Talking Yourself through Drafting

Some of you know that I hate drafting—which is weird for a writer to say, I know, but that's the way it is... or at least the way it was.

I've learned (through time and work and lots of counseling) that it's not drafting I hated. I hated the fear of imperfection and getting it wrong. I hated the pressure that I put on myself to write well or write a lot (or both!). Most of all, I hated that I hated myself for not meeting my own expectations.

Drafting is still hard, but I've been learning how to have compassion on myself—not just the part of me that's writing but also the part that puts so much pressure on me. That part just wants me to achieve my goals! It just wasn't aware that some of the ways it did that were harming me.

I've been easing my way back into writing consistently, and I've found myself approaching it differently. The tips below are some of what I've been learning. Maybe they can help you too.

Focus on the current words/sentence/paragraph. Don't think about everything you have to do—how many words you've written, how much revision you'll have to do, what you need to do later that day... All of that is overwhelming and makes it impossible to write. When those thoughts come, hear them then let them go, and focus on the next words again.

When you feel stuck or scared, take a break. I don't mean a long break like I've suggested before. Take just a minute or two, or maybe even just one long, deep breath. The sentence you're stuck on will look different. The emotion that's sticking you will pass, often much faster than you think.

Trust your past self. You've written before. You've revised before. You can do it again. (Even if this is your first novel, you wrote the paragraphs and sentences that came before. You wrote stories in school. You've told stories about yourself to friends.) Trust that you write for a reason.

Trust your present self. Thoughts will come that what you're writing isn't very good or that it isn't working how you'd like. But your present self can't know what's working and what isn't—not until you see the whole picture together. Trust that what you're writing now is good enough for now.

Trust your future self. Even if what you're writing were bad, trust that you will be able to make it better later. More than that: you can't actually know how to make it better until later. Your future self will handle that, and they'll be just fine.

Give yourself grace. Writing goals are good if they help motivate you, but they can backfire just as easily. When you find yourself afraid of meeting your goals, give yourself permission to turn them off. Whatever you accomplish today is fine. Five words are more than zero. There will always be days that you struggle to write, but there will be days later that you don't as well. Whatever you can do is good.

You write for a reason, and there are people out there who want to know what that reason is. We're rooting for you.

Make sure you root for yourself, too.

Human Editing vs. AI

I have my own issues with generative AI, but it is good at some tasks—tasks that (if it weren't for the copyright theft, plagiarism, labor theft, and climate-destroying energy needs) would actually be worth talking about in terms of how they can improve our lives.

One thing generative AI is genuinely good at is producing English sentences that sound intelligent. Among other things, this means it can be good at basic editing—making your words sound correct and smart—and it can even provide a kind of blind, meaning-agnostic textual analysis and recommendations for improvement.

That's editing, right? You can get it for free?!

Well, sort of. As with most things in our world, you get what you pay for. The Washington Post tested five generative AIs on their ability to perform this kind of editing. None of them did better than a D+, and only one of them didn't "hallucinate."

Free? Yes (for now).

Good?

If you have no money or critique partners, and you have the time and patience to investigate the accuracy of every suggestion, then AI can provide you with a kind of editing. It can make you sound intelligible... but not great or unique—literally the average of what the internet has to offer.

What can a human editor do, then, that the AI can't? Well, at their best, a human editor can provide the following:

• A-level corrections, recommendations, and analysis
• Insightful comments from a human who understands your intention and meaning
• Experience that comes from being an editor, a writer, and a human
• Suggestions that maintain your unique voice and vision as an author
• Harsh truths to help you improve
• Revisions that don't make up facts out of nowhere
• Connection with a human who's rooting for you

That's not to say all human editors are always amazing or do all these things, but an LLM never will. Finding a good editor is hard, but there are many out there who are worth the price.

The danger of generative AI is not that it's bad at things; it's that AI's intelligent-sounding answers fool us into thinking it's good at things, so we trust it with more than we should. We believe it knows more than it actually does.

I'm not gonna say don't use AI, and I'm not gonna say human editors are perfect. But if you choose AI, know what you're settling for, and if you hire a human editor, find one who provides value that's worth it to you.

(Am I one of those editors? Well, you can always try me out and see! A sample edit costs nothing but time.)

World-Building 105: Putting It on the Page

To recap the last few posts, we've talked about the following:

• What world-building is and how to get started
• How to keep your world-building organized
• The helpfulness of maps (yay!)
• How to make a setting compelling

So far, 100% of the info created through these tips is for you, the author—notes, maps, lists, Q&As. These are aids in writing your story, not the information you actually show the reader.

Because the goal of world-building is not to show the reader all the cool stuff you thought up but to immerse them in another place and time, to make them feel like there's more to the world than what they see, to help them believe this is a real place that could exist.

So, how do we do that with *waves hands around* all those notes and maps and junk?

Using World-Building in Your Draft

As you write, you will naturally drop hints about your world. Sometimes you have to explain things for the plot. Other times, you're just describing what's in the scene. Either way, something comes up that you can't assume the reader knows. Like...

The protagonist will be looking at the stars, and you mention the setting's two moons. The protagonist steps on a teleporter and thinks about how the technology works. Or they learn that they are part of an ancient prophecy that you now need to explain to the reader.

Or a thousand other tiny details that come up as you draft. Wherever it happens, you'll want to keep two things in mind:

1. Let the reader believe there is more to the world than what you're telling them.
2. Let the reader experience the world rather than be told about it.

These are guidelines, of course, and you'll have to find a balance. But the goal is to maintain the illusion that there is always more to discover.

"Part of the attraction of the Lord of the Rings is, I think, due to the glimpses of a large history in the background: an attraction like that of viewing a far off an unvisited island, or seeing the towers of a distant city gleaming in a sunlit mist. To go there is to destroy the magic, unless new unattainable vistas are again revealed."

