The Cult of Craft

Bryan’s conversation about “Craft Beer Evangelists” hit a nerve.

Mainly because, for the past few years, I was a member of a cult. A group of single-minded missionaries, of fanboy zealots, of plaid-clad revolutionaries, riding out from California on their own modern crusade.

I didn’t even really know I was a member, but I still played my part. I parroted the virtues of our leaders to anyone who would listen (and many who were only pretending to listen), meanwhile demonizing the unforgivable sins of our “enemies.” To me it all made sense, it made me feel good, and gave me a sense of identity. The group felt like home, a warm and cozy fireside gathering where the other people in the room just “got” me.

I didn’t question or challenge the narrative. I was perpetuation manifest. I was a member of the Cult of Craft Beer.

Ha! Beer as a cult! Sounds ridiculous, right? Perhaps Oliver has been dipping into the rum stash too much, and came out the other side a wee bit hyperbolic?

Perhaps. But perhaps not.

Let’s look at some of the defining characteristics of cult-like behavior (my emphasis added):

• The group displays excessively zealous and unquestioning commitment to its belief system, ideology
• Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished
• The leadership dictates, sometimes in great detail, how members should think, act, and feel
• The group is elitist, claiming a special, exalted status for itself, its leader(s) and members
• The group has a polarized us-versus-them mentality, which may cause conflict with the wider society
• The group is preoccupied with bringing in new members
• The group is preoccupied with making money
• Members are encouraged or required to live and/or socialize only with other group members
• The most loyal members feel there can be no life outside the context of the group

Sound familiar?  Trade organizations setting definitions so we know what to drink? People on social media treating honest criticism as inflammatory nonsense? These behaviors rear their heads often, as new people enter the fold, or diehards do their best to keep the group-think thriving. The “Us-versus-Them” mentality is particularly strong, and has a become a defining aspect of “craft,” even though the “devious” Big Beer Companies still produce and sell 80%+ of all beer in the country.

The cult is alive and Tweeting. Don’t believe me? Here’s a recent conversation I got into with @BrewStuds:

@OliverJGray @beerbecue7 a good chunk of the country is still fighting to have the same freedoms that we enjoy in the more reformed states

— Brew Studs ♥ Beer (@BrewStuds) October 29, 2015

Rhetorically, this is dangerous territory. It puts beer in the same category as emancipation from slavery, civil rights, women’s suffrage. It sounds like we are fighting for some righteous cause, like we’ll go to war if we must for our “rights” (even if those rights only apply to what fermented drinks we can buy). It’s absurd when viewed from the outside, but totally reasonable to someone on the inside.

I challenged BrewStuds and said their thinking was potentially militaristic. Their response: “Militaristic? Passionate maybe.” This argument comes up a lot in conversations about beer, the idea that passion is justification for pretty much any behavior, and the real reason for brewing beer. Not money or economics or science, just “passion.” It tends to trump anything else; in the eyes of the cult, there’s no way craft brewers are anything but open and altruistic, because of their “passion” means they’re making great beer for us to enjoy with no ulteriors whatsoever.

This psychological magnetism to beer isn’t really a surprise, though. It was going to be something, and beer’s timing was impeccable.

With the economy still sluggish and a large chunk of Millennials out of work or underpaid, America is ripe for cultural makeover. Much like Tyler Durden’s “Project Mayhem” in  Fight Club, those joining the craft movement do so of their own free will after meeting others who’ve joined the proverbial fold, seeking some kind of freedom from the status quo, something they can wrap their identity around to feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves. Beer might seem an odd vehicle for cultural readjustment, but history plus availability plus the clever story of authenticity woven by small brewers has made it a perfect catalyst for social chemical reaction. Plus, humanity has always had a penchant for intoxication.

The first rule about beer club is that you ALWAYS talk about beer club.

Now that I’ve managed to step aside (either through disillusionment), I can see just how powerful the pull is. Many Americans (especially young Americans) are lacking financial and vocational independence, and it makes sense that they’d seek identity through some cultural movement. It makes sense that they’d come together to form a group, and beer, breweries, and bars offer an ideal set of circumstances (regionalism, nationalism, egalitarianism) on which to build a like-minded community.

But all perceived sense aside, a one-sided narrative, especially one fueled by a business-minded trade organization, is not an ideal way to live one’s life. Cults, typically, are not good things. They promote polar thinking and mindless subservience, even if the original goal was something much, much more humanistic and kind.

But cults are also not often an intentional creation, they just happen when one’s message reaches enough people who agree with it.

So is craft a cult? By literal definition, definitely a solid maybe.

Note: I want to make it very clear that I am not against the Brewer’s Association, no more than I’m against ABInBev. I’m a writer, trying to stay impartial. I actually support the BA and what they’ve done for over all US beer. But it’s important to look at all sides, as objectively as possible, without letting your personal prejudice (either way!) color the debate.

Craft and Draft: Plotting Progression

Do you remember the exact moment your pet turned from kitten into cat, or from puppy into dog, or from tiny goldfish to slightly less tiny goldfish? If you’re a normal human, probably not. Our brains tend not to notice small, incremental changes that happen over a long period because we’re only fed little pieces of information each day, and struggle to put all the puzzle pieces together to create a single image of the change. The only way we really notice the complete evolution is by comparing the present to the past using photographs or some other artifact, so we can make a direct comparison between mewling kitten and meowing cat.

Your progress in writing follows the same rules. You improve slowly over the course of many sentences and paragraphs written over many hours and many days, and you rarely notice any improvement as it is happening, even if it is relatively drastic. This is partly because of the natural functions of your brain, and partly based on how we’re told progress is supposed to work.

We are taught, through school and the visible success of public figures, that progress is a linear thing, a perpetually chugging and climbing train that always moves upward and forward, upward as we scramble up the Aggro Crag of our craft and forward as we hurdle over the obstacles of life and art, American Gladiator style. It makes logical sense that every word we write, every short story and essay we finish, moves us closer to our goal of becoming excellent writers. Every hour we put towards getting better actually makes us better. Practice, in theory, has a one-to-one progress pay off.

If we graphed the idealized form of progress, the purest, sweetest form of achievementitude, it would look something like this:

Pretty simple: as time stomps ever-forward, our skill inevitably improves.

But obviously nothing in life is idealized, not even our fantasies and dreams. Writing is a roiling, boiling witches brew of different techniques and skills, all of which need to come together to create a strong, compelling narrative potion. It requires a close eye on the cauldron and balance of the various ingredients – for these purposes grammar, imagery, dialogue, creativity, and structure – to brew up a tincture that readers will pick out from the other bottles on the shelf and actually want to imbibe.

