On Writing: Five Things I Learned from the Bridegroom
"The unexamined life is not worth living," said Socrates, and I don't want anyone accusing me of disregarding respected Attic philosophers, so here is a short list of lessons I learned while writing my first novel. Possibly these nubbins of hard-earned wisdom will be useful to others embarking on the same journey, though I acknowledge beforehand that each writer is going to have his or her own process which may be slightly (or drastically) different from mine. The meta-lesson, perhaps, is to be thoughtful and open-minded about finding that process.
1. Planning is good. S.B. was not my first attempt at writing a novel, but it was my first successful one. What was the difference? Planning. In my previous attempts I had only a couple of pages of notes down before I started writing in earnest; the rest, I figured, I would just work out along the way. Certainly I had the broad strokes all figured out in my head; I could see the scope and shape of it—everything that would happen, how all the characters would be, the tone, the prose—it was only a matter of sitting down and banging it out.
None of these imaginary opuses made it past one or two chapters, of course. Sooner or later I began to question whether I had started with the right tone, whether the characters were quite right, and whether I might just be writing myself into a corner. Mostly my sense of direction had simply faded away; as beautiful as it was, I couldn't keep the vision held in my head indefinitely.
Satanic Bridegroom was different. I decided to approach the project in a workmanlike manner, as though I were a carpenter building a house. I figured everything out in advance—choosing the material, taking measurements, studying the fixtures, et cetera. After getting down several pages of notes, I prepared a list of chapters, and then for each chapter I wrote a page on what would happen in that chapter. This ended up making all the difference; if anything, I should have planned even more at the start, maybe sketching out ideas on prose, tone and thematic elements for each section.
Now, of course this approach is not going to work for everyone; perhaps some people need to discover everything on the fly to feed their inspiration and momentum, and that's fine. It's worth mentioning, though, as it could be a useful technique for those whose projects end up wandering off into the mists of where-was-I-going-with-this?
2. Mornings are good. I learned, rather late into it, that I am a much better writer first thing in the morning than I am last thing at night. Why? Don't know. Doesn't matter. What's important is that I shouldn't have been beating myself up about not jumping on the computer to write after a long day at the office, but I should have been beating myself up about not carving out time for myself on weekend mornings.
Again, your most productive time may be different from mine, but it's a good idea to figure this stuff out sooner rather than later.
3. Be careful about forcing things. There where times when I made myself bang some words out even though I was feeling tired, crabby or uninspired. "I just need to be disciplined, get through it, and move forward," I thought, and, for sure, this is not a bad impulse for a writer to have. The problem was that even though I did indeed move forward, the result was often dead, predictable, and uninteresting prose. Even worse, it was writing that was difficult to revise, because I didn't like it and I didn't enjoy spending time on it. Trying to fix it after the fact was simply tiresome and demoralizing.
So, what to do? I think the lesson here is to be disciplined, but to be disciplined about not just writing but about setting up the conditions for good writing. It's not enough to block off a couple of hours, because if you're scattered, distracted or disinterested when those hours come around, it won't be worth the effort. "Mental hygiene," I think is the term.
4. Fix it or mark it. Often when I was writing, I found myself unsure about some historical fact or the exact meaning of a word I wanted to use. In these cases, I would put something down on the page and think "well, I'll just fix it later." Now, this in itself is not a bad thing, but the problem was that I assumed that I would afterward remember that I had put something provisional in that needed correcting, and this was not always the case. In fact, I later found myself in the embarrassing position of having my first readers pointing out dumb mistakes and only then remembering that I had just thrown something in there temporarily and had never fixed it.
For the future: if I'm not sure about something (for example, in the first paragraph here, whether "learned" or "learnt" was more correct), I shouldn't put off looking it up, and if I absolutely must, I need to highlight that word or section so two-months-from-now me won't mistake it as something I thought was street legal.
5. The blurb, the one-pager, the ten-pager. A bit of book marketing advice I've gotten is that if I'm going to try to get a literary agent to look at my work, I'll need to have ready a blurb, a one-page description, and a ten-page description of the piece. The problem I'm finding is that S.B. is a bit hard to describe; it's not exactly a horror novel and not exactly an adventure novel. Personally, I think of it as "weird fiction," but this is a niche term which not everyone is familiar with. Meanwhile, even though it's sort of a genre piece (even if the genre is a bit murky), the writing has a much more literary feel to it than is typically found in that sort of thing.
In other words, the book might be a hard sell.
Now, I think the reality was that for this first novel I had to write what I wanted to write and just make that mistake; I needed to take advantage of the momentum of inspiration and not second-guess where I was headed. Going forward, however, I can see that if I can't come up with a punchy blurb or one-page description of the piece I intend to write, that may be a signal that I'm writing something that will be difficult to talk people into reading.
For my next blog post, we will discuss yet another Socratic quote, namely “Each pleasure and pain is a sort of nail which nails and rivets the soul to the body, and engrosses her and makes her believe that to be true which the body affirms to be true; and from agreeing with the body and having the same delights she is obliged to have the same habits and ways, and is not likely ever to be pure at her departure to the world below, but is always saturated with the body; so that she soon sinks into another body and there germinates and grows, and has therefore no part in the communion of the divine and pure and simple." I'm not exactly sure what that means, so it may be a while.
