Ep. 182: How to Allow Yourself to Suck and Fix it Later

Ep. 182 Miniepisode: How to Allow Yourself to Suck and Fix it Later

Transcript

Rachael Herron: Welcome to “How do you Write?” I’m your host, Rachael Herron, and this is a bonus episode brought to you directly by my $5 Patreons. If you’d like me to be your mini coach for less than a large mocha Frappuccino, you can join too at www.patreon.com/rachael

Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode #182 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron. 

[00:00:21] Couldn’t be more pleased that you’re here with me today. Today’s a mini bonus episode smack dab in the middle of quarantine and Corona virus, here in California, we are not going to have our state home orders lifted until at least the end of May. I know that LA I’ve heard, just went to the end of June and I have to tell you I’m doing really well. I was made for this kind of life, I really was, and I don’t mind enjoying parts of it. The whole thing is so awful and tragic, that where we find happiness, I believe we deserve to find happiness. So I enjoy being here at my desk and I enjoy talking to you. And today I’m going to go through a couple of questions that I’ve had stored up. I won’t get to all of them, but I’ll try to do them soon. If you are a patron level of $5 or up, you should use me to ask questions. That’s what I’m here for, I’m your mini coach for this. 

[00:01:23] Mariah, however, just sent me an email. This is not really a question. She had a comment. After I did a mini episode, pretty recently about revisions and skeleton scenes. And it tickled me so much that I asked for her permission to share it with you here today. Mariah is the person who, four years, ago when I went full time writing more than four years now, she encouraged me to coach writers and she volunteered herself to be my first. A Guinea pig and victim. I was already teaching and I knew that I loved to teaching, but I hadn’t really bolstered myself esteem up yet to coach and Mariah is the person who really broke that up for me. And now it is one of the things that I absolutely truly honestly live for. So I think I owe this debt of gratitude to Mariah forever. And then she does wonderful things, like send this amazing email. So listen to this in case it helps any of you, in case you’ve been feeling the same way or there’s something in here that might help, she says, hello.

[00:02:29] Hello. Thank you so much for that super helpful mini episode about revisions and skeleton scenes. My reaction to all of it remains, wait- I’m allowed to do that? Which is ridiculous and so telling. Intellectually, I know books don’t spring, fully formed from the writer’s mind. We’ve talked about it so many times, every writer I read who talks about their process says this. There’s tons of literature and podcasts and whatever about it. And still my mind insists that I’m only a good writer if I sit down, start typing and the whole thing comes out pretty much perfect and sensible and lyrical in one go. With all the themes and the layers in the right places. Maybe you’ll make a small continuity mistake about someone’s eye color or their dog’s name or something, but doing an actual pass for something like add others’ visceral’s, as part of your bona fide writer’s process? No, I heard that bit about add others visceral’s, which as an aside is one of my passes. I just look at all my characters and I make sure that they are moving their bodies in a visceral way that telegraphs to the reader, what the other non-main characters are feeling. So that’s like a little mini pass for me and it takes an hour to do for the whole book. So going back to Mariah’s letter, I heard that bit about add others visceral’s when I was cycling home from the office. And I think I laughed out loud on the psychopath. It was just so outrageous and liberating and right. Yes! So I think this message is maybe finally sinking in for me. More skeletoning and making notes of passes I need to do someday, less agonizing over why I’m stuck or why things are meh or not clear to me yet. So liberating. Also, I expect I’ll have to hear it again many times, but that is the way of the world for now. I’m humming along nicely. I did seven and a half hours of work last week, mostly planning, some researching, keeping it skeletony and moving along and it feels like real progress. So yay! 

