I'd say I'm a beginner, picking away very slowly at my first novel.

When I write, my focus is sentence by sentence, and I rewrite that way as I go along. It makes any writing take way too long. Ah ha! My crits are sentence-focused. Gotta quit doing just the 1st 13 lines and crit longer stuff... hmmm..... No, I've got to write!

But on the other hand, I don't labor over the words in my outline; I trust myself to get the words right when the time comes. The problem with my very lengthy outline is, there's a good framework, and a lot of ideas thrown together, but I haven't got as far as I want in organizing it all into a cohesive story. I wish I'd know about the snowflake method before getting started, two+ years ago.

Outlining.

Forcing myself (often painfully) to wait until I had a fully fleshed outline of my story before beginning it sparked me to finally begin looking at my stories holistically from the beginning (seeing beyond the sentences). Before, I usually started my story with very little idea where it was going, then once a rambling draft was done, tried to see it as a whole. This predictably led to some really bad endings and some inharmonious stories.

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Merlion, I took it differently. I assumed he meant that as writers mature, they don't have to think about the craft as much because they automatically avoid violating "rules" after all that practice, and can afford to focus on story. I think that once you get to the point where you don't have to think about craft, but can still execute it, then you can really start focusing on the fun stuff.

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Hmm. Well to each their own, I suppose. But lines like these:

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They are also still very trapped by the rules of everything

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This level of writer is starting to understand that not all the rules are good rules.

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This bunch just kept going, kept learning story, and love what they do. This group tends to follow its own rules.

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The major flaw with this writer is rewriting. They think that constant rewriting makes a story better instead of actually killing it. You hear these people tell you proudly that they have done a dozen rewrites on something. Of course, they have no idea in each rewrite what is better or worse, but they believe that rewriting always makes things better.

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The good ones, the ones that will continue to move up, are understanding that you can never learn it all in the craft side of writing. They have learned or are starting to learn how to study writing, to get beyond sentences and really look at story structure, at pacing, at character voice, at cliffhangers, at openings and endings and even theme.

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Seem at least to me to more or less directly cast re-writing and adherence to "rules" and focus on craft as very secondary in importance to story, and to a large extent as obstacles or at least as things that can very easily become obstacles. He seems to be presenting the mistakes that writers make at the various stages with focus on story as the result once they realize that the other things are mostly just lessons.

The "rules" that you are always railing against lately are more artistic rules like "You can't have a story with curiosity as the MC's motivation"

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....I do find it extremely interesting that he seems to place very little emphasis on ... re-writing (I daresay he even seems to paint these things as obstacles in some cases)...

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I'm with you on this assessment. When I read some of his older posts (I came across his blog a few months back) I got the feeling that he did not put as much emphasis on editing as I would have expected. He seems to be a writer that writes a draft, does a once-through, then submits.

I also remember reading on his site that he has a goal to have 100 books published by the end of the year. He currently has around 90 published (when I read that post / bio). That's ambitious for any author. It seems to be working for him. I couldn't work at that pace.

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Yeah, I more meant craft rules, like consistent POV, coherent prose, internal consistency, even grammar.

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Yeah I realized later thats probably what you meant bbut (and I could be wrong) I don't think those are the ones he was talking about. Well except for POV. I think he was talking partially about the "artistic" ones as you put it, but also largely about the ones that are sort of in between. POV, I think, is one of those and I'd also include things like the idea that 3rd person omni is bad, and a biggy for me, "show don't tell." These, I think, are more what he meant...they are technical and "craft" related to an extent but in the end very subjective and I think in truth more tools than rules. However, we get bombarded with the idea that they are in fact immutable necessary rules (like the basic technical ones of spell, grammar, making basic sense etc).

It seems to me he feels these "rules" are nearly obstacles and that eventually most "successful" writers stop worrying about them. Not because they "understand them enough to break them" but because they figure out things like "show don't tell" are basically just another wrench in the toolbox.

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I agree with your comments on the subject, but I don't think that I, as a beginning writer, have a firm enough grasp on the basics to try that stuff yet. I think of it like painting. Look at Picasso's early work compared to his later. If he had started with Cubism, no one would have taken him seriously.

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I understand what you mean, and agree to a point. However, I don't really see these things stratafied into objectively easier or more difficult areas. Its all about what comes naturally to a person (for instance I'm naturally better at setting and description than I am with plot and character penetration.) To use your analogy (although I don't know much about Picasso) another person may have found Cubism easy and made it there starting point, whereas whatever style was used before that might then be what they grow into and find more difficult.

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I'm with you on this assessment. When I read some of his older posts (I came across his blog a few months back) I got the feeling that he did not put as much emphasis on editing as I would have expected. He seems to be a writer that writes a draft, does a once-through, then submits.

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Yeah, I don't really see many professional writers talking about doing a whole lot of extensive re-writing...its another kind of contradictory thing because some times we are told that (Stephen King in On Writing I think does talk about it, but I never got the feeling he does all that much of it himself.) I personally tend to finish, get a few crits, fix errors and polish, then submit. The only times I've totally re-written stories are ones from way back that I love but know are technically very flawed, so I can apply new knowledge.

I think overdoing revision and re-writing can easily become a trap and a bit of a vicious cycle especially for beginers.

