Episodes
Tuesday Mar 30, 2021
Episode 57 - Writing What You Don't Know That You Don't Know
Tuesday Mar 30, 2021
Tuesday Mar 30, 2021
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Titles referenced in this episode:
- Ken Follet https://ken-follett.com/books/
- WMB Episode 43 with Antoine Bandele
- The Martian by Andy Weir
- Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
- Writing The Other Workshops and Resources
Episode Transcript:
Rekka (00:00):
Welcome back to another episode of, we make books, a podcast about writing publishing and everything in between. I am Rekka. I write science fiction and fantasy as RJ Theodore.
Kaelyn (00:11):
I'm Kaelyn. I am the acquisitions editor for Parvus Press. And today... So today we're talking about the phrase, "write what you know," and how I dislike it.
Rekka (00:22):
Quite a bit. As it turns out.
Kaelyn (00:24):
I feel like it can be, without context as Rekka points out in this, a little bit of a cop out. A little bit of a, like, I don't know what to do here. Well, write what you know. Um, as a writing exercise, I think that's fantastic. But as a problem solving technique, I think it's lacking. Now, granted, as we point out, Rekka and I are coming from a genre fiction background, so we don't actually know a ton about aliens yet; we're working on it. So, yeah, I, um, I don't know. I'm not a big fan of the phrase, but, uh, we, you know, get into all different aspects of this. And then we spend a lot of time talking about, okay, well, how do you write what you don't know? And how do you know what you don't know? And if you don't know what you don't know, what do you do about that?
Rekka (01:12):
And do— and what if you don't know that you don't know anything, are you allowed to write?
Kaelyn (01:16):
Certainly hasn't stopped people.
New Speaker (01:19):
That's a, we didn't get into that. So, uh, here comes the music and we'll keep going on this. On the other side.
New Speaker (01:40):
I'm running out of cappuccino.
Kaelyn (01:43):
Sorry to hear that.
Rekka (01:44):
I'm getting very low.
Kaelyn (01:45):
So what happens when you've run out of cappuccino?
New Speaker (01:48):
I switch to water.
Kaelyn (01:49):
But how do you feel?
Rekka (01:52):
Um, let me tell you about it... In prose form? Were you trying to make that a segue?
Kaelyn (02:00):
Yes, I was.
Rekka (02:00):
I was not on the, uh, the wavelength of how that was exactly going to transition.
Kaelyn (02:05):
Well, that's because you're running out of cappuccino and you're caffeine deprived and your brain is not working at the, uh, super caffeinated level that you would like it to be.
Rekka (02:13):
Gotcha.
Kaelyn (02:14):
So if you were writing a character that was in desperate need of coffee...
Rekka (02:18):
I would know exactly what to write.
Kaelyn (02:20):
Yeah. So today, um, we're talking about the, uh, pervasive and very strange phrase, write what you know. And I say very strange, because everybody seems to have different opinions about what this means. And Rekka and I even have different opinions about what this means.
Rekka (02:38):
Well, the people who've said it to me have had different opinions about what it means. Um, sometimes it's somebody saying literally dig into your own life, and that's the only place where your inspiration or subject matter can come from. That kind of precludes the entire genre of science fiction and fantasy.
Kaelyn (03:00):
I don't like when people say that, because I think what ends up happening is you have a character or multiple characters that's experiences are limited to your own experiences. And I don't know about you, but I don't want to read a book that's just about me. I'm not interesting enough for that.
Rekka (03:18):
Writers already have to struggle to vary their characters enough so that you can identify them by their dialogue alone, for example. don't then tell that writer to rein it in and make the characters more alike by making them all like the author.
Kaelyn (03:34):
I think it's a little bit of a trap and a trick to tell people, write what you know.
Rekka (03:40):
Well, I know Star Wars. Can I write Star Wars?
Kaelyn (03:43):
Absolutely.
Rekka (03:44):
Okay, cool. All right. I'm happy with that answer. I think we can end it there.
Kaelyn (03:49):
All right. Problem solved. End of episode. Excellent.
Rekka (03:51):
Everybody write Star Wars or your favorite thing.
Kaelyn (03:54):
Quick clarification. We're obviously talking about fiction here, because if this is a nonfiction book, then you're doing research essentially. Um, or you're telling a narrative story that happened, presumably there's documentation to back up. Um, obviously Rekka and I work in genre fiction. You know, we tend to lean a little more towards the science fiction and fantasy side of things here, but I think this applies to characters and stories across the board. Although we will get a little, as we get, dig a little more into this, we'll get a little into things that are unique to science fiction and fantasy. And in this regard, I think though, that saying write what you know, and limiting yourself to your own experiences— I mean, I don't have that exciting a life ... if I'm limit— If I'm writing a book, and we limit it to my own experiences, it's going to be a lot of pizza. Beer, Mets games, pizza, hockey, a lot of documentaries.
Rekka (04:56):
Makeup styling?
Kaelyn (04:58):
Yeah. A lot of makeup. So, I mean, do you want to read 80,000 words about that? Cause I don't.
Rekka (05:04):
So you don't like the minutiae of write what you know.
Kaelyn (05:09):
No.
Rekka (05:12):
So allow me to talk about the minutia for a minute. This is the knowledge you have that sinks the reader more deeply into the character at any given time, even though it is what you know about a situation, it's what you know about being deep in that situation as a human being in that space. And even though sometimes we write aliens, we still occasionally need to feel like humans in a space, uh, to connect with our readers who are, in theory, human. So in the case of the cappuccino, because one example is probably as good as another. If you know what it's like to be busy and reach for your cappuccino and realize you drank the whole thing without appreciating it, because you were so distracted by whatever you were focused on. Or, you know the feeling of looking into the bottom of your cup and seeing just that little bit that sinks into the depression formed by the curve of the bottom. And you still have a headache and you still need coffee, except it was a cappuccino and you just spent $5 on your coffee instead of a proper $2. And now you can't go get another one. Um, the feeling of realizing that it's time to switch to water and you didn't really want to drink water because it's cold and you wanted to be cozy and you're in a bad mood and you just wanted your favorite cozy drink. Um, these are all little details that you can apply to a scene that doesn't have to be cappuccino. Uh, you know, if you're relating your cappuccino experience to your science fiction character's favorite beverage that they drink in the morning could be raktajino, could be caff. The characters who can't live without it. Uh, there's also the characters who can't live without their coffee, but only on a chemical level. They actually don't like the flavor and they drink it as fast as they can. These are different kinds of relationships that people can have with something. And so you are writing what you know, and you know it, but it may not be universal. And these are very micro, visceral things that people can generally relate to. Because even if people don't like coffee, they might love tea and they know what it feels like to not have their tea in the morning. Um, or they just know what it's like to not have that piece of their routine, or for the piece of their routine that they hold sacred to be forgotten because something else is going on. So these are all things that can draw your reader in because they create a more relatable experience. And you don't need to have a degree in coffee roasting to understand how this works. You don't need to look, on the internet, what other people say about drinking coffee? Um, if it's not coffee, you know, you don't want to talk about coffee? Talk about your favorite pillow. Talk about your favorite sweater, your slippers. Write about these little things that matter. Um, write about what it's like to be sad, and then have the weather does change and the sky opens up on you, and now you're sad and soaking wet. Like these are all things that readers can relate to, even if they can't relate to your science fiction scenario or your fantasy world. And that's how you write what you know on a micro level.
Kaelyn (09:01):
It's useful. You're writing something and the character's exhausted, and they've just run out of cappuccino.
Rekka (09:06):
I literally did. Just so you know, I literally just ran out of cappuccino
Kaelyn (09:11):
And boy, do you know what that feels like.
Rekka (09:13):
I do.
Kaelyn (09:14):
That said I'd like to get a little bit more to a macro level. Do you have any other, any other thoughts?
Rekka (09:21):
Um, I'm trying not to cry. I'm in that moment where the cappuccino is gone. So continue go to your macro level. Cause I'm, I'm still here in the micro and I'm suffering. So pull me out of it. Take me with you.
Kaelyn (09:33):
So on the macro level, this is what I kind of call the research area. Now, people who are like true, write what you know people: if you're not a doctor, you have no business writing, anything that has to do with being a doctor. If you are not an astrophysicist, you should not be writing anything that takes place in space. This is nonsense. There are not a lot of astrophysicists in the world, so we don't get to have all of the astrophysicists writing perfectly correct science fiction. Limiting people to writing only what they know is going to produce a very limited amount of books that could end up being very dry.
Kaelyn (10:14):
This kind of then branches into, okay, well, you have to do research on the things that you don't know about. Let's start with research and how much of it you do and where you get it from. And then we're going to move into how you apply this to your writing and the worlds that you're creating and the characters that are living there. The research all depends on what you're researching. You know, if you're writing historical fiction, you better be really well-versed in what was going on in history at that location at that time. You better have some primary sources from people who were there. Uh, you'd better be really clear about, you know, the, um, you know, the location, the political environment of the time, the class of the—you know, let's say it's about a family—their social class, and you'd better know what the important things that you need to identify with them are like, for instance, if you're writing about somebody, um, living in reformation era England, you'd better know what was going on between the Protestants and Catholics. And you'd better say which one this person is.
Rekka (11:23):
That's why I write secondary world fantasy.
Kaelyn (11:26):
Yes. Exactly. So in some cases like that, you know, like if you're writing fiction that is set, you know, in, in our world at a different time period or, um, a different place, you need to do research to, to find out what that time or that place or that people are like. And you need to do it, not only just to build a compelling character, but to be accurate. Because if this is an area where, if you're setting something, you know, in our quote-unquote reality, you gotta be accurate there otherwise... Well, one, I don't think anyone's really gonna publish it, but two, it's not going to go over well when it's published, it's not something that a lot of readers and reviewers in the community have.
Rekka (12:15):
patience for.
Kaelyn (12:16):
Yeah, exactly. The example I always use is Ken Follet books. Uh, Ken Follet writes these thousand page tomes of meticulously researched stories. One of his series is about a specific family through various generations. And then the other is about a town in, uh, the high middle ages in England. And my God, the research this guy did into—I think it was like 12th century—English stone masonry techniques. And then, uh, the wool industry open— it, you know, like, uh, how they died and all of this stuff. And you know what, no one can poke holes in that guy's research cause, Oh my God, did he do his research! But he still wrote really compelling characters. And you know what? He didn't write what he knows, because he's not a 12th century peasant from England. He has no context for the series.