[00:04:35] Oh my gosh, Mariah. Yay. Yay. Yay. Yes, yes, yes. I have to keep realizing this. I know that I will always feel exactly like you, that I am not a real writer because when I sit down, my words don’t flow easily. They don’t come out well, they don’t come out in the way that I want them to. I forget what I’m doing in the middle of a sentence, this whole draft is a pile of crap. And the fact that I feel that way, is something that prevents me from feeling like a real writer on many, many days. And so I remind myself of this and if you’re listening, thinking what is skeletoning? That is something I just call when I, I use that word when instead of writing the whole scene, I skeleton it out. I just put the barest bones, literally bones of what is, you know, literally meaning figuratively, the bones of what are going to happen. What is going to happen in this scene? They’re going to go to this place. They’re going to say something like this, their emotions are going to feel this way. And this part of the plot will be revealed. Great. There’s a scene. If I can’t write it right now, I have the skeleton to revise later. Oftentimes, I would say most of the time, I don’t skeleton something. I go into the scene and I bash it out as badly as I can. And I try to be lyrical and I try to write good sentences and they fall flat. They fall on the floor and they ride around like snakes trying to shed their skin, which is what they need to do. And then I go back to them later in revision, but sometimes I just can’t write a scene. It’s just too hard. So I will skeleton my way to the end and I’ll jump into the next scene as if I haven’t written that bad one. And this is something that people that I teach nowadays say over and over is when I finally let them see some bad writing of my own, some first draft writing of my own. The common thing that they all say is, “Oh my gosh, you weren’t kidding. That is really, really bad.” And I say to that, yes, it’s really, really bad. That’s how writers work. We write bad things and then we fix them later. So Mariah, thank you for this. This was an absolute delight to get. 

[00:06:58] Okay, so Maggie, Maggie M. Hi, Maggie! She has a couple of questions. What is your process for deciding which point of view is the best fit for a novel? For me, it’s less of a process and more of a feeling. I normally really start to think about the characters before. I usually get a premise, a slight premise. And then I start thinking about the characters, the ones who are biggest and brightest in my mind normally get a point of view. I have never, and probably will never write more than three points of view. Three is my absolute limit, because in revision, when I’m trying to make all the voices sound different, that’s about as much as I can handle. In the first drafts, I don’t worry about keeping their voices sounding different because it’s the first crappy draft. But I do always think about, who matters, who will matter most to the reader of this book? That’s my main character. And when it comes to deciding which character gets to have the point of view for a scene, there’s an old tried and true rule with air quotes around it, that the person who has the most to lose should be the person with a point of view in this particular scene. That’s a nice rule. It’s also really good to break, it’s really awesome to watch, to have, to have one of your characters, watch another character, lose the thing that they needed. So they, the other character, excuse me, Alexa, stop. Oh, I probably just stopped your ALA EXA. Sorry, that was a timer. Yeah, so it’s also sometimes nice to watch the character who doesn’t have as much to lose in the scene, to have that person watch the character who does. So that is something that you can play with a little, a little bit. But I hope that helps. 

[00:08:50] And her second question is, “If one of the characters you created could become a living person, who would you pick?” That is such a great hard question and right now, I have to say it would probably be the one that I am writing. Her name is Jillian. She is an OB GYN. She is pregnant and she’s honestly the first person I have ever written a book about in first person. So she’s feeling pretty alive and dynamic to me and I’m in a fourth draft, so I’m really inside her head and I like her. She’s pretty strong and kick ass. So I would love to have her come to life as a living person. But the other person that I always say is Nolan from Pack Up the Moon. He was the father. And I absolutely love Nolan. I feel a very deep kinship with him. I think I’m, I think Nolan might be me in a man’s body. Cause we do accidentally write ourselves into our books. We really do. We try not to, but it happens all the time. And Nolan, of course, as characters do, took on his own character and his own self. And he’s really, he really turned into this beautiful, caring, human being who is broken in a very particular way. And I love him and I miss him. So I would love to have dinner with him and give him a really big hug. 

[00:10:19] So thank you for these questions. Thank you, Mariah, for your email. Lefty and Thomas, I’ve got your questions queued up for next time. So that’ll be the next mini episode. I’m not forgetting about you. And I want to wish everybody very, very, very happy writing. I hope you are able to get some writing done during this crazy time. If you’re not, give yourself some forgiveness and try again tomorrow. But if writing is the most important thing to you and you feel like you should be doing it, then by God, get to the page and write some utter direct, put some crap on the page. Don’t worry about it, lower your standards. And then where your standards land, dig a basement for them and let them land on the basement floor. Lower those standards. You can do it and keep me posted on how you’re doing. Happy writing and we’ll talk soon my friends. 

Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of “How do you Write?” You can reach me on Twitter, twitter.com/RachaelHerron, or at my website, www.rachaelherron.com, you can also support me on Patreon and get essays on living your creative life for as little as a buck an essay at www.patreon.com/rachael spelled R, A, C, H, A, E, L and do sign up for my free weekly newsletter of encouragement to writers rachaelherron.com/write/

Now, go to your desk and create your own process and get to writing my friends.