For rea­sons I won’t bore you with, I’ve been with­draw­ing from the world a bit recently. Friends and asso­ciates are reced­ing into the back­ground and I’m focus­ing more and more on my writ­ing. This is nei­ther good nor bad, it’s just the way things are, and I’m try­ing to make the best of it. But in the process, I’m dis­cov­er­ing some­thing about writ­ing that I don’t think I fully real­ized in the last 23 years that I’ve been writ­ing seri­ously. Writ­ing alone is hard.

To a cer­tain extent, we all write alone, of course. It’s the nature of the job. But what I’m find­ing now, cut off from my for­mer writ­ing part­ner and hav­ing left the cri­tique group I founded long ago, is that I miss the fel­low­ship of other writ­ers, and could really use some­one to bounce ideas back and forth with. It’s just not the same ask­ing myself ques­tions and try­ing to answer them.

Case in point. I’m gear­ing up for Script Frenzy in April. I’ve got a good idea for a screen­play, some­thing I’ve been kick­ing around for about a decade that I’ve always known would make either a kick-​ass action movie or a good Crichton-​esque (before his State of Fear sell­out hack­i­tude) tech­nothriller. Per­fect fod­der for the “100 script pages in a month” white heat of Script Frenzy. But I’ve got sec­ond act prob­lems. I know how the movie starts, I have a great, kick ass end­ing, but how to get from one to the other is a mite fuzzy. And it’s here that I really wish I had some­one to ban­ter with, some­one who could help me answer some of the ques­tions I have about get­ting to that cru­cial plot twist that takes you from the end of act 2 and car­oming into act 3.

But I don’t have any­one left that I trust. This is fool­ish, I know, since there’s real­is­ti­cally no dan­ger in talk­ing openly about my story. Give two writ­ers the same basic story and you end up with “Armaged­don” on one side and “Deep Impact” on the other. But old habits die hard, and I’m keep­ing the details to myself. The story ques­tions I’ve teased out of my out­line I’ll have to answer myself. The answers will come, and at least I have sec­ond act prob­lems and not the third act prob­lems (good story but no sat­is­fac­tory end­ing) more com­mon, and deadly, to screenplays.

I didn’t appre­ci­ate the social aspect of writ­ing until it was gone. Like so much in life, I sup­pose. So I ask my read­ers, those of you who know the soli­tude of the writ­ten word. How do you deal with the iso­la­tion of writing?

Now that I’ve started rewrites on my NaNoW­riMo ’06 project, I thought this might be a good time to describe my approach to fic­tion. This is by no means the only way or even the “right” way to write fic­tion, it’s just what works best for me.

For the first draft, best writ­ten for NaNoW­riMo with reck­less aban­don, I take to heart Stephen King’s con­cept of sto­ries as fos­sils, found things in the ground. The writer’s job is to dig up the fos­sil so its shape is vis­i­ble and rec­og­niz­able while break­ing as lit­tle as pos­si­ble. With that in mind, I start with an idea, a few char­ac­ters and a vague sense of where I want to end up and start writ­ing. The story twists and turns, tries to buck me off and I wan­der down a blind alley or three that go nowhere and force me to pre­tend they didn’t hap­pen and start over at an ear­lier point in the tale, but I usu­ally end up with a work­able first draft this way. It’s not read­able by any­one but me, and vast swaths of it even lack punc­tu­a­tion, much less per­fect spelling, as those parts were typed lit­er­ally with my eyes closed as fast I could go. This is what I fin­ished three Novem­bers ago with Home­world, my Mars novel.

A few weeks ago, I started read­ing back through that first draft, rein­tro­duc­ing myself to the story and char­ac­ters. Two years may seem like a long time to let a story lie fal­low, but it took that long for me to get enough dis­tance from it to approach it again with fresh eyes. Reread­ing the story as a new reader I was by turns impressed and hor­ri­fied at what I’d writ­ten. Some parts were great, oth­ers not so much. But the story beneath the telling was just as amaz­ing as I’d remembered.

As I went through the first draft, I jot­ted down the major scenes, just sim­ple reminders of what each scene was about. Like:

Bev is attacked by a space aard­vark. The crew dri­ves it away with Nerf bats.

(no, that’s not a real scene from the book)

This gives me a very loose out­line (no Roman numer­als here, despite what you were taught in school) for the sec­ond draft. Just a beat by beat sum­mary of what happens.

Then, with the char­ac­ters and their voices firmly in mind, I start the sec­ond draft. This is com­plete draft, tak­ing noth­ing from the first other than the vague out­line. I’m rewrit­ing every word over again. And, as you might expect after a sep­a­ra­tion of two years, the sec­ond draft is dif­fer­ent. So far there are things I pre­fer in the new draft over what I wrote orig­i­nally, and there are things I think I did bet­ter the first time.

When I’m done with this draft, which will also be the first truly com­plete draft since the first draft got stuck in act 3, I’ll go back over both drafts and com­pare them scene by scene, and merge the best parts of each into draft num­ber 3. After that, I’ll go back over the third draft for style, con­ti­nu­ity, and then finally give the whole thing another pol­ish to reduce word count as much as I pos­si­bly can, shoot­ing for 80 – 85% the length of draft num­ber 3, the com­bined version.

That’s the plan. For those of you work­ing nov­el­ists out there (pub­lished or not), how does this com­pare with your process?

Update: Fit­tingly (or iron­i­cally, depend­ing on your per­spec­tive) for an arti­cle about sec­ond drafts, I for­got to men­tion a few things on the first run through. Specif­i­cally, I told you what I do, but not why. Which is kinda important.

