The Steps of Revision According to Elizabeth Miller

Step 1: In a timely manner, complete the things necessary to continue your existence as a part-time adult. This includes feeding yourself, finishing your homework, and put on comfortable pants.

Step 2: Make sure you have consumed coffee today. If it is before 5:00 p.m., consume more if you find your caffeine levels lacking. If you don't drink coffee or it is after 5:00 p.m., drink tea. If you don't like either, go away.

Step 3: Sit down and get your chosen pen out. If you have proceeded to entering your edits into your computer, open the document.

Step 4: Promptly check Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Youtube, Pinterest, and then Instagram again with the pen out next to you.

Step 5: Grumble and get one page through. If you feel like you are the world's worst writer and no one will ever publish your stuff, proceed to Step 6a. If you feel your writing is pretty darn good, proceed to Step 6b.

Step 6a: Remind yourself you're making it better and continue editing.
Step 6b: Turn off Netflix because clearly you need to devote your full attention to your book.

Step 7: After three pages, decide you've earned a break. Get a snack and re-watch an episode of Arrow and ogle Stephen Amell's abs/arms/chest/back while he does a salmon ladder.

Step 8: After two episodes, get annoyed with yourself, shut your laptop (if you need it, take it to your bed). Remove pants for maximum comfort and crack down. Ten pages later, turn off the lamp and go to sleep.

Step 9: Turn the lamp back on to jot down the great idea you spent five minutes trying to convince yourself you'd remember in the morning before coming to your senses.

The Bad Guys

I want to talk today about villains. Also known as the bad guys or the antagonist. They range from the likes of Ursula from The Little Mermaid to Voldemort from Harry Potter to Agent Smith from The Matrix. Side note: the only reason I picked these three is to show that I watch and read a wide variety of genres. 

Villains can be lots of fun to write. In many cases, they are the only other character who can provide a real challenge to the protagonist/main character. There's also something fun about pitting your hero against this new character and seeing how it turns out. Evil dialogue too is just so much because I can let my melodramatic side run wild.

But successful villains, the ones that scare us, are so much more than that. They aren't melodramatic and more importantly, they aren't evil for the sake of being evil. 

I think this is a particularly important distinction to understand because as soon as you try to imagine what evil for evil's sake would actually look like, you start to come with the reasons why they're evil. You might think they're bullshit and to us not-evil folks, they are bullshit. We get to hide behind the knowledge that those people are just evil and somehow that Others them.

For those of you who did not take Tom Drake's lit class (or don't spend your free time knee deep in books and stories): Othering is claiming another person's differences from you makes them less than you.

As a writer, though, I don't have the luxury of simply writing a villain who kills or tortures or plots the overthrow of a good leader and chalking it all up to 'He/she is just evil'. Nope. Not gonna cut it. At all. So I have to do for the villain what I do for every other character: crawl inside their head and see the world from their perspective.

Most of my villains, once I got over my tendency to just shout THEY'RE EVIL and move on, aren't diabolical fiends who feed off the pain of others. They're just people who have goals and fears and hopes. Sometimes the ways they go about getting them (i.e. fighting a war) aren't that different from how the heroes are going about trying to reach their goals (i.e. defending their homeland). 

But there was one villain I wrote who absolutely terrified me. I think one of the characters in the story described him in this way: "He's fire and fire loves nothing more than to burn." But he had a story for how he came to be that way. He didn't come into the world wanting to watch it burn. Life before he met my main character made him that way. 

What terrified me about him was the fact that he had come from me, like every other character I've ever written. I imagined him, I created him and I justified his actions. He was incredibly human to me because I saw parts of myself in him. I tend to see the parts of myself I like in my heroes: stubbornness, intelligence, determination. But in this villain I saw my anger, the way I find it too easy sometimes to hate.

The nature of evil that terrifies us is not the horrible things it creates but the reasons behind it. If we look just a little harder, we can see the path that led to the thing or person we've named evil. We comfort ourselves by saying we would never do that, we're better than that, we value the lives of others, we're different from the people who made those choices. Sometimes, that is true. Most people wouldn't make the choice. 

Whether that's true is a topic of debate in the field of psychology- ever heard of the Milgram experiment? 

My point is this: yes, there are people in the world who make choices that lead to terrible, awful, gut-wrenching things. But when we refuse to see them as people, we aren't doing it because it's true. We're doing it to make ourselves feel better because if they aren't people and we are, then we would never be able to do the things they did. 

