Remember way back at the beginning of this series when I announced I’d give away a 15-page critique? Well, here’s the list I have of who’s entered. If your name isn’t on the list and you wanted to be entered, leave a comment on today’s post, and that’ll enter you! I’ll be drawing the winner’s name tonight (probably around midnight, so get your comments posted before then!) and announcing it on tomorrow’s post.

Alexandra
Eileen Astels
Rachel Smith
Terra
Lori Benton
Leslie S.
Amy Jane
Karen (from Queensland)
Patricia W.
Emilie
Everly Pleasant
Sally Bradley
Krista Phillips

So if your name isn’t here, leave a comment today—tell us about your WIP (work-in-progress), post that question that’s been bugging you and keeping you from moving forward in your writing, share a little about why you’re a writer, etc.

When he revamped the original Star Wars trilogy, George Lucas said, “Movies are never finished, they’re only ever abandoned.” (Adapting a quote by da Vinci: “Art is never finished, just abandoned.”)

I’m not quite sure I agree with that sentiment, but I know there are plenty of authors who do.

I’ve written before about contest addicts who spend all of their writing energy revising their first three chapters and never moving on to new story ideas, or finishing their manuscript. And, as I shared last time, my favorite advice is: Finish Your First Draft.

But other than the idea that finishing a manuscript means you’re moving forward in your writing, I hadn’t really thought through all the reasons why it’s important. Until I met fellow writer Julie Dearyan for coffee and dessert the other night and we talked about our experiences with finishing manuscripts. And I realized: there is a certain euphoria, a certain feeling of accomplishment, of fulfillment, that comes from finishing a manuscript.

But once you’ve written “The End,” does that mean you’re “finished” with that manuscript?

For the first three manuscripts I completed, I was finished with them as soon as I wrote the last line. Why? Because I was already thinking about the next project, and I pretty much knew I wasn’t going to do anything with them. They were learning exercises. What was I learning? How to finish a first draft. How to take what I learned about crafting a complete story—beginning, middle, climax, ending, character arcs, plotting, etc.—and apply it to new characters and ideas. Learning to finish a first draft also leads to another very important lesson: learning to start a new story idea.

For Stand-In Groom, I had a “finish by” date I was working toward: the date it was due to be submitted in its “final” version for my master’s degree. When I finished the first draft, it definitely wasn’t “done” because I’d introduced a major plot point (George keeping his identity secret and pretending to be the groom) about halfway through writing it. So I was mentally rewriting the first twelve or so chapters even as I was writing the end of the draft. Once I completed the second draft and now had a cohesive story, I went through two additional revisions based on feedback from my grad school mentor to polish and refine it; but even after I submitted it—for my master’s and for the contest I entered it into that year—I realized the opening still needed some tweaking. But by the time I did that, I was ready to move on, to be finished with it. And that’s when I knew it was “done.” After that, the few changes that I made to it were “edits,” based on feedback from my editor at Barbour.

With Ransome’s Honor, I thought it was finished when I submitted it to my agent to start shopping around back at the end of 2007. When the feedback came from Harvest House, the only publisher that showed any interest in it, that they thought it started too slowly and that the heroine was in too negative of a headspace in the first chapter, so they thought a prologue might be helpful, I actually ended up adding a completely new dimension to the backstory of the two main characters, which necessitated quite a few revisions when they did ask for the full manuscript. When I did my final revision of the manuscript for my contracted deadline, I tweaked even a few more things—some based on the editor’s feedback, some because it’s something I hadn’t noticed on previous revisions. So is it “done” now? Yes, until I get my final edits back from my editor there.

Over dessert the other night, Julie brought up another interesting point: if you have an old, worn-out piece of furniture in your living room, you probably walk right past it every day without really thinking much about it; or, if you do, it’s just a passing thought that you eventually need to do something about it. But until you get a new replacement, you don’t realize just how old and worn-out the old one was. It’s the same way with our manuscripts. If we just keep “sitting” on the old one—constantly going over it and revising, editing, revising, rewriting, editing, etc.—we’ll never realize just how wonderful and important to our writing journeys starting something new is.

Until you move on—even if you feel like you’re abandoning that manuscript—you’ll never know what you might be capable of as a writer. The revision process is not a creative process. It’s analytical. It’s critical. It’s math versus painting. It’s science versus poetry. While you may enjoy both, it uses a completely different part of your brain. When you spend all your writing time revising something that’s already completed, you aren’t priming the creative pump, you aren’t exercising your imagination, you aren’t feeding the muse. You aren’t writing.

So when is your novel finished?

That’s something you’ll have to decide for yourself, but you do have to ask yourself: are the tweaks you’re making to it actually improving the story or are you just tweaking it because you don’t want to let the story go and you’ll find any excuse necessary to keep working on it? A novel is kind of like a marble sculpture. You want to chisel away anything that doesn’t belong, but one strike of the chisel too many and it’s damaged, if not ruined.

If you aren’t sure, set it aside and start working on something new. And if you don’t already have an idea for something new, take the time to try to find something new to start developing.

Hey, all!

I just wanted to post this really quick tonight to let you know that the final post in the becoming a writer series won’t be up until late Monday evening, because I’ll be tied up with an on-site freelancing gig all day Monday. And since I’ve been out of the house almost all day today (Sunday), I never had a chance to sit down and write it.

