[NOTE: The below post is not meant to be an endorsement for or a prohibition against guns in the real world in which we all live. It is a discussion of firearms in fiction. Keep comments civil… or I’ll boot you out the airlock into the silent void.]

Guns, man. Guns.

*flexes biceps*

*biceps which turn into shotguns that blow encroaching ninjas to treacly gobbets*

CH-CHAK.

Ahem.

If you’re a writer in a genre space — particularly crime, urban fantasy, some modes of sci-fi — you are likely to write about some character using some gun at some point.

And when you write about the use of a gun in your story, you’re going to get something wrong. When you do, you will get a wordy email by some reader correcting you about this, because if there’s one thing nobody can abide you getting wrong in your writing, then by gosh and by golly, it’s motherfucking guns. Like how in that scene in The Wheel Of Game of Ringdragons when Tyrion the Imp uses the Heckler & Koch MP7 to shoot the horse out from under Raistlin and Frodo, the author, Sergei R. R. Tolkeen, gets the cartridge wrong. What an asshole, am I right?

You can get lots of things wrong, but you get guns wrong?

You’ll get emails.

As such, you should endeavor to get this stuff right. If only to spare yourself the time.

I’ve gotten them wrong from time to time, despite growing up around guns (my father owned and operated a gun store — we were hunters, we had a shooting range at the house, I got my first gun at age 12, etc.etc., plus he was a gunsmith, as well) and despite owning them.

Thus, seems a good time to offer up some tips on how to write guns well, and some common mistakes authors make when using the shooty-shooty bang-bangs in the stories they write. And yes, I’m probably going to get something in this very post wrong, and I fully expect you to correct me on it, YOU SELF-CONGRATULATORY BASTARDS.

Also — keep in mind that this list is by no means exhaustive.

You should go to the comments and add your own Things Writers Get Wrong About Guns.

• Let’s just get this out of the way now — if you want to write about guns, go fire one. Go to the range. Pick up a gun. Use it. This is your first and best line of defense when writing about a character and her firearm. Also, when you’re writing about murder, YOU SHOULD MURDER SOMEONE. Wait, no, don’t do that. I certainly never have! Ha ha ha! *kicks corpse under desk*

• Specificity breeds error. If you’re not highly knowledgeable about guns, then you might be best drifting away from specificity rather than toward it. The more particular you try to be about including details (“Dave held the Smith & Weston .45 revolver aloft and after jamming the clip into the cylinder he thumbed off the safety…”) the more you’re likely to get wrong. There’s value in just saying, y’know, he pointed the gun and pulled the trigger. You don’t have to get masturbatory with details. Admittedly, some genres like that kind of masturbation, but it’s a detail you can tweak later.

• Also masturbatory: All that egregious action-jacking. Characters don’t always need to do some fancy “jack the action” shit every time they’re handling a gun. Some guns need that. Some do not. Doing that will nearly always eject the shell that’s in the chamber, which is only a thing you want if it’s an empty casing and the gun does not automatically eject empty casings for you. Because many guns — like, say, pistols — are very efficient that way.

• No, the air did not stink of cordite. This is so common, it hurts me. Besides it being sorta dumb — I mean, it’s so needlessly specific, it’s like saying someone ate a banana and “tasted the potassium” — it’s also wildly inaccurate. Cordite hasn’t been in use pretty much since the middle of last century. Modern gunpowder is, like cordite, a smokeless propellant. (It’s also not very powdery; my father reloaded his own ammo and I was struck that gunpowder is more like little beads, like something a robot might eat atop its ice cream sundae. *crunch crunch crunch*)

• Revolvers don’t generally have external safeties. They do have safety mechanisms — hard-to-pull triggers, hammer blocks, etc. — but not many with traditional external safeties. (A rare few have what’s called a “grip safety,” particularly on hammerless revolvers, which despite their name aren’t actually hammerless, but merely conceal the hammer inside the gun. Blah blah blah. SO MANY THINGS TO GET WRONG.)

