I don’t read just the ‘final’ draft aloud. I also read earlier drafts that way, when I have made serious revisions of a paragraph or a scene. I’m doing it now. This is good, because every read-through makes the text better. But after I read for a while, my voice will rise in pitch, and I read faster, and I am no longer aware of what the words mean, or what they might mean to the reader. I have lost my focus. If reading aloud is going to do me any good, I have know what effect my words will have. 

Even reading for text needs this degree of attention. If I read too fast, I miss too many ‘little’ problems. I have to really see every word, one word at a time, while still moving forward. It’s not easy for me to maintain this intensity of focus, and I can always tell when I’m losing it. Then I have to stop, put it aside for a while, do something different (like paying bills, feed the cats, step outside for movement and air) so that I can come back and read refreshed, almost as if the story were new. If I am able to maintain my focus, what I get is a good clean text that is typographically correct. But this isn’t enough. 

—————

I need to read the whole draft aloud a second time, and this time for story. That is, does it flow? Can a reader follow the action without getting confused? Is there unnecessary description, or a description out of place?  Sometimes I discover that I’ve repeated myself, several pages apart. 

What does my character experience? For example, when Jenny walks into the room, there may be dramatic paper on the walls, the color of the ceiling might be unusual (mirrored?), the floor may be carpeted or bare, there may be other doors, the light coming in the windows may suggest the time of day, the furniture may be in a typical or an unusual arrangement. I may need to know some of this as the story progresses, but if all this stuff is what I show when Jenny first comes in, it doesn’t work. 

Think of a scene in a movie. That stuff about the room has to be there, and there are, of course, scenes where the setting sets everything up. But in most scenes, the setting is just the background, and the camera is focused on the seven people standing near the middle of the room, talking quietly but intensely. Can you tell what their mood is? Can you understand what they’re saying? Are they moving or standing still? That’s what I should show, but only if Jenny needs to stay and talk to these people. Maybe she discovers that she’s in the wrong place and should leave, and her having been there at the wrong moment affects the development of the story. But if the room is just an excuse to describe something unusual, then I shouldn’t show it at all. It’s just a living room.

A lot of my original text is actually information for me, not for the reader. I need to know what that room looks like, so that my characters can move as if they were really there, and not walk around a sofa one time, then walk through it another. So that, “She slid to the next seat over,” or, “The chair she wanted was in the far corner.” Or something better than that. So I read for story, for flow, for clarity, and frequently it takes more than one pass. But at last it begins to feel good, so that I have to reread only those parts that don’t. When I get chills all through, I know that I can move on.

—————

The third read-aloud is for performance, as if I were reading it for a discriminating audience of people who like this kind of story. This is not the same as reading for story, though there may be overlaps. This time I pay attention to anything that sounds odd, or feels wrong when spoken, or is unclear as I hear it. If you read this post, you may be able to follow it, but if I read it to you, is there anything that is just a little off? Even just a little can take readers out of the story for an instant, maybe just long enough so that they lose interest. In a movie, the director has to make sure that his or her audience can actually see what they need to see, as if they were watching reality and not some poorly written fiction. And for me, I want my reader to experience my story in that way, and not to be distracted by the text. 

Again, this may take more than one pass. But when I get to a full read-through, which I can enjoy no matter how many times I’ve read it, then I can be fairly sure that many readers will enjoy it as much as I do. And if they do, then I’ve done it right.

And with each reading aloud, I find more typos, missing words, doubled words, wrong words, misspellings, extra spaces …

I don’t remember when I first realized, that what I considered to be a final draft wasn’t really final. I had worked on the novel from sketch, to rough, to first, to second, to final draft, frequently with sub-drafts in between. I came to the point where I could do no more, it was done, I was finished, and it was ready for submission and publication.

Except that it wasn’t. It needed a lot more polish, fine details, little things. I learned this when I was giving a reading at a convention, of a novel which had been published and was available in the dealer’s room and on line. One typo could be forgiven, maybe, but there were more than that on those first few pages, some words weren’t right, and some were out of place.

Most readings at conventions are delivered as quickly as if they were being read silently, and often with little or no inflection. It sounds like the reader just wants to get it over with. I had been almost as bad. That bothered me, until I remembered what I had learned about reading aloud to an audience, when I had been a member of Toastmasters International. Most of our speeches were to be given from memory, but sometimes we read things aloud. 