And because these skills are not perfectly synonymous with each other, because they require different, often disconnected parts of your brain, because they may come naturally or not come at all, progress is never going to be perfectly linear. We’d like to think that each thing we write is still moving us forward though, so roadblocks in certain areas are just plateaus, times when we circle the wagons to weather the dust storm until we can sally-forth once again, all pen-and-paper manifest destiny like.

If we graphed a more realistic representation of progress, it would look something like this:

A little more complicated, but still manageable: time still trudges down his path and we still get better, but we have to take some detours and hang out in some places until it’s safe (or smart) to move on.

But naivety; I know you too well. How quaint to think we’d always be improving, never slowing or staggering or falling behind! For a long time this idea, the notion that progress could never be stopped, clouded my mind like a heavy early morning fog that had yet to be burned off by the heat of the afternoon sun. I wanted – expected – everything I wrote to improve upon the last thing I wrote. I lived under the impression that every essay had to out-do the last, every short story needed to be more and more nuanced and literary, that every metaphor had to transcend mere humanity and do a fly-by buzz of the god’s palatial manor up on Olympus.

But that is as improbable as it is impossible. We are hard-wired to want to always improve, but if you obsess over what is in practice an unachievable goal, you’ll never actually write anything, stuck the underworld on the quest for unending improvement. You will write stuff that just isn’t very good. You’ll backslide, your words will fail you, you’ll have some pieces that instead of ringing out into the world with the flair and revelry of a triumphant trumpet, will slither out and drop onto the ground with an unsatisfying and sort of disgusting plop.

You’ll find that the train of climbing progress is actually a roller coaster, and at any moment the bottom might drop out, sending you screaming down the rails into a valley of meh. Sometimes you’ll write a thousand words and the only improvement is a single adjective clause tucked away in some otherwise uninspired paragraph. Sometimes you’ll have a fresh, invigorating idea that ends up ruined by your poor execution. Progress isn’t always upwards, but that’s OK. You can learn just as much from your not-so-good writing as you can from your really good writing. The point is, you’re still writing.

If we graphed the ups and downs, the cheers and jeers, the flourish and the plops of how we really grow, it would look something like this:

Now it’s looking more like a true writing process: when your dialogue is near perfect, your imagery is like, something grey or something? When your creativity is soaring, your grammar might be guttural Cro-magnon pseudo-speak and your structure might be reminiscent of a 3rd grader’s finger painting. You’re still technically improving, but sometimes only in one area, sometimes moving downwards before upwards, but still forward, as each new lesson, good or bad, teaches you something new.

This all dances around the idea that we are humans (not robots who can eat and survive on graphs alone) and our moods and wants and emotions all play into how we create. All of these skills are completely dependent on how we employ them, how we glue them down on the construction paper and arrange the colorful shapes, which is in turn dependent on our confidence.

Confidence, even using bold and headstrong people as examples, is nigh unplottable. The data for such a thing isn’t made up of numbers that can be understood by anyone in any real way. It’s like a taco made of paperback books or a cupcake baked with broccoli inside and frosted with hummus.  It’s outside of our normal brain bubbles. It’s all very non-Euclidean.

But, since I’ve got this graph theme going, I tried anyway. If you added human confidence to this whole progress thing, it would look something like this:

Regardless of your actual progress, you’re constantly fighting the growth and maturity (or lack thereof) of your confidence. Each success boosts and sends the orange line twirling skyward, like a model rocket at full blast, bumped slightly off it’s trajectory. Each rejection and stream of mean comments causes the rocket (and orange line) to smash into the ground (or X-axis) at full force, trying to burrow into the ground to hide from the negativity. Confidence in your art is the one ingredient that can make or break the literary meal, as it effects every single aspect, down to how you cook it and present it to your diners.

Progress can be so intangible, so caught in the fishing nets of practice and skills and self-doubt, that we can’t even see it as it creeps into our brain. It is important to take some time to track your progress, either with spreadsheets or a notepad or an abacus or something, so that at intervals you can take a break and actually look at what you’ve accomplished and how much you’ve improved.

Progress is slow going and often painfully roundabout, and yet we’re taught to think it’s a straight arrow-shot to fame and fortune. We’re conditioned to think that achievement is positive and should be celebrated, while failure is negative and should be shunned. But that’s just silly. No one could possibly live up to the expectations of winning or succeeding at everything they do, every time they do it. And if they somehow could, via a pact with some ancient evil or a old, bored Djinn, I’d say they were actually missing out on the lessons that can be taken away from doing something wrong.

Don’t be upset if your progress slows or stop or goes backwards, or even if you can’t even see any progress for a while; that is completely natural. The only thing that will actually hurt your ultimate progression is to quit completely. If you stop writing, you stop learning – from the wins and the losses – and soon enough, your graph will be blank.

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather have a ton of squiggly, messed up lines that show I’ve tried, than no lines at all.

How to Peer Edit

It’s easy, as a writer, to think of your craft as a one-way street. You write words, send them bleeping and whirring through the wiry innards of the internet to a reader, who then reads them. It’s all very binary. Writers are 0, readers are 1.

But when you start getting up and out, into the writing world, into the community of like-minded crazy people and neurotics and geniuses, you’ll start to notice that the writer-reader relationship is just the final product of a massive word factory, an interconnected automaton that clunks and steams as writers feed it raw materials through their laptops and tablets and notepads.

This factory is where all the drafts between 0 and 1 happen, where those oft-spoken-about but rarely seen editors do their editing things. While there are some wonderful and talented professional editors holding senior positions in the factory, the majority of the day-to-day editing is handled by the writers pulling bad words off of never-ending conveyor belts and turning big red valves on proofreading machines. This factory is the thumping mechanical heart of planet writing, the place where little baby mewling essays turn into triumphant opinionated masterpieces and sad, confused stories grow up to play in the literary NFL.

Good news: they’re hiring.

Editing another writer’s work will improve your writing. It gives you a chance to read all kinds of stuff you might not see otherwise, but also gives you a chance to see what mistakes other writers are making. Editing gives you the chance to learn from other people’s lessons, dissect how a writer created an image or a theme or a tone. It’s also one of the few ways you can truly give back to the writing community short of becoming Rowling-famous and giving away money because you’re feeling particularly philanthropic.

Seems easy, right? Go join a workshop group, grab some stuff, and edit! I like that attitude, that energy. You’ll need that. But not all edits are created equal. Prior proper preparation leads to efficient, effective editing.

How to Peer Edit

Things You’ll Need:

• Something to edit (preferably something that needs to be edited)
• A word processor with a “track changes” feature (MS Word, although I don’t like to admit it, works great. GoogleDocs ain’t bad in a pinch either)
• A printer and a red pen (in case your computer explodes or the hamster-wheels powering the internet suddenly fail)
• Your brain (that thing you routinely confound with whiskey and words)

Step 1: Take it for what it is

Before you take your crimson, inken scalpel to the page, bent on excising the grammatical tumors of the piece, take some time to just read it. Enjoy the story. Let the language court your brain and take it out to a fancy dinner, listen to the nuance of the word choices as they dance their elaborate syntactical ballet. Make friends with the characters, take a mental vacation to the setting, and really just let the narrative wash over your brain like a beautiful word wave.

