It’s Tuesday the 15th, the middle of September 2020 and I’m sitting here before my computer feeling pretty exhausted.

It’s a good kind of exhaustion, but an exhaustion nonetheless.

I’ve spent an awful lot of time of late working on my latest novel and, now that its nearing its end, I’m beat by all the intense work but happy because its coming to its end.

If you frequent this board, usually I’m much more active about posting, and of late it seems I’ve only been able to do on average one every week or so… Well, it seems that way, anyway. Further, because of my focus on this novel, many of the posts have involved Book #8 in my Corrosive Knights series.

I tend to write about what’s going on in my life and/or my current interests and at least for the last couple of months I’ve been focused like a proverbial laser on this novel and getting it done.

Which brings me to something I’ve mentioned it before and I’ll note again: I’m always amused by the way authors are depicted on TV or in the movies. I often have these visions of Angela Lansbury as the fussy Agatha Christie-type mystery writer who seems to write in her spare time while solving mysteries in her other spare time.

Or there’s the Hemingway-type author, the great outdoors explorer/great white hunter who also seems to have so much free time to engage in his manly activities while also seemingly writing books and stories in his spare time.

Then there’s the intellectual type, with a pipe in hand and thick glasses on their face, who at least seem like the type that would spend hours before a typewriter/computer creating their works.

There’s also the crazed/weird author, perhaps exemplified by the likes of Edgar Allan Poe (though tragic) or H. P. Lovecraft. People who are misfits yet brilliant when they set pen to paper but are otherwise looked upon as oddballs by society in general.

The other day I saw the opening to a Colombo episode that featured author Mickey Spillane (of Mike Hammer fame) being offed in the show’s opening minutes. Spillane is presented as a famous author who has the time to go to bars and have himself a good time, then record his fiction so that his secretary can transcribe it later.

The bottom line is the act of writing is often presented as something done on the fly, quickly and without much effort by the authors themselves or the focus goes toward the personalities rather than their actual writing.

I’ve noted before that for me writing can be excruciating. I’ve noted the quote one author -whose name sadly eludes me- that they “don’t like writing, but love having written.”

In other words, when it all comes together and you hold the completed novel or see your story in a magazine/online, you’re proud of your work, immensely so, but the actual process of getting there can be very hard.

Mind you, I’m not asking for some sympathy here or saying “poor me”.

The fact is that while I don’t love the actual process of writing, its in my blood and I couldn’t imagine spending those hours doing anything else.

But it is hard stuff.

Just as an athlete spends countless hours practicing before reaching the big game (and I can imagine many athletes love the game but aren’t quite as enamored of the training involved to play it), authors like me -because I’m sure there are others with different techniques- spend countless hours working on our stories and moving pieces this way and that, cutting out sections or realizing we have to do something completely different… and throwing away what may turn out to be months of work in favor of going into a different direction.

With Book #8 in the Corrosive Knights series, I wound up doing just that. The novel began as one thing but after months –months!– of toying around with different ideas, I slowly came to the realization that I needed to go in a different direction and that’s what I did. I had some 20,000+ words written by that point and most of it was now useless.

I very much doubt, too, that any of it can be used in the future and for some other work!

So that’s the way it goes with writing. It’s not this casual thing that I do then solve mysteries on the side with my beautiful sidekick, who we make eyes with and might get involved with.

Neither am I always out in the wilds, canoeing or mountain climbing or (heaven forbid) hunting. Nor am I a weirdo (at least I hope not!) who society looks upon as an oddball.

What I am is a guy who spends a lot of time before the computer or before printed pages, near constantly thinking about what I’ve written and where it is I want to go. Looking for rough edges and softening them, looking for bad grammar/descriptions and fixing them.

In time, the work goes for this amorphous with some ideas in it, say a beginning and an end, maybe some idea of a middle section and certainly vague ideas of what the characters are and what they’re doing, then slowly I mold those disparate ideas until they start to make sense and, once they do, work them more and more, cutting out the fat and focusing like that proverbial laser on what needs to be in the story and what does not.

If I’m successful, I hope my novels -which sometimes can take as many as 2 years to complete- can nonetheless be read in one longish sitting.

In fact, I consider this a great success: That I’ve written something which has drawn a reader in so well and so quickly that they are willing to spend their precious hours breathlessly working their way through the book, whether it takes them one prolonged sitting or a couple of days.

Regardless, I don’t want to waste any readers’ time. I want to present, with each new novel, the very best I’m capable of. I know that my works may have flaws and hopefully they’re nothing more serious than a silly typo here or there.

I want to entertain you, and I truly, sincerely, don’t want to waste your time.

