It’s not just an outline; it’s a prototype

Today, I’m starting the rough draft of a new novelette that I’ve been brainstorming and researching for the last week and a half. As usual, I’ve begun by putting together a detailed outline of the entire story, and as tends to happen, it’s almost ludicrously comprehensive: the current version runs to about 7,000 words for a story that I expect to top out, after revision and cutting, at 10,000 words or so. I’ve justified this approach in the past by arguing that an outline like this is really more of a stealth first draft, allowing me to work out issues of plot and character without worrying about details of language and expression. And in approaching the writing process in this way, I’m unconsciously following the good advice of David Mamet:

As a writer, I’ve tried to train myself to go one achievable step at a time: to say, for example, “Today I don’t have to be particularly inventive, all I have to be is careful, and make up an outline of the actual physical things the character does in Act One.” And then, the following day to say, “Today I don’t have to be careful. I already have this careful, literal outline, and I all have to do is be a little bit inventive,” et cetera, et cetera.

All the same, I sometimes look at the outlines I write and wonder if they consume more of the process than they really should, and I’m occasionally reminded of Borges’s parable about the map of the empire that was the size of the empire itself.

Really, though, a detailed outline isn’t a map or a blueprint—it’s a prototype. Over the last month, I’ve been reading Jesse Schell’s appealing book The Art of Game Design, inspired by the fact that some of my most meaningful recent insights into structure and narrative have come from video games. Schell spends a long chapter discussing the importance of prototyping and testing, which he sums up as The Rule of the Loop: “The more times you test and improve your design, the better your game will be.” The problem, at least when you’re operating under a deadline, is that it’s hard to build and test a full working version of a complex system like a game—or a novel—more than a handful of times. And the solution is to start with a very rough model that addresses potential problems without troubling itself too much about quality. Schell advises game designers to employ the spiral model of software development, as conceived by the engineer Barry Boehm:

1. Come up with a basic design.
2. Figure out the greatest risks in your design.
3. Build prototypes that mitigate those risks.
4. Test the prototypes.
5. Come up with a more detailed design based on what you have learned.
6. Return to step 2.

On its face, this isn’t so different from what most writers do: we start with a rough draft that we know isn’t going to be pretty, read it over to get a sense of the major issues, then take it through iterations of revision and editing until it starts to resemble the story we hoped to create—or takes a different, more surprising shape altogether. What’s worth remembering, though, is how rough that initial prototype can be. As Schell points out, when you’re designing a video game, you can make a version on paper to test the basic mechanics of the premise: you can cut Tetris pieces out of cardboard and slide them down a paper screen, or use graph paper to map out a level of a first-person shooter like Doom, pushing around cutout monsters while a player moves and attacks. It’s crude, and it can’t be mistaken for a finished game, but that’s part of the point: the rougher it is, the more likely you’ll see fundamental problems that a more polished version might have misled you into overlooking.

Which brings us back to the outline. The outlines I write are rough, ugly versions of entire stories, or of large sections of a novel, and reading them over before I start the day’s work allows me to think about the story on a relatively high level: I’ll often print it out and make changes by hand to fix things like transitions, the order of scenes, and anything that doesn’t seem clear or logical, which is much more efficient than confronting these problems after I’ve already begun the draft. Later, of course, there will be issues I can’t address directly until some version of the story itself has been written, but it’s rare that I’ll get that far only to find that some major element of the narrative is untenable, as occasionally happened in the old days. The result is a fast version of the loop that Schell describes, and it allows me to pack a greater number of iterations into the limited time that I have. An outline that approaches the length of the story itself may seem excessive, and it does consume a disproportionate amount of the process. But in the long run, it saves me a lot of trouble.

The good idea trap

Ideas are poison. The more you reason, the less you create.

—Raymond Chandler

As I’ve noted on this blog many times before, good ideas are cheap. Today, I’d like to make the case that they’re also dangerous, at least when it comes to bringing a story to its full realization. And I say this as someone who has a lot of good ideas. Nearly every novel or short story I’ve written hinges on a clever twist, some of them better than others. (I’m still pleased by the twist in “Kawataro,” and wish I’d done a slightly better job with the one in “The Voices.”) It’s partly for this reason that I tend to focus on suspense and science fiction, which are genres in which conceptual ingenuity is disproportionately rewarded. In some cases, as in many locked-room mysteries and the kind of hard science fiction we find in my beloved Analog, the idea or twist is all there is, and I’m probably not alone in occasionally saving time by skipping ahead to the surprise at once, without having to sit through all the bother of plot or characterization.

Which isn’t to say that a dynamite idea is always a bad thing. A story like Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Star,” for instance, turns almost entirely on the revelation in its final sentence, but that doesn’t make the rest of it any less satisfying—although it also doesn’t hurt that the story itself is relatively short. The real mistake is to assume that the creative process hinges on the idea. As I mentioned in my recent post on Shakespeare, a story’s premise is often the least interesting thing about it: nearly every idea has been done before, and the more it lends itself to being expressed in a single knockout sentence, the more likely someone else has written it already. As a result, an artist who commits himself to the cult of the idea, rather than its execution and elaboration, will eventually start to seem desperate, which goes a long way toward explaining the curious downward arc of a man like M. Night Shyamalan, a director with a sensational eye and considerable talent long since betrayed by his ideas.

It should come as no surprise, then, that good ideas can be the most dangerous, since they’re inherently seductive. A writer with a great original idea is more likely to overlook problems of plot, structure, or language, when a merely decent idea that demands flawless execution may ultimately result in a more satisfying story. I’ve said before that a writer is best advised to start out from a position of neutrality toward his own material, and to allow his passion to flow from the process, and I still think that’s good advice. I’ve learned to be very suspicious of ideas that grab me at once, knowing that it’s going to be hard for me to remain objective. And I’ve found that sustained detachment, which allows me to evaluate each link of the chain on its own merits, is much more valuable than an early rush of excitement. Otherwise, I run the risk of turning into the producer described by David Mamet in On Directing Film, who “sees all ideas as equal and his own as first among them, for no reason other than he has thought of it.”

And the more talented the writer, the greater the risk. All writers have their moments of cleverness and ingenuity; the labor of turning a bad sentence into a good one is the sort of work that encourages the development of all kinds of tricks, and a writer who knows how to get published consistently can only get there with a lot of shrewdness. It’s worth remembering, then, that there are two sides to craft. The word evokes a set of proven tools, but it also carries a negative connotation: when we describe a person as “crafty,” that isn’t necessarily a compliment. The real point of craft is to cultivate the ability to treat all premises as fundamentally equal, and which rise or fall based only on how honestly the author follows through. It treats the best premise in the world as if it were the worst, or at least as if it required the same amount of time and effort to reach its full realization—which it does. It’s the author, not the idea, that makes the difference. And it’s frightening how often a great idea can turn a good writer into a bad one.

The case for traditional publishing

Yesterday, none other than David Mamet, an author whose influence haunts this blog in more ways than one, announced that he would be self-publishing his next novel. It’s a little tricky to draw a line between other authors and Mamet, who isn’t exactly uploading his book to the Kindle store: ICM, his agency, is making an ambitious push into publishing its clients’ books, and it has resources for packaging and marketing that many literary houses would envy. Yet although this isn’t an example that most writers can follow, it still feels like a turning point. It’s possible that we’re entering a new phase of how books are distributed and promoted, with self-publishing being the smartest option both for literary stars—who get a much larger cut of each sale—and for emerging writers, while authors on the midlist stick with business as usual. But I wouldn’t write off traditional publishers just yet. Even if you’re an author with an established audience, and especially if you’re just starting out, the boring, conventional route of working with an agent and going out to publishers is still often the best option, and not for the reasons you might expect.

In my case, I’m grateful I did it the traditional way, just because otherwise my books wouldn’t be nearly as good. On the first and most obvious level, the traditional publishing process serves as a kind of check on work that isn’t ready for print, which is a courtesy both to readers and to the authors themselves. If you’re having trouble finding an agent or publisher, it’s possible that your timing is just wrong, but it’s equally likely that your work isn’t quite where it needs to be—and if that’s the case, you’ll probably be glad one day that you held back from releasing it. As I’ve mentioned before, I spent close to a year working on my first novel with an agent, only to part ways without going out to publishers. At the time, it was a frustrating experience, but looking back, I’m grateful that it turned out that way. The book I was able to write at the time simply wasn’t good enough; it was a promising first draft, but little more. I’d be mortified now if that version of the story had seen print. And as daunting as that endless succession of gatekeepers can be, it certainly forces writers to work harder.

