When I first got serious about writing fiction, I would just kinda hack my way through, doing the best I could, and then I would go back through, fix anything that "didn't feel right", and I'd think I was done. One story in the bank. Pretty common mindset for beginning writers.
Then people would read my stories, and most of them would say "Oh, it's good..." in that non-committal way that all writers must come to accept from their friends and family. And I thought to myself "I want more detail! What was good about it?" I was always open to criticism too, but I was not so naive as to expect my friends and family to put their lives on hold to do a deep line edit. And when I was lucky enough to have someone say "Well, this bit confused me...", my reaction was always tinged with frustration because I knew I'd never get any deeper analysis than that. And so I began looking for editors.
Truth is, good editors--people who are willing to dive deep with you--don't come cheap. And online writing groups are full of crappy advice from people who don't know jack. I got some valuable help here and there, but in the end I always came up short of what I knew I needed: a hard kick in the pants from someone who knew the craft better than me. And since I wasn't going to be able to afford a real editor any time soon, I had to be the one to kick myself. If I was going to be the writer I wanted to be, I had to buckle down and actually learn grammar, story structure, and all that junk.
That's around the time this little resource dropped into my life: Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and Dave King. The wealth of insight contained in this book is beyond anything I can describe to you without quoting it in its entirety. It is irreducibly amazing. Within seconds of picking up this book, I had already learned something crucial that I was previously ignorant of: the distinction between showing and telling. I liken the experience to Plato's allegory of the cave. Before reading Self-Editing, I thought those dancing shadows were the world entire. After I finished it, I emerged into a new and wondrous world. This new existence demanded much more from me, but it also empowered me to do proportionally more.
Speaking of proportion, this is the book that introduced me to that startling concept as it relates to fiction. Browne and King's most salient example of proportion on the macro scale goes something like this:
A woman wrote a novel, and her editor demanded that she cut it by one third. So she took out all the cooking scenes, driving scenes, and coffee shop scenes. But she left all the sex scenes intact. What was left was suddenly a work of erotica, though it was never intended as such. The novel had been thrown out of proportion.
Proportion is a subtle and powerful tool and no writer should labor in ignorance of it. It's simply the idea of how many words you spend on what. Becoming aware of this enables you to pull all kinds of dazzling tricks. When your heroine is running from an ax murderer, you don't pause the narrative to describe some bit of scenery; you rush past it in the blurriest detail, and thereby convey the urgency of running for one's life much more elegantly that simply stating "she ran for her life". You can use tricks of proportion to subtly convey that one character is important, or that another is irrelevant. You can use proportion to draw out the moment before the ghost leaps through the wall, or to show a boxer's focus by giving a blow-by-blow account of the bout. And if you are unaware of proportion, you can inadvertently direct the reader's focus to something you consider unimportant.
The above is but the palest imitation of a tiny part of the treasure trove of advice contained in Self-Editing for Fiction Writers. This book is the first one I recommend to any writer looking to up their game, and it is unrivaled in my writing bible, because this book not only made me a better writer, it made me a better person.
Browne and King were the force that finally pounded the idea of transparency into my thick skull. Before reading this book, I wrote out of a desire to be known, a pathological need to be seen. And in truth, this is the exact opposite of what a good writer should do. A good writer should tell stories. A true artist must remove himself from his art. An example that I always come back to is the acting of Gary Oldman. He is an actor who so thoroughly inhabits his part that the man himself disappears, and there is only the character.
After reading Self-Editing five or six times (one of few books to have enjoyed that privilege), I realized that transparency is the root of all that is good in art. And in life. They say you must lose yourself to find yourself, and transparency is how you do that as an artist. By working hard to remove your self-conscious affectations from your work, you find that your spirit was always present in the work itself, and your deliberate presence was clouding the truth. And the part of you that's there may surprise even you. You may not be the person you'd like to think you are, but you might just be the person you need to be.
If you've ever looked at a work of art and felt like it was "trying too hard", it lacked transparency. If you've ever read a book and thought "Boy, this author sure thinks he's clever with all the fancy words", the story lacked transparency. On the other hand, if you've ever picked up a book and found yourself unable to put it down, chances are that author was transparent; s/he didn't stand in the way of the work itself. If you've ever finished a book and found yourself missing the characters or homesick for the novel's setting, that book was utterly transparent.
What more could an author possibly want? What better feeling could there be than having readers fall in love with your characters and settings such that they forget you--and they--exist while reading your work? What incredible magic! How could there be any greater reward?
Anybody can sing and dance and have coins thrown at them. Only a great artist can walk off stage and bring his audience to tears when they see what he left behind.
And the keys to learning this are all contained in Self Editing for Fiction Writers.
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