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.