Even after you’ve sold a book, though, the structures that a good publishing house has in place can prevent you from making costly mistakes. I’m currently working my way through the copy edit of Eternal Empire, for instance, and I’m already relieved that another pair of eyes has reviewed the manuscript so thoroughly. Even apart from issues of grammar, my copy editor has pinpointed continuity problems, typos, and implausibilities that I never would have seen on my own, and I get physically ill at the thought that any of them might have seen the light of day. (Among other things, I don’t seem to know how to spell “Ceaușescu.”) On a higher level, I put more care into the books I write knowing that they’re eventually going to be read by an editor whose stakes in the process are more pragmatic than emotional, and who has no reason to tolerate anything less than my best work. It’s fine for authors to want more power, but there are times when the only way to grow as a writer is to give up some measure of control, and to devote yourself to earning it back.

Of course, many of these conditions can be recreated by a writer working alone, but only at a price. The author Michael J. Sullivan, for instance, recently used a Kickstarter campaign to raise money to self-publish his next novel, and estimated that the costs of editing and cover design would come to $3,000, although he ultimately raised much more. That’s a fair amount of money, and it cuts considerably into an author’s larger share of the proceeds from self-published sales, to say nothing of the costs of marketing and promotion. Whether an individual writer can do this more efficiently than a conventional publisher is an open question, and my mind isn’t made up on the subject. I still strongly believe, though, that it’s an avenue that a writer should explore only after pursuing the traditional route as diligently as possible, as much for its artistic and spiritual challenges as for its practical incentives. The publishing system is a flawed one, but it tends to leave authors better than they were when they entered it. And in the end, that’s the consideration that matters the most.

“A solitary figure stood near the basketball courts…”

(Note: This post is the forty-third installment in my author’s commentary for The Icon Thief, covering Chapter 42. You can read the earlier installments here.)

In theory, a writer can get to know the characters in his fiction better than anyone in his own life, himself included. I’m often struck by how little information I really have about people—even close friends—I’ve known for years: I’ve generally only spent time with them in one particular context, and I have a hunch that I’d be startled to see what they’re like at the office, say, or with their own families. Go a little further back, to childhood or adolescence, and the picture is even less clear. In fiction, by contrast, we can learn everything about a person, at least in principle. A quick search online turns up countless forms and questionnaires designed to help authors brainstorm every detail of their characters’ appearance, habits, past, and inner life, from their eye color to their favorite hobbies to how they really feel about their parents. It’s more scrutiny than many of us even devote to ourselves, at least at any one time, and the question of how much of this material an author requires to invent fictional but convincing men and women is an issue that every writer needs to confront.

In my own case, I’ve been inclined leave many of these questions unanswered. Part of this is a practical consideration: as I’ve mentioned many times before, I’m not a fan of backstory, and although I spend a fair amount of time thinking about each character’s personal history before I start writing, I know that very little of this material will end up in the finished novel. Human beings, both in fiction and in real life, tend to be more vividly defined by their needs in the moment, and while what happened to them in the past can inform their present wants and decisions, we very rarely embody the full sum of our life stories: one quality tends to predominate over the next from one minute to another, and certain threads of our personality grow in importance while others wither away. As a result, I’ve never tried to create systematic backstories for my characters. Instead, I work out which elements bear most urgently on the present moment and leave the rest in shadow, which is why, for instance, I go into detail about Maddy’s failed attempt to start an art gallery, but still don’t know the names of her parents.

But there’s also a more intuitive aspect to this approach. Protagonists, as William Goldman observes in Which Lie Did I Tell?, must have mystery, and they’re often more interesting to the extent that the author withholds crucial information. Part of this has to do with the way we identify with characters in fiction: David Mamet has pointed out that it’s better to say “A hero on a white horse” than “A tall hero on a white horse,” because the more we add unnecessary detail, the harder it is for readers to imagine themselves in the protagonist’s place. (This is one reason why I’m especially resistant to detailed descriptions of a character’s appearance, to an extent that sometimes frustrates my circle of initial readers.) It’s possible, of course, for a writer to leave important elements to implication in the finished work, while privately knowing a great deal about the characters. But I’ve found that I’m happiest when certain aspects remain a mystery to me as well, even as I obsessively think about each character’s objectives from scene to scene.

In Chapter 42 of The Icon Thief, for instance, Ilya is standing near a playground in Brighton Beach, preparing to go after the men who betrayed him, when he sees a little boy and his mother:

“Daniel!” the boy’s mother shouted. At the sound of the name, Ilya’s head gave an involuntary jerk…Watching the boy rejoin his mother, Ilya thought of the many transformations that he had undergone since he had last referred to himself by that name.

This is the only indication in the entire novel, and in the two books that follow, that Ilya was once called something else, or that the name he goes by now is one that he chose for himself. There’s obviously a story here, and it’s possible that when I wrote this passage, I was laying in a hint for something I intended to develop later on. As it turns out, I never did. And if you were to ask me who Ilya was and what he was doing before he was thrown into Vladimir Prison, I’m not sure I could tell you, although there are clues scattered throughout the series. Keeping these details hidden, even to myself, turned out to be a kind of insurance policy: Ilya, I realized, grew more interesting the less he was shown, and by keeping his past deliberately undeveloped, there was no risk that I’d err in revealing too much. What really matters, far more than where he came from, is what he wants now. And at the moment, he wants revenge…

David Mamet and the limits of craft

If you’ve been reading this blog for any period of time, you’ve no doubt gathered that I like David Mamet. While I generally agree with Lawrence Weschler that Walter Murch is the smartest person in America, there was a time in my life when I would have ranked Mamet at least a close second. I’ve learned a tremendous amount about craft from his essays, interviews, and commentary tracks, and in particular, his little book On Directing Film is the most useful guide to storytelling I’ve ever seen. As I’ve mentioned before, I discovered it at a point when I thought I’d figured out the writing process to my own satisfaction, so reading it was a little like having an efficiency expert visit your business for a day and set you straight regarding best practices. I encountered it too late for it to have any real influence on The Icon Thief, but it was a major reason I was able to get City of Exiles from conception to finished draft in under a year, and it’s since become an indispensable part of my approach to writing. I try to read it again every six months or so, especially when I’m starting a new project, and I’m still amazed by its level of insight and practicality.

Yet there’s a shadow side to Mamet’s intelligence and mastery. It’s taken me a long time to figure out what it is, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently, ever since seeing Mamet’s latest movie, Phil Spector, which aired over the weekend on HBO. Like all of his films, it’s watchable, full of good dialogue, and admirably streamlined: it clocks in at just over ninety minutes, and there isn’t an ounce of fat on the screenplay. All the same, it feels weirdly like half a movie, or a brilliant sketch of something better, which is true of nearly all of Mamet’s work as a director. I haven’t seen a movie of his I didn’t like—I even enjoyed Redbelt—but there’s something clinical and detached about his style that leaves even his best films feeling a little thin. And the more I think about it, the more it seems like an inevitable consequence of his approach to craft. Mamet’s method is as rigorous as mathematics: you figure out the sequence of objectives for each character, then craft the scene and the individual shots to convey this information as simply as possible. Hence his beloved story about Stanislavsky:

Stanislavsky was once having dinner with a steamboat captain on the Volga River and Stanislavsky said, “How is it that among all the major and minor paths of the Volga River, which are so many and so dangerous, you manage to always steer the boat safely?” And the captain said, “I stick to the channel; it’s marked.”