• Nope, Glocks don’t really have the standard manual safeties, either. More on a Glock’s safe action system here. Oh, and yes, a Glock will set off metal detectors. They’re not Hasbro toys.

• This is a magazine. This is a clip. Note the difference.

• This is a cylinder.

• This is Tommy, and he’s thuglife.

• The bullet is the projectile. The casing is the brass beneath it, in which you find the powder. Beneath that is the primer (which is what the firing pin strikes to set the whole party off). The entire thing is the cartridge (sometimes referred to as a ’round’). The caliber is the measurement of the bullet’s diameter. A caliber of .22 is 0.22 inches in diameter. Might also be measured in millimeters, as in 9mm. I’m surprised men don’t measure their wangs this way.

• Shotguns do not use bullets, and the ammo isn’t called ‘cartridges.’ They are called ‘shotgun shells.’ If if contains pellets, it might be referred to as a shotshell. If it contains a slug, probably not. In a shotshell, buckshot is larger pellet size, birdshot is smaller pellet size. Shotgun shells are measured not in caliber but rather, gauge (or bore), indicating a somewhat archaic measure of weight, not diameter. Then there’s the .410 (four-ten) bore. I don’t know why they do it that way. I’m going to blame wizards. Gun-wizards.

• Pistols let you know when your shit is empty. Last round fired — the action snaps back as if to say, “Hi, look at me, I’m no longer firing mushrooming lead at those aliens over there.” So, you can never have that scene where the hero or villain points the gun, pulls the trigger, and it goes click. I know, this robs you of such precious drama. Work around it.

• Guns do not have an eternal supply of rounds. They run out! True story.

• A ‘firearm’ is not a man whose arms are on fire, nor do they shoot fire.

• But that would be pretty sweet.

• Automatic weapon: one trigger pull = lotta rounds. Semi-auto: one trigger pull = one round. But, with a semi-auto, you can pull that trigger very quickly to fling many bullets quickly.

• Most revolvers are double-action, meaning you can pull back the hammer and have a very sensitive, light-touch trigger pull. Or you can leave the hammer uncocked (like a eunuch), and have a harder, more stubborn pull of the trigger. Revolvers that can only fire with the hammer drawn back are called “single-action.” Also, the archaic name for revolver is “wheel-gun.” Which is pretty nifty. Shotguns are sometimes called “scatterguns,” which I don’t think is as nifty, but whatever.

• I’ll let Myke Cole tell you about trigger discipline.

• Holy fuckpucker, firearms are fucking loud. A gun going off nearby will cause a user without ear protection to hear eeeeEEEEEEeeeee for an hour, maybe a day, maybe more. The sound is worse on the shooty bang bang side of the gun than it is for the user behind the weapon.

• Silencers — aka, suppressors — are basically bullshit, at least in terms of what most fiction thinks. They do not turn the sound of your BIG BANG-BANG into something resembling a mouse fart. It carves off about 20-30 decibels off somewhere between 150-200 decibels. The goal isn’t stealth so much as it is ear protection. They’re frequently illegal in the US.

• In an AR-15, AR does not stand for assault rifle, but rather, ArmaLite rifle. An assault rifle is a specific kind of combat rifle meant for service — like, say, an M-16 or AK-47. An assault weapon is a legal term with lots of floating definitions (some meaningful, many not). (Note: I have no interest in discussing the politics of firearms below, as it has little bearing on the discussion. OKAY THANK YOU. *jetpacks away, whoosh*)

• Precision means how tight your grouping when firing at a target — meaning, all hits are scored close together. Accuracy indicates how close those hits were to the intended target. They are not interchangeable. So, if you fired ten rounds at Robo-Hitler, and all ten rounds missed but were in a nice little grouping on that barn wall — hey, precision! If your hits were scattered all over the place and one of them clocked Robo-Hitler in his little cybernetic Hitlerstache, that’s accurate, but not precise. And, ten rounds in the center of Robo-Hitler’s chest is both accurate and precise.