Rekka (13:14):
At least no one has found his time machine yet.
Kaelyn (13:16):
Yes. Yes. So there are certain scenarios in which, you know, you can't write what you know, you just have to do the research.
Rekka (13:26):
But there's also, you don't know what you don't know. And sometimes you're just going to get it wrong.
Kaelyn (13:33):
Yes, definitely. There are some instances of, "we don't really know, so I'm going to speculate or I'm going to make something up here" and you know, then sometimes, maybe a decade later there's a new archeological discovery and that thing that you made up, wow. That was exactly wrong.
New Speaker (13:48):
Yeah. Or exactly right.
New Speaker (13:50):
I was going to say, it'd be weirder if it was right. Then, you know, you have the Dan Browns of the world who take some theories and present them as fact and just really run with it. And sure, it makes for compelling reading and an interesting story and everything, but it's not correct.
Rekka (14:08):
And not going to hold up to much scrutiny.
Kaelyn (14:10):
Yeah.
Rekka (14:10):
Look, you're not there because you think you can take a college course in this.
Kaelyn (14:15):
Yeah.
Rekka (14:15):
I hope.
Kaelyn (14:17):
So. You know, historical fiction, obviously you really need to have all your ducks in a row, but we're talking about some different kinds of fiction here. So let's just talk about, you know, maybe not people set in earth.
Rekka (14:29):
Okay.
Kaelyn (14:30):
I live in New York city. There are a lot of books and movies and stuff set in New York city. One of my favorite things about when I'm watching something set in New York and there's a chase scene through Manhattan and I'm watching the famous locations that they're running by and none of these are close together. This person ran a mile and a half uptown, to turn around, run two miles the opposite direction, and now is somehow in New Jersey.
Kaelyn (14:59):
And so if you're, you know, even if you're just writing a, you know, a fiction story that is like, again, I'll use New York as an example, set in New York city and you say, "Oh yes, my, um, character lives all the way out in, um, you know, Flushings Queens in a giant 200 story, you know, whatever building," okay, well, that's not a thing that exists. If they're going to, you know, have certain places and settings and expectations of stuff that they should be doing based on that character, you need to be familiar with and you need to research these things.
Rekka (15:36):
Yeah. Your New York character is not going to hop in the car and go to the grocery store.
Kaelyn (15:41):
And this is ridiculous, but also like, just get out of map and look up the subway stations. If you're going to make it, like, if you're going to be specific, like, Oh, they got on the 1 Train and went to Queens. No, they'd didn't. The 1 Train doesn't go to Queens. If you're not sure, just say they got on the subway.
Rekka (15:58):
They definitely have maps of New York that you can reference.
Kaelyn (16:04):
Yes.
Rekka (16:04):
I think there's a danger of writing what you looked up, as opposed to writing what you know and understand.
Kaelyn (16:14):
If you remember, uh, you know, quite a few episodes back, we talked to Antoine Bandele was a, an episode about creating maps for your book. And I mentioned to him that I live in Astoria, Queens and he said, "Oh my God, I was just there. Uh, I needed to come and do research." And I said, "what do you need to do research on in Astoria?" He said, "I'm writing something set in New York. And one of the characters is Brazilian." And I said, "ah, and there is a small microcosm of Brazilian people in Astoria." And I mean, it's not even, you know, like, uh, Chinatown kind of concentration, but there is a small concentration of, uh, Brazilian shops and stores and restaurants and stuff. And he came out and had a look around because sometimes you just got to get out there and see it.
Rekka (16:58):
I mean, like, you will never understand, from a Wikipedia page, what it's like to walk through a place. And things are getting a little bit better with uh, Street View.
Kaelyn (17:09):
Uh, Google Maps can be a big help with. All of this is to say, "Oh, so what you're telling me, I should just write about my, you know, town that I grew up in, in Pennsylvania and nothing else?" No, absolutely not. I mean, but you also don't have to travel anywhere, but just be aware of, and try to do as much research on everything as you can, to get a level of authenticity there. Um, in this case, you know, you may not be capable of writing what you know, because you don't know what it's like to be in a particular place.
Rekka (17:41):
Yeah. Like don't write about rural Pennsylvania, if you are from Nebraska and you've never been to Pennsylvania and you don't feel like anything up about it.
Kaelyn (17:50):
Especially if you live in rural Nebraska, because then you could just write it there.
Rekka (17:55):
If you're writing a small town, why not pick the small town that you know, or at least a stand-in that's based on the town you know. Because then you're less likely to get the details wrong. So if you're writing about Grant's Pass, Oregon, but you've never been there and you're from New Jersey, do you honestly know what it feels like to be in Grant's Pass, Oregon, maybe write about your small town in New Jersey or, you know, put a little effort into it until you do know it and then you can write it.
Kaelyn (18:27):
Yeah. So, and this is, you know, we're still right now in the realm of things that actually exist in the world. They are, that's a lot easier to decide what you do and do not know. Um, once we get into the realm, Rekka and I operate in, science fiction and fantasy, where you're having to invent things, I think people get the, "well, it doesn't matter what the research is. I'm just going to make up whatever, whatever I want." Yes. However, your world and your characters still need to abide by rules. And unless you want to create an entire new set of rules from everything from biology to have gravity works, then presumably you're going to be carrying over some of our real life applications of this into the book.
Rekka (19:17):
What do you say to me, who does write science fiction on planets that, you know, from which the characters have never heard of Earth? Like, do I get to break every rule?
Kaelyn (19:30):
No, of course not.
Rekka (19:32):
Which rules do I get to break? Please, I'm asking.
Kaelyn (19:37):
You get to break whatever rules you want, Rekka. You know that. Just you though, not everyone else. Just you.
Rekka (19:43):
Give the qualifier because people are going to be confused.
Kaelyn (19:45):
Yeah. The genuine answer is it depends. Because it also depends on how much work you want to be put into the book of explaining why this rule doesn't exist in this world. And genre is going to matter a lot here, hard military SciFi, the expectation there is that we're adhering to the basic tenants of physics as we understand them on earth right now. Fantasy, I think a lot of times, doesn't get too bogged down in this, unless it has a reason to. Everywhere you go, the gravity is the same. The air is presumably breathable, unless it's not for a specific reason. Um, science fiction has a little bit more to make up for there, you know, because we're setting it in like, yeah, it's, it's fake in terms of, you know, in, in the sense that the author has made something up. But you know, what if something's set on Alpha Centauri? Like, we do know that Alpha Centauri is a real place. And while we don't know the exact conditions there or what, you know, for certain is orbiting it, we can make some speculations. Now you can, you know, of course, write in "everything we knew was completely wrong!" So I think the way you've got to sort of approach this and we're going to, we're going to talk large scale and then we're gonna narrow down from here. Okay. What are you keeping? What are you getting rid of?
Kaelyn (21:08):
Always start from a position of everything that is true on earth and physics as we understand them on Earth, I can apply across the board here. Your reader is going to start from that understanding unless you tell them otherwise.
Rekka (21:24):
Their default is everything they think they know.
Kaelyn (21:26):
Yes.
New Speaker (21:26):
Which you can't control if they're wrong. But whatever they think they know, that's what they're going to apply as the default understanding. So if you're going to break a rule, redefine it as early as you possibly can to avoid confusion.
Kaelyn (21:43):
Yes. So if you're getting to the point where you have to start explaining things that, you know, we're, we're beyond what I think the average reader is going to understand, you've got to decide, "am I going to make something up or am I going to do the research and explain this within the context of what we understand in terms of, you know, physics and biology now?" So all this research I'm talking about, how do you do this? Well, there's no good answer to that. And sometimes the best way is to hope, you know somebody who knows a lot about this stuff.
Rekka (22:20):
Sometimes, um, I would say, wait until you learn something that excites you, and use that as the opportunity to dig deeper into that subject and research. And you don't know what you don't know. It's hard to even research something that you're completely unfamiliar with because you don't know the right keywords to even type in.
Kaelyn (22:44):
So a really good example of this is Andy Weir's book, The Martian. Andy Weir is very lucky because he is the son of a particle physicist and an electrical engineer. There's all of these physics components that come in. So we've got mechanical and electrical engineering, biology, physics, computer science, all wrapped up in this. Andy Weir is not a, not proficient in every single one of those things. He had to do a lot of research and talk to a lot of people. And he wrote in a scenario that technically doesn't exist. Because we don't know how all of this would really go on Mars, but we can speculate.
Rekka (23:24):
Yeah. And he studied orbital mechanics, astronomy, and like the history of space flight in order to make this as well-founded a story as he could.
Kaelyn (23:35):
So that's an excellent example of science fiction grounded in reality, even when these things don't actually exist and we're still going, "well, maybe on Mars, this is what it would be like." But it goes to show you what comes with this kind of hard work. Anyway, The Martian is an excellent movie, excellent book. Um, and it is an excellent example of how far good research can get you. Whether, you know, it's The Martian or Harry Potter or Ender's Game or something. All of these things have fantastical elements to them, but there's ways to rationalize them and to make it seem like something that could be feasible because you've established that's what this is. But you're not writing what you know.
Rekka (24:20):
Yeah.
Kaelyn (24:21):
You're learning.
Rekka (24:21):
Yeah. You're learning in order to better write a more convincing scenario.
Kaelyn (24:26):
Yes. In some cases the, you know, write what you know is you've got to come up with something and teach it to yourself.
Rekka (24:35):
Yeah. And sometimes you have to seek out other people who can tell you what you need to know that you don't know.
Kaelyn (24:39):
Yeah. So let's talk about that a little bit. Let's say, um, you're writing something where there's a lot of biology involved for whatever reason. Human, alien, or otherwise. So what are you going to do here? Well, there's so much information on the internet and, you know, first of all, establishing what reputable sources are is very important, but you know, the American College of Physicians, uh, the Mayo Clinic, a lot of, you know, hospitals and research facilities, they have a lot of information online about these things. Um, the other really interesting thing is, uh, YouTube, there is a lot of interesting videos out there about "here's how this functions" and they're made by, you know, doctors, scientists, and reputable people. There's a lot of really good how-to videos out there. There's so much information out there. I think two of the biggest areas that, um, you know, where it's like writing what you don't know and not doing a great job of it, is probably, um, law related things and medical related things.
Rekka (25:50):
Yeah. And there are doctors who have written books to help you because they're sick of seeing you do it wrong.
