An early lesson every author must learn is how much to avoid comparing yourself to other authors. There will always be those who are more prolific than you are, those whose prose is more beauteous, whose characters are more compelling, whose plots are more interesting, whose worlds are more imaginative. And there will be just as many who you can sneer at for being less prolific, beauteous, compelling, interesting, and imaginative than you are (with regards to writing). Comparisons are a futile endgame, though they have their utility in helping to provide some frame of reference. A comparison that is more difficult to shake is comparison with yourself.
When I started the site, one of the few bits of reliable advice I could find about building an audience was the importance of putting out regular, substantial content. That led to Tuesday blog posts and Thursday book reviews, a twice-weekly cadence I’ve now maintained for six years. It also led in part to my decision to publish the Blood Magic series in real-time, writing a short story each month and publishing it directly to the site – and these were not short stories like the 2,000 word Elegant Literature submissions, but six-to-ten-thousand-word adventures. You can still read all thirty-six of the main episodes, along with the bonus episode, here on the site, although their quality reflects where I was then as a writer, along with the lack of revision. Some of them have stood the test of time better than others.
Blood Magic saw me writing, on average, ten thousand story-words per month, plus a few thousand words on blog posts and book reviews, and sometimes more given over to whatever side projects I happened to pursue. Just the Blood Magic content is equivalent to a decent length novel each year, a pace which I sought to (and mostly did) maintain when I turned my attention to Impressions. Then, I started to slow down. At first, that was the transition to another project, stumbling into work on Golems and Kings, and I had that lull in the spring where my writing motivation was low. However, I’ve realized my slowing pace is due to more than the differences between unique projects, differing amounts of writing time, and fluctuating motivational levels. It is due to my changing relationship with writing and storytelling. Reading The Rhetoric of Fiction helped crystallize this change, but it’s been occurring for months now without me quite noticing it. At risk of sounding arrogant, I am slowing down my writing because I am becoming a better writer.
When I wrote Blood Magic, I just sat down and wrote the stories. I had a very basic outline of what each episode would be about, equivalent to one of those one to two sentence descriptions that come with television episodes, and I had a few notes about worldbuilding, magic systems, and characters, but mostly I sat down and I wrote each episode. My goal was to write good stories, but I didn’t give a lot of thought as to what that meant. I didn’t evaluate the diction I used, the sentence structures I chose, the interplay of pacing, tension, dramatic irony, poetic devices, or the million other intricate elements of the writing itself that make up the telling of a quality story. In that sense, they are derivative, because they are derived from my semiconscious synthesis of the reading I’ve done over the years transformed into original story output. The stories aren’t derivative, but the writing is. Not from any one source in any plagiaristic or deliberate sense, but in the sense that I had a feeling of what a story should be like and attempted to replicate that feeling with my own characters, plots, et cetera. I know, remarkably unscientific for an engineer.
That works for some people. It even sort of worked for me. If you look through the whole Blood Magic series, and my other writings coming off that project, there is clear improvement in content, technique, execution – in almost every aspect, my writing improved throughout the three years I worked on Blood Magic and as I continued with short stories and the start of Impressions after finishing Blood Magic. Working with my writing group helped immensely, too (as did doing actual revisions on the stories before releasing them out into the wild). However, I’ve had a lingering dissatisfaction with my writing ever since I started the expansion of Golems and Kings, maybe even since I finished Impressions. The words I was putting on the page were not the words I wanted to be putting on the page. My writing reached a quality that could be considered acceptable – I did have a few pieces accepted for publication in this time frame – and there it stalled. With perhaps a bit more outlining, and of course revisions, I could probably put out reliably acceptable pieces of writing (acceptable to me, not necessarily acceptable in the sense of being accepted for publication).
Settling for merely acceptable, though, is not what I want to do, and with each truly excellent book I read I catch a glimpse of what my writing could potentially be. Resources like the Writing Excuses podcast, Sanderson’s recorded writing lectures, and courses like the one offered by the Writers of the Future organization dig deeply into the mechanics of plot, character, and setting, subjects which genre authors have long complained are neglected in traditional writing curricula. I’ve echoed that position before, but the complaint elides a pertinent question: if writing curricula were not adequately teaching plot, character, and setting, what were they teaching? I don’t know the answer to that question – my formal studies are in subjects like astronautical engineering and in-situ resource utilization, not writing – but I wonder if those curricula addressed the foundation of storytelling which I have only recently realized I am missing: rhetoric.
“Missing” may be a strong word. It is obvious I have a grasp of rhetoric at some level; to an extent, rhetoric is inseparable from the basic process of forming coherent sentences and stringing them together to communicate. Merriam-Webster unhelpfully defines rhetoric as ” the art of speaking or writing effectively: such as the study of principles and rules of composition…[or] the study of writing or speaking as a means of communication or persuasion.” I prefer to use a definition like this one: rhetoric is the implementation of language for effective communication one level above or abstracted from the basic mechanics and structures involved in that language. More simply, rhetoric is about choosing how to say what you want to say. In terms of storytelling, plot, setting, and character are what we want to say. A deeper understanding of those three elements of story does not help the author choose how to say it. Studying rhetoric does.
Anyone who writes – anyone who communicates – employs rhetoric, but it’s no more necessary to understand rhetoric in order to use it than it is necessary to understanding how all the components of a cell phone work together in order to use a cell phone. My efforts to develop my rhetoric heretofore have been like attempting to upgrade a cell phone’s software without understanding how to code. Reading rhetoric I particularly appreciate, for instance, is an attempt to imprint better rhetoric without understanding what it is I’m trying to change or being conscious about implementing it. This can work (a lot better than upgrading an operating system without looking at or interacting with the code), but it’s limited and inefficient. Thanks in large part to The Rhetoric of Fiction, I am now being deliberate about developing and implementing the rhetoric I want to see – rather than treating it like an unchanging operating system I can only affect indirectly, I am treating it like an application I can custom-code to my specifications. In other words, I am now being conscious and deliberate about my rhetoric as much as I am always conscious of plot, setting, and character.
The effect on my writing is marked. When I started attempting to implement some of my learning from The Rhetoric of Fiction, I could tell within a few paragraphs how much stronger the writing was. However…those few paragraphs took me much, much longer to write. Before, I could sometimes sit down and write two thousand words in a couple hours (if I had the plot, characters, and setting sufficiently worked out in my head in advance). Now, it might take me an hour to write a few hundred words. It’s a dramatic and frustrating reduction in raw output, but the increase in quality is, I think, well worth the time.
There is an argument to be made that I don’t need to slow down, even that I shouldn’t slow down, in order to implement rhetoric in this way. Many authors I’ve listened to or read, in talking about their writing output, emphasize the importance of getting words on the page, not belaboring each sentence and paragraph so that you never make any progress, because anything can be fixed in revision. I’ve grown more comfortable with revision in general, and with my ability to fix specific issues and make particular improvements through the process. My staged approach to revisions contributes to that, and perhaps I could add another stage to focus on rhetoric. And there will inevitably be revisions to rhetoric – I never expect to get it perfect on the first attempt. Where I am with the writing in this moment, however, I need to be constantly practicing this improved and intentional rhetoric. With practice, I suspect that my improved intentionality in rhetorical implementation will become more instinctive, so that my pace will increase again; in the meantime, I must resist the urge to compare my current writing pace to my old writing pace.
IGC Publishing 