Ep. 225: What Do You Actually MEAN When You Say to Write Fast and Badly?

In this episode, Rachael Herron answers questions from her Patreon supporters. What does a crappy draft actually look like, for real? Also, we talk about making sure stories move forward in a real way when constrained by historical facts, how to incorporate beta reader feedback if it’s all over the place, and why we flip away from our manuscripts when we’re “thinking” about them. 

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. 

Join Rachael’s Slack channel, Onward Writers!

Go HERE to see Rachel Lynn Solomon’s awesome example of writing quickly looks like (Rachael’s drafts look exactly like this!) Swipe to the second picture to see.

Transcript:

Rachael Herron: [00:00:00] 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.

[00:00:16] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode # 225 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron. I am thrilled you are here today. Today is a cool question and answer podcast from the questions that you have left me over at patreon.com/Rachael at the $5 a month level. You get not only all the essays, but the access to ask me any questions you have about anything particularly writing. Mostly we talk about writing, but if you don’t, feel free to ask me anything. So I’ve got a bunch of really good ones here, and I hope that they help you out. Just a quick update since this is the week’s episode, we had a shitty week. Lost our dog Clementine, who was really a dog of our heart. Aren’t all dogs? But this one was really, really special. If you want to see how beautiful she is, you can go to RachaelHerron.com/Clementine  

[00:01:13] I did a little bit of a remembrance of her as I usually do when we lose our animals. But this one was a really hard, y’all really hard. I feel like my grief around Clementine is bigger than just losing our old sick dog who was on hospice, pet hospice was the best she was on it for about six months. She came off of it a few times. She was doing so well and to have them come to our house and put her down in a slow, gentle manner where she was completely comfortable, it was really everything. But the grief around her, it’s just holding a lot more than grief around just Clementine. I feel like I’m grieving all the old animals that I’ve lost and all the mothers that my wife and I have lost and the people that we have lost and 2020, and also Clementine. And this is going to sound weird, and I don’t know how to explain this. I’ll just say it. We were not making concrete goals, concrete plans to get to New Zealand until Clementine died. And I know that sounds awful, but we weren’t willing to go without her. And she couldn’t make the trip. She’s just too old and she was too precious for us to leave.

[00:02:26] So, on Friday, I think it was Friday or Saturday. It must’ve been Friday. Lala got her visa, so we can go to New Zealand and on this visa, we have to go by August 19th. Which is six months from date of issuance. Oh my God. We were told by immigration that we would have a year to enter after she got her work visa on her way to getting her permanent resident visa. But this has happened a couple of times with immigration in New Zealand, they were fantastic. They answer all your questions, but they don’t always answer them the same way. So that one year was wrong. And we got to get out in six months if we want to hit this visa, which I think we think we do. So that was on Friday. And then Sunday Clementine died. All hindrances are out of the way. And so grieving Clem, Oh, I’m feeling getting choked up. Grieving Clementine is also like this precursor to grieving the loss of our life here in the States, which is normal. I know we’re going to grieve the people that were leaving and the house we’ve lived in for 15 years and our way of life. And we are moving with such excitement into this new world, but, so it’s like I’m saying the loss of combination has just been something for me that has been difficult to handle and I’m moving through it at my own pace and actually letting myself grieve and feel feelings. I’m not good at that, but I am getting better at it. I have to say.