Kaelyn (25:54):
Yeah. I remember a panel I went to at the, uh, Nebula Conference about death building. One of the panelists is an emergency room doctor. And you know, they're talking about there's tolerances that the human body is allowed to sustain in writing that in actuality would never happen. One of the examples he gave was like, Sean Bean's character in the first Lord Of The Rings movie, who's got like a thousand arrows sticking out of him, but he's still standing up and swinging a sword.
Rekka (26:21):
To be fair. He does die eventually.
Kaelyn (26:24):
He does. But as this doctor pointed out, he was like, "yeah, one arrow to the stomach is enough to make most people not be able to stand up."
Rekka (26:32):
But also he's Sean Bean. So that's what killed him. Not all those arrows.
Kaelyn (26:37):
That's very true. You know? So there's, there's a certain degree we're willing to accept there just because it's know it's stakes, it's intensity, it's, you know, trying to, you know, scare the reader a little bit. Um, if everybody in fantasy books and science fiction, really, any books got, uh, incapacitated the way they should from, you know, a basic—
Rekka (27:02):
"The way they should." Sorry, I'm getting punchy. We're super fragile. Who made us so brittle? So, so delicate.
Kaelyn (27:12):
Blow to the right, you know, area. Like I always laugh when I'm watching and there are these sword fights and like the people are whack at each other in the legs. And I'm like, "that's a shredded ACL." "That's that meniscus is gone." "That person doesn't have a knee anymore." Anyway, there's a level of tolerance we're allowed to have there, but that said, if somebody is getting cut in half and they survive, they'd better be living in a world where getting cut in half is part of the reproductive cycle or something, you know, they just become two smaller versions of, of that person. Although I will say in the same panel, I was listening to the, the doctors presenting, uh, give us an example of a guy who came into his ER in two different ambulances and survived. So...
Rekka (27:59):
On that note!
Kaelyn (28:00):
On that note,
Rekka (28:02):
What do you know, anyway? What does anybody really know?
Kaelyn (28:06):
You know, look, we've, we've all heard the stories of the fantastical and the extraordinary. But to kind of, you know, circle back to our original thoughts here, you know, of writing what you know, and writing what you don't know: research is very important. Um, limiting yourself to writing what you know—unless, you know, I dunno, maybe you've had a really interesting life. Maybe you've had a lot of things happen to you. You've done a lot of stuff. Um, then that's great. But you know, the other end of it is if you haven't, you're, and you want to write an interesting, compelling story, especially if it involves like fairies and leprechauns. I'm kidding. Those are real obviously.
Rekka (28:48):
Obviously.
Kaelyn (28:49):
You're going to have to do some research and you're going to have to come up with your world rules and parameters. And in the course of the research, identify what you decide you're going to keep versus what you're going to change. And then you have to explain that you're changing it.
Rekka (29:07):
I always come back to: the more detail you feel like you have to include to justify the things you're doing, possibly the more research you need to do so that you truly understand it.
Kaelyn (29:20):
I'll give you another really good example of this. And this is actually a nonfiction book that falls really interestingly into the write what you know category. John Krakauer's book Into Thin Air. It's about the 1996 Everest disaster. He got, according to his account, talked into coming on this Everest expedition. And it just so happened that while he was there, and this was in the May climbing season, this massive blizzard storm or what have you, struck the people as they were all trying to come back down the mountain and eight people died. This story, it's harrowing, it's terrifying, it's heartbreaking. And it makes you never want to go anywhere near Mount Everest.
Rekka (30:11):
I don't even want to read the book.
Kaelyn (30:15):
But the reason he went on this expedition was he was going to write an article about it for the magazine he worked for. And now he's writing a book about this terrible disaster that took place. So he's coming from a place where he's actually very knowledgeable about, mountaineering and know, you know, knew all of these people and knew how everything was supposed to go. And now he's got to do a bunch of research and collect information and accounts from different groups and stuff about why what happened happened. And he puts together a really interesting case and story about all different aspects of the, uh, culture surrounding, like, people trying to summit Mount Everest and, you know, the situation of like people who really don't have any business trying to climb Mount Everest and just paying a lot of money to guides to get them up there. There's all of this speculation that, um, one of the things that happened that made this so terrible apart from, you know, a blizzard on Mount Everest, was some kind of a pressure system came through and dropped the oxygen to nothing. So that's a nonfiction book where, you know, this guy was writing what—he set out to write what he knew, and then ended up having to incorporate a whole bunch of stuff he didn't know as well.
Rekka (31:26):
That is a very literal write what you know. We've already covered the micro writing, what, you know, in a very personal, um, tangible, you know, physical and mental sensation sort of way, to add realism to a scene. And that can create tension and, and, um, drama, uh, especially in like a, um, you know, third person limited perspective or first person perspective. But, uh, we've also covered researching to learn what you don't know so then you can write it. And we've covered writing what you don't know, because nobody knows it.
Kaelyn (32:15):
One thing I'd like to just point out quickly before we wrap up here, there is a difference between writing what you know, writing what you don't know, and writing something that isn't yours to tell.
Rekka (32:28):
Yeah. And we didn't go into that this time on purpose because that's a whole topic.
Kaelyn (32:33):
You know, saying that there's ways to degree search and gain experience is not the same as saying, "I am a straight white cis person. I am going to write about a gay black trans person, and I will just do a lot of research and that makes it okay." It doesn't. Don't do that. That is not your story to tell.
Rekka (32:52):
That is... Writing... Don't write what you think you know. Don't write what you think is hot, and just assuming you know enough about it. And when I say hot, I mean, popular, uh, will attract attention.
Kaelyn (33:10):
There's always ways to include diverse characters into your writing. But anytime, you know, you're really going like, "wow, I don't know anything about the type of character, this person, that I'm writing here." That's probably a good point to take a step back and say, "is this something I should be writing?"
Rekka (33:33):
If this person is nothing like me?
Kaelyn (33:35):
Yes.
Rekka (33:36):
In what ways are they not like me? And are those ways that I should not be attempting to explain to other people?
Kaelyn (33:43):
You know, like I said, this is a whole other episode. We're not going to, you know, go into this, but it was worth making the statement that it's one thing to research places, locations, history, physics, medical sciences, researching people, outside of historic context, to use as a character is probably a place where you should take a step back and decide whether or not that's something you should be writing.
Rekka (34:12):
Um, if you are looking for a resource on knowing when it's okay, you know, cause casual representation in books is good. So look for a series of lectures and of courses called Writing The Other. That's a fantastic resource. They cover all sorts of different marginalized identities. And, um, the courses are paid and they should be because this is someone's time and effort to educate you. Uh, so that would be the best resource I could think of. And if we were ever going to cover that topic, I would be bringing someone on from the Writing The Other courses in order to talk about it. So honestly, I'm just going to refer you to them.
Kaelyn (34:53):
For all of this, you know, saying like there's nothing stopping you from doing research and trying to learn and build here. There is a line where research does not matter anymore at that point.
Rekka (35:04):
Right. It's just not appropriate.
Kaelyn (35:06):
This will not ever be a situation in which you're writing what you know.
Rekka (35:10):
Yeah, exactly.
Kaelyn (35:11):
So, um, you know, on that note, that's, it, it turned into a little bit, I would call this writing what you know versus researching what you don't.
Rekka (35:19):
Right. Versus keeping your hands off what someone else knows.
Kaelyn (35:23):
Yeah, exactly. Um, look, you know, I have definitely, um, you know, in the course of my life, like when I was in grad school, I had people, you know, who would say like, "Hey, I, can you tell me about this historic thing? I need it as a point of reference for something," um, a lot of people who in specialized, you know, areas, professions, or educations or stuff are frequently very happy to talk to you about them. You know, this isn't to say that you can just inflict yourself on anyone and say, "tell me all about the human nervous system. I need to know about every ending."
Rekka (35:57):
Ideally you have something to offer them. Whether it's money or your own experience in a way that will help them.
Kaelyn (36:04):
Yeah. Or just let me take out to dinner. And if I can just bounce a few things off of you, if this is a friend of yours or something like that. Um, when we're able to go out to dinner again, don't take anyone out to dinner, right now.
Rekka (36:14):
Yeah. No, that's bad. Be a good person. Keep people protected.
Kaelyn (36:18):
Yes. So, you know, don't be afraid to try to reach out to actual human resources that are experts or have more knowledge about these things than you do. It never ceases to amaze me the hobbies that my friends have that mean they know all of this stuff that I can't believe they know a lot about. But yeah. I think, uh, I think that's a good place to end.
Rekka (36:45):
Okay, well, if we haven't hit all the marks or you still have questions, you can find us on Twitter and Instagram at @WMBcast, you can find us on Patreon at Patreon.com/WMBcast. Or you can even leave your question in a rating or review on Apple Podcasts. We would love if you would do that over there, because we want more reviews so that more people can find us and ask us more questions. So hopefully that answered some of your questions about this nebulous, strange advice that you hear so often.
Kaelyn (37:17):
It's just the worst advice.
Rekka (37:20):
I don't think that it's completely without merit. It's just not good without explanation. So, um, with context, it's, uh, a fun thing to consider and something to keep in mind. All right, we're done. I swear. We're done talking about it. We will talk to you in two weeks, hope you all have a lovely time. Stay safe, wear a mask, avoid other humans.
Tuesday Mar 16, 2021
Episode 56 - Dev Edits and Line Edits and Copy Edits, Oh My!
Tuesday Mar 16, 2021
Tuesday Mar 16, 2021
We Make Books is a podcast for writers and publishers, by writers and publishers and we want to hear from our listeners! Hit us up on our social media, linked below, and send us your questions, comments, and concerns for us to address in future episodes.
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Twitter: @WMBCast | @KindofKaelyn | @BittyBittyZap
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Episode Transcript
Rekka (00:01):
Welcome back to another episode of, we make books, a podcast about writing publishing and everything in between. I'm Rekka. I write science fiction and fantasy as R J Theodore.
Kaelyn (00:10):
I'm Kaelyn Considine. I'm the acquisition editor for Pu... Pu... Wait, I'm the acquisitions editor for Parvus Press. And we can edit that out.
Rekka (00:20):
Yeah. Is that a line edit?
Kaelyn (00:24):
Oh God. You know what? That's a good question. That, uh, I think that would be a line edit. Yeah. Uh, yeah. So today we're talking about editing. Um, I know it's something we've talked about before. I think we, we really were very focused on developmental edits.
Rekka (00:40):
Well, sure. Because that's your favorite, right?
