 I’m deep in the labyrinth of another revision this week, and perhaps the most important thing I’ve realized is this: I am nothing if not consistent. I may approach the writing differently for every revision, but I always progress through the same stages of my creative process, the same mindsets and emotional quagmires. I’ve been through them so many times now that I can clearly recognize them, like old friends, or maybe like old archenemies. To tell you the truth, I mostly resent them, but I guess, in the end, they are mine, my stages of revision.
1. Reading the Edit Letter 2. Last 3 Days of Freedom 3. Revision Triage 4. I Have Made a Huge Mistake Part I: Biting Off More Than I Can Chew 5. I Can Work Without Weekends! 6. I Have Made a Huge Mistake Part II: Day 4 Breakdown 7. I’m Not Mad At You I’m Thinking 8. How Is There Still ⅔ Left? 9. Permanent Brain Fog 10. Parks and Recreation Rewatch 11. Midpoint 12. Constant Neck Pain 13. No Time for Exercising (But All the Time for Naps) 14. Dark Night of the Soul 15. Hug a Dog 16. What Day Is It? 17. Cookies Please 18. Am I Laughing or Crying? 19. Every Day 3 A.M. Wake Up (Thinking About the Book) 20. Deadline Met/Anticlimactic Email Sent 21. Sick for a Week (I’m currently in “Am I Laughing or Crying?” so please send your good thoughts my way.) Why is my brain like this? Why can’t the stages of my revision process be “The Best Sleep I Have Ever Had” or “Also Clean Everything”? It’s kind of hellish having to live through some of these things over and over again, it’s also weirdly kind of nice recognizing these waypoints for what they are: temporary. Just part of the process. In the midst of everything, it’s a comfort to know that nothing lasts forever, and however bad my current stage of revision feels, it won’t always feel that way.  I am an overwriter. I have been for as long as I can remember. I add paragraphs of description because I can’t write a scene unless I know exactly where everything is and what everything looks like. I start every scene pages before it actually has to begin. My solution to most story problems is “throw more words at it.”
Overwriting is great because it gives me a lot of material to work with when I go back to revise. It’s awful and frustrating because pretty much all of my work ends up too long. When I first started querying The Reader in 2014, the manuscript was 121,000 words. (For reference, at the time, the conventional word count for young adult fantasy topped out at 100,000 words.) Unsurprisingly, I got a ton of rejections. So, after consulting with some lovely and generous professionals, I stopped querying and went back to revising. By the time Pitch Wars, an online mentoring and pitch contest, rolled around, I had cut 14,000 words, so I entered the contest with a 107,000-word manuscript. That was still a little long for queries, but thank the muses, Renée Ahdieh, author of Flame in the Mist and the forthcoming, The Beautiful, was willing to take me on as a mentee. Over the next two months, I cut another 10,000 words, and by the time I signed with an agent, The Reader was sitting at a pretty 97k, 24,000 words shorter than it was when I started querying. As might be obvious from this little anecdote, I’ve become quite familiar with cutting down my word count, and I’d like to share some suggestions in hopes that they’ll be helpful to other overwriters out there. On the internet, I’ve seen advice like: Do a document search for every “just” or “that” and delete all of them. Or: Cut all instances of filtering. A note: Filtering is where a description first has to go through a character’s perspective, like, “He could see the mountains rising out of the fog in the distance.” In this example, “He could see” is filtering, so you could remove it to change the sentence like so: “The mountains rose out of the fog in the distance.” In general, this is the kind of “one size fits all” advice that I find supremely unhelpful. (Like “Show. Don’t tell.”) Every story is different. Every scene or character requires a different touch. So while I think it’s great to eliminate unnecessary words, because it keeps the sentences tight and uncluttered, I believe that some words that seem unnecessary can, in fact, be useful to the storytelling. The repetition of “just,” for example, could be part of a character’s voice, demonstrating their need to have things be simple. Or the use of “that” could be for rhythm and clarity. Descriptions that are filtered through a character’s perspective might tell us that the character is an observer, or they might be a hint that the character’s observations are too biased to be trusted. Instead of these big search-and-deletes, when I want to cut down on word count, I look for bigger passages that don’t serve the needs of the story: Sentences that repeat information or only serve one narrative purpose (see my Rule of Three (But Not Always Three) Things) can be cut, rephrased, or combined. Paragraphs that, while adding interesting character details or beautiful descriptions, don’t contribute to the forward motion of the plot can often be removed. When I was revising The Reader, I’d cut entire scenes or chunks of scenes if they didn’t get right to the point--often the beginnings or endings while I was working my way into a chapter or couldn’t figure out how to end one. Of course, there are also the Big Changes to consider: Sometimes characters can be eliminated entirely, or at least combined with other characters. Sometimes subplots that don’t tie in to the main story can be removed or streamlined. These can feel difficult to tackle, because changing something big often creates a ripple effect of smaller changes throughout the rest of the story, but I’ve often found that the removal of an unnecessary character or plot thread doesn’t affect as much as I think it will. Then, if I still need to lower my word count, I figure out how many words I need to cut, divide it by my page count, and try to cut that many words per page. For example, in a 300-page manuscript that I want to cut 3,000 words from, I try to cut 10 words per page. 10 words at a time often seems more doable than 3,000 total, and it forces me to be really demanding about how I’m using every word on each page. To be honest, though, it rarely works out that I cut my target amount every time. Sometimes I’ll cut more. Sometimes less. Sometimes nothing. But overall, this process, however, not only helps me closer to my target number of words but also polish each page to a shine. In sum, when it comes to my great adversary, the word count, I try to prioritize the needs of the story, adhere to my Rule of Three (But Not Always Three) Things, and go big before I go small. I hope this helps you sharpen your editing scissors, my fellow overwriters. Let’s get to work!  Over on Instagram, my friend and colleague, Parker Peevyhouse, author of The Echo Room (2018) and Strange Exit (2020), has been posting videos about different aspects of her revision process, and I’ve found it fascinating. (I particularly love this video about the tent pole, which is an approach I’ve never considered before!) I’ve made no secret of my love for revision, and Parker’s videos have inspired me to talk about an aspect of my own revision process: revision triage. To me, revision triage is the process of identifying the varying levels of difficulty in a revision, from the hardest, most time-consuming edits to the easiest, breeziest, just-needs-a-trim-here-or-there alterations, so that when I start revising, I can tackle the biggest and most difficult changes first and gradually move toward the smallest. That process takes a few days to a week, and it usually looks like this: 1. If I have an editorial letter covering the larger patterns and overarching problems of the manuscript as a whole, I’ll read that first (and only once). Edit letters generally point out the biggest issues in a story, so having these on my radar early gives me a way to think about how they all relate to each other and how they might change things in the story once I start tackling them. 2. I’ll set the edit letter aside for 1-3 days, depending on a) what my deadline is and b) how much time it takes me to start having ideas for how to approach the revision. Sometimes I get ideas quickly. Sometimes I have to get ideas quickly because I’ve got to turn my edits in very shortly. But for me, that little window of time is essential for not-doing, for not thinking directly about the work that’s to come so that the ideas from the edit letter can settle and come together in a way that makes sense to my brain. 