Category: The Writing Lab

Some Wild Ideas About Writing Drafts I’ll Probably Never Try but There’s Some Good Points About Them So I Wanted To Share Them Here

photograph of crumpled paper near a pencil

I do try to check out some of the good blogging on WordPress, but I have to admit I spend a good portion of my time on Substack. It was when I was tooling around on Substack a while back that I read an interesting article about drafting techniques in writing. Although I’m usually not the type of writer to base their posts on someone else’s writings, I thought what the author, Mason Currey, had to say interesting enough to get into it here.

The entire article, “Rip it up and start again,” can be found here. Everyone talks about revisions or prewriting (me included), so I often don’t see a lot of advice or instruction out there about the drafting process. Below, I intend to summarize some of the techniques described in the article, analyze what concepts they have in common, and explain why I wouldn’t probably try them myself.

Let’s get started!

Rip it up

I was not too familiar with Currey initially, although he is from Los Angeles and is the author, among other things, of The Daily Rituals series, and he’s done a few other things as well. This article was enough to get me to subscribe to him on Substack.

First, Mason shares a writing technique suggested by the bestselling author Oliver Burkeman. This technique involves writing out a manuscript draft, printing off said draft, deleting the draft, and then retyping out the draft onto computer.

At first glance, this seems like extra work, but Burkeman explains it allows him to make changes and deletions to the manuscript more naturally. As he put it:

It’s like: I’ve written this thing, I’m not happy with it yet. I print it out, I type back in. Typing it back in is just admin work, right? It doesn’t tax my soul in some terrible pretentious writer way. It’s just typing it back in.

Mason also discusses two other techniques that I might classify as “radical separation.” The first of these was suggested by Taika Waititi, the man behind What We Do in the Shadows and Thor: Love and Thunder, among others. He described writing one or two drafts of a story, putting it away for as much as a year, rereading it once or twice, either throwing it away or locking it away, and then rewriting the manuscript from memory. The director explains why he finds this to be a good revision technique:

And what I think is useful about that is you filter out all the stuff that doesn’t seem very important. So what happens is your 120-page script suddenly become 70 pages. And it’s just the bare bones, the very slim, sleek structure of your film. And that’s when you can start putting in more jokes or, like, the tonal stuff that makes it your own thing.

The last of these came from the author Lauren Groff, a three-time National Book Award finalist, which is similar in principle to the others if not in exact execution. She writes out a first draft longhand in a notebook, puts the notebook in storage, and then rewrites the entire book from memory in longhand for what will become the true first draft.

On an unrelated note, Mason also lets us know that Groff works on multiple writing projects at once and even puts them in different locations. Although I’m not that extreme, I do have a tendency to work on more than one project at a time.

What each of these techniques have in common is an attempt to refine and improve the first or rough draft process, or at least to get a head start on the revision process. There is a clear tendency for people to pile in a lot of information and material into their first drafts. Dan Ackroyd was infamous for writing massive scripts for the movies he was starring in, such as The Blues Brothers. Shoot, the first draft I had for The Holy Fool was somewhere around 150,000 words and I ended up hacking more than 50,000 words from that rough draft to make it something approaching a tight narrative.

So, I can absolutely relate to this, especially to trying to get the overall shape of the story right the first time. You don’t want to get off on the wrong foot, and you want to bring the story you want to tell to life from the beginning.

While I can understand the instinct behind these techniques, I don’t believe I want to use these in my own work. Now, I do write down the initial notes for my projects in longhand in notebooks, but I prefer to be typing when it comes to putting together a rough draft. Maybe it’s the journalist in me, or it’s the love and desire for typewriters I had as a kid in the pre-Internet era I as a Generation X kid grew up in1. I’m guessing part of my hesitation has something to do with this.

But the other part of my hesitation has something to do with my particular situation. To be frank, everyone, I have not been able to write a book in a shorter amount of time than two years. I am hopeful my horror special set in a small town on the Mississippi River might be the tale that breaks this streak, but procrastination and my work habits have kept my productivity, while not at a Harper Lee level, at not the best levels.

And this leads me to another issue. I have lived for more than a half century, and I am very much aware that the remaining portion of my life is not as long as what has come before me. To be honest, all three of these techniques seem to add to the length of the writing process than subtract from it. Whatever I am doing for the remaining years of my existence, I will be racing against time to write the stories I want to be writing. I have more than a few stories left to tell, and I would prefer to spending my final days trying to think of things to write rather than regretting the stories I didn’t have the chance to tell before I passed.

As far as avoiding some of the pitfalls these techniques are designed to avoid, I believe I am trying to avoid them by writing only the scenes I find most interesting to me and leaving the “filler” scenes until the very end, or just forgetting to write them (even better). But if these techniques work for you, by all means dive into them.

But…

As with all the advice I give around here, feel free to ignore it if you find it conflicts with writing habits or techniques which actually work for you. The number one piece of writing advice I ever have given my English, composition, and/or special education students is this:

If something is working to help you write well, whether or not it’s the recommended thing to do, keep doing it.

Next Time…

I’m planning on starting a deep dive into worldbuilding the next time I do a writing advice column. Hope it’s helpful to you writers out there.

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On Prewriting, Part 5: Setting

top view of man putting cards with text of acts of a play on a table

Welcome to The Writing Lab, where I try to pass along any insights into the craft of writing I’ve learned during the past thirty years.

For the past four editions of the lab, I’ve discussed the process of prewriting, the start of the writing process where you begin to develop your ideas, transferring them for the first time from inside your head and onto the printed page or electronic file. After discussing some of the basics behind prewriting, taking a look at how I’ve developed stories over the years, how to build characters, and a quick discussion of plotting. let’s spend this weekend talking about another important aspect of prewriting, which is setting.

[AUTHOR’S ONGOING NOTE FOR THIS SERIES:] The advice I give here is geared mostly toward fiction writing; however, it can easily be applied to nonfiction as well.

The Where and When: About Setting

Photo by Aaditya Arora on Pexels.com

The setting of a work of fiction is based on two different factors – when the story takes place and where it takes place. I would say the latter has the more impact on the story rather than the former, for reasons I’ll get into in a little bit. One thing I will say, however, might be one of my rules of thumb, which I will list below:

The difficulty of constructing a setting for your story is in direct proportion to how similar your setting is to your existing time-space circumstances. The farther removed your fictional setting is from your own surroundings, the more difficult it will be to develop and maintain it.

Into the Time-Slip

I plan to keep this section brief.

The vast majority of stories told in the past, told now, and will be told in the future are presented in past-tense – essentially, a story told which occurred sometime in the past. Few stories are told as if they are occurring right now (present-tense) and much fewer act as if they are telling a story occurring in the future (future-tense). It takes considerable mental energy to keep when is happening straight in your heard, especially if what happens is fictional1.

Again, the same rule I mentioned above applies: the farther away the time period of your story is, the less you know about your setting. For example, if your story is set in the 1920’s, do you know what life was like without the Internet, or without mobile phones, or functioning electricity in half the places you traveled, or with the presence of however many mentally traumatized veterans of the Great War wandering around? Unless you’re a ghost or you’ve done your homework on those times, the answer to this question is likely “not very much.” So, you will either have to pull your story back to a time more familiar to you, or you need to buckle down and get your homework done2.

