The Ink-Pot and the Palette

In a talk before the Romance Writers of America conference in 2018, prolific author and neuropsychology professor Jennifer Lynn Barnes exhorted her audience to stop editing the pleasure out of their books.

(Link is to download-for-purchase, well worth the six bucks if you're a writer.)

Barnes's earliest published books, she says, were selling better than later works, though the later works were "objectively better," showing more craft, skill, and discipline. She set out to discover why, and what she found was an uninhibited delivery of pleasure in the earlier books that she had self-consciously edited out of the later ones.

This reminded me so much of the fanfic-to-profic writer's journey that I checked, and yup, she's a fanfic scholar as well as a doctor of psychology. Fanfic is pleasure. It is all about hitting the pleasure button over and over and over again. It's probably why almost everyone I asked said that fanfic is the one kind of reading they still have attention for in these troubled times.

What does Barnes mean by "pleasures"? She identifies a handful of universal pleasures:

• Sex
• Touch
• Beauty
• Wealth
• Power
• Danger
• Competition

There are, presumably, others. (She acknowledges that "universal" here means most people in most cultures.)

She analyzes three stories--The Hunger Games, Titanic, and Twilight--to show how all those pleasures are abundantly present in huge mega-hits.

Then she goes into the smaller, less universal, more personal pleasures, which she calls Your Personal Id List. These are little story elements you love to encounter in your reading, and love to add to your own writing--things that scratch specific itches that you can't necessarily consciously explain.

These are the things Professor Barnes was editing out of her later books, thinking they were repetitious, unprofessional, somehow not original or literary enough.

Your Personal Id List can include absolutely anything. She reveals several of her own, then asks the audience to share some of theirs, and they run the gamut from twins, to eating ice cream, to "there's only one bed". From big important jewels, to long haired men, to forbidden love. From dining together, to scenes in the rain, to siblings.

Most of us can instantly name a dozen or so of our favorite things--things we've included in every story, things we adored in our childhood reading. Our bulletproof kinks. My writing community avidly jumped all over this concept, and it turns out, giving ourselves permission to include that one thing yet again makes writing hard scenes easier and more fun.

Here are some of mine:

• Competent craftsperson
• Weaving, knitting, spinning, dyeing--fabric stuff
• Making physical things
• Fluent in another language
• Portraits, painting
• Tailoring
• Men wearing earrings
• Home, coming home, arriving in a comfortable place
• Rings (especially magic ones)
• Liminal places
• Albatrosses
• People from the stars, people who are stars, stars in general

What are some of yours?

I've been producing the Story Grid Editor Roundtable, a reasonably successful writing podcast, for the past couple of years. We've made 115 episodes, 95 of them fully scripted hours. I've edited them all. I'm proud of our work. We put it out there in less-than-perfect state, improved as we went along, and broke a lot of new ground in our subject area.



Our long-range purpose was to give away the store: generously share our fiction-editing expertise and thereby slowly build our platform and our "social proof," and attract paying clients. This has worked fairly well--better for some of us than for others. Me, I'm unapproachable and scary, so my clientele has grown slowly, but I get the scary, serious people, and that's how I like it.

Now signs are pointing to my leaving the show behind. The first sign was a bit of a rearguard action a week or two ago that seemed intended to undermine my own contribution to the show. The second was Kim announcing her intention to leave at the end of our current 12-episode series. The third was my own inability to even think of a contribution to the episode we recorded last week--to the point where I made no contribution at all. This pandemic situation robs me of about nine-tenths of my mental battery most days.

Naturally in a group endeavor some in-fighting is bound to emerge. Differences in style, goals and personalities have become more marked in this time of unprecedented stress. What's more, nothing lasts forever, and it's okay to let a good thing go when it no longer feels like fun.

Still, I've got a considerable investment here. If I walk away, I cede the platform we've built together. There's no obvious way to carry any of that social capital away with me.

So I proposed to the group that instead of recording an episode in our usual Monday morning slot this week, we have a meeting to discuss refreshing the show's format and trying new things as a way of salvaging it. My proposal met with near-silence, so I imagine that Monday's meeting will result, after all, in my leaving.

I'm not sure I care. Right now (and the mood is extremely variable these days) I feel only relief at the thought of no longer having to produce an episode a week. But next week, who knows?