3. Once 1-3 days have passed, I’ll read the edit letter again, making notes about how to tackle the various issues. This is the beginning of the actual organization process, and it almost always concerns those big, time-consuming edits, so I try to be as clear as I can about how to implement the changes. 4. Then, I’ll read the manuscript from beginning to end, including notes and marginalia from my critique partner(s) or editor. During this read, I’ll STET advice that I already know I won’t be taking, incorporate suggested cuts I know will make the story better, and jot down potential alterations or notes for later. I try to do this quickly, on instinct, using my vision for the story and my thoughts from the edit letter as a guide. I’ll often also write notes at the beginnings or ends of each chapter, summarizing changes that affect the whole chapter instead of just a paragraph or a page, so I can keep track of them later. For me, the purpose of this read is to take in the entire narrative at once, and if I allow myself to linger on one section for too long, I start to lose track of the arc of the whole story, so I try not to take too long with it. I can’t go too quickly, though, because this read of the manuscript also gives me a sense of what the middle-level revisions are going to have to be and what sections need only minor polish. 5. Now, please allow me to introduce you to my extreme Ravenclaw tendencies. Once I have notes from my edit letter and from my review of the manuscript, I go into triage mode. I make a color-coded spreadsheet to group my revisions by the biggest to the smallest, a sort of map for my revisions to come.  Above is a revision map for The Reader that I made in 2015. It’s grouped by character (across the top), and then by severity of changes, with the most severe in red and the quickest to address in white.  I did a similar map for The Speaker in 2016. As before, I’ve grouped changes by issue and character across the top, but this time I’ve added colors down the side, starting with dark red for the most work and moving toward purple for the least. This map started out much more colorful, but as I went through, I started switching revisions that I had already accomplished to white, which made it easy to track what I’d already accomplished and also what was still to come.  This is a revision map for the project I’m currently working on. As before, there are changes by character, but this time I’m also grouping them by different types of changes along the left-hand side. My triage color-scheme is less complicated now, with only five colors: red, orange, yellow, and green, and purple for reminders or other issues. I’m continuing to white revisions I’ve already completed, but this time I’m also graying out revisions that I want to put a pin in for next time. Every revision triage results in a slightly different revision map. People say each book teaches you how to write it, and I've found that to be true of revising as well as for drafting. Each story needs to be told in a different way. Each round of edits has different requirements. But for me, this process always boils down to the color-coded spreadsheet, the categorization of different types of changes. That's what gets me through. Sometimes it feels like this process of revision triage takes too much time, especially when I’m on deadline, but ultimately, it’s so helpful to me to have an overall sense of where the story is headed, what it’s going to look like when all the threads are tightened and all the extra stuff is cut. It helps me to prioritize issues that will create ripple effects in the narrative, so I change things once instead of over and over again if I try to tackle a bunch of little things first. And finally, it makes me feel like I’m moving forward, breaking down even the big tasks into smaller parts, so I can cross them off like little victories in the long slog of revising a novel. Work and Process is a year-long journey of exploring and reflecting on the artistic process, craft, and working in a creative field. Each Sunday, I’ll post some thoughts, wonderings, explanations, and explorations on writing and creativity, and by the end of it, I hope to have 52 musings, examinations, meanderings, discoveries, bits of joy or inquisitiveness or knowledge to share. In each post, I’ll also include a topic for the following week, so if you happen to be inspired to question/wonder at/consider your own work and process, you’re welcome to join me. We’ll be using the #workandprocess hashtag across all social media platforms, and I hope we find each other to learn and connect and transform on our creative wanderings.  The other day, I was visiting with my friend, Evangeline Crittenden, a multi-skilled actor, director, writer, and musician, whose latest projects include Pepper & Snatch’s Cowboy Cabaret (next show June 13th at the Bang Bang Room in Downtown LA!) and the dream-pop duo, Glamour Pony, and during one of those meandering, thought-provoking conversations that last for hours, we started talking about the necessity of audience participation in performance. A performance shouldn’t spell everything out for you, we agreed, shouldn’t tell you exactly how to feel or think or process, shouldn’t smother you with its own interpretation until you cannot breathe. (I do want to say that this could all be a matter of personal taste, though. We like what we like and create the way we create. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) This discussion got me thinking about the 2005 film, Hitch, starring Will Smith as a dating coach who teaches men how to get the women of their dreams into relationships. I don’t recall much about the movie, and given what I remember about its premise, if I saw it again today, I don’t think I’d like it much either, but this one scene keeps coming back to me: Hitch is teaching Kevin James’s character, Albert, how to get to the first kiss at the end of a first date, and he says, “The secret to a kiss is to go ninety percent of the way, and then hold.” Go ninety. Then stop. Wait for the other person to go the last ten. Here’s what I like about this idea: giving the other person the opportunity and choice to participate, inviting them to bring something to the interaction between you. The percentages may vary, but I think maybe this advice applies not only to kisses but to performance and writing as well. Once, in a creative writing workshop, a colleague told me that I didn’t have to land so heavily on each paragraph. I didn’t have to hit so hard. I could just let the words ring for a while. At the time, I thought, Uh, no. I want every word to land like a punch. Or like a steamroller. To this day, my solution to most of my writing obstacles is “throw more words at it.” One hundred or why bother, amirite? Since then, however, I’ve come to appreciate that space between ninety and ten, that restraint, that gap between the thing and the audience, the place where meaning resonates. Poets do this beautifully, I think, utilizing line breaks and white space, creating breathing room on the page, places for the words to ring, gaps that ask the reader to make their own connections or to imagine outside of the poem. I love rereading Danez Smith’s poem, “summer, somewhere” (excerpted here) from their collection, Don’t Call Us Dead, for example, not only because it’s beautiful and painful and powerful and and and... but because the lines ring: paradise is a world where everything Ring. do you know what it’s like to live Ring. It’s stunning, the way the words take you right to the edge of