This also works in reverse if you ware thinking of future settings. Even though the whole point of science fiction writers is to prognosticate and consider what is to come after us, it’s always a tricky process to do well3. I won’t get into the issue much here, but especially if you are working on a first draft, go ahead and make your best guess. Don’t worry, you can always sort out your issues in the later revisions.

Now, let’s talk about place.

Where are You? Where is Your Story?

First, as with time, the further away the place of your story is from your own experiences, the less you will have personal knowledge of it. As with time, you’ll have to do your homework, or in the instance of you fantasy and science fiction writers out there, you’ll have to think long and hard about what this place and the affiliated people, societies, and cultures are all about. And maybe you borrow ideas from other cultures, blend them together into your own ideas, or you come up with your own “unique” ideas you don’t realize you borrowed from multiple cultures and/or places until months or years later. However, you should also know if you borrow from your own experiences, you are going to want to alter that setting a bit so it doesn’t precisely mirrors your real life4.

When I think about the concept of place in fiction, at least two stories come to mind.

  • When I was in high school during the late 1980’s, a Nintendo NES console replaced my aging Atari 2600 get-up which had served me for much of that decade. Of course, I was addicted to console gaming at the time, but what surprised me then was my mother becoming nearly as interested in my console as I was. In particular, she was addicted to the original Zelda game. In this game, Link would find certain maps to the underground area of Hyrule or whatever it was and you would have to walk through each area to show where things were at on the map you can see from the pause screen.
  • I remember hearing a story attributed to Mark Twain (I heard it retold in the science fiction classic film Deep Impact years ago) that riverboat captains along the Mississippi River back in the 1800’s would switch pilots during different parts of their journey upstream or downstream. These pilots would have a clear and extensive knowledge of given sections of the river – where the shallows were located, where the navigable river channel was located, and things of this nature. They would only have knowledge of their given sections of the Mississippi, but not as much for other places.

The idea behind these stories is an idea behind my understanding and approach to setting. Some people might use the metaphor of setting as an iceberg, with sailors traveling on the ocean’s surface only seeing a small percentage of the entire iceberg, with the majority of it hidden beneath the waves.

However, I think a more fitting metaphor for this purpose would be the reader as an explorer in a new land. An explorer enters a new land with either incomplete maps or no maps at all. I see the reader as an explorer in the world you as a fiction writer create. All they know is what they see as they come across it, whether that is locations, those who live there, and the societies they have created. You as the author of this setting is aware of what is in this wider world, but the audience is not.

We’ll get back to this last point in a moment, but let me advise you that in your role as storytellers, you never want to reveal everything about your setting even by the end of your story. First of all, the only way you could even begin to tell all about your setting is with the clunkiest, most awkward info dump which would take up half of the book or story. Secondly, your readers are explorers in the lands you created. They want to discover the lands for themselves. They want to be surprised and amazed, and to be an effective storyteller, you have to give just enough information to inspire them to keep exploring your world, your story.

How much you yourself know about the setting of your story is another issue.

Some writers might choose to only know, or find out about, the parts of a story’s setting a reader will encounter during the course of a story. Others, however, will want to know about all about what that world is. I would count myself among this latter group.

My reasoning is this: you want to see what is behind the curtain and how it works even if your audience doesn’t manage to see this view. You want to be able to see how your world functions so you can represent it accurately. I’m reminded of Alan Rickman acting as Severus Snape in the Harry Potter series in strange ways but ways that made sense to him because he knew the whole shape of his world, which included the motivation of his character. That made Alan’s performance5. I want to know every inch of my world. Even though it might take some time, I believe it is time well worth spending.

But…

As with all the advice I give around here, feel free to ignore it if you find it conflicts with writing habits or techniques which actually work for you. The number one piece of writing advice I ever have given my English, composition, and/or special education students is this:

If something is working to help you write well, whether or not it’s the recommended thing to do, keep doing it.

Next Time…

With the new year, I’m going to get into what I consider to be definitely an extension of setting, but is also related in ways to other parts of the prewriting process as well, which I will term world building. This is essentially developing your setting with a par more detailed eye than a simple plan. We’re talking about building an entire history and backstory to your story, which will prove helpful even if your readers only see a fraction of what you eventually develop. I’m looking forward to tackling this.

Hope everyone’s writing is going well. I’ve got the rest of the calendar year off from work, so when I’m not traveling to see family, I’ll be trying to meet my personal writing goals for the year. Just about 10 days left, so it’s going to be a good spring to the end.

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  1. As always, if you can manage a present or future-tense story, go right ahead with it. But I don’t want you to go a step too far if you realize it’s beyond you. Sometimes the old ways are best. ↩︎
  2. I was a bit reluctant to do a “research for fiction writers” post because it can lead into numerous complications, but the further I get along in this series, the more I see the need for it. We’ll get to world building first, however, trust me. ↩︎
  3. And just now, I realize I might have to do a separate post for science fiction world building. Not that it is going to be easy, but then again, most of the good material isn’t. ↩︎
  4. I have a bit of experience on this regarding my most recent writing project, but that’s a story for another Writing Lab. ↩︎
  5. Rest In Power Alan Rickman (1946-2016). ↩︎

On Prewriting, Part 4: Plotting

top view of man putting cards with text of acts of a play on a table

It’s once again time for The Writing Lab, where I try to pass along any insights and advice on the art of writing I’ve picked up during past thirty years or so.

For the past three editions of the lab, I’ve discussed the process of prewriting, the start of the writing process where you begin to develop . After discussing some of the basics behind prewriting, taking a look at how I’ve developed stories over the years, and how to build characters, let’s spend this weekend discussing something a bit controversial – how to develop your story’s plot.

[AUTHOR’S ONGOING NOTE FOR THIS SERIES:] The advice I give here is geared mostly toward fiction writing; however, it can easily be applied to nonfiction as well.

On Prewriting, Part 4: A plotline paved with good intentions

red and white map chart
Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko on Pexels.com

The reason I just mentioned the idea of plotting in fiction is controversial is because of a certain division between two different philosophies of dealing with the issue of how to develop the storyline. It’s the difference between “Pantsers” and “Plotters.”

Pantsing vs. Plotting

Although I had heard of these terms years before, I really came into contact with these contrasting styles when I met and joined a now-defunct Des Moines writing group known as the Iowa Writers’ Corner. In our discussions about plotting and how they worked out where their stories were headed, more than a few of my fellow members proudly considered themselves to be pantsers.

Pantsters is shorthand for describing “those who write by the seat of their pants.” The general idea is, they come up with an initial concept and/or general premise, a main character, and then they start writing. And they write, and they write, until they get to the end. The general idea is that they follow the story as it coalesces in their heads and onto the page. They go with the natural flow of the story, and if that path is not so smooth the first time around, well, that’s what the revision process is for.

There are many authors who have this opinion. Stephen King, one of my literary idols growing up, has long been skeptical of laying out how a story is going to go. As he wrote in his memoir/writing advice book On Writing:

I distrust plot…because I believe plotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren’t compatible. A strong enough situation renders the whole question of plot moot. The most interesting situations can usually be expressed as a what-if question.

(On the other hand, there are some critics who have wondered whether some of King’s novels could have used some more outlining. I will refrain from further comment on the matter, except to say all writers, myself included, have our areas ripe for improvement.)

Then there are the plotters, those who believe you need to have some idea of where you are going before you start down the storytelling road. As you might have sensed, I consider myself to be one of these types of writers, at least to a point.