I'm writing a new story.

It began as an experiment. Shawn Coyne, my editing mentor, wanted to find out whether an accomplished writer (me) could create a fresh story by borrowing the deep structure of a masterwork, but changing the setting.

If I could, he would publish it.

The masterwork he chose was Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain," and my task was to transpose it to Regency England.

The experiment was a success in that it did inspire me to start a new story, something I haven't been able to do for more than three years.

It was a failure, however, in that all Shawn's rules blocked me for almost nine months, and I wasn't able to break the blockage till I broke most of the rules.

Once I finally let my story diverge--from "Brokeback," from Shawn's idea of its meaning, from the scenes I'd written in the first days of the experiment, and at last, from the experiment itself--it was no longer the thing Shawn wanted. Which means Story Grid probably won't publish it.

It is the story of two lower-class men (servants) who meet on the job and fall in love. But that's where the "Brokeback" scaffolding ends. I'm changing everything else. Above all, I am not going to kill one of them. I don't think we need any more buried gays.

Instead I borrowed other stories' scaffolding: the devoted but deluded servant in The Remains of the Day. The relationship dynamic from The Untamed. Part of the ending of The Song of Achilles.

And the true-life history of Matthew Tomlinson whose 1810 diaries were recently uncovered.

I'm submitting the first act of this no-longer-anything-like-Brokeback story to a writing partner in a couple of days, and we'll see how it goes.

What's the best and worst criticism you've ever received? And how did you assimilate it?

I'm thinking mostly of feedback on writing, but I'm interested in experiences of any kind of critique you may have received on any kind of activity.

Here's why: In September I'll become a certified Story Grid Editor. There's a big discussion among Story Grid course-mates about how to make sure the client is ready for the editorial work.

Well, receiving feedback is a skill, and I want to write a little book or cheat-sheet for prospective clients to help them build that skill. I've managed to acquire it, but I don't know how I did it.

• Do you have the skill?
• How did you get it?
• Was there a particular turning point?
• Or do you avoid critique altogether? If so, why? And is there any ideal situation under which you'd be open to it?

I finished my final draft of Restraint on Thursday and sent it out yesterday to four champion fellow writers willing to read it for structure, pacing, flow, and logic. That's a big, big job.

I expect to get suggestions back for further small changes, and of course I spotted typos the instant I hit the send button. I could undoubtedly still shave a few words for style, or add a sentence here or there to fill out a minor plot point, but the novel--this novel--is finished. Any big changes at this point would be making it into a different novel.

It's a little weird, cleaning up all the files, closing all the research tabs, shutting down the gigantic spreadsheet called "Engineering Restraint" after more than two years of rewrites. The prospect of starting a new project is daunting.

But I'm starting. I'm thinking about the new political situation, and how it's my responsibility to write for the Resistance in some way. Not a dystopian Hunger-Games-ish thing--that's not who I am as a writer--but somehow a weaving of resistance into the fabric of the historical novel I'm already researching.

The biggest difference, I'm finding, between a novel-length fanfic and a publishable novel isn't that you have to change the characters' names and give them different haircolors (though there is that).

The biggest difference is that you're writing for strangers.

( Telling the story to strangers )

The second meeting of the Super Hardcore Editing Group left me a bit wrung out. The work is intense and so are the people doing it. A lot of brainpower goes into those two hours--so much brainpower, in fact, that I was worthless for anything except Twitter and grocery shopping until six hours had gone by.

We spend little to no time on our prose. Two of our four members don't even have much prose yet. Just outlines. Tent Poles (PDF). We've spent 90% of our meeting time so far digging deep into each other's story summaries, trying to place those poles accurately so that the fabric of the story can be stretched taut over them.

I'm struggling with the middle of my novel. Apparently this is a common problem. The beginning of a story tends to be clear in a first draft and not that hard to spiff up in further drafts. The final act is typically pretty clear too--it's often obvious from the very moment Inspiration plants the story seed in your mind.

But my middle 50%--that is, everything between my First Plot Point (the event that introduces my conflict and drives my protagonists on their path) and the Second Plot Point (the last bit of new information, which drives the story to resolution) is a complete rat's nest tangle of loose ends, extra characters, scenes with no arc or direction...a mess.