[00:03:52] So that’s what’s been going on around here. A little bit of writing been happening. Not a lot. I took Monday off, which is my fiction writing day, just to cry and I cried all day and it helped. So other than that, everything’s going as well as it can be. I’m swimming again. And that’s amazing. I managed to get, I’ve found a place where the swimming pools open and it’s an Alameda and it’s on the estuary and you can look out into the estuary right across the Bay and actually see the lights of San Francisco. When you swim at night, it is so incredibly beautiful and affordable, and I’ve been swimming three times a week and it is the best thing I can do for my mental health right now is swimming. I can’t believe that I went a year without doing it regularly. I’m a late to swimming swimmer. I only learned really to swim about two and a half, three years ago. When I took lessons as an adult, I always knew how to swim. I could get to shore if I need to do, but I didn’t know how to do it efficiently and gracefully. And I swear to God last night as I was swimming was the very first time that I felt like I got the grace and the efficiency and it was just easy. And I, you know, it’s not because I’m terribly fit, but it’s because I know how to move with ease and grace through the water now because somebody taught me and it just reminds me that as adults, we have this amazing ability to keep learning, to do the things we wanna do, so if there’s something that you’ve been scared of doing, God knows I was terrified of taking swimming lessons, but it has paid off in such a huge way. And now that is my bomb. Being in that place, being in water is where I feel the best. So I just wanted to mention that that’s enough of an update.

[00:05:33] Let’s jump into questions. This is from Michelle. Hi Michelle! I have a new question, it’s process-related. Sometimes when I’m editing, I feel the need to flip to a new screen or look at my email or something while I think about the editor’s comment and how to do what she’s asking, which is what I’m doing right now, and I am I just telling myself that because I want, am I just telling myself that, because I want to distract myself or is this a real need in order to process information? This is an awesome, multi-sided deep question, Michelle, and I’m really glad that you are asking it. We all feel this way and it’s a case of it’s going to be one thing or the other. It is a case of your editor’s comment is telling you to do something that you don’t want to do or that you don’t yet know how to do, and that makes you uncomfortable. And therefore, I’m going to look at my keyboard here, on a Mac, if you hit command tab, you’re toggling, you’re toggling over to your email. You’re toggling to Twitter. You’re toggling to anything that is open on your desktop. I do that as soon as I hit a patch of I don’t even know what this next sentence should be. I tend to hit command tab. I have to look at it every time because I do it so frequently. I have no idea what I’m actually doing, and I can flip flop around all the screens that are open on my computer. I’m sure there’s a way to do that on a PC as well. So I do that in moments of discomfort. Therefore, when I’m really focused on writing, and when I am writing, this is what I do. I close every other window. So I do toggle, I toggle and I can’t get anywhere. There’s nothing else open. And so I’m just left, staring at my computer.

[00:07:19] For me, that is when I’m toggling like that, it is a distraction. It is I’m uncomfortable, let me do something more comfortable, like check email, or look at Twitter or whatever it is. Sometimes we’re just trying to get out of writing or doing the hard work. But other times your brain has been asked this major question by your editor that you’re not sure of the answer yet. And you haven’t thought it through, our brains do incredible excellent and necessary work while we are processing other things while we’re driving, while we’re taking a shower, while we’re feeding the kids, while we’re checking email. Sometimes, although I think email probably is such a thinking busy task at the same time. Your default mode network of the DMN is this network in your brain of interacting brain regions that is active when a person is not focused on what they’re trying to think about. So if you are focused on doing something else, the default mode network goes into play in your brain and starts to create connections between the things that you have been thinking about at other times.

[00:08:30] So when you are thinking and processing this editor’s question, it can be very useful to do something else. And perhaps that is what you’re feeling is that, it’s literally the sleep on it principle don’t know how to fix something, sleep on it. The default mode network is incredibly active when we sleep. It is literally cleaning out detritus in our brains, actual physical detritus. It is opening the neural pathways. They actually expand in order for this cleaning to happen. And at the same time, they’re making these connections that we can’t make easily just by thinking really hard by making ourselves think really hard. So if you’re feeling that yes, make yourself a list of the questions that you don’t know the answers to. And this goes for all of you who are writing as you’re writing VA don’t know what to do next. Write it down, look at it and go do something else. Your brain will be processing the whole time. It is this wonderful magic trick. I like to think about the big questions before I go to sleep. I don’t think very hard on them. I don’t close my eyes and try to think about them, but because I’ve looked at the questions that I’m asking myself shortly before I go to sleep, oftentimes more often than not in the morning, I ask myself, did I figure out the question? Did I figure out the answer to this question? And my, the front of my brain will say, no, of course you didn’t, you were sleeping. And the back of my brain will say, surprise, here you go. Serving it to you on a platter. It doesn’t happen all the time, but it happens reliably enough that I’m a big believer in doing it. So yes, if your brain Michelle is telling you that you want the default mode network to do some work while you’re doing something else that is part of your process, just don’t let it become a distraction and you know, the difference, we all know the difference. So really good question.

