I like to cook. Sometimes. To a limited extent. Well…no, not really.

Let me start over.

I’m a notoriously picky eater, so for the most part I don’t love to eat what I know objectively to be delicious foods. I have a limited repertoire of things I like, and I like them prepared my way. In order to get that, from time to time, I’m willing to cook.

I started with salsa. I love a good salsa, but something about the texture of the stewed vegetable chunks just gets to me. I prefer it with the vegetables finely chopped (or even blended).

When I lived in Wichita, there was a restaurant that prepared their salsa that way. Carlos O’Kelly’s. I loved the place. I’d go and stay for hours, just eating limitless chips and salsa. Ah, to be young again….

But they stopped. The year before we moved away, they decided to reinvent their salsa recipe, and they switched to a “thick and chunky” style, and I’ve never liked it since.

I’ve never really found a great replacement, either. I know some places that do fine-chopped salsa, but it’s too sweet or too vinegary or too heavy on the cumin. And I know lots of places that make delicious salsa, but I’ve got to tolerate the textures.

So, four or five years back, I decided to learn how to make my own salsa. I bought a bunch of vegetables, and started iterating. I had trouble with the tomatoes, though. Every time I tried making it with fresh tomatoes, the tomato taste overwhelmed everything else.

So I turned to an old family standby: Rotel Canned Tomatoes and Chilis. Opened a can of that, dumped it in the blender for ten seconds, added some fine-chopped onions and jalapenos, some cilantro, a few spices…and voila, a perfect salsa.

It was a little depressing to realize I’d spent a month testing and perfecting, trying to come up with my own personal recipe for salsa, and I ended up using a canned product. Worse yet, I decided to try out the Rotel Mexican Festival one time, and it was almost exactly what I got from all my little additions.

I could blend up a can of that, sprinkle in some chili powder to make it just a touch spicier, and there was my salsa. Of course, it makes sense. They were trying to make exactly the product I was looking for. It didn’t really satisfy my creative yearning, though. I wanted to make something my own.

So I turned to another of my absolute favorite foods that suffered from the same problem. Chili. Oh, I’m a huge fan. I don’t like the big slimy stewed tomatoes lurking under the surface, though, or huge chunks of onion that go crunch when you’re eating a soup.

I did a little research, looking into chili recipes, and found myself reading the same ingredients lists I’d gotten familiar with when I made my salsa. It’s basically some meat, some beans, some salsa, a few extra spices that don’t really work in salsa, and a little extra tomato sauce.

So I went through the whole process again. I tried making it from scratch. Then I tried making it with a batch of my salsa to simplify things, and it was just as good. I was still adding some cumin and habanero, and I was leaving out the cilantro so I was back to using the basic Rotel.

But then I discovered a new product on the aisle at Wal-Mart. Rotel Chili Fixin’s. (The apostrophe represents the missing “g,” it’s not a bad pluralizer. I promise.) And you know what? It was just what I wanted.

Ten seconds in the blender, mixed with a little fine-chopped onion, meat, and beans, and then stewed in a pot for half an hour or so. It makes a remarkable dinner. I like to add a little extra chili powder to make it spicier, but that’s just me.

This week we had a Christmas party for the Consortium. I’ll probably talk it up elsewhere, but I wanted to mention it while we’re talking about my culinary peculiarities. See…as the party was approaching (and all the Christmas festivities in general), Trish felt like trying some new things, making some new recipes. She asked me if I had any requests.

And I said, “Ooh, Chex Mix! Not like the kind in a bag, but real party Chex Mix. With peanuts.” (Why don’t they include peanuts in Chex Mix? Seriously.)

She did her research, found a recipe for what I was wanting, mixed it up, and we tried it out a couple days before the party. It was excellent. Delicious. Incredible.

But I felt like it was missing something. It needed a little more zing, to make it perfect. So, the night of our party, I asked her to make up another batch, and this time (you guessed it) I added chili powder.

I’m a remarkably creative person. I really am. It just…it doesn’t show up in the kitchen. Apparently when it comes to cooking, the entire vast panorama of my creative genius collapses to a single point:

• Add chili powder.

Okay, if you’re following orders then at this point you’ve read through your finished book, cover-to-cover, and discovered the story you actually ended up telling. Maybe you read through it with a red pen, maybe you fixed some things, but your primary focus was on discovering what was there.

Now it’s time for revision. That means (as I warned you before), another read through your book. This time, instead of looking for the big picture, your goal is to focus in on the details. Look closely at the way you use language.

Fixing the Typos

On the surface, it might sound like I’m telling you repeat the process you went through last week. In a sense, maybe I am. I did tell you then that every read through your book will involve minor error corrections.

Technically, that process is called “copyediting,” and most people would recommend putting off any serious copyediting until the very end of your revision process. After all, anything you change between now and the end is going to need another look.