Don’t try to fix mistakes, even if they’re obvious. Don’t try to analyze the voice or theme.

Just read.

And when you’re done, put it away for a little bit.

It’s important to appreciate the art of the piece you’re revising before actually offering any feedback. You need to understand what the author was going for, what message they hid deep in the emotional soul of the writing. If you don’t “get” the story, or haven’t taken time to just read it as a non-writer would, your final feedback won’t be as helpful, and might even, at times, be hurtful.

Step 2: Fix the easy stuff

Once you and the story are BFFs, you can start your actual review.

I find typos, misspellings, grammatical mistakes, and punctuation faux pas the most distracting things on the page. Before I can look at theme or metaphor or fancy things like sentence structure and variation, I have to go through and (try to) clean up as many eye-luring boo-boos as possible. It’s OK though; I’ve got a big supply of backspace band-aids.

There are many ways to do this, some really effective, some not so effective.

My favorite technique is to read the story backwards, starting with the last sentence working towards the start. This lets you view the sentence as a whole and fish out any little inconsistencies without your brain automatically filling in the gaps of what it already knows and expects to come next. By going backwards, you can focus on the sentence in a vacuum of itself, all without damaging its relationship to the rest of the paragraph.

Some people might argue that this isn’t a good use of editing time, but I disagree. The writing will have to be proofread eventually, and training your eyes to spot inconsistencies will make your own drafting stronger.

Step 3: Look for writing tics

As you read, try to notice if the writer repeats certain ideas or constructs or words. It’s possible that something (an idea, a memory, an ancient evil) has wormed its way into their processes, influencing every single sentence they type without their knowledge or express written consent.

This can be as simple as a person using the same kind of transition (say a terminal simile) or as complicated as a person creating the exact same kind of metaphors with very little variation. For example, I know I have a problem with creating too many magic/wizard/fantasy/medieval metaphors, like a hardened warrior whose sword and steel soul is tainted by blood and battle.

It is your responsibility as an editor to point this stuff out for the writer. This kind of feedback is the most revered and praised, as it  often brings into focus topics and issues that would have been near impossible for the writer to discover on her own. Read carefully and note anywhere things seem to sound or feel the same. Highlight similarities in the same color (say bright orange), so the writer has a stark visual of just how often a tic is sneaking into her writing.

Step 4: Ponder the mysteries of theme

Theme in a piece of writing (especially a short piece of writing) can be an elusive gremlin that pops his head out of a hole for a second and then disappears, only to pop up again in some impossibly distant place a few seconds later. Sometimes it’s blatant, like dozens of thick slices of chopped jalapeno on the top of a pizza when you specifically wrote “no jalapenos” in the “additional notes” field on the pizza ordering website. Sometimes it’s so subtle that you can barely pick it out, like the addition of a tablespoon of dry Amontillado sherry to a traditional enchilada sauce.

But it’s gotta be there if the piece is going to succeed. Try to find examples of a writer carrying the theme that you like and specifically call them out with colors or comments. In a recent story (it’s short, I promise) I used a lot of Christian allusions and references to support the theme of a lapsed Catholic being unsure of her place at a funeral. Some were intentional, others weren’t. I had an editor friend point out some that I, caught in the energy of the writing itself, didn’t even know I’d written. It was pretty cool and taught me a lot about the piece.

When you’re editing, point out every example you can find, even if they seem loose or under-formed. These help the writer see if his theme is strong, or if it needs to be bolstered in certain places. It also helps you develop closer reading skills, which will benefit you when you’re self editing early drafts of your own work.

Step 5: Write pointed, specific feedback

There is nothing worse than getting all pants-peeing excited to digest someone’s comments on your work, only to find things like, “this is good,” “I don’t like this,” or “I don’t get this at all.” Comments like that are worse than not reviewing the piece at all.

Fight your baser instincts to immediately point out what you like and don’t like. In the grand scheme, your subjective tastes don’t matter. Just because you didn’t like it doesn’t mean it’s bad. Just because you did like it doesn’t mean it’s good.

A writer needs objective feedback about how it is written.

If you can’t, you just don’t possess the fortitude to not voice your opinions, then make sure you accompany any vague comments with a clear and specific why. Did you like it because it was beautiful to read or because it established the tone? Did you not like it because it was confusing or distracted you from something more important?

The more specific your feedback, the more the writer learns about his own craft from your edits, and the more you learn about the writing process as a whole. This is one of those, “you’re only cheating yourself” situations, like lying about how hard you worked out to impress your coworkers who really don’t care either way. If you take short cuts in your editing, you’ll be missing great examples to learn about bigger issues at work in all writing, and you’re just being a dick to the person whose work you’re reviewing.

Step 6: Do it again, and again, ad infinitum

Yea, nothing fancy to say here. Do 10 sets of 30 edits three times a week for maximum results. Apply ice to any finger injuries. Apply beer to any brain ones.

Guest Post: “Losing” NaNoWriMo

It’s pretty easy for me to ramble on about NaNoWriMo after two successful years. But what about those who aren’t filled with the zeal that comes with typing that 50,000th word? My friend and fellow blogger, Phillip McCollum, shares his insights about “losing” NaNoWriMo, what he learned, and why losing isn’t a bad thing in this crazy game of writing. If anyone is interested in writing a guest post for Literature and Libation, please send your ideas to literatureandlibation@gmail.com.

I’ve been convinced for a while that Oliver and I were brotherly warriors in another life, swinging swords side-by-side on the medieval battlefield and sharing flagons of ale afterwards. As soon as he mentioned a guest post, I realized his mind and my mind had already started down different paths to the same destination. Having just reached the end of NaNoWriMo with Oliver crossing the finish line, we both knew the other side of the story had to be told.

The side of the losers.

Please understand that I’m not trying to be self-deprecating here. The fact is that in order to “win” NaNoWriMo, you must have written 50,000 words toward your novel by 11:59:59 PM on November 30th (according to whatever time zone you’re in, I assume). Having only completed 31,509 words by the appointed deadline, the logical conclusion is that I “lost” NaNoWriMo.

Losing doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game and anyone who tells you otherwise has a lot to learn about losing. Not only do you get to refine your game for next time, but everyone loves a comeback.

If you took part in this past NaNoWriMo, maybe you cranked out 49,999 words and just couldn’t find another that wouldn’t look like a fresh scratch across your brand new Jaguar.

Or, like me, you slammed your foot on the pedal coming out of the gate, but discovered you lacked the staying power to see things through the monotonous middle and into the finish line.