                                                                                           —J. R. R. Tolkien

Right, But... How?

Well, for example, as you describe the setting's two moons, do so through the protagonist's perspective. How do the moons make them feel? Maybe they're lost in a forest but thankful for the light of the two moons to guide them. Maybe they used to look at the moons as a child and felt safe under one and uncomfortable under the other. In this way, we experience what the protagonist is experiencing, and the world-building is deepened at the same time.

Or maybe in your world bible, you know that the moons were set there by the gods or that one of the moons houses a magical prison. Or maybe you know nothing more about them at all—that's fine too! But as you describe them in your draft, you don't say what you know them to be, but you might say what people believe them to be. Like, maybe the protagonist's grandmother used to tell them a story about the moons that they now think is silly (but that maybe has a grain of truth to it—or not!).

Or maybe they're just moons. That's fine too.

What about the teleporter?

You probably don't want to go into the whole history and function of the technology unless that's a thing the protagonist would be thinking about (maybe they built them!). But again, how does the protagonist feel about teleporters? How do they think they work? Maybe they don't know at all, and that worries them every time even though they've used them their entire life. Maybe they heard a story about someone who got messed up by one, and they wonder if it's scientifically accurate. Maybe they have full confidence in them and quietly judge the folks who fear them.

Little extra thoughts like these help us experience the teleporter while also suggesting that there might be more to it than we know—there's more to discover.

And the prophecy? Don't exposit the prophecy like a history textbook. Reveal it through the lens of the character who explains it and of the protagonist themselves. How do these two characters feel about it? What does it mean to them? Do either of them doubt the prophecy? Fear it? Zealously believe it?

Again, now we're experiencing the world-building. It matters to us because it matters to characters that we care about.

And also, we're never getting the whole story (that's in your world bible) but rather what the characters know or believe about it. This way, the world always remains bigger than anything the reader can experience.

Avoiding(?) Infodumps

We're often told to avoid the dreaded infodump. As with most things, this is more what you'd call a guideline than an actual rule, but the reason infodumps are dangerous is because (1) they tend to be telling rather than allowing the reader to experience the world, and (2) they tend to tell everything the author has ever thought.

But that doesn't mean you can't use them. An infodump from an in-world narrator's perspective, that also leaves some things mysterious, can be just as compelling as any bit of action.

Leaving some mystery can help a world feel real and lived in, like there's always more to discover just around the next corner. It's a type of mystery that can pull your reader into the world.

And letting the reader experience the world through your characters keeps them invested. They want to learn about the prophecy because their favorite character's goals depend on it. They want to know how the teleporter works because Captain Dan wants to know (or because he already does know, and who doesn't want to be cool like Captain Dan?).

All those notes you took answering questions and organizing your thoughts give you a deep well to draw from as you guide your protagonist and your reader through the world. You'll think of new things as you draft, and you can add those to your notes, too. Every bit of it makes your world deeper, more immersive, and more real.

Just remember to keep some of those bits for yourself.

World-Building 104: Making a World That's Compelling

This is part of a series on fictional world-building. We've talked about how to get started, how to organize your thoughts, and how you can use maps for inspiration and internal consistency.

We've noted several times that world-building can be a huge endeavor. Even if your setting is mostly true-to-life, you're still creating a whole made-up world to immerse the reader in. It can be overwhelming to think of everything that is—or even just could be!—true within your setting.

On top of it all, you want your world to be compelling, to draw the reader in so that they want—no, need!—to know more about its mysteries and what happens next to the characters in it.

How do you do that?

To make a world that's compelling requires two of the same things that make your plot and characters compelling: conflict and theme.

Let me explain.

Conflict

A good plot has conflict—usually grown out of the conflicting goals of the characters within it. Luke Skywalker wants to save the princess from the evil Darth Vader. Eleanor Shellstrop wants to stay in the Good Place even though she doesn't belong there. The Baudelaire orphans want to escape the evil Count Olaf.

These conflicts are what make these stories compelling. We root for these characters and want them to succeed. But the worlds of each of these stories have their own inherent conflicts as well (major spoilers deliberately avoided below):

• In Star Wars, the Galactic Empire oppresses the entire galaxy, while the Rebel Alliance struggles to resist their fascist rule.
• In The Good Place, humans face a universal point system that determines whether they live in paradise or are tortured for eternity.
• In A Series of Unfortunate Events, a mysterious organization secretly helps people and thwarts those who would do harm.

These conflicts are all part of the world-building of their respective settings. They exist whether or not the characters are aware of them or even engage in them.

Though, as you may have noticed, characters are frequently involved in their world's conflict. That's part of what makes their stories so compelling. You certainly can tell stories in these settings that don't engage with the world's conflict (the Star Wars universe does all the time!), but those stories are often seen as side stories—fun but maybe not as compelling as the stories that change the setting itself.

Conflict in world-building provides a deep well of ideas and plots to draw from as you tell your characters' stories. It helps the reader become even more invested in your story.

Theme

Related to conflict is your world's theme. This element often remains under the surface, rarely stated outright and sometimes even ambiguous. Readers may not know or even care what the theme is, but your theme can help you make decisions about what is in the world while also making everything feel more connected.

Again, the world's theme might not be the same as the theme of your story. Star Wars is about a farm boy learning that he is capable of so much more. In The Good Place, a selfish woman learns to live ethically. The orphans of Unfortunate Events learn to navigate a world that is more dangerous than they knew. But each of these worlds also has themes independent of the characters and plots within them:

• The world of Star Wars explores themes of fascism, freedom, and resistance.
• The world of The Good Place explores ethics and morality.
• The world of Unfortunate Events revolves around education vs. ignorance and what it means to do the right thing.

Your world's theme is usually tied to the world's conflict. And yes, your plot's theme will often touch on the world's theme, but it doesn't have to.