I can understand the distrust of Uncle Stevie and others of any process that suppresses creativity and spontaneity. However, I think some planning is required, and I’m going to have fun using analogies and/or metaphors to explain my point, heh heh.

I mean, you wouldn’t take a trip from Iowa to San Francisco without having a Rand McNally road map or at least consulting Google’s services. Oh, sure, you might add a restroom or tourist stop or two, you might have to change your path due to construction and the like, but you’d want to have a rough idea of where you are going to go beforehand.

There is just as much artwork in designing and constructing a building as there is writing a story. Anyone would be crazy to not have some blueprints of your prospective home or office building or whatever before construction started. Of course, you’d want to feel free to make changes to those plans if they didn’t work out; for example, if the marble exterior for your skyscraper began breaking off and falling to the ground and you had to swap it out for some other material1.

And finally, I would use an analogy from the world of professional wrestling to make my point, since I have continued to be fascinated with its culture and its storytelling possibilities2. When you are getting ready for a match, you might feel confident enough to call your moves in the ring as they come along, and adapt to both botches and the feedback from the crowd. But you’re always going to know what the finish is going to be.

A Variety of Plotting Plans, or Everyone’s Got Their Own Brand of Kung Fu

In all honesty, there are plenty of ways for you to sketch out the possible courses of your story. There’s a reason why many of these structures and tropes continue to be used repeatedly over the course of Western and other cultures – they tend to work.

And many of them have similar beats. To paraphrase Bruce Lee, many people have their own fighting styles and the names for these styles, but most men and women have the same two arms and two legs, right?

There’s the common three-act structure, which I ended up teaching many of my past English/Language Arts students a few years back.

All credit for this (and other graphics) go to the creators.

There’s the Hero’s Journey described by Joseph Campbell and studied by (among others) George Lucas when he was cooking up Star Wars.

Then there’s the Save the Cat technique, which I learned at a writing conference sponsored by the Midwest Writing Center in the Quad Cities which became a big influence on my own plotting strategy.

And of course, there are many other options out there (or variations on the ones above) for you to find online or explore.

But…

As with all the advice I give around here, feel free to ignore it if you find it conflicts with writing habits or techniques which actually work for you. The number one piece of writing advice I ever have given my English, composition, and/or special education students is this:

If something is working to help you write well, whether or not it’s the recommended thing to do, keep doing it.

Next Time…

I think during the next edition of the Lab in December, we’ll briefly get into some tips on research. I think I can provide some tips in this regard from my experience in journalism, but I also believe you can overthink this process3. After that edition, we’ll get into setting, which will lead us into the wider arena of worldbuilding.

See you down the road.

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  1. This actually happened with the AON Center in Chicago. ↩︎
  2. My obsession with professional wrestling has crept into other portions of my life. I have actually told students that they shouldn’t work themselves into a shoot, or they need to stop acting like everything in their life is a work. Yes, I am the king of inside jokes. ↩︎
  3. As I mentioned before, this series is generally aimed at fiction writing, and the previous statement was made with this in mind. In nonfiction writing, especially regarding historical events, etc., the research process is not just important to the final product, it is essential. Perhaps this is one of the reasons I’ve not been seriously motivated to undertake any major long-form nonfiction writing projects. ↩︎

On Prewriting, Part 3: Character development

brown wooden desk

Hi, and welcome to my writing lab, where I try and rummage through my brain for insights and advice on the art of writing I’ve practiced, both for pay and for fun, for the past thirty years or so.

For the past two editions of the lab, I’ve discussed the process of prewriting, or the essential assembling of ideas and structure that kicks off the entire writing process. After discussing some of the basics behind prewriting and then taking a look at how I’ve developed stories over the years, let’s spend this weekend discussing character development.

[AUTHOR’S NOTE:] While the advice I give here is geared mostly toward fiction writing, it can easily be applied to nonfiction as well. You likely will just need to sprinkle some research over it, lol1.

On Prewriting, Part 3: Character Development Bodybuilding in your head

Dogs are friendly souls with emotions who can be dear companions and even family to us, but they’re not reading our stories. As much as the dastardly chat bots and AI entities crawling across the Internet might suck in endless numbers of stories in an attempt to recreated them2, there’s no way they are consuming and enjoying them in the way we do3. In the end, we are homo sapiens writing stories for homo sapiens, so it is only natural for these stories to be populated with humans, or at least characters who are acting like humans. We relate to people and want to see what happens to them. Human or human-appearing characters are at the center of our stories because we want to see people like us and their experiences.

But we don’t want to just meet people. We want to learn about them, follow their stories, root for them. So to do this, as we consider the premises of the stories we tell, we need to know how to create characters we can build stories around.

Molding Characters

You probably have a basic idea of the people who will be part of your story at the beginning when you develop the premise. But as you go further along in the creative process, you get to know these characters better. First you meet them, and then you start to have a dialogue with them, just like meeting real people for the first time. You have to ask them some questions; it’s a getting to know you process.

The question is, what do you need to know about them? What information do you need to know about these characters – especially main characters – to get you interested in them?

Role/Motivation

What role does each of the characters play? Who is your protagonist (the main character)? Who is your antagonist (the one who opposes the main character)4? Is the character a mentor, helper, or love interest5? You might have already sorted this out in the process of coming up with the premise, but you’ll need to solidify it by this point.

You also need to sort out the motivation and goals of your characters, especially your main character/protagonist. We need to know why we should care about them. Oftentimes, you will have a main character with multiple goals and both short and long-term goals.

For example, let’s take the main character of my debut novel, The Holy Fool – newspaper columnist Samuel “Sonny” Turner6. Early in the book, his main motivation, given to him by his mentor, editor Gus Pulaski, is finding out whether the owner of the newspaper he works at, the Chicago Journal, is planning on selling the newspaper to someone likely to strip it for assets. Once he confirms this is, in fact, happening, his focus shifts to seeing if he, with the help of his fellow staff, can possibly stop the sale.

However, it becomes clear that he has other goals, as well. He has what he considers a big story involving the ongoing war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and yet he finds himself in conflict with both the owner of his paper, who doesn’t see it as a proper story, and with Sonny’s mentor, who sees the value of the story but believes the preservation of the paper should come first. Sonny finds himself becoming attracted to a co-worker even though it is at a turbulent and inconvenient time for him. Meanwhile, in the long-term, Sonny realizes the old ways of journalism he was taught by his mentors are dying out, and he begins to consider whether there might be a better way to report on the world around him than the way he’s always done it. Now we’ve got a bit of complexity around him, something of interest.

However, this can be done just as well around side characters. One example from The Holy Fool was Casey Barnes, an African American employee of the Chicago Journal who works in the newspaper’s Washington, D.C. office. Casey is a lifelong D.C. resident, born and raised. He wants to properly report on his home, in a way that’s authentic rather than glad-handling. So, he avoids the typical D.C. cocktail parties and attempts to gain influence. He talks to the people on the ground, the grunts who make the nation’s capitol work. And through that, he becomes a journalist’s journalist7.

Backstory

For someone who is a massive fan of world-building8, the idea of developing a back story or background for these characters is essential.

I am very much a believer in the “iceberg” concept of back story and background, where you develop a lot of information and story even though the reader might only see five or ten percent of your work, just like ships will only see five or ten percent of the icebergs they have to avoid.