Yesterday I posted that I was finished reading and pen/ink revising through my latest novel, the 9th draft of the book, and was looking forward to putting those revisions into the computer.

Last night, I slept really hard.

Lights out and goodbye.

Though it may not seem the case, writing is a very stressful, time consuming job.  Job as in work.

I’ve stated it before but it bears repeating: Writing is WORK.  At times very, very hard work.

I started this latest book in the Corrosive Knights series, believe it or not, waaaaaay back in 2014.  I wrote some notes and sequences, amounting to maybe 10,000-15,000 words, then let it go while working on, among other things, Foundry of the Gods (Book #6 of the Corrosive Knights series).

When Foundry of the Gods was finished, it was back to Book #7, the conclusion to the Corrosive Knights series, and for nearly two years now I’ve been working on it and, incrementally, brought it closer and closer to its conclusion.

The first 4-5 drafts of the book were very incomplete, as most of my novels are in those early drafts.  There are some segments that I have well thought out and write.  There are other segments that may be presented as nothing more than an outline.  Perhaps no more than one or two sentences!

Which brings us to the heading above: Persistence.

With each read-through, with each putting revisions into the computer, I move the proverbial ball forward.  Sometimes the ball “moves” many miles forward.  At other times, perhaps it doesn’t move forward nearly enough.

With each revision and if I’m paying attention -and, trust me, I try my very best to do so- the novel slowly emerges.

There are “a-ha!” moments, where you come up with some clever bit or sequence or dialogue that improves everything around it.  But more often than not what you’re doing is realizing this doesn’t work or that sentence is bloated or that sequence is a repetition of a sequence that came before.

Rather than simply cracking open your cranium and letting your thoughts spill all over the page, what I tend to do as a writer is incrementally build my book over time.  I’ve mentioned before that when I’m writing, a day doesn’t pass where I’m not thinking about some part of a book I’m currently on and how do I improve this or that.

This goes on for, on average of late, two full years as I write my latest work.

For some writers, the process is certainly quicker.  Stephen King, as I’ve noted before, stated in his book on writing that he will write a book, put it away in a drawer (to, as he put it, “cool down”), then do a revision and off it goes to be printed.  If he’s to be believed, that means his first run through a novel is very close to what he eventually releases.

I’m jealous!

Clearly what works for me may not work for others.  I suspect if Mr. King took two full years to write a novel he might have given up the career.

But for me, as much of a pain in the ass as it is to so slowly, incrementally create a book, the fact of the matter is that this is how it works for me, and when I get to the end of this particular road I look back at all that hard work and the persistence needed to create it…

…and I’m proud of the work.  So very proud.

And I finally, finally get to have a good night’s sleep! 😉

Bloat: unwarranted or excessive growth or enlargement; to make turgid or swollen

As I jump into draft #9 of my latest Corrosive Knights novel, I’m particularly interested in finding -and snipping away- anything within it which could fall under the above definition.

I’ve talked before about how difficult it is to write -and it is- but as one reaches the stage where I’m at, where your story is pretty much set and you’re moving away from creative writing and to revisions involving grammar and spelling, one should also try their best to see which sections of your book require pruning.

It’s not as easy as it sounds.

Let’s face it, authors fall in love with their works.  Hell, they wouldn’t spend all that time on them if they didn’t love what they were doing, but the danger is that they get to the point where they may not realize parts of their beloved works, be they something as small as a sentence or two to as large as several chapters, would be better left out.

When I was writing my very first novel, Haze, I very much fell into that situation.  Originally the book featured a very long opening section which served to acquaint the reader with the protagonist.  It went on for way too long before we got to the “meat” of the story.

As I was very much a novice to the whole book writing business at the time, I simply was not aware of this bloated opening act.  Luckily, I didn’t publish the work then and there and instead revised and re-revised the work over and over again and gradually developed an understanding of what worked and what didn’t.

I was also helped immensely by the fact that I put the novel away for a while -perhaps a little over a year or so- before getting at it again.  It was at that point that I realized how much I could get rid of from that opening section without hurting the reader’s understanding of the protagonist and while getting that same reader that much quicker to the “good stuff”.

It was an important lesson for me and I’m fascinated to find book reviews where readers say something to the effect that a book needed “a good editor.”  Usually the comment refers to a book being too long and featuring material that was unnecessary and should have been eliminated.

You know, bloat.

So, in the interests of brevity, here I go into my own novel.

Let’s see what I see…

Been a while since I posted some personal thoughts on the writing process but, as I’m not elbow deep in the 7th Draft of my latest Corrosive Knights novel, I realized it was a good time to go into at least one very important -perhaps THE most important!- element in writing:

Be concise.