Theme aids world-building as a means of making decisions. Say you were creating a new planet in Star Wars, and you're trying to decide its history and characteristics. These could be literally anything—a world within a world! How do you decide?

Well, think about the world's larger theme and conflict. What does this new planet have to do with the rebellion against the Empire? Maybe it's on one side or the other. Maybe it has tried to stay deliberately neutral and uninvolved. These decisions can help guide you as you detail the planet.

Even if the planet has nothing to do with the Empire, the world's theme can guide decisions about the people and culture. How have these people wrestled with fascism, freedom, and resistance? Maybe a local ruler oppresses the local farmers in some way. How? Are the farmers resisting, have they given up, or do they believe the ruler to be beneficent? Or maybe the planet has devised a form of government to prevent fascist rule. What does that look like? How did they arrive at that?

By using the world's theme, we've gone from "This planet can be literally anything! HELP!" to a smaller set of questions that not only focus our ideas but also complement the larger conflicts within the world. The world's theme helps us arrive at decisions while simultaneously making the entire setting deeper, more connected, and more compelling.

Putting It All Together

The best part of world-building is that you can come at these elements from any direction and it still works. Themes might emerge from a conflict you already have in mind. Conflict might be defined by themes you already want to explore. Either might arise from a character or plotline that you've already thought up in your head.

And when you become aware of the conflicts and themes in your plot, characters, and world—and when all those conflicts and themes begin to inform each other—you end up with a world and, more importantly, a story that is even more compelling than the random, cool ideas you scratched down at the start.

Now, you just gotta use that information in an actual draft. We'll talk about that next time.

World-Building 103: Maps!

Today, we're going to talk about one of my favorite parts of world-building: maps! This is the third part of a series on world-building. The first two parts can be found here:

• How to get started
• How to get organized

Often, we think of novel maps as big, complicated (possibly overkill?) illustrations used primarily for secondary fantasy worlds like in the Lord of the Rings or Song of Ice and Fire series. They're pretty and scary and pretty scary when you think about making them yourself!

Big fantasy novels often publish their maps as part of the book, and that's certainly something you can explore, but for our purposes today, we're just talking about maps to help you draft and deepen your world.

These maps can be as big as a world or as small as a village or even a single house. They are not for the reader; they're for you, the author.

An early map I drew for my old Air Pirates novel (that I have to get back to some day)

How Do Maps Help With World-Building?

Maps can provide several benefits to your story, even if nobody ever sees them but you:

• A map helps maintain consistency. Like a world bible, a map provides a way to keep track of things in your story—specifically, where things are relative to each other and how far away they are.
• A map helps you think things through. Drawing a map—like drawing anything—requires dozens of tiny decisions that you might not have thought about if you were just looking at words in a word bible. How large is this place? What does it look like? How far is it from that other place? How did it get there? What resources is it near? It's another avenue of questions to ask that can deepen your world.
• A map can inspire new ideas. You'll start your map with the locations you know, but pretty soon, you'll run into areas that provoke new ideas. What would be located in this space here? How might that impact the people in the other places? What cool thing might go in this empty space?
• A map can immerse you in the world. One reason maps are published in novels is to immerse the reader in their worlds. Making your own map can do the same for you. And as I've said before, if you are immersed in your world, your reader will be too.

The map for my Post-Apoc Ninjas novel

How Do You Make a Map?

There are lots of ways to make your own map, but my preference is to actually draw the thing. You don't have to be an artist, and it doesn't have to make sense to anyone but you, but drawing your own map gives you several advantages over, say, finding or generating a map online:

• It's faster. This feels counterintuitive, but it's true—I've spent enough time with map generators to know. Usually, you spend a lot of time generating new maps (or trying new searches) when it would be much quicker to just do a couple of drafts yourself.
• You get exactly what you want. You may not know what you want right away, but when you start generating maps, you quickly realize you know what you don't want. This is one of the reasons drawing your own map is actually faster. Drawing your own forces you to think it through and make decisions, until you realize you actually do want certain things.
• It's easy to revise. This is another reason that finding or generating a map doesn't work as well: you know it's not what you want, but you can't just tweak things here and there. You have to generate a whole new map with different parameters. Drawing your own map, revision is as simple as a quick erase.

(Interestingly, the same advantages above apply to using AI to create anything—writing a novel or creating an image or whatever. It feels like AI will save you time, but in the end, it actually takes longer and is never quite what you want, and that's not counting AI's other problems.)

A map for a secret project I co-authored with a friend (man, I want to return to this one, too)

How Do You Use the Map?

Most of the utility you'll get from your map will come as you're actually making it—as you're asking and answering questions and recording dozens of large and small decisions. A map can also be an inspiring thing to look at every time you sit down to write.

And, depending on your story, you might occasionally use it to determine times and distances, though this happens a lot less often than you'd think... even in a book that's all about walking:

As you write your story, your map will be useful for reference and inspiration, but always remember one key thing: your reader will never see it. It can be tricky to write for someone who can't see what you see, but as with most things, it's a skill you can learn.

In the end, the goal of your map is not to be perfect or pretty or to ever be seen by anyone. It's help your world remain consistent and to help you immerse yourself in that world. Because when you're immersed in your own world...

You know the rest.

World-Building 102: Getting Organized

Last week, we talked about what world-building is and how to get started. Among other things, we learned that world-building is... well, it can be a lot.

Even if you're just taking regular old modern-day Earth and giving it a small tweak—like humans figure out how to get to Mars or there are actual witches—there are still dozens of questions and implications that you could think through to deepen the world. And for a full-blown secondary fantasy world? The questions are endless.

So today, we'll talk about organizing all of that so you don't get overwhelmed.

1) Start a world bible

A world bible is just a document (or a wiki or a Miro board or something) where you record your ideas and decisions. You'll need this so you can remember them and reference them later.