Kaelyn (00:43):
Yeah. You know, there's, there's different components and different people you're going to encounter through the process of editing a book and they'll all want different things from you and be asking you to change different aspects of the book. So—
Rekka (00:56):
Oh, one thing we didn't say: that you are the author and your name goes on the cover. So all of these edits come from people who are hired because this is their specialty. However, this is your story. So it is up to you to stand by these edits. And if you don't feel comfortable standing by the edits, then you should not accept them.
Kaelyn (01:22):
Qualifier. I will have there: check your contract. Your book may have been accepted conditionally pending you making certain changes. So there's uh, there's contractual obligations for edits. But you know, as Rekka said, at the end of the day here, his name is on this. We talk a little bit at the end of the episode, about how, you know, people are, might yell at you online about things that you had absolutely no control over. So control the stuff that you can.
Rekka (01:47):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So anyway, um, there are lots of kinds of edits and they are variably painful each in their own way.
Kaelyn (01:56):
Some are far more excruciating than others.
Rekka (02:00):
And on the other side of this lovely ditty, we will tell you about them.
Kaelyn (02:17):
...that landing devices on Mars is becoming as routine as something like that can be, is, is very, is very cool. So yeah.
Rekka (02:27):
Yeah. Speaking of routine. How's that?
Kaelyn (02:33):
You've probably heard us say things like developmental edits, copy edits, line edits. And if you're going okay, well, what the heck is all of this art? Don't I just edit the book. No, you don't.
Rekka (02:46):
Sometimes you edit the book. Sometimes someone else edits the book, sometimes a third person edits the book. And sometimes you get a stack of pages and you hope that someone edited the book real well.
Kaelyn (03:02):
Yes. There's three main kinds of edits. You're going to come across while working on a book and then a fourth step in this order: developmental edits line edits and copy edit. Then after copy, edit, typically comes a proofreading. We're going to go through these step-by-step and instead of giving you definitions upfront, explain what they are as we're walking through them. So Rekka, as somebody who's gone through this process, what would you say your favorite part of all of these edits are? if you had to pick one of the three, what's your favorite?
Rekka (03:36):
Page proofs.
Kaelyn (03:39):
Really? Even as a writer?
Rekka (03:40):
Yeah. No, I mean, cause you're almost there. This is the point where you are just making sure that nothing weird happened in the process of getting this into a layout and you get to reread the book. You're in theory, looking at an immutable copy. So you can't keep fiddling with it. And all you're doing is checking to make sure that there's not like a weird space before a period, or something strange like suddenly you've got smart quotes and—.
Kaelyn (04:17):
Let's save that for when we get there.
Rekka (04:19):
That was the wrong answer, folks. Apparently I wasn't supposed to say that. I was supposed to say the dev edit is my favorite.
Kaelyn (04:24):
And that's because that's everybody's favorite because the dev edit—
Rekka (04:28):
No the dev edit means you have to tear out your heart and write it all over again.
Kaelyn (04:33):
The developmental edit though, is the part where you're still writing.
Rekka (04:37):
I'm not in this to write. I'm in this to have written.
Kaelyn (04:43):
Fair. Um, yeah. So the first thing you're going to hear about, you know, with the first one you're gonna encounter is developmental edits. Developmental edits are where it is what it sounds like you're still developing the story. Um, this is what's going to happen generally um, at any stage of this before your book is finalized, pretty much. So anytime you're getting feedback from anyone, be it a writing group, um, a friend, an agent and editor, uh, some random guy that you started talking to and told the story.
Rekka (05:16):
No, don't start talking to those guys.
Kaelyn (05:19):
That is, that's a developmental edit. There's obviously different levels of intricacy and sophistication to this. Um, if you're working with an agent, they'll probably give you some high level stuff, especially for the beginning of the book. If you're working with an editor, however, they're gonna be much tougher on you. This is the part where they're going to say, "okay, I like all of this. Here's the thing. Your magic system doesn't make any sense." Or "it seems to have some rules and then it's breaking them" or "the world-building is inconsistent" or "there's a plot hole here." Um, a lot of times you're going to start big, you know, like, all right, let's like, I've had authors where I'm like, ""I need you to send me a document of how magic works here. Or "I need you to send me a timeline of the events before this story because there's characters referencing things and they're contradicting each other. And I don't think it's a case of an unreliable narrator."
Rekka (06:16):
Unreliable author.
Kaelyn (06:20):
There's a lot of those. So your developmental edits are where you're finishing the big parts of the story where you're narrowing— you're nailing down, um, the rules of the world, the world, building the characters, addressing any plot holes. In some cases you may be making massive changes to the book. Sometimes it's not "this sentence contradicts something another person said," sometimes it's, "Hey, um, I don't think you need this character. They're really not doing much. Get rid of them."
Rekka (06:54):
Right. And in which case, all the threads of the story that have to change as a result.
Kaelyn (07:01):
Developmental edits can be, you know, for as much as they are probably the most fun, I guess, of the book, writing process.
Rekka (07:10):
That's a big question mark in your voice, there.
Kaelyn (07:14):
Well, they're the most fun for me certainly, but, um, you know, I think, uh, I would hope that people writing enjoy working on their books and look, it can, developmental edits can be like, they can be brutal. Um, a developmental edit can result in a significant overhaul of what you were writing. Now, this isn't to scare anyone because the thing is, if you're working with an editor at this point, they wouldn't have bought your book if they didn't like it and think there was something good in there.
Rekka (07:46):
Right.
Kaelyn (07:47):
So remember your editor just wants what's best for your book. You maybe not as much.
Rekka (07:55):
Well, what about for people who are self publishing?
Kaelyn (07:58):
So for people who are self publishing, you know, it depends on how you're doing this. Did you hire an editor? Maybe that's the person who's, uh, who's doing this. But if you're doing this on your own, hopefully your developmental edits have been more of the process of writing and refining your book, getting feedback, incorporating it into there. But that's where this is all coming from because somebody reading it and saying, "yeah, I like this" is different from somebody going, "okay, well you have this character, Laura. And she went into the bathroom and then we never heard from her again."
Rekka (08:37):
Look, this happens sometimes.
Kaelyn (08:39):
Sometimes people go into bathrooms and never come back out. Um, but that's, I mean, developmental edits is so broad compared to the rest of these because it's all of the work that gets your book to a point where it is quote-unquote done in terms of developing the story. You've stopped developing the story, everything after this now is grammar and syntax and prose and making sure the story is coherent and flows well. Um, Rekka, as someone who has gone through some pretty significant, uh, developmental edit overhauls...
Rekka (09:21):
Yeees?
Kaelyn (09:21):
How'd that feel?
Rekka (09:23):
Is 60% significant?
Kaelyn (09:27):
Oh, that's nothing.
Rekka (09:27):
What about when you do it twice?
Kaelyn (09:29):
Well, that's 120%.
Rekka (09:31):
Okay. So I've rewritten 120% of SALVAGE. Um, yeah, it's— look, it's funny because it's a lot of work, and I'm the type of person who will grind myself into the earth to get work done on a deadline, regardless of what that deadline's reasonable level is.
Kaelyn (09:55):
Well, now let me ask you this, because your books specifically, you know, especially as you got farther into the Peridot Shift series with various POVs and everything, when you change something, the, I imagine it's a bit of a butterfly effect.
Rekka (10:12):
Well.
Kaelyn (10:14):
Okay, let me rephrase that. I know it's a little bit of a butterfly effect.
Rekka (10:16):
No, but it even goes beyond that because the first revision was to add all the POVs.
Kaelyn (10:22):
Yes. Yeah, that's true.
Rekka (10:23):
Um, the, the first book was one single POV and I felt as though that was now a requirement of the series. Um, specifically an earlier editor that I contracted to help me revise FLOTSAM told me, "dump all these other POVs and just follow Talis." So that's what I thought I needed to do for book two, because that's what I had set up as an expectation for the reader, I felt. So it came as a shock when the publisher's editor that, um, I started working with on SALVAGE as a new editor, came back and said, "I think you could fix a lot of the issues you're having with this book, if you introduced new POVs." So you've seen that meme of like Cosmic Brain. Like that's what happened to me. I was like, "this is an option?? I can go in and add more POV's and show people more of the mindsets of the different people in the, in this world?" It was amazing. I was, I was pumped. I was ready to go. By adding other POVs I was able to go to where the action was happening and get the information to the reader without it having to pass third hand to my main characters.
Kaelyn (11:55):
You did a really significant overhaul, but then I'm sure that presented a challenge because after you overhauled and rewrote this book to include these other POVs, anytime you made a change, then you have to account for that.
Rekka (12:10):
Right? Because like, it was, most of my characters weren't even present, um, in the, between the two drafts.
Kaelyn (12:16):
It's not only, and this is, I mean, we could do a whole episode on this, but it's not only where Talis is, who she's with, and what she knows. You need to track these other characters, encountering other characters, other places, and gathering their own information that they may or may not be sharing with other people. So one change trickles down into all of these other characters and it's something you have to account for. Developmental edits, especially from a multiple POV book: It's a process.
Rekka (12:44):
It's probably where a lot of the, um, like the timeline inconsistencies happen that readers catch that no one else seems to during the process of getting it out into the world. Um, it's not that the writer was drafting in a flurry and forgot what they wrote. It's more that they drafted in a flurry, revised it themselves, send it off to somebody else. And then somebody else stuck their fingers in and said, "let's pull on these threads and see what happens." And then you have little details you forgot all about that you overlook even when you reread.
Kaelyn (13:17):
And this, by the way is the reason I am a big fan of having an outline.
Rekka (13:21):
Oh, but it's the little details.
Kaelyn (13:23):
There are books that I read that, you know, it's not even just the little details it's "this does not line up. This makes no sense." And in developmental edits, that's where you're supposed to catch things, but you know, a big secret here: uh, editors are people too. And sometimes we, you know, in all the course of all of these changes, miss everything. This is very much turns into, can't see the trees for the forest kind of situation. It's always good to have somebody who is not so in the weeds on this take a look at it, to be able to take a step back and point out, "hang on. That girl never came out of the bathroom."
Rekka (13:58):
Right. I know you're still worried about her.
Kaelyn (14:00):
I'm very worried about like, is she okay? Is she having a medical emergency? Was there a portal in there somewhere? What happened to her? So this is, this is making this sound scary and overwhelming. Developmental edits. I find are always the fun part where you really get to, you know, have somebody who's excited to talk to you about your book and you get to tell them all the details and you know, all the secrets and the nitty-gritty stuff going on here. So, um, I enjoy them, but you know, that's just me. I just get to torment people with them.