spelling it out, but don’t. The way the reader has to piece together the rest. Has to take that leap into meaning. Has to think (and I think also to empathize and connect). I think that’s more powerful, in a lot of ways, than words that wash over a reader, overwhelming them, because it invites a more active participation, because it creates a more interactive experience. There is, of course, a time for creative work that does most or all of the work. There is also a time when a driving, steamrolling sort of narrative style works better than a spare, restrained one. (Maybe that’s a topic for a future post?) But I love that breathing room between the art and the audience, because I think it means the audience comes out of themselves, in a way, isn’t insulated from the creative work but part of it, forming these connections, building bridges. Next week: EGO. For the past few months, after the biggest crisis in confidence I’ve experienced in probably ten years, I’ve been thinking about the role of self-confidence in art. When is it necessary? When will it ruin you or your creativity? How can we use it and not let it overwhelm us? Join me me me me me next Sunday at tracichee.com and/or post your own responses with the hashtag #workandprocess. I’ll go ninety. You go ten. <3 Work and Process is a year-long journey of exploring and reflecting on the artistic process, craft, and working in a creative field. Each Sunday, I’ll post some thoughts, wonderings, explanations, and explorations on writing and creativity, and by the end of it, I hope to have 52 musings, examinations, meanderings, discoveries, bits of joy or inquisitiveness or knowledge to share. In each post, I’ll also include a topic for the following week, so if you happen to be inspired to question/wonder at/consider your own work and process, you’re welcome to join me. We’ll be using the #workandprocess hashtag across all social media platforms, and I hope we find each other to learn and connect and transform on our creative wanderings.  Well, hello! After two weeks of meandering toward this topic, we’re finally talking about significant concrete detail. It’s funny--I always thought of significant concrete detail as this fundamental concept, like, oh, okay, I need to describe things, check and check. It’s one of the first things I studied in Introduction to Creative Writing, and although it’s stuck with me all this time, I don’t actually think I really understood it until recently. Because it’s important, but it’s actually not simple at all. Every time I tried to write about significant concrete detail, I realized I first had to write about something else. Scene and summary. Sensory detail and abstraction. My rule of three (but not always three) things. Don’t worry, though, we’re going to break it all down together. First, let’s clarify what I mean by detail. In my mind, a detail is a description of something in the scene, usually a part of the environment, a character, or an action. In this definition, details aren’t summary, nor are they dialogue or thoughts. Including a detail would be talking about that red chair in the corner or about that dancer moving across the stage, but the backstory of the chair or the dancer’s internal monologue. Then, significance. For something to be significant, I think, it must be relevant to the story you’re telling. It must contribute, in some way, to the forward motion of the narrative, to the development of the character(s), to the atmosphere of a scene, to the conflict, to the stakes, etc. For example, let’s look at this passage from Emily St. John Mandel’s adult literary post-apocalyptic novel, Station Eleven, wherein one of the main characters, Kirsten, is describing her backpack and the few belongings in it (pg. 66): Her backpack was child-size, red canvas with a cracked and faded image of Spider-Man, and in it she carried as little as possible: two glass bottles of water that in a previous civilization had held Lipton Iced Tea, a sweater, a rag she tied over her face in dusty houses, a twist of wire for picking locks, the ziplock bag that held her tabloid collection and the Dr. Eleven comics, and a paperweight. Everything is significant here. The backpack (“small,” “child-size,” “with a cracked and faded image of Spider-Man”) tells us first that Kirsten doesn’t need many belongings, because they will fit in such a small bag, and second, that although she is an adult walking the ruins of human civilization, she’s also still clinging to her past and the childhood that ended, essentially, at the same time the world did. The list itself tells us something about her, too. She’s economical. She carries what she needs to survive but not much more. And she has the ability to survive on very little. Finally, the last two things she carries, a tabloid and comics collection and a paperweight, not only tell us that Kirsten is fascinated by and years for the world she never really got to know, but they also tether her post-apocalyptic storyline to the two other storylines in the novel: that of a lead actor in a pre-apocalypse production of King Lear and that of a paparrazo-turned-EMT during the flu outbreak that annihilated most of the global population. I think this is a good time to talk about My Rule of Three (But Not Always Three) Things, which is that everything you put on the page must fulfill at least two or three narrative purposes. They can immerse the reader in the scene, sure, (that’s one), but they also have to create atmosphere, ratchet up the tension, reveal character, generate conflict, increase the stakes, develop theme, etc. If something (a detail, a bit of dialogue, anything) isn’t doing this story work, then it can probably be cut or exchanged for something that will pull more weight. If you count the meanings we’ve already discussed (two for the backpack, three for the list itself, two for the collection and paperweight), the above passage from Station Eleven already accomplishes seven things. But we can also examine each detail individually to see how much it accomplishes. The “glass bottles of water that in a previous civilization had held Lipton Iced Tea” is a long phrase for what could have been just “bottles,” “glass bottles,” or “Lipton Iced Tea bottles,” but the long and slightly stilted phrasing tells us that perhaps Kirsten doesn’t actually remember what Lipton Iced Tea is, or even what iced tea tastes like, so there this also this disconnect between her/her current world and her memory/her old world. The “red” of the backapck, in contrast, doesn’t contribute nearly as much. Different details can do varying amounts of work, but overall, this single sentence tells us maybe a dozen things we need to know about the story. Everything does more than one job. Everything contributes more than one thing to the storytelling. Now, before we get into concreteness, I’d like to quickly dip into the difference between sensory detail and abstraction. Sensory detail is, as you might expect, detail that evokes the five senses (smell, touch, sight, sound, taste). A peppery scent on the air. A velvety sky. A howl in the bones. These are sensory. You can almost smell/feel/hear them. Abstraction, on the other hand, is more vague. Abstractions are often emotions (love, fury, distaste, consternation), and by themselves, they often rely on a reader’s existing ideas and expectations rather than generating or evoking new ones, so they can lack the power and originality of sensory details and can come off as cliche. (This isn’t to say not to use abstractions at all. As I mentioned in my post on writing advice, I dislike writing dogma and prefer to figure out how to use different writing tools in effective ways. As a tool, abstraction can work really well in conjunction with sensory details, for example. Do what’s best for your story!) Okay, so, to return to our exploration of significant concrete detail, concrete details are ones that are sensory. They put the reader in the middle of a scene and invite them to feel, see, and hear along with the characters. Let’s take another paragraph from Station