I started the week with the story of my lonely, zombie Christmas. Some of you might have guessed where the series was going based on comments I’ve made before — that writing is a really lonely profession. More of you might have figured it out by looking at the series title, “On Collaborative Writing.”

That’s what I want to talk about this week. I’ve brought it up before, because it’s a process that fascinates me. I’m not sure how someone goes about collaborative writing, but I’ve never let that stop me trying.

I brainstormed a long-running high fantasy series with one of my best friends. We put in many long hours figuring out the world, the characters, the epic history and the individual storylines that would make up actual books. We never wrote a word, but we spent a lot of time on collaborative imagining.

I pitched an idea to Courtney, too, most of a year ago. I suggested we write a spontaneous action/adventure title (which I strongly suspected would become urban fantasy, given our backgrounds).

My suggestion was that I would write a whole scene as intense and exciting as possible, then hand it off to her and her first job would be to rewrite that scene to make it even more exciting, and then write a following scene just as exciting as her rewrite. Then she’d give it to me, and I’d make that one more exciting, before writing my own.

That way, we could leap-frog our way to an end product that Vin Diesel would be proud to star in. How could it go wrong?

That’s still on the back burner, because we’re both far too busy with our own commitments. We’re juggling several books constantly. Neither of us really needs a new project.

Good Ideas

And that’s where I got the idea for another approach to collaborative writing. Actually, it was two things: that, and a girl I met in my Category Fiction class at OU last fall. We became pals, and (as I sometimes do) I decided to read through her blog to get a better idea who she was.

She’s a writer, with a deep love for the storytelling process and an old longing to be a novelist. Her one big foray into noveling so far didn’t go too well, though, and she’s said frequently she doesn’t have the creativity to dream up the intricate, engaging storylines she loves so much.

Writing coach that I am, I couldn’t let that go. If someone wants to be a novelist, she should become a novelist. After all, it’s going to make her a better person, too. That’s too much to give up over a little thing like not-having-any-idea-what-to-write-about.

Prewriting Packages

Now, me? I’ve never had that problem. I’m at the other end of the spectrum. I have so many story ideas I can rarely finish writing a book before I’m sidetracked onto a new one. It’s a problem. In fact, it’s precisely the problem I opened with. I’ve got too many good story ideas to ever get around to writing them all.

The Ghost Targets series alone represents 25 novels (of which only four are written). On top of that, I’m working on reviving my fantasy franchise, which represents at least two dozen plotted novels (of which, once again, four are already written). Then there’s Sleeping Kings, the world of Auric, my CCC project, my new high sci-fi projects, and on top of all that, I made up three brand-new standalone novel ideas in the last six months that are all three perfectly golden.

On my own, I’ll never touch them. Or…well, not for a long time anyway. And if you’ve been around for a while, you know what I do to capture a brilliant story idea and save it against the day I actually have time to work on it.

Detailed, detailed prewriting packages. All the stuff we talked about last October. It does take some serious time, but it’s worth doing. I’ve now got prewriting packages nearly done for all three of those storylines, and as I was thinking on Jena’s creativity problem, it occurred to me that I had a potential solution right there in front of me.

Writing the Middle

So I extended the offer to her (no idea if she’ll be interested), and I’m extending it to you, too. I’ve built some good, quality stories, but I don’t have time to do the actual writing. If someone wanted to do that, though — with no more pressure to perfect it than you’d expect for any given first draft — they could start with one of my prewriting packages, build a draft for me, and then I could do the rewrite on it.

I know that won’t appeal to everyone. Some people love the thrill of discovery, or making up the plot as they go along. For someone who just wants to work on a writing project, though — especially someone who feels a little new and is looking for a learning opportunity — this could be a great experience.

If you’re at all interested, come back tomorrow and we can discuss it more. I’m going to post a short synopsis for each of the projects currently ready, and say a few words about how it would actually work. See you then!

I’ve made no secret around here of my struggles with social anxiety. I’ve made some major strides in the last year, but I’ve still got some work to do. And, even once that’s done, I’ll always be an introvert.

That means I have trouble in highly social situations. Even when they’re fun, and packed with people I like being around, they wear me out. After a couple hours, I need to escape. After a couple days of social stuff, I start to shut down. After a couple weeks (like one might encounter around the holidays), I really start having problems.

