Advice for beginning writers

Part two: Editing comes in stages

• You can’t expect to get it right the first time, so don’t even try. The purpose of a first draft—be it a page, chapter, or even the entire novel—is just to get your main ideas on paper (especially if you are prone to forgetting your plotline, then it’s really important that you write it out before forgetting it entirely). So in your first pass through, JUST WRITE. Never mind the convention errors—there will be a ton of them—never mind if your story is even chronologically sound, or if your world history is a bit skewed, mixing the Egyptian pyramids with President Andrew Jackson—although that would make for an interesting story—but never mind all that. Get the words on the page and then read through your work to see what a horrendous writer you are and wonder if you even want to continue with this hopeless endeavor.
• Let me note that it is perfectly fine to edit as you go—I do after all—but I usually tend to just edit the small things, like using “there” instead of “their,” and these small things are recognized immediately and changed accordingly. But sometimes when you can’t think of just the perfect things for your characters to say, substitute some lame dialogue in its place until you can come up with something brilliant.
• While editing your work, it would be extremely helpful if you let someone else edit your work with you. I know it’s scary to let someone look at the masterpiece that is your work, but your ultimate goal is to have it read by millions right? So start with a couple of people by letting them edit your chapters/stories, make comments on it, and read though them to see if they can be used to enhance your work.

Birthday times

Here is a birthday parable for you all. But in order to tell a modern parable, we must first examine a great one by the King of parables, Jesus Christ.

My 24^th birthday is similar to a parable Jesus told in the book of Matthew in the New Testament. As I recall, a great king invited all the nobles to come and share in a wedding feast for his son who was getting married. Each royal guest turned down the invitation on account of being “too busy.” The king then invited all the people of the street to come and adorned them with rich robes and sat them down at the royal table with him to celebrate his son’s marriage. And of course, the parable ended with the famous line, “and he threw [the nobles] out into the streets where there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth.”

Pretty ominous last line, eh? But we'll get to that later. Well, on my special day I invited all my closest friends that I have shared several birthdays with already to come and spend the day with me. Let's just say I got the "I'm too busy line" in a variety of ways. Now, I didn't exactly resort to inviting people off the streets (not strangers anyway), but I did run into some friends on the street and invited them to come along. Lo and behold they were the ones who proved themselves to be my friends. I made dinner reservations at a semi-formal restaurant for ten people. You know you are well loved when you sit down to a half empty table of friends. Yes, there were five of us sitting around a huge round table. Now I couldn't adorn my guests with rich robes, but I was able to share my cheescake with the girls. :) We had a fantastic time -- just me and the girls, and laughed at the overzealous waitress who constantly checked our IDs.

And the "nashing of teeth"? I decided not to care anymore if people wanted to spend time with me on my birthday or not. They live in their own punishment, and I shall not rely on people anymore. True friends will show their colors. And what a brilliant array of light it is.

Advice for beginning writers

I decided to start a new series on writing. Being a beginning writer myself, I suppose it is a bit pompous of me to bestow advice on others, however, advice I shall impart.

Part one

After writing for some time, take a break—

• This works on two levels, first: there is no need to sit at a computer or note pad for eight hours writing straight. For goodness sakes, grab an energy bar or something. Step out of the room for fifteen minutes, an hour, whatever it takes to let your mind temporarily relax and not think about the characters’ next moves.

• The second level works if you have been working on a story for several weeks or months. STEP AWAY FROM THE COMPUTER. If you’re working on a story day in and day out for 10 hours a day—no matter how fantastic it is—it is not worth you coming down with a neurological disease. Take a long break. I mean, there’s no need to completely move away, but by all means, go on vacation for a week or two. You need to let the story mull over on the page (or in your saved files) for a while; reset your goals, hopes, and dreams for the story, and let the characters have a few weeks rest from looking at your face constantly. You don’t think they get tired of looking at you? Believe me, they do. And they’re screaming for you to not make them accidentally shoot their half-brother or go snorkeling with sharks.