Even if your reader is not quite sure of what a character’s entire story is, and you might never reveal all of this story, it is vitally important you understand what it is so you can fully understand the character, and all of their intricacies. You need to understand what they have gone through, what drives them, and why they seek what they seek. It’s your job as a writer to reveal just enough of this story so they are motivated to see what will happen next.

Personality

What are the strengths and weaknesses of your characters, especially your main characters? To make them realistic, to make them more breathing people and less Mary Sues9, you have to include both.

When I started to put together the idea for my book The Yank Striker, I had a main character, DJ Ryan, who was about as different from me as any character I have ever written. I was inspired by the past athletes, highly successful ones like Michael Jordan and Tom Brady, people who were focused on excellence to the point of obsessiveness, so the idea of having someone who could be successful in one area of their lives while having tunnel vision shutting out other things seemed to fit. And yet, while he’s very successful as a football player, as a soccer player he’s still learning and has to measure himself against opponents with more experience and skills that he doesn’t have. These contradictions can add depth and originality to your characters.

Also, these characters, like actual people, can have true contradictions. While DJ has a problematic relationship with his father, he very much shares his hair-trigger temper. However, while his father’s temper is triggered by disrespect to him, DJ’s is triggered by injustice to other people, especially those who find it difficult to fight back.

Character Arc

Finally, there’s the important character arc, or the progress the character makes toward their goals. What are the internal conflicts (moral choices, ethical quandaries, self-doubts) they have to face? What about external conflicts, like obstacles human or otherwise, that get in their way?

Although we like to talk about positive character arcs, remember the journeys your characters take could be triumphant. They can also be tragic, or even ambiguous. Regardless of the path you choose, you have to have a clear realization or resolution at the end of their story.

Next Time…

Next month, we’ll get into plot development. There are some writers out in the world who believe you should just start writing and follow wherever their whims take them. (I’ll talk about these “pantsers,” as in seat-of-their-pants writers, as part of the next installment.) However, I’m of the opinion you should have a rough idea of where a story is going before you head out onto the story road. We’ll talk about how all the different ways you as a writer can make the journey.

I’ll see you later, then.

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  1. A piece on proper research will definitely have to be a selection for a future Writing Lab piece in this series. Feel free to make any other topic suggestions for a Writing Lab piece in the comments. ↩︎
  2. #copyrightinfringement ↩︎
  3. #bulterianjihad ↩︎
  4. Fun fact – this does not necessarily have to be a human; it could be a force of nature, an aspect of society, or maybe even the protagonist himself if you are really tricky. Just make sure if it’s not human, you throw in some personification to make that non-human being a bit more relatable. ↩︎
  5. For goodness sake, make the love interest their own individual person with their own interests and desires. It shouldn’t be some Manic Pixie Dream Girl creation intended only to support and fuel the protagonist (look the term up, kids). ↩︎
  6. Also the main character of its in-production sequel. ↩︎
  7. He plays a big part in the sequel set in 2024-? (the original is set in 2008-2009). ↩︎
  8. Ohhhh, we’re going to get into it in a later edition of this Writing Lab, trust me. I love building worlds. ↩︎
  9. This is what a Mary Sue is. ↩︎

On Prewriting, Part 2

The Writing Lab, 20 September 2025

Hello! Hope everyone is having a great weekend. It’s once again time for The Writing Lab, where I try and share some insights from writing that I’ve developed from writing, both for pay and for fun, for the past thirty years or so.

It was last month that I began discussing one of the first steps of the writing process – prewriting, where you first generate and develop your ideas, as well as plan out how it will be organized.

With this piece, let’s continue this talk about prewriting by concentrating one of the essential parts of the prewriting process: generating and developing premises for stories. I’ll discuss some ideas about how you might wish to approach this process, using some of my own experiences and processes as examples1.

[AUTHOR’S NOTE:] While the advice I give here is geared mostly toward fiction writing, it can easily be applied to nonfiction as well. You likely will just need to sprinkle some research over it, lol2.

A representation of the whole writing process. Note how prewriting is at the start of the process.

On Prewriting, Part 2: Developing your initial premise

It’s somewhat strange to me I often don’t get the question “where do you get your ideas?” It might be because I haven’t been putting my fiction out in public that much until recent years, so I haven’t had the opportunity to get tired of those questions as maybe those who have been in the game longer.

As I mentioned earlier, this part of the advice comes from my experience, which might be much different from yours. Creativity, by nature, if you’re really using it properly3, is a very individual thing. So, to describe the initial part of my creative process, I want to use a very individual metaphor to describe it. The metaphor I think best describes my own creative process is something I call “The Perpetual Stew.”

rustic hot vegetable stew in clay pot
Photo by Selim Alyz on Pexels.com

Perpetual Stew

Back in the day, they had a lot of names for what I call a perpetual stew: forever soup, hunter’s pot, hunter’s stew, and the like. This would go back to the medieval days when people would have a pot like this above a fire or hearth and cooks or whoever was in charge of such things would continually add food and other ingredients to it over days and weeks and even longer, continually adding in and serving out, like you’d hear about in medieval inns and the like. You’d throw in whatever was around or you could harvest at the time: rabbit, hen, pigeon, maybe some pork if you were lucky, grains of course, and whatever vegetables like leeks, cabbage, and other items to flavor up what was in the pot.

Something similar to this is cooking in my head constantly. I end up dumping in whatever I mentally consume, or perhaps gather, into this mental perpetual stew. And I mean everything.

If you don’t know, I have a vast amount of interests and things I learned about during my life. Earlier when I was a kid, I’d dump the whole lore of Star Wars and my love of space Legos in the pot. Over the years, I would add ancient and medieval history and architecture, chess and game theory, 20th century history and culture, the history of 1980’s and 1990’s indie rock in America, professional wrestling throughout the world, bad movies from America, India, and Africa, military tactics and history, 20th century journalism, years of reporting from newspapers and websites, current events, foreign cultures of all kinds, and of course the fiction from 400 to 500 years of Western civilization and beyond. This is among other things, of course.

Eventually, I started to ladle out some servings from this perpetual stew and use it to create some artistic meals. Long ago and back when I was a kid, I took some of those images of Star Wars and the space Legos I played with as a kid and and use it to cook up a sci-fi fantasy space opera long lost to the vagaraties of time and idle thinking. Then there were a few young adult novels, personal obsessions, and teenage-scenarios that got turned into my first manuscript and the one book that got produced as a result of the now defunct National Novel Writing Month (better known as NaNoWriMo). I’m not sure those books will see the light of day because they would need some rewrites and it would be like pretending I was twenty or thirty years old when I was in fact twenty years older. It’s like another person altogether wrote those two books45.

Of course, simply pulling out ingredients from the stew and slopping them together on a plate or in a bowl doesn’t quite work. What I’ve found has worked is when I ask myself questions about what is in the stew or what I want out of it. I’ve found asking these questions helps focus the premises or hooks of my stories clearly enough that it provides at least the skeleton of my tale before I begin drafting.

Asking Questions

question marks on paper crafts
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I’ll give you two examples from my own creative experience. Back in college when I was studying journalism, I learned about an incident that happened at the New York Post in the early 1990’s where the newspaper’s staff was up in arms about the possibility of a shady parking lot mogul buying the paper. Eventually, the paper ran an entire edition about this person, making it clear the staff were not interested in having him for a boss. The incident ended up scaring this buyer off of buying the Post, although the paper eventually wound up in the hands of Rupert Murdoch, which I don’t think was an upgrade.