How you organize your world bible is up to you—the document is literally there to aid you and you alone. I like to separate mine into sections like a historical timeline, nations or kingdoms, sentient species, cosmology (how the world came to be), how magic works, unique plants and animals, etc. Obviously, not every story needs every section, but these are places to start.

Remember, too, that your world bible is a living document. It is for your benefit only, and you can revise and add to it as you need to.

2) Choose a point and work outward

It's overwhelming to try and think about everything at once, but the point of having a world bible is that you don't have to keep it all in your head. You can have one idea, write it down, and then move on to the next.

Maybe a cool idea for your magic system makes you think of some war that might have occurred—jot down the magic idea then move over to the history section. Maybe writing down ideas for that war raises the question of how many nations there are and what state they're in today—scroll down to the list of nations and start brainstorming some ideas for that.

Don't know how to answer a question yet? That's okay. Just write the question down and move on.

What if a new idea conflicts with an older one? That's okay! Again, nobody else is going to read this document, so it doesn't have to maintain internal consistency. I mean, you should try, but you can address conflicts as you discover them.

Often, when a new idea conflicts with something you thought of a while ago, you'll find that the older idea can be easily updated or dismissed. And if it can't, then maybe the new idea can be tweaked. Consistency is important in world-building, and it's a lot easier to create when you haven't even written the story yet.

SIDEBAR: Creating a world bible for collaboration—say, for a video game or when co-authoring a novel—does require more internal consistency. People who are not you will reference the world bible and assume what's in there is fact. The basic ideas in this post still apply though. You and your collaborators just have to do extra work to keep the world bible up to date.

3) Sketch out a timeline of events

I mentioned a timeline as part of the world bible. For me, this is where I often start, and it often becomes the backbone of my world. It helps me to understand how one thing led to another and how everything is connected.

It might not work that way for you, but a timeline is still a good thing to have. Understanding the larger story of your world is a good way to maintain consistency and create real depth.

4) Focus on your story

It's easy to go overboard on details and histories and nations and magic systems and flora and fauna... but remember that you don't have to flesh out everything. You really only need enough details to start writing your story.

When you feel yourself getting overwhelmed with questions or unable to detail some aspect of the world (or unwilling to because it feels boring), take a step back. Ask yourself, "Do I need to know this to write my story?"

Often, you don't.

Because world-building isn't about actually creating an entire world; it's about creating the illusion that you've created an entire world. And that's a lot easier to do.

How do you know when you're done?

The truth is you're never done. There are always more details you can think up (and there always will be when you start writing the story). The good news is that you don't have to be done to start writing.

World-building of the kind I've described above has two main goals: 

1. To help you understand your world enough to start writing
2. To give you extra details to draw from when you need them

We'll talk more about the latter one in a future post. But for now, you know you're done when you feel immersed in the world and ready to start writing the story.

Like I said before, if you are immersed in your world, then you can immerse your reader in it too, and that is the whole purpose of all of this.

World-Building 101: Asking Questions

If you're writing any kind of genre fiction—if there are any fantastical or sci-fi elements in your world at all—you need to do some world-building. This is true whether you're creating a full-blown fantasy world, a sci-fi universe set 100 years in our future, an urban fantasy that's mostly like our world but with some magic in it, or even just our regular world but everybody has self-driving cars now. All of these require some world-building.

So, let's talk about that.

What is world-building? It's you understanding why things are the way they are in your fictional setting and how things are different from our world. It's exploring the "What if?" behind your speculative fiction. What if magic was real? What if we colonized other planets? Even a full-blown fantasy world is a form of "What if?": What if there were a world like ours, except with elves and dwarves, and it was created by some kind of gods?

World-building is thinking through the implications of that "What if?" and then using those implications to flavor your story and immerse the reader.

How do you do it? By asking questions. For example, say your setting is a world exactly like ours except that the city your story takes place in was designed with walkable spaces and public transportation instead of cars. This is mostly (but not entirely) science-fiction, and it raises some questions that you might want to answer, like...

• How long has the city been like this? Was the city always this way, or was it converted from a car-based environment?
• Is it the only city like this, or are most cities in this world like this too?
• How do people feel about it? Is it just normal to them, or is it brand new or even controversial?
• How did the city come to be this way? Is it part of an urban-design experiment, or did the culture shift away from traditional cities because something happened, or something else?
• Does the city's design have a direct impact on the story, or is it more of a backdrop?

With each question, you'll want to explore how that might change things. How do people feel about the city? How does that affect the story?

And as you answer questions, more questions will come up. You might not know or even care about all the answers, and that's okay, but thinking through some of them will enable you to flesh out the world in your mind.

The more you can immerse yourself in the world, the better you'll be able to immerse your readers.

What about deeper world-building, like secondary fantasy worlds? The example above presents only a small change in our world, and already there are a lot of questions and things to think through. How do you create a whole new world?

The same way: by asking questions. For example...

What is a central feature of this world that makes it interesting and/or different from our world? This is usually some form of magic, but it doesn't have to be. For example, the Game of Thrones universe has dragons on one side, White Walkers on another, and a very particular political situation among the humans in the middle. It does have magic, but that magic isn't central to what makes the world unique.

Are there sentient species other than humans? What are they like? Where did they come from (e.g., were they created by gods, or are they an evolutionary branch, etc.)?

Is there magic? Who can do it? How does it work? How long has it existed? What would the implications be on war, economics, and politics if certain spells existed and could be cast by anybody?

What kingdoms, nations, and cultures are there? How are they different? What is interesting and unique about them? Why are they like that?

What are the major historical events that have occurred? How have they affected the people of the present? Were there wars? If so, how big, how long, or how terrible? What do people think of these events now?

Just keep asking questions—the same questions your readers will be asking, in fact. The more you ask and answer, the more fleshed out your world will be.

