What about you? Any pet peeves in other people’s writing? Do tell!

One of the most difficult processes of revision is cutting (but not necessarily deleting) chapters or excerpts that you’re invested in. Those chapters may hold some personal meaning, or you may simply have spent a shitload of time writing them. Let’s say you spent a week researching every detail from which trees are indigenous to the region in which the antagonist took his vacation to the front page headlines of the Kansas City Star on November 17, 1949. Let’s say you spent a week writing it, another week polishing it, and yet another week revising it after having had it critiqued by your best friend, your Aunt Gracie, and your award-winning writers’ group. And let’s say, worst of all, that it’s really good. Tough luck. Chop it. Because if it doesn’t move the story along, doesn’t deepen the reader’s understanding of the character, or just doesn’t fit where you stuck it between Chapters 21 and 23 as a flashback that takes place within a dream sequence, it’s gotta go. But how can you make that excision while losing the least amount of blood?

1. Fist of all, when you’re writing chapters, don’t spend too much time on the details until you’re done with the entire manuscript. I know the temptation to spend hours doing research because research means you get to use the Internet (and we all want excused to use the Internet) and research means you get to put off doing any real writing. But it’s better to write “TK” (short for “tokum” an intentional misspelling of “to come”) and to come back to it later. I can’t tell you how many chapters I’ve spent weeks writing and revising to perfection only to remove them completely from my manuscript. Now when I sit down to write, I resist the urge to over-research before it’s time.

2. Second, don’t delete the chapters you remove from your manuscript. Just move them to a separate folder titled “Extra Chapters” or “Extra Scenes.” You’ll find a use for them someday, either as scenes in you next novel, as standalone pieces to be published in magazines or journals, or as fodder for other stories, chapters, and blog posts.

3. Don’t take it personally. Your writing is not you. If someone suggests you remove a section, it doesn’t mean you aren’t a good writer. In fact, it doesn’t mean that that passage is not well written. It just means that the book will work better without it. Which brings me to number four.

4. Tell that chapter to take one for the team. A book is like a team and and each individual chapter, or passage, needs to act in the best interest of that team. If that means benching it, then so be it. Give that chapter a glass of lemonade and some sunscreen. Let it watch the game. But keep it off the field until the game is won.

5. And finally, don’t get too attached to your writing. Remember the story of Rodin, who chopped off the hands of Honore de Balzac. Quoted from Laos Egri’s The Art of Dramatic Writing:

Rodin, the great French sculptor, had just finished the statue of Honore de Balzac. The figure wore a long robe with long loose sleeves. The hands were folded in front.
Rodin stepped back, exhausted but triumphant, and eyed his work with satisfaction. It was a masterpiece!
Like any artist, he needed someone to share his happiness. Although it was four o’clock in the morning, he hastened to wake up one of his students.
The master rushed ahead with mounting excitement and watched the young man’s reaction.
The student’s eyes slowly focused upon the hands.
“Wonderful!” he cried. “What hands… Master, I’ve never seen such marvelous hands before!”
Rodin’s face darkened. A moment later Rodin swept out of his studio again. A short while later he returned with another student in tow.
The reaction was almost the same. As Rodin watched eagerly, the pupil’s gaze fastened on the hands of the statue and stayed there.
“Master,” the student said reverently,”only a God could have created such hands. They are alive!”
Apparently Rodin had expected something else, for once more he was off, now in a frenzy. When he returned he was dragging another bewildered student with him.
“Those hands… those hands…” the new arrival exclaimed, in the same reverent tone as the others,”if you had never done anything else, Master, those hands would make you immortal!”
Something must have snapped in Rodin, for with a dismayed cry he ran to a corner of the studio and grabbed a fearful looking axe. He advanced toward the statue with the apparent intention of smashing it to bits.
Horror stricken, his students threw themselves upon him, but in his madness he shook them off with superhuman strength. He rushed to the statue and with one well aimed blow, chopped off the magnificent hands.
Then he turned to his stupefied pupils, his eyes blazing.
“Fools!” he cried. “I was forced to destroy these hands because they had a life of their own. They didn’t belong to the rest of the composition. Remember this, and remember it well: no part is more important than the whole!”
And that’s why the statue of Balzac stands in Paris, without hands. The long loose sleeves of the robe appear to cover the hands, but in reality Rodin chopped them off because they seemed to be more important than the whole figure.
Neither the premise nor any other part of a play has a separate life of its own. All must blend into a harmonious whole.

What about you? How do you balance your scenes with your plot? Do you outline your plot first and then write your scenes to conform to that? Or do you write the scenes, try to cram them into a plot (the way I do), and then end up with a whole lot of deleted scenes?

What about you? What is your process for starting a new project? Where do you begin?