That story sat in my perpetual stew for a while when one day, I took it out, so to speak, and began asking whether it might be a good basis for a story I’d long wanted to write about the journalism field. That’s when I began asking questions, in the process adding some new ingredients to the new creative meal.

  • What if we set the story in the more familiar location (for me) of Chicago?
  • What if it was set at a declining major newspaper?
  • What if it was happening right during the 2008 presidential elections and the start of the Great Recession, with financial institutions collapsing all around?
  • What if the events of this journalistic revolt ended up with the founding of an American-created, journalistic-focused Wikileaks?

I blended the ideas together, and soon enough, I was writing my debut novel, The Holy Fool. Much more needed to be done in the prewriting, but those questions solidified the premise and much of the action of the story.

More recently, I asked the question, What would my main character and his news organization be doing right around now, in today’s world? And just like that, I had a sequel on my hands.

For my series The Yank Striker, I had my fandom of the sport of soccer and an affection for the Americans who dared to make the sport their profession. It stayed cooking for a while as I gradually added more knowledge of the world of professional soccer in Europe and the US. One day, I had a question:

  • When we finally have an American who can play as well as Lionel Messi, who might that person be? Then I asked:
    • Who would he be?
    • What’s his background?
    • What type of personality would he need to be a true sport superstar (spoiler, a bit obsessed)?

By the end of those questions, I had my main character and the bare frame of what became The Yank Striker series.

Of course, after asking these questions, you still will likely have a long way to go before being finished with the prewriting process. However, you will have a good idea of both the nature of your story, your premise and/or hook, and what you need to find out before drafting out the story.

Next Time at The Writing Lab:

Next month, we’ll get into developing your characters. Every reader is a person, and people are naturally drawn to interesting people in fiction. We’ll discuss what you might need in a main character, as well as supporting characters as well, as well as how they can drive your story as well.

Until then, take care.

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While I do appreciate you following this blog, I really would like you to subscribe to my Substack page. By subscribing to that page, you’ll not only be receiving my Substack newsletter, The Writing Life With Jason Liegois (the companion blog to this one), but you’ll also be signing up for my email list. Just click the button below.

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  1. As with all pieces of advice I give here, if you have a better or more effective way of doing some of the things I discuss here, absolutely feel free to stick with your systems. Better yet, message me or share them in the comments so I can “borrow” them. 😅 ↩︎
  2. A piece on proper research will definitely have to be a selection for a future Writing Lab piece in this series. Feel free to make any other topic suggestions for a Writing Lab piece in the comments. ↩︎
  3. That means not using AI to write your bloody stories. What’s the point of creativity otherwise? #ButlerianJihad ↩︎
  4. It might be worth another (or rewritten, depending on how much I’ve discussed the entire story before) Writer’s Biography entry to get into the ins and outs of how it all turned out and why I likely wouldn’t consider trying to release them. ↩︎
  5. Or now that I think about it, maybe I’d release them as web-exclusive stories? Why not make use of stuff I created, even if it’s in a throwaway manner? Why not, indeed, as long as I add the caveat that a kid wrote these books and not the current adult version of me? ↩︎

The Writing Lab, 16 August 2025: On Prewriting, Part 1

photo of pen on top of notebook

Hello everyone out on the Internets. It’s Writing Lab time.

It’s the week I take anything I’ve learned from my thirty or so years working around writing and messing with fiction in my spare time so I can share it with you, my readers.

For the past several editions of this writing lab, I’ve discussed the concept of revision and how it both fits in to the greater writing process and how it can drive your writing. So, I’ve decided to change topics and get into the first part of the writing process – prewriting. Today, I’m going to introduce the topic and get into some of the basic elements of this first part of the writing process.

[AUTHOR’S NOTE:] While the advice I give here is geared mostly toward fiction writing, it can easily be applied to nonfiction as well. Frankly, I’ve done enough nonfiction writing in my day professions (journalism and teaching) to limit my nonfiction writing to these blogs.

A representation of the whole writing process. Note how prewriting is at the start of the process.
man and photos on brown corkboard
Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com

On Prewriting, Part 1: The Basics

The term “prewriting” can be confusing because it implies no writing takes place in this part of the process. This is not the case, although the “writing,” depending on your process, can include a couple lines of scribbled notes or more substancial text. Regardless, since this takes place before you start assembling your rough draft, prewriting makes sense as a term.

In the simplest of terms, prewriting is the process where you formulate and develop the ideas and story you want to write about. This involves creating the characters of your story, especially the main one, establishing the plot and setting of the story, and whatever research you need to complete to make the story seem believable and grounded.

Again, I am just going to review some of the items I believe are essential parts or elements of the prewriting process. My intent is to go into them in far more detail in subsequent Writing Lab posts.

  • Premise: What is the driving idea/what if question/situation that sets off your story? As an ex-reporter, I’m always a believer in the right questions giving insights you wouldn’t expect.
  • Characters: What is needed to create compelling characters? What do you need in a main character (MC) to make them someone a reader wants to invest their time in. How much information is needed for a fully realized MC? By comparison, how much do you need to flesh out supporting characters? Also, do you really need a human antagonist, or is there another solution to this?
  • Plot: What is going to be the storyline of your tale? Is it going to be a conventional three-act story line, or something matching The Hero’s Journey? Or is it going to be something non-linear and unexpected? Is there a good reason for this?
    • This is where some writers divide themselves into “planners” and “pantsers” when it comes to planning, especially in the area of plot. Basically, planners like to sketch things out in advance, where pantsers tend to just start writing immediately after minimal (if any) preparation. I am more of the former than the latter type of writer, but we’ll get into the differences in more detail later.
  • Setting: When and where is your story taking place? For most writers, time might be a straightforward concept, although again you might want to experiment with a more non-linear concept.
    • Place can become more complicated, especially if you choose a setting you, your audience, or possibly both do not have much experience with or connection to. This gets into the whole concept of worldbuilding – constructing both the physical aspects of your world, as well as the non-tangible elements, such as its society and culture (or multiple societies and cultures).
  • Research, which is any self-education you feel you need to be able to tell a realistic story. I always think you need some level of research for any fictional project, whether it involves things you have already learned over the course of your life or it’s new information you need. Even in a story that might seem familiar enough you would not have need additional knowledge, some additional searching can become vital.

The one thing to keep in mind, as with all my writing advice, is that you should proceed with prewriting in whichever way works best for you.

Next Time at The Writing Lab:

On the next writing lab, I’ll get into some of how my own prewriting process works, and one of the most common questions any author gets: “Where do you get your ideas?”

And I know I promised you this before, but I’ll come through next time – there’ll be some stew involved.

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While I do appreciate you following this blog, I really would like you to subscribe to my Substack page. By subscribing to that page, you’ll not only be receiving my Substack newsletter, The Writing Life With Jason Liegois (the companion blog to this one), but you’ll also be signing up for my email list. Just click the button below.

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The Writing Lab, 19 July 2025: On Revising, Part 5

Hello all out there on Substack, WordPress, or in the various nooks and crannies of the Internet. It’s Writing Lab time again.

This is where I try to take some of the hard-earned skills and experiences I’ve picked up from (checking the calendar) nearly thirty years of working in writing or writing-adjacent fields (first journalism, then teaching, then back to journalism for a hot second, and now back to teaching for a while now), as well as my experiences with blogging and fiction writing1.