Everyone makes their own mistakes, but I’m sure we share a few generalities. I hope that sharing my lessons will resonate with you and at least get you to think about what you can do better the next time around.

Focus and Research:

I made a huge mistake here. I waited too long to think about what I was writing. I mean really think.  I had a basic idea of setting, time period, historical events, and characters. I even posted a blog entry of things to research after I finished writing. I figured I could just run with the story and make up things as I went along. I had some scenes roughly drafted and ready to spit out. There would be plenty of time after the first draft to fix the small mistakes, like my ancient Egyptian priest growing frustrated with his flaky Internet service.

What I lacked was focus. I didn’t have a clear idea of what I wanted this book to be. Historical fiction with a touch of fantasy? Fantasy loosely based in historical fact?

Without a clear cut path, I was crossing streams. As I made my way through the first set of scenes, I found myself wanting to be more accurate concerning historical events. There I was, 10,000 words in and coming to the realization that a month or two of research would have benefited me greatly.

What do you mean my antagonist wasn’t a king yet when this village was attacked? Okay, well then I guess I just need to put more focus on his father. But I don’t want to write about his father. That’s a different story than what I’m trying to tell. So now I need a new source of conflict since that battle didn’t take place. I need to research more. But I don’t have time. At a minimum, I need to get 1,667 words out tonight.

I’m sure you can imagine this situation snowballing and then realizing that while you may be writing lots of words and exercising your prose muscles (still a good thing), what you write will not be publishable because it’s a pile of scenes that mean absolutely nothing.

When scenes trump story, the whole idea of a coherent novel goes out the door.

Lessons Learned:

I need to know where I want to focus before writing. Specificity is important because it helps me prepare and keeps me on track. If I ever decide to write a book by the seat of my pants again, I’ll make sure Historical Fiction is off the table. In my opinion, that’s a genre which requires a lot of upfront research and planning.

Maintain a Timeline:

The idea of a timeline fits snuggly with my previous point. Without proper research, how can you be sure your imagination is synchronized with historical record? Call it trying to juggle too much information in the little time I had to write. Call it laziness. I never put together a timeline of events and backstory. In fact, I remember spending a couple of hours scouring the Internet for decent timeline tools, when in reality, that time could have been better spent hobbling together something in a spreadsheet. The perfection bug bit me again. I didn’t need the perfect tool, I just thought I did.

This left me completely unorganized. Things were happening when they shouldn’t have and people were making speeches long after they kicked the bucket.

For example, the idea behind my novel came from some reading I did about an Egyptian city named Naucratis. The historical figures I found myself compelled to write about, well, I’ll just say that a basic timeline would have shown they weren’t even around to see Naucratis being built. They only missed it by, oh, a few centuries.

Oops.

Lessons Learned:

All I need is a simple spreadsheet to start. One column for scene/historical event, another column for date. Something this basic would do wonders for ensuring that I’m not making a mistake such as the one illustrated above.

Plotting/Structure:

My last couple of novel attempts have gone the same way. I would begin an outline and type up brief synopses of anywhere from ten to fifteen scenes. Then I found myself anxious, so I started writing, telling myself that I could pants the rest. Well, as you now know, that was a bad idea.

I find that I have a lot of fun writing the scenes I’ve already outlined and am not concerned about whether or not I’m saying what I want to say. I know they fit into the outline I drafted. If they vary a little bit, cool, no big deal. I don’t mind tweaking my outline to accommodate.

But when I reach the end of the scenes I’ve outlined and find myself facing the blank page, somehow scrubbing the shower becomes the most important thing in the world. A few more excuses later, the guilt becomes overwhelming and I’m left with one question: Now what? I can throw some more conflict at my characters and pull some new goals out of thin air. That’ll fix them, right?

But as I’ve proven to myself over and over, chances are, it won’t.

Lessons Learned:

I need to know where I’m going and I need to put it down on paper. This gives me the confidence to write freely, knowing that I’m not just writing to write, but I’m writing toward the story goal.

Characters:

After reading that George R. R. Martin usually drafts character biographies hitting sixty to seventy pages, I proceeded to hang my head in shame.

I didn’t spend enough time fleshing out my characters before writing. I came up with basic bios, but without nearly the amount of depth they needed. Too vague. Too much on the surface.

And that’s just for the ones I made up. For the real historical figures, I should have researched them as much as possible. If my target audience includes history buffs, I can’t be loose with the facts and prevailing opinions.

Character traits are one thing, but I also found I had another problem with them. Going back and looking at my scenes, a lot of times, my POV character of the moment was a bystander. He would sit and watch the world turn, occasionally answering a question or making some absurd speech. He was lifeless automaton and would only act when I turned the crank.

Lessons Learned:

Be a lot better at fleshing out my characters. Make my characters active. People don’t want to read a novel where all the fun stuff is happening around your character.

“If you can accept losing, you can’t win.” -Vince Lombardi

Craft and Draft: Fixing What Ain’t Not Broke

You’re belly button-deep in a manuscript that has taken over your soul and filled you with a writing fervor so intense that you haven’t eaten or gone to the bathroom in 18 hours. Everything is going amazingly well; the characters are organic and their motivations are varied, believable, even human at times. Your narrative arc is building tension exactly like you imagined, and that dramatic climax you’ve got tucked so deftly up your sleeve is about to drop with an impact that could be measured in megatons. You got this writing thing down. 

And then you give your manuscript to a friend/editor/someone you’ve strapped to a chair and forced to read your work.

Their feedback isn’t the glowing awesomeness you expected from such a genre-altering, life-changing, world-healing piece of writing. They found plot problems. Big ones. Characters who seemed flat or underdeveloped. They even found some language that just straight up didn’t make sense.

How dare they question your art!? You are the master of this story, a demi-god of the world your brain manifested and turned into many many pages of words. This lowly reviewer just doesn’t get it. You stomp around like a child in snow boots, cursing their name and reminding yourself how awesome you are with impromptu bathroom mirror pep-talks.

After some time away from your story, you sit down and read it yourself. Suddenly all of those mistakes our reviewer pointed out are pretty damn obvious

Oooooops.

How do you fix it (and apologize to your editor for your tanturm)?

1. Admit you have some issues

Not personally. I don’t care if you’ve got a coke habit for your coke habit. I’m talking about writing issues here.

Some of your characters may not be working very well. Hell, your main character may not be working very well. Before you can fix anything, you have to accept that your first draft will have flaws. And they may be major. And there may be a lot of them. And it may require a shit load of editing and rewriting to fix.

That’s OK. The first step is acknowledging you have a problem. It can be really hard to separate your emotions from something you have worked so hard on, but 999,999 times out of 1,000,000 you won’t get it perfect the first time around. There is absolutely no shame in revising. There is a lot more work, but no shame.