Part of Toastmasters was getting evaluations from other members. A common comment for readers was to go more slowly. Of course. So I tried doing that for my next read speech, and I was more careful, as if I were recording an audio book. Or as if I were telling the story instead of reading it. I could feel the difference in the audience’s response.

I had tried to read my novel that way while at the convention, which was how I had found the problems. Later, I read the manuscript I had just finished that way, as if to an audience of interested fans, and I found typos, doubled words, missing words, misspelled words, bad phrasing, sentences or even paragraphs out of place, and on and on. And reading it aloud took longer than I had hoped, because it took time to fix all the problems I found. Sometimes I had to fix the same problem more than once. But when I had gone all through it, I was pleased with what I had accomplished. 

I had the experience, many years ago, while typing up a hand-written text, of being able to continue to read, and to type, while responding to something Diane was telling me. I was rather surprised by this. I had slowed down a lot, but I had done it all at the same time: read, write, hear, and speak. Amazing.

Years later I read an article about the verbal part of the brain, which turned out to have four different regions: reading, writing, hearing, and speaking. It vindicated my understanding of what I had done. 

Later I began to think that the writing region was also divided into hand-writing and typing. I couldn’t test it — left hand on keyboard, right hand holding a pen. But other writers have told me that their first drafts are frequently if not always hand-written, and sometimes their corrections are done by hand too, because they are thinking differently by hand than by keyboard. That is my experience as well. 

Reading a text silently uses only the reading region of the verbal part of my brain. Reading aloud also involves the speaking and hearing regions, which lets me become aware of things I would otherwise have missed. 

When I have finished what I used to think of as the ‘final’ draft of a story, it is so familiar that I am reading what I know, not what is actually on the page. I need to back off, and not just so that I can read it as if it were almost the first time. I now polish every ‘finished’ text by reading it aloud. It has helped a lot.

And I have learned how to read aloud three times, each with a different emphasis. I’ll have to get to that next time.

I read The Exorcist years ago, shortly after it was a best-seller. It changed my life in a subtle but profound way, and its effects continue to this day. I never saw the movie.

The story is not about the possessed girl, though a lot of the story is spent on her. The movie, of course, was controversial because of its explicit portrayal of her possession. The actress was not allowed to watch the movie, because she was to young to see the scenes in which she had the part of the girl.

But the book is not about the girl or possession, it is about Father Karras and his crisis of faith.

The people he serves are the dregs of the city: the homeless, the bums and drunks, the prostitutes, the criminals, the disturbed. And they smell bad. Serving them is a major part of Father Karras’s job as a priest. He has been thinking for a while that maybe he’s not fit to be a priest. He’s supposed to love these people, but they disgust him. He is seriously thinking that, after this exorcism, he will give up the church and find something else useful to do, find another life. Not as many pages are spent on him as are on the girl and her family.

But this is the struggle that is the core of the story. Blatty just shows it, he doesn’t point to it, or call our attention to it, or emphasize it. We see Father Karras’s thoughts, without any outside comment. They are just there, one misery along with all the others.

It isn’t until the last part of the story, when Father Karras is about to give up, that he has his epiphany. It happens, and the story goes on and comes to it’s conclusion. It is that epiphany which has been with me all my life.

How can he serve the people in his parish when he feels no love for them, only disgust? Because, the love of this kind isn’t what you feel, it’s what you do. Many of you probably know that.

The first time I experienced the muse was in about 1977, while I was walking across the UNC Chapel Hill campus to meet Diane, who was getting her PhD in mathematical statistics. I didn’t know what the muse was then.

I had been thinking about writing a book-length story, instead of the short stories of which I had sold only two. This story would have the trappings of science fiction. The anti-hero would be based on my shadow, the Jungian opposite of who I was. He would arrive on another world, in his search for a thing (I would find out what it was later) which would make him wealthy enough to get out from under his father’s financial thumb. He was a remittance man, that is, his father paid him to stay away from home. That’s all I knew.

The story came to me in a series of unfolding scenes. This was the main plot, the core of the story, from beginning to end. It ran through my mind in only about twenty minutes. I knew there would have to be more, but I needed to remember what had come to me, so I ran through it again, and a third time. Diane and I got home, I sat down and wrote out a kind of outline. It was a list of what would be accomplished in each of the scenes, but not how it would be done.