For this week’s edition, I’m going to take one more look at the art and practice of revision. I believe revising might be the most important part of the writing process, because it’s there raw ideas and stories get crafted into coherent and compelling ones.

To recap how this particular series has progressed, I began with a quick review of revising and how it fits in with the broader writing process, and then I elaborated on this with a broad overview of my own revising process and how it works for me.

Then I discussed word count. While it’s always a good idea to try to write as much as possible, not every single word needs to be in the final version of your creation. I’ve got a new saying: You don’t need to get the last word with yourself. And then, I briefly touched on the element of collaborating with others, both in the revision process and writing in general.

So, for this installment, which will be the last in the revision series for now, will be about the concept of raising the stakes of your story2. We’re going to talk about how to get readers to care more about the story you are trying to tell, and how to make that story more compelling.

On Revising, Part 5 of 5 (for now): Raising the Stakes

playing card and poker chips and dices
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

I remember I was in the middle of my initial revisions for the book that would become The Yank Striker when I had a conversation with one of my close acquaintances about the book. At a certain point in the revision process, I always wanted to take a look at everything about my story and see if there is anything structurally the matter with the piece. Are my characters (especially the MC) compelling? Does the story flow? Does my plot have any leaks or dead ends?

So, I showed it to my friend Misty Urban, who happens to be a quite good author of contemporary fiction and historical romance, and she gave me some very insightful comments.

There’s a type of critique that really puffs you up and there’s a type of critique that pulls you down, pulls you down so hard it either breaks your will or you totally disregard it. The critique I got was a third kind – the kind that excites you with the possibilities that you didn’t see before. It’s the type of critique that shines a light onto something you didn’t realize and lights the way to a better story.

There was a lot to it, but the essential part of the critique was this (I’m paraphrasing here): “Well, it’s all good to have an interesting character going through interesting experiences. But it’s not like he’s in danger of losing, is there? Not the way you have it written. The way you have it written, I know he’s always going to succeed. There’s not the suspense there, is there?”

It was then that I realized:

I needed to raise the stakes in my novel.

Let me try to explain this a little.

One of the deadliest things that a beta reader, or any reader, really, can say about a book is, “Well, who cares?” If you want readers to care about your story, you have to make that story involve struggle.

If I was going to define what stakes were, I would lay it out like this. What does your main character (MC) have to gain if they succeed? What do they have to lose if they don’t? Are they the type of things that other readers could relate to, even if they don’t find themselves in the same situations as those characters? Could they relate to them, at least?

The problem was, my MC was always winning. Even that’s all right, but I have to make sure that it’s tough for them. There has to be doubt in the readers’ minds that your character is going to succeed and some consideration of where the character is going to be if they fail.

Essentially, the premise of my book is, what would an American version of Diego Maradona or Lionel Messi look like? What would that person’s path be to soccer glory, and what would they have to overcome to make that happen?

In reading over Misty’s comments, I realized that I had dedicated most of my time to ensuring that my MC would reach those heights and not enough time putting obstacles in his path. For example, Diego had to overcome poverty, and Lionel had to overcome hormone deficiency to become the soccer gods they eventually became.

What did my character have to overcome to reach his goals, especially as a 17-18 year old kid starting to learn about life and what it takes to succeed? I had to show more of the building and less of the ribbon-cutting ceremony, essentially. I had to show the struggle, the climb to the top, to make sure that people cared about what happened to my MC.

I have to credit Donald Maass and his book Writing the Breakout Novel for educating me on the concept of raising the stakes in fiction. Those stakes I’m talking about mean simply: what is there to lose if the main character or characters fail in their efforts? These stakes have to be both public (affecting society or the greater public) and personal (affecting the main characters). In the case of public stakes, you always want to ask yourself if these public stakes are believable, or something that could be a plausible danger if the author gives sufficient detail. Personal stakes depend on making your reader relate to or even sympathize with your MC and their struggles. As the story goes on, you have to continue to ask yourself how things could get worse in the case of the public stakes, and how the personal stakes could matter more to the reader. And you should make sure things get tougher for your characters as time goes on.

Next Time at The Writing Lab:

On the next writing lab, I’m going to start getting into the creative process and prewriting ideas in particular. I’ll discuss a bit of my process on developing and fleshing out ideas. Also, stew will be involved.

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While I do appreciate you following this blog, I really would like you to subscribe to my Substack page. By subscribing to that page, you’ll not only be receiving my Substack newsletter, The Writing Life With Jason Liegois (the companion blog to this one), but you’ll also be signing up for my email list. Just click the button below.

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  1. Even though I also write poetry, it’s an art I’ve picked up relatively late, so I’m seeking advice rather than giving it. soccer will be used a bit interchangeably to describe the same game both here and in the book. Those are the breaks, as they say. ↩︎
  2. Unlike with the previous entries in this series, this one is certainly fiction-centered. ↩︎

The Writing Lab, 21 June 2025: On Revising, Part 4

close up photography of eyeglasses near crumpled papers

Hello everyone who has somehow happened onto this electronic page, either through a friendly email or the whims of the mighty algorithms, or by some random twist fo fate. Welcome to The Writing Life.

Since it is once again the third weekend of the month, I am bringing you another edition of The Writing Lab. As I get older, I become painfully aware of how much I don’t know about the world and what I might never know. However, since I’ve had twenty-five-plus years of experience with the art of writing, as a journalist, teacher, fiction writer, and fledgling poet, I am at least slightly comfortable in saying I might have some knowledge of the art.

Since I started The Writing Lab back in March, I have fixated on the topic of revising. It turns out I’ve had a bit to say about it, one of the steps in the larger writing process. In all honesty, I’m of the opinion revision is the most important part of the writing process, because I see it at the step where your writing, especially your fiction writing, gets crafted into something both coherent and compelling1.

We began with a quick review of revising and an explanation of how it fits into the writing process. I continued the following month with a broad overview of my own revising process and its basic workings.

I then touched on the topic of word count. Many writers, and I include myself in this category, see the more you write, the better it is for your creativity and productivity as well. However, what you learn in the revising process is the more you write, the more difficult it is to search through the word salad and find a clear and compelling story. You need to learn you don’t need to focus on getting the last word with yourself. I talked about it in detail before.

So, for this next installment, I want to discuss something perhaps not as discussed in writing columns—the idea of collaboration in writing, especially when it comes to the concept of beta readers. As I am still in the process of prepping my book The Yank Striker’s Journey for publication, this issue is still fresh in my mind.

corrections on a paragraph written on a paper
Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com

On Revising, Part 4 (of ?): On the subject of writing collaboration and beta readers

In the realm of art, one of the questions is how much it is an inherently individual effort and how much it is a inherently collaborative effort. This can depend on the type of medium the artist works in. For example, musicians and film directors can find their creative processes involve interacting with and creating alongside many different people. For novelists and painters, however, it can be a far more individual journey—one man, woman, or being staring at a blank page or a blank canvas until a certain amount of inspiration strikes.

However, such categories obscure creative realities. In the realms of film and music, for instance, one person with a clear artistic vision, maybe a singer, guitarist, or producer, or a director or actor, can dominate above others’ visions. Also, those who are writers or painters can end up relying on outsiders far more than what immediately becomes apparent.