Even famous authors face these issues. Erik Larson (author of multiple national bestsellers like Isaac’s Storm and Devil in the White City) nearly didn’t use Isaac as the protagonist of his book because he felt he was “uni-dimensional.” This is after (what I assume, citation needed) hundreds upon hundreds of hours of research about Isaac, his life, and the Galveston Hurricane of 1900. Sometimes you have to make hard choices for what is best for your writing, even if it means throwing away countless amounts of hard work.

It’s not fun and it’s not easy, but sometimes, you just gotta take one for the story.

Remember when I asked if I could borrow your speeder? Well, I had a little accident. There was an Ewok and a tree and some rebel scum; long story. Anyway, I swear it’s not as bad as it looks.

2. Reduce, reuse, recycle

A lot of writing problems come from the desire to be super-duper complex, as if that will somehow make everything instantly more compelling and multidimensional. While, yes, tossing a running chainsaw to a juggler already keeping an angry ocelot and a canister of tear gas in the air would certainly be entertaining, it definitely opens him up to a much bigger margin of error.

Troublesome and unclear plot points can be resolved by removing or reducing the number of conflicts. Sometimes this means removing a character from a scene entirely, or removing a scene that you thought was a moment of pure genius. You may have just made to many allusions to outside works or other parts of your own work that make an entire section lose its edge.

Brevity is the soul of wit, but also makes for crisp, coherent writing.

When you reread one of your major plot-moving scenes, stop yourself anywhere you start thinking about another point in the story or something else entirely. Chances are, if the section can’t hold your attention, it will also send your readers off on a mental tangent, and even possibly cause them to stop reading.

Unless you’ve got a lot of practice under your belt, don’t try to over complicate things. Simple characters with clearly defined motivations in well described, relevant settings will always be more interesting to read than crazy shit that is just in there to crazify other shit.

If your ultimate goal is publicly readability, these are the choices (and possibly sacrifices) you have to make. Remember, just because you remove something, doesn’t mean you can’t add it back in later, or rewrite it and use it somewhere else in the story, or at the very, very least use it in another story.

Writing is awesome like that.

No, dude, I’m sure. You totally don’t need that piece. It’s for decoration or something. Listen, trust me, I saw a video of how to do this on Youtube.

3. Bust out the tools

If you aren’t going to get it right on the first try, you probably also won’t get it right on the second. Or third. Or fifteenth.

OK, you might have it right by then, but revising is definitely not a one-and-done process. It’s a lot more like whittling; you slowly shave away layers and carve out details until the perfect look and design appears where a hunk of plain ‘ole wood sat before.

Spend some time revising character, then move to dialogue. When that seems a little better, move on to scene, setting, and contextual detail. Revise the exposition along with the action. Slowly but surely, the themes of the piece will stick out their little, poignant heads, and your stylistic voice will yell at them to come play in the sun.

But you’ve got to put in the work. If editing something of length seems daunting, try splitting it into chapters, acts, or some other more digestible chunks. Writing programs like Scrivener work really, really well for this, but if technology just ain’t ‘cho thang, printing it out and making little piles works just as well.

If you’ve got a short form piece (let’s say, sub-5000 words) just suck it up and edit the damn thing. It isn’t going to magically get better the longer it sits on your hard drive. The sooner you get your mind-wrench on the literary nuts and bolts of the story, the sooner it will be super-mega-awesome and the sooner random people will want to pay you tens upon tens of dollars for it.

OK, I admit: this might not be right. But! All of the pieces are technically attached. I’m definitely putting these hours down on my timesheet.

4. Get perspective

Unless you spend some time away from your writing, you’ll never see your own mistakes. Forest for the trees, or whatever.

When you’re at a natural stopping point (read: you’ve exhausted your entire reserve of mental energy and would barf if you tried to drink another cup of coffee) put the piece away for a while. Save it to a folder that’s a couple of folders deep. Print it out and stick it under your couch. Whatever you need to do to get some creative distance from the thing.

I’ve done this countless times for homework assignments, blog posts, personal essays, and yes, even full length novel/novellas. You’ll be amazed what a little bit of down time can do for your worldview on things. Specific things you just couldn’t live without in an earlier draft will suddenly seem trivial. Other weird, half-developed ideas will suddenly become subplots or great cultural commentary that you missed or ignored the first time around.

Step away from the computer. Go do some chores or play some video games or take a trip to the ruins of Pompei. Your writing will thank you (and be better) for it.

Yea, OK, No. It doesn’t look any better from up here. In fact, I think it looks worse. Let’s look at it from way over there, far far away from this mangled wreckage.

Step 5: Rinse, repeat

This isn’t really a step, it’s just a reminder to redo all the other steps once you think you’re done with them. This process may seem tedious at first glance, but as a personal favor to me (and your Right-Brain), try it at least once.

If your writing doesn’t look, sound, and feel better from a round of acceptance, reduction, perspective, and editing, then I’ll buy you a beer.

Hey, let’s not tell Lord Vader about this whole “I crashed a really expensive speeder that I wasn’t supposed to be riding in the first place” thing. I feel like he’d overreact and get all ” force-choke-a-stormtrooper” on us.

Craft and Draft: The Proof is in the Reading

Guys and gals, I have one of those things to make.

A concession? A regression? A Congressional appeal?

No, no. A confession. Yes. Confess, sins, all that.

I am a bad proofreader. Note that I didn’t say that I am bad at proofreading. I’ve spent far too many hours studying language, grammar, syntax, and abusing the “format painter” in MS Word to be lacking the requisite skills. My badness comes from my impulsive heart, not my literary brain.

When it comes to proofreading, I don’t apply consistent attention or emphasis. Often I’ll be so happy with myself that I finished something, that I think one quick read-through is enough before I put my greedy little mouse cursor all over the “publish” button. Other times I’m overly confident in my ability to translate thought to finger movement to letters to sentences. I couldn’t possibly have made a mistake, I typed everything so deliberately.

But low and bend and behold and be humble; almost all of my posts appear on the internetz with typos. Errors. Poorly placed prepositional phrases. Sometimes even gross homonymic misspellings. For that, I apologize.

I should have no excuse (but of course I do). Proofreading is at least half of what I do to pay the bills. I am personally responsible for making sure important things like status reports and new-work proposals look and sound good.

When so much is on the line, how dare I let a passive construct through on my turn to stand guard? Who do I think I am?

It has nothing to do with attention to detail, fatigue, or how boring the particular thing you’re proofreading is. Through a highly thorough, empirical scientific process, I have discovered that the reason that I (and everyone who struggles with this) am a bad proofreader, is because there are anti-proofreading goblins living inside of my brain.

And their will is bent on making me miss shit that should otherwise not be missed.

They’re like the three stooges of making you look bad/feel stupid.