Eleven, in which Kirsten and her friend August are on guard after having left a creepy cult town. At this point, they think they’ve heard something in the forest (pg. 136): August and Kirsten set off as quickly and quietly as possible in the direction of the sound. The forest was a dark mass on either side, alive and filled with indecipherable rustlings, shadows like ink against the glare of the moonlight. An owl flew low across the road ahead. A moment later there was a distant beating of small wings, birds stirred from their sleep, black specks rising and wheeling against the stars. Instead of using summary to tell us that the characters are on edge (abstraction) because they’re afraid (also abstraction) they’re being stalked, the author instead uses significant concrete detail. There’s this focus on sight (or lack thereof): “dark,” “shadows,” “glare,” and “black.” The simile “like ink” feels tactile to me, that particular cool fluidity of spilled ink, but that, too, is about the impenetrability of the night. And there’s an emphasis on sound as well: “indecipherable rustlings,” “distant beating of small wings.” I’d add “birds stirred from their sleep” too, because the repeated “whirr” sound of the words “birds” and “stirred” also evokes a particular small, fast sound. To put it all together, these concrete details are significant, because they create both atmosphere and tension. In this scene, the characters are unable to see very far in the dark woods, but because of the smallness of the sounds, the things in the woods feel very close. It’s unsettling, knowing they’re not far from possible threats but not knowing exactly where those threats are. The question, Has the cult come after them? doesn’t even need to be asked, because it’s already evoked more powerfully in these details. Kirsten and August are thinking it. The reader is thinking it. We’re all crouched in the dark, together, listening and wondering what’s out there. *chef’s kiss* Next week: SPACE TO BREATHE. I’ve been thinking a lot about the role of emptiness in the creative process. The necessity of white space on the page. The gaps in which we make meaning. Breathe with me next Sunday at tracichee.com and/or post your own responses with the hashtag #workandprocess. Inhale. Exhale. You’ve got this. <3 Work and Process is a year-long journey of exploring and reflecting on the artistic process, craft, and working in a creative field. Each Sunday, I’ll post some thoughts, wonderings, explanations, and explorations on writing and creativity, and by the end of it, I hope to have 52 musings, examinations, meanderings, discoveries, bits of joy or inquisitiveness or knowledge to share. In each post, I’ll also include a topic for the following week, so if you happen to be inspired to question/wonder at/consider your own work and process, you’re welcome to join me. We’ll be using the #workandprocess hashtag across all social media platforms, and I hope we find each other to learn and connect and transform on our creative wanderings.  I did it again. I said I’d talk about significant concrete detail this week, and now I’m talking about something else. That’s because as soon as I started trying to talk about significant concrete detail, I realized that I first needed to address a different topic: the difference between scene and summary. You may have heard the advice, “Show. Don’t tell.” I suspect it’s intended to mean: use description and action to write an immersive scene, rather than explaining to the reader what’s going on and what’s at stake, as if you were a lecturer rather than a storyteller. But ultimately, this is one of my least favorite pieces of writing advice, because it ends up being so reductive. “Show. Don’t tell.” means you get long paragraphs of description about, what, a room? A person’s clothes? An action sequence? These things can be compelling, of course, but strict adherents of “Show. Don’t tell.” tend to linger on these inconsequential details, making them seem drawn out and even boring, rather than getting a move on with the story. That said, what I find more useful than “Show. Don’t tell.” is a discussion of scene and summary. You might be able to recognize these as soon as you see them. Scene is where it feels like you’re actually there with the characters. The writer includes descriptions, dialogue, actions, and even if the passage written in the past verb tense, it still kind of feels like it’s all unfolding or happening as you read it. (You could say it’s “showing,” but like I said, I’m trying to get away from that paradigm.) Summary, on the other hand, is where big pieces are quickly (relatively, anyway) skimmed over. These passages can feel like a montage, or a jump in time, or a recap of something that’s already happened somewhere else. It feels like a recounting of an event, rather than the event actually happening in real time. Do you remember those scenes in Ant-Man where Michael Peña’s character, Luis, tells Ant-Man a quick-ish anecdote? That’s summary. (You could also say this is “telling,” but you know how I feel about that.) I’d say that in general, the bulk of a story is often made up of scenes (although pieces like "Brokeback Mountain" by Annie Proulx use summary in breathtaking ways, covering years of information in a few sentences or a paragraph). Scenes, in general, keep the reader in the story, if that makes sense, while summary is used to give readers information they need, but that they don’t need to see happen before their very eyes. Someone’s great uncle keeled over at dinner one night, so the main character has inherited a vast sum and now needs to figure out how she’s going to live the rest of her life? Great opportunity for summary. We don’t need to see the uncle’s death if the story isn’t about the uncle or his death but about what the main character is going to do with the money now. The characters go to bed? Great. We don’t need to see their extensive night time rituals. We can just be told, “Occupied by their separate thoughts, the family retired to their separate bedrooms for a restless night of sleep,” and move on to the next scene. What I love about scene and summary (as opposed to “Show. Don’t tell.”) is that they both have their places, and their places are almost never totally separate. Writers flip back and forth between scene and summary all the time. For example, let’s look at this passage from A Shadow Bright and Burning, the first book in a rollicking good read of a YA fantasy series by Jessica Cluess: The sorcerer guided Sarah to a chair while I remained by the wall, invisible as always. Schoolteachers don’t stand out naturally, and I was far too thin and dark-haired to make much of an impact. Granted, I didn’t want to stand out to Agrippa today, not if he’d come about the fires. I exhaled, praying that my heartbeat would slow. Please say that he had come for some other reason. The scenery, the terrible April weather, anything. I love how Cluess jumps effortlessly back and forth between scene and summary here, weaving them seamlessly to keep us in the present storyline while also providing background information necessary to our understanding of the story and characters. SCENE: It’s as if we’re watching these actions unfold: the sorcerer and Sarah in movement; the main character, Henrietta, standing still, unnoticed: The sorcerer guided Sarah to a chair while I remained by the wall, invisible as always SUMMARY: Then the narration switches to exposition, revealing, I think, how Henrietta conceives of herself at the beginning of the novel, before the start of her adventure: Schoolteachers don’t stand out naturally, and I was far too thin and dark-haired to make much of an impact. SCENE: And just as quickly, Cluess pops us back into the room with Henrietta, the sorcerer, and Sarah. The narration remains in her head, but it’s concerned with what’s happening right now, emphasized by Henrietta’s focus on her breath and heartbeat: Granted, I didn’t want to stand out to Agrippa today, not if he’d come about the fires. I exhaled, praying that my heartbeat would