But that just brings us back to the act of othering and suddenly we don't see so different.

This is Mine

I believe in the power of words. 

Sometimes, though, I forget something and tonight I stumbled across a reminder. Occasionally, the writer gets separated from the writing. It takes on a life of its own and as the writer, I feel like a branch caught in the current, just along for the ride. 

But the thing is, I am the writer and that makes the writing mine. 

The world is made of uncertainties. People drift apart from childhood friends. They fall in love and get their hearts broken only to fall in love again. Maybe they find the right person or maybe that person never shows up. Maybe there is no one right person. Hopes rise and are brought crashing down by ruthless reality. Dreams fade under the sheer weight of passing weeks where nothing extraordinary happens. There's a saying my history professor is fond of: All we know for certain is I am here and this is now. Nothing else is known for sure.

My writing is mine. Nothing, death or travel or change or loss, will change that. I wrote it down and so it will live. Even if I got hit by a bus tomorrow and lost all memory of the last ten years, my writing would be there. It would still be mine.

Writers too often get consumed by what other people think of their writing. Their criticisms, their preferences. Sometimes, I find myself furious with what someone said about a line in a poem that I love but they think I should have made a different stylistic choice. I thought it was just my inner bitch coming out. 

It isn't (well, maybe a little bit.) It makes me angry because that person is trying to take my writing and make it theirs. And no one, no one, has that right.

Writing belongs to the writer. It is part of us, no less vital than our blood or our skin. Writing gives us power if we do it well but that does not make it any less ours.

When everything else fades into memory, lost to the haze of age and decades of life, I will still have this. 

This is mine. 

Rambles: Writing is Hard

Writing is hard.

I've probably said this before and I have no doubt I'll say it again. Writing is damn hard and if you don't believe me, just think about having to write a five page essay. Doesn't part of your soul just hurt thinking about it? 

The thing is, I get the impression people forget that writing is hard. Ironically, some of those people choose not to write and occasionally scoff at those of us who have chosen to study it in college. 

Some day I'll have to write a post about how irritating it is to have what I do dismissed as 'easy' in one breath and deemed the most horrific form of homework known to man in the next. But today, that's not the point.

Fellow English majors, college seems hellbent on destroying our love of writing by forcing us to write essays and when we do write creatively, we have to take criticisms for it.

Now, I think workshop is an incredibly valuable tool for a writer. We get too close to our own writing and we need advice. But the trouble with workshops is that they are only as good as the people in them. Not every creative writing class is going to have writers at your level or, preferably, above your level, to give you good critiques and pointers. Believe me, I know. 

But I have a thick skin when it comes to my writing because by the time I got to workshops, I had written enough that I knew my general weaknesses. I also knew enough about writing stories to know what was good criticism (and by good I mean useful) and what was just stupid.

It can be hard when you're used to writing because you love it to suddenly have your work picked apart. So then you get caught between hating writing because you have to write essays and being too afraid to write for fun because you've acquired an internal editor who did not come with a mute button.

I'm here to tell you it's okay that writing is hard. It really is. It's supposed to be hard. If it isn't hard, you aren't pushing yourself and if you don't push yourself you won't get better.

Some parts should get easier. Like basic punctuation (although this seems to be a huge struggle even for college students and is a huge pet peeve of mine. I mean, if you read books you can just learn proper punctuation from that for shit's sake. I digress.)

Some days (more like for short bursts of time), writing will be as easy as breathing but those days are few and far between. Don't sit around waiting for them because writing on all the other days is hard. 

It's okay to write shit. It really is. Seriously. My dad thinks Hemingway got it right with his 'if I write one perfect sentence in a day it was a good day' or whatever it is but this is, in my humble opinion, absolute bullshit. That's like doing one squat on leg day with perfect form and thinking that will do anything for your booty. 

Write a lot. Write stupid shit that you cringe to look at it. Write some halfway decent shit that you get a few good things out of. Write mediocre crap that you can make better. Write a decent poem so you can borrow the two really good images for a different piece. Write all that because somewhere in between all that, you'll write that one line. That one amazing, unbelievable line. The one that when you read again, you can't believe that you wrote. 

It won't happen often but I promise you, it will happen. But you have to do the work. Like with squats. You have to do a lot of them, probably with less than perfect form, for a long time (weeks) before you see any results. 

Tomorrow is leg day, in case you were wondering why I am so fixated on squats. 

