On the Mysteries of Writing
This is the first entry in the “On the Mysteries of” series, with future stories exploring human anatomy and medicine.
My last story included mention of how someone like me, with informally diagnosed dyslexia, might cope with writing professionally. Part of the answer was doing it slowly. The other part was leaning on help from as many people and apps as possible. I drew many of my inspirations from Stephen King when I began writing in earnest. Read his 2000 memoir, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, for a peek behind his curtain.
One of my academic advisors complained that I disappeared when I wrote papers. I couldn’t write amid the chaos of twenty people talking and shuffling around the lab. I needed the quiet of home to concentrate on building one sentence after another. Writing comes slowly to me, a few words at a time, so it takes me hours to write a few paragraphs. I always envied the students who struggled to keep their papers under the ten-page limit of many university assignments. I could barely write five pages.
Walking helps stimulate my brain to come up with ideas and plot solutions—I call it “perfusing my brain” after the idea that walking raises my blood pressure and brings more oxygen and nutrients into the deepest recesses. Writers, including Virginia Woolf, Henry David Thoreau, Charles Dickens, and Stephen King, have extolled the benefits of walking on their writing. King said in a 2014 interview, “I wake up. I eat breakfast. I walk about three and a half miles. I come back, I go out to my little office, where I’ve got a manuscript, and the last page that I was happy with is on top. I read that, and it’s like getting on a taxiway. I’m able to go through and revise it and put myself – click – back into that world, whatever it is.”
I’m not alone in needing a quiet place to write. Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (she wrote in a converted toolshed). Others who have written about their writing spaces include Stephen King (“put your desk in a corner”), Graham Greene, who rented a secret office, William Faulkner, who detached his doorknob once inside his study, Charles Dickens, who wrote on a desk and chair he brought with him when he had to write away from home, and Maya Angelou, who rented secret hotel rooms for writing in every city she lived in (she moved between many cities in her eighty-six years).
I’ve done all my writing since 2004 at a desk in the corner of a ten-by-thirteen-foot room with a sloped ceiling. When the door doesn’t block out traffic or construction noise, I keep wax earplugs handy. To reduce distraction, I mute my phone and turn off spelling and grammar checkers for the first draft. My first drafts are too rough to show anyone, so I go through them several times with spelling and grammar checkers (Microsoft Word and Grammarly), edit print versions on a tablet so I can mark them up with a stylus (using OneNote saves paper), and listen to them using Word’s “Read Aloud” feature. When they’re ready to share, I send them to two beta readers: Mom and Sarah. They have their own reading and writing styles that complement mine.
I let my writing sit for at least a week before I look at it again, preferably longer, but when I hope to write something every couple of weeks, I often don’t have more than a week away from it. With books, I can get months of distance from them while I catch up on queer reading and projects around the house. There’s no shortage of maintenance on a house built in 1891. When I come back to a piece with fresh eyes, I’m often embarrassed by what I find and blame it on temporary insanity. I do at least two more reads in printed and e-book formats before I go to press. Each read exposes more typos, awkward phrasing, and filter words that, in an ideal world, spelling and grammar checkers could catch. Software can’t replace the human mind yet. Stephen King wrote, “How long you let your book rest—sort of like bread dough between kneadings—is entirely up to you, but I think it should be a minimum of six weeks. During this time, your manuscript will be safely shut away in a desk drawer, aging and (one hopes) mellowing.”
Stephen King writes for his wife, Tabitha, who acts as his first reader and unofficial editor. He wrote, “She and I may argue about many aspects of a book, and there have been times when I’ve gone against her judgment on subjective matters, but when she catches me in a goof, I know it, and thank God I’ve got someone around who’ll tell me my fly’s unzipped before I go out in public that way.” With my first fictionalized memoir, Murder of an Uncommon Man, I ran it through AutoCrit to highlight my overuse of adverbs, cliches, filler words, and repeated phrases before I shared it with a friend who teaches communications. I printed a bound paperback draft (“author’s copy”), and she marked up typos and sections that needed work in pencil. She took it on during her summer break, but it really needed an editor paid for full-time work. I dreamed of finding a publisher who would hire an editor, but I didn’t have any luck finding an agent or a publisher to take it to the next level.
My lack of success with traditional publishing led to a rewarding adventure in self-publishing. I had fun creating the cover, formatting the text, and building it into a book using the different publishing apps. The greatest reward was using it as an introduction to talk to friends about my father’s tragic story, including the book club pictured above. The paperback sits on two library shelves today, and was available electronically in two libraries before it aged out of their systems.
This summer, I’m editing The Transformation of Jennie Heckenlaible and hope to make it publishable with Sarah’s help.[i] This is after two years of working with other writers who did beta reads, and tweaking it while searching for an agent or publisher. Query after query led to rejection, and in their shoes, I might have done the same. They couldn’t sell enough copies to pay for the editing time it would require—Sarah sent me back to do another edit before she could read past the first few pages.
Famously, Stephen King rewrote Never Flinch from scratch after Tabitha rejected it. “When I did the first draft of this book… my wife read that book in the manuscript, and she said, ‘This really isn’t very good. It’s derivative, and it feels like it’s straining to make various connections within the story.’ I took that very hard, but I also took it to heart, and I rewrote the book from the jump.”
I used ProWritingAid’s Chapter Critique and Summary Analysis features to point out stiff dialogue, sections that dragged, repetition, and filter words in The Transformation of Jennie Heckenlaible. An editor once told Stephen King, “Not bad, but PUFFY. You need to revise for length. Formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft—10%. Good luck.”[ii] With Sarah’s help and the maxim “kill your darlings,” I’ve cut 7200 words from the original—about 10%.
My drive to finish and publish The Transformation of Jennie Heckenlaible is the hope that at least one trans teen might benefit from reading a positive transition story in these dark times. Toni Morrison said, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” I benefited from Jennifer Finney Boylan’s 2003 adult transition memoir, She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders, but I’ve heard from agents that few are publishing positive Young Adult transfemme stories. The culture war and generative AI assaults on the publishing industry have taken their toll on queer stories, so I’ll do what I can through self-publishing. I’ll keep you posted on my progress.
Any thoughts? How are you doing? Email me…
For a musical pairing, consider Elvis Costello and the Attractions’ “Everyday I Write the Book.”
[i] This is the rough draft. Read at your own risk!
[ii] “In the spring of my senior year at Lisbon High—1966, this would have been—I got a scribbled comment that changed the way I rewrote my fiction once and forever. Jotted below the machine-generated signature of the editor was this mot: ‘Not bad, but PUFFY. You need to revise for length. Formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%. Good luck.’ I wish I could remember who wrote that note—Algis Budrys, perhaps. Whoever it was did me a hell of a favor. I copied the formula out on a piece of shirt-cardboard and taped it to the wall beside my typewriter. Good things started to happen for me shortly thereafter.”