This all feels like a lot. And it is... and it's just the tip of the iceberg, but it's also a lot of fun!

We'll talk more in future posts about how to organize your thoughts and get the world-building on the page, but to start, you really just have to let your mind wander and ask why?

Think about what excited you about this world idea in the first place. Was it a magic system? A future society living among the stars? A particular "What if...?" that piqued your interest? Start there and branch out, following whatever questions and threads interest you the most. Don't worry about answering everything, just the parts that are exciting to you.

Because if it's exciting to you, it will be exciting to your readers, and that, really, is the whole point.

Setting Up Character Growth

Writing a compelling story requires a lot of ingredients. One key ingredient is the character arc.

Compelling characters—especially protagonists—usually grow and change over the course of the story. They learn something about the world or themselves, and this knowledge changes the way they live their life. This is, of course, talking about a traditionally Western style of story, but if you're publishing in the Western market, you'll want to know this.

Character growth is compelling because we want to believe that people can grow and change—we want that for ourselves. It's compelling because the character has a dream and strives to achieve it despite all odds, and we love that. That's the kind of character we can root for and identify with.

What if you designed the character and obstacles in your story such that they are diametrically opposed? A pacifist must defeat a murderous dictator. A rebellious loner must trust others in order to stop a great danger. A nervous homebody must overcome their fear to rescue someone they love. The character is ill-equipped to face the obstacles in their way, and the only way to achieve their goal is to grow.

It's a compelling arc, which is why you see it everywhere in fiction. It might look like this:

1. A character believes something that has served them well their whole life. Neo believes he is nobody special. Shrek believes he's unworthy of love. Hiccup believes he is a bad Viking.
2. The character wants something that cannot be achieved with their old beliefs. Neo wants to understand the Matrix, but he must become special to survive. Shrek wants Lord Farquad to leave him alone, but he must rescue a princess to do it. Hiccup wants his father to accept him, but he has to be a good Viking to do it.
3. There comes a crisis point where the character tries to solve the problem the old way, and it fails them. Neo's mentor is going to die, so Neo tries to fight using what he knows. Shrek realizes he loves the princess. Hiccup is torn between pleasing his father and protecting his dragon Toothless.
4. At their lowest point, the character must learn something new. Neo nearly dies, until he sees the Matrix for what it really is. Shrek decides to risk everything for his love. Hiccup decides to be the kind of Viking he wants to be.
5. The story's climax shows the character stepping into this new way of being. Neo defeats the Agents. Shrek and his friends stand up to Lord Farquad. Hiccup and Toothless rescue Hiccup's father.

The character at the end is different than they were at the beginning. If the character-at-the-end had faced the same inciting incident, maybe the story would never have happened! That's true growth.

Of course, this is just one way to draw a compelling character arc. It's effective, but it's not a formula—merely a framework that you can customize for your story. Experiment. Try new things, and see what works for you.

And then do that.

The Pressure We Put On Ourselves

A lot of what I write here is projection. That is to say, a lot of my advice are things I need to remind myself. And one thing I constantly struggle with (as do many writers) is the fear that what I'm writing isn't very good.

This fear is paralyzing. It frequently makes me not want to write at all.

But here's the thing. The part of you that is afraid, that puts pressure on you to MAKE IT GUD OR WHAT'S THE POINT, is—believe it or not—trying to help you. It wants you to create amazing things, and it believes that you can! But it doesn't realize that the pressure it's putting on you is actually having the opposite effect.

That's because the pressure used to work. When you started writing, you pushed yourself to improve, to get your butt in the chair, to get the words out. That pressure is what got you on the writing path in the first place. (Probably. I'm definitely projecting now.)

But the pressure didn't stop, and people can't live under pressure all the time forever. Writing is a marathon, not a sprint, but that pressuring part of you wants you to run your hardest the entire time.

What I've had to learn is how to be kind to myself. I need to give myself permission to suck, of course, but I also need to be kind to that part that's yelling at me all the time. It's just doing what worked, and in truth, I don't want it to stop completely. I just want it to trust me.

For me, that involves a lot of self talk. Whenever I'm doing something hard, especially writing, I end up having a conversation something like this:

ME: This sucks. What's the point?

ALSO ME: It won't suck when it's finished.

ME: It'll take so much work to get there though.

ALSO ME: That's okay. We've done it before. We'll do it again.

ME: What if it never gets better?

ALSO ME: It will. It always does.

ME: What if this time's different?

ALSO ME: Then we'll figure it out when we get there.

And so on.

In the past, I would get depressed or angry with myself for not being good enough. Now, I'm trying to be kinder, to talk myself through it. I've written stories before, and I'll do it again. It's always hard, but I know how to do the work to make the story better. I know I can do it.

You can too.

Personal Updates

There has been a lot going on in my own life lately. I know many of you care about such things, so in lieu of writing tips today, I wanted to fill you in on some things.

On work. After a few months without steady work, I've secured a long-term contract as a narrative editor for an upcoming action RPG. It's really fun work, combining my experience in writing, editing, and branching dialogue. I also get to work with some pretty great people (and a stable paycheck is no joke).

I'm also still taking on private clients. When I restarted my editing services, it was with the intent of keeping them going indefinitely. Rebooting freelance work is hard, and ultimately, I'd like nothing more than to serve private clients full time if I can. So, if you need editing for your novel in any form, let me know!

On writing. This topic's harder. A couple of months ago, I lost my agent. It was nothing bad between us—Tricia Lawrence is a fantastic agent!—but the agency was restructuring, and she and I hadn't sold anything in a long while. I don't fault her decision one bit.

It's also been a while since I've been able to focus on my own writing. I've been doing more for the kids this past year as well as going through therapy for myself, both of which resulted in less mental, emotional, and temporal resources to create worlds. I'm still hopeful that I will be able to return to it soon (see "On life," below), but yeah, it's been hard.