It is regarding the latter phenomenon we will review today. As a young man, I considered writing to be a one-man band situation. I created my worlds, I wrote them down on paper (or electronic files) and then released them into the wider world. However, I’ve come to realize the wisdom of former US President Barack Obama when he said during a 13 July 2012 campaign speech:

Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.

In this instance, Obama was not trying to downplay the efforts of entrepreneurs and their creativity. What he was trying to say was there were plenty of people behind those successful entrepreneurs which helped them to get to where they needed to be. They had a support system to reach their goals.

With this in mind, writers do not get to be a success just based on their own skills and talents. They have to rely in part on the efforts of others to see their creative efforts develop into their optimal form. The intent behind this post is to detail how this idea of collaboration fits into the revision portion of the writing process in particular and their creative process of novels in general.

Again, the cliche of the fiction writer is someone striking out on their own on a creative standpoint, without the input or responsibility of collaborators, financial backers, and the like. For example, it’s not a coincidence that George R.R. Martin first started writing his A Song Of Ice And Fire series after being frustrated with the technical and financial limitations television had put on his ideas as a Hollywood screenwriter, ironic since that series would inspire one of the most expensive television programs in history. 🙂

Being your own boss as a fiction writer has tons of advantages. You don’t get into any arguments over whether a character or plot twist makes sense, or whether your story should be set in Los Angeles rather than an undersea colony, for example. You set your own deadlines, as well as the size of your work (within reason unless you are willing to pay to get it published). All of this is true.

When it comes to revisions, however, I do have a rule of thumb.

Any man can be his own editor, but they can never be their only editor.

One area where collaborative effort can play a significant and absolutely necessary part in writing is during the revision process. Whether you call them peer reviewers, first readers, or, as is now the fashion, beta readers, having another set of eyes to read what you’ve written can be the difference between an OK revision and a great one. Why is this? Simply put: you as a writer are not going to be able to find every plot point not wrapped up, every unrealistic characterization, and every unfinished scene, not to mention every misspelled word. You don’t need a village to write a book, but I think you do need more than one set of eyes to revise it.

Where do you find these beta readers? Unfortunately, most of us don’t happen to live in the household of Stephen King, which wound up producing four different published authors. So, you have to look around. I’m lucky enough to have a local writing group that I participate in. This next month, I’m actually hoping that some of them will do me the honor of reading my latest WIP. There are many online groups that have people willing to look at WIP’s, although the quality of this help can vary. I’d recommend developing acquaintances with members online before asking them to beta read. Sometimes you can be lucky enough to get a professional critique; however, I wouldn’t spend a massive amount of money doing this.

As far as when in the revising process this should take place, I would say it should happen before you seriously consider adding and/or subtracting major portions of your manuscript. By that, I mean the heavy lifting. Whatever form it takes, having more than just your eyes and viewpoint revising your work is key to making sure you don’t leave anything needed out and that you don’t keep anything that you don’t need. After a certain point in the revising process, you don’t want to make massive changes to your work, so it’s best to get this feedback early so you are more open to it.

Of course, there are many other ways people can collaborate with you in the writing process. I think a proofreader is massively important if you want to make your manuscript look professional. Most of the time, this just covers grammatical and conventions issues, but it can also cover some light revisions as well. It made a big difference with my work.

While I left the design of my first two books up to my publisher, I went to an outside designer for The Yank Striker’s Journey. It certainly cost me more than either just leaving it to my publisher or trying to rough out something myself on Canva, but I believe the results were well worth it.

There are some other professionals, such as marketing experts, who might also be of assistance for writers. All I can advise on this matter is to choose carefully. There are many people out online who say they can help you, but I’d take plenty of time to research them. As this world gets more digital, I find myself relying more on people I’ve had personal relationships with rather than wholly online. In the end, I think you should consider collaborating with people who can add something to your product you wouldn’t be able to accomplish as effectively on your own.

On the next writing lab, I’ll discuss another aspect of revising. I think I might have at least two more editions of this topic before having to consider another aspect of writing.

I’m going to be out of town Saturday for a book fair event, so I’m not even going to try and coordinate a live chat or Substack Note. However, if you have any questions about the article, had questions about fiction, poetry, or essay writing, or you wanted to get some advice on something you are trying to create, reach out to me either in the comments of this post or directly through Substack DMs. The links for both of them are below.

Hope I see you around.

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While I do appreciate you following this blog, I really would like you to subscribe to my Substack page. By subscribing to that page, you’ll not only be receiving my Substack newsletter, The Writing Life With Jason Liegois (the companion blog to this one), but you’ll also be signing up for my email list. Just click the button below.

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  1. Most of this advice is aimed at fiction writers rather than nonfiction writers or those who write poetry verse, but I believe the vast majority of it applies to you just as much to those who write fiction. ↩︎

The Writing Lab, 17 May 2025: On Revising, Part 3

rewrite edit text on a typewriter

Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the Writing Lab. Here’s where I try to impart some knowledge of writing I’ve managed to pick up in the twenty-five-plus years of experience I’ve had with the art in a way which might be useful to you, the reader. This is especially the case if you want to write yourself.

Over the past couple of months since I’ve started this Writing Lab, I’ve decided to do a series on the revising process. We started with a quick review of revising and how it fits into the writing process, and then I continued with a broad overview of my own revising process and its basic workings.

On Revising, Part 3 (of ?): Regarding word count and reducing it for fun and creativity

Photo by olia danilevich on Pexels.com

I think that I reached a new level of maturity as a writer a few years ago when I cut 1,000 words from the manuscript I was working on at the time and I was as excited about that as I was writing 1,000 new words.

For several years, I taught writing either primarily or as part of my other language arts instruction in the general education classroom. Now, I teach special education, but I do advise many of my students regarding their writing, and some of them have writing goals that I work with them on.

Some of them have been eager writers, and some of them I’ve had to figuratively drag onto the page. But one common problem many of them have had was that they considered the process of writing to be:

  1. Get an idea.
  2. Write it down.

As I explained to you at the start of this series, that is not the case. Again, I believe revision is where the true heart of writing takes place, a lesson I have tried to impart on my students and something I’ve worked to structure my instruction around. At the junior college level, for example, I always found more essay peer review and instructor review had more value for the students than any live lecture that I gave.

“Liegois, you must have always been a great revising wiz, then,” you might or might not say. Or, it might be the voices in my head. However, I would respond to this statement by saying – Reader, there were a few holes in my game1.

Specifically, the one hole that I am thinking of is that I tended to write a lot more than I needed to. A lot more.

You’ve got to remember, I was the guy who turned a relatively simple journalism thriller into a 160,000-word opus. After I wrote it, I began reading all of the writing advice articles that said to avoid anything bigger than 100,000 words unless you were Stephen King or George RR Martin or whatever. Obviously, the idea of cutting more than one-third of an existing novel horrified me.

Until, that is, I actually did it.

Reader, you will never be as hyped as you will be when you cut that 2,000 or so words from your manuscript and realize that nothing of value has been lost. Oh, my goodness, the relief you will feel from having all of those unnecessary words fall away from your work will be nothing like you’ve ever felt. It will be like the old lumbermen of the Mississippi River clearing a log jam from a bend of the river and watching the logs flow into the main channel. (I get to use the river metaphors because I live on the river, got it?)