If nothing else, Mamet’s movies stick to the channel, and his philosophy as a director has always been that you shouldn’t stray much to either side. Most famously, he believes that if a script has been properly written, the actors just need to say the lines clearly and without inflection, and the words themselves will do the work—although if Phil Spector is any indication, even Mamet can’t always get this from Pacino. This approach to storytelling is unimpeachably correct, and if you’re going to imitate any director, you can’t go too far wrong by following Mamet: at worst, you’ll end up with a first draft that is mechanical but basically efficient, which is far from the worst that can happen. (As T.S. Eliot says in one of his essays, a poet who imitates Dante will wind up with a boring poem, but someone who imitates Shakespeare is likely to make a fool of himself.) But Mamet has essentially transformed himself into a director who delivers brilliant, clean, unimpeachable first drafts. And it’s no accident that the best movies based on his work—which I’d argue are The Untouchables and Glengarry Glen Ross—were made by other directors.

And we’ve seen much the same progression in Mamet’s prose, which has devolved from the wit and lucidity of On Directing Film to something crabbed, aphoristic, and airless. Bambi Vs. Godzilla contains five or six pages that include some of the best storytelling advice imaginable—if you’re curious, it’s in the chapter “The Wisdom of the Ancients”—surrounded by material so tight and hermetic that reading it becomes physically enervating. The same is true, sadly, of Three Uses of the Knife, and I’m too discouraged to even try The Secret Knowledge. Which is just a reminder, as if we needed one, of the pitfalls of genius. Mamet remains the most intelligent living writer I know, and when it comes to the nuts and bolts of craft, he’s right about almost everything. But being consistently right for forty years can be dangerous in itself. Mamet is very good at what he does, and unlike a lot of artists, he knows the reasons why. But there’s a point where logic and craft take you only so far, at least not without being willing to embrace the possibility of failure or foolishness. Mamet, like most smart men, simply can’t take that risk. And although he’s still the best there is at sticking to the channel, there’s a chance that a lot of viewers will simply decide to change it.

My essential writing books

1. The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White. If I were putting together an essential library of books for an aspiring writer of any kind, The Elements of Style would be first on the list. In recent years, there’s been something of a backlash against Struck and White’s perceived purism and dogmatism, but the book is still a joy to read, and provides an indispensable baseline for most good writing. It’s true that literature as a whole would be poorer if every writer slavishly followed their advice, say, to omit needless words, as Elif Batuman says in The Possessed: “As if writing were a matter of overcoming bad habits—of omitting needless words.” Yet much of creative writing does boil down to overcoming bad habits, or at least establishing a foundation of tested usage from which the writer only consciously departs. More than fifty years after it was first published, The Elements of Style is still the best foundation we have.

2. The Art of Fiction by John Gardner. I bought this book more than fifteen years ago at a used bookstore in Half Moon Bay, shortly before starting my freshman year in high school. Since then, I’ve reread it, in pieces, a dozen or more times, and I still know much of it by heart. Writing books tend to be either loftily aspirational or fixated on the nuts and bolts of craft, and Gardner’s brilliance is that he tackles both sides in a way that enriches the whole. He has plenty to say on sentence structure, vocabulary, rhythm, and point of view, but he’s equally concerned with warning young writers away from “faults of soul”—frigidity, sentimentality, and mannerism—and reminding them that their work must have interest and truth. Every element of writing, he notes, should by judged by its ability to sustain the fictional dream: the illusion, to the reader, that the events and characters described are really taking place. And everything I’ve written since then has been undertaken with Gardner’s high standards in mind.

3. Writing to Sell by Scott Meredith. I hesitated between this book and Dean Koontz’s Writing Popular Fiction, which I reread endlessly while I was teaching myself how to write, but I’ve since discovered that it cribs much of its practical material from Meredith. Scott Meredith was a legendary literary agent—his clients included Norman Mailer, Arthur C. Clarke, and P.G. Wodehouse—and his approach to writing is diametrically opposed to Gardner’s: his book is basically a practical cookbook on how to write mainstream fiction for a wide audience, with an emphasis on plot, conflict, and readability. The tone can be a little mercenary at times, but it’s all great advice, and it’s more likely than any book I know to teach an author how to write a novel that the reader will finish. (One warning: Meredith’s chapter on literary agents, and in particular his endorsement of the use of reading fees, should be approached with caution.)

4. On Directing Film by David Mamet. I’ve spoken about this book at length before, but if I seem awed by it, it’s because I encountered it a time in my life when I already thought I’d figured out how to write a novel. At that point, I’d already sold The Icon Thief and a handful of short stories, so reading Mamet’s advice for the first time was a little like a professional baseball player realizing that he could raise his batting average just by making a few minor adjustments to his stance. Mamet’s insistence that every scene be structured around a series of clear objectives for the protagonist may be common sense, but his way of laying it out—notably in a sensational class session at Columbia in which a scene is broken down beat by beat—rocked my world, and I’ve since followed his approach in everything I’ve done. At times, his philosophy of storytelling can be a little arid: any work produced using his rules needs revision, and a touch of John Gardner, to bring it to life. But my first drafts have never been better. It’s so helpful, in fact, that I sometimes hesitate before recommending it, as if I’m giving away a trade secret—but anyway, now you know.

The art of making choices

Who is the author of a movie? As with most collaborative art forms, it’s a question that gets tricker the closer you look at it. A screenwriter like William Goldman might argue that the author of an original screenplay deserves most of the credit, which seems reasonable until we remember that most stories are radically altered, often by anonymous hands, from initial draft to shooting script, and equally significant changes may take place in the editing room. An editor like Walter Murch plays an enormous role in finding the final structure and rhythm of a movie, but here, again, there’s a huge range of potential influence, from editors who simply reflect the director’s wishes to artists like Ralph Rosenblum, who discover a shape for a movie while working on their own. Then there’s the producer, who often shepherds the entire process from the initial idea to the marketing campaign, oversees major creative and hiring decisions, and is there to pick up the Best Picture award on Oscar night. This says nothing of the cinematographer, art director, sound designer, composer, and others, who can enormously influence our final experience of a film, or the actors, including a star whose involvement may have been crucial to securing funding in the first place, and who is often the only face the public associates with the finished product.

Usually, of course, we tend to think of the director as the final author of a film. This is a surprisingly recent development—the auteur theory as we know it wasn’t developed until the early fifties—and it’s often been criticized as unfair to the many other talents whose work is essential to filmmaking. Yet the auteur theory, while inherently undemocratic, is like democracy in at least one way: it’s the worst theory of film, except for all the other theories that have been tried. And it’s the only way I can explain a movie like Silver Linings Playbook. It’s funny, beautifully acted, and ultimately very touching, yet the screenplay is manipulative, contrived, sometimes superficial, and doesn’t always escape the trap of smug, affected quirkiness. Watching it, I realized that you could shoot the same screenplay, word for word, with most of the same actors, but in the hands of a different director, the result would be unwatchable. And the only explanation for its ultimate effectiveness is that David O. Russell, who also adapted the screenplay from Matthew Quick’s novel, is a director who understands his own strengths and limitations, and particularly his ability to make specific, subtle choices that can take otherwise routine material and make it compelling.

Because a director’s ultimate role is that of someone who makes choices, thousands of them, starting in preproduction and continuing on an hourly basis until the final cut is delivered, covering everything from the color of the wallpaper to which of three possible endings to use. As David Mamet says of his experience directing House of Games:

[The crew] came over to ask me my opinion regularly, not because of any talent on my part, or because of any expertise I had demonstrated, but because the film is a hierarchy and it was my job to do one part of it: to provide an aesthetic overview, and to be able to express that overview in simple, practicable terms—more light on her face, less light on her face; the car in the background, no car in the background.

This may sound straightforward, but anyone who has confronted the endless series of choices that a work of fiction presents, even for a writer working in solitude, knows that it’s the hardest thing in the world, especially when conducted in public, with thousands of dollars at risk of being lost with even the smallest delay. Those choices, as much as the individual talents of the creative team involved, are what give a film its flavor and individuality. Nearly everyone involved in movies on the studio level, from the color timers to the supporting cast, are there because they’ve reached the peak of their profession, but it means nothing if their gifts are squandered or misdirected.

And some of the most crucial choices that a director can make are, by nature, invisible. It’s no exaggeration to say that the best performance in the world can be turned into the worst by a deliberate selection of bad takes in the editing room, and Russell’s approach to Silver Linings Playbook is a reminder of how subtle this process can be:

There’s an extreme version we shot that’s very dark. You know, we had to cover it several different ways on a 33-day schedule. And the De Niro character was written harsher or warmer…So you have to be careful with it and it took a lot of careful work in the editing room with Jay Cassidy to calibrate it.