I do still have one novel sitting with a publisher. It has gone through a rewrite and a couple of rounds of revisions. I'm hopeful something will happen with that soon, but without a contract, there are no guarantees yet. We'll see.

On life. There have been a lot of changes in my household in the last several months, and a few more coming. Many of you know that my real job is being the dad of many, many kids. And this past year, I have been the stay-at-home parent in addition to work, which (as stated) has contributed to a reduced ability to write for myself. (Current events aren't helping either.)

And even more changes are coming. Chief among them is that my first-born biological son has moved to the States, and several others (we have five boys within a year of each other) may be moving out soon as well. This is hard emotionally and comes with a lot of unknowns. Empty nest syndrome is real, folks (and yes, I recognize how weird it is to talk about an "empty nest" when three to six of them are still at home).

But who knows? Maybe once I've worked through the emotions of it all and solidified a new schedule, I'll be able to write some more. I certainly hope to. I have a lot of hopes for my near future, but right now, I feel like I'm in a liminal state, waiting for the end of the transition.

Until then, I'm gonna keep doing what I'm doing, working on my editing, spending time with kids who haven't left, and working on myself.

So, that's me...

What Readers Really Want

“And so,” he said, “in the end, what must we determine? Is it the intellect of a genius that we revere? If it were their artistry, the beauty of their mind, would we not laud it regardless of whether we’d seen their product before?

“But we don’t. Given two works of artistic majesty, otherwise weighted equally, we will give greater acclaim to the one who did it first. It doesn’t matter what you create. It matters what you create before anyone else.

“So it’s not the beauty itself we admire. It’s not the force of intellect. It’s not invention, aesthetics, or capacity itself. The greatest talent that we think a man can have?” He plucked one final string. “Seems to me that it must be nothing more than novelty.”

—Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

As much as we write for the love of storytelling, most of us also want our writing to be popular. We try to write what people want to read, what's popular, or what speaks to the current moment. The publishing industry compounds this, publishing something people really like, and then—whether serendipitously or to cash in on a trend—they publish a bunch of other things like it.

That's not to say follow-ups are all clones. They are often very good on their own! But the sameness of a genre can wear out the audience, and eventually, a lot of readers no longer want to read stories about, for example, dystopian YA or magical schools. (More's the pity.)

We can't control the publishing industry, but we can control what we write. We can't know what will sell, but we know what people want. They want to be surprised and delighted and entertained, and the way to do that—just as Brandon Sanderson's character Wit points out above—is to give them something new.

Readers get bored when they can predict what will happen or when they feel like they've seen something before, but we love novelty.

And there's nothing in this world more novel than you.

I do think it's important to be aware of trends, and it's no good trying to avoid all the tropes (it can't be done), but the most important thing is to write something you like and to infuse it with your unique heart, voice, and experiences.

Because whether they know it or not yet, that is what readers really want.

Injecting Emotion

Most writers don't think of ourselves as actors, but we are a little bit. We have to imagine what our characters are feeling and then portray it. It's just that writers portray it slowly on the page (and revised over time) rather than in the moment with our voices and bodies. It's a different medium, but the goal is the same: to connect with the audience, to make them feel what we feel.

I've talked before about using description to convey emotion. Among other things, I said, "Think about what's happening in the scene—what can be seen, heard, felt, smelled, or even tasted. Then, think about what the characters are feeling and use that to color what is described and how."

Let's go a bit beyond that. What if you didn't just think about what your characters are feeling? What if you felt it too?

Of course, every writer's process is different, but it's likely you're already doing this—at least sometimes. You may have become sad when you had to kill a character or gotten angry at something your villain did. That's what this is. All you gotta do then is use it.

Take those emotions and describe them: what your body feels or how your feelings color the world around you. Your description doesn't have to be perfect (it's not gonna be—it's a first draft!), but there will be gems in there. More importantly, that initial description will help you feel those feelings again when you revise, so you can fine tune it to better describe what you were feeling at the time.

Right, but... How?

Some people struggle with feeling these emotions. I certainly did. For most of my life, I considered emotions untrustworthy, something to be avoided. That belief led me to shunt my emotions down until I didn't feel them anymore. (Or rather, I thought I wasn't feeling them. In truth, I didn't recognize them for what they were, but they created all kinds of stress and anxiety, among other things. But that's a whole other post...)

If this resonates with you too, here are some tips that might help you tap into your characters' emotions better, thus helping your readers do the same.

Act out the scene. Put yourself in your characters' shoes, not just in your head but physically. (If you have a willing friend, act it out with them—maybe even talk about what both of you are feeling afterward.)

Draw from your experiences. Maybe you've never had to flee from a deadly assassin or walked through a haunted wood, but you have been scared. Think about times you felt something like what your characters are feeling and put yourself back in that situation. What did it feel like? What was going on with your body? Can you feel those feelings again?

Learn from the acting world. Actors have to be in touch with their emotions, and we can learn a lot from them. I'm not saying take acting lessons or join a troupe (though those would certainly help improve your writing!), but maybe read some articles about acting or improv. Learn about what actors do that we don't normally think of.

Play D&D or other tabletop RPGs. Tabletop RPGs are a fantastic and relatively safe way to practice putting yourself in someone else's head. Granted, most TTRPG groups aren't going to deep-dive into emotional acting, but they are an entertaining way to imagine what someone who is not you might feel or do in situations you've never been in. (It can also be another method to practice a bit of improv!)

Do some inner work. I'm not suggesting you seek counseling to become a better writer, but if you're struggling with emotions—whether your own real-life emotions or feeling the imagined ones of your characters—maybe process why that is. Emotions are a normal and vital part of being human (and a critical part of writing). It's well worth exploring our own issues with them.