Rekka (14:29):
It is a very, very good thing to enjoy the teeny tiny details of your book. Both as the editor working on it and the writer creating it.
Kaelyn (14:42):
I find one of the most important tools for developmental edits, especially for books with a lot of characters or places is a timeline. Timeline of events before the book and timeline of the events during. I have had books that I've worked on where I've just gotten an Excel sheet to track which character is where at what time to make sure that we're not accidentally saying they were both in this town on the same day. Your editor is going to do a lot of work on this because your editor is going to be your sanity check here, to use the, uh, well, the developer term. Um, you know, does this make sense? Does this work? Is there something here that is very obvious that we're missing? Developmental edits are also where, you know, you're going to, besides all of these checking for problems, you're also going to flesh out characters, their arcs, their motivation, their stories. You're going to do some world-building as well. Probably. Um, again, some of it will be clarifying. Some of it might be like, "Hey, this is really interesting that you mentioned in passing. And later in the story, we need a new setting. Why don't you use this?" So developmental edits can seem a little like, "Oh my God, it's going to be all the mistakes. I'm going to have to rewrite everything." But they're also the time where you really get to have fun with your book. In my opinion.
Rekka (16:08):
I get really excited about developmental edits because someone has challenged me on something. For example, like how I handled my POVs or a detail of why my character does this, or suggests that, you know, a stake isn't high enough, or suggests that things are happening too conveniently, you know, dominos are falling in too straight of a line. And by being challenged on these things on a broad level, I tend to get all my gears really cranking and suddenly things that, you know, don't occur to me when I'm drafting on my own from, you know, building the outline on my own, coming up with the concepts and figuring out where the book is going on my own. Suddenly when you have another person reflecting back what your story is saying to them, it gets very exciting and I get very motivated, and inspired, to come up with new solutions that, um, address the concerns and probably do some other stuff too, that weren't even brought up. But like, you know, this is where suddenly like, "Oh, these two characters come together at the end and how perfect that they end up in the same spot and that just sets this up to happen...!" And those are the sorts of, um, it feels like serendipity when all your dev edits make the story you wanted to tell, come out of the story that you actually drafted.
Kaelyn (17:55):
Aww, Rekka, that was beautiful.
Rekka (17:56):
Thank you.
Kaelyn (17:59):
So, yeah. Dev edits: they're fun. You know what's not fun? Line edits. Yeah. So once your story's, you know, finished quote-unquote. And by that, I mean that the story exists, it's complete, everyone's happy with, you know, the plot, the character arcs, the timeline, everything going on.
Rekka (18:20):
I like how you say, you know, "once your story is finished, QUOTE-UNQUOTE..."
Kaelyn (18:26):
Yeah. You thought, you thought you were done here. Um, this is— so something that you notice in editing, as you continue down the chain here, the burden shifts more and more to the editor. So line edits are next. Line edits, you are probably still doing with your actual editor. This is probably still going to be the same person. A line edit is something that is addressing writing style, language use, um, combing the manuscript for obvious errors, like run-on sentences and redundancies, at a sentence and paragraph level. So this is where— and this is also typically, especially if you're, self-publishing where you do your read aloud. "Did I just use the same word three times in one sentence? I did."
Rekka (19:13):
You will not know it until you read that thing aloud.
Kaelyn (19:17):
Um, I did. You know why? Because there's only so many ways to say "rock."
Rekka (19:21):
Right. Well, sometimes you have a word that does not stand out when you use it three times in a sentence. Other times when that word is, you know, ostentatious, then you do hear it over and over and over again. Cause you just, when you're drafting or rewriting, you just like you get a groove somewhere in your brain and a word will stick in it and you'll end up using it over and over and over again until you clear that.
Kaelyn (19:45):
Yeah. So you're going line by line and looking at this now. You've got the broad stuff. Every step we take in the editing process, we're going through it with a finer and finer tooth comb. Um, you know, for developmental edits, everybody breaks these out different ways. You know, there's like, "okay, first, we're going to address this. Then we're going to do this. Then we're going to do this." Every book's different with, you know, how to address that. Line edits are much more standardized here. The read aloud is very helpful, especially if you're self publishing, but what you're doing here is you're going and looking for like repeated words, redundant sentences, unclear pronouns, you know, maybe there's like two men in a fight and you just keep saying, "he, he, he, he" it's like, "okay, well, who got stabbed here? Who's bleeding to death on the floor who, who died? I don't even know now." I like to not do line edits right after the developmental edit is finished because you, you become like unable to see things in the manuscript. But line edits are really important because what they're also going to come up with is this is a very, very strange thing, passages that just don't read well parts of the book that to a reader who hasn't been working on this for months are not going to make sense or are going to seem disjointed. And this could be something like a shift in tone or phrasing that is a really awkward. Um, this could be digressions in the narrative that sort of take away from the scene at hand, it could be pacing related. Now let's be clear. This is not the copy edit. We're going to get to that next. You are still going to have to do sentence-level work here where you may have to add, change, and remove things. This isn't like "change 'she' to 'Rekka.'" This is "rewrite this paragraph because the whole thing is very confusing. And I don't know who just died."
Rekka (21:48):
Right.
Kaelyn (21:49):
Um, I've gone through line edits where I've crossed out entire paragraphs and said, "I need you to condense this down to one sentence, one or two sentences for the pacing of this scene, because it's a fight and this is taking too long." Um, I've added notes where it's like, I mean, my, I think my most common line edit is "describe this more, expand on this."
Rekka (22:13):
Expand on this.
Kaelyn (22:13):
Expand on this. Expand on this.
Rekka (22:15):
Tell me more. Dive deeper.
Kaelyn (22:17):
Yeah or, you know, this is where a, an editor might say, "throw in a couple words here and tell us what they're thinking or how they're feeling, throw in a reaction." This is where you're checking to make sure everything is coherent and communicating what you want it to. Line edits are an incredibly time consuming process.
Rekka (22:39):
They do seem like they might be the worst.
New Speaker (22:42):
They're not my favorite. Um, I personally can't do them for more than an hour and a half to two hours at a time, or things start to wash off your back. And this is where you've gotta be really sharp on what you're looking at and making sure everything is, is making sense. Editors do line edits differently. In some cases I will, you know, when I do this, I put a note in there of, you know, for instance, "expand on this, tell me what this person is feeling at a reaction here." In some cases I will go in and just edit the sentence if it's a matter of, you know, flipping the, uh, the phrases in the sentence, or this sentence should come before this one. Now obviously, you know, all of these, are— none of this is being dictated to authors. If it's that way for a reason, we'll discuss it. Right. But this is the first time probably that you're going to get something back from an editor and have to go through an add and accept changes.
Rekka (23:45):
That's a whole new nightmare, if you haven't worked with track changes before.
Kaelyn (23:49):
If you are to the point where you're getting ready for a line out of it, and you've never done this before, maybe talk to your editor and sort of agree on how this is going to be done. There's different ways to track changes and you can always modify it. But, you know, it's just something to keep in mind. You know, developmental edits, you're going to be getting, you know, multiple passes of that. Some of it will probably be a letter then, you know, as you get farther, further into it, it'll be, you know, notes directly in the manuscript and that sort of thing. Line edits are when you're getting back a document that is marked up, that, you know, if it were a physical copy, it will have looked like someone's stabbed it to death because it's just going to be covered in red. There's no such thing as a manuscript that is so perfect it doesn't need line edits. Some of the best writers in the world have editors for a reason, because you need a fresh set of eyes on this. I definitely will. Sometimes when working on a manuscript, if I catch something really glaring right off the bat, you know, just take care of it right then and there. But the actual line edit pass is, it's a very lengthy process to do it well.
Rekka (24:56):
I can't even imagine attempting to do a line edit. How do you stay focused and not get swept up in looking at one aspect and forget what else is going on?
Kaelyn (25:09):
I think my record was 2000 changes in like a 90,000-word manuscript. That was changes, not additions and deletions. For the author, this is the first time where something like this can seem really overwhelming because you've got to sit down and go through all of this now, and now you've got to be clear and fresh on all of it. Um, and on top of that, then sometimes your editor is going to hand you something and just say, this paragraph doesn't work and it's unclear fix it. And you're going to go, "well, I'm the one that wrote it. How am I supposed to fix this? This seems clear to me." In that case, you know, you go talk to your editor and you work through it. This is another one where you'll have a couple of calls, probably, you know, minimum, a couple to get through the whole thing. That's line edits. It is definitely my least favorite of the edits. I will. I mean, really my side. I only do two, the developmental and the line. Um, I obviously definitely prefer developmental. Line edits are they're, they're hard, but obviously very, very important. Which brings us to our third step in the editing process and the last of our true quote-unquote edits. And this is the copy edit. Now the copy editor is probably a different person.
Rekka (26:34):
In an ideal world the copy editor is a different person, because you want a new set of eyes on this.
Kaelyn (26:40):
Copy Editors are magical creatures who can at a speed incomprehensible to the mortal brain, go through a document and check for things like spelling, grammar, punctuation, syntax.
Rekka (26:55):
Just a mistaken word. Like you typed the wrong word or, or a homonym.
Kaelyn (26:59):
Yeah. Incorrect hyphenations, inconsistent uh numerical formatting, inconsistent formatting in general. Weird fonts. Weird capitalizations. Any factually incorrect statement that you may have made. A good copy editor will catch things that should have been caught in line edit that weren't for whatever reason. Copy editors are the people that go through and say, "this is correct English." Now, if you're writing nonfiction, this is more straightforward. There is, you know, what typically happens is a copy editor ascribes to a certain manual of style. Then there's also, you know, depending on which dictionary you're using, Oxford versus Webster, um, which that just tends to be American versus English-English. And they'll also have, you know, their, their stylistic format, um, even in non-fiction, you know, there's things you have to grade on, like, um, "how are we writing out numbers? Are they going to be a numerical value or is it going to be a Roman numeral? Or are you going to write out the entire number?" Now when you get into science fiction and fantasy, this gets a little more tricky, obviously. So, um, a lot of times what we've done with our copy editors is provided, you know, a list of characters. "Okay, here's their names. Here's the absolute definite correct spelling. Here's a list of places. Here's the absolute correct spelling."
