This round we’re doing some recent discoveries on my writing journey. Some are less groundbreaking and more “I did not expect this to become an issue” things, which, hey no one told me about them, either.
1. Switching tenses between your WIPs is not easy
Up until my upcoming book (Eternal Night of the Northern Sky, go check it out) I wrote exclusively in past-tense with very rare exception save for a fanfic here and there. I cannot remember what compelled me to write ENNS in present tense, but I’d committed and 10k words in, there was no going back to change it.
Committing in the first place made it very frustrating trying to actively remember my English verb tenses and sentence structures (and I am a native English speaker) that just have not come naturally to me in 8 years of writing, but once I got it, I got it.
So while waiting around during the editing process and trying to go back to past-tense for another project, past-tense started to look janky and awkward and my WIPs, too, are now written in present-tense. I am undecided on how to feel about this beyond annoyed that it is a problem.
2. Implied sex scenes have surprising pros and cons
I’m of the belief that sex scenes, like action scenes, should serve a purpose and do a lot of heavy lifting. It’s not just the actual progression of movement between the characters, it’s the exploration of trust and vulnerability, the consummation of a relationship, the growth of these two characters together with a new understanding (if this is meant to be a huge moment and not, like, an establishing one-night stand). Otherwise it becomes gratuitous fluff.
Enter the problem: I cannot write all the character development that occurs during a sex scene, if I cannot also write the sex. All of that newly broken ground on trust and gushy emotions has to come in the buildup before I decide to cut away and in skipping the rest of that scene, I have to essentially freeze the character development until I pick up the narrative again in the aftermath.
So if it’s a moment that’s meant to be the climax of two characters trusting each other, or anything that would require them talking through this important milestone in their relationship, I have to rework everything around the redacted narrative.
Sex scenes are just so unique that way. People can be very sensitive about them, they’re very tricky to get right, very revealing about what the author thinks is sexy and attractive, incredibly important relationship milestones for the characters, and, aside from torture or extremely graphic violence, the only scenes you ‘fade to black’ on and leave it up to wild imagination.
*OP why don’t you just bite the bullet and write the sex? Because I want to be an inclusive author and you’ll enjoy my book even without sex to go write your own, but you might not read it if it’s on the page because of personal taste or triggers or beliefs, okay?
3. Your crutch words will haunt you
Here is a list of 40 of them. I will never be the kind of author that struggles to make my stories longer. To everyone who does, I wish I had your problems—trying to trim the fat off a narrative already running at breakneck speed demands trimming individual words off sentences sometimes. Like crutch words.
These carry over from real-world conversation, words we don’t always realize we’re relying on. My big one is “just”. I had a 125k word manuscript and had over 600 instances of “just” and maybe only a dozen were warranted by the time the ax fell.
Good news is, once you see them and embarrass yourself finding, replacing and/or deleting them, you become very aware of them in your writing. Crutch words are a lot like cursing, which I talked about in Part 5—not including them doesn’t leave a big of a crater in the dialogue as you might think. I still use “just” and “so” but “so” is worked into my writing style as a syntactical element and I tend to leave my “so’s” in place. “Just,” on the other hand, can be cut 99% of the time.
*Disclaimer, those dozen “justs” I ended up keeping in that manuscript were all in dialogue, because while the narrative should be clean of crutch words, personally I think keeping them as your characters’ crutch words can make them feel more human.
4. Breaking up dialogue-heavy scenes with movement can get tedious
This is entirely dependent on writing style. Some books will have entire unbroken paragraphs of dialogue, make a new paragraph, and keep going with the same unbroken dialogue. Some will split a monologue up with character movement or reaction to whatever’s being said. Some authors are very frugal with dialogue tags (to varying levels of success) and some over-describe the movement of their characters or use way too many superfluous tags when “said” is not actually dead, your primary education lied.
Just keep in mind that writing is, well, written. The intonation of words might be completely lost in translation if you slap your reader with a wall of text, especially in an important character moment, and they have a critical misunderstanding in how they’re supposed to perceive the line being delivered.