Again, every writer has their own process. It might be that none of this is for you, and that's fine. But if you're seeking to better connect readers with your characters, I hope you can find something useful here.

How to Write in Dark Times

It is objectively difficult to create when it feels like the world, including the networks and structures we take for granted, is crumbling around us—even more so when it actually is. But art in all forms is a critical kind of resistance and reconstruction, and it's one way we can actually help.

But what the heck do you write about when everything is terrible?

Thankfully, we're not the first to experience this. Writers have been writing in dark times for as long as there have been times. Stories didn't stop being told just because there were world wars, global depressions, or raging pandemics. In fact, many of our best stories were created from those times.

With that in mind, here are some of the reasons I and others continue to write.

To Give People Hope

A story can give people hope that the darkness can be beaten, that even the smallest person and the smallest act can matter. For example, J.R.R. Tolkien drew on (among other things) his experiences in World War I to write The Lord of the Rings, even as he lived through the build-up toward World War II.

Stories can give people hope for a better future, like Susan Kaye Quinn's Nothing Is Promised hopepunk series, written amidst the ever-present doom of our climate crisis yet presenting a vision of what humanity is capable of.

To Give People Inspiration

The darkness can be beaten, but how do we beat it? Your story might address this more directly, presenting a dystopian world and the hard-pressed, reluctant heroes who tear it down—for example, Suzanne Collins' Catching Fire, Lois Lowry's The Giver, or Alan Moore's V for Vendetta. It's fiction, yes, and not an instruction manual, but stories like these can be the seeds for real-world ideas (or in some cases, real-world warnings).

To Shine a Light on the Truth

Many stories, especially those by authors from underrepresented or oppressed groups, reveal truths that majority culture is often blind to. These are the kinds of stories that can change someone's entire worldview, and humanity needs as many as we can get.

R.F. Kuang's Babel takes a scathing look at the former British Empire and the cultures that were crushed to create it. It raises critical questions of whether an invincible power can be fought at all and, if so, how—all while telling a gripping historical fantasy tale.

Celeste Ng's Our Missing Hearts paints a vision of a terrifying America-that-could-be (one that feels increasingly real in today's political climate) and asks the reader to consider how such a thing could have happened and what they might do within it.

To Increase Empathy

Not all stories need to touch on dystopia to make a difference. Every story is an exercise in empathy, especially the most personal ones, and empathy is critical to pull us out of the darkness.

In Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste Ng writes about a town that believes itself to be uplifted yet struggles when faced with its own underlying biases. There is no great villain nor power to be toppled in this story, but it nonetheless forces us to empathize and wrestle with multiple perspectives on difficult moral questions.

(Honestly, all of Celeste Ng's work is amazing. I can't recommend her enough.)

To Provide an Escape

Not all stories need to inspire or teach or represent. A story that is merely an escape is every bit as vital during dark times. When every headline feels worse than the one before, despair comes all too easily. But despair is how the darkness wins. In a fight like that, joy and escape become lifelines and weapons.

My examples, of course, are from my own interests—what I have read and remember (hence all the sci-fi and fantasy). But there are so many good examples I am omitting here. Please, recommend your own stories-from-dark-times in the comments. We want to read them!

I Have to Rewrite the Whole Thing?!

They say you have to murder your darlings, and you think, sure, I get that—a phrase here, a sentence there... But what if the feedback is that a whole scene isn't working? Or a whole chapter? What if you're asked to add or remove an entire character or, God forbid, rewrite the entire novel?

Why would you even consider that? There are lots of possible reasons. Here are a few off the top of my head:

• A chapter isn't working and needs to be cut entirely or replaced with something else.
• You removed an entire character and need to rewrite whole chapters or scenes.
• A hard drive crash caused you to lose a huge chunk of work.
• After finishing a first draft, you realize you love the world and characters, but the plot isn't working at all.
• You returned to an old draft after several years and want to update it with everything you've learned.

Rewriting something you've already written feels bad, hard, impossible. It took so much work to get those words there in the first place—why would you want to do it again?

Let me reassure you that, while it does feel scary, a rewrite is never as bad as you think it will be for one simple reason:

You already did it once.

What's hard about writing something the first time is that you don't know what will happen or who the characters are or how to say what you want to say. But after having written it once, a lot of this mental work is already done! And if you've lost work and are just trying to redo it, it's even easier. You don't have to think about changing anything—you can just try to remember what happened and write it as though you had outlined it already.

The fear of rewriting largely comes from this unexamined idea we have that what we wrote the first time was good, and we're afraid we won't be able to replicate it again. But you absolutely can.

You did it once. You can do it again.

What's even better, the act of a rewrite allows you to improve what you had written, because you're not starting from scratch. You have a foundation to work from—even if it's just in your head—and you can actively improve on that foundation as you rewrite.

Most of the time, doing a rewrite is optional. But if you're willing to try, you can find great freedom and flexibility in your story. You'll discover what I said in a previous post: that your novel is always soft and malleable. And when you've finished, you'll often find that you love the new version more than you ever loved the original...

...you know, the one you thought you could never recreate.

Perhaps most importantly, you'll begin to learn to trust yourself—your skill, craft, and experience. And that is where the really good writers are born.

Seeing What the Reader Sees

One of the hardest but most important aspects of editing your own work is reading it with fresh eyes. You can (and should!) do this with beta readers or by hiring an editor, but being able to do it yourself is so, so valuable.

But how the heck do you do that? After all, when you're reading your own work, you not only know what's going to happen but also what might happen, what never happened, and what happened once in an old version like seven revisions ago!

You have to get out of your head. You have to read your own work as though it were the first time you've ever seen it. You know nothing that isn't on the page! It's not easy, but here are some tips to make it possible.