Rekka (28:18):
I would like to suggest as you go over the line, edits from your editor, that this is a good time to catch any name and build a glossary, if you haven't already done it. Any proper name or unique word to your world that people might be like, "huh? I wonder what that is." This is a good time to make a glossary. And then you've chosen the official spelling and you can refer to it yourself. You are going to use this glossary more than your readers ever will.
Kaelyn (28:45):
Absolutely. If you have naming conventions in your world, if there is, um, you know, like "this is how this title is formatted," "this is how you address, um, somebody from this place," uh, "this should always be..." This is what you need to give the copy editor because the copy editor needs to know what to flag as possibly incorrect. Copy editors also, I mean, like auto-correct can do some weird things sometimes, especially if these are, you know, made up names and places.
Rekka (29:24):
Neo-pronouns. Autocorrect loves to just wreck havoc on them.
Kaelyn (29:28):
Yeah. So sometimes autocorrect will change something to make it correct as autocorrect sees it. And the copy editor needs to know that that's not what that's actually supposed to look like. So arming your copy editor with the resources and information they need is super important. A copy editor is going to give you back a manuscript that is going to have thousands of changes in it, because they have been moving commas and periods— and commas, by the way, are something that your line editor is going to go and have opinions about, and then your copy editor is going to say, no, that's wrong. So there is going to be a little— don't worry, it won't just be you fighting with the copy editor here, your regular editor's going to be doing that too.
Rekka (30:14):
She's not wrong, folks.
Kaelyn (30:16):
Yeah. And you know, generally you defer to the copy editor.
Rekka (30:20):
Right. They're hired for their skillset. The previous editor was hired to help you craft a better story.
Kaelyn (30:27):
Exactly. Yes. Copy editors are very, very special people. Always be nice to copy editors.
Rekka (30:35):
They're precious and wonderful. And you're not! Going! To anger them!
Kaelyn (30:40):
No, do not anger the copy editors. Copy editing, by the way, just as a side note is an incredibly valuable skillset. We talk a lot about "copy" over the course of these episodes: "back copy," "cover copy." "Copy" is words. It's words that you have written and you were getting ready to send out into the world. A copy editor's job is to make sure the words and the grammar are being held to the standard that they are supposed to.
Rekka (31:10):
That they're doing what you want them to, which is communicating efficiently.
Kaelyn (31:15):
Anything that you have read that is published, that is not a simple sign (and even in those cases, sometimes that could've used a copy editor) has probably gone through a copy editor, or it should have at least. They're— copy editors work in all sorts of industries that are publishing adjacent. You know, like marketing companies will frequently have somebody who, maybe it's not their full-time job, but can do copy editing for them. It's an amazing skill set to have and it is something that if somebody put a gun to my head and said, "you need to copy edit this. I don't think I could, because I can not maintain that level of detailed consistency.
Rekka (31:54):
That's the thing is like, when you're talking about a novel that could be a Sanderson novel of 500,000 words, a copy editor, you know, should sit on a throne of diamonds and wear a crown and be served all their favorite—
Kaelyn (32:12):
The skulls of their enemies.
Rekka (32:14):
It is absurd, the amount of work they do to make us look good.
Kaelyn (32:19):
By the way, if you are self publishing and you're going to hire a copy editor, not to scare anyone, this is a heads up. They're not cheap.
Rekka (32:27):
They shouldn't be. Like, listen to how much work they're doing.
Kaelyn (32:30):
Yes, exactly. It's obviously different, but it's like going to hire like, you know, a welder or, you know, a, a stone mason or something. This is something that they have been trained to do.
Rekka (32:42):
So pay them.
Kaelyn (32:44):
Yeah. Copy editors: wonderful people, pay them, be very nice to them. So that's really the last stage in like the editing editing. And you're going, "Oh, well, that's great. I'm done." You're not. You're not.
Rekka (32:55):
Oh, sweet summer child. You are not done.
Kaelyn (32:59):
Because next is proofreading. Now, if you're sitting at home and going like, "Oh my God, proofreading, like my teacher would tell us to do in elementary school before I turned something in? Like, 'Oh, make sure you proofread this.'" First of all, your teacher was using that word incorrectly. Um, what they were actually telling you to do is copy edit.
Rekka (33:19):
Well, no. Copy edit and then proofread. What your teacher didn't tell you was to do it twice.
Kaelyn (33:24):
Yes. Yes. So let's do some terms here. Cause you know how I love definitions. We talked about what a copy editor is. They edit copy. We know what copy is. Proofreaders: that's exactly what they do. They read proofs. So this is, you know, in the days when you still had to use to print these things and mark them up manually, you would print a proof. So like if you've ever gotten formal pictures taken and it says like there's a watermark on there that says like "proof only: not for distribution" or something, that means that that's the version that's not final. We have to look at this and make changes to it. A proof editor is checking for the quality of the book before it goes into mass production. "How does this look now?" Is, you know, and Rekka can certainly speak more to this than I can, being a graphic designer. Um, but is this like, "are there huge rivers through the text? Are the margins okay? Are there massive gaps between words?" A proof editor is also going to flag any mistakes that they see, obviously. You're always flagging mistakes as you're working through this.
Rekka (34:34):
And an author also gets their proofs, um, sometimes called galleys. And it's now your last chance to make sure that everything came across the way you intended. And sometimes, that can involve the placement of a word on a page. "Does this sentence get chopped up and become unreadable because of the way it falls across columns or pages?"
Kaelyn (35:02):
Yeah. And you know, I did this once with Rekka and there's all of these terms I had never heard before. Like um what do you call it? An orphan when there's like—
Rekka (35:10):
Right? You've got orphans, widows, rivers, there's lots of terms that, um, it's up to the graphic designer. The page layout artists has hopefully looking at these too. Uh, the publisher is hopefully looking at these too. Hopefully there's like the entire team is, either together or separately, sitting down. You know, you want to say that in this digital age, we don't need to print these out anymore, but you really do. Because looking at it on the screen is not going to show it to you the way it's going to appear in the printout. And keep in mind, we're not talking about the e-book proof here.
Kaelyn (35:47):
And it's funny. Cause I was going to say actually is the other thing that a designer and a proofreader is going to do is try to account for anything that could end up looking really funny on an e-reader. There's only so much you can do with that. But there are certain things that stand out that are like, "this is just going to look strange."
Rekka (36:04):
Yeah. So depending on how everything's structured, because it's entirely possible that you have a different person doing the design of the print book than you do creating the e-book, or you may have somebody who comes in and takes the designer's files and converts them to an EPUB to try and basically get the most recent version. Um, but then you have to watch out for things that a designer for print will do that does not translate well to EPUB. And um, so there, there's a lot of work on the proof that like, I'm aware of and this all may sound like a big pile of overwhelm, but basically what Kaelyn is bringing up is that there's a reason that people print out or create proofs. And that's where the word comes from for "proofreading," because basically it should be called "last chance editing" because after this, it costs a lot of money to make any changes. At this point, it will cost money to make changes. But this is one copy. When you have a print run of 10,000, now we are talking "Too late. Sorry."
Kaelyn (37:17):
I mean, it's also it's design and quality check too. It's you know, for all of the time we were talking about when you're doing a line that it's about, does this make sense? Is this going to distract the reader? The proofreader, the designer, is doing this too, where they're looking at this and going, "hang on, like something's weird here. And this is going to be confusing." That's really, as Rekka said, this is your last chance. This is when—
Rekka (37:47):
This is when you hope you find any mistake that made it through the cracks, because these are going to be the mistakes that those one star reviewers zero in on, and just drag you across the coals for. And sometimes it's nothing to do with you, the writer, um, sometimes it's a formatting issue. Sometimes it's the result of weird behavior from copy-paste between programs.
Kaelyn (38:10):
But I love those reviewers that are like, "and the author clearly did not check their margins." Like, no, they didn't. They're the author. That's not their job.
Rekka (38:17):
That's not their job. Yeah. Self-publishing maybe, but even then a lot of these things are outside the author's control depending on the tools they use.
Kaelyn (38:25):
So yeah. So then at that point you are actually done, that's it.
Rekka (38:31):
One hopes. Now it's time for your, um, launch strategy and your marketing plan and your book tour and... Sorry, you're not done.
Kaelyn (38:41):
That's your edits. And we, you know, we made it sound like this was just a neat step-by-step, but you know, let's, let's be honest. We all know that's not true.
Rekka (38:52):
Oh, God. It's like, "hurry, hurry, hurry. What the heck does this mean? I don't understand this grammar rule you're explaining to me and I don't have the Chicago Manual of Style. So I'm just going to try and interpret what you said or maybe I'll rephrase the sentence, so we don't have to even have this conversation. And then I'm going to submit it back to you..."
Kaelyn (39:11):
The times where I was like, "look, I'm done with this word. I'm not doing this anymore. We're just getting rid of it."
Rekka (39:17):
Sometimes we just write around a word. Yeah.
Kaelyn (39:20):
You know what I would say and what I hope anybody who, especially if you're going through this for the first time is: take this, and I'm not saying this to sound condescending, take this as a learning experience. This is a really difficult thing to do. Um, you know, like you thought writing the book was hard. Well now you've got to edit it, but take it as a learning experience where you can try to gather as much information about the thoughts and process and everything that goes into this on your own. You know, really try to engage and pay attention to what's happening. Not only because it's your book, but because this is going to help make you a better writer.
Rekka (39:57):
Oh, there's very little that you can do about having to go through this process except appreciate that, um, that it is making your book better.
Kaelyn (40:09):
And look, I think we've all at some point picked up a book that clearly wasn't edited. Well. Um, I can think of a few off the top of my head. I have one in particular, I remember mentioning to Rekka and she said, "Oh, how do you like that?" And I said, "I've never read a book more desperately in need of an editor in my life." Um, I think everybody, you know, kind of goes into this with the, "okay, well, whatever, then I just need to edit it." That that, child, will be your undoing. Um, editing's a process. The more you can learn about it as you're working through this process, the more it's going to benefit you as a writer in the long run. Rekka, Would you agree?
Rekka (40:56):
Nah, nah. Just, wing it.
Kaelyn (40:59):
Just slap a bunch of words on the page and be done.
Rekka (41:02):
You know what, Word has spellcheck. You're good.
Kaelyn (41:05):
Basically the same thing. Yeah and by the way, on that note real quick, you know, this is for both writers and self-publishers. Um, you know, for those who are going the more traditional publishing route, taking a pass at this, you know, in doing some line edits yourself before you submit it is a good thing to do. No one's expecting it to be perfect, but you know, addressing any sort of egregious errors is always a good step.
