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How Do You Write Podcast: Explore the processes of working writers with bestselling author Rachael Herron. Want tips on how to write the book you long to finish? Here you’ll gain insight from other writers on how to get in the chair, tricks to stay in it, and inspiration to get your own words flowing.
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Transcript:
Rachael Herron: Welcome to “How do you, Write?” I’m your host, Rachael Herron. On this podcast, I talk to authors about how they write, what their process is and how their lives fit together. I’ll keep each episode short so you can get back to writing.
Welcome to “How do you, Write?” mini episode number one 151. I’m Rachael Herron.
I’m so glad that you’re here for this first mini episode. And I’ve decided that I’m going to keep the numbering tradition so that good old iTunes doesn’t get too confused and I’m going to launch right in. Basically what this is, the many episodes are supported by Patreon members at the $5 and up level.
You basically put me on retainer to ask any of your questions and I’ll generally answer between one and three questions, but I want these to be super short so that you can listen to them. And the time that you drive to the grocery store, perhaps. So I’m going to start from the top and work my way down. I’ve got a bunch queued up, so if I don’t get to yours today, I will get to it soon. Please enjoy!
So this first one is from Afton. Uh, and she says, What? Oh my gosh. I love this because you can ask any question about anything. And I even have like a question about maybe a heater down here, so we’ll get to that one.
But this one is very technical. What is your opinion on the, “Never use the word “I” to start a sentence?”. That is one of those things that we learned in school and I did a little bit of Googling on it, and it is just one of those old myths along with the one that says, you can’t start a sentence with and, or but all myths, all a little bit archaic. And they come from the time when, uh, people were a little bit more formal about their writing. Nowadays, we can start sentences with I in fact, as a memoir writer, I do it all the time. I love starting sentences with “and” or “but”. And the really interesting thing about “and” and “but” to start a sentence is that sometime you can swap the two, which does not seem to make sense. You should logically “and” does not mean anything like “but” does, and it still stands that you can sometimes stop them and the meaning is enhanced a little bit. So go ahead and start your sentences with “and” and “but” and I, what you do want to remember is sentence variation. Don’t start a lot of sentences with “and” or “but” don’t start every sentence with “I”. If you do, your words can sound a little bit, wrote a little prescribed, and you want to mix up your sentence length the way that your sentences are structured to give the reader a more dynamic experience of your writing. But yeah, there’s a, there are no more rules left around “I”, “And”, or, “But” so have fun with those sentences. Afton also wants to know if I ever wear my No Human Is Illegal Armband that she made me, and in fact I do and I love it. So thank you.
Let’s see. Lefty asks, do you have any other tips and tricks for first drafting? Like the sprint advice? I had a quick show a little while back on sprinting, and that’s actually where I got the idea to do these mini podcasts.
And my only other tricks Lefty, are these: just to remember on a real base, cellular level that we are trying to get terrible drafts done and down on the page, and I always say this, but I am the last person to believe that. I always think that I should be the exception that surely this time, my first draft is going to be something a little bit better than my old, crappy first drafts have been and every single time I am let down by myself that I can’t make them better. And that is true of most every writer. So the biggest thing for me, and first drafting, is to just try to get out of the way of this perfectionist self of mine that sabotages so much of my work. I always have a vision for every book that I’m writing and they show up and I try to put it on the page and my vision fails and it is ugly and awful, and I can see that gap between the book I want it to be and the book I’m actually writing, and that gap just freaks me out every time. And I always believe I’m not going to be able to fix it, and I always am and you will always be too. The thing to remember is to get out of our own way, lower our standards for what our first draft writing should look like and allow our hands to go as fast as possible.
If you are having a hard time with first draft, I do recommend dictation. I think I mentioned it in that podcast, but if you’re using a Mac, there’s already dictation built into your computer. Just hit the function button twice and a voice to text will pop up in whatever program you’re using. It’s not perfect, none of them are. I really like using Dragon anywhere on my phone. It is a paid service, but you basically talk into your phone and then you email yourself the document, copy and paste it into whatever you’re working on because you’re doing that so quickly. You’re doing it at the speed that you talk. It does come out super crappy and it kind of gets you over yourself, which I like.
I can on days where I’m really struggling to write, I will honestly go lie in bed and sometimes I even pull the covers over my head and I just talk into the phone and when I’m done talking for 15 minutes, I have a thousand or 1500 words that are terrible that will need a lot of cleaning up, but I have moved forward and I can put them on my document.
I can spend a little bit of time tinkering with them. I don’t ever edit when I’m writing a first draft, I do not revise. I believe most of us don’t do our work that way and complete books. Uh, but I will let myself tinker to fix up the sentences that make no sense because they were voice to text.
And you know how auto correct works. That happens with our books too. And I prefer to fix those auto correct problems right after I say them or on the same day that I say them. Otherwise, a couple of days go by and I do not know what I said. That made that sound, that made those words appear on the page.
So I do kind of tinker with those, but that’s all I do. So those are a couple of tips and tricks for you, Lefty. And, um, Lefty also asks, I’d love to know more about your draft pass technique for editing. Like you said one time that it takes you one hour to add setting in your novel, and I just don’t understand how you can do it so fast.