I put it aside because I had a draft of a novel which I was struggling to finish, and I spent some weeks on it. I needed a map of the city, and I already had one, but it had to be altered to fit the story. I needed more scenes to flesh out the setting, the characters, the culture, and the songs that would be playing through my hero’s head. I had to figure out how to put those scenes in the appropriate places in my list. I wish I still had it.

When I finally started writing, my muse wouldn’t let me stop, not even to work for my landlord to pay my rent. I wrote 75,000 words in eight and a half days. I took the half day off, then I began to revise and correct and make the story ready for submission. That took a while. I sent it to an agent who had been recommended to me and, after another while, The Planet Masters was published, by St. Martin’s Press, in 1979.

I didn’t know until many years later, that the stories which I had written while inspired by my muse were far better than those which I had worked out intellectually. I learned where my muse lives, deep in the back of my head. I learned how to let my muse come to me, by not looking for it. I learned that pushing on my muse drives it away. Inspiration is for the art of creation. What I know about the craft of writing is for revision, correction, and development, after I have the full story.

I have written stories without the guidance of my muse. They all seem to lack a kind of vital spark. Some of them have been published, and may be well written and well developed, but they lack life. They lack spirit. Because my intellect got in the way, and I didn’t let my muse work for me. It’s my muse which gives my stories the spark of life.

The original hero of what would eventually become The Black Ring was male, super-competent, brave, and strong. I wrote a long novel and, with the idea of doing a series, I drafted two sequels. I was going to do a third when I realized that my hero was boring. Everything was too easy. He was like a weight-lifter on steroids, a martial arts grand master, and he never made a mistake. Overdone, implausible, unsympathetic, and boring.

I had spent years telling myself stories and tales and episodes about this hero. I never wrote any of them down. They all started from a dream I had, when I was about thirteen, with myself as a hero. I had never been a hero in my dreams, and have never been one again. My youthful wish-fulfillment fantasy, inspired by that dream, grew from being something like me at that age. He gained super powers, and physical augmentations, and became a kind of heroic monster. 

Those stories failed because of that character, who was not a living hero after all. The stories didn’t work, and they never would, no matter how much I tried to rewrite them. In fact, after a while, I couldn’t force myself to read them, even to harvest plot ideas. I threw away something like three hundred thousand words.

I had filled notebooks over the years, with ideas about fantasy weapons, carriages and ships, strange races, stranger worlds, groups of good companions, and hierarchies of dangerous enemies. I didn’t want to throw those away, so I asked myself, What about a hero who was the opposite of the boring one who was never challenged by anything? What if my hero was like, say, a young Sally Field….

In that instant my hero became clear to me. She would be small, young, over-protected as a child, never independent a day in her life. Everything would be a challenge for her. Nothing would be  easy. She would have to grow, and learn, and change, and slowly become a hero, in order to serve the story I wanted to tell.

The writing was so easy that it almost wrote itself. It was as if I was an actor portraying my character. I felt with her when she found herself in a strange place. I let her, as if she were a real person, try several times to solve a problem. I didn’t interfere when she made mistakes, and knew how she felt about it when she when she did. 

I didn’t do what I would do, but I played the role as if I were she. That’s very different. I followed her as she learned and grew, as she discovered her strength, her courage, her intelligence, her leadership, her sense of duty, none of which had ever been tested before. And more than once I was surprised — I didn’t know she could do that!

I let it be that way with all the other characters, though less deeply. They each had their own part to play, and I didn’t interfere, I let them make their own decisions. I got to know them as they carried the story for me, and some of them surprised me. And some of them died. 

They were all, of course, only figments of my imagination. Or, you might say, products of my muse. I have learned, though it wasn’t always easy, to trust my muse, and to not let my intellect interfere. If I made my characters, major or minor, do something that was against their nature, the story died. I still sometimes forget, but I’m getting better at that as the years go by.

New writers are frequently told that they should create brief biographies of their characters. Name, age, gender, nationality or ethnic origin if it matters. What they look like, what they wear, where they work, their immediate and (sometimes) extended family. How they get along with people, their strengths and weaknesses, their likes and dislikes, the secrets in their past … and on, and on. 

You can spend a lot of time doing that. I’ve done it, and it’s a powerful distraction from the story itself. But as soon as I start writing, if I’m paying attention to my characters, they come alive, and surprise me in many ways, and the biography proves useless. I learned this, after wasting hundreds of thousands of words, by making my characters comply with the biography, instead of letting them behave according to what I have learned about real people. It is that which enables my characters to come to life, and to feel real, because somewhere, somewhen, I have seen that behavior in real people.

