 I make no secret of my unabashed love of revision. It’s my favorite part of the writing process, when I have the basic shape of the project and can finally see where it needs to be chipped away, added to, refined, and polished. I am happiest when I’m dismantling pieces of a book that aren’t working or spending half an hour picking out the exact right metaphor, rhythm, syntax for a single paragraph.
I came to my adoration of revision early in my study of craft, when I was at UC Santa Cruz. In my freshman writing seminar, we were required to produce a 20-page research paper on one of our readings. It was hard. I don’t think any of us had written anything that long and academically rigorous before, so we were all struggling, and about halfway through the quarter, after we’d turned in drafts of our ragged, pitiful attempts, my instructor said something that made me totally rethink the way I approached writing. Revision, she said, is re-envisioning. It seems so simple, after the fact, but at the time, it completely blew my mind. Revision is envisioning your project in a new way. Coming at it from a new angle. Seeing what else it could be. Approaching it from the perspective of knowing that you can tear down whatever you want because you can always make it better, make it whatever it was supposed to be from the beginning, only you couldn’t see it at the time. It felt freeing, knowing that I wasn’t beholden to the words I’d already written, to know that I could delete them and rework them and write new ones, better ones, ones that were truer or more beautiful. What’s so scary about that process is, I think, the feeling like if you have no limits on what you can delete and deconstruct, there’s the very real possibility that you can mess up all the hard work you’ve already done. But I learned something else my freshman year of undergrad, and it was actually in the same quarter, during my Introduction to Creative Writing course. We had a guest speaker (I wish I could remember who, but I’ve since lost my notes from those classes), who came in to talk to us about her books and her process, and she told us that all her second drafts were monstrous. But that’s okay! she said. Let them be monstrous. I remember sitting in that small lecture room, feeling like everything had changed for me… again. Because this was a new freedom, too. The freedom to write something bad. Something ugly. Something flawed and messy and misshapen. To know that I could write long, thick arms of subplots that would unbalance the whole narrative and to know that that was okay because I could always reshape them later. I could always cut them entirely, if I needed to. I could remove huge chunks of story, leaving a project looking skeletal and half-lumbering toward its ending, and in the end, the story would not only survive, but it might just be better for it. (Spoilers for The Reader below.) In The Reader Trilogy, for example, for a very long time, up until the 30th draft or so, Nin was supposed to live. Sefia found her in the Guard’s prison, broke her out, and ran away with her into the Delienean woodland, where Nin, having had enough of Sefia’s family’s hijinks, abandoned her. I still love that plot, because it shows how complicated Nin is. She still loves Sefia, but because of her involvement with Sefia’s family, she’s lost her job, her freedom, her sense of self… and by the time Sefia frees her, she’s just… had enough. She sees Sefia’s okay with Archer, and she makes a choice for self-preservation rather than for love and loyalty. The problem was that the ending of The Reader was so much better if Nin died. If Sefia saw Nin die. If the loss of one more person in her life tipped her over the edge into the person she had to become. So I killed Nin, and I killed this beautiful nuanced subplot, and I didn’t look back. Because it made the story stronger. Revision is re-envisioning. Let it be monstrous. These two concepts not only gave me freedom, they made me brave. I could try things that were risky (and you know how much I love risky), that could damage weeks or months of work… or that could bring everything together in a way both unexpected and inevitable. I could abandon storylines. I could create or destroy characters. I could chop entire chapters if I had to. I could be bold. Because with revision, I could do anything. Next week: MAPS & PACING. A couple weeks ago, I mentioned that I am a structure writer. I have to grasp the structure of a project to really understand it. I think that’s because I am by nature a visual thinker. Which means that when I’m working on a project, I make lots and lots of maps. Since this is a craft blog series, I’d like to share some of them with you, in case they help you in your work and process as well, starting next week with a pacing map I made while I was revising The Reader. Let’s forge ahead next Sunday at tracichee.com and/or post your own responses with the hashtag #workandprocess. In the words of author Chuck Wendig, art harder. <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.  When I was studying to become a teacher back in 2011-2012, I came across this concept that completely changed my thinking about education: the zone of proximal development. It’s the space between what you can do right now and what you can’t do yet, a space that you can cross but only with help. In education, you want to design lessons that sit in that zone of proximal development, challenging students to step up their current skills while providing the support they need so they don’t get discouraged. I loved this. It encompassed so much of what I already adored about learning but had never articulated before: the challenge, the satisfaction of success, the desire for new challenges and new successes.