The goblins never stop. They will crawl around just behind your eyes, making sure you skip over that incorrect possessive apostrophe, and right when you’re about to see that “a” before a vowel that should be an “an” they’ll poke the distraction center of your brain with a #2 pencil.

But don’t feel bad. Even the President of the United States is afflicted with APF goblins.

The first step to fighting them is to accept them. Don’t beat yourself up over mistakes in proofreading. You tried, it’s not really your fault.

But when you do make a mistake. Learn from it. Remember where the goblins like to mess you up, when, and why. Eventually, you’ll be onto their game, and they will have a harder and harder time tripping you up.

Make sure you do you best to proofread everything. Emails, YouTube comments, Fark.com thread posts, anything. The more you proofread, the more the goblins have to work. Eventually you’ll tire them little bastards out.

Poor little dude is pooped.

A few other helpful tricks to keep the goblins on their toes:

-Proofread out loud. Somehow the process of using three different parts of your brain by reading, saying, and then hearing what you’re reading can really help catch hidden mistakes. This is also great for improving the cadence and readability of your work, which the goblins just hate.

-If you’re struggling with line-by-line edits, read your piece backwards. I know, it sounds odd. But read each word individually from end to start, and you can review it as a standalone word, not part of the piece. Your brain tricks you into filling in blanks when you proofread because you know what it is supposed to say. Reading backwards confuses the shit out of the goblins.

-Have someone else read your work. I know, you are awesome, and clearly don’t need any outside help. But think of the goblins. Other people have different types of goblins and sometimes their goblins won’t see what your goblins did. And vice versa.

-Study. This may seem tedious, but really, do it. Get your hands on Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, Walsh’s Lapsing into a Comma, Truss’s Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, and O’Conner’s Woe is I. Reading about grammar and style may seem boring, but if you’re a writer (or deign to call yourself one), it is a necessary evil. Grammar is the math of writing.

-Be deliberate when you proofread. Proofread with a vengeance! Make it mean something to your writing. It is so easy to just say, “welp, close enough”, but an editor will see right through that. Remember that poor proofreading will sink a great piece faster like a pair of leaden Pumas. Don’t let your talent be hidden behind silly mistakes.

That said, feel free to post in the comments any and all of the mistakes you catch in this post. My goblins are on fire today.

The pen is mightier, etc.

P.S. I’d like to extend a special thank you to Phil over at beatbox32 (a talented, aspiring writer who is quite eloquently and thoughtfully chronicling his painful attempts to improve his craft whose blog you should definitely check out) for giving me some of the ideas to write this post.

Craft and Draft: Be a Tool

The kids are all abuzz with the saying, “don’t be a tool” with the obligatory “bro” or “brah” or “son” perfunctorily tacked onto the end.

I say screw the kids.

Be a tool.

A lot of writers (and hopeless creatives in general) assume that their brain is the one and only thing they need to succeed. In defense of that theory, it is the source of all your ideas, the seat of your talent, and the mother of all of your ingenious invention.

But the brain is only the Dewalt cordless drill of our creative toolbox. We have tools all over us. In fact, we are made out of tools.

It would be pretty difficult to write without your hands. Sure, there are things like Dragon out there, but at the end of the day, I don’t know one writer who doesn’t rely heavily on the ten or so fingers at the ends of his arms to bring his stories to life. But do you take care of them? Are you careful about where you stick them, what your pour onto them, or what they do while you’re asleep?

Until very recently, I was a nail biter. The moment the tips of my nails got longer than 2mm, I gnawed them to bloody nubs like some deranged mental patient in an independent Canadian horror film. My fingers constantly hurt, and I’d be forced to keep band aids on them, which in turn impacted my writing.

I finally realized how stupid I was being and kicked the habit. I went to Target and bought some $3 nail hardener which also tastes like a mixture of cranberry juice cocktail and roadkill, just in case my resolve lapsed. I applied it daily and let my nails grow, only trimming them with a set of nail clippers when they looked uneven. The added bonus: my finger nails are now bright and shiny like a Disney Princess’s tiara. I am bootiful.

Suddenly, magically, my fingers don’t hurt! I can write for hours and hours without worrying about that raw cuticle I ripped into the side of my thumb. All because I took the time to take care of my hands, my tools.

That little anecdote is just one, somewhat graphic, example. You wouldn’t leave your nice expensive Craftsman table saw that you “borrowed” from your neighbor 9 months ago out in the rain, would you? Then why would do something similar to your body?

Deep down, we all have this image of these amazing writers and artists who lived the dream and created mind-blowingly brilliant work after six lines of cocaine and a fifth of Jameson. Unfortunately, this is not reality. Most of the people who lived like this crashed, and crashed hard. Think Hemingway, Capote, Thompson, Kerouac, Poe, Fitzgerald, Joyce, etc. While a few drinks may loosen your mind-muscles, a lifetime of binge drinking will not result in success unless you were born with some supernatural talent and an immune system to match.

You’ll never get to the height of your creativity if you feel like crap. It’s that simple.

If you eat something that makes you feel like shit, your writing is going to be shit. If you have no energy because you’re out of shape or haven’t been sleeping well, your writing will have no energy. If you’re feeling dejected and pathetic because you don’t believe your art is any good, your writing will deflate, curl into the fetal position, and cry all over itself.

To be great you have to work hard, and to work hard you have to feel great. It can be difficult to eat right and exercise all the time, but you have to try. Little things make a big difference. When considering that Five Guys double cheeseburger, opt for a salad from Sweet Green instead. When you’re sitting waiting for that slow ass elevator, remember that the stairs would get you there faster, and you’d feel better. When you sit down to clack away at the keyboard, these little choices will seep from your body through your fingers into your writing, and it will be better, because you are better.

You have been given an amazing set of tools. Use them and take care of them. Don’t leave them out to rust.

Drilling a pilot hole is like the first draft, and drilling the…nevermind, this analogy is going nowhere.

Craft and Draft: Dialognostics

We’ve had a heart-to-heart about characterization. We’ve talked birds-and-bees about the ins and outs of drafting. We’ve danced, and laughed, and had one too many beers.

Now let’s talk about the tongue of good fiction: believable dialogue.

I find there are two main camps on this issue: those who think dialogue is stupidly easy and those who think dialogue is brain-bustingly difficult. I fall somewhere in the middle. Some characters seem to voice themselves naturally as I write, while others drool on themselves and grunt when trying the most basic of communication.

In concept, dialogue should be easy. You’re making your characters talk. To each other. Or themselves. We, as humans, talk to each other all day everyday. How hard is it take what is a perfunctory exchange and put it down on paper?

Really. Damn. Hard.

Dialognostics

(My theme accidentally shrank my pictures. I’m working to fix the CSS. In the mean time, feel free to click the images for full sized, readable versions.)