I may have told this story before2, but I realized something about myself in my former, unfettered form, when I wrote and never had a care for how much I wrote – I wrote a lot. People tended to tell me I had an ear for dialogue when they read my stuff, which was nice – I’m a massive admirer of Elmore Leonard, so I was down with that. The only problem was, I wrote pages and pages of it. I wound up writing three pages of dialogue in a situation where one page of dialogue would have done. I realized that I should have taken in the example of Clint Eastwood when he cut out much of the dialogue from that one movie of his when he realized he didn’t need it.

The point is, when I started to look at what my characters were saying, I realized they only had to say it once (maybe twice, if they were nervous), but no more. Once I realized that, my manuscript started to shed words 1K without too much hassle.

The point is, when I started to look at what my characters were saying, I realized they only had to say it once (maybe twice, if they were nervous), but no more. Once I realized that, my manuscript started to shed words 1K without too much hassle.

The point is, when I actually started to look at what my characters were saying, I realized that they only had to say it once (maybe twice, if they were nervous), but no more than that. Once I realized that, my manuscript started to shed words 1K at a time without too much hassle. After several months, I was down to a manuscript that I could live with.

I know I am not alone in having this problem. And when I say this, I am referring specifically to one author I am a big fan of, Laurell K. Hamilton. I’m such a fan that I have, at this minute, something around a dozen paperbacks of her Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series on my bookshelves.

But she goes on and on. There’s sex scenes that could fit into one chapter rather than two, dialogue that could wrap up after a half-page rather than three pages. None of this makes me want to not read her. However, I want to try and avoid the same pitfalls in my own work. (You should be reading other people’s work for what you should avoid just as much as what you should emulate.)

When I started writing The Yank Striker, I had word count in the front of my mind the minute that I started to write the rough draft. I quickly realized, as I went through my notes on the project and started to judge what could fit into less than 100,000 words, that I had more of a series on my hands than a single work. I remembered the stories about how J. R. R. Tolkien shopped around his manuscript of Lord of The Rings around to his buds on the University of Cambridge campus and that they were horrified at the size of the manuscript. He wanted to put the entire Lord of The Rings story into a single volume, can you believe it? He finally got talked into splitting it into a trilogy.

The point is, words are important. Use them wisely. Artistic restrictions can be good for you more so than they can be bad.

On the next writing lab, I’ll discuss another aspect of revising. I’m honestly not sure how many entries there will be in this series, but there will be at least a few more.

Also, I’m going to make sure this time to post a Substack Note related to this post, asking those of you with writing and/or revising questions to share them in the responses. I’d love to hear from you and maybe help you with that one project you’ve wanted to get you across the finish line.

See you then.

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  1. This statement should not imply no further holes in said game do not exist. ↩︎
  2. Famous last words. ↩︎

The Writing Lab, 19 April 2025: On Revising, Part 2

marking a composition page with sticker

One of the biggest observations I’ve ever made about writing is you need to work with what works for you. By this, I mean the art of writing is a very individual process. What works for me, or you, might not necessarily work for each other or for other people; or, it might work but in a heavily modified format.

In this spirit, this week’s writing lab is a continuation of what I began to talk about last month; namely, the task of revising. Where before I went over some of the basics of revision and how it fits into the overall writing process (spoiler; it might be the biggest part of the process), in this post I’m going to go over some basics of how I structure my own revisions and what it looks like for me.

On Revising, Part 2 (of ?): My System: an overview

Photo by olia danilevich on Pexels.com

As I mentioned in the last Writing Lab post, the revising process is something that can be repeated (theoretically) to infinity but (practically) for anywhere from between three to five “rounds” of revisions. Based on everything I said, I’m not set on giving you one hard and fast number you have to stick with all the time. One rule of thumb, however, might be this: Take whatever number or revision rounds you come up with and add one or two to it.

I like to keep track of what changes I make to a document and the differences that come with those changes. But, I’m a lazy person in that I don’t want to give myself a lot of extra unnecessary work. So, I borrowed something from the software world for this process.

I designate the rough draft of every manuscript I write as “Book Project (or whatever its working title is) 1.0.” Whenever it is time for me to start my revisions, I will make a duplicate of the file and then retitle it “Book Project 2.0,” thus letting me know this is the first version of a manuscript now being revised. When it is time to do another full revision, you simply make a copy of the manuscript you are working on and then retitle it Book Project 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, and so on.

What happens if you are making minor changes, or you are only concentrating on one aspect of the manuscript to review? Well, let’s say you decided to see if you didn’t retell a background story to one of your characters or your setting more than a half dozen times. Then, you might make a copy of your manuscript and title it something like Book Project 2.1 or Book Project 2.5. The convenience of this procedure for me is it allows me to make as many smaller changes to a story and I don’t run out of numbers to keep it straight in my head (ex., Book Project 2.5, 2.6, 2.61, 2.8, 2.812, etc.). On most electronic documents like Google Docs or Microsoft Word, it allows you to make notes on the document itself. I can use it to write down comments regarding any major changes to the manuscript.

Exactly what each of those revisions covers is another good question. There are those who believe you should try to look at every aspect of a manuscript in a revision. While I do think it might be a good idea to do this for your first revision, afterwards you might want to fix your attention to one big idea to address in each of your later rounds. Some examples of what some of these big ideas can be include:

  • Word count. There are plenty of advice articles on how big your manuscripts should be. The consensus is that genre books and most fiction should be under 100,000 words or less. If you haven’t been watching your word count, that could result in a lot of sentences, paragraphs, or even scenes and chapters you must eliminate from your work.
    You might think it’s impossible to cut a 160,000-word manuscript down below 100,000, but trust me, it is possible. I wound up doing this for my first novel, The Holy Fool. That required a lot of scene cuts and me removing something of a subplot from my novel, but I managed it.
  • Continuity issues. I remember a scene from the 1985 Arnold Schwarzenegger film Commando where a car is trashed rolling onto its side, Arnold rolls it right side up, and he drives away in a perfectly maintained car. You want to avoid similar silliness, which can come from calling one thing by two different names or having one thing in two different places.
    In the process of writing my second novel, The Yank Striker, I changed the name of a soccer club halfway through my rough draft, so I wound up having to change pages of description1. It was worth it, but you must be meticulous when you do it.
  • Other big ideas. Is your main character unlikable? Do you need to give more or less background to your story? Are there subplots that are just fizzling out? Is the pace of your book off, or it takes too long to get going? This is where your heavy lifting happens.

On the next writing lab, I’ll go into some of these processes I skimmed over above and discuss them in more detail. Along the way, I’ll also go into how I’ve used the revising process to make improvements for my books and writings before publication. See you then.

Also, I’m going to post a related Substack Note for this post2, asking those of you with writing and/or revising questions to share them in the responses. I’d love to hear from you and maybe help you with that one project you’ve wanted to get you across the finish line.

See you then.

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While I do appreciate you following this blog, I really would like you to subscribe to my Substack page. By subscribing to that page, you’ll not only be receiving my Substack newsletter, The Writing Life With Jason Liegois (the companion blog to this one), but you’ll also be signing up for my email list. Just click the button below.

Subscribe to my Substack here.
  1. The reason for this was due to my obsessiveness for research. I originally named the soccer team from the East End of London which recruits my main character, DJ Ryan, as Donchester FC. However, in speaking online to some people from England, they explained names with Chester as a suffix (meaning camp or fort) were not common in the East End area but those ending with Ford (meaning river crossing). So, Donchester FC became Donford FC. ↩︎
  2. Find me there at jasonliegoisauthor.substack.com. ↩︎