slow. Please say that he had come for some other reason. The scenery, the terrible April weather, anything. If a fervent believer of “Show. Don’t tell.” were writing this story, they might belabor Henrietta’s inconspicuousness, going into excruciating detail about exactly how and why she fades into the background of this scene. But summary, coupled with the very voice-driven statement “invisible as always” (which in itself might be considered a form of “telling,” I suppose, but the “as always” has such wonderful hints of both resentment and resignation to it, “showing” that while Henrietta may consider herself “invisible,” she isn’t necessarily content with it, thus creating tension between who she considers herself now, who she wants to become, and how she navigates the path between them), achieves the same effect in a more efficient way. Both scene and summary (or “showing” and “telling”) are such great tools for a storyteller, and they serve different purposes (although, of course, I advocate trying to use them for totally different purposes, too, just to see if you can). I don’t see any point in ignoring one of the tools in your toolbox when you could, instead, try everything. Get comfortable with ways to incorporate both scene and summary into your work, and then, if you’re so inclined, get bold. These are your tools, after all. How else can you use them to tell a good story? Next week: SIGNIFICANT CONCRETE DETAIL. No, really! Next Sunday at tracichee.com and/or post your own responses with the hashtag #workandprocess. It’s already been written, I promise! <3 Work and Process is a year-long journey of exploring and reflecting on the artistic process, craft, and working in a creative field. Each Sunday, I’ll post some thoughts, wonderings, explanations, and explorations on writing and creativity, and by the end of it, I hope to have 52 musings, examinations, meanderings, discoveries, bits of joy or inquisitiveness or knowledge to share. In each post, I’ll also include a topic for the following week, so if you happen to be inspired to question/wonder at/consider your own work and process, you’re welcome to join me. We’ll be using the #workandprocess hashtag across all social media platforms, and I hope we find each other to learn and connect and transform on our creative wanderings.  I know I was going to talk about significant concrete detail this week (and I will, next time!), but last week’s discussion of experience and creative instinct got me thinking about the ways we conceive of artistry and how, I think, that’s linked to the ways we conceive of artists.
First, I think it might be helpful to define some terms. Personally, I believe that creative work comes from two places: talent and skill. Talent, I think, is something you’re born with. Some of us get more of it than others. Some of us get it in certain areas. That’s fine, I suppose, but I don’t think that it’s actually that important. For example, I was talking with a couple of poets the other day, and the subject of meter (a fancy and more structured way of talking about rhythm, I think) came up. You may remember meter from your English courses, practicing scansion, isolating trochees, spondees, and iambs, counting stressed and unstressed syllables: da DA da DA da DA… I remember my instructors warning the class that our study of meter was coming up. It’s going to be hard, they said. It’s going to be tedious, they said. It’ll be on the midterm, though, so you’d better learn it now. But I... loved... it. Without thinking too hard about it, I could “hear” (or maybe the correct word is “feel”) the different beats in a word or combination of words. I thought it was marvelous--so powerful and, at the same time, almost undetectable. I’d always assumed that my training in music (piano, flute, guitar, choir) made scansion easier for me, but one of the poets I was talking to said she had a musical background, too, and still didn’t feel like scansion came easily to her. I’ve never really considered myself talented--in the past, I’ve said that I only feel naturally good at one thing when it comes to writing, and that’s coming up with a cool idea (although lately I’ve even begun questioning that)--but for a second I did have that thought: Whoa, maybe I do have talent. Quickly followed by, So what? Maybe talent can make you more sensitive to certain aspects of art or make certain things (like scansion) a little easier, at least at the outset. But I think the impact of talent is generally negligible when compared to skill. I believe skill is something you work at. Something you practice. Something you get better at only with time, effort, and (often) guidance. It doesn’t matter, for example, if I can hear the rhythm in a line of poetry if I don’t have the skills to use that in my own work. I mentioned back in Week 4 that one of my two universal pieces of writing advice is to always keep learning, and I’m absolutely talking about skill. (Related, Kameron Hurley, author of The Mirror Empire and The Geek-Feminist Revolution, has a fantastic post on persistence and how learning and increasing your skills and not giving up is more important than talent in a career in the arts.) Skill, I think, is what really matters, not only because it means you’re not born with a finite amount of artistry in you and once you hit your limit, too bad, but also because it means there’s hope. Sometimes I look at my peers, whom I respect and whose work I admire, and think they make the work look so easy. It comes so naturally to them. They produce beautiful, thought-provoking art as effortlessly as I would turn on a faucet, and I sit here trying to wring out just one artful word from this dumb, dried-up brain of mine. It’s discouraging, feeling like you’ll never measure up to your contemporaries because they’re just so much more talented than you are. But here’s what I try to remind myself: Art that looks effortless is often the product of years of work. Last week, for example, when I was talking about creative instinct, I didn’t mean instincts we were born with--I meant instincts we develop through experience, practice, and work. If I know, without consciously thinking about it, that a scene isn’t working, it’s not because I have a superhuman gift with scene writing. It’s because I’ve written so many scenes now, I know how it should feel when they’re good, and if it doesn’t feel like that, then it’s time to approach it from a different angle. I recently watched Mary Shelley, a film about the woman who wrote Frankenstein, what some call the first science fiction novel, and there’s a scene where all of the little inspirations that have been peppered throughout the movie (she likes to tell horror stories, she saw a demonstration of galvanism on the corpse of a frog) suddenly come together in this frenetic act of artistry. She takes up the pen, and in one quick montage, she scribbles out this seminal work of 19th century fiction! What genius! I think we like to believe that some artists are just born. “True genius” is a more romantic narrative than “I worked hard at this for decades so I wouldn’t suck at it.” And I’ll willingly admit that Mary Shelley may not be the best example, because she was a teenager when she wrote Frankenstein, and because it reportedly did have its origins in a single weekend of telling scary stories. But I feel like I’ve seen this portrayal of the artist before: the prodigy, the virtuoso, the rare person born with so much talent, it was practically inevitable that they make a masterpiece. At least, I’ve seen this portrayal often enough for it be harmful to the rest of us, because if we believe that some things just come more easily to some people, that some people just get to be artistic geniuses, well, then, why should the rest of us even bother trying? No, thank you. Give me the art that’s difficult. Give me the creators that struggle. Give me the understanding that making something really great takes time and effort and probably failure, big and small. Give me a community where we’re all in this together, and maybe someone’s got an ear