That’s good advice. It really is. The thing is, I can’t help myself. If I spot a typo and don’t fix it, it drives me nuts. It distracts me from whatever it is I’m trying to focus on. So I just go ahead and make changes whenever I spot them.

Feeling the Flow

That’s not really what I mean by “look closely at the language,” though. There’ll be copyedits forever, but your job in this pass isn’t so much to fix the language and it is to discover the language you use.

My friend Jessie (a professional copyeditor who reviewed Gods Tomorrow as a personal favor) told me every author has a word or two that he tends to overuse. My worst is “though.” She spotted it in her review, and told me to go back through the book and cut every instance of it I could.

It’s a good chance to double-check your adherence to some of the standard writing rules. Avoid adverbs. Make sure you’ve got at least one active, simple-tense verb in every sentence. Use simple dialogue attributions (95% of the time, it should be either “asked” or “said”).

Now’s the time to look at your verb tenses, too. If the book is in past tense (and it should be), make sure the whole thing is in past tense.

And check perspective while you’re at it. Is it first-person or third? Do you slip into second from time to time? Do you skip around different characters’ perspectives?

You don’t have to fix all that now. You will have to fix it eventually, and if it’s an easy fix you might as well go ahead. But right now your main job is still scouting it out. Discover how you use the language, what your strengths and weaknesses are, so you can make a strong plan for fixing it.

Today is December 14th. That means Thursday is going to be December 16th. I know, I know…I’ve just demonstrated that I’m a brilliant mathematician. Or…calendarist. Something.

There’s a special significance to December 16th, though. Around here, anyway. Thursday will be the official anniversary of Unstressed Syllables. One year ago Thursday, I wrote my first post here.

It feels like a much longer time than that. My life has changed hugely in the last year. I’ve gone from being a professor to being a student. I’ve gone from being a writer to being a publisher. For that matter, I’ve gone from being an unpublished writer to being a published one.

And whether you know it or not, you’ve played a big part in that. I’m intensely grateful to you, my readers, for coming around (even if you never do say a word).

Through this website I’ve established important relationships, I’ve established myself in some (admittedly small) corners of the internet as a writing expert, and most importantly I’ve established that for myself. For the first time in my life, I see myself as an expert, and that has given me the confidence to do everything else I’ve done.

And that all started here. It started a year ago, when I talked about why I wanted to write a writing-advice blog and, specifically, why I wanted to write one aimed at people afraid of writing.

In the time since, we’ve wandered far and wide. These are just some of the topics we’ve discussed (in chronological order):

• Writing to a template
• Becoming a better person through writing
• Designing document structure
• Writing first drafts (and the marble statue metaphor)
• Improving rough drafts
• The value of blogging
• The structure of a story
• Audience analysis
• Reader response questions
• The power of good metaphors
• How to write a 3-act narrative
• The changing face of publishing
• The value of a writing group
• How to fit research into your writing
• How to write powerful outlines
• How copyright works (and doesn’t)
• The value of the public domain
• What’s wrong with The Da Vinci Code
• How plot points work
• Visual storytelling
• Writing what you know (you’re not too boring to tell a story)
• National Novel Writing Month
• Prewriting for NaNoWriMo
• The struggle to keep writing
• The tragic loneliness of writing

My publication schedule has changed from time to time, and I make no guarantees that the one you’re seeing now (sort of) is any kind of permanent. But I have as much commitment to Unstressed Syllables today as I did a year ago.

And I’m looking forward to the topics we’re going to discuss in 2011, including storytelling techniques (with a detailed review of what I learned in Category Fiction this fall), and an investigation of what went into publishing my novel last October and what I can share with you about that experience with regard to your own works.

In the meantime, we’ve still got a draft of a NaNo novel needing revision, so let’s get back to that, huh? Come back Thursday for cake, punch, and a discussion of what you should change in the second pass through your manuscript.

I started the week with a story about learning to program, about learning the difference between typing computer code into a machine and actually writing a game. The difference (in case you skipped the story) is called “debugging.”

And that’s where we are now with our novels. November’s done, our first draft is done, and we’re ready to talk about revisions, editing, rewrites. We’re ready to debug our first drafts. We’re ready (returning to a different metaphor) to start converting a boring block of marble into a priceless work of art.

Getting Started (Again)

One of the things I’ve learned in this business is that there’s an awful lot of starting, and not really very much getting finished. Back in October you started this book with some detailed prewriting.

Then in November you started this book with daily writing that began at the top of page one. Now it’s time for us to get started making a statue — unless, of course, you already got started last week by making a plan. Even if you did, it’s time to get started on that again.

And we’re still nowhere close to getting done.

As I said last week, I recommend several stages of revision. And the key to them — to every one of them — is reading your book.

I know you wrote the thing. You just wrote it. That doesn’t change a thing, though. It’s a big solid block of marble. It’s dense and inscrutable. It’s a world of mystery, waiting for discovery.