It’s cause I’m terrible at setting, uh, when I’m writing a first draft, I leave setting almost completely out. I am not a visual writer. I do not see things in my mind’s eye like a movie. I barely see anything in my mind’s eye. I am a completely word driven person. I have this thing called teletype synesthesia that every word that I say, and every word that I hear, and every word that I hear in a song, and every word I hear in conversation, I can kind of see it running in a ticker tape in my brain. Always. Always, always, always. So it’s very important to, for me to understand spelling of people’s names because I’m seeing it now drive me crazy if I’m constantly playing with the spelling of it as there, you know, as somebody saying their name, so I don’t see images and therefore I’m just very bad at setting.
So I understand. I accept that about myself. And setting is one of those draft passes. What a draft path – pass is for me, I write the terrible first draft, the absolute crap, shitty first draft first, and then I do a major revision and my major revision is the revision that takes the most time. And what it is, is really making sure that all the scenes are in the right place, that my characters have a character arc that I believe in, that they are doing the right things at the right time. It’s a lot of getting rid of scenes that don’t work and writing new scenes that fill in the places. I don’t ever know what a book is going to be really, truly, even if I outline it from hell, I still don’t know what a book wants to be until I’ve written the whole first draft.
So that big a revision that I do, that first revision is just getting things in their place. I don’t make any of the words look pretty. There’s no point to making any words look pretty. If you’re going to take that scene out later, and in fact, it can do you a disservice if you make a scene really good and later it shouldn’t be there.
You for – for plot sake or for character sake, you will have a very hard time recognizing that. If you’ve already gone over it three or four times or more to make it look beautiful and make all the sentences gorgeous and as strong as they can be. So I tend to not do that at all. I like to keep that till much later.
So I do my first big revision and that is the one that takes the longest. And then after that I might have another revision to make sure that the plot really works and that my characters really work. And after that I just get into something I call draft passes. And that means I’m looking at one thing and just one thing.
As I virtually flipped the pages in the book, or as I scroll the word document, so when I’m doing my settings pass, I go to each scene and I make sure that there are one or two, maybe five sentences about the scene. My books are really, really character-driven. So setting is not something that turns into a character.
I am not writing a beautiful mountain that acts as a character in this book. I just don’t think I would ever do that. So my settings are minimal and I can easily do it in an hour, insert one to five sentences into each scene just to make sure my people are in the right place. Maybe, maybe there’s more setting if you know, the fires crackling or something, but even that feels a little bit odd to me.
So I do that other draft, um, passes that I do, uh, include… Let’s see, dialogue. I’ll go through and look at each line of dialogue and make sure that it is as strong as it can be. I tried to get rid of as many tags as I can, like he said, or she said, by adding action beats if I can, and I never let myself do something like, you know, he shouted, or worst of all, remember from, uh, the Hardy boys and Nancy drew, he ejaculated. We’re not going to use those kinds of herbs. Um, he said, and she said, those disappear in the reader’s eyes, but even though they actually disappear, readers don’t actually see them.
I do like to try to remove as many as I can. And still have everything make sense. So that is a pass for me. What else are passes? Sometimes character arc is another pass. I will pull out all of the Stefanie chapters and I’ll just read the Stefanie chapters with nothing else in there and make sure that her story is cohesive and I’ll remove another character and just read his chapters to make sure those are cohesive.
I feel like there’s a lot of other draft passes that I do that I am not thinking about. Um, the- but the very last draft pass that is the most fun pass is what I call the lyrical pass. And it is truly the last, the last, last revision pass that I do. And it is when I look at every sentence to see if I can make that sentence any better or any prettier or any more lyrical or any more strong, I look at the paragraphs around it and make sure that the paragraphs are built beautifully. And this is when I get to put my full craft into play. And that is not an hour thing that is going to take days and weeks to do that lyrical pass. But for me, it’s the reward of knowing that everything is now in its place as good as I can get it, and I get to make the word sing. And it is true that as I’ve been going through and doing all of these other passes and the first and maybe second larger vision that I have been tightening up sentences. So a lot of times I get to sentences in there. It’s good as they are going to get. They are sturdy, they’re doing exactly their job. But the lyrical passes, this is the time I can experiment with metaphor and simile. If it doesn’t get in the way. I don’t want to be creating more darlings that I should be killing, but I just want to make things sing a little bit more. So that is my favorite last pass. I hope that helps a little bit and I am very excited to be doing this particular format for this podcast. I look forward to the next mini podcast of “How do you, Write?”
Please lay your questions on me. All questions are welcome. I’m sure that we’re going to go over and over some of the similar questions as they come up. In months and perhaps years to come. And that’s fine because I always feel like when I need to know something, I like to hear it a few times and I always learn something else.
So I look forward to doing this with you. Thank you again for your questions, and we’ll talk again about these kinds of things next week. Bye.
Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of “How do you, Write?” You can reach me on Twitter https://twitter.com/RachaelHerron or at my website, rachaelherron.com, you can also support me on Patreon and get essays on living your creative life.
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