This year we came back from Thanksgiving with my family, then had a Christmas party with friends, then had a big Consortium Christmas party at our place, and then headed up to Wichita for Christmas with Trish’s family.

Trish’s whole family.

We got in Thursday evening, had a nice dinner with her parents, and then on Friday afternoon I drove out to the west side of town to reconnect with one of my best friends from high school, Brad. Dan met up with us, too, and we had a grand time for several hours.

I drove straight from there over to the traditional big family Christmas Eve dinner at Golden Corral, where thirty Charboneaus (10 of them under the age of 10) were gathered around a single, long table, laughing and having a good time.

We left the restaurant around 7:30 and headed back to her parents’ house (all thirty of us), to open presents. With the exception of my little family, all the rest of them live within maybe a dozen miles of each other. It’s amazing how close and connected this family is, and that showed as we all gathered in the huge basement family room, talking and joking while waiting our turns.

It was bright and cheerful and fun, but by the time it was over I was worn out. We all were, really. Everyone else went home, we got the kids in bed, and then we all crashed.

Saturday morning rolled around, and we had a quiet moment with just the six of us while Annabelle and Alexander discovered their presents from Santa. An hour or so after that, people started trickling back in. We put twenty people around folding tables for a big Christmas lunch, and started talking excitedly about the evening plans. Everyone was coming back (everyone), for snacks and games into the wee hours.

And that was when I said my goodbyes. It had already been the plan — Trish and I are both well aware of my limitations in situations like this — and by that point in the afternoon it was absolutely necessary. I hung around to help put the kids down for their afternoon nap, waved goodbye to everyone, and slipped away.

Trish’s dad had offered to bring her and the kids home later in the week. That gave me two full days of sweet, blissful silence and alone time to recuperate before I had to go back to work. I’d had a wonderful Christmas, but I was really looking forward to a couple days of quiet.

When I got on the road, though, that sweet anticipation quickly fell away. It was cold outside, heavily overcast, all the stores were closed and dark, and the roads were deserted. After all the cheery bustle of two straight days surrounded by family, those two hours driving toward an empty house felt incredibly lonely. Several times along the way I thought about turning around and going back.

It got worse when I got home and realized there wasn’t really anything in the pantry or fridge to make a decent dinner. It was still Christmas day, so I passed the empty Homeland parking lot on my way to Wal-Mart and found that closed, too. I ended up stopping in a 7-11 and buying a can of chili and package of saltines for my Christmas dinner.

I decided to console myself with a little bit of entertainment. I’ve piled up a long list of movies to watch over the last six months, when I didn’t really have the time to do it, and these two days made a  perfect opportunity to get caught up. So I threw my chili in the microwave, turned on the TV in the living room, and popped in the first movie in my list.

Zombieland. It’s the story of a handful of survivors left, alone, in a world ravaged by a zombie apocalypse. The protagonist is driven by a desperate (and impossible) desire to have a strong, supportive family around him, in spite of the almost certainty that all the family he had left had been wiped out by the monsters.

It’s two hours of desperation and toil in a world built of loneliness. (Although I have to admit, it’s pretty hilarious at points.)

Still…what a choice. I mean seriously. That might have been my most depressing Christmas ever. I should’ve gone with It’s a Wonderful Life.

At last we’ve come to the rewrite. The big one. The end of the line.

If you’ve really been thinking it through, you might have a question about the way I’ve arranged things. It might seem strange that I had you fix sentences before I let you go in and move paragraphs around (inevitably breaking some sentences). And I had you change the flavor of your book before sending you in to do the kind of wholesale rearranging that a rewrite calls for.

The fact of the matter is, you’ll be doing more passes on the book. Every pass through gives you a better idea what it is you have to work with, and you weren’t ready to make major changes until you’d looked closely at all those other elements.

By now, you should be. By now, you should be qualified to get in there and do some serious work.

Rewrite like It’s November

So…what exactly do I mean by “serious work”? Chances are good you already know, from your review of your own novel. In the end, it’s always going to be a different requirement for each project, but I can give you a few examples:

Gods Tomorrow starts with Katie’s first day at a new job working for the FBI, in Washington, DC. She has just moved in from Brooklyn (where she was a cop), and feels extremely out of place.

To introduce her character and get some of the exposition out of her head, I had her making frequent phone calls (sort of) to her boyfriend (sort of) back home. Their exchanges were incredibly powerful, characterizing both of them deeply and really creating a strong emotional attachment for Katie (since we got to see her vulnerability in an environment where she felt so safe).