But it wasn’t until a few years later, before I’d published a trilogy or signed with an agent or even finished a novel, that I realized how the zone of proximal development applied not only to my work as an educator but to my writing as well. I was working on The Reader, desperately hoping that I’d somehow be able to pull it off, that someone would want it, that someone would buy it, and it was at this vulnerable and pivotal time that I saw a live video chat with Markus Zusak, author of one of my favorite books, The Book Thief. The link to video is now broken, unfortunately, so I can’t remember exactly what he said, but what I got out of it was this: I only want to write the books that maybe I can’t write. And it was like for maybe the second time in my artistic life, I’d been seen. (The first might be that colleague I mentioned in Week 4, who told me to stick to my guns when all my other classmates were telling me to write like someone else.) Because that’s what I wanted (want) to write. Things that challenge me. Things that are juuuust out of my current reach. Things that I have to stretch and learn and grow and expand for. Things that are at the far edge of my zone of proximal development. Those are the projects that excite and invigorate me. Those are the projects that only I can write. Those are the only projects I want to write. Do you watch The Good Place? It’s a sitcom by showrunner Mike Schur (Brooklyn 99, Parks and Recreation), and the basic premise is this: The characters are dead and have been sent to a non-religious version of heaven, the Good Place, but one character doesn’t actually belong there because she's a human trash bag. While she tries to maintain her cover as a good person, she starts taking ethics lessons to become an actual good person. Hijinks ensue. The show is hilarious and uplifting, and it takes narrative risks and makes amazing plot twists, and the whole thing just feels, to me, beautifully refreshing. There’s also The Good Place: The Podcast, wherein the cast, crew, editors, designers, writers, and other people involved with the show discuss each episode, and it’s also funny and uplifting and creatively inspiring. Okay, but in case you missed it, allow me to reiterate: It’s a half-hour network TV sitcom about ethics. In the first episode of The Good Place: The Podcast, showrunner Mike Schur talks about how each episode, in addition to being funny and dynamic and narratively compelling, also explores an ethical concept, like moral particularism or utilitarianism, for example. So: jokes on jokes on jokes, plot twists, and ethics lessons in a sitcom. To me, the whole concept just feels so stupidly ambitious, and I mean that in the absolute BEST WAY. Doing something that shouldn’t work but totally (for some reason) does? And is also totally great? And maybe changes the way we think about sitcoms or network television or storytelling? Yes please. This is how I try to approach my projects, with, to quote The Good Place, “a ton of unearned confidence.” For example, The Reader is a young adult fantasy about a book within a book told in three timelines and eight perspectives. (As further evidence of my stupidity and ambition, I give you The Speaker: ten perspectives and three timelines, and one is told backwards. But let’s focus on The Reader for a second.) Should I have tackled this nonlinear, multi-perspective metafiction epic as my first novel? Or even my second? Probably not. Did I do it anyway? YOU BET I DID!* That’s because I don’t want to write things I already know I can do. Give me the stupidly ambitious. Give me the projects I maybe can’t write. Give me the distant edge of my zone of proximal development. Give me difficult and the brain-breaking and the world-expanding. I want to tackle things I haven’t mastered yet. I want to write something short! I want to master the cliffhanger chapter ending. I want to do a four-book series. A seven-book series! I want to say something about the things that are important to me, and I want that something to be thoughtful and nuanced and worth saying. I want to make people go, “That shouldn’t work but it totally (for some reason) does!” My ambition is vast. My aspirations are high. I just hope my creativity can keep up. Next week: WRITING IS REVISING. Not everyone loves revision, but it happens to be my favorite part of the writing process, and I’m so excited not only to be diving into a new batch of revisions on my current project but also to talk about how I approach revision with you! Cuddle up with your screen next Sunday at tracichee.com and/or post your own responses with the hashtag #workandprocess. P.S. I got to work with a puppy in my lap this week! <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 mean, whether I was successful is, of course, up for debate, but even though there are things I would change or do better if I was doing it again, I feel like I did what I could with what I had at the time and I just hope to keep doing better in the future. =]  Today I’d like to start in what might seem at first glance an unlikely place: the end of The Matrix Revolutions, the third installment of The Matrix Trilogy, released in 2003. For reasons we probably don’t need to discuss here, I kind of wish The Matrix Trilogy had stopped with the first movie, but The Matrix Revolutions did teach me one thing about storytelling that’s stuck with me for over fifteen years. It’s the climactic battle between Neo and Agent Smith, in the homogeneous, greenish-hued nightmare the Matrix has become, and Smith declares that he’s seen the ending of the fighting, and it ends with Neo’s defeat. There’s a battle that probably would have been better with a good deal less flying around, and finally Neo admits, “You were right, Smith. You were always right. It was inevitable.” He lets himself be absorbed, because Neo being absorbed by Smith is the only way to defeat him.