So stay tuned!

“Writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce.”
~Annie Dillard (The Writing Life)

Back at the beginning of this series, I mentioned attending my first writers’ conference at Ridgecrest, NC, in 2001. Up until that time, I’d been writing and writing and writing for years. I’d even majored in creative writing (and hated it) many years before that (which I touched on a little bit in the first post in this series).

At the conference, I took the Fiction 101 track, taught by author T. Davis Bunn. It was pretty early on in the first day’s workshop that I heard the piece of advice that had the most profound influence on my writing career of anything I’ve learned since:

“Above all else: FINISH YOUR FIRST DRAFT.”

It seems like a pretty simple thing, doesn’t it? Almost too simple to have to be said aloud, right?

But how many people out there are like I was: content to just “play” with our characters by either revising/rewriting existing stuff we’ve already written or writing scenes/vignettes that don’t necessarily tie together into a story, but that’s okay, because we’re writing and entertaining ourselves, without ever having a story that has a beginning, middle, and end.

I think this is probably a bigger trap for those of us who are character-driven than for those who are plot-driven. Those of us who start writing because we’ve fallen in love with a couple of characters really are writing to spend time with those characters. If we don’t have a clear idea of a story for them, we can write stuff about them for years without ever “finishing” anything. Take it from me and my 200,000-word unfinished opus that I spent ten years playing with.

One of the questions I’ve seen most often in the interviews I’ve been doing recently is what advice would I give to “aspiring” writers.

My response is this:

Just like someone cannot one day pick up a stethoscope and scalpel and “become” a doctor, one cannot just pick up a pen and notebook (or start up a computer) and “become” a writer. Writing fiction is as much about learning and studying as it is about composing and creating.

I’ve heard it said that no one can consider themselves a “real” writer until they have written at least one million words. I’m not sure it takes quite that many. I would revise that to say that it’s really hard to truly learn how to write well without having written at least two or three complete manuscripts, attended a few writing conference or workshops/classes, and read many writing-craft books and/or websites.

To all aspiring writers: get your manuscripts finished! Stand-In Groom was my fourth complete manuscript and the first I’ve ever completely revised, and it was an almost three-year process from beginning to end. With each manuscript I wrote and completed, I learned more and more about the craft of writing. So instead of just concentrating on polishing and repolishing those first three chapters for contests or submissions, get the whole book written and revised, then start on the next one while you’re in the process of submitting.

Am I suggesting that no writer is ever going to get their very first manuscript published? Absolutely not. But I’ve talked to a plethora of writers who did get one of their first finished manuscripts published—and now they cannot abide to even split the covers of that book because they’re embarrassed by the lack of quality in the writing.

By writing a story through to completion, you’ll learn more about yourself as a writer than you will from any seminar, workshop, conference, mentor, or critique partner. You’ll learn how long it takes you to write something from beginning to end. You’ll learn your natural rhythm for pacing and character development. You’ll find out that you have a tendency to write chapters of a certain length (which can change, based on what genre you write in if you write multiple genres). You may find out that you’re really better suited to women’s fiction rather than romantic comedy or to cozy mystery rather than hard-core suspense.

But more important than any of that, you will feel a sense of accomplishment and confidence in yourself and your calling as a writer when you write those two most glorious words: THE END. Nothing else in the writer’s life can compare with writing the ending of a story—whether it’s a happy/hopeful, bittersweet, melancholy, or tragic.

Forget trying to make it perfect as you’re writing it. Just write. Turn off the internal editor. Ignore the analytical side of your brain. Don’t worry about rules and finding the perfect descriptive verb. Don’t write for anyone but YOU. As Stephen King told us in On Writing: you write the first draft with the door closed, you revise with the door open.

“A writer who is writing at white heat with the muse at his shoulder doesn’t need any rules. All he needs to do is be a good typist.”
~Ellen Gilchrist (The Writing Life)

Every time someone announces winners of writing contests, I always read them, because I know I’m going to see familiar names and want to congratulate friends and acquaintances. However, there are some people I worry about—their names regularly appear on finalists’ lists for multiple contests, and have been there every year for five or six or more years. A few I’m close enough with that I’ve talked to them about this phenomenon and I’ve come to discover that there are certain writers out there who have what many of us call “contest addiction.” They spend most of their writing life revising and implementing suggested changes on the first ten, fifteen, twenty-five, or fifty pages of their stories—but never really go past that. Either they never finish the story, they just keep entering those few pages into contests, hoping the editor/agent judge will miraculously offer them a publishing contract, or, when they do get a request for a submission, the rest of their manuscript has suffered from severe neglect and can’t live up to the quality of the opening pages.

I’m a big proponent of writing contests. Entering multiple contests helped me overcome my fear of letting others read and comment upon my writing—after the trauma of majoring in Creative Writing the first go-round in college and years of being sure I would never let “strangers” read my writing ever again. And it was entering Stand-In Groom in a major contest in 2006 and being a finalist that gave me the confidence to approach two agents and ask if I could submit it to them. But do you see the difference? I took the comments and feedback that I received from those early contest entries and applied the feedback I received to all of my writing—and I moved on, kept writing, kept finishing manuscripts, kept building my confidence.

Your turn. What’s the greatest single piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?