for rhythm or someone’s got an instinct for plot, but we’re all struggling in our own ways, and we’re all trying to get better. If I haven’t made it clear enough, I want to dispel the illusion that creative work is something divinely inspired, something inherent, something you have to be a one-in-a-million talent to do. Rather, please allow me to draw back the curtain, to rewrite the story: creative work is work. It takes skill more than it takes talent. It takes years. It takes study. It takes practice. It takes patience, determination, and persistence. If you are having a hard time with your project, if you are building up your skill set, if you are developing your instincts, you are not alone. We are all with you. Next week: SIGNIFICANT CONCRETE DETAIL. For real this time, next Sunday at tracichee.com and/or post your own responses with the hashtag #workandprocess. Time to get back on track. <3 Work and Process is a year-long journey of exploring and reflecting on the artistic process, craft, and working in a creative field. Each Sunday, I’ll post some thoughts, wonderings, explanations, and explorations on writing and creativity, and by the end of it, I hope to have 52 musings, examinations, meanderings, discoveries, bits of joy or inquisitiveness or knowledge to share. In each post, I’ll also include a topic for the following week, so if you happen to be inspired to question/wonder at/consider your own work and process, you’re welcome to join me. We’ll be using the #workandprocess hashtag across all social media platforms, and I hope we find each other to learn and connect and transform on our creative wanderings.  If you read last week’s post on creative hobbies, you know I’ve started gardening more as a creative outlet. You also know I used to be an accidental plant-murderer. There are a number of ways to kill plants (not enough water, not enough light, too much light, too much food, not enough food, pests, disease, pruning, etc.), but my primary offense has always been overwatering. I’d see my plants struggling and think, Oh no! They need more water! when in fact, almost always, the plants were actually telling me, Less water, please! before drowning in my frantic and ignorant zeal.
The thing is, I had such limited knowledge and experience that I had only one way to address my plants’ needs: more water. But the more plants I’ve kept alive (and also killed, to be honest), the more I’ve learned to understand what they like: more water, less water, more light, less light, some fertilizer (but not too much), repotting, thinning, pinching, different soil… Now, when I see them struggling, I test the top inch of soil for moisture or feel the heaviness of the pot before watering. When encouraging my herbs to grow a certain way, I cut them at the right spot. I now have a lot of ways to approach gardening, a lot of tools in my toolkit, so to speak, and the experience and understanding to help me use those tools effectively. Which brings me around to my point for this week, because learning how to garden has gotten me thinking about the relationships between experience, instinct, and skill. It wasn’t too long ago, with regards to writing, I used to say that my main method of problem solving was “throw more words at it.” Stuck on a plot point? Throw more words at it. Can’t figure out this character’s motivation? Throw more words at it. Don’t know where to end a scene? Throw more words at it. As with my plants, I had a limited understanding of the problems my stories were having and a limited number of ways to address them, which often resulted in long (and/or many) drafts with lots of unusable words and ultimately a lot of stories that went nowhere or simply weren’t very good. But as I’ve written more stories, done this for more years, I’ve gained more experience with and understanding of my own work and process, which has ultimately translated into what I think we’d call instinct. Now, I can be working on a project, run into a problem, and understand within a page or two what’s wrong. Maybe I’m starting the scene too early. Maybe I don’t understand the main character’s motivations well enough. Maybe I don’t have a handle on the narrative voice. Maybe there needs to be more action/more funny/more angst. Maybe I need to slow down and stop pressuring myself so much. These instincts mean that I don’t often have to write huge chunks of manuscript before I realize they’re not working, saving me in both time and frustration, and my years of classes and craft books and writing exercises mean that I can usually find a good tool (a map, a brainstorm, a list of 10 things, etc.) to address the particular problem I’m having at any given moment. What’s cool is that experience and instinct work not just for the day-to-day practice of writing but for understanding my creative process as well. In the past year or so, I’ve noticed that it’s getting easier to listen to what my process is telling me. Now is the time to absorb rather than produce. Now is the time to plan. Now is the time to listen to music and take walks and jot down scattered notes that don’t connect right now but are in fact formative building blocks for the story I’ll later create. Now is the time to write the first words. Now is the time to read and revise. This understanding means that I don’t dive into a project before it’s ready to be written, or I let a book percolate for long enough that by the time I start on it, it’s dying to be written, or I collect enough research material that I’m not stymied by my own lack of world-building a quarter of the way into the novel. And these instincts, I think, will only get better the more experience I get. I found out the other day that if you cut a sprig of mint at a certain point and leave it in water (because perhaps you’re not ready to use it), it will send out roots, and you’ll be able to plant it again! It’s so exciting, because I feel like there are so many more things to learn and experience, both in gardening and in writing, and I’m so looking forward to discovering them. Next week: SIGNIFICANT CONCRETE DETAIL. I’m a descriptive writer by nature--I think because I as a writer have to understand exactly what a scene looks or smells or sounds like if I’m going to write about it. Otherwise I feel like I’m writing into nothing, trying to fill a void with a story rather than figure out the story that’s already going on in a particular environment. One of the first things I ever learned about craft, and indeed had practically drilled into my head while I was at UC Santa Cruz, was the importance of significant, concrete detail. Let’s rehash my college glory days next Sunday at tracichee.com and/or post your own responses with the hashtag #workandprocess. Oh frabjous day! <3 Work and Process is a year-long journey of exploring and reflecting on the artistic process, craft, and working in a creative field. Each Sunday, I’ll post some thoughts, wonderings, explanations, and explorations on writing and creativity, and by the end of it, I hope to have 52 musings, examinations, meanderings, discoveries, bits of joy or inquisitiveness or knowledge to share. In each post, I’ll also include a topic for the following week, so if you happen to be inspired to question/wonder at/consider your own work and process, you’re welcome to join me. We’ll be using the #workandprocess hashtag across all social media platforms, and I hope we find each other to learn and connect and transform on our creative wanderings.  Spring is here. The little crabapple tree I’m trying to turn into a bonsai is leafing out. After I finally figured out that I needed to fertilize it, the spearmint that’s been struggling on my windowsill for two years is finally thriving. I’m starting forty-eight basil plants from seed in hopes that enough will survive so I can achieve my lifelong (okay, decades-long) dream of being able to periodically harvest my own basil for fresh pesto. All of a sudden, after a lifetime track record of killing every plant that’s ever had the misfortune of being under my care, I’ve somehow become a gardener.