A roadmap out of the mess is beginning to emerge thanks to the Sheggers. But boy does my brain hurt.

In my quest to level up in my writing, I set out blindly last summer to revise my novel.

My friend Sue lobbed inspiration at me in the form of The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, and I began to see myself as a Warrior for Art. It was a thrilling time, overcoming Resistance, writing every day for four hours, and going outdoors in the early evenings after a hard session, with the deliciously overtaxed brain of the Real Writer.

Though I was fixing small things in my novel, I sensed I wasn't really making progress. But I was inspired and hopeful enough to give a large sum of money to a professional editor, who, I believed, would guide me to the next level. Alas, the professional editor couldn't, or wouldn't, My hopes--not to mention my pride--went down the drain with my money.

It was a sad time. One of my nieces, always kind and inquiring, asked me one day, "How's the writing coming?" and I said, "Oh, I've given up. I'm not calling myself a writer at all anymore."

( It was a low point in my writing life. )

Tuesday critique group keeps getting better! We have now left copy-editing behind, and everyone is pumped up about making real, structural improvements to their work.

The beauty of a weekly group with the same people is that we all commit our pet faults over and over, so I get to see Faults A, B, and C* every Monday, and every Tuesday, I get to dig deep and find constructive suggestions for fixing them. And every Wednesday, when I go back to my own writing, those faults leap off my page at me, like whoa, I didn't realize I was doing that!--and I now have an idea of how to fix them.

And in this way, little by little, I'm learning to fix the faults before I commit them! Like, not committing them in the first place, almost!

I never realized before how valuable a writing group could be, but it's turning out to be priceless.

*Here are the some popular recurrent problems I've learned to see so far, thanks to this group:

Pulling punches: can't bear to be so mean to your characters. A comfort after every hurt. People agree. Things Are Nice. This is a beautiful place. Please don't fight. (I am so GUILTY of this!)

Swallowed the SHOW DON'T TELL pill which is a beginner pill that should be spat back out as soon as possible: dares not tell us a character is surprised; instead bends over backwards to describe surprised facial expressions and body postures. AKA The Eyebrow Problem. (I err in the opposite direction.)

Telling the Truth Instead of Telling a Story: "but they need to eat! This restaurant scene makes perfect sense" in the middle of an action arc. AKA "shoe leather", "stage directions", and "macro lens". (Still struggling with this one every day. I suspect it will only go away completely in third drafts.)

I'm tearing up the world with this Story Grid method! It's amazing.

Fully 43 scenes lacked Conflict, Arc, Turning Point, Stakes, and/or Plot Purpose. Some can be fixed, but a whole bunch are deadwood. No matter how much I've loved each of their conflict-free little faces, they're on the chopping block.

Now that the deadwood is off my mental radar, the real heart and bones of the novel have started to emerge. It went something like this:

ME: I've written a gay Regency romance with one major flaw: it doesn't have a happy ending.

STORYGRID: No you haven't. You've written a historical social drama that doesn't require a happy ending. Its major flaws arise from your misconception about its genre.

ME: But...but...it's all about love!

STORYGRID: No it's not. It's about self-expression, honor, and keeping your place in society.

ME: Well, but my Antagonist, the ex-boyfriend, is motivated by jealousy and greed, just like a romance antagonist.

STORYGRID: No, your Antagonist, Society, is motivated by its desperate need to maintain the status quo, just like a Social Drama Antagonist. It gives the weapon of blackmail to its unwitting accomplice, the ex-BF, who is nothing more than Society's bitch. Society needs to be rid of him just as surely as it needs to destroy the Protagonists.

ME: But my Protagonist wants love, just like in any romance!

STORYGRID: No. Your Protagonist wants to surrender to his sexuality but he needs to, ahem, Restrain himself. He wants to flout Society's rules, but he needs the goods that social conformity provides. He wants Tristan because he needs guidance and structure and cover to be his true self.

ME: Oh! I get it! And Tristan needs to prove he's a real legitimate grown-up nobleman, so he takes on the role of John's protector.

STORYGRID: And it just happens that true love arises from that, but look at the tragedy that comes with it.

ME: Wow.

STORYGRID: Do you still think you were ever writing a Regency Romance?

Me: *tiny voice* Nope.

STORYGRID: *dusts hands together*. Okay. Get back to work.