Make every word, sentence, paragraph, and chapter count.  Trim the fat and, even more importantly, be on the lookout for it.

Authors are like any other people: You’re -quite understandably- proud of things you can do.  This goes for things you do on your job to things you do in your free time and can take the form of many things.  Whether it be cooking a meal, cleaning your home, setting tile, building a dog/tree house, running a personal best mile, etc. etc. etc. one takes pride in one’s accomplishments and creative writing, in my case specifically, is what I absolutely live for.

I love the act of writing a book, even when its a freaking pain in my ass and things don’t seem to be quite right and it takes too long to get through a certain section or you bemoan all the time spent before your computer or reading through the printouts.

The satisfaction comes at the end, when you know you’ve done your best and created something you’re proud of and, even more importantly, you’re certain its something others will enjoy.

But here’s the thing: You can’t fall too much in love with your work and get to a point where you’re blinded to potential weaknesses.

When I was elbow deep in Draft #6 of the book, there was a section in it toward the beginning that, frankly, wasn’t all that exciting to read through.  I would go even so far as to say I found it something of a chore to read.

I didn’t think much of it at the time, figuring I was either exhausted (as I frequently am… I fear sometimes I work myself a little too hard even as another part of my mind berates me for not working hard enough!) or too concerned with other sections of the book that needed work or… whatever.

So here I was yesterday in Draft #7 of the book and I get to that same part and… its boring me.

Again.

This time around I put the draft down and decide to take a bathroom break.  As I do so, I think about that section of the book (a chapter, really), and recall my similar feelings when I read that particular section a while back.

I have sudden, blinding insight and realize, perhaps one draft too later (but better late than never!) that if I’m feeling bored reading this particular chapter, and its my own freaking work, then how will others react to it?

So I think some more.  The chapter is important to the story so eliminating it entirely is out of the question.  No, I realized, there was a need to take another careful look at it and read it yet again and try to see why it wasn’t working.

Though I was past that chapter, I returned to it, resolved to unlock this mystery.

With that mindset, I realized the chapter had more bloat than others.  I simply went into too much description of things that ultimately didn’t matter all that much to the story, even though the events in the particular chapter were important to the overall novel.

And I became a surgeon and carefully went over the chapter line by line by line and cut all the things that were not necessary while keeping all the things that were.  In the end, I suspect the first half of this chapter will be roughly half the length it originally was, but readers will move through this chapter much quicker and the points I was trying to make will be made that much faster.

The late author Elmore Leonard had a fascinating list of 10 Creative Writing Do’s and Don’ts (you can read the full list here).  My favorite bit of advice is his very last point:

Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.  My most important rule is one that sums (this) up: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

I love that first line: Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.  In other words, when writing a novel or story of any kind, the author should try their best to keep the stuff people want to read and remove/delete/eliminate the stuff they don’t want to read.

Sounds simple but, of course, it isn’t quite so simple.  For six drafts I had a chapter in my latest book which bothered me yet, dense as I am, didn’t see it for what it was: Bloated.  It was only on the 7th pass that I recognized there was a problem and addressed it.

This is why I work through as many drafts of my novels as I do and take great pains to make sure they’re released when they’re ready.  While it may take a reader a day or two to read one of my novels, it takes me of late two full years to write these works.  But that’s the time needed and that’s the time it takes.

The last thing I want to do is write something that bores people… especially me!  😉

Or perhaps a better writer?

There are a plethora of “how to” books out there regarding this topic and I know what you’re thinking: Which ones are worth spending my vast riches on?

Over at Slate.com we have the following article which may help you separate the wheat from the chaff…

8 best books on writing, according to Novelists, Poets, and Writing Professors

Now, it’s damn tempting to think that reading a few books like these mentioned above will help your writing.  I suspect that if you study them, you will likely help yourself to some degree.

As someone who has considered doing an “On Writing”-type book (I’ve given my advice here and there on this blog), let me be the first to say this: There is no one advice book that will suddenly make you a superb writer.

Yeah, big reveal there, I’m sure.

The fact of the matter is that each author or potential author has their “style” of writing.  Shadow author Walter Gibson was able to produce a mind-boggling amount of words on a daily basis.  I recall he noted how his very last Shadow novel (these novels tended to be between 50-60,000 words so they could be considered novellas) was written in a single long sitting and sent out to the publishers of the pulp magazine the next day.

Stephen King, at least according to what he wrote in his On Writing book, stated he writes a book in roughly three months or so, puts it in a drawer to “let it cool down”, then comes back to revise it and its out.  I suspect that since releasing that book, he’s streamlined his writing habits even more.  I wonder if he revises his books much at all, or leaves it to editors.

