Being in the right place at the right time

NaNoWriMo has come and gone, and there are now millions more written words in the world than there were a month ago. Aspiring writers all over America—all over the planet—are sitting in front of their masterpieces wondering what they have to to do to them before they can start querying agents.

How do you know when you’re done?

A client asked me this recently, saying, “I write and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite, and every time I think I’m finally finished it turns out I have to rewrite again. This can’t be how Stephen King does it.”

Here’s the short answer: You’re done when your editor tells you you’re done. That’s how Stephen King does it.

Here’s the long answer: training, practice, and time. Truman Capote recommended a year between rewrites. A year? Yes, a year.

How much patience do you have?

The way professional writers (you know them—they’re the ones agents and publishers ACCEPT) do it is:

1) Plot. Come up with a truly gripping story.

What would be an amazing thing for someone to do? Hunt a vicious white whale across the seven seas? Ride a raft down the Mississippi with a runaway slave? Help an escaped convict, in terror of your life, when you’re only seven years old?

AND. . .what would be another amazing thing that could happen at the same time? The whale hates your guts and is determined to kill you? Your raft is highjacked by a couple of confidence tricksters? You’re hired by an insane old woman to help her “educate” a wealthy girl to hate poor boys?

And how could these two stories finally collide in a shower of fireworks? Against all odds, you actually FIND the whale? Your partner, the runaway slave, is “sold” by the confidence tricksters? You come into money from a mysterious benefactor—the escaped convict from long ago—which enables you to impress the young woman you’ve grown up loving?

2) Character. Spend approximately ninety-nine years locked in a small windowless room daydreaming and writing notes and backstory and scenes about your protagonist and main characters. Go outside and write down everything interesting you see about everyone in the world. Give your characters paralyzing internal conflicts—two desperate needs they can’t possibly satisfy simultaneously—along with a hellfire-&-brimstone motivation to satisfy them. Then give them a time limit, and make it short. Not only MUST they satisfy these opposing needs, they must do it NOW.

3) Language. Spend another ninety-nine years reading voraciously only the best literature and studying and practicing incessantly the art of constructing beautiful, simple, straight-forward sentences full of telling details (and only the telling ones!) in a steady, reassuring rhythm to rock the reader into a state of hypnosis that prevents them from seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, or even tasting anything in the real world around them. Then learn how to shock them with sentence construction and when and why and where.

4) Editing. Learn to wrap your legs around the back of your head and do the Charleston, which is prerequisite to the extraordinary feat of getting enough distance from your own writing to be able to edit it objectively.

5) Patience. And wait for the years to do their work on you. Because all of this takes time, lots and lots and lots and lots of time, time to well up from your subconscious, to get out of your fingers onto a page, to sink into the writing-skills part of your brain, to become an aspect of your very personality. Fiction writing isn’t something you spend a few years earning a degree and then just go get a job in, like real paying careers. It’s something that takes your entire life to grow into.

That’s how you find out when you’re done.

OR.

There is one alternative.

Instead, go find another writer who already knows how to come up with gripping plots, complex characters, and driving internal conflicts and is willing to help you. Someone who already knows how to write simple, straight-forward sentences in a hypnotic rhythm and can identify the beauty and hidden strength in yours. Someone who not only knows how to do it, but knows how to teach, guide, and mentor others. Someone who’s already completely objective about your work, even without the Charleston. . .

Find a really great editor. And let them tell you when you’re done.

NOT ONLY THAT. Find an editor other writers have test-driven before you and get their opinions. Someone with time on their schedule this year or this season or this month and reasonable rates. Someone willing to show you before you spend a fortune what they know and what writers get for their money.

I can hear you now: but how could this be? What possible motivation could someone really great have to make room for you on their schedule right away (when there are so many professional writers out there, who also need editors) and not charge you the moon and the stars?

Well, someone has to be one of their early clients in this phase of their career. Really great editors come to freelance work from previous writing careers, and they all have to start freelancing somewhere. Someone has to be the one who gets in on the ground-floor before their schedules extend into the distance and the rates go up to the standards set by other editors who have been freelancing for longer (or who just set higher rates).

That someone could be you.

You know how publishing writers say their success is a combination of determination, patience, and being in the right place at the right time?

6) Be in the right place at the right time.