Behind the Curtain - Writing Advice and Philosophy, Courtesy of Dean's Online Fiction

When you clicked on the link for this page you were probably expecting something about knowing whether or not your story was ready for submission to agents or editors. At the time I'm writing this I'm still trying to figure that out for myself, so I don't know that I'm really all that qualified to offer any insights there.

Instead, I'd like to discuss how you know that your story is ready to be written. Like just about everything related to writing, it's not an exact science, but I firmly believe that some of our ideas just aren't ready to be written at the time we sit down to write them.

Maybe if I illustrate with an example from my own life. My first brush with actual, creative writing (apart from a single, terribly-written chapter while I was still a teenager) was a fanfic novella that weighed in at about 40k words. (You can read more about that whole experience here.)

It wasn't all that tough of a project. I proceeded with very little in the way of an outline and started putting words down on paper with an abandon that looking back is nothing less than amazing. Six months later I'd finished up my rough draft and posted it online.

Surprisingly enough, I'd found that I enjoyed the process, and even more astonishing I got five or six comments back from people saying that they'd quite liked reading my work. As quickly as that I started contemplating a career in writing, but I found that somewhere along the way a sequel to that first book had flourished in the back of my mind.

This time I did a much better job outlining the plot, and apart from having even less free time once I graduated, it proceeded pretty much without a hitch. My characters were well-developed, and the few curves they threw at me only served to make the plot more interesting.

What only a few people knew was that in the back of my mind I had another story bubbling away. Sometime between when I finished that first book and the second book I'd had a nightmare that really threw me for a loop. Like most nightmares it was pretty fragmentary, but I picked out a few fairly freaky threads and made notes about them to ensure that I'd be able to come back and remember everything when I finally got done with my current project.

I firmly believed, despite never having much appreciated thrillers/horrors, that my third book was going to be an adaptation of my nightmare.

The unpleasant reality of just how much work a job in corporate America involved conspired with my ever present love of video games to severely retard my progress on that second book, and when I finally finished it I pretty much stopped writing for the better part of two years.

At the end of those two years I found myself unemployed and resolve to never work as an accounting professional again. I turned back to my literary pretensions as my backup plan and sat down at my desktop with the intent of picking my horror story back up.

Instead I found myself working on The Greater Darkness, which began life roughly the same time as the horror story, but with much less form or substance. I don't remember all of the reasons that I finally settled on working on The Greater Darkness over the horror story, but once again I found that it flowed fairly naturally into a semi-detailed outline and then out into a manuscript.

I needed another project while I waited to edit The Greater Darkness, but once again something else edged the horror story out of the queue, and I found myself working on The Trial. (See more about both of these books in the Novels Section of DoF.)

I finished up The Trial, went back and did several editing passes on The Greater Darkness, started sending out query letters, and then finally picked the horror story back up.

It was a nightmare, and not in a 'people will be so scared they'll love this' kind of way. Outlining was agony. I had a handful of scenes that I felt needed to be in the book, but they didn't seem to move naturally from one to the next.

Really that should have been enough of a sign to convince me to stop, but I launched into the story assuming that I'd be able to solve the various problems as I got to them. I was wrong, and I wasted quite a bit of time trying to make the story work.

While most of my stories were part of a larger story arc, I'd figured the quickest way to publication would be to get as many different series started as possible. My logic was that I'd be able to start the sequels once I knew which series an editor was really interested in. That more than anything else had compelled me to pick the horror story back up despite the fact that the sequel to The Trial had been yammering away pretty frantically at my subconscious.

When the horror story finally convinced me that one or both of us wasn't ready for it to be put on paper, I half-heartedly started in on the next book in the Chronicles of the Guadel. I think at the time I was more than a little worried that I only had those two stories in me, and that now they were on paper I'd never be able to write anything else.

Wow, I couldn't have been more wrong. I tore into the second Guadel book and it went by extremely quickly, which finally convinced me that sometimes a book just isn't ready to be written. Maybe it's because you're not skilled enough yet to pull off what you're trying for, or maybe there are just plot holes that your subconscious hasn't gotten around to figuring out.

Whatever the reason I think there are two take aways for me from this experience. Don't waste your time relentlessly grinding through a story that just seems determined not to come together, but don't use that as an excuse to never start.

The place to really figure out whether a story is ready to be written is in the outline stage. If it's not working in the outline, it's not going to work in the rough draft either