This is why we use italics for emphasis. We’re still trying to legitimize the interobang (!?) because it’s very useful, and we’re very far from legitimizing Tumblr Speak to convey sarcasm and sincerity. How we convey tone is generally isolated to the generation we grew up in and the technology we had available (like how younger generations interpret ellipses compared to their parents).
There’s that Tumblr post out there that goes: “I never said she stole my money,” and claims that the meaning behind the denial changes wildly depending on which word you stress, seven different ways—and that person is absolutely right.
Every dialogue-heavy scene is a case-by-case basis, and best advice I can give is to have your betas pay extra attention to those scenes, making sure they interpret it right, or even having someone read the dialogue back to you with inflection to make sure you’re tagging and describing it properly.
Too many breaks for narrative and you risk clogging up the scene. Not enough and you lose a lot of the emotion behind their words when you aren’t describing how the speaker is visually reacting to what they’re saying.
5. Truth really is stranger than fiction
Maybe it’s the capitalist hellscape we all find ourselves in, but for example: If you told me someone wrote a book about a submersible, built for tours to the Titanic wreck, and was dubbed “Titan,” run by a company called OceanGate, failed via catastrophic implosion on its descent to the most infamous maritime disaster in history, infamous for its hubris as the “unsinkable ship,” only to find out that the company with “-Gate” in its name circumvented and ignored multiple regulations and expert opinions…. I’d call that the most contrived and lazy attempt at a criticism of human folly I’ve ever seen.
And that sh*t really happened. Titanic is already almost mythical for its hubris. The engineer of that ship stared God in the face and said bet, and lost. Then you have the same damn incident happen a century later, for the same damn reasons.
Truth might not be ‘stranger’ than fiction, perhaps as equally contrived, equally unbelievable, and can reach equal amounts of astounding stupidity. Anyone, anywhere, for the rest of literary history, can no longer say “that deus/diablo ex machina would never happen” because it can. It did.
6. You’ll find inspiration everywhere, but have nowhere to put it
Deciding what kind of story you want to tell takes so many layers, it deserves its own post that has been covered plenty else by other writers over the years but since I write fantasy and sci-fi, my inspiration usually starts with “I want to write a story about X fantasy element” and I go from there. Then the sub-genre, like if it’ll be an adventure, urban fantasy, high fantasy, what time period, etc. Then the theme.
If I’ve got my laptop close, I can polish off a whole first chapter in maybe two hours. And then… it gets dumped into my “stalled projects” folder, to be saved, but moved aside so it doesn’t clutter the workspace of WIPs I’m actually invested in.
Sometimes they’ll get revisited, sometimes my enthusiasm wanes as quickly as it came on. It can get disappointing and discouraging, but if anyone ever met your “I want to be a writer” with skepticism, or you yourself fear that you’ll be a one-trick pony in a creative slump forever: The inspiration probably isn’t the issue, it’s committing to the story you dreamt up.
7. Just because it never gets published, doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value
My writing journey began with original works back in middle school, then I gravitated toward fanfic once I discovered it and got a huge confidence boost from all the positive feedback from my readers, then felt restricted by my fandoms and switched back to original works. The very first novel I started out with was my sci-fi WIP, eight years ago, that will likely never see the light of day as it was written. I have two completed books that could be self-published right now.
The problem: Book three, of a planned five, generated a “deleted scenes” pile that quickly outpaced the word count of the actual manuscript because I cannot seamlessly fit every arc of my ensemble cast when and how I want them to happen. And, as previously mentioned, those 8-year-old characters have suffered me using them as writing therapy, and some elements have gotten far darker and more convoluted than I intended, because the worldbuilding pool got way deeper than a book with an ensemble cast can support.
But even if it never gets published, it’s not worthless. Those two books sprinted so I could jog. They were so detailed and so complex and had so many layers that starting over in a different genre with something simpler like ENNS was a breeze. I’d cut my teeth on a narrative that demanded an insane amount of behind-the-scenes production that nothing else would ever be as hard.
Not everyone will have that experience, but if you’ve saved all your old and cringey works from your early days, go back and read them and compare them to where you are now, and hopefully you realize that you’re turning into the author you thought you would be, even if you’re not quite there yet.
Now go write your insane mega-hit waiting to happen.
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