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Merlion, I agree with your self assessment of your strengths. So, by all means, take advantage of them. But if you are weak in a certain area, maybe utilizing formulas and "rules" is a good starting point to figuring out how to improve those areas. I don't know if that makes sense.

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It does. Whats ironic though is that I've often found the most improvement in those weak areas by breaking certain of the "rules." For instance (yes I'm going off topic but I'm going to make it quick) I realized that often when trying to inject emotion into a story and its characters and give readers a greater sense of penetration into the characters mind, "telling" is often more useful than "showing". Sure you can "show" emotions and some times it works well but a lot of times its ambigious and subjective, so you often just need to let them know what the character is thinking and feeling, straightforward.

Likewise its easier for me to come up with a plot involving things I'm interested in and motives I can sympathize with. Trouble is my interests and sympathies appear to be a bit different from most.

Anyway, the article has made me feel a lot better about my current line of thinking, thanks for posting it Kathleen.

I'm shooting for the moon and expect to get there by studying and practicing and applying. Lately, I've been running my test bench stories through thematic value, meaning, and message. I started out writing with something to say. I've come back around to the beginning.

I have to admit that I would be interested to read some of your "test bench stories".

Edited to remove comment about critts after searching...

Yeah, Smith's strengths/weaknesses classifications and their inherent biases from the perspective of a long time accomplished author. I believe an emerging writer is better served by writers of the same approximate skill level. I expect Mr. Smith has forgotten a lot of what he had to go through to get where he is and what he's forgotten that might benefit an emerging writer is no longer on his writing radar.

I've put up one or two 13 Lines here and one or two short short stories at Baen's to test the waters and check my progress in other writers' eyes.

My test bench stories are not mine, they're acknowledged classics that I dissect for insight into particular story attributes. Theme and message for example, any or all the Potter books. General theme, loss of innocence, coming of age. Message, adults don't have all the answers either, young people must find answers for themselves and fashion their own adult identity as best they can. Sort of metafictive in that writers too must fashion their own identity.

There is a freshness to a story when it is first written that can be lost by too many rewrites. And I think Dean feels that it is better to go on to the next story and write it better because your writing skills have improved just by writing the last story, than it is to apply any new skills to messing with something that isn't quite good enough yet.

Dean has also encouraged writers, if they don't want to give up one story and move on to the next one, to write it all over again without looking at past drafts--ie, without "rewriting"--because that is more likely to restore some freshness to the story and incorporate any new skills attained since the first writing of the story.

Writing a lot of stories very fast without a lot of rewriting could work because as writers improve over time, their stories also improve and what they are writing becomes more worthy of being read not only because their wordsmithing skills have improved with practice, but their storytelling skills have also improved with practice.

I think it's a kind of "exercise the muscles" idea: the more you work your creativity muscles, the better and stronger they will become, and the more you expect and demand from your subconscious, the better and more interesting the ideas will be that it supplies you.

For whatever it may be worth, I have said many times that I believe a good story will cover a multitude of writing sins, but the reverse may not be as true. So focussing on story is more likely to get you published than focussing on writing without story. (And I think that's part of what Dean is also saying.)

By the way, I want to make it clear that I am presenting what I believe are aspects of what Dean is saying. I consider it part of my job to offer writers as many ways of writing as I can possibly find for them, so they can figure out what works best for each one individually.

Therefore, I am not espousing Dean's approach or anyone else's as THE ONE TRUE WAY to write.

I can see his point. If you want to improve at story-crafting why spend all your time trying to fix one broken one? It's hard writing off a novel's worth of effort as just a learning experience, though. I suppose if you can crank out three or four a year it's not as big a deal as throwing out the baby you've nurtured for a year or two. It's worth a try, if just as an exercise to raise my game.

I'm also thinking of the author that churns out 200 novels in their career, all of them a good read, all of them 'what their readers want' and all of them about as memorable as an in-flight magazine. I contrast this with the handful of authors that seem to turn out fewer works that are not only a good read but have something more that makes them live in the reader's memory for years.

Thanks,

If you throw it into OSC's MICE terminology, we can be an early professional level person in characters and a beginner in ideas.

I think what is useful is sort of giving ourselves status reports in our progress on different fronts. We might use MICE, we can use other elements of writing. But it should show areas where we are better and worse. We can use our current writing skill ratings to work on improvement.

The goal might not to be the top professional category (even he doesn't give himself the top rating,) but getting skill levels up so that they aren't impediments to writing.

I agree that some authors (Emily Bronte for one, Harper Lee for another) may only have one novel in them. Dean's many and fast approach would certainly not help them much. But I think he would agree that WUTHERING HEIGHTS and TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD are powerful stories.

Dean also recommends learning how to write many and fast by writing a short story a week. I know arriki has tried this, and I believe she was exhausted after about eight weeks (and eight stories). Ken Rand is the only author (besides Dean and, possibly Kevin J. Anderson) that I know of who has been able to do something like that over a long period of time.

Kevin J. Anderson uses what he has called a "popcorn" method in which he has as many possible stories as he can think of all heating in the popcorn-popper of his brain, and as they "pop," he grabs them and does things with them as quickly as he can so he can grab the next one and do things with it. He gets a lot done that way, too.

This is still just one way to "make it" (in the sense that Dean is talking about) as a writer.