It doesn’t matter if you’re a plotter or a pantser, you’re going to doubt your structure and wonder if you’re doing it right.
I’ve been both, at one time. Well. One at a time. (Started detailed plotter, changed to pantser, sort of, except for most books I sort of “see” the entire structure from above, just not the details, even before I start. It’s just I internalized the structure. (We don’t talk about A Few Good Men. Heartburn. One scene at a time. Rushing into the unknown. I never want to write another book that way, and yes, Happy Fun Murphy, taunting thereof. Right.))
But you’re going to doubt it. You can, after a while and with much work, kind of play both sides of the equation: writer and reader. But never perfectly.
In the same way you can set up a camera and record yourself walking down the street, but you can’t physically see yourself walking down the street. (We have security cams. I was absolutely convinced I looked like a gnome. I know, I HAVE gained a lot of weight, but this looked…. bizarre?
Then I saw a recording of a relatively skinny friend walking out. He also looked lumpish and massive. So, it’s the angle, and not at all like reality. Cameras do make a difference.)
So you’ll worry. Even if all your fans say it’s great, you’ll wonder. Should he have known about the stolen shoe before the Sword Dance? Should they have had the talk about herrings before the battle of the lampreys? You’ll worry for years.
And it’s silly.
First, stop having the horrors about books you wrote twenty years ago. You’re done. They’re out there. Some people love them, some people hate them. No you can’t “Fix” them now. It won’t win you any fans and might lose you some. And that’s just me, talking to myself.
Second, no novel is perfect, but you can perfect yours before you let it out of your hands.
What you can’t do, besides making it perfect, is fixing it while writing it.
You can’t fix the language, you can’t fix the structure, and you can’t fix that character who was supposed to be the hero and is the world’s greatest ass on the page.
My husband does this. Every paragraph he stops and fixes. Unless it’s a short story and he’s under deadline. Which is why he hasn’t finished a novel in…. um…. 20 years?
So, don’t do that. Because all you do is keep going back. And then you have three pages at the end of the month.
No, no one is saying to write badly. I’m saying, vent your anxiety some other way.
I recommend you write the thing through as much as you can in your writing time. And when you stop writing and are doing other things — the best for this are hand washing dishes or ironing. I don’t know why — think about the problem you’re having and how to solve it. Then dry your hands, write your solution on a sticky note and pin it to your board, stick it to the monitor. (My monitors often look like porcupines by the end of a novel.)
When you finish the book, read it over, to make sure you aren’t imagining problems. (I often am.)
Depending on how much of a mess it is, i.e. if it’s more coherent than three books smooched together? Send it to beta readers. See what they say.
If they see some problems particularly some of the same problems you anticipated? Start going through again and read your notes on how to fix. Do a heavy fix-pass.
When you’re done, send to other betas. Also, go do something else, preferably another book, then come back to this.
When you get the replies back, go over and do another fix if needed.
Then do a pass for grammar and wording.
And let it go. It won’t be perfect, but it’s often much better than you would think, particularly when you read over it ten years later.
No novel will be perfect. And trying to fix a novel while writing it just means you neither fix nor write.
Write the whole thing. Then fix what you can. Then publish.
I bet you no one complains about what you thought were glaring mistakes.
But don’t worry, they’ll find really stupid stuff to complain about, causing you to murmur “but I don’t have a character named Silver Dawn! What even?”
And none of it matters. Shut up and write the next one.
Books are communication. They aren’t complete till they’re read.
Mad Genius Club 
17 responses to “Trust and Verify – Sarah A. Hoyt”
One of the things I’ve discovered (lack of beta-testers) is to read the book backwards.
Seriously. Start from the end, go to the start.
I’ve caught more “what the?!?” moments than I care to ever admit to…
There’s also the muttering it out loud approach. It’s truly astonishing how many duplicated words there are, especially over a line boundary — your eye simply glosses over “the the”. It’s the one thing automated editors are good at catching.
I’ve found the text to speech function in MS Word useful, when I remember it. (Last book release suffered from “been struggling with this since late 2020, it’s getting kicked out the door with what attention the volunteer proofreaders/copyeditors and I can spare.)
The writing is done inside my head. The typing is what happens when I’m trying to get it OUT of my head. But it needs to have formed inside my head first. This is why, when I actually sit down to write, I can flow 2000 words or more in an hour. They’re already there, they just need to be let out.
yep. 3k here.
If you never finish writing your stories, eventually you teach yourself to never finish.
That too. Absolutely.
And it takes a bit to learn to tell “I must keep polishing!” from “Something’s missing. I need to step away from this and mull/chew on/research it a bit more.” The Scottish story has a plot, most of the first chapter, part of the second, then stalled. I opted to set it aside and work on other things. Now I know what the problem was (1.two plots – better pick one! 2. needed more folklore) and how to move the thing ahead.
One thing to do if you find yourself not finishing is to sit down and re-read your stories in an afternoon. It can cause something to jump out at you.
I seem to recall that Heinlein gave very similar advice on writing, “Finish what you start.” BTW, I don’t recall a Silver Dawn, but Firesign Theater’s, “The Tale of the Giant Rat of Sumatra,” including a MIss Violet Dawn Dudley, as the ingenue.
I endorse thinking while washing dishes. I don’t ever iron these days, so I substitute cat rotation for that.
I don’t iron much these days, either. Boys moved out, Dan works from home.
On finishing things, Close Relative finally convinced me to make the cover something I can actually do Right Now, not something that remains at the far end of a steep learning curve. Because it doesn’t matter unless it is published.
So, short story coming soon-ish. Because now I have to re-figure-out all the Amazon bullsh1t I haven’t touched in three years.
Phantom? Ping me on hotmail, please.
The Royal Road experiment means as soon as the chapter hits, it gets read. I rarely (and I do mean VERY rarely) get to fix things. The Mr Three Arms problem got fixed. A lot didn’t. And won’t, until The End.
My problem is the universe knows I’m trying to write. Last three times I put digits to keyboard, there was a medical emergency, a death, and an explosion. I’ve scribbled in emergency rooms more times than I’d like to remember. Once, at the viewing before a funeral (he’d understand).
… I’ve been sneaking plot into notes that Will Be Typed someday. Maybe I can take a couple days’ vacation and do the thing. Soonish. It’s planned. Also, Spirit Beasts wants to be written, too. And promises to be short. Like, novella short, if not short story length.
I believe this to be lies.
Oh. That. I hate the idea the Universe is fighting me, but seriously? Today I sat down at keyboard at 11
I have two WIPs in the same universe just now, with very different stories and tones and everything. Worse yet, one of them has been in-process for 5+ years and its plot arc is less than half done.
So I have taken to re-listening to them at work either with the MSWord app’s text-to-speech tool or the Natural Reader app (still AI-voiced, but better intonation and pronunciation than the Android version of MSWord has). It both gets my mind back into the story and shows ALL the typos and glitches I might have missed.