• Many firearms must be “sighted in” for precision and accuracy.

• Nobody turns their guns sideways to fire except dumbshits who like not hitting targets. The sights on top of a gun are there for a reason, as it turns out. IT’S ALMOST LIKE THEY WERE PUT THERE ON PURPOSE. Note: that’s not to say your fiction does not contain dumbshits who do this — it’s just noting that doing this is totally ineffective.

• Most untrained users are neither accurate nor precise with firearms. Particularly if they’ve never held one or used one before. So, that scene where the utterly untrained user picks up a pistol and puts a blooming rose right between the eyes of the assailant 50 yards away — that’s lottery-winner lucky. Now, a shotgun using shotshells — well, you get a spray pattern with those pellets, so that offers a much better chance. (Which is why for an untrained user a shotgun is a smart home defense weapon. Also, a bullet could go through drywall and strike an unintended target — a less likely effect with a shotgun.)

• Bullets are not magically sparky-explodey. They’re not matches. They don’t set fire to things.

• Ragdoll physics are super-hilarious in video games, but someone struck by a bullet does not go launching backward ten feet into a car door. The recoil is largely against the user of the gun, not the recipient of the hot lead injection.

• Actually, an untrained user of a gun might find that recoil particularly difficult to manage at first — a scope might give them a black eye, a pistol might jump out of their hands or (if held too close to the face) might bop their nose. I mean, the reason the butt of a rifle or shotgun is padded is because OW I HAVE A BRUISE NOW.

• Dropped guns do not discharge.

• Hollow-point bullets are meant for damage (“stopping power”) more than penetration — the bullet, upon hitting the tender flesh of the alien, blooms like a metal flower due to that dimple of space in the bullet. It expands, makes a bigger projectile. Which does more internal injury — but doesn’t necessarily penetrate all the way to the other side of the XENOFORM. In theory, this makes the bullets safer (er, “safer”) as they do not pass through and strike other innocent targets. For the alien that just got shot, it is obviously not as, erm, caring. (Hollow point bullets are not really armor-piercing, by the by.) One company does make “Zombie Max” bullets, which is completely fucking ludicrous tying a pop culture phenomenon of fake supernatural entities to actual cartridges, thus enticing children and other goonheads to think HAW HAW HAW ZOMBIE BULLETS WHOA COOL. Zombies are not real, and firearms are not toys.

• Laser guns are rad. PYOO PYOO.

Your turn.

What else?

* * *

The journey to become a successful writer is long, fraught with peril, and filled with difficult questions: How do I write dialogue? How do I build suspense? What should I know about query letters? How do I start? What the hell do I do?

The best way to answer these questions is to ditch your uncertainty and transform yourself into a Kick-Ass Writer. This new book from award-winning author Chuck Wendig combines the best of his eye-opening writing instruction — previously available in e-book form only — with all-new insights into writing and publishing. It’s an explosive broadside of gritty advice that will destroy your fears, clear the path, and help you find your voice, your story, and your audience.

Amazon

B&N

Indiebound

Writer’s Digest

The question I pose is a pretty simple one:

What is the scariest book you’ve ever read?

It doesn’t need to be horror, of course, though I expect a good bit of horror to creep and skulk through. And you can talk about comic books, too, if you’re so inclined.

Note: I’m not asking about your favorite scary book. I’m asking about the one that scared you, or freaked you out, or disturbed you on some fundamental level.

I get more than a little freaked out by serial killer books. Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite is an early one that got under my skin. Recently, worth noting Mister Slaughter, by Robert McCammon — pre-Revolutionary War serial killer tale, with tension so taut it was like a rope around my neck as I read it. Or, consider the last two Lauren Beukes novels: The Shining Girls and Broken Monsters. I’m only halfway through the latter but dang can she a) write and b) freak you the fuck out. For non-serial killer novels, while the film version didn’t spook me, the novel of The Exorcist is a pretty amazing read, and if you’ve never read it, well, now’s the time.