[00:10:30] Okay, Maggie. Hello, Maggie! Maggie says my work in progress is a solid draft and I have feedback from five of the eight beta readers slash critique partners I sent it to. However, feeling overwhelmed, trying to bring this manuscript to the next level. So in class you have said you can do each manuscript pass, like setting pretty firing words, et cetera in two to three hours, how on earth do you do it that quickly? My mind can’t wrap around doing it without reading the whole thing, every pass, which takes out which takes hours and hours. Suggestions on compiling, evaluating and using feedback from beta critique readers once you have it, feels different from a paid editor where you should probably accept most everything they say. In fact, many of them conflict with each other, you know me, I’m sure I’ll have more questions in the future. And I’m grateful for that. Maggie, please send me more. But first let me clarify something that I have said, I often have passes, which are after my second and third draft. I do these smaller passes in my revisions, which are something like setting. I can look at every single scene and ask myself, is there a sentence of two or two at least of setting in this scene? 

[00:11:39] If not, let’s add it right now. I can do that for an entire book in two to three hours, I do not feel the need to, I actually prevent myself from reading the whole manuscript. I skim it at best. Skimming each scene, where’s the setting, not there. Okay. Drop some in. Good. Move on to the next scene. However, like you said, the predefining words, the making all the words on the page beautiful, that last, the very last pass that we do, because if we do it earlier, we may get too attached to the scenes that are in there and then we won’t know that we need to change them or remove them. Which is why we don’t predefine and make our sentences perfect. Make our paragraphs perfect until the end of revision, the end, the very end of a book, not in the first draft, not in the second draft, not in the third draft, but in the passes later on. That my friend I cannot do in two-three hours, that’ll take days of long concentrated hours. However, I will say that while I preach not to make your sentences pretty while you’re working on them, every single revision and every single pass that you do, you are going to be touching sentences. You are going to be making them better. So this predefined doesn’t mean that you are dealing with first draft ugly sentences. These are a little bit more grown up. 

[00:12:59] So and it’s, I think one of the most fun passes, sometimes I call it Twitter-fying in my head, if you have 140 characters, but you write 300 and you need to get it down to the old 140 characters, it is so much fun to revise each sentence, to make each sentence tighter, get rid of all the extraneous words that don’t need to be there. Oh, I just find it delicious, but no, I can’t do that in two to three hours. I’m sorry that I gave you that impression. Some passes are simple. Like adding character description, two to three hours, making my sentences beautiful, days, days and days. Okay. And then your other questions, suggestions on compiling, evaluating and using feedback from beta slash critique readers once you have it. Yes, my suggestions are always to be very careful. We do not want to entrust our books entirely to non-professionals. Non-professionals are going to give you opinions and by non-professional, I mean, someone who hasn’t published quite a few books and hasn’t gone through the editing process quite a few times. So it’s fine to have beta readers who are new writers, who haven’t published a book or just really good readers. It’s fine to have them, but you have to take their advice with a grain of salt and you only use it if it resonates deeply within you. If it does not resonate deeply within you, then you throw it out.