Then there are authors who take up to ten years plus to create their work.  Clearly and unlike Walter Gibson and Stephen King, they sweat all the details.  Perhaps a little too much!

Me?  At first I was able to release roughly a book a year but of late I’ve found myself taking two years to write a book.  Though I wish I could release material more quickly -oh how I wish I could!- it takes a while to get all the details of a story together, much less present it in a way that I feel is exciting and interesting to a potential reader.

The thing about writing is that you have to have something of a vault of information in your head regarding stories.  Not only the ones you admire for their success, but also those you look back on and learn from their failures.

Mind you, I’d be the last person to say all my books are magnificent, earth-shattering triumphs (though over at Goodreads.com my books have earned a cumulative average of 4.10 out of 5, something I can’t even begin to say how much I’m humbled by and appreciate).

However, I’ve tried to be a sponge with regard to stories.  I’ve been that way since I was old enough to read.  Whatever it may be, comic books, novels, stories, TV shows, movies, etc. etc. I’ve taken in, enjoyed, then mentally taken apart.  I’ve examined what worked and what didn’t, where the author/actor/director really got me as a viewer/reader and where they didn’t.

Again: What worked and what did not.

And this sort of examination helps me, I feel, as a guide when I’m writing my own works.

Why does it take me 2 years to write a novel?  Because on average I go through 12 drafts of a novel before I feel it is good enough to release.

12 drafts, ladies and gentlemen.

12 times I go through a book, the first 5 or 6 drafts usually being a gradual build up in the story, to the point where I feel I’ve gotten all the elements needed in their proper place.  The next 5-6 drafts tend to be about the storytelling itself, to make sure the book is lean and mean and doesn’t feature any repetition or awkward phraseology.

In other words, work, work, work!

It seems an obvious thing, but if you’re interested in writing something, what do you write?

The obvious answer should be similar to everything else regarding you as a person: Write what you like.

If you’re into science fiction, write science fiction.  If you’re into mystery, write mysteries.  Ditto with romances, biographies, young adult, children, or how-to tomes.

Having said that, I suspect there are those who pursue genres or book types which are popular, as well.  I’m hopeful they’re a minority, but who knows.

So you want to be a writer of, say, mysteries, and you wonder what you need to do to come up with your story.

The first step in the process, should you have reached the point where you want to write mystery novels, is to read plenty of mystery novels.  You see what works and, sometimes even more importantly, what does not work in other mystery novels/stories.

You analyze what excites you about them, what, for lack of a better term, “tickles your fancy”.

The next step is to start writing.  And you write and write and write and, eventually –hopefully!– you’ve written that first novel.

Then what?

There is a story, very likely apocryphal, that upon writing his first novel Ernest Hemingway threw it in the trash and got to work on his next book.

The fact of the matter is that whatever you write first, whatever it may be, is likely not going to be all that great.

Understand, there certainly is a possibility the novel or story you write is a good one.

But let’s be real here: Just because you decide to go to the track one day and run a lap or two, it doesn’t mean you’re suddenly the heavy favorite to win the 500 meter race in the next Olympics.

So write that first novel as best as you can.  Pour your heart into it and revise it and polish it and try to make it the very best thing you can.

Then, you have to find the moment to abandon it.

I’m not saying you should throw it away and use the experience gained to write your second novel.  What I’m saying is that as important as starting a novel is, it is almost just as important to find the time to finish your work on it.

I know what I talk of!

Haze, wasn’t the first story I wrote but it was my first attempt at an honest to goodness novel.

Writing the book proved a brutal but ultimately very rewarding experience.

Of all the books I’ve written since, one of the biggest lessons learned from writing Haze is that you need to focus on what is important in the story and not get too consumed with page or word counts.

In the book’s early incarnations, there was an awful lot of stuff going on in the book’s first act, stuff that over time I realized didn’t add much to the story and, worse, kept readers from getting to the good stuff.

The writing of this novel turned from my finding how to create a story to my learning what was important in telling that story versus what was extraneous.

It took me years to figure this out.

In between, I left the book for a while and devoted time to writing other stories and plotting other novels.  I worked and worked while Haze sat in a drawer and on my hard drive.  Now and again I would return to it, having gained more experience over time, and revise it.

I can’t say how many times I’ve revised that book, but I suspect it was far more than my usual 10-12 revisions of a novel.