Anyway —

Your turn!

What books have really gotten under your skin?

Maybe it’s not a book, exactly, but a particular scene.

Let’s hear it.

(We’ll do movies next week, and maybe games after.)

Last week’s challenge: From Sentence To Story.

It is apple season, people.

Apple season.

APPLE SEASON.

And with apple season comes a chance to sample a world of weird apples.

Uncommon apples.

Like, say, from this list grabbed at North Star Orchards here in PA.

I want you to look through this list.

You can use a random number generator if you like.

But pick three of these apples.

And include them — not apples themselves, necessarily, but the names of said apples — in your story. They can be included however you see fit: character names, place names, some other worldbuilding aspect, anything and any way you so choose.

You’ve got 1000 words.

Post at your online space.

Link back here.

Due by next Friday, noon, EST.

Pick your apples.

In case you didn’t know —

Paul Feig is rebooting the Ghostbusters franchise with women doing the bustin’ of ghosts.

This with the writer of The Heat, Katie Dippold.

(For the record: I freaking loved The Heat. Not high comedy, and plot holes you could break a leg in, but man did I laugh. I am a tiny bit sad that it seems like it won’t be getting a sequel.)

Of course, with this news, I’ve seen the cry:

It’s a gimmick.

Feig is obviously aware of the criticism, too, because he says:

“I just don’t understand why it’s ever an issue anymore. I’ve promoted both Bridesmaids and The Heat and myself and my cast are still hit constantly with the question, “will this answer the question of whether women can be funny?” I really cannot believe we’re still having this conversation. Some people accused it of kind of being a gimmick and it’s like, it would be a gimmick if I wasn’t somebody whose brain doesn’t automatically go to like, I want to just do more stuff with women. I just find funny women so great. For me it’s just more of a no-brainer. I just go, what would make me excited to do it? I go: four female Ghostbusters to me is really fun. I want to see that dynamic. I want to see that energy and that type of comedy and them going up against these ghosts and going up against human detractors and rivals and that kind of thing. When people accuse it of being a gimmick I go, why is a movie starring women considered a gimmick and a movie starring men is just a normal movie?”

I think this is pretty fucking awesome.

And I think calling it a ‘gimmick’ is a little bit shitty.

Here’s why.

a.) Calling it “gimmick” is very dismissive. A gimmick is a trick, a ploy, a cheap contrivance or tactic designed to get people to buy the product. Putting women in the roles of an iconic franchise is meaningful culturally, in that it’s creating more roles for women. Roles that were once reserved for men. And narratively, it’s interesting, as it lets you tell new stories and attract new audience.

b) Assuming that putting women in the role is gimmicky assumes that women are already in a place of power — it assumes that, “If we do this, this’ll generate ticket sales.” Given how risk-averse Hollywood has been regarding the role of women in film, yeah, I don’t see it.

c) Or, it assumes it’s doing it for the controversy. If making new roles for women — or making diverse roles in general — is controversial to you, that says more about you than about the creators of the work. Also, Hollywood is known for making safe choices more often than controversial ones.

Now, someone might say, with some earnestness, that why Ghostbusters –? Why can’t you create a new cool action-horror-comedy franchise for women, instead? Well, you can (or, at least, you can try). And certainly it’s a noble goal that sounds great in a perfect world.

But here’s why it’s important that it’s this franchise.

Yeah, it’s very nice and good to say that women should be able to have their own iconic roles and not have to get the sloppy seconds of roles established by men. But there’s a danger, there, too — if you say, women can’t be Ghostbusters, or The Doctor, or James Bond, you might really be saying, “These are my toys, go play with your own.” Go find your own franchise is a very good way of dismissing them and saying “but this one’s ours.” It’s also a very good way of ensuring that they won’t get their own movie made or own roles anyway — the sad reality of present-day Hollywood is that it’s easier to make a movie if you have some pre-existing material to build off of. The Ghostbusters franchise is exactly that. It’s a great springboard to tell this new tale.

