The First Wall, Part 2

I’ve always been able to set words together, naturally, easily, so I’m not used to learning new things pertaining to writing. There had to be some place where people like me go to learn to use whatever talent they have at it. Probably lots of places. I didn’t have a lot of time to waste, and I wasn’t going to be able to wait around for classes or workshops. And I didn’t feel ready for workshops, and the idea of sitting in a classroom after suffering through a string of degrees so many years ago made me want to cry. Though I can’t. Man, wouldn’t it be great to be able to cry? Must be nice.

Anyway, I was left with two resources readily at hand: the entire web, and a bunch of books on writing on a shelf in my bedroom, leftovers from a friend’s studies on the same subject. The web seemed big and impersonal, and seemed like the kind of place where bad advice is a common as good advice. In fairness, awhile back a friend had sent me a link to an old blog of Jim Butcher’s relating to writing technique, and I had found it useful. But the books seemed like a better source of concentrated knowledge.

So I looked through the books. I chose one called How to Write a Damn Good Novel by a guy named James N. Frey. It seemed like a good general guide to dealing with the types of issues I had.

I would like to pause for a moment and point out two things that made this experience nightmarishly miserable for me. Not Frey or his book, but reading these types of books in general. First, I find nonfiction of any kind just brutal to read. It’s like being in school, but where the school follows me everywhere I can carry a book. I have friends who only read nonfiction, and they seem like reasonable people, but I think they must be sick or insane in some way that will only reveal itself when they start eating brains in public, or something. Personally I read exclusively fiction, and don’t feel like I’ve missed out on any knowledge. As everyone knows, huge swaths of history are fiction anyway, a lot of science turns out to be fiction in the end, and let’s not even get started on biography, philosophy or religion.

Second, these books were made out of paper. I hadn’t read more than a couple of books on paper since getting my first Kindle, what, three years ago? That’s two out of easily five hundred books in that time. And I hadn’t read even one paper book in at least a year before this event. I couldn’t believe how annoying it was to have to carry a stack of paper around, turn pages, etc. I think I wrote about this stuff in a previous blog entry, so I won’t belabor it, but it horrifies me freshly thinking about it now.

Bottom line, I didn’t have any choice on either count. It was this or put the project on hold and find a class, or keep writing in the dark while fully aware that I was missing something. I soldiered through the hardships of learning new stuff from reading nonfiction, making my way through the entire book and folding over pages to mark passages relevant to my specific issues. I’ve never liked highlighting, but dog-earing and maybe taking some summary notes later always worked for me.

I will stop short of recommending this book in particular over others. I have nothing against it. I suspect there are a lot of books that teach more or less the same information. I will say this, though: it turned out that I’d found the answers I needed to get past that first wall.

It took me a day or two to read that book, and immediately afterward I spent another day or so reading a second one, How to Grow a Novel by Sol Stein. That was the book that yielded the horrible quote I posted early in this blog, but otherwise it was informative and useful for the most part. Even if it was a physical book, hardback, full of nonfiction.

I might later review individual books on writing, but that’s not my purpose right now. What happened next was that I was able to go back to my writing with some new tools that gave me two new capabilities:

1. I understood the overall structure that the book would need to have in the end, as well as the necessary structure for each scene and other smaller pieces of the book.
2. I now had a working knowledge of how to judge whether a given segment was beneficial or unnecessary, and how to tune it up.

In addition to these key new powers, there was an important rule I learned, one of those things that you read and know it’s true but still hate it and rail against it:

“All first drafts are crap.” - Attributed to Hemingway, though I haven’t verified that.

For me to accept that I would spend as much time rewriting as I have been writing was hard, but I understand the wisdom of it. Some days the writing was slow going, and after I got this point from the Stein book, I realized that I could just pound through sections that were dragging, rather than getting bogged down, because the odds are I’ll have to rework them anyway.

I haven’t decided whether to cover any aspects of writing theory and craft in this blog. I’m no expert and I’m no teacher, certainly not of this stuff. But I have written a lot of articles, and it might be worth covering some of these points one by one down the road. We’ll see.

And so, after about a week of struggling and finally solving the problem with my least favorite bitter medicine combo—learning by reading non-fiction—I got past that wall.