Back to writing. Yeah, it's hard. Yeah, sometimes it feels like bashing your head into your desk would be productive. Yeah, you question your life choices on a daily basis.

I've always decided to keep going. I've put in too much work in the past eleven years to give up now.

Don't you give up, either. Ever. 

My Thoughts on Killing Characters

I was scrolling through Pinterest this morning, you know, as one does before going to the gym. My Pinterest feed is typically cute animals, writing quotes, and ridiculously in shape people. 

One of the things I saw was a screenshot of something off of Tumblr. It was a list of ideas to get out of a writing rut. 

Guess what the first one was. Go on. I'll wait.

The very first one was 'kill someone'. At the end, someone had written that these were the best writing tips they'd ever some across. 

*deep breaths* ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?

So I should explain, so you don't think I need to go to anger management classes. One of the things I hate more than anything else in writing is when writers kill characters for the sake of being brutal or for the sake of creating plot. And let's just be clear- there is difference between a character dying as part of a plot and a character dying to advance the plot.

But let's get back to this idea of killing a character because your story has stalled out. 

First, who the fuck do you think you are? George R. R. Martin? Shakespeare? 

If the answer is no (hint: it fucking is), then you should probably find a better way to move your plot than just picking a character to kill. Killing a character because you, the writer, haven't figured out what comes next, is the lazy, immature way out. 

It's the same as not knowing how (or not wanting to deal with) what naturally comes next in a scene so you knock out the main character, thus saving yourself the trouble of actually writing said scene. Suzanne Collins, I am referring to Mockingjay. 

For the sake of argument, let's say you are stuck at a point in the plot and you're not sure what to do. Maybe you had an outline you've since scrapped or maybe you're just writing because it's fun.

This is what I do. I step back. I go for a run (although I've heard walks are just as good but I'm too impatient for walks) and think about what needs to happen after the scene I can't write. I work backwards. Then I write the damn scene. Who cares if it's absolute shit? Revision exists for this precise reason.

The second option is to just skip to the next scene you know how to write. I personally can't do this because I have to go in chronological order otherwise I'd have a beginning and a end, with no middle.

I am not saying you shouldn't ever kill a character because people die. It's a fact of life so it's a fact of writing stories. There's a big damn war going on in my book right now, so yes, I am going to kill characters. But long before I got to this war, back when I was still writing the beginning of B&G I knew which characters were going to die. Their deaths will change the plot but not the overall story arc. Death isn't something that happens to the plot: it's what happens to the characters who don't die. 

I suspect those of you who may have read B&G are worried about which characters I'm going to kill in C&C. Good. You should be worried. 

But I'm not fucking Shakespeare, so I promise some characters will be alive at the end of the third book.

Eleven Years

I've been thinking a lot about how I've changed as a writer recently and I somehow got it into my head that maybe some of you would enjoy reading about how it all started, at least for me. If not, I'm not at all offended. Return to Facebook and enjoy cat videos. Or puppy videos. Hedgehogs. Donkeys. Whatever your heart desires.

When I was in fourth grade, my mom enrolled me in a week long summer writing camp at The Cabin in Boise. For a week, from 9:00-12:00, I hung out with a group of kids my age and wandered downtown Boise doing various writing assignments for our instructors. Nothing huge because even late elementary school kids can't write a whole lot. At the end of the week, we had to read one of our pieces for the other groups and for our parents. I read a poem about the river which my mom still has in a frame at our house. 

That was the beginning. Well, okay, not exactly.

I have no memory of this but my parents have told me that when I was young, two or three, I would have them play with me and my set of Winnie the Pooh figurines. But I would tell them what to say and, according to my mom, I always had a little story worked out. Go three year old me! Woo!

I was in fifth grade when I made my first attempt at prose writing (if we can even call it that). I wrote really bad diaries because I was obsessed with the Dear America and Royal Diaries series. Yes, they were all bad and no, nothing could be salvaged from them. Believe me- I've transferred them from every laptop I've owned. More on that later.

So I basically hijacked my mom's laptop by using it so much she never had any time on it so by the time I was in sixth grade, she had given up and given it to me. I used to get up early on the weekends (early meaning my parents weren't awake yet which is even more impressive if you know how incapable my dad is of sleeping in) and go upstairs to write. 