1. Planning is good. S.B. was not my first attempt at writing a novel, but it was my first successful one. What was the difference? Planning. In my previous attempts I had only a couple of pages of notes down before I started writing in earnest; the rest, I figured, I would just work out along the way. Certainly I had the broad strokes all figured out in my head; I could see the scope and shape of it—everything that would happen, how all the characters would be, the tone, the prose—it was only a matter of sitting down and banging it out.
None of these imaginary opuses made it past one or two chapters, of course. Sooner or later I began to question whether I had started with the right tone, whether the characters were quite right, and whether I might just be writing myself into a corner. Mostly my sense of direction had simply faded away; as beautiful as it was, I couldn't keep the vision held in my head indefinitely.
Satanic Bridegroom was different. I decided to approach the project in a workmanlike manner, as though I were a carpenter building a house. I figured everything out in advance—choosing the material, taking measurements, studying the fixtures, et cetera. After getting down several pages of notes, I prepared a list of chapters, and then for each chapter I wrote a page on what would happen in that chapter. This ended up making all the difference; if anything, I should have planned even more at the start, maybe sketching out ideas on prose, tone and thematic elements for each section.
Now, of course this approach is not going to work for everyone; perhaps some people need to discover everything on the fly to feed their inspiration and momentum, and that's fine. It's worth mentioning, though, as it could be a useful technique for those whose projects end up wandering off into the mists of where-was-I-going-with-this?
2. Mornings are good. I learned, rather late into it, that I am a much better writer first thing in the morning than I am last thing at night. Why? Don't know. Doesn't matter. What's important is that I shouldn't have been beating myself up about not jumping on the computer to write after a long day at the office, but I should have been beating myself up about not carving out time for myself on weekend mornings.
Again, your most productive time may be different from mine, but it's a good idea to figure this stuff out sooner rather than later.
3. Be careful about forcing things. There where times when I made myself bang some words out even though I was feeling tired, crabby or uninspired. "I just need to be disciplined, get through it, and move forward," I thought, and, for sure, this is not a bad impulse for a writer to have. The problem was that even though I did indeed move forward, the result was often dead, predictable, and uninteresting prose. Even worse, it was writing that was difficult to revise, because I didn't like it and I didn't enjoy spending time on it. Trying to fix it after the fact was simply tiresome and demoralizing.
So, what to do? I think the lesson here is to be disciplined, but to be disciplined about not just writing but about setting up the conditions for good writing. It's not enough to block off a couple of hours, because if you're scattered, distracted or disinterested when those hours come around, it won't be worth the effort. "Mental hygiene," I think is the term.
4. Fix it or mark it. Often when I was writing, I found myself unsure about some historical fact or the exact meaning of a word I wanted to use. In these cases, I would put something down on the page and think "well, I'll just fix it later." Now, this in itself is not a bad thing, but the problem was that I assumed that I would afterward remember that I had put something provisional in that needed correcting, and this was not always the case. In fact, I later found myself in the embarrassing position of having my first readers pointing out dumb mistakes and only then remembering that I had just thrown something in there temporarily and had never fixed it.
For the future: if I'm not sure about something (for example, in the first paragraph here, whether "learned" or "learnt" was more correct), I shouldn't put off looking it up, and if I absolutely must, I need to highlight that word or section so two-months-from-now me won't mistake it as something I thought was street legal.
5. The blurb, the one-pager, the ten-pager. A bit of book marketing advice I've gotten is that if I'm going to try to get a literary agent to look at my work, I'll need to have ready a blurb, a one-page description, and a ten-page description of the piece. The problem I'm finding is that S.B. is a bit hard to describe; it's not exactly a horror novel and not exactly an adventure novel. Personally, I think of it as "weird fiction," but this is a niche term which not everyone is familiar with. Meanwhile, even though it's sort of a genre piece (even if the genre is a bit murky), the writing has a much more literary feel to it than is typically found in that sort of thing.
In other words, the book might be a hard sell.
Now, I think the reality was that for this first novel I had to write what I wanted to write and just make that mistake; I needed to take advantage of the momentum of inspiration and not second-guess where I was headed. Going forward, however, I can see that if I can't come up with a punchy blurb or one-page description of the piece I intend to write, that may be a signal that I'm writing something that will be difficult to talk people into reading.
For my next blog post, we will discuss yet another Socratic quote, namely “Each pleasure and pain is a sort of nail which nails and rivets the soul to the body, and engrosses her and makes her believe that to be true which the body affirms to be true; and from agreeing with the body and having the same delights she is obliged to have the same habits and ways, and is not likely ever to be pure at her departure to the world below, but is always saturated with the body; so that she soon sinks into another body and there germinates and grows, and has therefore no part in the communion of the divine and pure and simple." I'm not exactly sure what that means, so it may be a while.
posted by Joe Gola at 9:08 AM
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