When you go to any kind of gathering, for business or pleasure, you may meet new people. You know nothing about some of them. What they look like may suggest something about what they are like but, too often, those suggestions can be misleading. You may strike up a conversation, which may last more than a few minutes. You may enjoy talking with these people, and look forward to your next meeting, when you can have other conversations with them.

I attend science fiction conventions, and meet and talk with a lot of people, and everyone I talk with adds something to my understanding of human nature. I get to know some people quite well, but only as what they are like are at the conventions. I know almost nothing about their background, occupation, influence on the world, even their families. Sometimes, when I ask, I learn that he’s a heavy mechanic in a ship yard. She’s a physicist involved in deep space exploration. He’s a truck driver who’s daughter was born on the same day and year that my daughter was. She’s a small press publisher, displaying her authors’ books as well as her own. That is all interesting to me, I talk with them about it, and I want to know more.

But if my characters have backgrounds like these, how will that help them to deal with typical fantasy enemies, situations, obstacles. Can the physicist handle a sword? Can the truck driver deal with a dark magician? Can the mechanic make a choice about who to kill and who to save? The publisher, maybe, as she has read a lot of that kind of fiction, can draw upon that knowledge. But how about a successful advertising agent? 

My characters must all act and behave as they really are when they are just people. And like the people I meet at conventions, I will only learn who they really are by spending time with them, watching them deal with the story’s situations, putting them to the test, so that they can discover their unknown strengths, weaknesses, and deeper nature. What my heroes, male or female, become in the course of the story, may be a complete contradiction to who they thought they were before the story began.

My characters do not live in static biographies. They live and grow in the story in my head.

Beginnings are always difficult for me, as they may well be for many other writers. I don’t mean just the hook, the first few words which make someone want to read on for at least a page or two. For example, “He went out onto the balcony, and knew, by the way she was leaning on the rail, what she was going to do. He climbed up on it when she did.”

I used something like that in a story called called “Dorian’s Choice.”

What I mean is that the beginning of a story, of a chapter, even of just a scene has to establish a setting, some characters, a situation, in a way that informs readers, as well as making them want to read more.

Sometimes it’s not so hard, if the setting is familiar. How about a tree-lined residential street. That’s enough that most people can almost see it. The situation might be instantly understandable, for example, “Geoff went out onto the porch, waited for Marian to get her coat, then they went down to the sidewalk.” There’s a hint of something leading to this. We can find out more about who Geoff and Marian are and what they look like in later paragraphs and pages. But there should be something to make readers ask questions, something like: “The car screeched around the corner, jumped the curb, and crashed into the tree at the end of their front walk, just three feet from them.”

There are plenty of questions here to draw readers in, and they will get answers, and find more questions, the more they read. And maybe they’ll discover that this was just a precursor to a larger story, as in Star Wars part 4.

But how about this: “The portal opened to what looked like, but might not actually be, some kind of a ruin. It was partially over-grown with shrubs and grasses of strange colors, but they could have been planted there. And there were crawlers and jumpers everywhere, some of them as big as a hand. Janae and Lef-Korak, his Chenatsch partner, went through the portal which closed behind them. Had they come too late?”

But what can readers see, or hear, or smell? What is a ‘crawler’? And how long would it take to describe all that without losing the reader’s interest? Does any of it mean anything?

That’s where I sometimes spend hours, or even days, working on a beginning that will let readers visualize and understand what I’m telling them, without it being a data dump or a textbook description, and do it clearly enough to arouse their curiosity and make them want to read more. Of course, some readers would have put it down at the first sentence — they thought Ill met by Moonlight was going to be a romance.

Take my two examples, and see for which one it is easier to write the next paragraph. The second one is more like the stories I choose to tell.

I used to run a writers workshop at science fiction conventions. It was very simple. I told those who attended to write the first hundred words of a short story. I gave them ten minutes, then I asked each in turn to read their exercise aloud. I and my panel would comment, trying to help them understand what they had done well, and where they could improve.

We could not comment on one person’s exercise, because it wasn’t the first try at a narrative hook, it was just notes. I thanked the writer, then told the class that this was really the way to start working on a story, with ideas. They may be for a possible start, or for what an ending might be about, or about characters, setting, situation, obstacles and conflicts, or anything else which came to mind. I don’t have trouble remembering what the over-all story is about, but I find that notes about details like these, and other plot elements, are essential.