The out­line process between drafts one and two is vital. While the first draft is all about cre­ative aban­don, the out­line process is where I take the key ele­ments of the story, rearrange and oth­er­wise change them as nec­es­sary, and then reassem­ble them into a nar­ra­tive struc­ture that makes sense. This is where I find and plug plot holes, uncon­vinc­ing char­ac­ter moti­va­tion, etc. When I start on the sec­ond draft, I’m secure in the knowl­edge that the story is solid. This is also where I get to do a lot of fore­shad­ow­ing, since I know what’s com­ing up, knowl­edge I didn’t nec­es­sar­ily have in the first draft. But unlike draft num­ber three, which is about style and craft, draft two is still about story, which is why I start over from scratch. There’s still room for sur­prises, but over an under­ly­ing struc­ture rather than out of nowhere.

In Mal­colm Gladwell’s new book, Out­liers, he makes an inter­est­ing obser­va­tion. In any rel­a­tively com­plex dis­ci­pline, it takes 10,000 hours of prac­tice to achieve mas­tery. This 10,000 hour rule seems to apply equally to music com­po­si­tion, soft­ware devel­op­ment, writ­ing, sewing, play­ing hockey, any­thing. No mat­ter what you do, you don’t do it at a pro­fes­sional level until you’ve spent 10,000 hours at it. There are no short­cuts. Even Mozart didn’t pro­duce what peo­ple con­sider his best work until he’d spent 10,000 hours composing.

Doing some back-​of-​the-​envelope cal­cu­la­tions, I fig­ure I’ve spent about 4,000 hours writ­ing in my life­time. Maybe as much as 5,000 if I’m seri­ously under­es­ti­mat­ing my blog­ging. I’ve prob­a­bly spent less than 1,000 hours writ­ing fic­tion. Assum­ing I can lump fic­tion and non­fic­tion together, that means that even if I buckle down and spend 2 hours a day, every day, writ­ing fic­tion until I get my 10,000, I’ll be ready to start writ­ing qual­ity work at the begin­ning of 2016, at the age of 44. I’ve fac­tored in a few skipped days here and there, since I know even at my most dili­gent there will be days where social com­mit­ments on top of my day job won’t allow for 2 hours of writ­ing time.

Seven years. Seven years of writ­ing stuff that I know I won’t be able to show any­one, because I’m not good enough yet. The thought fills me with over­whelm­ing dread, for sev­eral reasons.

First off, I know that in that amount of time I’m going to burn through every idea I cur­rently have in my devel­op­ment note­book. Every project I’m even mar­gin­ally excited about must be sac­ri­ficed to the mon­ster called “learn­ing the ropes.” By the time I’m ready to write pro­fes­sion­ally, I’ll have to come up with all new mate­r­ial. That part doesn’t worry me, since I know writ­ing ideas are like buses: another one will be along even­tu­ally. But I also know there’s no way I can spend seven years writ­ing about “filler” top­ics and char­ac­ters that I don’t care about. So I have to waste the stuff that I’m cur­rently pas­sion­ate about just to make it work. That’s a pretty depress­ing thought, moreso than wast­ing a block of stone or a can­vas for prac­tic­ing other art forms.

Sec­ondly, I’m acutely aware of how much that seven years of daily writ­ing sounds like work. Glad­well also posits that if the work you’re doing is ful­fill­ing, if it’s some­thing that you’re pas­sion­ate about, you’ll do it any­way and the 10,000 hours will come eas­ily as a side effect of how you choose to spend your time. As much as I feel like I should be, I’m just not jazzed about the idea of writ­ing that much “prac­tice” that is unlikely to ever get pub­lished. I write on aver­age 500 words an hour for fic­tion (1,000 or more for non­fic­tion), so we’re look­ing at 2,500,000 words, 2.5 mil­lion, before I’m “good enough.” That’s 15 – 25 aver­age length nov­els. So far I’ve writ­ten 2 and half nov­els and a novella. Ten times that out­put before I’m good enough to go pub­lic makes me want to crawl under my couch.

And lastly, “good enough” for what? Even if I get my 10,000 hours in, that puts me at the same skill level as pro­fes­sional nov­el­ists like King and Grisham. It in no way guar­an­tees the same degree of suc­cess. Glad­well also points out that suc­cess in any field has as much to do on who you know, how you were raised, when you were born and where you grew up as it does on indi­vid­ual achieve­ment and hard work. So while I might be as good, tech­ni­cally, as my favorite authors, I might have no bet­ter results in get­ting pub­lished and onto book­store shelves than I do right now. Is that much work worth it when there might be no reward?

Oddly, 10,000 hours of blog­ging feels totally doable, com­pletely unlike fic­tion. Two hours a day of blog­ging, point­ing out stuff on the net that inter­ests me as well as writ­ing orig­i­nal arti­cles like this one, is def­i­nitely more than I’m doing now, but it would be a pleas­ant and engag­ing use of my time. It is also just about guar­an­teed to make more money for me than fic­tion thanks to Google Adsense, though prob­a­bly never enough to sup­port me with­out a day job. But that doesn’t mat­ter. I’m in it for the LOLs, so they say. So maybe the prob­lem here is my insis­tance on hang­ing on to fic­tion when that’s not were my last­ing pas­sion lies (I’ll prob­a­bly always get a “bug up my ass” to tell a story every now and then, but the excite­ment never lasts long enough to write a book anymore).

What have you spent 10,000 hours doing, and does it sus­tain you, or do you sus­tain it?