This transformation didn’t happen overnight, of course. It started maybe six or seven years ago when I was given my first moth orchid, which, contrary to popular belief, has a care routine so regular and predictable that even I could keep it alive. (If you’re curious, see the end of the post for details!) Slowly, I acquired more orchids, then branched out into air plants, bonsai (or what will become bonsai in like 10-20 years, I hope), and indoor herbs. I like the creativity of gardening, particularly with the bonsai, which I’m trying to figure out how to train as well as grow, and I get to be a problem-solver, learning if it’s sun or water or fertilizer the plants need more or less of, trying to determine why the leaves are wilting like that, what the proper soil mixture is, where the plants are happiest during what times of the year. But I’ve had a lot of creative hobbies over the years (drawing, music, book-making, egg-painting), and while I still turn to them occasionally, it’s gardening that’s taken up more and more of my creative free time. And I think that it has to do with my career. Everyone’s experiences are different, of course, but for me, a strange thing happened when I started writing novels professionally. Writing, which had always been a fun creative outlet, a hobby, something I pursued not because it was my job but because I loved it, suddenly became the thing I did because I had to. Without a doubt, I still loved it (and still do), but it had also become an obligation, a responsibility, something I did not because I was inspired, necessarily, but because I wanted to get paid. Which was fine. I welcomed it. I had always wanted to do this work, and I was so grateful and fulfilled because I was actually getting to do it. What I didn’t expect and have been struggling with for a few years, though, was that becoming a professional author not only changed my relationship to my writing, but it also changed my relationship to all my other creative hobbies. For me, becoming a professional author didn’t just mean getting paid to write the books, but it also meant promoting the books, and that’s where things started to get weird for me. Perhaps the most difficult part of this job for me has been navigating social media. I’m naturally a private, introverted person, most comfortable talking one-on-one with someone and kind of super terrified of trying to engage with a lot of people at once, so figuring out how to be in public online has been a huge challenge for me. Of course, I think professional authors do this in various ways--some are brilliant at joining communities or engaging with their readers or building their brands and platforms, some are hardly on social media at all--but for me, who was a new author in 2015-2016 and who often feels like a new author today, I felt (and still feel) this huge pressure to do better with my online platforms. There’s always this low-key buzz of anxiety in the back of my brain, sometimes even when I’m doing the bulk of my job, which is writing the books. How can I get more followers? How can I attract more readers? How can I get more likes/retweets/comments/replies? What am I going to post on Instagram? Will anyone pay attention? Should I be on Twitter more? How do I increase my engagement? Am I failing? Why does it always feel like I’m failing? And in this strange and stressful whirlwind of insecurities, it feels like everything I do should be performative in some way. If I come across some wildflowers, Instagram. If I have a funny thought about a TV show, Twitter. If I do my hair and makeup that day, selfie (or because I’m terrible at selfies, make someone else take a flattering photo of me, which almost invariably ends up being both time-consuming and an exercise in self-criticism). If I’m painting eggs, I can do designs inspired by book covers! If I’m baking, I can post cookies, cupcakes, muffins! We can bond over our shared love of baked goods, can’t we? If I’m drawing, I can post photos of my sketches! Look, everyone, I’m artistic! That’s a brand, right? Am I cool on the internet yet? In this weird, stressed-out brain of mine, not only had writing turned into a job, but so had all of the other fun, creative hobbies that I’d ever pursued, and that made them not fun anymore, not relaxing, not creative outlets that I wanted to keep doing but chores that I had to do because if I didn’t do them, I wasn’t doing the promotional part of my job, I was letting opportunities slide past, I was failing. And then I started gardening more. The trick, I found, is not being very good at it. I’m not a great photographer, and my plants are pretty ugly (because I’m not a great gardener either), so I’m never really tempted to share them or use them as social media content. My plants aren’t photo opportunities. They’re just my plants. This hobby isn’t an avenue for promotion. It’s just a hobby. And for me, at least, that’s been so freeing. My brain has something to chew on when it’s not actively working on a story. I can do something creative that I don’t feel the pressure to incorporate into my act. I don’t know if I’m the only one who feels this way, but for me, it’s nice to have a creative space where I don’t have to worry about reviews, judgments, comparisons, or competitions. I just work on it, and some plants live and some plants die and some plants flourish and some plants struggle, but I’m not stressed out over whether or not I’m failing or falling behind. I just keep doing it, and it’s relaxing and challenging and makes me content. This is something I’ve realized lately that I need. I love writing books and getting paid to do it, but I also think I need a protected creative space away from being the business of being an artist. Don’t get me wrong, the anxious churn of doubts and insecurities about my online presence (or lack thereof) is still there, and still frightening, and still distracting--having a creative hobby doesn’t help that. But having a creative hobby where I don’t feel the pressure to perform or to sell is nourishing to my creative spirit, which I need if I want to keep doing the main part of the job, writing. It will, I think (I hope), make this career more sustainable mentally and emotionally and artistically, so I can keep doing this thing that I love. Next week: KNOWING YOUR PROCESS. Next week I’d like to talk about artistic instincts--how we get them, how we can use them, what they tell us about our creative endeavors, how to listen to them. Join the party next Sunday at tracichee.com and/or post your own responses with the hashtag #workandprocess. BYO cheer. <3 Work and Process is a year-long journey of exploring and reflecting on the artistic process, craft, and working in a creative field. Each Sunday, I’ll post some thoughts, wonderings, explanations, and explorations on writing and creativity, and by the end of it, I hope to have 52 musings, examinations, meanderings, discoveries, bits of joy or inquisitiveness or knowledge to share. In each post, I’ll also include a topic for the following week, so if you happen to be inspired to question/wonder at/consider your own work and process, you’re welcome to join me. We’ll be using the #workandprocess hashtag across all social media platforms, and I hope we find each other to learn and connect and transform on our creative wanderings. How I Keep Moth (Phalaenopsis) Orchids Alive Light: I’ve kept my orchid in a west-facing alley window and an east-facing one, in northern California where the sun wasn’t super intense at either time of the day, but was still pretty consistent. Light’s never really been that big of an issue for my orchids, though. Mostly, I feel like they should be getting some light but