I wrote hundreds of half finished, barely begun, terrible stories. Then, in seventh grade, I wrote a story that I actually finished. It came out to roughly 40,000 words which is fucking impressive for a twelve year old and I'll fight anyone who says otherwise. No, it wasn't very good. But it had all the elements necessary for a good story: conflict, tension, rising action, even an ending. 

It was around that time that I decided I needed to get better at writing dialogue so I decided to write plays. Not good plays but we still performed them with the neighbor kids for our parents and it was fun. See, having a writer for a friend can be fun!

Once high school rolled around, I spent my summers writing a series of five books about a girl who could control air, earth, fire, and water. Again, not the best but by the time I finished the fifth book, a few weeks before I left for college, I knew. I wasn't just playing at this. I was a writer. 

It took me almost eight years of writing to say it: I am a writer. I've put in the time to get good enough that I know most writing sucks.

It took me almost ten years of writing to say this: I need to revise this. So I did. And then I said the scariest thing yet: I am good enough to be published.

Eleven years I've been writing. Coincidentally, right now I have eleven stories I'd consider book length. 

I'm not even twenty one yet. Just think of all the stories I have left to write.

It's going to be wild, terrifying, exhilarating, brilliant, insane, frightening, breath taking and every imaginable thing in between. That's life. That's writing.

Reaching Goals: All Aboard the Struggle Bus

Let's talk about goals. Like, real life person goals, not character goals. It is the new year after all. For me, as a student, the new year doesn't feel like it really starts until second semester starts which isn't for three days so I'm not late at all. I won't be defined by your calendar. 

Anyway, goals. We all make them, not just around New Year's but all the time. Little goals, like 'I will not miss class' and bigger ones like 'I want to lose weight' or 'I want to get a really good grade in this class'.

If you're anything like me, some of those big goals turn out to be a lot easier than you thought. And those little goals morph into the biggest mountains you've ever seen. Metaphorically speaking. 

When I was younger, writing was just something I did because I enjoyed it. I used it to escape, to go live in places more exciting than Boise, Idaho. I used it to entertain myself. Don't get me wrong, sometimes that still happens but now I am older. I won't go so far as to say 'wiser'- I'd settle for 'slightly less naive.' 

There are a lot of results from this but the big one is this: now, writing isn't just an escape. It is work. Enjoyable work but work nonetheless. Why? Because I have decided I want to be good at something and no one excels at something without working at it. Don't argue with me- it's true. People a lot older and a hell of a lot wiser than me have said so. 

So writing isn't as much fun anymore. Thus, writing has become a goal. In my head, still stuck in the high school mindset that writing is just for fun, I see it as a little goal. It's not. It's a big honking Sisyphean goal. It's got other, slightly less enormous goals attached to it. Like revising.

My goal isn't even really to write that much. My goal is to revise. I have two books that need work. One is more about fine-tuning and the other is in its very rough first form. In the case of the latter, I will get to do a lot of writing because I've got a lot to add. 

So how am I going to do this?

That is an excellent question. The first step is I am telling you, Internet, that I am going to do it. This creates accountability. Because I'll feel bad if I don't do something I committed to doing to someone other than myself. This is a trick I use when I need motivation to go for a run on the weekends. It works like a charm for a lot of other stuff too. Humans hate to feel humiliated more than they hate to do uncomfortable things.

My second step is this: I am going to start off slow. A few pages at a time. Because revising is like running a marathon. You can't start out running twelve miles to train for it. You've gotta put in those three and four mile runs to condition yourself. I really need a different metaphor but oh well. 

The third part of my expertly devised plan is this: I am going to reward myself for finishing drafts. When I finish another draft (I've lost track of the number, how great is that?) of Black & Gold and the second draft of Crown & Claw, I will buy myself something. Not sure what it's going to be yet but it cannot be a necessity. Otherwise it isn't a reward.

I know there are other people out there with goals on the struggle bus with me. Maybe my plan isn't perfect but if nothing else, I take comfort in this: I will get it done. Because even if nothing else, I want that shiny, new, pretty draft to start in on with my pretty purple pen.

Why not a red pen, you ask?

Because red pen looks like blood all over the page and who wants that stressful shit when you've already got a decimated novel on your hands?

Then why purple, you ask? Why not blue or green or just plain black?

Because fuck you society, I won't live my life your rules and a purple pen is how I choose to express my individuality.

Okay, I should probably go to bed now because unpacking stresses me out and tomorrow I'm moving furniture around and--

Stopping now. Happy New Year, everyone.