Writing Mistakes Part I

I keep starting these series of blog posts and forgetting about them. Whatever, it’s not like anyone’s keeping track.

I’m not going to talk about the boring stuff: you’ve all heard that, I think. Show vs. tell except when you need to tell, etc.

I’m going to talk about a pretty big mistake I made maybe twelve years back, when I first started pitching the first version of Jaeth’s Eye. And that’s this: I thought I had a voice.

Or at least, maybe I did, but I sure as hell wasn’t listening to it.

I was pretty happy with my prose at this point. It was melodramatic at times (not that it still isn’t), but I was okay with it. But I was struggling with what I was actually trying to say. I was struggling with portraying a story that seamlessly unraveled from the beginning to the end. I wanted to jump to certain points, to “show” the reader what I as a writer can do, rather than exploring the story along with them.

I pitched the fucking thing around and didn’t know why it kept getting rejected. I would get some good responses, mind you: my favourite was from Tor, which was a hand-written note that said, “Try us again.” I may have saved the thing (or thrown it somewhere in a fit of anger, I don’t know fucking artistic tantrums). I focused on trying to fix up my prose or trying to adjust my pitch.

I recently read an article that hit this right on the head. It spoke about how too many writers think that the secret is in editing and restructuring their prose, when really, the meat of a story is in the intent. 

Don’t get me wrong…all those years of trying to do everything by the book was good for me. I developed some very good technical writing and editing skills. I learned to write market copy and be versatile enough in the craft to write anything from articles about divorce to warehouse logistics. I’ve even dabbled in freelance technical writing and could probably make a decent income from that (except I’m crazy and stupid and chose this depressing route instead).

The turnaround for me happened sometime in 2010, and I didn’t even know it at the time. I wrote two books: Birthplace and The Wanderer’s Gift. Birthplace is a weird YA paranormal/horror/whatever it’s never going to find an audience anyway story that’s been brewing in my head for years. The Wanderer’s Gift is an epic fantasy novel with a very good premise (to me anyway) but absolutely no direction.

Birthplace‘s intent was easy. It’s about a boy, Pablo, who is suffering from loneliness and self-worth. And then later he finds out that he comes from a long line of shapeshifters, and chaos ensues. Easy enough.

I still scraped along, not really sure why Birthplace worked so well and The Wanderer’s Gift didn’t. I thought maybe epic fantasy wasn’t the thing for me and tried my hand at a literary/fantasy mashup novel called Under Del Pan. Great concept, but I was still struggling with it.

I rewrote Jaeth’s Eye again for the umpteenth time and decided to pay attention to each character’s personal journey. I was still struggling with this with that novel, partly because of the looming shadow of all the other drafts. But for the first time, the story was alive, and what’s more, I didn’t even care anymore how other people would perceive it. I cared that it was breathing, that I felt like I was on fire while writing it. That feeling intensified with each sequel. And now I want to write a sequel trilogy to it (Ferral’s Footnotes), which is not even going to happen until 2020 at the earliest, but fuck if the whole story isn’t already playing on loop in my head. (And not just the sexy scenes, either.)

So there you go. Mistake number one: thinking it’s all about the tools when the tools are just supposed to be the beginning. Being able to cobble together decent sentences and smash words together isn’t enough. You have to know the life and blood of a story, too, which goes beyond cool concepts or original ideas. The end goal is not a book, but an experience.