TAKE A BREAK. This is probably the most common advice. Step away from what you wrote for a while—days, maybe weeks or even months if you can. When you come back to it, you might have forgotten parts, but more importantly, your brain will have the opportunity to approach it like a new thing. That feeling won't last through the whole novel, but hold on to it as long as you can. Also...

TAKE NOTES. As you read your novel with fresh eyes, write down facts and details—especially things that you know have changed from outline to draft or from revision to revision. But—and this is the most important thing—you cannot write down anything that is not on the page! Write down what you see, not what you think you see.

PRACTICE. Believe it or not, seeing a familiar document from a fresh reader's perspective is a skill you can improve at. How do I know? It's literally my job. The more you do it, the easier it will be to see a manuscript the way a new reader would see it, setting aside all the extra information floating around in your head.

This is a very important skill for writers to learn. Beta readers are amazing, and a good editor is well worth the money, but you are the only person in the world who fully understands your intent and your vision. If you can maintain both readers in your head at once—one who has never read this before and the other who knows what you want it to become—you can do anything.

What Kind of Editing Do You Need?

In spite of *gestures at everything*, I am still a professional editor, and I still want to help you with your writing. So let's talk about that for a bit.

It's not uncommon for writers to be unsure of what kind of editing they need. They want to make their novel the best it can be, but they also don't want to break the bank doing it. Once you've determined whether you need an editor, how do you know what kind of editing to get?

This isn't helped by the fact that different editors use different terms and definitions. I'm going to use my terms here, which should give you a foundation for talking to any editor even if they use these terms slightly differently.

I'm going to talk about three very broad categories of editing:

1. Developmental edit
2. Line edit (a.k.a. copy edit)
3. Proofread

Developmental Editing

This is what you want when you've finished an early draft and want to know whether the story works. A developmental edit (or dev edit) looks at the big picture—structure, pacing, plot holes, themes, characterization, world-building. Does each scene and chapter serve a purpose and move the story forward? Does every major character have an arc?

From a practical standpoint, a developmental edit will consist primarily of comments in your document and a thorough editorial letter.

This edit is for writers who are ready to dig deep and do major revisions—adding or removing characters, combining subplots, cutting or rewriting whole chapters. You might even decide the best way forward is to rewrite the whole thing! (That's not as bad as it sounds, mind you. I'll talk about that in a future post.)

A dev edit might be less helpful if you're satisfied with the story's plot and structure and you just want it to be written better or if you're on a tight deadline and don't have time for major revisions.

This kind of edit is generally better earlier in the writing process, when the novel still feels soft and malleable. (Technically, novels are always soft and malleable, but it's hard to feel that way after the 50th revision!)

Line Editing (or Copy Editing)

This is for when you know the story and structure are sound, but the writing just isn't where you want it to be. A line edit (sometimes called a copy edit, though some editors have different definitions for each of these terms, so always ask!) looks at the writing and the craft—description, dialogue, sentence length, character voice, emotional impact. Does each sentence and scene convey the feelings you want them to? Are the style and detail choices consistent throughout? Is the word "just" used too many times, and does the main character sigh too much?

From a practical standpoint, a line edit will consist primarily of (lots of!) tracked changes with additional comments throughout the document to explain those changes or query the author's intent.

Line edits are useful when you're getting ready to publish and want to make the novel sound as good as it possibly can.

Proofreading

This is the last step before publication. The editor will be looking for objective errors—typos, grammar issues, punctuation. The goal is to create a document that is completely error free (even though, as any writer knows, that's virtually impossible).

Deep Edit

There's another kind of edit, sometimes called a deep edit, which is like all three of these rolled into one. The editor provides developmental comments, line edit changes, and an error free document all in one.

As you might imagine, this is a lot of work—some of which could be wasted if, for example, a developmental comment motivates the author to rewrite an entire chapter! On the other hand, this can be a good way to get a lot of information all at once.

Because every kind of edit not only improves that manuscript but also helps the author level up their knowledge and writing skills. Even if you don't end up using all of the tracked changes in a chapter you rewrite, you will still benefit from understanding why those changes had been suggested at all.

These Categories Overlap!

The way I've laid it out here can make it feel like editing is black and white—either you get developmental comments or line editing changes but not both. The truth is that there is a lot of overlap between each type of editing.

For example, I will often make line editing comments on a dev edit to help the author learn and save time in their revisions, and I will frequently leave developmental comments in a line edit as I go. And a line edit always looks for objective errors. These categories are really more about what the editor focuses on rather than rules about what they Will and Will Not Do.

How Do I Know What I Need?

In an ideal world, a novel would have a developmental edit (or two!) on an early draft followed by a round (or two!) of line editing and a final proofread before publication. But for an author on a budget, that's a lot! So what do you really need?

Ultimately, only you can decide, but these questions might help:

• What stage is the novel at? Earlier stages benefit more from a dev edit, while a line edit is usually better if the novel's close to finished.
• What aspects of your manuscript are you confident about? If you know the plot and chapter structure is good, for example, then you probably don't need a dev edit.
• What level are your writing skills at? For example, experienced writers who have published a solid story or two might (MIGHT!) have less to gain from a dev edit. Newer writers might benefit from a deep edit as a way to acquire a lot of knowledge all at once. (Note that everybody needs a good line edit.)
• What can you afford? A single round of editing can be very expensive, with no real guarantee of a return, so only you can decide what's most important to you. Maybe you can lean on beta readers for free developmental feedback. Or maybe you have a good sense of craft but less of whether this story will work, so you risk skipping the line edit. Or maybe you want to get a deep edit to learn as much as you can from it to apply to all future revisions.

Again, you're the only one who can decide, but also, talk to your (prospective) editor! Even before you hire them, most editors are happy to discuss what kind of editing might be best for you, and many (like me) offer free sample edits that can help you figure out what kind of feedback seems most useful.

Do your research and trust yourself. You know what you need better than anyone.