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Writers who write?

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LeeZion:
I write for a small newspaper in Harrisonburg, Va. Except that is about to change. On Feb. 23, I will leave this job to go work at an equally small newspaper in Morgantown, W.Va. Except at this paper, I will become a copy editor/layout editor. In this capacity, I will cease to be a writer and instead work on honing the writing of other people.

I have also written four novels — the most recent of which I have completed in November. None of these are published yet. But now that I have four novels under my belt, I am going back through all four and giving THEM some serious copy-editing. Actually, by this stage it's more like minor tweaking, since all four of them have already gone through the serious copy-editing. Now all that's left is some final polishing.

Once all four are polished, I will shop them around. In fact, I made several New Year's resolutions, and one of them was to complete the copy-editing and start shopping them around.

Anyone who has ever written for a living will tell you that there is no great writing, only great RE-writing. I completed my first novel in August, 1999, and when I did I thought I was really hot. But now when I look at what I had done back then and I'm embarrassed. That one was very much a rough draft compared to what it is now.

I have spent a lot of time copy-editing OTHER people's work, and copy-editing MY OWN work. One thing I've learned is that polishing one's own manuscipt takes a THOROUGH reading, AND re-reading a few months after that, AND re-re-reading a few months after that. Your eyes will fail to see the hideous mistakes lurking in your own manuscript, because your brain knows what you meant to say. As a matter fact, I had one sentence in my first novel which had a glaring error in it that I never once saw, over a period of months, no matter how much I looked at it: "He had already found out about it already."

So copy-edit, let it rest, then come back to it again.

I have a few other tricks I've learned over the years. One hint: Your writing will get stronger if you find a way to say the same thing with fewer words. When I finished my fourth novel, it absolute raw form it was 57,856. After several months of putting it through the wringer, I got it down to 50,437. And yet even though I got rid of one out of every eight words, the story still says the same thing. That makes the writing much more "tight" and "punchy."

Kai:
Yeah guys; we don't need another Faulkner (as much as I love the guy, those sentences get really long and tend to be a bitch to follow if you don't have your complete attention on it). The above is great advice.

vegkitkat:
My last english teacher was all about the pith, and the concrete images. He was a cool dude, and gave good writing advice.

Inlander:
LeeZion's comment about having written four novels reminded me of another piece of advice I'd like to give: write a lot.  Write a hell of a lot.  Writing is like any other skill: you learn how to do it from experience and from practice.  Don't expect to write a publishable novel on your very first attempt - and don't try to.  Apart from anything else it takes a while to figure out how to write something that long, and on your first attempt you probably just won't be able to.  I have any number of unpublished, neglected novellas and short stories sitting on various computers and disks - and I have no intention of ever publishing them.  They weren't for publication: they were my learning curve.

Also, if like me you read a lot of Kerouac it's very easy to be seduced by that very romantic notion of getting a story right the first time, and making no further changes to that.  Well it might have worked for On the Road, but unless that's the kind of writing style you want to emulate you're going to have to revise your manuscript, maybe over and over again.  But you know what?  Spending days figuring out exactly how to end a scene, or what word to use to perfect the simile and best explain what you're trying to get across, that the real intellectual puzzle of writing.  Increasingly it's that which is the most enjoyable part of writing for me: sitting down and nutting this thing out.

cuchlann:
While writing - a lot - is a great idea, and anyone that wants to write should be doing it, the other part is to get a good, critical second opinion.  If you never get any outside advice (hopefully from someone that knows something about writing) you may just repeat the same mistakes.  Hence my habitual lack of strong, thematic connection of beginning and end until I had a teacher or two work with me on that.

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