A Writer’s First Kiss

Fellow writer Adam-Troy Castro posted:

“Finally sent out that story, which involves Alexander Knox, the star of my thus-far unsold novel BEHEMOTH.”

See what he did? Adam-Troy Castro has a novel, BEHEMOTH. Unsold, it is still a fertile, worked out-world from which he extracted an incident from the life of a star character. Perhaps the incident was implied in text, perhaps not. But this is utterly professional, and a great example for students. If you are following the Lifewriting program, and working on a novel, all you have to do is extract an incident or character, turn it into a two-page piece of flash fiction, and you’ve fulfilled your basic obligation for the month.

Because the pattern so far is:

1. Write a sentence every day.
2. Write 1–4 stories a month
3. Finish, polish, and submit.

The next step is for my obsessive peeps.

4. Don’t rewrite except to editorial request.

This one probably comes directly from Robert Heinlein, and it’s a doozy. ONCE YOU ARE FINISHED AND HAVE SUBMITTED, don’t go back and endlessly polish. The fact is that your “editor” mode will probably ALWAYS be smarter than your “writer” mode. After all, you’ve read much more than you’ve written, right? So it’s a little like polishing a rock but constantly increasing magnification: you’ll NEVER get it perfectly smooth. But the voices in our head, the perfectionistic one, has convinced writers to spend months…