Rekka (41:29):
And you mentioned earlier, and we didn't really emphasize it enough. Reading your book out loud to yourself. This is something that like after the surgeries I had and the treatment I had last year, is going to be very difficult for me in the future. I am still going to do it. I don't care if my book is a Sanderson-sized doorstop. It is so valuable to read the work out loud and hear the words the way you put them on the page.
Kaelyn (41:54):
I, for my day job, send a lot of emails and um, a lot of times, you know, I'll be doing like some co-work time with people on my team, and I will have to keep muting things because I read emails out loud before I send them. Um, so yeah, if you are, you know, for tips for both people submitting for traditional publication, people who are self-publishing—obviously, if you're self publishing, you need to be much more thorough—take a pass at yourself, look word has, you know, some decent, uh, intelligence about this now. It's not perfect.
Rekka (42:30):
It's not great. I would not rely on it alone.
Kaelyn (42:32):
No. Well, we're, we're getting there. Read it aloud, but then also: Grammarly. And I didn't want to get too into the weeds on this in this episode because Grammarly is not a panacea. It is not a cure all. It is not going to make your book perfect, but it is a good way to take a pass at something and to also use it to start recognizing patterns of things that you've done.
Rekka (42:56):
Also, its algorithm is getting a lot better.
Kaelyn (42:59):
The algorithm is getting fantastic. I would say, especially for self publishing, obviously the paid version of this is worth it.
Rekka (43:06):
Yep. It's a yearly subscription.
Kaelyn (43:08):
Um, one thing is just do not let it integrate into everything on your computer because it's going to try to, and it will ruin your life. Yeah.
Rekka (43:15):
Yes I am— I have a Grammarly subscription and the only thing I do is go to grammarly.com, login, and paste my text into their editor.
Kaelyn (43:25):
It's going to be like, "Hey, you like Grammarly, right? Wouldn't you like to write fantastically all the time, give us access to your email, give us access to your web browser, give us access to your texts." And then you're going to hate yourself.
Rekka (43:38):
And it's like pulling out ticks to get it back out again. Plus it messes up forms. At least it did the last time I let it anywhere near my web browser. It will mess with the forms that you're trying to submit, um, that have like the built-in editors and stuff. It was a mess. Anyway, don't do that. On top of Grammarly, there is also ProWritingAid. It used to be like, it's basically Grammarly, but has a different algorithm. And so you would run through one and then run through the other and then maybe it would be cleaner for having done both. Now. ProWritingAid has a bunch of different modes. It lets you set the reading level that you intended to write at, and then tell you whether you are along the median for that, overall, and point out words that you are using that are not within your expected reading level, and all this good stuff. So if you write, um, middle-grade, ProWritingAid might be a tool that you definitely want to consider as well. Like we said, we didn't mean to get into the toolbox end of these things, but these are things that you can do on your own to really get as clean a draft as you can.
Rekka (44:43):
You know, people who read romance seem to be a lot more forgiving of typos and errors than people who read within a genre that is more typically traditionally published, which is not to say that traditional publishers get it right all the time. But the fans and readers are much less tolerant of that.
Kaelyn (45:05):
I think science fiction, especially hard military SciFi is the one, in my experience, that's going to go after you for typos the most.
Rekka (45:13):
Well, they're going to go after you for a lot of things. So we're not even going to go there today. All right. So, um, any last thoughts on editing and the different levels of editing and can you go backward? Like if you realize there's a big error— like here's, here's my worry as an author, is that the publisher is going to get me to copy edits and then in my copy, edit review, I realize, "Oh my God, that's an egregious, uh, continuity error." Or "this would be very offensive."
Kaelyn (45:48):
It's definitely happened where, you know, it's like, "Oh crap, Laura never did come out of the bathroom."
Rekka (45:54):
Yeah. Right. To use our example from earlier.
Kaelyn (45:56):
Like at this point, you, you know, you call a sit down and you say, all right, we got to figure out a way to resolve this. And by that point, you know, it's not, you're out of the traditional editing process at that point. You're, you know, you're doing containment strategy by then. Um, if you've gotten that far in the book and there is a giant mistake that's going to have massive rippling effects through the entirety of the book and nobody caught it to this point—because presumably at least three or four set of eyes have been on this by now—and nobody's caught it that's means there's probably some larger issues here that need to be addressed as well. Um, but look it's definitely happened where it's like, "Oh my God, well, what happened to that one character?" And then you've got to go find a way to address it.
Kaelyn (46:45):
And what I've found to the best way to do is to isolate it, to say, "okay, Laura went into the bathroom and never came back out." If the easy explanation to that is Laura is not an important character. She was just a friend that drops by,
Rekka (46:58):
Bye Laura.
Kaelyn (47:00):
Yeah. We add a sentence where "I heard Laura leave and the door closed behind her. I guess I'll catch up with her next week." If Laura is somebody that you know needs to be addressed, maybe this is a series. Maybe later we find out what happens to Laura. Um, there's ways to deal with it. But my, my favorite strategy is containment. Isolate the problem and then figure out where we're going to address it down the line.
Rekka (47:25):
In any level of editing, whether you are coming in too late to catch a problem, or you are coming in on schedule, and this is just your first line edit, or your, even your dev edit. Sometimes the solution is to remove a thing that's a problem rather than to write in why it's not a problem.
Kaelyn (47:45):
Did Laura need to be there at all? Did we need to see her? Did she need to come in and use the bathroom?
Rekka (47:51):
I mean, to Laura, she needed to use the bathroom, but for the purposes of our story, I'm not sure what kind of slice of life story this is, but I'm, it's not sold me so far.
Kaelyn (48:04):
Um, this will happen occasionally. My best advice I can give you is: don't panic, deep breaths, figure out a way to adjust the problem.
Rekka (48:13):
There's going to be a simpler solution than your first panicked worry might—especially you get more panicked later in the process, this all starts to happen.
Kaelyn (48:23):
Absolutely. Yep.
New Speaker (48:24):
You have a minute to take a breath and think of a simpler way out of it.
Kaelyn (48:28):
Take a breath. Your editor's there to help you with this. You know, bring in somebody else that's read the book if possible, and get yourselves a cup of tea, tea, coffee, wine, whatever, and figure out how to address this. There—I've never come across a continuity error or a plot hole or something so far into the process that it wasn't fixable.
Rekka (48:50):
No, I think that's, that's a good place to leave people. A little bit of hope. It's never, it's never too late. It's never too big to fix.
Kaelyn (48:56):
Yep. Well, anyway, so that's edits. Um, you know, the one takeaway I would have here is: try to enjoy them as best you can, because this is, this is part of the writing process. And it's a part of the writing process where you can really learn a lot. I think. So. Um, so anyway.
Rekka (49:20):
Yep. If you have any more questions about editing, if you really feel like Kaelyn missed the, the question that's been burning in your soul, you can at us @WMBcast on Instagram and Twitter. You can support us at patreon.com/WMBcast. And, um, if you could leave a rating and review on Apple podcasts for this episode or any episode, the podcast in general, just leave a little like half, half formed phrase. We'll edit it for you.
Kaelyn (49:50):
Or just make like a winky face.
Rekka (49:53):
Yeah. Like a Winky face is fine. Um, but if you have a comment or a compliment or a criticism or question, please leave it at Apple podcasts for our podcast, which will help other people find our podcast. Um, I've been hearing from a few people lately that they are tuning in for the first time and bingeing. Um, there's a lot of people, there's a lot of people on treadmills, um, who are listening and other, you know, kind of like time-consuming things. And I'm just like, thank you so much for spending that time with us and, um, appreciating what we have to say enough to continue spending that time with us. So, um, that's awesome. And, uh, that's a great thing to leave in a rating or review. Winky face.
Kaelyn (50:35):
"Winky face. Excellent treadmill listening."
Rekka (50:39):
There you go. All right. We will talk to you all in two weeks. Thank you so much again for listening and, uh, see you next time.
Tuesday Mar 02, 2021
Episode 55 - Poetry Brained with A.Z. Louise
Tuesday Mar 02, 2021
Tuesday Mar 02, 2021
We Make Books is a podcast for writers and publishers, by writers and publishers and we want to hear from our listeners! Hit us up on our social media, linked below, and send us your questions, comments, and concerns for us to address in future episodes.
We hope you enjoy We Make Books!
Twitter: @WMBCast | @KindofKaelyn | @BittyBittyZap
Lots of links this episode!
- A.Z.’s website https://www.azlouise.com/
- @az_louise https://twitter.com/az_louise
- “Chorus of the Captains” by Amanda Gorman (Performed at the NFL Super Bowl) https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/super-bowl-2021-read-the-transcript-of-amanda-gorman-poem-chorus-of-the-captains/
- The Hidebehind: https://cryptidz.fandom.com/wiki/Hidebehind
- The Iliad: http://classics.mit.edu/Homer/iliad.1.i.html
- Shakespeare: http://shakespeare.mit.edu/
- Poem “She’s Not A Phoenix” by A.Z. Louise (Strange Horizons): http://strangehorizons.com/poetry/shes-not-a-phoenix/
- AASHTO Manual: https://www.scribd.com/document/118295981/AASHTO
- Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer: https://www.jeffvandermeer.com/book/annihilation/
- Twisted Moon: http://www.twistedmoonmag.com/5/louise.html
- Submission Grinder: https://thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com/
Episode Transcript (by Rekka, blame her for all errors)
Kaelyn (00:00:00):
Welcome back to another episode of We Make Books, a show about writing publishing and everything in between. I'm Kaelyn Considine. I'm the acquisitions editor for Parvus Press.
Rekka (00:00:07):
I'm Rekka. I write science fiction and fantasy as R J Theodore. And I might start writing some poetry as R J Theodore.
Kaelyn (00:00:15):
Yeah, really? Gonna, you're going to take that dive, that plunge?
Rekka (00:00:19):
Well, look, I've written a lot of poetry in my life. I've just spared everybody.
Kaelyn (00:00:24):
I didn't know that about you actually. I feel, um, not betrayed. Um, what's the word I'm looking for here? Uh, surprised.
Rekka (00:00:33):
Surprised. But not disappointed. I hope.
Kaelyn (00:00:35):
No, no, of course not. I've never disappointed at any of your writing. Uh, so yeah, we, um, We Make Books took a little bit of a turn—but it turns out not too much, if you listen to the episode—um, into the realm of poetry, because you know, it turns out people do actually publish poems and stuff.