Fictional dialogue isn’t real human dialogue. As Gary Provost so aptly put it, “Dialogue is real speech’s greatest hits.”

Think about how you speak for a second. Even if you are the most intelligent and articulate sum’bitch in your postal code, you’re bound to drops some “ums” and “likes” and awkward pauses into your daily speech. These do not translate well onto the page, and make your writing seem crude and unpolished. This in turn “breaks the dream” for your readers, and makes them lose interest.

So you need to make your characters hyper-articulate to keep readers interested. Every sentence they utter should be intentional, clear, and character defining. I’ve even heard (and like the idea) that the very first thing your character says in your story is a snapshot of their personality.

Doesn’t seem so easy now, does it?

Let’s cover some common errors that turn terrific tales into tongue twisting terrors of tentacular torture.

1. Unqualified dialect

It may be tempting, as you build a world or place a story in a certain locale, to give your characters some regional spice by giving them clever accents. Unless you know that specific dialect perfectly (as in, you grew up immersed up to your neck in people speaking that way) avoid doing this.

It is incredibly difficult, and more often than not confused/distracts/offends your reader. See below:

A ‘lil cockney rhymin’ slang ain’t nevah ‘urt no one, no hows.

What we often forget as we craft our worlds is that our readers are smart. They can fill in blanks we leave behind, and will, if we let them. If your reader knows the story is set in an English-speaking suburb of Medieval France, you can bet your pants that they’ll automagically give the characters French accents, just because that’s how the human brain works with patterns.

If your setting is ambiguous (or nonexistent in real life, like in high fantasy or science fiction) then you can qualify the dialogue very early on by adding a tag like, “Anytime, mon cheri!” said Julius, his creole-like accent spilling through his clumsy pronunciation. 

But seriously. Only do this is you have balls of titanium alloy and a pen made out of powerful ancient writing dust.

2. Inappropriate announcement

I’m very guilty of doing this; making characters say things to let the reader know a key detail, when the character already knows this detail and would never say it out loud.

It’s like a very heavy-handed soliloquy that just doesn’t work. These tend to slide themselves in during scene climaxes and endings, where you’re trying to reveal a universal truth or some story defining idea that your protagonist learned during their journey.

For example:

Needs significantly more explosions to live up to Mr. Bay.

In this case, pink Space-Lady wouldn’t need to say this out loud (to herself or anyone else) because she would have already drawn that conclusion in her head. It is your job as a writer to figure out how to make this message come through in the extra-dialogue writing, be it exposition or plot action.

You can try to have a symbolic event that passes this message along, or have your character find and read a note, giving us an omniscient view into her thoughts and in turn making the announcement seem less “here’s my awesome story defining idea let me shove it down your throat with some lemon juice and calamari.” There possibilities are near endless, but avoid a “Deus Ex Machina” moment by giving your reader a trite, obvious statement directly from a character.

(My “note” suggestion is highly dependent on the Point of View (POV) you’re working from, but that’s juicy writing-meat for another educational cookout.)

3. Inconsistent voicing

In a short story, it isn’t that hard to give a character a voice and have it carry over 3,000, 5,000, or even 10,000 words. You definitely have to pay attention, but since your narrative arc is relatively small, you only need to keep a voice consistent for a short period of time.

When you try to keep a voice consistent in a novel, things get all maple syrup really quickly. As the plot quickens and thickens and character motivations change, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep their voice inline with their established personality, but also situation appropriate. Even the most bubbly cheerleader is going to slightly change her tone when the werewolf lumberjacks and clawing at her door, but you, as the master of the universe, need to make sure she still sounds like the same cheerleader.

This get stupid-complicated when you bring in three, four, five, or ten characters in the course of a story. One out of place piece of dialogue that contradicts the characters established personality and motives can change (read: ruin) that character’s impact on the story:

The Uruk’hai are misunderstood creatures.

The easiest way to keep track of each character’s voice is to simply draw a picture. Or make an Excel speadsheet if you’re as nerdy as I am. Write down the “default” voice for each character, and then compare that voice to each scene.

For example – Johnny McTurnip Boots [default]: Melodramatic, kind of stupid. Johnny McTurnip Boots [when the monsters attack]: Overly emotional, panicked, has the stupidest suggestions for escape.

He’s the same character, but his voice changes appropriately per the scene he is in. I highly recommend visual aids to help organize your characters and scene, especially if your story is so complex it would make weaker men wet their brain-pants.

4. Poor placement and dialogue overdose

Dialogue fills two main roles in fiction: it gives your characters directly attributable voices and it speeds up narrative. Conversely, exposition can give insight into characters, but it also slows down the pace of the narrative.

While it seems logical to have your characters speak whenever they need to say something, counter intuitively, this may not be the best idea. If you’ve got a scene that is very, very dialogue heavy (say, 100% dialogue) your reader is going to blow through it very quickly. If you place that scene at a crucial point in the story, you may inadvertently cheapen what was supposed to be a poignant and heartfelt.

Ever notice that “Godot” has “God” in it? Whoa.

Balancing dialogue and exposition also keeps the reader interested as you’re weaving action, backstory, setting details, and unique voices into the writing all at the same time.

Try reading your story out loud. Are there places where you seem to warp through a section at lightspeed, skipping the Romulan fleet altogether and putting the entire Federation at risk? Do you find yourself switching between two characters so frequently that you can’t remember who is what or when or where?

You might find that you can break up your dialogue with some action and it will still be just as effective. Jumble the pieces if you have to. You can always Ctrl+Z.

5. Cliches and tags

Neither of these are so important to warrant their own section, but while I’m rambling, I figured I’d mention them.

Captain Rumbeard had always wanted to be a Belgian chocolatier, but his father would have never allowed it.

Avoid making your characters say thing that you hear other people say often, like “he’s a thorn in my side.” Instead say, “he’s jabbing at my innards with his pointy stick of annoyance.” Pass your draft to someone else and tell them to circle anything that seems familiar. Chances are, most of what they circle will be accidental cliches.

Be sure to also properly tag your dialogue. In my first novel (attempt) I used them very sparingly, and at some points, not at all. My beta readers were very confused. Drop little phrase like “said Stevie Mufflington” if it is unclear who is speaking, or if no character clearly identifies the other. You almost never need to use anything more than the past tense of say (said), but very judicious use of stronger words like “exclaimed” or “barfed” can work, if they’re not overused.

My last note is to openly talk to your characters. You know deep down what good dialogue sounds like; you’ve already read it and seen it on the screen. You may want to do this behind closed doors. Starbucks patrons don’t take kindly to you have a two-way conversation with completely imaginary people (who just so happen to be giant lizards who work on an oil rig).

Speak up. Write down.