And that’s another thing that experience teaches you.  I’ve come to realize that my first 1-3rd draft of a novel is usually where I’m putting ideas down, sometimes out of order or presented in a word salad.  If I have a notion for a scene and I’m not certain about where it will go in the book, I may just write a description and highlight it and go about writing whatever else needs to be written.

In time, I have that first “full” draft of the book and from that point on the polishing starts.  I go over the novel to make sure I’ve accounted for every action, that I’ve explained why things occur and how.  I make sure everything is clear.

The last three or four drafts of my latest novel are inevitably devoted to grammar and syntax.  I make sure everything is spelled right and that there be as few typos as possible.

And once I’m done, it’s off to the next book.

I’ve said it before and I’ll repeat it again: Writing is not an easy thing to do.  It requires considerable work and, as should be obvious by what I wrote above, considerable patience and effort.

But if I can do it, anyone can! 😉

One of my favorite quotes regarding the movie making business, and one which I have mentioned before, is by noted screenwriter William Goldman.  Mr. Goldman wrote the screenplay for such classic films as Harper, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All The President’s Men, and Princess Bride, among many others.

In his 1982 book Adventures In The Screen Trade and referring to making a “successful” film, Mr. Goldman famously wrote:

Nobody knows anything.

He elaborated:

Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for certain what’s going to work.  Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.

This applies, to my mind, to almost all forms of art.  David Bowie had a spectacular music career.  He first hit it big with the release of the single “Space Oddity” in 1969, which happened to coincide with NASA getting the first man on the Moon.

However, his subsequent albums didn’t do all that much and there was the thought that he was a “one hit wonder”.  He would release a full album that year, Space Oddity, which included the single but other than that one song didn’t do all that much.  The next year and in 1970 he would release what I consider his first great album, The Man Who Sold the World, and that album went absolutely nowhere.  His next album, Hunky Dory, was released in 1971 and to many this is the first “real” David Bowie album.  The album featured the successful song “Changes” but it too wasn’t as huge of a success as what came next: 1972’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders of Mars.

It was that album which made David Bowie a superstar and, over the years, people realized both The Man Who Sold the World and Hunky Dory were indeed pretty damn good albums as well.

However… what if Mr. Bowie hadn’t released Ziggy Stardust?  What if the record company gave up on him following the so-so success of his first three full albums?

Moving into literature, what makes a successful novel?

Why, for example, have the Harry Potter novels become a literary mega-success while other young adult novels featuring magic -there are plenty to choose from!- haven’t?

Why did Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn’s incredibly successful third novel, hit a nerve in readers and sell like crazy and result in a successful movie adaptation while her previous book, Dark Places, didn’t do quite as well?  Sure, the success of Gone Girl resulted in an uptick sales for Dark Places and a movie was eventually made of it starring Charlize Theron and yet… when one thinks of Gillian Flynn, one doesn’t think of Dark Places, one thinks of Gone Girl.

Looking more broadly, why did Fifty Shades of Gray succeed so wildly while so many other works of erotica have not?  Why are the works of H. P. Lovecraft today looked upon as horror classics yet during his lifetime Mr. Lovecraft barely made enough money on them to survive?  Why did Stieg Larsson’s Girl With The Dragon Tattoo become such a huge worldwide hit?  Was the novel really that great or was the tragedy behind the novel’s creation -the fact that the author died before it was released- what made people curious to buy it and its two sequels?

The answer is… unknown.

Nobody knows anything.

You can write a truly great novel and find people really, really love it.  You can write something people hate.  You can get plenty of positive reviews and ratings or be slammed with negative ratings.  Worse than that, your book might engender indifferent reactions.

Your novel does well.  Or decently.  Or poorly.

You may wonder why, but its pointless to do so.  There is no explanation for a success.  Hopefully, it is because your book was well written but it could be because it featured an intriguing topic presented at the right time.

There are plenty of famous authors out there who have sold a ton of books and who many view as poor writers.  I could mention a few right here and right now but what’s the point?  They succeeded and, you know what?  Good for them.  Anything that gets people looking around for books has to be a good thing for every other author, does it not?

Yet you still wonder: Why did these works succeed?  Why did others that you feel deserved better did not?

Nobody knows anything.

Least of all me.

The bottom line is this: As a writer, write what you like.  Write about things you as a reader would like to read.  Hope for the best but, if the work doesn’t succeed, don’t feel all is lost.  Perhaps your second book… or your third… or your tenth… will finally get you the audiences you long for.

Even if it doesn’t, be proud of what you leave behind.  Do the best you can with the tools you have and don’t worry about the success.

Leave behind a legacy.  Leave behind something you’ll be proud of.

In the end, there is no magic formula for success.  If there were, the world would be an awfully boring place.