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As writers, we have a lot of voices in our heads, even on days when we take our medication. Many of these voices are intensely negative. I want to talk about two such voices: Self-Doubt, and the Internal Editor.

At first, these voices may seem similar; both are very critical of your writing. But if you listen carefully, you can tell them apart.

The Internal Editor is all business – just doing his job. When he spots problems in your work, he’ll be as specific as he can, and he’ll try to offer suggestions. “Your first chapter is boring,” he’ll say. “Cut it.” Or: “Death to the adverbs!” The Internal Editor is your friend, because his goal is the same as an external editor’s goal: to make your writing the best it can be.

Self-Doubt is lazy, lying on your couch all day, yelling out criticism but never offering to vacuum or help with the dishes. “You’re pathetic. Look at this thing you wrote. It’s terrible!”

If your Internal Editor is new and inexperienced, he may not be able to offer you many specifics or improvements. “This doesn’t work,” he may say, “but I don’t know how to fix it.” That’s okay. Keep reading, keep practicing. He’ll improve with time. But even from the beginning, his focus is on the work itself, and how to make it better.

Self-Doubt, on the other hand, just wants to hurt you; and because he’s inside your brain, he knows exactly how to do it. He insists that you are weak, that you are stupid, that you will never be good enough.

That’s what is known, among psychologists, as bullshit.

Telling stories is powerful, it is noble, it is brave, it is beautiful. Self-Doubt understands none of those words. That’s why he hates you. That’s why you have to beat him.

There are many strategies for this, but the one I know best is simple, dogged perseverance. Don’t engage your Self-Doubt directly, don’t argue with it, don’t analyze it, don’t drop down to his level. Just do your thing. Keep writing. Keep writing when you feel terrible. Keep writing when you get rejected. Keep writing when you think everyone else is better than you.

No matter what, keep writing.

I think of that song, Tubthumping, the singers ecstatically chanting its chorus with so much faith it transcends the cliche:

I get knocked down
But I get up again
They’re never going to keep me down

This is your creed. This is your map. If you say these words and believe them, there is only one voice that will matter anymore.

Yours.

Revision is strange.

You spend weeks, months, even years, going through multiple drafts of a manuscript. These words you’ve written, they’re not just words anymore. You have a history with them. You know them.

So when I revise, I feel a little like a deviant monk, scribbling in the margins of some sacred text I was only supposed to transcribe. Cutting out a phrase here, a paragraph there, putting new words in the mouths of saints whose canon went unchanged for centuries. What will the abbot think when he learns of these shenanigans?

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not squeamish. If a scene doesn’t work, if a paragraph has to go, I seek and obliterate those suckers like a Sicilian plumber at a Goomba convention. Destroying one’s words has its own kind of joy; it’s cleansing. Yet it still feels, at some level, vaguely subversive.

This weekend I added a whole new chapter, written entirely from scratch. If fiddling with paragraphs is subversive, adding new scenes feels downright heretical. I stare at the infinite possibility of the blank page, and I think: really? You mean I can take these beloved characters, these people whose stories I thought I already knew, and make them do whatever I want?

Oh, hell yeah I can. And it’s fun, the way starting a new book is fun.

But this reverence for what’s gone before, for the draft as currently written, makes a certain amount of sense. If I can cram yet a third simile into this straining post, revising a manuscript is like hiking a trail. You forge the first draft from nothing, hacking through undergrowth, wondering where you’re going. But each time you pass over the trail again, whether it’s a full revision or just a re-read, you smooth the path in your passing. Almost subconsciously, you adjust, correct, improve. The result of many such passes is writing that’s polished, that’s been thought about a lot. And every time you leave that well-worn path, you’re cutting a new detour through the jungle, and the new path is rough, at first. There are panthers in the jungle. You were right to be wary.

But if you only walk down the same old path, you’ll only get to that same old destination.

Forge the trail.

Write the heresies.

Stomp the Goombas.

If you’ve never read Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky,” give it a shot. The text is here and it’s only twenty-eight lines.

“Jabberwocky” was originally published as part of his novel Through the Looking-Glass, which is next on my reading list as soon as I finish China Mieville’s Kraken.

The poem is generally called “nonsense verse,” which means that he made up a lot of the words. But “nonsense” isn’t quite right, because although the words don’t have dictionary entries, you can still get a sense of what the poem is about. This is partly because of context, and partly because he didn’t form the words at random; if “mimsy,” for example, sounds vaguely weak or pathetic, maybe it’s because it’s a combination of “miserable” and “flimsy,” and sounds similar to “wimpy” for good measure.

I think it’s a fun poem, and I’m especially partial to its airtight meter. But what I find really remarkable is that no fewer than five of Carroll’s “nonsense” words went on to migrate into the dictionary. All five of the words below give their etymology as “coined by Lewis Caroll”:

chortle – to chuckle gleefully

galumph – to move along heavily and clumsily

bandersnatch – an unconventional person considered a menace

frabjous – wonderful, elegant, superb, or delicious

jabberwocky – writing that contains “nonsense” words, like the poem

There may be others I missed; and that list covers only the words that are widely accepted by Real Dictionaries (though not, apparently, by WordPress, which underlined “bandersnatch” and “frabjous” in red). Other words, like “vorpal,” though not quite to the status of dictionary words, have still gone on to wider use (in video games, for instance).

Five new words in twenty-eight lines: that’s about one new word coined for every six lines. Can any other English work claim to be that fertile?

I did my state income taxes this weekend. I was all set to post something snarky about how the Ohio I-File system was designed by lobotomized lemurs, and then I got to the Minnesota online filing system. You know, the one that doesn’t exist. So, nice job, team. Fist bumps all around. I thought no one could give me warm fuzzies about the IRS, but you got it done.