Plus, putting women characters inside an iconic franchise has meaning because it’s an iconic franchise, one formerly dominated by men. There’s a metaphor, there, if you care to find it, about the workplace — it’s vital women colonize those roles and those spaces reserved for dudes. You certainly shouldn’t say, “A woman can’t be CEO of this company, go form your own company, lady.” Saying that a woman can’t be The Doctor because The Doctor is traditionally male is roughly equivalent to saying a woman can’t be a doctor because doctors are traditionally male. It’s easy to shrug it off because, “oh, ha ha ha, this is just pop culture,” but hey, fuck that shit, George, pop culture is the food we feed our brains. Pop culture is the colloquial language we all speak — it’s the common tongue of the people. We all speak Ghostbuster. We all know the song. We all know the imagery and the story and the icons of it. It’s important for women to be here, not over there.

Anyway.

Them’s my thoughts, do with them as you will.

What I wanna hear from you is —

What women should take the roles? Some of my potential choices include: Mindy Kaling, Aubrey Plaza, Tig Notaro, Katie Aselton, Uzo Aduba, Melissa McCarthy. What, pray tell, are yours?

A cross between The Handmaid’s Tale and Wicked, with a dash of Grimm and Disney thrown in, Stray is part coming-of-age story, part fairy tale, part adventure, part sweet romance.

Stray tells the story of Aislynn, a princess who misbehaves and must give up her royal trappings and enter a life of service as a fairy godmother. Will Aislynn remain true to her vows and her royal family, and turn away from everything she longs for? Or will she stray from The Path and discover her own way? Epic, rewarding, and provocative, Stray will appeal to readers of Entwined, by Heather Dixon; to those who grew up watching the Disney princess movies; and to fans of the acclaimed musicals Into the Woods and Wicked.

* * *

1. Kill your dragons

Ok, sure, the actual advice is “kill your darlings”, but in this case dragons is more accurate because the beasts had to be slain for STRAY to become what it is.

It wasn’t an easy decision for I am an unabashed dragon-lover. But when it comes to literature (and life), sometimes you have to make the tough choices. And the dragons, those magnificent scaly beasts, just weren’t working. So they had to go. Along with 90% of the original manuscript. Sometimes you have to be brutal.

2. The curse of the strong female character

Women. You can’t draw them. You can’t animate them. And you certainly can’t render them. But can you write them?

If I’ve learned anything about being a female writer and a female reader, is that no one comes under scrutiny quite like the female protagonist, especially is she’s a teenager. She doesn’t get any passes – she’s got to be a role model, a “strong female character”, but she can’t be too good, too perfect, or else she’s a “Mary Sue”.

However, the best thing about writing young women is the awesome YA community, the one that supports and loves these contradictory characters. So write those female protagonists – because at the end of the day, some pretty amazing people have got your back.

3. Screw breadcrumbs, give ‘em bread

In a previous professional life, I worked in production on a bunch of different animated movies. Animation, like publishing, is a slow process. And it can be hard to muster up a sense of accomplishment when you’re working on something that you can’t share with others for months, sometimes even years. So I turned to baking.

Comparatively, baking is a very fast process. Gather a bunch of ingredients, mix them together, put it in the oven and voila! You’ve accomplished something.

When it came time to write STRAY, I wanted to give my main character, Aislynn, something that brought her a sense of calm and order. Something that made her feel accomplished.

Most people say “write what you know”, but also write what you like. Write what excites and interests you. Get your character’s hands dirty, messing around in the things you love. Nothing will be more fun to write.

4. Diversity in fantasy

I didn’t even think about at first. My book was a nod to Europe-style fairy tales, so of course every character was white and straight. It’s not like gay folks or people of color existed in the olden days, right? And was one thing to have a world where only women could do magic and society is ruled by a strict doctrine called the Path. But diversity? That’s just crazy.

Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

Your story needs diversity. It just does. Aislynn’s story certainly did. There was no reason I shouldn’t populate the world of STRAY with LGBT characters and characters of color. And let’s face it – anything that makes you question the knee-jerk assumptions you make about your own writing and storytelling is a good thing.

5. Making magic bad

Magic is awesome, right? I’m the Harry Potter generation – I waited for my Hogwarts letter like everyone else (still waiting, but it’s cool, I don’t mind being that much older first year) and I’ve spent plenty of time imagining what it would be like to have magical powers.

But what if it wasn’t awesome? What if our society saw it as something untoward. Something…dangerous.

It’s easy to forget that a character like Aislynn has never read Harry Potter. In fact, if she lived in our world, she’d probably be of the mindset, like some are, that JK Rowling’s books promote witchcraft.

Subverting the impulse to think of magic as wonderful and, well, magical can be tricky. I recommend drawing comparisons to things our culture has problems with – such as women and what they should be allowed to do with their bodies. After all, there’s nothing more dangerous than a woman who does things without society’s permission.

* * *

Elissa Sussman is a writer, a reader and a pumpkin pie eater. Her debut novel, STRAY (Greenwillow Books/HarperCollins), is a YA fantasy about fairy godmothers, magic and food. She received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and in a previous life managed animators and organized spreadsheets at some of the best animation studios in the world, including Nickelodeon, Disney, Dreamworks and Sony Imageworks. You can see her name in the credits of THE CROODS, HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA, THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG and TANGLED.

She currently lives in Los Angeles with her boyfriend and their rescue mutt, Basil.

Elissa Sussman: Website | Twitter

Stray: Amazon | B&N | Indiebound

The poor sad widdle second draft.

I’m in the midst of one of these right now, and while you see a lot of attention given to the first draft and to the overall editing process, you don’t see quite so much attention given to the second draft specifically. But there should be! The second draft is a peculiar animal. Interstitial. Imperfect. It’s frequently the growing pains draft, where two limbs grow and two limbs shrink and by the end of its hormonal transformation it’s the same creature as before but also, entirely different. The second draft is the teenager of manuscripts. Awkward, pimply, full of faux confidence and bravado, and something-something pubic hair.

Okay, maybe not that last part?

Anyway. Let’s talk a little bit about the second draft.

Psst! You Didn’t Write The First Draft

Yeah, no, I know you actually did write the first draft, but shh, shhh, we’re trying to be tricksy hobbitses here. By the time you get to the second draft, your best way forward is to somehow convince yourself that Some Other Asshole wrote this book. Because you can be cold, clinical, dispassionate when you’re attacking the draft if you think it’s not yours. It’s like having children — you can look at other people’s kids and be all like LOOK AT THOSE SAVAGES HANGING FROM THE CEILING FANS, but then you see your own kid drinking out of the toilet like a dog and you’re like, awww, he’s pretending to be a puppy — he’s gifted.

You’ve gotta treat this book like it’s some rando’s kid. Baby Rando.

Rando II: First Blood.

Whatever.

You have a few tricks by which to accomplish this. You can put in a lot of time between first and second draft. You can take the second draft and edit a printout of it instead of editing on screen. If editing on screen, you might consider changing the font, font size, margins, anything to make it look unlike the book you wrote. (Just don’t use the Wingdings font.)

A lot of writing and rewriting is tricking your audience.

But it’s about tricking yourself, too.

The Second Draft Is Often The Hardest

For me, this second iteration of a manuscript is always the hardest. It’s like, I just don’t know what to do yet. I’m still a blind man in the dark feeling for an elephant. It’s not like your novel is a simple little thing. It’s not a picture hanging crooked on the wall. It’s roughly 100,000 words of bewilderment and mystery. And every word has the potential to be hot garbage or high fashion. So much of writing a first draft feels like running a marathon while drunk — you’re just gallumphing about, yelling and laughing and crying and praying to Sweet Saint Fuck that the end is near. And then at the end you collapse in a puddle of your own liquorsweats.