[00:14:31] You can thank them kindly for it. They’ve done their best, but it doesn’t work for your book. The exception to this is the 3-person rule if three different people without talking to each other. So we’re not in like a room where people start to agree with each other. Like when one person says something, the other person agrees with it. If three separate people come to you, and say your main character is super frustrating in this scene, I just wanted to smack her. I don’t know why readers are so violent, but readers always put that review. I wanted to smack the character. If they all say that, then if three or more people say it, then you should probably listen to it and figure out what they’re trying to say. They won’t have the answer for you most likely, but it will be a clue toward what you should be looking at, but otherwise just take what really resonates with you. You are right. This is not a professional editor that you have hired to help you with the book. So you just have to take what you love. The best way to learn about your writing and fix your writing of course, is to eventually hire an editor or get an agent who sells your book to an editor at a traditional publishing house. One of those two options, but then that professional editor, you will type, you will take most of their ideas because they’re right. They know what they’re doing. They’re the height of their game, because they’re good at what they do. And that’s how we learn about our writing. And that’s a lot more, it’s easier to trust a professional editor because they do know what they’re doing. So grain of salt, take what you love and leave the rest of your beta readers suggestions. Never have to, you never have to back up your decisions to them either. They’re merely trying to be helpful. And that’s it. 

[00:16:20] All right. This is from Christina Kaye. Hi Christina! Okay, I’m in the process of drafting my first novel where romance between two central characters is both the theme and the main story I want to tell. I have a solid premise and I know my characters inside and out. Still, I’ve struggled to develop the finer points of my plot in a way that supports my characters’ development while also keeping the story moving in an interesting and satisfying way. My concern is that my plot devices will feel forced or inadequate. Do you have any advice on crafting a story driven plot without over complicating the heart of the story? My novel is loosely inspired by sensitive and important events in history. However, my goal and vision is not to write the historical fiction. What are your thoughts on how to be sensitive to historical themes without needing to make sure I’m being historically accurate in my representation of the events? I hope that makes sense. 

[00:17:15] Okay. So your first question here, about, I think it really comes down to supporting your characters’ development while keeping the story moving in an interesting and satisfying way. You do not want, as you say, your plot devices to feel forced or inadequate. When we are dealing with any book in which two people are coming closer together over the course of the book, which is most books, not just romance, these characters have to be reacting to things that are happening because of them. Our plot devices feel forced or awkward or wrong when outside events are happening to our main characters, that’s fine. We can have outside events happen to our characters. That is sometimes what it takes in plot, but what really, really matters is, how they react. And of course we want them to react in the wrong way so that it makes things worse. They are probably reacting in the wrong way, out of a sense that this is the right way to do something and they are further complicating and making things messier. But this is something that, especially in a first book, it’s easy to forget. We want to make the story, have enough tension and have enough conflict. So we throw things at the characters, whereas that doesn’t actually work. It doesn’t fulfill the readers need to see true organic complication caused by the people inside the book. So two people who are falling in love in a book like this, they are both each other’s love interests, and they are also both each other’s antagonists.

[00:19:05] And they, because if they were to fall in love and get together in the beginning of the book, there’s no book. We have to keep them apart for organic, very real reasons. They have to look at the world in different ways and respond to the world in different ways that complicate the plot because of what they are doing and because of what they’re thinking. And that can be really, really hard. These are characters that we believe in and that we want to see do the right thing and we need to make them be doing the wrong thing, especially for each other. Keeping in mind that is not real conflict. If the conflict can be solved by having a 10-minute heart to heart. So a conflict is not a mistaken identity or overhearing part of a conversation, but misinterpreting it. So that they hear, you said this about me and my feelings are so hurt, but really if they sat down for 10 minutes, the other party would say, but no, I was talking about you in this way and you didn’t hear the other part of the story. And I was actually complementing the way you handle this.

[00:20:11] Oh, now there’s no more conflict. That’s not real conflict. So anything that can be solved in a 10-minute heart to heart conversation, not real conflict, not big enough conflict. I shouldn’t say not real conflict, but not big enough conflict for a story. The conflict that we want to see in a story, especially when it’s put in historical setting is yes, the things happening around them to them, but much more importantly is how do they screw it up once they’re inside that situation? How do they screw it up in a real organic way that pushes away the other character for long enough that the tension is built inside the story? And this is true of not only romance, but of any book in which characters are interacting with each other. Good people are interacting with each other on the page. I’m not talking about antagonist, antagonists look like the classic bad guy, antagonist, they’re easy to deal with. What is more difficult to deal with is the good guy, antagonist, which they’re both being for each other until they’re finally together in the end. I hope that that helps. 

