Ditch Those Bad Habits!

 

Terry here, with our question of the week:

What bad habits have you ditched to make yourself a better writer? What good habits have you picked up? 

 These questions bring up other questions: 

 1) Am I better writer that I was? 

 2) Do I have good habits? 

 3) Where did I get them? 

 So, let’s get started. Number one. Am I a better writer? I think so. I just decided to go through some manuscripts that I abandoned for one reason or another, with the idea of sprucing them up and moving forward. I started reading a few pages of one and my immediate thought was, “Did I write that? It’s pretty damn good.” So I read on. And then, I came to the part where I digressed. Yep. I wandered away from the subject and included things that didn’t really need to be there. Obviously, when I wrote this first draft, I didn’t know how to edit it. 

 The fact that I recognized those lines as being unnecessary tells me that yeah, maybe I have improved as a writer. The old manuscripts have some raw power, but they need a lot of work. I once attended a writer’s conference at which one of the stars was E.L. Doctorow. He told us he was going to read from the first draft of the book he was working on. I was dazzled. I later joked to him that I thought he was showing off, that what he’d read was wonderful. He gravely told me that the sentences may have been good, but that they didn’t work toward what he intended. I later read the book, Loon Lake, and was astonished to discover that only the slightest bit of his first draft made the cut. He had been trying to teach us budding writers that we needed to really pay attention to our intentions about what we were working on. Extraneous sentences had to be cut, no matter how “golden” they were. 

 I remember reading Cormac McCarthy’s first book and thinking, “Wow! What a great writer.” And then reading his later books and understanding that although his first book had some amazing writing, his later books were more polished. 

 So addressing the second questions, do I have better habits? I always had some good writing habits—an ability to concentrate deeply when I’m writing. When I’m working on a book I write most every day. I set goals and I intend to meet my goals.

But when I was a fledgling writer, I had some habits that didn’t work so well: 

 I’m sure many writers are familiar with the problem of getting to a sticky part of the manuscript, and suddenly having a much more brilliant idea for another book! A wonderful book! A book that will be a best-seller! A book that will have none of the deficiencies of the one I’ve been working on! 

 For many years, I’d allow that second, new, shiny idea to divert my attention. I had many half-written manuscripts lying around moldering. Somehow, along the line, I learned not to be diverted by that siren song. I don’t even bother to write down the shiny new idea anymore, because I know it’s ephemeral. It has no substance. It’s just my brain balking at doing the hard work of finishing what I’m working on. 

But how did I learn this? I’m not sure, but I think it had to do with the fact that when I started my Samuel Craddock series, I was writing from my heart, and that I was onto something important for me. How many times did I have to hear the advice, “ Write something only you can write,” before I finally understood what it meant. And that’s when I was able to ignore the muse’s teasing. 

 And then there was the bad habit of listening to every person in my critique groups, and in the end writing “by committee.” I didn’t have enough confidence in my work to sift information for what could really be useful. Learning to trust yourself is tricky. If you go too far down that path, you maybe be unable to hear good advice. What you have to learn is how to tell the useful advice from the suggestions that don't work toward your goal. 

 Another bad habit was thinking “good enough” was good enough. I sent in too many manuscripts that were not ready for publication, thinking, “It’s good enough. A good editor will make it shine.” Good enough is never good enough. It has to be better. Every line has to matter. The manuscript has to be edited again and again, until you're sure it's perfect. (It won't be, but it might finally, really be "good enough.") One of my all-time favorite lines from a reviewer was, “There’s not one wasted word.” It took me a while to get there, and it's a lesson that has to be learned more than once. 

 How did I learn better habits? By reading advice from writers I admired. By attending conferences and listening to experienced writers talk about what they had to learn. Going back to E.L. Doctorow’s teaching, I learned that you have to be true to your vision of the book you’re working on. That doesn’t mean you can’t address revisions that a good editor suggests. It means that while you are working on your book, you keep in mind what story you want to tell people. And you keep at it.