This line is actually a reference to The Matrix Reloaded, a whole movie ago, during the first battle in which Agent Smith tries to absorb Neo, and Smith says in that sinister-but-matter-of-fact growl that probably only Hugo Weaving can pull off, “It is inevitable.” And he’s right. And the reason he’s right is because after that moment, there is only one place the story could go, only one showdown, only one way to stop him, and it all leads (at least theoretically) to this one moment, this one, inevitable conclusion where Neo lets Smith take him. But for something to feel inevitable--an ending, a plot point, an OTP--the writer has to put in a lot of work planting the seeds and training them to grow toward their target. This week, in honor of my friend Meg, one of the contributors of Writer’s Block Party, a great blog on writing and publishing, I’d like to talk about how I approach that work, at least in part. (Some hints/spoilers for The Reader Trilogy below.) First, I want to refer back to last Sunday’s post and note that I am a structure writer. I conceive of my books through the major beats or crisis points in a story and the arcs that connect them. Before I ever begin drafting, I know at least some of these points, so I can write toward them. For example, all the way back when I was first drafting The Reader, I knew these major story beats for the final book:
To have these beats feel organic (that is, unforced) and meaningful to the story, I had to start introducing them early. I think of it like planting seeds in the narrative. Start them early, keep them growing by returning to them, and have them ripe by the time the story needs them. A note: My general rule is to reference something--an arc, a plot point, a joke, a meaningful interaction--at least three times. Once to introduce it. Twice to remind the audience that it’s there and to strengthen their expectations for it. A third time for the payoff. I think The Avengers (the first one) does this particularly well with Agent Coulson’s Captain America trading cards. First, they’re a joke, poking fun at Coulson-as-fanboy, as Black Widow asks Captain America if Coulson has asked him to sign his trading cards yet. Then the joke pays off when we see Coulson describing the cards to Captain America: “It’s a vintage set... It took me a couple years to collect them all… Near mint… Slight foxing around the edges...” But the third time the cards are mentioned, their meaning has changed. It’s just after the midpoint, and Loki has escaped, Coulson has died, and the Avengers are more divided than they have ever been. Nick Fury throws the bloodied set of cards on the table, trying to motivate the Avengers to unite. As an audience, we’re fresh off Coulson’s death and we’re reminded of what a pure nerdy boy he was, how dedicated he was to the idea of the Avengers, and how much we want to see them assemble too. (Do it for Coulson, Avengers!) As I said in Week 4, one can and should, of course, break this “three times” rule if it suits the narrative, but it’s a good one to keep in mind as you’re planting the seeds for events to come. From The Reader Trilogy, let’s take “how the protagonists would defeat the Guard” as an example. A lot happens during this crisis point--magic, death, ship battles, various other shenanigans--and a lot of it involves Cannek Reed, the outlaw captain obsessed with immortality. To get him to this point, where someone so consumed with his own survival is willingly running toward his own death in the hopes of making a better world, I had to plant a lot of seeds, and I started early, in The Reader. The third time we see Captain Reed, he’s five years in the past, at the bottom of a maelstrom. This scene is actually from the end of another of his quests, one that we never get to see, but it plants two important pieces of The Reader Trilogy’s climax: an important artifact that comes into play during the final battle and how Reed is going to die. It’s the latter, knowing how he’s going to bite the bullet (so to speak), that turns Reed into the character he is, the one obsessed with conquering death. It’s the whole reason he goes to the edge of the world, where he discovers an important piece of information for the climactic battle. It’s also what drives him to search for the Trove of the King, a journey that starts in The Reader, causes his adventures to intersect with Sefia’s, and takes him all the way into The Storyteller in search of another important artifact. Every time one of these artifacts or pieces of information is mentioned, it becomes more memorable and more important--to continue the metaphor, like a vine growing through the story, toward a crisis point I knew I’d have from the beginning. In this way, these narrative vines are woven throughout the novel, hinting at events to come. Of course, I don’t plan everything. In fact, revision is one of my favorite parts of the process because it allows me to plant even more seeds (for characters or plot points I discovered as I was drafting) and train even more vines, braiding them together and tightening the narrative until (hopefully) the beats of the story flow from one to another, as inevitable as a river flowing out to sea. Next week: STUPIDLY AMBITIOUS. You might have noticed in my weekly work space photos, which are at the top of every Work and Process post, that I’m currently outlining a New New Secret Project. It’s been awesome… and so far out of my comfort zone, because I’m not an outline writer by nature, that it’s been a real challenge. But I kind of love that. Next week, I’d love to talk about challenging yourself. How do you level up your skills? When do you set new goals for yourself? What inspires you to do better, whether in concept or in process? Bring your hot beverage of choice and meet me next Sunday at tracichee.com and/or post your own responses with the hashtag #workandprocess. Cheers. <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.  Can we start today with one of my favorite poems, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot? (You can read it at The Poetry Foundation for a little lovely kick of language!) Among many other things, I love the sound of the words, how they’re strung together, their surprising harmonies, but what I’d really talk about today is what I think is the central question of the poem: How should I begin?
