Over the last two weeks, I’ve finally started in on a project that’s arguably long overdue: a complete, tear-down rewrite of my first completed novel, still provisionally titled The Shadow of the Ruin.
The first manuscript was written between January 2013 and August 2018, at a staggering 222,500 words. A partial rewrite, aiming primarily at cutting length, was completed in August 2019, coming in at 168,500 words. This latest one aims to take that down further, into the 120,000-130,000 range. But simply cutting material, rewriting a description here or there, can’t fix fundamental problems — and as my very first serious writing project, the original manuscript was home to more than its fair share of those.
So, as I’ve been working my way through the skeleton of this latest (and, hopefully, final) revision, I’ve been thinking about all the things I would have done differently if I’d started writing it today, not as the fresh newbie of a writer I was back in 2012.
If I could somehow travel back in time and leave behind some advice for my past self, here are the five most important lessons I would try to impart to save myself time and effort in the future:
#1: Take it seriously right from the start
This is a big one, and I can’t emphasize it enough. The years I spent doing nothing on my ideas or the kernel of my first draft are years I will never get back, development on my creative journey that could have been but simply is not.
Back when I opened up that first Word document and slapped together the first few paragraphs of my writing concept, I think I intended it simply as a lark — an experiment, never meant to go anywhere. Now, nine years later, my single greatest wish is that I had tried harder right from the start. Time is the most finite of all resources.
#2: Show, don’t tell — but only show if it’s important
When I started out, I had a very particular style of planning and writing a chapter — and it was completely wrong. I would plot out the entire sequence in my head, imagine everything the characters would do, and then right all of it.
And I do mean all of it. If I had a chapter where a character woke up, ate some breakfast, then went downstairs and walked down the street to their friend’s house, that would not have been handled in a single paragraph like I just did.
No. I would have felt the need to write out a sequence in their room to justify having them wake up there, then describe their breakfast (trying to fit in some character building!) and then describe the street for good measure as they walk down it.
Stop doing that, younger self!
#3: Aimless writing makes aimless reading
My background is in visual media: as a professional landscape photographer, I learned how to compose an image long before I learned how to compose a novel. And one thing I would try to tell myself is that the two disciplines actually share a lot in common, particularly when it comes to clutter and direction.
In a photograph, the viewer needs the help of the composition to direct their attention to the strong points of the image. We compose so that the photo reads as a linear narrative; the eye is first directed to a burst of color in the lower corner, then a river carries it up to the mountains, where the eye comes to rest, taking in the clouds above. Everything is carefully planned and calculated. Anything that isn’t part of that path is a distraction.
My early writing would have been the equivalent of simply taking a picture in the heart of a bustling city and hoping the viewer had the patience and ability to pick it apart and find the details. If you present ten things and all of them are given equal weight, the reader absorbs all ten equally — and poorly. But if only two of those ten things are important, what you’ve actually done is simply weaken them. The reader doesn’t absorb the story as well, and they don’t care as much.
#4: The art of the scene transition
Of all the aspects of writing, I think the one that’s been the most essential in helping me streamline my writing is mastering the art of the scene transition.
What I’m talking about here is how to string together scenes within a chapter. Dialogue has always come easy to me, and descriptions (when I can remember to keep them short) are no problem. But when it was time for a character to move from place to place — oh, boy.
Somewhere around the time I began work on my second novel, I imposed a rule on myself: every scene transition must be handled in a single paragraph. If I can’t deal with it in a single paragraph, I need to step back and look at the plot structure to figure out why.
Is it because something important is happening during the transition? It shouldn’t. That means the actual transition is only up until the point where the important bit happens.
Is it because I have too many description calls I want to fit in during the transition? That shouldn’t happen, either. That’s just going to be overwhelming information, and draw the reader’s focus. Fewer, stronger, descriptions is the way to go. Take whatever needs describing, and boil it down to only two or three strong descriptors.
I could probably write a whole post on this subject, but that’s for another day…
#5: Bad priorities
Finally, something that’s more of a macro issue. Priorities are the subtle framework of everything one does. Every person has a set of values and beliefs that they work off of; what they believe constitutes good writing, good structure, and even whatever rules of writing they happen to subscribe to.
It’s important for this framework to be solid. When I started writing, mine wasn’t. In fact, it was terribly flawed.
Here’s an example. When I was writing my first draft, I had it in my head that the manuscript needed to be long. It wasn’t an accident that it weighed in at over 200,000 words — no, that was a plan. I had grown up reading door-stopper fantasy epics, and I had it in my mind that I needed to emulate those in form if I wanted my own epic fantasy to be like theirs.
With critical thinking and time, I now realize that what I was attempting to copy from those works — what I had highlighted mentally as a strength, even a necessity — was a weakness. The more I learned to discipline my own writing, to tighten up my plot and write efficiently, the more I began to notice sloppiness in those same works I had grown up with.
I could certainly go on, but that’s where I’m going to stop. There’s an ocean of advice I’d give myself back in December 2012 if I had the ability, but I don’t. In the end, all I can do is focus on where I am now, and never stop learning more lessons that someday I’ll wish I could pass on backwards in time.
Any time I feel discouraged about my writing (something that isn’t nearly as common as it was, I’m happy to report), all I have to do is look back at how far I’ve come. And I’m eager to look to the future, wondering how bad my writing from the present day will look to the version of myself that will exist in 2030. I hope that the future me will have another truckload of advice that I would benefit from today.
With any luck, part of that advice will concern how to get published and become a commercially successful writer. Of all the things I’ve learned since 2012, that’s not on the list — yet!