[00:21:14] Oh, and then your second question, what are your thoughts on how to be sensitive to historical themes without needing to make sure I’m being historically accurate. I say, use your imagination, do it in whatever way you want. You are in charge of this world. And in your brief, three or four sentence preface to the book, note to reader, or you can use it at the end of the book saying this is loosely based on X, Y, and Z thing in history, but I’m a fiction writer and I fictionalized it.  So you’re going to see a lot of things that I made up. Good. Great. Now they just get to follow you. Knowing that you have built this world, you have built the rules, you’re breaking the rules whenever you want to. And you’re making stuff up. And that is excellent. Readers love that. Great questions. Thank you.

[00:21:59] Alan T. Hello, Alan says that your mantra is that we should just get crappy pages on the word as quickly as possible. On a pragmatic level, I understand the benefits. I equate it to songwriting. First, you make a quick demo on an acoustic guitar, then you head to the studio and polish it. I love that. The problem I have is that I can’t seem to let myself do it. Partly because I don’t think I would enjoy it as much. Do you have any tips on how to nudge myself in that direction and how crappy is too crappy? It would be great to hear some before and after examples from your own work, if possible. So here’s the crux of your question. This the sentence that says the problem I have is that I can’t seem to let myself do it partly because I don’t think I would enjoy it as much.

[00:22:47] That tells me that you haven’t spent a lot of time experimenting with it. It is at its essential base, an uncomfortable place to be, to be putting crappy words on the page, letting them stay there, walking away from them and starting the next scene. However, if you’re not finishing books, if your method of writing books is not getting you to completed books, then your method is not right yet. You have not figured out your method and most writers methods, and we all hate realizing this the 99% of us who this is our method. We all hate realizing this is that we must try and we must write that crappy draft first, and it doesn’t feel good. And a lot of writers give up. Because their method is not completing books and they don’t want to write the crappy first draft. That is normal. You are normal if you are in that position, the only way through it unfortunately, is to do it. And for me, I like time-based parameters. You can do that or word count. A lot of people work well to word count. I work well to word count, but I also sometimes work even better to time parameters. I know that if I sit in front of my computer for one hour, with nothing else open on my desktop, preferably the wi-fi turned off. So I can’t even accidentally toggle to something because nothing would be there and my phone in another room or just put out of sight. My phone is actually not a problem. I don’t use it for much, but if your phone is a suck and leave it in another room. I know that if I sit in front of the computer for one hour, with those things around me, I will generally get about 1400 to 1600 words done. That’s my pace. That’s my staring at the ceiling. That’s my get up and go pee, get another cup of water, sit down. I’ll get 1400 words eventually. Cause I’ll get so bored of not being able to do anything else. I’ll start to write and I’ll write crap. Another, oh, my stomach is talking. I don’t know if you guys can hear that, but you know what? Real life happens on the show. So I’m not even going to cut and, and retake that. Another thing is all of the tricks, finding out all the tricks you can do to make yourself do it. I really like using v2.WriteorDie version II online. Don’t buy it. Don’t download it. He doesn’t support it anymore, but write or die version two online, you can use it as an, this was essential to me in learning how to write a crappy first draft, turn it on.