Prufrock starts with an invitation: “Let us go, then.” The speaker is ready to start his journey, but again and again, he hesitates, wonders, “Do I dare?” and “Do I dare?”, stops, thinks of all the inevitable conclusions to his journey, asks, again and again, how should I presume? and how should I begin? and, still, after all that (and it is a long poem), never actually begins. Sometimes, I feel like embarking on a new project can be like that. There is so much to do before you even write a word. I read. I research. I mull. I make playlists. I watch movies, TV shows, documentaries. I travel, if I can. I make notes. I build theogonies, magic systems, family trees. My friend Erin Summerill, who is perhaps the sweetest and most energetic person you’ll ever meet and also the author of the Clash of Kingdoms series, pre-writes. She recently mentioned to me that she had over 100 pages of pre-writing for a new project, absolutely putting me and my pitiful few spreadsheets and scattered notes to shame! So, with all of this research and note-taking and pre-writing to do before we ever actually make anything, how should we presume? And how should we begin? At what point do you stop studying 17th century ship battles or pause the YouTube videos on how to make a bow? When do you, unlike our dear immobile friend Prufrock, take the first step into your art? I imagine it’s different for everybody, but, in case it was helpful, I thought I’d share the two things I always need before I ever write the first words of a new project: the world and the beats. The World Although I’m not a thorough world-builder by nature, I do need to have some sense of the world of my book before I begin writing it. For me, that usually involves geography, time period (or for fantasy, analogous time period), technology (including magic, if it’s that type of story), values, some historical context, and the characters or various entities that will push or pull the story in one direction or another. When I started The Reader, for example, I had a map of the world (Kelanna), a rough technological mash-up from the 17th (ships) and 18th (guns) centuries, a magic system (Illumination), an illiterate society, and my main characters. In retrospect, I could and should have done more preliminary work on Kelanna, because as I went along, I discovered there were holes in my world, and I’d either have to stop writing to figure it out or just avoid the topic altogether. (How do Kelannans keep track of time? I still have no idea.) Many more masterful world-builders than me do this work ahead of time, and one of my goals as a writer is to develop more thorough world construction techniques. (I’m currently delving into The Planet Construction Kit, recommended by my friend, writer, and professional LARP designer, Ben “Books” Schwartz.) Because I only need the bare bones of a world before I start writing, I often start with just the bare bones, and that’s something I’d like to improve upon. The Beats Now, the one thing I absolutely have to have before beginning a new project and cannot for the life of me do without are the major story beats: the crisis points where the tension is highest or the characters have the most to lose, the turning points where the status quo changes so dramatically, it can never go back to the way it was before. (Some spoilers below.) When I started The Reader, for example, I knew:
That left a lot of story to cover in between, of course, a lot of dots to connect, but knowing these beats gave me goals to write toward and a sense of the characters’ arcs as well as the arc of the novel, and this, more than anything, is what I need to begin a project. While the world-building is certainly important and should not be dismissed, where my storytelling heart truly lies in structure. I am a structure writer. (Not to be confused with a plot or outline writer.) Structure is what excites me about a new project. Structure is what I fall in love with. I conceive of my novels by their direction, their contours and ridges, their silhouettes, their beams and bones. I understand my work by how it feels in my hands, by its framing, by what it’s going to look like against the horizon when it’s done, and that’s what drives me to take that first step into my art. To go. To dare. And disturb the universe. Next week: PLANTING THE SEEDS. For all I am a structure writer, I don’t naturally outline my projects before I begin them, and that’s because I’m also a discovery writer by nature. I love the feeling of knowing I’m writing toward something, but not knowing exactly how I’ll get there until I’m actually typing the words, until my characters are surprising me with where they want to go and what they want to say. Ever since learning this about me, my friend Meg RK has been asking how, if I don’t plot out every little bit of my novels, I can foreshadow so deeply the events to come. Well, I’m finally giving Meg her answer. Climb aboard the Foreshadowing Express with Meg and me next Sunday at tracichee.com and/or post your own responses with the hashtag #workandprocess. Write on. <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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