Unfortunately, as the story picks up pace, there’s less and less room for that sort of thing, and as Katie’s story is in DC (not Brooklyn), there’s no real room for Marshall in the story anywhere after the first plot point. That left me spending a lot of time strongly developing a character who was destined to disappear for the biggest part of the book.

By the time I got to the end, I already knew the beginning needed to change, so in my first rewrite, one of the major things I did was cut Marshall out of the story entirely. I pared ten or fifteen phone calls down to two or three, and turned them into messages she left for her father. Same infodump, same characterization of Katie, but nothing coming back from the other direction.

That’s no small change to the story. That’s going in and making up new material (her father, her relationship with him, and why he never actually answered any of her calls). It’s making some painful decisions about what to cut (and what to save for future books), and what’s actually necessary.

The trick to rewriting well is to really invest yourself in something I mentioned last week: your story isn’t finished. You’ve got to accept that this isn’t just “tweaking,” this is writing. When you step into a rewrite, you’ve got to be prepared to make story.

Be bold. Dive right in, and do what needs doing.

Save Your Drafts

At the same time, you should be aware that you have an opportunity here many of the authors who’ve gone before could only dream of. You can easily and cheaply save the very things you’re changing.

Save your drafts. My little sister does all her writing in Microsoft Word, so between edits she’ll make a copy of the file she’s been working on and add a new version number to the end, just like a computer program. The last copy of her book I looked at was version 7.0, but I’m pretty sure she got up into the 13s before she set it aside.

Sure, I “cut” all those phone calls with Marshall from Gods Tomorrow, but I didn’t let them get away. They did a remarkable job characterizing these two and their relationship, and I knew that relationship was going to make it into the books someday, so I saved their calls in a separate file.

I go back to it from time to time and read it like old emails or chat logs. It’s a powerful glimpse into the story I need to tell someday, even though it didn’t get into the story I told before.

Make plans now to save everything. Keep a copy of your very first draft. Keep a copy of your book as it existed after the first rewrite (and after the second, and third, and sixteenth). Storage space is cheap, and there’s valuable information to be had by glancing back into your own process.

It’s a safety net, too. It frees you up, psychologically, to do the things you need to do. It’s a lot easier to carve a character out of your story when you know for sure you can always roll back to a version that had him in it, if it goes badly.

Save early and save often, and then get in there swinging. It’s your opportunity to do great things.

For nearly a year now, Trish has been participating in a monthly book club with our friend Becca and several other ladies I don’t happen to be familiar with.  She has really enjoyed it, as much for the opportunity to get out on her own and hang out with grown-ups at least once a month, as for any real appreciation for the books they’ve read.

We’ve talked about the books some, and I’ve even gotten to eavesdrop on a couple she listened to as audiobooks. I’m not really in any fair place to judge, but I will anyway: lots of these books sounded awful. Just…plotless, meandering, character-driven dreck.

The book they read in November was different. It had rich and dynamic characters, but they were big and exciting and caught up in a fast-paced adventure that took place in an imaginative setting that not only intrigued them, but sparked rich discussion and debate (at the book club, and also at home).

I know all that for two reasons. The first: December’s book club met at my house. The first Tuesday of the month, I got home from work and quickly devoured a couple slices of cold pizza while Trish was setting out the sumptuous feast for her guests. Then I took the kids back to their room where we’d be banished for the next three hours.

Meanwhile, the doorbell started ringing. Guests showed up, each of them bearing some new delicious treat, and while I tried to read a book to the one-year-old at the same time I was fending off a makeover from the three-year-old, they settled in to talk literature, philosophy, and world politics.

I did my best to eavesdrop, but I really couldn’t hear a thing. It drove me crazy. I mean, sure, I had a fun time playing with the kids…but I really wanted to be part of the conversation going on out in our living room.

An hour and a half later, I got my chance. Trish came back to peek in, check on the kids, then she jerked her head toward the living room and said, “You want to come meet everybody?”

I nodded, more enthusiastic than you might have guessed (unless you already know the punchline here, anyway). I handed the baby over to Trish, then walked down the hall and into a living room full of women I didn’t know. All eyes turned to me.

Then the one I would come to know as the Talker raised her chin, and said, “Okay, first things first. We’ve been talking about this book all night and we’re all agreed on one thing: when they make a movie, you have to make sure they get someone hot to play Ghoster.”