Craft and Draft: Fully Licensed Preacher Practitioner

There’s nothing worse than those guys who sit and give you advice, but seem to forget it all when they themselves run into the same problem they have been advising about. Like the guys who, with supreme confidence, tell you exactly how to pick up girls but always seem to be the ones slumped over a bar stool crying into a mojito by themselves at the end of the night.

Those guys suck.

So in an effort to show that the advice I have been giving isn’t just magically pulled out of my metaphorical ass: Behold! An example of me literally practicing what I preach.

A nonfiction article of mine about the plights of shaving went live today on “The Good Men Project” – http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/the-good-life-shaving-face/

Despite it only being slightly over 1000 words, this piece was part of a pretty extensive revision cycle:

1. The first draft was finished on February 19, 2012. It was roughly 1500 words.
2. I trimmed it down to 1300 words, cleaned it up dramatically, and completed the second draft of February 27, 2012.
3. I submit this piece to a workshop of 10 of my Hopkins peers in the fabulous Cathy Alter‘s “Contemporary Nonfiction” class on April 10, 2012. It was about 1275 words at the time.
4. Based on that feedback, I revised, removed, changed, restructured, and added to the existing draft. Total word count, 1150.
5. Revised again, chopping out irrelevant sections, and revising some of the jokes to be more absurd, because hey, why not?
6. Finished one more round of changes, cleaned up the grammar and formatting, and submitted it to The Good Men Project on May 22, 2012.
7. Article was accepted and published on August 9, 2012. Final word count: 1041.

So there you have it. A single 1041 word article took about 4 whole months to draft, revise, pitch, and publish.

Good things come to those who wait. The good news is, you can work on tons of other things concurrently.

Get to writing (or revising)!

This is a picture of me writing this post. A little meta-POV for your Thursday.

Craft and Draft: Building Castles

Not all of these posts are going to include Lego. Just most of them. Maybe I’ll do some in Minecraft to mix it up a little.

This post piggybacks off of my previous post about characterization, but is more focused on complete drafts.

Building Castles 

As one of my enthusiastic classmates was waxing poetic about her experience revising her latest fiction piece, it struck me that the entire Draft Development Cycle (DDC) builds on itself. You’ve got all of the details, characters, and settings in your head, but they are raw, disorganized.

There is some strong magic swirling around the craft of writing that hides the creative process. Unlike master painters whose every brush stroke can be witnessed and studied, excellent writers seem pull their stories and skill out of the ether, as if it is an extension of their very soul. Young writers often don’t see the missing piece; the years and years of practice and patience and persistence. 

This leads to disillusionment.

Like when you imagine an amazing picture of a bear riding a snowmobile firing laser blasters at robot dinosaurs, expecting it to look like this:

Why yes, I did Photoshop this myself. Thanks!

But when you finally draw it, it looks like this:

Yep, drew this myself.

See? Disillusionment.

As is the case with any creative art, it takes time to refine your skill and eventually master it.

As a writer, you have a singular advantage over painters and sculptures and sidewalk chalk drawers: your art is infinitely malleable. First draft sucks? No worries! Just rewrite the parts that suck until they unsuck. You can never make a mistake that can’t be rectified.

Drafting is like playing with Lego. You start with a blank, flat green board, have all the pieces you could ever need in a big plastic bin next to you, and can build anything you want. For this example, let’s say you want to build a picturesque castle. You imagine the castle in your head, and get to building.

1. Zero Draft

This is the very first draft of your piece that comes oozing out of the primordial goo that is your psyche, malformed, unsure that is should even exist. I call it the “zero” draft instead of the “first” draft, because chances are your main theme is underdeveloped or completely missing at this point. This is the draft where you let your brain shift the gears while you carelessly slam your foot down on the accelerator. As to be expected, you might crash and burn and suffer horrible injuries, or at least swerve wildly around the roadway, endangering everyone and everything around you.

The zero draft of your Lego castle would look something like this:

They told me I was daft to build a castle on the swamp, but I build it all the same.

It’s not not a castle, but it’s certainly not something you’d like to defend during a siege. But you’ve got a start, the bones, the basic structure of the castle, even if it’s little more than a pile of rocks with a flag at this point.

2. First Draft

After you’ve taken some time to evaluate the structural integrity of your castle, you can rewrite your zero draft and fix a lot of the problems. You can add content, remove stupid fluff, flesh out characterization, and really right the ship. Don’t go too crazy with fixing grammatical stuff at this point; you’re more concerned that the mortar of the castle will hold, than what color heraldry you’re going to put into the great feast hall.

The first draft of your Lego castle could look something like this:

This is what I imagine the front gates of Riverrun looks like. But you know, with more walls.

It’s a lot more castle-esque now. There is still a gaping hole in the back of the structure, and your guards would demand hazard pay to walk along those ramparts. But at least a drunken peasant could identify it as a castle now, which is a step in the right direction.

3. Draft X

The next draft is actually a series of drafts, in which you tweak your content, have other people read it, question character motives, and ask probing plot questions. This is when you build a tall tower for your gaoler, only to tear it down when you realize you don’t even have a dungeon. This is when you fill in the murder holes you added just behind portcullis because your kingdom isn’t, and will never be, at war. This is when you learn about your story, and can play with character desires, tweak dialogue, and repair any of those major plot holes that have been sucking the narrative into a mire of confusion and triteness.

The Draft X castle could look something like this:

What manner of man are you that can build a castle without rock or wood?

Or like this:

That is no Orc horn!

Now you have a castle to write home about. Unless the castle is your home. Then your letter won’t go anywhere. You can see that the walls are strong, and you’ve even made room for windows and arrow slits. The roof has taken shape, and you have staircases connecting the scenes for your characters to walk up and down.

It is important that even though your castle looks pretty good, you don’t stop. Stopping now would be like running a 100-yard dash and stopping at 95 yards. It’d be like baking a delicious cherry pie for 45 minutes when the recipe called for 60. It’d be like dressing yourself in the morning but intentionally not putting on pants. Don’t stop yet, you’re not done, but you’re almost done.

4. Final Draft

Getting here takes time and effort, so if you’ve made it: woot to you!

Now is when you get to really dissect the language of your story, correcting unintentional passive constructs, replacing boring verbs with explosive ones. This is also the time to adds bells and whistles; flesh out characters and setting descriptions, re-pace your action scenes, and de-mushify the romance.

Eyes to text as comb to hair.

This is what your final draft would look like, if it were a castle:

The horn of Helm Hammerhand shall sound in the deep one, last, time!

Now you can pitch it or post it or sell it or just bask in the glow of your hard, tedious work.

Just remember: a castle (much like Rome) isn’t built in a day. Even the best architect needs to plan out how he uses his materials, which stone goes where, and how many beams are needed to support the weight of the roof. If your piece isn’t what you expected it to be, draft and draft again. The bin with the all the Legos is right next to you.

Dig in. Build. Draft. Create.