[00:25:12] You write as fast as you can. If you slow down, the screen will go red. If you set it so that it will, if you slow down enough, if you don’t type, it’ll start erasing your words and believe me, you will keep writing. If there’s a threat of your words being erased and you can’t get them back, there’s no control Z. v2.WriteorDie version II online is not a place to store your work. It is not a word processor in any way. It is a place where you go to write. And then when you’re done writing you copy and paste out what you wrote and you put it into your document. A site that works a little bit better and is less punitive that I have students who really love, is WrittenKitten, I think its just writtenkitten.com or Google it. And every hundred words, you get a kitten. And I have a student right now who is measuring her writing in kittens. If she writes 2000 words, she- that’s a 20 kitten day. The other day, she had a 65 kitten day. It was either 65 or so 67 kitten day. Holy cow. I’ve had like a 67 kitten day once in my writing career, I can’t write that much in one day.

[00:26:18] But she did and she’s counting it and kittens, same kind of idea as Write or Die Version II, you must copy and paste your words out and put them into your document, but it is a place that reminds you. And of course, you have to be online to use these. You can’t turn off the Wi-Fi for these, but it reminds you to keep going, to keep going, you must keep writing. You gotta write another a hundred words. If you want a different kitten to pop up another image of a kitten, you can take screenshots of them. They’re amazing. So getting crappy words on the page requires tricks and rewards. Figuring out how you best work, where you best work. For me, one of the best ways to get crappy writing done is that I have an Alpha Smart Neo 2. It has revolutionized drafting for me. I’ve only used it for one book, but it was extreme. You can get them for 50 or 60 bucks on eBay. They don’t make them anymore. I’ve talked about it on the show before, but basically it is a typing- typewriter emulator.

[00:27:20] So you can only see three or four lines at a time as you type, you can’t go back. You can’t edit. You just go somewhere, go lie in the hammock, go sit on the couch. You’re not online. You can’t be online. And you just type, you type as fast as you can, or as slow as you want, really. But you just keep going. You don’t go backwards. You keep going forward. And then when you’re done with your session, you come to whatever computer you’re using. You plug in the Alpha Smart Neo 2, and it then types out your words. And if you’ve typed a lot, it’ll take a long time to type onto your document, into your word document, into your Scrivener, wherever you want it to go. I have found that that has been incredibly useful because I cannot toggle away. I can’t get distracted. I can’t predefine the words at all. I know that you’re asking for before and after examples. I think those would be hard to read on the air. So what I’m going to do instead is if you go to, HowDoYouWrite.net and click on this episode, I’m going to embed Rachael and Solomon’s image of her crappy first draft because it looks like my crappy first draft. And then it’s awesome. It shows the blanks, the holes, the things that we skip over the skeletoning that we do as we’re going. So please come to HowDoYouWrite.net and look at that image. I will embed that over there, and that will be helpful to look at because it’s really bad. It is unreadable by other people; my crappy first drafts. Some people’s crappy for drafts are a little bit cleaner, mine are not. They’re fast. They are hurried. They are best at if I can’t remember the name of a character, I’ll just write name all in caps. If there’s something I need to figure out later, I put it all in caps. I put asterisks everywhere for things to look up later. I just keep moving forward every single time that I write. 

[00:29:09] So I hope that this helps to hear Alan. It’s a great fantastic question. Thank you everybody for your questions. If you are a member of the mini coaching at that level, please send me some more questions. I am now out of questions. I will be doing a podcast soon on Hybrid presses because I get a lot of questions about Hybrid presses. Hybrid presses are not like Hybrid authors. They have nothing to do with each other. I’m a hybrid author because I traditionally published my books and I self-published my books. Therefore, I am a hybrid. A hybrid press is something totally different and can be very, very scammy. And that serves its own mini podcasts. So that’ll be coming soon, but I’m out of questions. So people on my question list, on my mini coaching level, please send me questions. Please help me help you. I really love talking about this stuff to all of you. I wish you very, very happy, very messy, very crappy writing that you can leave behind you and reward yourself for everyday doing, knowing that someday you’ll be able to clean them up and actually form it into a book. And I do love Alan that songwriting metaphor. It’s just, the songs are so much easier to do because there’s so much shorter than a book, but it is exactly that idea. So thank you very much. Thanks to all of you and happy writing my friend. 

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.