Which is why the role of a director, even after all this time, remains so mysterious. It’s about calibration, or finding the right balance and tone for elements that can be combined in an infinite number of ways—which is why it seems to go wrong more often than it goes right, despite all the talent involved. Novelists do much the same thing: every word represents a choice, as does the direction of the plot, the actions of the characters, and even the decision of which story to write in the first place. Craft is about learning to plan as much of this process as possible in advance, while developing enough intuition and experience to make smart choices in the moment when confronted by the unexpected. And when a director, or any artist, can bring this sort of craft to bear under pressure, when it’s needed the most, it’s then that he deserves to be called an author.

A life’s work in half an hour

Yesterday, I posted a quote from the former United States poet laureate Robert Hass: “You can do your life’s work in half an hour a day.” It’s a nice sentiment, and one that I desperately wanted to believe seven years ago. Back then, I was working at a job that I liked, but didn’t love, and I was doing everything I could to write novels in my spare time. I’d already begun and discarded an ambitious project that I’d spent close to a year researching, only to find myself lost after a couple of chapters, and the novel I’d chosen as its successor—an art world story that would eventually, after radical transformation, be reborn as The Icon Thief—wasn’t going anywhere. Frustrated, I resolved to force myself to write a certain number of words each day, and decided to make the the goal as achievable as I could. A hundred words, I thought, was a reasonable quota: if necessary, I could do the necessary work in five minutes, and if I kept up that pace, after two and a half years, I’d have a novel. Anything more would be gravy. Thus inspired, I wrote my target on an index card and posted it to my medicine cabinet, so it would stare me in the face each morning, in a writer’s version of the mirror scare.

I should give fair warning, at this point, that this isn’t a post about how I wrote my first novel a hundred words at a sitting. In the end, I didn’t keep up the routine for very long—maybe a month at the most. Ultimately, as readers of this blog know, I quit my job to write full time, and although it took me years before I could begin to make a living at it, I think this was the best solution, at least for where I was at that point in my life. I’m aware, of course, that this isn’t an option that most of us have: even in my own case, the ability to do so was the result of a confluence of several unrelated factors, as well as some degree of blind luck. Moreover, I don’t think word count was my problem. I have a hunch that I would have been more than capable of writing a novel while still working during the day, provided that I managed to develop the planning and outlining skills I later developed. I didn’t lack time or energy; what I lacked was a plan. And although in my own case, I had to commit completely to writing before acquiring these habits, there’s no reason why they can’t be put to work under other circumstances. (Part of the reason I write this blog is out of the hope I can convince a few readers to avoid the mistakes I made.)

But Hass’s advice is still valuable, even if, at first glance, it seems to apply to poets more than novelists. Just it’s easier to start saving money by easing into it gradually, then increasing the amounts over time, the habit of writing every day—which nearly all professional writers share—is best achieved in small steps. There’s nothing wrong with the math of writing a hundred words a day, as long as you can keep it up over the long term, which is where all those outlining and creativity tricks come into play. And the nice thing about writing is that once those hundred words are written, barring some kind of unforeseen disaster on your hard drive, they’ll stay there, and the resulting paragraph has the same ultimate value as those written on days of extraordinary productivity. The only real benefit of spending the entire day writing, aside from the chance it affords to disappear more deeply into the fictional dream, is that it allows you to cover the necessary ground a little faster. Minute by minute, however, the ground looks much the same. To slightly misquote David Mamet, you write a novel in the same way you eat a whole turkey: one bite at a time.

And the best part of writing each day, even in small amounts, is that the half hour you spend at the computer turns out to be only a fraction of the effort you’ve invested in the project elsewhere. As I’ve noted many times before, much of a writer’s best work is done while he’s apparently engaged in something else entirely: taking a walk, doing the dishes, shaving, in the bus, bath, or bed. That half hour of work isn’t just important for its own sake, but as a means of organizing and channeling the otherwise aimless work of one’s daydreams, which tend to inevitably return, at the most unexpected moments, to the problems of the story you’re writing. And the only way to enter that continuous state of receptivity is to write every day, even if the word count remains a modest one. A writer is like an athlete: most track and field events are over in a few seconds, but they represent the result of endless hours of solitary devotion, which only attain their full meaning in the arena. For us, the arena is the page, and every word we write is, or ought to be, the visible crystallization of an unseen and ongoing process. It’s possible, as Hass notes, to do your life’s work in half an hour a day. But only if you’ve structured the rest of your life around it.

Solving the second act problem

David Mamet, in Three Uses of the Knife, tells what he claims is an old joke from the Algonquin Round Table: “A couple of guys are sitting around talking. One says, ‘How’s the play going?’ The other says, ‘I’m having second act problems.’ Everybody laughs. ‘Of course you’re having second act problems!’” And no wonder. Beginnings and endings are tricky, too, but we can approach them with a couple of proven rules: get into the action as late as possible, leave it as early as you can. Middles, by contrast, tend to turn into an unstructured mess of complications, with the beginning a distant memory and the end nowhere in sight. This is especially true of the start of the second act, when the main problem of the first act gives way to an even more serious obstacle, and it’s no accident that in everything I’ve written, it’s invariably this part of the story that goes through the greatest number of tightenings and revisions. Whenever it comes up, it feels like I’m confronting the problem for the first time, but I’ve slowly managed to figure out a few guidelines that might be helpful:

1. Cut transitional material as much as possible. Second acts are difficult because they’re all about transitions. You’re departing from the first major movement of the narrative into something larger, which usually means that there are a lot of pieces to slide into place. Unfortunately, this is also the moment when the attention of the reader or audience is likely to drag, so you need to be even more ruthless about cutting here than usual. If a story is two hundred pages long, and you’ve already cut as much as you can from the beginning and the end, it isn’t a bad idea to turn to page 100 and see if there’s anything you can excise from the twenty pages to either side. Any architectural structure has its points of weakness or stress, and in long works of fiction, it’s likely to be right here. And the best solution is to cut directly from the end of one action to the center of the next, as in the wonderful act break in Raiders of the Lost Ark, which moves without pause from Marion clutching the medallion in snowy Nepal to the rooftops of Cairo.

2. Put the pieces together in a different order. The opening of a novel generally presents a clear sequence of events, and even if you’ve restructured the story elsewhere, you’ll often find that the order of the initial chapters remains more or less the same. In a story with a three-act structure, this isn’t true of the beginning of the second act, in which the characters have been introduced, the machinery of the plot has been set in motion along various parameters, and the resulting material can be presented in a number of ways. If the second act of a novel begins with five or six chapters that move between characters, it’s often useful to rearrange them to find the order that flows most naturally. It’s even better if you can cut or combine scenes. I’ve also learned that if you’re writing a number of different plot threads that have been left in a state of suspense, it’s best to avoid resolving the immediate problem in at least one of them until the others have gotten further along: the reader will be more interested in following Susan on a plane to Samarkand if he’s still wondering how Jack will get out of prison in Jeddah.

3. Don’t forget to enjoy yourself. Second acts can feel like a chore, but when properly done, they can be immensely satisfying. Since you’ve already established your characters and central conflict, this is the chance for them to really come into their own. The second act of a movie like Seven Samurai enriches the situation presented in the first act and looks ahead to the action of the third, but is also fascinating in its own right—but only because the director and writers have done the necessary work. A second act lacks the obvious payoffs of the story’s beginning and end, but the fact that the author needs to work all the harder to maintain our interest often results in surprising, unpredictable storytelling. This is a big part of the reason why the second installments in movie trilogies, like The Empire Strikes Back, are often the best: deprived of easy dramatic solutions, the story has no choice but to explore its own world, go off in ingenious directions, and give the characters room to play. Whether or not there are second acts in our own lives remains an open question, but they certainly exist in fiction. So there’s no excuse for not handling them well.

A fella smarter than myself

I tried to imagine a fella smarter than myself. Then I tried to think, “What would he do?”