Reason number two: the book was Gods Tomorrow.

I laughed and agreed, then I sank down on a chair opposite all of them and we talked. It was fun. They all loved the book. (Several admitted afterward that they’d been dreading something awful when they agreed to read a book written by the husband of someone in their book club, but they all agreed they were pleasantly surprised.)

The conversation was incredible, too. We talked about where the story idea came from, and various elements of the science fiction universe (they were curious in particular where I’d gotten the idea for the Hippocrates watch).

We talked about the naming conventions — how I’d worked Greek and Egyptian mythology so heavily into a near-future sci-fi setting — and about the characters, and about what life in that world would really be likely.

And, for more than an hour, we talked about privacy. That’s the biggest theme of the series. What would life be like without privacy? What could we do if we had access to all that information? I had readers on both sides of the debate, right there in the room.

It was invigorating. It was so much fun. Talking with them (and listening while they descended into arguments among themselves), I saw little flaws in my storytelling, ways I could tighten it up or make it clear. I also saw what worked (and a surprising amount of it worked), and how certain characters and certain plot developments resonated differently with different readers.

None of that was accidental, of course. I put hundreds of hours into building that story to be something worthy of a discussion like that. It was quite a thrill to see the end product in action, though.

Not bad, really, for my first book club.

I started this  week with a story about my creativity in the kitchen. It all really boils down to finding a prepackaged dish I really like, and adding some chili powder. Usually black pepper, too, but that didn’t make it into Tuesday’s story.

It’s a solid metaphor for what we’re doing with our novels, now. This week we start the first “rework” of the manuscript, in which you actually get your hands dirty and start changing things. You’re still not doing the huge rewrite, but you’re ready to take the dish you’ve come to know (with all its strengths and weaknesses), and add some flavor to make it your own.

Finished Isn’t Final

When you actually go to do that, you might be surprised to find some real resistance — especially after two full read-throughs when I was insisting you refrain from making any kind of significant changes. I made it sound before like those modifications were hard to resist, but now that it’s your job, you might find them hard to do.

That’s actually why I told you to hold off before. It’s easy enough to see what your novel needs, to know what you need to do, but when you get the cursor to the spot in the document where it’s got to happen…it can be incredibly hard to start typing.

We put so much work into building the novel, into getting from “It was a dark and stormy night” to “The End.” We pour every last ounce of energy into the construction of this Thing, we make that final mad dash to the finish line, and then we call it done.

We know it’s a rough draft. One read-through is plenty to make that clear. We know it needs work. But it’s done. It’s a solid piece. It’s finished.

I know from lots of experience how intimidating it is to open up that draft, and (switching metaphors like mad), make the first incision. The moment you do, the moment you add a new sentence to your book that requires a new sentence after it, and another and another, until you stitch it back into the surrounding scenes…right then, your book goes from “finished” to “unfinished.”

That’s a weight on your shoulders. That’s a burden you have to carry until you get it done. Don’t be surprised when you balk at taking it up. You know just how exhausting it is to have an unfinished novel on your hands, and you’re about to voluntarily submit yourself to that again.

Do it anyway.

Trust me. It’s frightening, but it’s far more rewarding this time through than it was the last. You’ve got a solid base. Everything you do from here on out pushes your story a step closer to perfection.

You’re Still Writing

That’s most of the key to getting over that hesitation, focusing on the reward in store. The rest of it is just understanding that the “finished” you’ve got right now has been an illusion all along.

We do ourselves a disservice breaking up the process into “prewriting,” “writing,” and “editing.” Even calling it a “rewrite” doesn’t really capture the truth of the situation.

I’ve got four different names for postwriting, but in every one of those phases, you’re still writing. You’re still building a compelling story and figuring out how to present it in an engaging way. That’s writing.

The adrenaline-filled, coffee-fueled sprint of getting a first draft on paper is a part of the process, but it feels a lot more distinctive (and a lot more important) than it really is. You’re nowhere close to finished until you clean up the mess you’ve made.

And that’s exactly why we’ve been going back through the prewriting documents. That’s why I had you read through your document two full times before we started. You’ve got to get back into the mindset of writing (after hurling yourself desperately into the mindset of being finished a few short weeks ago), and you need to know exactly what you’re working with.

We’ll talk about the how tomorrow.