The second draft is a major shift, though. You’re no longer in that period of unfettered creation. You now have to pick through the wreckage of your first narrative and find what’s salvageable. (Really, the first draft is all barf and LEGO bricks. The second draft is picking those LEGO bricks out of the barf. Also, pro-tip: don’t eat LEGO bricks.) Intellectually, it’s a different act — yes, the second draft may require considerable rewriting, but it’s still organizational. It’s still taking the ideas and notions you’ve ladled onto the page and figuring out what to do with them. It’s incisive, cruel, calculating. First draft, you’re Clotho, wildly spinning the threads of fate.

But the second draft, you’re equal parts Lachesis and Atropos.

Measuring the thread.

And then cutting it.

For me, at least, follow-up drafts after this one get easier, if only because you settle into the comfortable discomfort of ripping apart your own work.

But until you sit in the pool for a while, boy does that water feel cold.

Deadlines, Tracked Changes, Redundant Backups

Before you do anything:

a) Set a deadline if one has not been set for you. A reasonable one. Not too tight, but not so far out that it’s meaningless. Tomorrow is too soon, and 2038 is probably when we’ll all be dead from GLOBAL HEAT DEATH, so, give yourself a proper window. I don’t know you, but for me, it’s a month, maybe two, maybe three.

b) Make sure you turn on track changes. It is very, very helpful to be able to go back through and see how you molested and mutilated your poor first draft. I turn track changes on, but I leave them hidden until I’m done. Also, I make liberal use of comments to myself and any potential editors or readers who might be going along on this cuckoo bananapants journey with me.

c) HOLY SHIT, back up your work. Back it up always, back it up obsessively. I save as I go and I backup to the cloud and I back up to the hard drive and I do this daily with a separate file for every day’s worth of work and I have Time Machine on my Mac so that everything gets backed up regularly to an external hard drive and I also carve my manuscripts onto the backs of various transients that I have chained to the radiator ha ha ha I’m just kidding I don’t have a radiator.

Re-Read, And Do It Aloud

I think very few pieces of writing advice are “true” in the sense that they are universal.

And this one may not be, either, but for me it’s damn close.

You need to re-read your work.

And you need to do it aloud.

I don’t mean like you’re doing a performance in Central Park. I mean — a quiet reading of the prose out loud. Even if you don’t read the entire manuscript that way, read those spots about which you’re unsure. Reading your work aloud is equivalent to closing your eyes and running your hand over a broom-stick or bannister: you will feel the uneven parts, the splinters, the popped-up nails. Even those you would’ve missed with your big dumb eyes.

Outline Anew For Mad Organizational Mojo

Make a quickie outline.

A new one to match the finished first draft.

It doesn’t need to be a book in and of itself, but go through the quick beats. Outline each chapter, maybe — one sentence per. Or outline the arrangement of tentpole plotpoints (meaning, those moments in the story that are vital to hold the whole thing up). You can get detailed, if you want — I’ve gone through and used Excel to chart the minutiae of a story (plot, character beats, thematic punctuation, appearance of certain motifs). The reason for doing this is — your novel? It’s a big trash bag full of who-the-fuck-knows. It’s the forest and you need to see the trees. An outline lets you get your hands on it. You can break it down, break it apart, and feel more comfortable understanding how individual components contribute to the whole.

Two Lists: Shit That Works, Shit That Sucks

Now is your time to be like a housecat on a countertop — you will use your paw to select the things that have violated your feline majesty and you will paw them onto the floor, FOR OH HOW THEY DISGUST YOU. Fuck this shit. Fuck that. Not that. Also that.