—David Mamet, Heist

Writers, by definition, are always trying to punch above their weight. When you sit down to write a novel for the first time, you’re almost comically inexperienced: however many books you’ve read or short stories you’ve written, you still don’t know the first thing about structuring—or even finishing—a long complicated narrative. Yet we all do it anyway. This is partly thanks to the irrational optimism that I’ve said elsewhere is a crucial element of any writer’s psychological makeup, in which we’re inclined to believe that we’re smarter and more prepared than we actually are. There’s nothing wrong with this; it’s the only way any of us will ever grow as writers, as we slowly evolve into the level of competence we’ve imagined for ourselves. Still, in any project, there always comes a time when a writer, however experienced, realizes that he’s taken on more than he can handle. The story is there, unwritten, and it’s beautiful in his head, but lost in the translation to the printed page. One day, he hopes, he’ll be good enough to realize it, but that doesn’t help him now. What he really needs is a way to temporarily become a better writer than he already is.

This may sound like witchcraft, but in reality, it’s something that writers do all the time. When we start out, we have no choice but to imitate the artists we admire, because when we set out to write that first page, we lack the experience of life and craft that only years of work can bring. Eventually, we move past imitation to find a voice and style of our own, but there are still times when we find ourselves compelled to channel the spirit of our betters. We do this when we start each day by reading a few pages from the work of a writer we like, or when we approach a tough moment in the plot by asking ourselves what Updike or Thomas Harris in his prime would do. Some of us go even further. In this week’s issue of The New Yorker, James Wood talks about a friend who became so obsessed by the work of the Norwegian writer Per Petterson that he copied out one of his novels word for word. This isn’t about stylistic plagiarism or slavish imitation, but a kind of sympathetic magic, a hope that we can conjure up the spirit of a more experienced writer just long enough to solve the problems in front of us.

And the act of imitation itself can lead to surprising places. There’s a great deleted scene from the notorious documentary The Aristocrats in which Kevin Pollak delivers the titular joke in the style of Albert Brooks. After milking it for two delicious minutes, he takes a sip of coffee and says:

That’s the trippy thing about doing Brooks, though—I’m faster and funnier than I am as myself. It’s very, very sad. It’s a possession. I hate to do it because, literally, I’m listening to myself and thinking, “Why am I never this funny?”

I’m not a huge Kevin Pollak fan, but I love this clip, because it gets at something important and mysterious about the way artistic imitation works. Pollak is a skilled mimic who does a good, if not great, impression of Albert Brooks on all the superficial levels—his vocal tics, his tone, the way he holds his face and body. Somewhere along the line, though, these surface impressions work a deeper transformation, and he finds himself temporarily thinking like Brooks. This is why typing out the work of a writer we admire can be so helpful: there’s no better way of opening a window, even just for a crucial moment or two, into someone else’s brain.

The best kind of imitation, as Pollak says, is a possession, in which we will ourselves, almost unconsciously, into becoming better artists than we really are. Imitation can become dangerous, however, when we focus on the superficial without also channeling more fundamental habits of mind. This morning, while watching the new teaser trailer for Star Trek: Into Darkness, which clearly takes many of its cues from the recent films of Christopher Nolan, I was amused by the thought that while Nolan has done more than any contemporary director to push the envelope of visual and narrative complexity in mainstream movies, the big takeaway for other filmmakers—or at least those who assemble the trailers—has apparently been a “BWONG” sound effect. But big influences can arise from small beginnings. The qualities that most deserve imitation in the artists we admire have little to do with the obvious trademarks of their style, and if we imitate those aspects alone, we’re just being derivative. But sometimes it’s those little things that allow us to temporarily acquire the mindset of smarter artists than ourselves, until, finally, we’ve made it our own.

Writing is cutting

Movies are made in the editing room. It’s a cliché, but it’s also true: you can shoot the best raw footage in the world, but if it doesn’t cut together, the movie isn’t going to work. Beyond their basic responsibilities of maintaining continuity and spacial coherence, the editor is largely responsible for shaping a film’s narrative momentum, streamlining and clarifying the story, and making sure it runs the proper length. And sometimes the editor’s role goes even further. As Charles Koppelman writes in Behind the Seen:

[Walter] Murch says it’s common in editing, and normally easy, to steer scenes five or ten degrees in either direction from their intended course. Shading intensity, favoring a character, softening a moment—that’s “the bread and butter of film editing,” as he calls it. “It also seems that flipping the polarity of a scene—going completely the opposite way from where things were originally intended—is something relatively easy to do in film editing.”

And although there are countless famous cases of movies being radically rewritten in the editing room, like Ralph Rosenblum’s brilliant reshaping of Annie Hall, a casual comparison between the published screenplays and the finished versions of most great movies reveals that crucial changes are being made all the time. To pick just one example: the closing montage of words and images at the end of The Usual Suspects, which gives the entire movie much of its power, is totally absent in the script, and a lot of the credit here needs to be given to editor John Ottman. And smaller, less flashy examples are visible everywhere you look.

At first glance, it might seem as if a novelist is in a somewhat different position. A film editor is constrained by the material at hand, and although in certain cases he may have some input when it comes to expensive reshoots, for the most part, he has no choice but to make do with the footage that results from principal photography, which can be massaged and reconceived, but only to some extent, with the help of clever cutting, wild lines, and lucky discoveries in the slate piece. (The slate piece, as I’ve mentioned before, is the second or two of stray film left at the beginning of a take, before the actors have even begun to speak. Mamet likes to talk about finding important bits of footage in this “accidental, extra, hidden piece of information,” and he isn’t lying—the evocative, ominous shots of empty corridors in the hospital scene in The Godfather, for instance, were salvaged from just such a source.) A novelist, by contrast, can always write new material to fill in the gaps or save an otherwise unworkable scene, and it doesn’t cost anything except time and sanity. In reality, however, it isn’t quite that easy. The mental state required for writing a first draft is very different from that of revision, and while writers, in theory, benefit from an unlimited range of possibilities, in practice, they often find themselves spending most of their time trying to rework the material that they already have.

This is why I’ve become increasingly convinced that writing is revision, and in particular, it’s about cutting and restructuring, especially with regard to reducing length. Fortunately, this is one area, and possibly the only area, in which writers have it easier now than ever before. In The Elements of Style, E.B. White writes:

Quite often the writer will discover, on examining the completed work, that there are serious flaws in the arrangement of the material, calling for transpositions. When this is the case, he can save himself much labor and time by using scissors on his manuscript, cutting it to pieces and fitting the pieces together in a better order.

There’s something appealing about the image of a writer literally cutting his work using scissors and tape, and it’s possible that there’s something tactile in the process that would lead to happy accidents—which makes me want to try it sometime. These days, however, it’s so easy to cut and restructure files in Word that it seems insane for a writer not to take full advantage of the opportunity. Like editing a movie in Final Cut Pro, it’s nondestructive: you can try anything out and reverse it with a keyboard shortcut. You can cut as much as you like and restore it with ease, as long as you’ve taken the precaution of saving a new version with every round of revision. And I’ve learned that if it occurs to you that something could be cut, it should be. Nine times out of ten, once that initial change has been made, you won’t even remember what was there before—and if, five or ten rereadings later, you find that you still miss it, it’s a simple matter to restore what used to be there.

And almost invariably, the shorter and more focused the story becomes, the better it gets. Not only is cutting a story as much as possible the best trick I know, in some ways, it’s the only trick I know. When I look back at my own published work, I naturally divide it into several categories, based on how happy I am with the finished result. At the top are the stories—The Icon Thief, “The Boneless One,” and a handful of others—that I don’t think I’d change much at all, followed by a bunch that I’d like to revise, and a couple that I wish hadn’t seen print in their current form. Without exception, my regrets are always the same: I wish I’d cut it further. The conception is sound, the writing is fine, but there are a few scenes that go on too long. And although it’s impossible to know how you’ll feel about one of your stories a year or two down the line, I almost always wish I’d made additional cuts. That’s why, as I begin the final push on Eternal Empire, I’m cutting even more savagely than my critical eye might prefer, trying to think in terms of how I’ll feel ten months from now, when the novel is published. (The divergence between my present and future selves reminds me a little of the gap between Nate Silver’s “now-cast” and his election day forecast, which will finally converge on November 6.) I don’t know what my future self will think of this novel. But I can almost guarantee that he’ll wish that I’d cut a little more.