• There is another reason why taking a break is so helpful for you and your characters: it lets you rest your eyes from looking at the same sentences and same grammatical/spelling errors. If you give yourself a few weeks break, you will have fresh eyes to see your story with. Look back over what you have written carefully and revise the tiny errors you’ve made. I can say from first-hand experience how vital this step is. After a year, I re-read a story I had published and to my dismay, found it wrought with spelling and syntactical errors. This is an embarrassment to any writer no matter their success. A writer should take pride in their work as it displays the very best effort put forth by the author, but finding those errors made me cringe and hope that no one actually opens the book to read it.


(And a preview for next time....)

• Here’s another helpful tidbit—have someone else read your story through. But not only read it themselves, have them read it out loud to you so you know how it sounds and can make changes accordingly if it does not have the desired effect.

A day in the life of the future:

Take one of the first scenes in Miss Congeniality—she is fighting her way through a horrendous crowd of people crammed into the corner Starbucks each vying impatiently for their morning fix of….caffeine. Of the thirty or forty people elbow to pointy elbow, each and every one of them is ready to kill Agent Hart for brushing past them so flippantly to the front of the line. What gives her the right to get her morning fix before everyone else? You see what the world is coming to? That crowd has murder in their eyes, ready to trample over her when they realized there was not emergency related to the FBI and the Starbucks front counter.

Lately I have relied on caffeine to keep me awake and somewhat alert during the day. Because of stress, and consequently lack of sleep, I haven’t felt refreshed in ages. So a quick stop at the local coffee stand is in order before showing up drained at school. However, to my dismay, caffeine isn’t doing as swell a job as usual. Sure, I’m awake, but not at all energized. My eyes are open, but my mind is completely turned off. Be it coffee or tea, I feel more irritable than relaxed. All I want to do is sleep—which I did get about 7 hours last night—but there is. Just. So much. To do.

That being said, this scene is just a glimpse of what the world will look like in about 20 to 30 years. You think waiting in a disgruntled line for a double-shot latte is bad now; wait until we are so conditioned to function on caffeine that we literally can not get through the day without five shots of the drug. I can’t decide yet if it will take the form of a liquid injection (eek!) or a pep pill. The problem with a pill is that it is too easy to take more than one. I mean, can you really overdose on too much energy? I supposed like anything else, your body has a breaking point. Maybe we’ll just explode if we try taking too much—it’s like your body is wound up so tight, the only way to release that energy is in one catastrophic burst. Well, good-bye to you.

You think I am joking, but just you wait—your body is slowly becoming more and more dependent on the stuff. When you start shaking after being awake for a couple hours without your daily coffee you’ll know what I mean. And believe me, the doses will have to increase to get the same effects…hmm, just like any other drug.

I wonder….

The affects of second-hand smoke

It's amazing how much smell can induce memories with the slight blowing of a breeze. Today I crossed paths with a young man smoking, and it was like a walk down memory lane. My name is Lissa Scott and I am a closet second-hand smoker.
Let me make clear that I am in no way a proponent of smoking or using tobacco products in any form. In fact the smell of cigarette smoke used to make me gag in my younger years. I would unabashedly hold my breath when passing a smoker on the street (which beats coughing loudly in front of them). But then Europe happened. In the summers of 2006 and 2007 I worked in Germany on military instillations. It is not an exaggeration when I say that EVERYONE in Europe smokes. It is absolutely ridiculous. Even all the Americans on base smoked. It's like they gathered every smoking person in the military and plopped them on one base. So everywhere I went, I was surrounded by a cloud of smoke hovering over my head. Eventually I became used to the smell. Some of my closest friends there were avid smokers, so to this day anytime I smell cigarette smoke I think of all the good times I had in Europe. I relish in the fading memory as I selfishly breathe deeply the toxic gases.
Umm...I just close my eyes and imagine myself, however briefly, walking the sidewalks of Kaiserslautern, Hameln, or London.....it's a wonderful feeling. Then I open my eyes and see a young pup smoking down Monmouth Avenue in front of Werner and remind myself that I'm not in Germany. Not even close. But I can always dream can't I?

And yes, I dream through a haze of smoke.