The problem, you see, is that when creating an income tax filing system, you can’t just set out with a song on your lips and a gleam in your compiler and hope for the best. You have to have some sort of plan.  But thankfully, novels are not like tax systems, and maybe we can take a different approach in our writing.

There are, as I mentioned last time, two major camps: outliners and freestylers. Freestyling gives you the flexibility to take the story wherever it needs to go. You’re not bound to a predetermined plot, so you can get in tune with your characters and make their decisions based on whatever you think they would really do right then. Stephen King is a freestyler, and he’s brilliant at creating characters you care about as a reader.

Unfortunately, the endings of King’s books – not to put too fine a point on it – suck. This happened with both The Stand and It. I tore through the pages of those giant books like nobody’s business, but when I got to the ending, it felt tacked-on; it didn’t make good on all that suspense. That’s why I didn’t read the Dark Tower series. I didn’t want to trek through seven giant books, only to be served with whatever random ending he decided to throw out there. Instead I went online and read the ending first, just to see; and, sure enough.

I’m nowhere near the level of writer that King is, but I know that I have the opposite problem in miniature. I plot extensively, get everything laid out so carefully ahead of time that any change I want to make later on becomes a sort of logic puzzle, trying to line up all the story threads I’ve surgically severed. And you know what? My beta readers have consistently told me I write kick-ass endings. They also tell me, though, that they can’t identify with my characters, that the plot steams forward but they’re not so invested in the outcome. That’s a problem.

Right around now, some of you are muttering a word that starts with “f” and rhymes with “alse dichotomy.” And you’re right; it’s very possible to create identifiable characters and a satisfying plot in the same book. I’m thinking Ender’s Game and The Lord of the Rings, to throw out a couple of the most obvious examples. But I think that at some level this means a marriage of the two approaches: perhaps freestyling with a definite end in mind, perhaps outlining based on a strong understanding of your characters. That’s what my revision is about right now – trying to take a strongly plotted book and flesh out the characters into people the reader can root for.

Oh, and speaking of the unlikely union of taxes and novels, The Pale King is coming out soon, and it’s supposed to be pretty good. Anybody planning to grab a copy? I’m still looking to tackle The Broom of the System first myself…

Second pass revision progress: 54%

This is awesome.

Okay – back to work!

If you, like me, spend a lot of perfectly good time reading author, editor, and agent blogs, then you may have heard that writers fall into two camps: plotters and pantsers.

Let me stop there. I really can’t go on until I complain about what terrible, awful names these are. “Plotter,” which makes it sound like Dr. Doom is penning his memoirs, is actually the better of the two. I won’t dignify “pantser” with an analysis. Do I have a better suggestion? No, I do not. This is full-on First Amendment non-constructive criticism, right here. But honestly. Pantser? Pantser? We asked a community of people for whom picking words is a job to name a subset of themselves, and they turn trousers into a verb?

Ahem.

The names are about how you plan your book before you write it. Plotters outline the plot first, whereas pantsers jump into the first draft without knowing quite where it’s all headed – writing by the seat of their pants, as it were. (Outliners and freestylers, I’m going to call them from now on, even though those names are lame too, because honestly.)

A lot of writers – the majority, from what I can gather – are freestylers. Isaac Asimov knew his beginning and his ending when he started a book, but nothing else. Stephen King doesn’t even know his endings ahead of time. To me, that’s inconceivable. I have to know exactly where everything is going before I go anywhere.

That choice has serious implications for how the books turn out, but I’m running out of time. I’ll continue this on Monday. Happy weekend, everybody.

So the book I’m working on now is a sci fi novel called The Counterfeit Emperor. The draft is complete, currently 50% of the way through its second round of revision. It’s around 110,000 words at the moment, will likely crest at about 120,000 as I add new scenes and details, then hopefully drop down again toward the end. The plan is to finish the current revision, do another quick pass for copyediting and other minor fixes (should lose at least a few thousand words there, just by tightening sentences) and then send it out to the beta readers again. If the feedback is positive, then I’ll tweak whatever needs tweaking and send it off. If not…well, we’ll see.

I said it’s 50% complete, and that means exactly 50%, not 51% or 49% – I’m tracking my progress by page count on a sort of “loading screen” progress bar taped to a kitchen cabinet. Just reached the 50 mark last night. What what!!

(Do people actually say “what what?” I started saying it as a joke and now I don’t even know what its deal is. How much of my lexicon now is strictly ironic?)

So. The state of the book is, uh, good. This is not my first try at a novel (nor – sshhh – my second), and I’ve been working on it longer than I’d care to admit, but I’ve got a good feeling. I’m making awesome progress, and the stuff I’m writing now is a lot better than anything I’ve written before. I think someday soon I’ll get to kick it out of the house so it can start earning its own way in the world…and then I can finally start something new!

…and this blog is an experiment.

I’ve done a couple of blogs before, about non-writing stuff, and the problem was always time. Blogs can be awful time sinks if you let them, and sooner or later, I always got to the point where the time costs outweighed the pleasures. So with this blog, I’m going to keep the posts short for the most part. That should help.

Another thing that should help is that I’m going to write about writing. Writing is something I care deeply about, and I hope that passion will fuel the blog.

(When did society reach the point where someone can write “passion will fuel the blog” and be serious about it? Anyhow…)

One thing I’m not willing to sacrifice is a consistent posting schedule. I want to update every weekday. Daily updates are good for my readers, and they’re good for me, too. If I didn’t have a consistent schedule, I wouldn’t update, and then the blog just becomes a bigger and bigger ball of guilt in the back of my brain.

And nobody wants that.

So – yeah. Blog about writing. Short posts, writing-centric, consistent updates. That about covers it for Day One.