My twenty favorite writing quotes

It’s hard to believe, but over the past two years, I’ve posted more than six hundred quotes of the day. At first, this was simply supposed to be a way for me to add some new content on a daily basis without going through the trouble of writing a full post, but it ultimately evolved into something rather different. I ran through the obvious quotations fairly quickly, and the hunt for new material has been one of the most rewarding aspects of writing this blog, forcing me to look further afield into disciplines like theater, songwriting, dance, and computer science. Since we’re rapidly approaching this blog’s second anniversary, I thought it might be useful, or at least amusing, to pick out twenty of my own favorites. Some are famous, others less so, but in one way or another they’ve been rattling around in my brain for a long time, and I hope they’ll strike up a spark or two in yours:

Be well-ordered in your life, and as ordinary as a bourgeois, in order to be violent and original in your work.

—Gustave Flaubert

An artist must approach his work in the spirit of the criminal about to commit a crime.

—Edgar Degas

The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.

—Linus Pauling

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from such things.

—T.S. Eliot

Graphical excellence is that which gives to the viewer the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time with the least ink in the smallest space.

—Edward R. Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

Luck is the residue of design.

—Branch Rickey

The first thing you do when you take a piece of paper is always put the date on it, the month, the day, and where it is. Because every idea that you put on paper is useful to you. By putting the date on it as a habit, when you look for what you wrote down in your notes, you will be desperate to know that it happened in April in 1972 and it was in Paris and already it begins to be useful. One of the most important tools that a filmmaker has are his/her notes.

—Francis Ford Coppola, in an interview with The 99 Percent

Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.

—Lionel Trilling

The worst error of the older Shakespeare criticism consisted in regarding all the poet’s means of expression as well-considered, carefully pondered, artistically conditioned solutions and, above all, in trying to explain all the qualities of his characters on the basis of inner psychological motives, whereas, in reality, they have remained very much as Shakespeare found them in his sources, or were chosen only because they represented the most simple, convenient, and quickest solution of a difficulty to which the dramatist did not find it worth his while to devote any further trouble.

—Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art

As a writer, I’ve tried to train myself to go one achievable step at a time: to say, for example, “Today I don’t have to be particularly inventive, all I have to be is careful, and make up an outline of the actual physical things the character does in Act One.” And then, the following day to say, “Today I don’t have to be careful. I already have this careful, literal outline, and I all have to do is be a little bit inventive,” et cetera, et cetera.

—David Mamet, Some Freaks

Great narrative is not the opposite of cheap narrative: it is soap opera plus.

—Eric Bentley, The Life of the Drama

You must train day and night in order to make quick decisions.

—Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings

I guarantee you that no modern story scheme, even plotlessness, will give a reader genuine satisfaction, unless one of those old-fashioned plots is smuggled in somewhere. I don’t praise plots as accurate representations of life, but as ways to keep readers reading. When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away—even if it’s only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.

—Kurt Vonnegut, to The Paris Review

The best question I ask myself is: What would a playwright do?

—Dennis Lehane, to The Writer Magazine

Mechanical excellence is the only vehicle of genius.

—William Blake

To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.

—Attributed to Leonard Bernstein

If you have taken the time to learn to write beautiful, rock-firm sentences, if you have mastered evocation of the vivid and continuous dream, if you are generous enough in your personal character to treat imaginary characters and readers fairly, if you have held onto your childhood virtues and have not settled for literary standards much lower than those of the fiction you admire, then the novel you write will eventually be, after the necessary labor of repeated revisions, a novel to be proud of, one that almost certainly someone, sooner or later, will be glad to publish.

—John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist

If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn’t bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.

—Stephen King, On Writing

You can’t win, you can’t break even, and you can’t get out of the f—king game.

—Harlan Ellison

He wishes he had never entered the funhouse. But he has. Then he wishes he were dead. But he’s not. Therefore he will construct funhouses for others and be their secret operator—though he would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed.

—John Barth, “Lost in the Funhouse”

A novelist’s view of the campaign

A few weeks ago, there was a lot of talk about whether polls for the presidential race were slanted toward the Democratic side. Nate Silver has done a better job of demolishing these claims than I ever could, although it’s worth pointing out that, on its face, the allegation never made sense: if the media were really lining up behind Obama, it’s unclear what they’d have to gain by artificially boosting his numbers, which would only encourage complacency and decrease turnout. (That said, if the polls had been running in the other direction, I’m sure we’d see similar accusations of bias from the left, as we did in 2004.) It’s also important to note that while members of the media, as individuals, may skew more liberal than otherwise—for the same reasons that such people tend to be disproportionately drawn to careers in journalism and the arts—their professional and collective decisions arise from a different set of impulses. The men and women who cover the news, like the rest of us, tend to be motivated by a complicated combination of ambition, pragmatism, time constraints, and the professional conservatism that comes from working in an industry that is still trying to figure out its own business model.

This just means that reporters, especially on the political side, essentially tell stories for a living. More than most kinds of reporting, covering a campaign is something like writing a novel: while most journalism focuses on the recent past or, at most, the immediate present, political reporting is inevitably about one particular date in the future. It’s about constructing hypothetical situations, mapping out possible developments, and marshaling evidence that can inherently be interpreted in multiple ways—which is almost a form of highly specialized speculative fiction. But apart from its predictive tendencies, political journalism is also inclined to look for dramatic narratives. A campaign in which one candidate is consistently ahead in crucial polls over the course of many months is the equivalent of a novel in which the stakes never change. As a result, the media is generally predisposed to depict the race as being closer than it actually is. This is why countless news stories over the past few months have referred to the presidential race as “virtually tied,” even when swing states told a different story. A close race means increased voter engagement, more clicks, and a greater appearance of balance. And emphasizing one number over another is a storytelling choice.

Of course, the campaigns are telling stories too, and both sides of this year’s election have their share of novelistic sensibilities. Stuart Stevens, Romney’s campaign manager, has written a novel and television scripts and served as a consultant for The Ides of March, and as I’ve mentioned before, Obama himself once seriously considered becoming a novelist. And where it counts, Obama hasn’t changed: when Michael Lewis writes, in his excellent Vanity Fair profile, of “the president sitting down and trying to persuade himself to think or feel a certain way first,” the temperament he’s describing is fundamentally a novelistic one. I suspect, for instance, that Obama approached Wednesday’s debate as a writer might approach a transitional chapter in a novel. A campaign, like any extended narrative, can’t consist entirely of high points: you need to carefully select the moments when you bring out your maximum firepower. I have a hunch that Obama looked at the situation and concluded, correctly, that Romney was a stronger debater; that the topic of the debate, domestic policy, was his own weakest selling point; and that the media narrative was predisposed to give Romney a victory to maintain the suspense. Not surprisingly, he decided to play it safe, much as a writer might decide to conserve his powder for more important scenes to come.

The trouble is that a campaign, like a novel, tends to be judged by its audience moment to moment, and unlike readers, we can’t move on right away to the next chapter. Viewed objectively, this wasn’t a very interesting debate—Romney’s Big Bird quip was the only memorable line of the night—but for twenty-four hours, it was all anyone wanted to talk about, which is like reviewing a novel based only on a single scene. And for the Romney campaign, clearly, this wasn’t a transitional chapter, but something like the second turning point in a screenplay, in which the setbacks of the previous section are clarified and transcended in advance of the crucial third act. In that respect, Romney did a very good job—although I can’t help but be skeptical of the storytelling instincts of a man whose favorite novel is Battlefield Earth. At every moment, we’re watching two different stories being written in parallel, in real time, and nobody knows what the ending will be. But in politics, as in fiction, it comes down to the long game. As David Mamet says, “Turn the thing around in the last two minutes, and you can live quite nicely. Turn it around again in the last ten seconds and you can buy a house in Bel Air.” Or, in this case, on Pennsylvania Avenue.