*paw swiping*

*glass breaking*

Go through your whole draft. Find things in the draft and put them in one of the two aforementioned lists — THIS IS BALLS AND I HATE IT or OKAY YOU CAN STAY. (You might have a third list, which might be roughly titled BLOODY HELL, NO IDEA, or simply, ENH…? In this third list go all the things that you can’t figure out if they’re total pants or utter genius.) You don’t need to commit to doing anything yet with this list — but it’s a good jumping off point for getting you to think about your work as an agglomeration of Things That Work and Things That Don’t.

Those things that work can, at least temporarily, remain unpoked, unprodded.

That which does not? Well, you’ll have to decide what to do.

Repair?

Or eradicate outright?

I Reach For Low-Hanging Fruit First

Entering into a revisions on a second draft, I am both lazy and timid. I pick and fritter and wince. I rarely make any motions right away that would startle the beast — I’m basically doing the equivalent of poking a teddy bear in its soft, round tummy. I don’t just scoop up low-hanging fruit; I look for the rotten stuff on the ground that’s already acting as a buffet for hungry bees.

I attack things that:

a) I know are super-broken because I probably knew it when I was writing it (“Mental note: in chapter 4, I call the protagonist Dave when her name is really Annabeth, and also I got high and wrote a random leprechaun sex scene so that needs to get chopped out with a fire ax.”).

b) I know won’t mess up anything else if I fix it — so, removing the aforementioned leprechaun lovemaking scene doesn’t then cascade through the rest of the draft.

So, in other words:

Obvious and easy.

I do this because again, I’m lazy.

But I also do this as it lets me get my bearings. It’s like warming up with stretches. I feel like I’m still accomplishing things. It lends the revision momentum, and once I get a little momentum…

Then I Just Start Fucking Shit Up

It’s like flipping a lever. For a while — a week or two — I do the gentle tweaking and tickling of the teddy bear, but then it goes all torture-porny as I suddenly wade in with a leather apron and start chainsawing the teddy bear down to the stuffing and buttons. I go from 0 to 60. Comfort, once gained, lets me move more swiftly and more dramatically. Chapters killed. Characters culled. Entire sections rearranged. It’s like having a room which doesn’t quite come together: you sit for a while and stare at it, but eventually you have to start moving some motherfucking furniture around. You gotta throw paint. Rip up carpets. Only way you make change is by doing the work.

The Second Draft Might Be Worse Than The First

Here’s a tough reality to the second draft:

It might be worse than the first draft.

It’s a weird phenomenon and you think it shouldn’t be that way, but if you think of your story as the wandering of a maze, sometimes in that wandering you must be forced to choose a new direction and in choosing that direction you discover you just ran like, 10 miles the wrong way. Dead-ends do not reveal themselves immediately and sometimes must be written toward —

Sometimes you have to write the wrong thing to figure out how to write the right thing.

It Might Be Your Last Draft, Or It Might Not

You might complete your second draft and the angels will descend upon you, skateboarding down their crepuscular rays while blowing shiny God-forged trumpets and you shall be done, hands clean, draft fixed, story gonna story, huzzah, game over, goodbye.

But you might need a third draft, too.

Or a thirty-third.

OR THREE THOUSAND AND  — okay at that point you might just wanna give up. We can’t all be writers. Some of us are meant to be detectives, superheroes, and secret Vatican baristas.

But still, the point remains: finishing your second draft is not a guarantee of finishing the work. It may be time to hand it off to an agent, reader or editor at this point, yes — but it by no means guarantees the tale’s true completion. You rewrite till its right. Because, as I am wont to say: writing is when we make the words, editing is when we make them not shitty.

Good luck on your second draft, ink-flingers and word-slingers.

* * *

Storybundle: The “Get Your Ass Ready For NaNoWriMo” edition. Six books (plus another six bonus books if you reach the $15 threshold) — pay what you want, give 10% to charity, determine the author/bundlemaker split. Buckets of cool authors, including Kevin J. Anderson (who also curated this bundle), Brandon Sanderson, Mary Robinettte Kowal.