Finding Your Flaws

You’re probably a step ahead of me here, but in case you missed it…those are all euphemisms for “it’s bad.” It’s flawed. It’s promising, but it isn’t there yet. Your job is to get it there. To find the flaws, to smooth the rough edges, to shape it into what it needs to be.

The first step of the process is an inspection. A review. The first step is simply to read your book, cover to cover.

Don’t make any changes yet. It will be tempting, but restrain yourself. I can’t count the number of times I’ve gotten two chapters into a review, realized I missed a chance to introduce some critical bit of information, spent an hour or two reworking the scene…and then read on to find I’d already done it (better) five pages later.

That’s what I meant earlier about the “big solid block of marble.” The mystery. A 50,000-word novel is a lot to keep track of. It’s too big to hold in your head — especially if you’ve been actively writing new bits at the same time.

Now don’t get me wrong — there are perfect opportunities that you missed. There’s critical information left out. Just don’t trust your memory to tell you where it is. Do yourself a favor, and give the book one review to find out. It will save you a lot of effort along the way.

Making It Shine

The good news is, there’s a happy surprise or two in store for you, too. There are elements of the book that are better than you could imagine. Right along with the missed opportunities, there’s flashes of brilliance. There’s genius in there.

And that is the first hint at the shape of the statue you’re going to make. You’re going to bring those pieces to a perfect shine. In fact, you’re going to make the whole book look like that.

It all starts with just sitting down and reading it. Have fun.

I started playing videogames at the age of six or seven. Within a year, I was programming them, too.

Now that’s not to say I was exercising my creative genius way back then. (Not in that medium, anyway.) No, my dad had a Commodore 64 and a subscription to Compute! magazine, which came with 5-10 pages of code for a game in the back of every issue.

It made for great typing practice, but the way I did it didn’t really teach me a lot about programming. See…I would just open up a command-line and then sit for hours copying all the PEEKs and POKEs and GOTOs line by line into the machine. I did it in order, and when I got to the end, I would run the program and see what happened.

If I’d done it perfectly, I could play the game. Once. As soon as we turned off the computer or loaded any other program, though, it was gone.

But, of course, I rarely did it perfectly. Usually there was a line missing, a variable misspelled, a PEEK pointing to 6643 that was supposed to point to 6463.

Sometimes that meant funny effects in the game. Sometimes it meant a spectacular crash, ending the game abruptly just as I got to the good part. Most of the time, it just meant nothing happened. The game wouldn’t run. Maybe it gave a detailed error report — I don’t recall — but if it did, I had no clue how to read it.

That’s…well, that’s not really how programming works. It’s not now, but it wasn’t then, either. I just didn’t know what I was doing. I should have been saving all that work, so a game that played could be run again and aagain — and one that didn’t could be fixed.

I didn’t learn any of that until two decades later, when I finally let Toby try to teach me how to program. He’s a master of it. During our years in college I’d watched him work some real wonders with programs he put together for class or for fun, but I wasn’t too sure he could convince me to enjoy it. I remembered way too many failed efforts of my own.

We talked about it for several months. He made me read a book. And then, finally, he told me to just come over and watch him work.

So I went to his place and sat down next to his spot at the computer. He clicked through a bunch of pages of dense code, rambled a bunch of meaningless explanation, then he tried to run it so I could see the magic in action.

Then he said, “Oh. Hmm.” Nothing happened.

Well, I guess something happened. He got an error message. I felt terribly bad for him, but he just opened another document, scrolled through to the right spot, changed a word on the page, then nodded in satisfaction.

He ran the program again. Then, again, “Oh. Hmm.”

We had two or three hours to work on the game, and spent at least two thirds of it on, “Oh. Hmm.”

And I watched, fascinated, as he debugged a program in development. By the time we were done I understood some of the issues, and even some of the fixes, but for the most part I just watched him darting here and there through an unbelievably complex web of functions and variables, adjusting, tweaking, fixing.

And then, at last, he said, “Aha! There we go.” And just like that we were playing.

It’s been seven or eight years since the first time that happened — and it has happened frequently since then, across various projects, consoles, and programming languages. These days, I just expect it.

In fact, these days I do the same thing. I remember trying to show off a program I’d written to Carlos, not too long ago, and it went precisely the same way. “Hey, check this out! Oh. Hmm.”

I remember a time when I thought typing in that initial code was “programming.” It’s not. It’s typing. Programming doesn’t have anything to do with inspiration, with sitting down at a blank page and making something incredible. Programming isn’t really about making but about fixing. It’s everything that happens between the “Oh. Hmm.” and the “Aha! There we go.”

That can be a surprise to novices (it was to me), but to real programmers it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

Speaking of which…do I even need to make the application to writing? Well, I’m going to. Come back Thursday, and we’ll talk some more.

Photo courtesy this guy.