The visual approach to editing

Last week, after a short break, I went back and reread the rough draft of Eternal Empire, my third novel, and immediately had something close to a panic attack. I was surprised by this, because my initial read, right after finishing the draft, was highly positive—I thought it had the potential to be the best novel I’d ever written. The second time around, however, I could hardly find anything right with it: it seemed too slow, too padded, and above all too long. Looking at it more objectively, I could tell that the structure was ultimately sound, and I knew intellectually, if not viscerally, that the set pieces and story points were all good. I hadn’t constructed this novel haphazardly; I’d approached it with a solid plan. (As David Mamet says: “The more time you have invested, and the more of yourself you have invested in the plan, the more secure you will feel in the face of terror.”) All the same, I was left with a problem: the book was at least 15% too long, after close to the same amount had already been cut from the previous draft, and I had just over four weeks to fix it.

What I’m about to describe is going to sound slightly insane, but please bear with me. I began by going through my printed draft with a pencil and crossing out anything I could. For the most part, I wasn’t so much reading the chapters, which I knew fairly well by that point, as regarding them with the eye of a sculptor: I was cutting paragraphs that seemed too long, unbroken chunks of exposition, lengthy speeches, anything that looked like it was taking up too much space. If I had two long paragraphs in a row, I asked myself if what they were saying could be better expressed in one, and nearly every time, the answer was yes. And I paid particular attention to the beginning and end of each scene, looking for ways to get into the scene later and leave earlier, as well as cutting anything that seemed purely transitional, which can be as simple as starting with two characters already in a room instead of out in the hallway. Every now and then, I’d create a PDF of the draft and flip through it rapidly on my laptop, looking for moments when a chapter seemed to run a page or two longer than I was expecting, working mostly by intuition.

This may seem like a strange way of operating, but it’s not so different from what a film editor like Walter Murch does when he views a movie at high speed or with the sound turned down: I’m not worrying about the details, but focusing on big structural elements, which often express themselves visually on the page. Robert Louis Stevenson says somewhere that all the words on a well-written page should look more or less the same, and to my mind, that’s also true of paragraphs. I’m not saying that every paragraph should be the same length, but that there’s a basic rhythm of description, action, and dialogue that I try to hit on a consistent basis, which is visually apparent at a glance. After all, when you’re browsing through a novel in a bookstore, you aren’t necessarily reading the words: you’re looking at the page to see whether it resembles your personal standard of readability. We all have a different sweet spot, but it’s one that we can intuitively recognize, once we’ve read enough books we like. And even when we’re reading a novel for real, we tend to approach the words on a page with a different state of mind when we see, out of the corner of one eye, that the chapter is about to end—a subliminal factor that doesn’t exist in film.

Personally, I’m convinced that this kind of high-level, predominantly visual approach to editing has a real impact on the experience of a reader who is encountering the story for the first time, moment by moment. And although this shouldn’t be the only editing approach a writer uses, it’s a valuable one, especially at the early stages of the editing phase, when you’re crossing out pages wholesale and focusing on the big picture. There will be plenty of time for granularity later, and if you find, on rereading, that you’ve accidentally cut out something important, you can always restore it. (This, incidentally, is why it’s important to save a new version of your manuscript with each major iteration of editing.) In my own case, by the time I’d finished this part of the process, I found that I’d cut close to 10,000 words from a draft that had already gone through one round of extensive cutting. Still, the memory of that first, awful read-through was a vivid one, and to get the manuscript down to what I thought was a reasonable length, I had to resort to the opposite approach. Tomorrow, I’m going to describe how I cut the next few thousand words, with the help of a well-designed spreadsheet.

Write like a hedgehog, think like a fox

“The fox knows many things,” Archilochus writes, “but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” And ever since Isaiah Berlin wrote his great essay The Hedgehog and the Fox, readers and critics have been dividing up writers into one category or the other—foxes who range widely over the world without any central philosophy, and hedgehogs who focus on one big idea. Really, however, most writers tend to alternate between the two roles: they’re foxes when gathering material and hedgehogs when the time comes to sit down and write. Writers have a dauntingly wide range of interests and obsessions, but in their actual fiction, they often rely on a handful of the same tricks—which is exactly how it should be. One or two good tricks that a writer has thoroughly internalized can be more valuable than an entire shelf’s worth of undigested literary wisdom. And while I’ve previously shared my ten rules of writing, I thought it might be worth distilling them down to the three big, hedgehog-level tricks on which I rely whenever I’m writing something new, even after everything else has fallen away:

1. Structure your stories one objective at a time. As Kurt Vonnegut points out, if you can make your central character want something right away, even if it’s just a glass of water, it will keep the reader reading. The key insight of my writing life is that if you maintain a laserlike focus on the character’s objectives at each successive beat of the story, without worrying about what comes next, the result will have a shapeliness and authenticity that you never could have achieved by planning from the top down. A character who has convincing objectives from moment to moment will also be convincing when you step back to regard him as a whole—and it’s both easier and more effective to concentrate on each beat in succession. This argument is emphatically made in David Mamet’s On Directing Film, the best book on storytelling I know, which I recommend to everyone who cares about writing. The result may not always be inspired—Mamet’s own films can come off as flat and a little bloodless—but if you write a rough draft with this rule in mind, the damned thing will at least work. And that’s really all you can ask of it.

2. Think of the story in threes. George Lucas, who at his best was one of the great methodical, not natural, storytellers of all time, expresses a similar point in the famous Raiders of the Lost Ark story conference: “The way I work generally is I figure out a code, a general measuring stick parameter. I can either come up with thirty scenes or sixty scenes…I have a tendency to work rather mathematically about all this stuff. I found it easier and it does lay things out.” And he’s right: it’s a lot easier when you have a number. In my own case, instead of the thirty or sixty scenes that Lucas talks about, I start with a pattern of three rough acts, which I know I’m aiming for even before I know what the story is about. Not every story lends itself naturally to a three-act structure, but it’s nice to have it in mind, both because it’s an intuitively appealing story formula with a beginning, middle, and end, and because, as Lucas points out, it gives you some useful parameters. And you can drill down even deeper, on an almost fractal level: I find myself dividing sections, chapters, and even individual scenes into three subsidiary units. This kind of structure, as arbitrary as it may seem, is an essential step toward finding a story’s organic shape. Which brings me to my third point…

3. Cut wherever possible—and at least ten percent. Just because you’ve structured a story in threes, and as a series of discrete objectives, doesn’t mean you need to keep all of them in the final version. In fact, the whole point of structuring the story so mechanically is to give you something to change—a solid substructure that you can refine based on how the resulting story reads in real time. If you’ve done your work properly, your rough draft will be a functional object that you can then shape at your leisure, knowing that you can always fall back on the earlier version when necessary. In practice, this often means pruning away the structure you’ve laboriously imposed: in particular, you’ll often cut the first and third beats of a given unit, leaving only the crucial middle. And, of course, you’re seeking to condense wherever possible. If you follow Stephen King’s dictum that the second draft equals the first draft minus ten percent, I promise that magical things will happen. These are simple, stupid rules, based on a couple of basic numbers—one, three, ten—that even a hedgehog can understand. But it’s the only way to release your inner fox.

Are you a gardener or an architect?

There are many different kinds of writers. I like to use the analogy of architects and gardeners. There are some writers who are architects, and they plan everything, they blueprint everything, and they know before the drive the first nail into the first board what the house is going to look like…And then there are gardeners who dig a little hole and drop a seed in and water it with their blood and see what comes up, and sort of shape it…I am much more a gardener than an architect.

That’s George R.R. Martin talking, and if my experience this weekend at Worldcon is any indication, the distinction between literary gardeners and architects may be Martin’s most lasting contribution to the way we think about writing. Of the ten or so events on writing I attended, either as a viewer or a panelist, I’d say that the gardener/architect distinction came up in at least half, usually to appreciative murmurs from the audience. Either approach, the speakers were quick to say, is perfectly fine, depending on the writer’s methods and personality—which is certainly true. But I also noticed that nearly every writer who brought up the distinction identified himself as a gardener, with an implicit sense that architects are slightly inhuman technicians whose left-brained approach can deprive them of the happy accidents of character and incident that lie at the heart of writing.

