTER/SCENE VARIETY

If you’re exceptionally clever, you may notice a pattern here. I recently tried a writing project entitled Sanctuary where I had a new writing strategy – basically just have a character and a situation, no outline whatsoever, and write what comes naturally.

Sounds cool, right? WRONG.

When I wrote what came naturally to me, I ended up with 200 pages of terrible, terrible dialogue. No descriptions of characters or places, no real plotline, just a meandering series of character interactions that did an okay job of establishing motivations but was otherwise unreadable. Poor Sanctuary is my least favorite of my writing projects since high school.

The problem was that I wasn’t focusing on variety within a chapter. And not just in the number of scenes that occur – I actually do okay on that – but on the things that are being portrayed in those scenes. Ideally, we have a little bit of character development, a little bit of dialogue, some descriptions thrown in there, and maybe a new plot point introduced. Like a well-tossed salad.

My salads are like lettuce in a bowl. Just lettuce. And that lettuce is barely digestible dialogue.

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NUMBER ONE: PACING 

Yeeeah, this is still my biggest problem. It’s really hard for me to tell what should make it in and what should be left out of a draft. Last year, I kind of went on this bender where I decided that everything that wasn’t absolutely necessary should be cut. Maybe if I were a better writer this would work out, and I’d be able to use a thousand words to set a scene, execute some kickass dialogue, and showcase character personalities all at once.

But I’m not that good yet. And so what happened when I cut scenes from Symphony of Legend, one of my newer projects, was that I left myself with a way-too-fast plot progression set in a world that felt two-dimensional. There was no time to adjust, relax, and look around at the places I’d created. It was just story moment after story moment, and the whole thing kind of made me feel queasy.

So obviously I can’t drone on and on in my books like I do in these posts, but neither can I remove all details of my world and in doing so make the whole thing flat.

FLAT EARTH CONSPIRACY – KALIN IS ACTUALLY LOCATED IN A CORNER OF DISCWORLD – SPHEREISTS ARE FULL OF SHIT

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But in all seriousness, what I’m really trying to work on with this new set of edits is variety. I want my stuff to feel well-rounded, like I spend the right amount of time on everything. And that, darlings, is my editing need for this year.

Now if only I could actually do that….

Yours, wondering why he sucks at descriptions,

-R.R. Buck