For myself, I have a very vague idea of what my next book will be. First I thought it was going to be nonfiction. Then I realized that I never read nonfiction and get really bored reading nonfiction and that all I really care to read are literary novels. So then it occurred to me that maybe I need to take my nonfiction research and turn it into a novel. I like that idea! But I am SO SO far from beginning a draft. I haven’t even begun to research it let alone come up with an outline or a plot. Oy. I get anxious just thinking about the process. And I envision myself (maybe this will be a self-fulfilling prophecy) taking years to really figure out a) What it is I want to say b) How I’m going to say it (plot), and c) What style I want to say it in. Maybe if it were my full-time job I could whip off a draft in a year, but with two kids, freelance editing, blogging, and finishing up what I hope will be the last revision of my memoir, I see it taking more like 5. And in five years, Tawna Fenske, and all fast writers like her, will have whipped off another six books, two or three of which will perhaps get published.

What about you? Are you a lightning speed writer like Tawna Fenske or a pokey poke writer like me? Do you wish you could write faster than you do, or are you happy with your pace?

So what about you? How do you motivated/trick/bribe yourself to get work done?

The first thing that helped me was my goals group. Together with several other writers, I meet every two weeks for an hour to set and discuss goals. We start by checking in on how we did with our goals—whether we achieved them or not, and if not, why not. Sometimes we have a homework assignment that we discuss (like what behaviors/beliefs are preventing us from making our goals and how we can change those); other times one person discusses what’s going on for him/her and that conversation helps the whole group. We usually end by setting goals for the following two weeks. I find that if I don’t set goals (for example, I missed my goals group meeting on my birthday and never bothered to e-mail goals to the group), I don’t achieve them. The goals group is extremely effective for me. We also have buddies, a partner within the group with whom we can check in with between meetings. My goal buddy and I usually check in for ten minutes during the week we don’t meet as a group. So at my last goals meeting I talked about my slump and set a goal to get eight hours of work done between Friday and Sunday, with the hope that getting my butt back in the chair would remotivate me. And it did.

As for the publishing industry and how bad things are, I just can’t think about it. I have to get the book revised to the point that I can’t improve it anymore. Then back out into the world (ie querying agents). I’ve invested too much time and money at this point to give up on it.

The revision process isn’t any less daunting. I still don’t feel like I know exactly what I need to do. But I have a big long list of suggestions, and I’m just taking them one at a time. I’m reading through the entire manuscript and marking where my character is weak and could be stronger. Once I get through that and make those changes, I’ll move on to the next step. It’s hard making such small progress, but, like running, there is no bad writing day. Every run is a good run, no matter how short or slow. Like I wrote at the beginning of the year , baby steps are the key to getting things done.

I was an oops baby, the last in a line of eight kids, born nine years after my brother. “I’m an only child with seven brothers and sisters” I told my parents after learning about the psychology of birth order in my high school Psychology class. I was too tall and too thin to be beautiful, or even very pretty. I had abnormally dry skin, and I wore my pants pinned at the sides so they wouldn’t fall down. I thought models were dumb and superficial and only gained a passing interest after a girl I lifeguarded with told me she had earned $800 in one day. I was from a middle class family and went to a private high school where a lot of girls had a lot more money than I did (In fact, I think all but one of my friends had more money than I did.) And I wanted money. I wanted the entitlement that came with it, the confidence, the carefree attitude, and the STUFF—fancy homes and cars and clothes. Our Catholic school uniforms were supposed to make us all equal, but you could tell who had money and who didn’t by the cars they drove to school, the jewelry, the hairdos, and the clothes they wore on non-uniform days.

In addition to money, I wanted adventure in my life. Maybe it was all the books I had read—from Danny Dunn, Time Traveler to Around the World in Eighty Days. I had wanted to study abroad during my junior year (Switzerland, so I could heli-ski) or do Outward Bound in New Zealand, but my parents couldn’t afford either one. I was bored to death with suburban Michigan with its strip malls and house parties, and I wanted to see the world, to ride subways in big cities and travel to foreign countries and learn foreign languages. I guess French class fostered my particular interest in Paris.

I also wanted romance. I’d been a romantic since I was 14 (again, maybe thanks to all the books I read), and I fantasized constantly about meeting the perfect boyfriend—gorgeous, funny, intelligent, nice—and living happily ever after. But while I was reading books, the more popular, more outgoing, more beautiful girls were getting the guys.

Modeling offered it all—money, foreign travel, validation and the chance to meet gorgeous guys. I think my mom filled my head with those romantic notions, too. She was always reading romance novels and watching television (including “Dallas,” “Dynasty,” and General Hospital”), and she was enthralled by glamour—wealth and fashion and romance. She would tell me, “No guy will date a picky eater” when I wouldn’t eat my greens, instead of “They’ll make you healthy and strong.”

I’d always been a serious student, and planned on earning a PhD one day, so it was out of character for me to ditch college to move cross-country to San Francisco, and then on to Paris, by myself at 18 to work as a fashion model. I guess I was a daydreamer, someone who fantasized about living in Thornfield Hall—the whole fairytale lifestyle as I mentioned above. But is that enough motivation? Or is there something I’m missing? I didn’t have a bad childhood, didn’t come from a broken home (although it was plenty dysfunctional). Is wanting money, adventure and romance enough to entice you to follow me for 300 pages through Europe and Japan? Or do I need something more?

Below is the first modeling picture I had taken after I cut off my long copper hair, shaved it up the back, and bleached it platinum. I was living in San Francisco, and I was 18.