Well, in case it isn’t abundantly clear by now, I’m an architect. My first blog post was called “Nails and Houses.” My favorite book on storytelling of any kind, David Mamet’s On Directing Film, abounds in architectural metaphors, and I seized every chance I could to recommend it at my panels this weekend. (I have a feeling I sold more copies of Mamet’s book than any of my own work.) I’ve used a lot of different metaphors to describe outlining, which I’ve called a stealth first draft and compared to the relationship that a screenplay bears to a finished movie, but perhaps it’s most accurate to say that the outline is a blueprint. At this point, I wouldn’t dream of starting a substantial writing project without an outline for at least the first major section, and I still believe that having an outline often makes the difference between finishing a project and ending up with a few tantalizing fragments. And while I’m aware that this approach doesn’t work for everyone, it works so well for me that I’ve discussed it at length, both on this blog and elsewhere.

What needs to be emphasized, however, is that a novel is not a house, however seductive that analogy may be. It’s easier to remodel, for one thing. And it can be planned and built in increments: I never outline an entire novel at once, but always leave a residue of plot and character problems unresolved at every stage. In some ways, the architectural approach to writing is less like building a house than like city planning: it involves many connected structures, built over time and for different reasons, each one of which subtly changes its neighbors and the surrounding landscape. Just as a healthy neighborhood consists, according to Christopher Alexander, of the coordination of patterns scaled to human needs, writing a novel is about orchestrating many self-contained pieces—beats, scenes, chapters—into a harmonious whole. And the result, if you’ve done it properly, is less a city like Brasilia, with its structure imposed from the top down, than London, which makes sense on the ground but also reveals surprising patterns when seen from above.

And what I’ve discovered about these architectural habits is that they’re very much like what Mamet says about his own methods: applied correctly, they set the imagination free. As a blueprint, an outline helps you organize materials and find places for elements that otherwise might be lost. I’m much more likely, for instance, to remember and utilize the free-floating fragments of inspiration that come at odd moments—while shaving, showering, or taking a walk—when I have a larger structure in which they can fit. This requires a certain amount of flexibility, of course, and a willingness to revise in light of new developments. Even when I’m working out a carefully structured plan on the page, I’m often surprised by unexpected plot or character turns, which emerge, not in spite of the pattern that surrounds them, but because of it. That tension between structure and serendipity is one of the great joys of writing. And fortunately, with a novel, it’s always possible to remodel, rebuild, and, when necessary, demolish.

Quote of the Day

Now, why did all those Olympic skaters fall down? The only answer I know is that they hadn’t practiced enough.

—David Mamet, On Directing Film

The treacherous craft of Aaron Sorkin

When I consider Aaron Sorkin and the weirdly watchable train wreck that is The Newsroom, I’m reminded of something that Norman Mailer once said about craft: “I think of it as being like a Saint Bernard with that little bottle of brandy under his neck. Whenever you get into trouble, craft can keep you warm long enough to be rescued. Of course, this is exactly what keeps good novelists from becoming great novelists.” Craft, in other words, becomes a kind of intellectual sleight of hand, a way of disguising bad thinking or more fundamental narrative problems, when a writer of lesser facility might have been forced to deal more honestly with the true implications of his material. Mailer cites Robert Penn Warren as an example:

Robert Penn Warren might have written a major novel if he hadn’t just that little extra bit of craft to get him out of all the trouble in All the King’s Men…And his plot degenerated into a slam-bang mix of exits and entrances, confrontations, tragedies, quick wits and woe. But he was really forcing an escape from the problem.

Which, if you think about it, sounds a lot like the The Newsroom, which so often confuses manic action and the rapid-fire exchange of factoids with drama and witty repartee. It’s a frustrating, often outright terrible show, and yet I find myself watching it with increasing fascination, because it achieves the level of badness that can only be attained with the aid of remarkable craft. Sorkin is a man of enormous talent, but in his best work, he’s been aided and restrained by other strong creative voices. The Newsroom gives us Sorkin uncut, without the guiding hand he needs to hold him back from his worst impulses, and the result tells us a lot not just about Sorkin, but about the nature and limitations of a certain kind of drama. Because watching this show forces us to confront what David Thomson, speaking about David Mamet, has called “the time-killing aridness in brilliant situations, crackling talk, and magnificent acting.”

That sort of “crackling talk” is a skill that can be learned over time, and Sorkin, who has written hundreds of hours of television, theater, and film, has had more practice doing it than just about anyone else. As a recent supercut made clear, he also tends to return repeatedly to the same verbal tics and phrases (“Well, that was predictable”). Yet this only reflects how good he really is. Sorkin is a machine for creating great dialogue, and like all insanely productive creative professionals, he likes to fall back on the same tricks, which he generates almost unconsciously. If he’d slaved over a line to make it work, he wouldn’t have used it again, but the fact that these lines reappear so often implies that they came easily. As Nicholson Baker says in U and I of John Updike’s reuse of certain images in his novels: “He liked it enough to consent to it when it appeared in a street scene the first time, and yet he didn’t like it well enough for his memory to warn him off a second placement.” And that’s the mark of a writer of almost supernatural felicity.

Yet it also conceals deeper problems of substance, as well as a disturbing lack of real ideas. As Sorkin recently said to Terry Gross: “I phonetically create the sound of smart people talking to each other.” And what The Newsroom demonstrates is that Sorkin’s blessed ability with dialogue has left him underdeveloped along other parameters, a shortcoming that seems especially visible now. If you write wonderful words for actors to say, this can conceal any number of other limitations, sometimes for years, but eventually the mask starts to slip. Sorkin is a verbal genius, with the Oscar and Emmys to show for it, but without good collaborators, his gift tends to ripen and rot. What Sorkin needs, clearly, is a strong creative force to push against, which David Fincher provided with The Social Network and Thomas Schlamme and John Wells did on The West Wing—although his recent purge of many members of his writing staff makes it doubtful if this will happen soon. But I hope it does. Because otherwise, the show will continue to waste its great potential, and a legion of viewers can only say: “Well, that was predictable.”

“Today I don’t have to be careful…”

As a writer, I’ve tried to train myself to go one achievable step at a time: to say, for example, “Today I don’t have to be particularly inventive, all I have to be is careful, and make up an outline of the actual physical things the character does in Act One.” And then, the following day to say, “Today I don’t have to be careful. I already have this careful, literal outline, and I all have to do is be a little bit inventive,” et cetera, et cetera.

—David Mamet, Some Freaks

Lessons from Great TV #4: Cheers

Film directors are often advised to burn the first reel, and audiences are usually better off skipping a sitcom’s first episode. Comedy pilots, even for shows that later became classics, generally aren’t very good, for reasons that aren’t hard to understand. They’re often shot before the writers or actors have figured out of the show’s voice; the cast hasn’t had time to develop a comfortable rhythm, or to see which combinations of characters are most promising; and worst of all, their scripts are usually saddled with a lot of exposition. As David Mamet likes to point out, when we tune into a television show halfway through, we already know exactly what’s going on—so why do we need all this backstory? The answer is that pilots aren’t made for viewers, but for studio and network executives, who, as any screenwriter can attest, like to have the backstory spelled out. And for comedy, which is rarely very good at conveying information, this sort of thing can be deadly. (This is one reason why dramas are more likely to have strong pilots than comedies, and why there’s never been a comedy pilot as good as the first episodes of Twin Peaks or Mad Men.)

Cheers has one of the rare sitcom pilots that works. Watching “Give Me a Ring Sometime” again this morning, I was struck by how elegantly structured it is. Crucially, it doesn’t try to throw too much information at the audience at once: it introduces the principal characters one at a time, and it doesn’t present us with a new face until we’re comfortable with the ones we’ve seen so far. In particular, it starts with Sam by himself, then opens, brilliantly, with an encounter with a character we’re clearly never going to see again, a kid trying to get into the bar with a fake ID. As a result, instead of scrambling to process two major characters at once, we’re focused, properly, on the star. The other regular players enter roughly in order of importance: it’s no accident that the next entrance belongs to Diane. Every ensuing beat is built around a readily identifiable situation, as screenwriter Terry Rossio recommends, and the plot itself, with Diane waiting in the bar for her fiancé to return, couldn’t be simpler. These are all smart decisions by writers Glen and Les Charles that could, in theory, be copied—but it wouldn’t work if it weren’t also funny and charming in a way that defies easy interpretation. Like most great shows, Cheers occupies the place where craft and magic meet. It’s easy to see how it’s done. It’s just hard to do it yourself.

Tomorrow: The accidental finale, or “How’s Annie?”