not the kind that will fry them. You know that feeling like when you go outside in the afternoon and you’re just getting cooked? They don’t like that. If they’re getting enough light, their leaves will be a nice bright green (somewhere between the green crayon and the light green crayon colors). If the leaves start to turn more yellow or have brown spots, they’re getting too much light. If the leaves start to turn dark green, they’re not getting enough. Start by putting them somewhere with some light (near a window, for example) and they’ll tell you whether it’s too much, not enough, or just right. Water: Watering is a little trickier, but not much. It depends on what your orchid is potted in. A lot of orchids from the grocery store come packed with a bunch of sphagnum moss, which holds a lot of water. People will tell you to put an ice cube on the moss (never touching the plant) once a week, and I’ve kept orchids alive this way. (The thing is, orchids are tropical plants and don’t super like cold, so this isn’t my preferred method of watering them.) Usually, after the flowers fall off and the spike (stem) turns brown, I cut the spike at the base, then repot the orchid in bark and a plastic pot with quite a few drainage holes (I used Google to teach me how to repot). The orchid bark holds some water, which is good, but doesn’t keep the roots soaking, which is bad and can drown/kill the plant. With my orchids potted in bark, I soak them for 10 minutes once a week, let them drain in the sink, and then put them back near the window. The bark should dry out over the course of the week, but if the pot feels heavy, like it still has a bunch of water still in it, I skip the soak that week and wait until the pot feels lighter the next time. I know that’s a huge paragraph, but basically, it’s pot in bark, soak 10 minutes once a week and drain. That’s it! Temperature: Temperature should probably be considered, but I’ve never had a problem with it. I think whatever we’d generally consider comfortable temperatures is what these orchids like, somewhere around 60-70 degrees Fahrenheit, although dipping a little above or below every so often hasn’t hurt my plants yet!  Writing to deadlines is such a strange thing, I think because a deadline is one of those intersections between art and business. Art (often) requires time to step back, to reflect, to discover, to make one thing only to realize you were making an entirely different thing the whole time and only now do you see how to really make the thing you wanted to make from the beginning. Business (often) requires things to happen a lot faster. When it comes to revision, for example, I prefer to read something over, to revise it, to let it sit, to think about it, to forget the old versions of it from previous drafts, to see it again as what it is, with all the new flaws that have appeared in its most recent edits, with brand new things to change and polish. But, for better or for worse (and I think there’s a bit of both here), my creative process is not the boss of me. There are publishing deadlines to be met, editorial and sales and printing schedules to adhere to, other people who are depending on me to get this book done so we can put it out there into the world.
Which makes the meeting of a deadline a particularly strange thing. I recently turned in a revision of my Secret Project, so I’m still feeling the momentum of deadline work (that compulsion to amass word counts or knock down chapters or hammer out character arcs), but the project is no longer in front of me, and that compulsion to keep working has nowhere to go. There’s technically more I could do to improve this manuscript: a couple details to include here and there, a bit of nuance to add to a character, continuity and consistency to iron out. I could absolutely spend more time cutting and editing and adjusting… Or I could not. There are more revisions to come on this project, and they, too, are going to take place in a limited timeframe, which means that there are only a limited number of times I can read and reread the manuscript in a set amount of days or weeks before I am so deep in the bramble of my own words (old and new, revised and re-revised) that I lose sight of the story entirely, the original drafts muddled with the latest, the things I cut or added all mixed up in one incoherent jumble. Given an unlimited amount of time, I could take a month between revisions to get out of the tangle of the project, to see the shape of it from a distance, to understand what I’m really looking at. But when deadlines are involved, I need to find ways to shortcut this process. Hence this week’s topic, not-doing. Or I guess, more accurately, not-thinking. Or not-looking, maybe? To give myself the kind of time/space/distance I need to come back to my project again with fresh eyes and a rejuvenated mind, I do my best not to work on it, not to till it or weed it or even look directly at it. I don’t let myself dwell on the story. I don’t allow myself to think about how to fix its imperfections. I try not to actively think about the book at all, like there’s this distance I want to create, or maybe a space I want to protect. Maybe it’s that I want my creativity to lie fallow for a while, so that when I come back to it, it’ll flourish again. Is it odd to think of the not-doing as a sort of work? I’m not actively thinking about my project, but it feels like I’m thinking around it, if that makes sense. I’m reading for research. I’m reading things that inspire me to be a better writer. I’m going on research trips and gardening and taking the dogs for hikes and considering the sensation of walking over different kinds of earth. I’m jotting down revision notes as they come to me (if they come to me), but not trying to figure out how to execute them or what ripples they’ll cause later. And all of these things, while not exactly the frenetic, driving, forward momentum of being on deadline, are things, I hope, that will not only make this project better when I return to it again but will expedite my naturally leisurely creative process so when art and business come together at my next deadline, maybe the intersection will be a little less fraught. Next week: CREATIVE HOBBIES. Until a few years ago, I would accidentally kill every plant I brought into my home. Then I discovered orchids, whose regular watering needs really suited me, and I started to collect a few different varieties, then expanded into a spearmint plant, some bonsai (well, they’re hopefully going to be bonsai eventually), air plants, and twenty-four basil seedlings that I’m starting this year. Somehow, I’ve gone from a plant-killer to (dare I say it?) a gardener. And I actually think that has to do with publishing, in a weird, roundabout sort of way. Hobby it up with me next Sunday at tracichee.com and/or post your own responses with the hashtag #workandprocess. Love and kindness. <3 Work and Process is a year-long journey of exploring and reflecting on the artistic process, craft, and working in a creative field. Each Sunday, I’ll post some thoughts, wonderings, explanations, and explorations on writing and creativity, and by the end of it, I hope to have 52 musings, examinations, meanderings, discoveries, bits of joy or inquisitiveness or knowledge to share. In each post, I’ll also include a topic for the following week, so if you happen to be inspired to question/wonder at/consider your own work and process, you’re welcome to join me. We’ll be using the #workandprocess hashtag across all social media platforms, and I hope we find each other to learn and connect and transform on our creative wanderings. |
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