Story Eight for Star Kings is what I’m beginning to work on now. What I have done is to let my imagination (muse, if you will) run free, and to write down, in longhand, whatever comes to mind. These ideas may not be in order, I may not know who does what, or who is speaking, or what the setting looks like. I may throw some of these away. I may add some. But that’s okay. I have what I need.

Next I will take these ideas and develop them, turn bare notes and rough ketches into narrative, dialogue, description, and a coherent plot. Once I have a very rough draft,  I’ll know a lot better what to do next. After all, I write organically, not by design. Most of the time. 

If you prefer to create an outline, then that is what you do. This is what works for me.

My heroes, who I describe as being human, want to become traders within the Cold Star Cluster, and later out in the limb of the galaxy. It is a long, slow process of education, training, and growth, of which I have shown only small critical moments.

Traders in the Cluster have to know how to deal with twenty some different peoples on other worlds. They range from one or two who are barely out of their stone ages, to three who have star travel, each using different technologies of their own invention. None of these peoples are human, though some are sort of similar. Not all are mammaloid, though all are warm-blooded, which I declare to be a necessity for developing any kind of technology beyond sticks and stones. Our octopi, for example, despite great intelligence, will never master fire.

These are not actors in rubber suits. Each of the peoples my heroes meet is an original creation — physically, culturally, psychologically, socially — based on what I know of biology and physiology. I have done my best to make them all plausible, if they are not perfectly realistic. I have modeled their societies to some extent on what I know of sociology and anthropology, but they are all their own people. 

It is this creation from scratch, making the strange worlds and peoples, and making them plausible that takes so much effort. It has nothing to do with plot or story, but with context. It is like the immense, creative effort that went into making the Death Star for Star Wars, just so that it would look like a real thing. Or like any part of Lord of the Rings. If my stories were told in my time and place, they would be easy, but perhaps not as interesting. Star Wars is, after all, a western in disguise. It is the galaxy far, far away that makes it different.

I had intended to have only one primary character (i.e. “hero”) and to tell the stories in third person from his point of view, except when I had to pull back, like a movie camera, and become a narrator. But when I am writing at my best, it is organic, and grows on its own. I refuse to be a slave to preconceptions. Sketches and outlines are tools, not straight jackets or prisons. I know writers who depend on them absolutely, and that’s what they need. My stories, being organic, grow of their own accord. It is up to me, as the writer, to make them work as readable fiction.

There was supposed to be only one viewpoint character. There turned out to be two, and that is a challenge I had not anticipated, and I will not deal with it in the conventional way. 

I wrote three short stories which were published in magazines. I reprinted them in my collection, A Closet for a Dragon, and Other Early Tales. But I also wrote stories for the six Elf Quest, Blood of Ten Chiefs anthologies. TOR published the first five volumes, but though we had been paid for the stories in the sixth, TOR did not publish it. No one knows why.

I was happy with those stories, and for a long time I wanted to write stories like them, in a world of my own making. It would be about a people, in a far future, in a galaxy so far away that George Lucas never dreamed of it. They fled their home worlds when they were attacked by those who wanted to steal their advanced technology. They found refuge in what they called the Cold Star Cluster, a clear space in the Great Cloud, which was just above the galactic limb.

I had lots of characters, strange settings, bizarre situations, prolonged conflicts, tremendous obstacles, powerful enemies, and grand objectives. I created lots of stuff, and even more than that. But the stories I tried to write never seemed to go anywhere. The great adventures which affected the whole my people did not work. I had lots of writing but no stories.

It took me years before I realized why. My Ten Chiefs stories were, unlike all the other stories, about a peaceful time for the Elves. There were no great conflicts. They were just ordinary people living their ordinary Elvish  lives. My stories were about who they were, how they lived, their culture and world, and how they coped with the occasional small but interesting interruption. Wendy Pini liked them.

I threw away all that I had written about the people of the Cold Star Cluster, and started all over again. This time they were, in their own context, ordinary people, living in an artificial world between the stars, doing just what ordinary people do — work, play, love, grow. Except that the setting is truly bizarre, the other peoples of the Cluster are not human, everything has to be invented from scratch. It is not Star Trek, or Star Wars, but something far else. 

It’s going well, it’s hard work, and it’s slow, especially now when I can work only three or four hours a day. But I like the six stories that I’ve finished so far. I don’t know how many stories there will be in the cycle, but it begins with the birth of the hero, and ends with the birth of his first child. It’s called Star Kings.