Avatar photoSteven Savage

Just Who Is Writing This?

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

So I continue to edit A Bridge To The Quiet Planet, where internet using gods, ancient orders of monster hunters, and trains on spirit-possessed tracks collide.  After the collision they exchange insurance information and complain behind each other’s back.

I found the editing felt  strange, odd.  There were parts I hated or even dreaded – which is entirely unfair to my incredible editor.  Thanks to her work this book is literally twice as better as I had created at the start.

Now you know me, I have to analyze something when I don’t understand it and figure it out.  Oh, and share it with you, my fellow creatives.

Why did I have this dread of editing?

I began analyzing these feelings and realized my basic worry was to find the book was an unsalvagable mess, that it would be impossible or too much effort to fix it.  Now my editor is all about pushing people forward – if the book had been a mess she’d still have left me enough comments to demessify it.

That’s when it struck me – my worry was that I couldn’t write it and couldn’t edit it.  In short – I had Impostor Syndrome.

I began to realize this strikes a lot of writers I see.  We’re there, writing away and are still convinced we’re not writers.  We think:

  • “My work is flawed so it’s not any good” – all work is flawed, so you keep at it and get better.
  • “No one cares about my work” – Someone will always care.  If you do, someone else will.
  • “I don’t have a specialty” – Well, fine, good, you’re broad.
  • “I’m only good at one thing” – That’s fine you, you’re a specialist.

Why is this?  I find two reasons.

First, writing is not an exact science unless your subject is very exact and like a science.  Because of this there’s no exact way to know you’re doing it right and certainly no way to know you’re doing it perfectly.  This makes it easy to imagine all the things you could do differently and never think of “right enough” – or developing your own standards.

Secondly, writers are imaginative.  We can come up with all sorts of ways to decide how bad we are.  We turn imagination on ourselves.

But a writer is someone who writes and improves.  If you do this, you’re a writer.  You’re only not a writer if you quit or stagnate.

Realizing this, I felt better. I’m going to do what I always do – forge ahead and write and get better.

 

-Steven Savage

All My Good Bad Influences

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

As I edit away on A Bridge To The Quiet Planet, my tale of a techno-magical world and an interplanetary road trip involving holy books, I am busy finding out how I mishandled my good influences.

This is not due to my own genius, this is due to my amazing editor, who I am willing to introduce to anyone who wants to pay her money to edit.  She is fantastic at pointing out flaws in my work, leaving comments, and using search-replace to highlight all my common errors.  Some pages of my book look like a vengeful highlighter achieved sentience and attacked common word combinations it had a grudge against.

Between her feedback and her markup, I began to realize that my major influences were also ones influencing my flaws.  Allow me to explain:

First, there’s a chance if you’re inspired by an author or a creator, you won’t do it quite right.

Second, you may make the same mistakes your inspiration makes – and likely being less polished than they, you’ll make them worse.

Third, your inspirations together may not sit quite right.  You need to find a way to fuse them into a whole.

So what happened with me?  Well my editor noticed passive voice (lots of was), strange asides, weird wordplay, and moments I was abstract from the characters.  Nothing unusual, but then I looked at my inspirations and realized where I’d stumbled.

My core influences are Sir Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, and Dave Barry.  If you read my fiction, the inspiration is obvious – I love playing with words, exploring settings, and deconstructing ideas.  Take these trends too far and you end up with infodumps and trying to be too witty.

I was also influenced by anime, with the fantastical elements, fusions of genres, and passion for characterization.  Again, you can take these things too far – it took watching My Hero Academia to realize that I too liked to do giant flashbacks that could be handled better when not animated.

Finally, I love oddball character stuff of all kinds – indeed one sub-theme of A Bridge To The Quiet planet is that it’s basically several parties of unusual personalities having an adventure and colliding with each other.  Its a tale of magic and super-science and demons, but is basically about the people in this world.  You can get distracted by the oddities and details and loose touch with the fact these are people.

So I did too much infodumping, wrong details, wrong approach, and got a bit too full of  myself.  But there’s one more thing I forgot.

I was following several styles – I was not combining them into one.  I was doing a story of intimate character portraits and giant weird worlds, of human eccentricity and complex societies.  There was a feeling of discord, of the two not blending – or of one dominating the other.

In short I took some of my inspirations too far or in the wrong direction – and forgot to find a style that fit to realize all my inspirations.

As you edit your work, look to your inspirations.  Then find out how you might be doing them wrong – or doing them right and not harmonizing them.

-Steven Savage

Steve’s Update 9/2/2018

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

Here’s the latest.  And would you believe it’s still busy.  A lot of August was overloaded.

So what have I done the last week?

  • A Bridge To The Quiet Planet:  Editing of course.  I have yet to get it up for pre-readers, but plan to this week.  It’s going quite well overall – but probably updates are gonna get a bit boring for awhile.
  • Way With Worlds: Keeping up on the Organization book.  Right now my guess is that one is out in October.  Again this is a side thing to the novel, but it is a good relaxer.
  • Seventh Sanctum: I’ve updated The Nexus with a change.  Instead of linking to other generators, I liked to assorted creative resources, including other generator sites.
  • Other: My car died so I had to get a new one.  Took a bit of time.

What am I going to do this week?

  • A Bridge To The Quiet Planet: It’s gonna be editing and more editing.  And I’ll post chapters for pre-readers.  I also plan to use Grammarly to help me out – I hear its spectacular.
  • Way With Worlds: More writing (I’m seeing a trend here)
  • Other: I’m speaking on self-publishing this weekend – if you’re in the Bay Area let me know.  I also hope to do some Sanctum stuff.

-Steven Savage