Rekka (00:00:52):
Yeah, quite a few of the markets that publish the short stories that we sub out (and sometimes trunk) are also seeking poetry and some exclusively, and some anthologies are all about poetry, and some single author anthologies end up being all about poetry. So if you've got a poetic bone in your finger somewhere, maybe this is the episode you need to hear to, um, try and draw some of that out.
Kaelyn (00:01:16):
Rekka was able to interview poet A.Z. Louise, who, um, was kind enough to take the time to sit down and, you know, talk about like some things I really didn't know about poetry and the publishing industry.
Rekka (00:01:28):
Yeah, it was great to have A.Z.. A.Z. Louise is a lover of birds, a killer of houseplants and a former civil engineer. Their love of speculative fiction has been lifelong, but they became a speculative poet by accident. Their work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Fiyah, and The Future Fire.
Kaelyn (00:01:45):
I think poetry is a little intimidating. I don't know why a poem is so much more intimidating than a full length, novel to a lot of people, but it certainly is for me.
Rekka (00:01:55):
I think there's a certain expectation of highbrow, um, of elevated intellect that is required for good poem or to understand a good poem. There, there seems to be some sort of requirement to get in the door to poetry.
Kaelyn (00:02:16):
Yeah. I think everybody's got this notion in their head that like to understand poetry, you need to have gone to school for it, which I don't know why nobody thinks that about writing.
Rekka (00:02:26):
Well, I hope it's not true about writing cause I didn't go to school for writing.
Kaelyn (00:02:30):
Yeah, exactly. Um, you know, and I think there's definitely a lot of theory and craft behind poetry to be sure. Um, and you know, this is, uh, it's an area of publishing that I think, in mainstream publishing, is not talked about as much. So, um, A.Z. was kind enough to spend some time with Rekka going through some of the nuances of it. It's very interesting.
Rekka (00:02:51):
I think so.
Kaelyn (00:02:52):
Yeah.
Rekka (00:02:52):
And I wanna try it now. I don't know when it will, but I'm gonna.
Kaelyn (00:02:57):
Well, um, on that note, we're going to let Rekka go, uh, you know, compose us a nice haiku about—.
Rekka (00:03:03):
Maybe a Limerick to start.
Kaelyn (00:03:05):
Oh definitely a Limerick. Yes. To start.
Rekka (00:03:20):
The world has just seen the first major American sporting event with a poem as featured part of the entertainment, um, which is just wild to consider. Um, because it doesn't feel like the world is getting more open to that sort of thing. But at the same time, this was scheduled like long before the same poet, Amanda Gorman, um, read a very moving poem at the inauguration of the president. So somehow poetry was already on the schedule for— I'm talking about the NFL Super Bowl. I just don't know how that happened.
A.Z. Louise (00:03:57):
It was so wild, absolutely wild to see.
Rekka (00:04:00):
And I love it. And um, so it is total coincidence that we're doing a poetry episode not long after that. just like I said, I needed a cohost and I jumped on A.Z..
A.Z. Louise (00:04:11):
Hello!
Rekka (00:04:11):
Because A.Z. was missing podcasting. Um, so yeah, I mean, I wouldn't be very happy if poetry, I wanna say came back. I don't know if that's fair to say, but it feels like poetry is more of a 18th, 19th century thing. And here we are in the 21st century and we are getting a lot of poetry, but it's in the form of like, "I have eaten the Lego pieces that were on the carpet and which you were probably building into the razor crest, forgive me. They were delicious. So sharp and so crunchy." There's been a different sort of poetry discourse lately, but there are poems constantly being published and there are poets out there constantly creating new poems. So let's, um, let's talk about poetry cause I want to acknowledge it. And if anyone in our audience has felt like, okay, I love poetry, but I have to write short stories to get published. Like, let's, let's put that in the bin. And so tell us, cause you write both.
A.Z. Louise (00:05:15):
Yes.
Rekka (00:05:16):
Um, what makes you write a poem instead of a short story? And when you write a poem, what's your thought process in terms of like where it's going to go when you write it, or do they just sort of happen?
A.Z. Louise (00:05:34):
So I kind of have two different modes for poetry. Uh, one is where I feel like I either miss poetry or need a break from prose and I just need to let the ideas and images flow. And the other mood I have for poetry is I'm processing something. So a lot of times for me, poetry is a first pass on emotions. So if you have wronged me, I've written a poem about you. Because frequently that's where I go when I'm really upset about something and I don't feel ready to talk to another person about it. And I just want to process it with myself for a minute first. Um, so frequently I will just have a line appear in my head and it will be too strange or too unstructured to be part of a short story. Um, and then after I put it down on the page, I can connect it to other ideas and that's how it becomes a poem.
Rekka (00:06:47):
Okay.
A.Z. Louise (00:06:48):
So it's sort of a connect the dots process, which is different from my short fiction process, because my short fiction process, I typically have a specific scene in my head, um, with specific people who are doing or saying specific things.
Rekka (00:07:08):
Okay.
A.Z. Louise (00:07:09):
So it's much more primordial. Um, however, I have written a poem and actually submitted it a few times and the other poems I had submitted it with got picked up, but not that one. And I was like, okay, there's something about this that isn't working. And I ended up writing a whole short story out of it
Rekka (00:07:33):
Based on the poem or using some of the words from the poem and just making the poem flow less like a lyrical experience.
A.Z. Louise (00:07:41):
Yeah, it was... So do you know what a Hide-Behind is?
Rekka (00:07:48):
I do not. And I bet some of our listeners, don't either.
A.Z. Louise (00:07:51):
So it's um, uh, a fearsome critter. Um, so it's this Appalachian cryptid. Um, and one of the things you have to do to protect yourself from the Hide-Behind is to drink being drunk will keep the cryptid from eating you, I guess. Maybe he's on the wagon. I don't know. Um—
Rekka (00:08:15):
Or he doesn't care or, you know, like you just won't care if the Hide-Behind eats you at that point and that's the going advice.
A.Z. Louise (00:08:21):
So that, um, that idea really stuck with me in part because my mom is from that area. So I felt that kind of cultural connection, but also because to me, the Hide-Behind is, uh, a creature who is dealing with trauma. Because if you were a logger back in the day in the Appalachians, your life expectancy was not very long and you were losing friends all the time because it's an extremely dangerous profession. And so that hit me because, um, I am Black and that hit me as "We are drinking. We are coping with an inter intergenerational trauma." So I wrote a poem about a father whose job is to hunt the Hide-Behind. So he is drunk a lot, but when he comes home and he's sober, he's teaching his daughter small scraps of his hide behind hunting craft, knowing that she'll have to go into it. Um, even though he wishes she didn't have to. So it is like a Black parent coming home and having to talk to their kids about all the horrible stuff in the world. And you wish you could shelter your kids from that, but you have to tell them, so in looking at this little poem and what I had done with it, I was like, "Oh, that's a whole story." Yeah. Obviously that's an entire story that deserves more than like 14 or 15 lines, which is my usual length of a poem. So it just sort of—the poem grew beyond being a poem and needed to be a story, which is not to say that a poem is less than a short story. It is that, for me with a poem, I'm creating mood and emotion and with a short story, I am creating, um, more of a scene. So a poem for me is like a piece of music that you listen to. And a short story is a play that you would watch or a musical.
Rekka (00:10:40):
Yeah. Or even the music video sometimes. Yeah. Okay. So yeah, I, when you try and I mean, the plural, you, um, when you try to define poetry in terms of how much it should encompass, I find that really tricky because I mean, you have the Iliad, which is technically a poem. You have Shakespeare, which is technically poetry. Um, what, like— English class taught me in public school, so many things about the structure of poems and how poems should behave, never really encompassed the subject matter of poetry and the kinds of poems that I liked, uh, such as the Highwayman, were nothing like the poems I was writing, which were these scraps of teenage angst. And I'm not going to give myself any more credit for them than that, even though, like, I did have one of them published, but it was one of those like "Send in your poem and $40" kind of thing. So I'm going to put an asterisk on that one. But it's funny, I recently considered going back and sort of writing like a response to that poem from this end of my life. And—
A.Z. Louise (00:12:08):
That sounds like a really cool idea.
Rekka (00:12:11):
Yeah. And it was a short poem too. I think it was like nine lines or something like that. And I feel like it would be so completely an interpretable to anyone else even paired like that, even if I gave you some context. So I'm always curious how publications can say "this is a good poem," you know, or, um, "this is the kind of poem we're looking for." Do you think there's a format that commercial or literary poetry magazines are looking for?
A.Z. Louise (00:12:46):
Uh, so I write almost exclusively speculative poetry. Like, I write other poetry, but I don't usually go out and try and get published because I just love speculative stuff. I didn't even know that you could write speculative poetry, and then I saw a call for submissions. I was like, "Oh, hey, that's a thing." And then I went back to the poetry that I loved in high school and college. And for me, poetry is very much about feeling and metaphor. And I write mostly very short form poetry. So if it's not more than a page, it's poetry, like, and if I feel like it's going to be longer, it's not poetry. But you know, I try to work, uh, the poetic phrase and metaphor into each line of what I'm writing when I write short fiction. But I think that when you're trying to sell a poem, it has to encompass something.
A.Z. Louise (00:13:57):
Uh, so I have a lot of poems about anger because I am a Black person, I am mentally ill, I'm queer on Earth. So when I'm writing a poem about something like that, I am trying to—usually through metaphor because it's about like a dragon or something—I'm trying to encompass the whole world of things, uh, that are causing that anger into a very small package. So every single line has to inform the other lines and frequently my poetry is... It works in a bunch of different orders and I have to work and work and work to figure out what the best order for each line is. Uh, and because short fiction generally has more plot and more character.
Rekka (00:15:03):
Right. There's a sequence of events.
A.Z. Louise (00:15:06):
You can't write character development, say, out of order, it's going to be weird. And obviously there are stories that are told out of order, but, um, there is still, uh, a basic structure there.
A.Z. Louise (00:15:23):
And, uh, obviously people talk a lot about how, uh, many editors are—and readers and writers are—trapped in a very Western sort of three structure. Plot-driven conflict driven structure. And while that is true, and I'm very mad about it, uh, because I do work outside of that a lot because of my mental illness—my brain simply doesn't put things together in the way that other people's do—um, there are still many different structures outside of the Western Canon, the editor or reader just doesn't know about it, you know? Um, they're not structureless. Um, they just have a structure that is not known to the reader. Um, now there— obviously poetry has structure, but I read mostly freeverse. So I'm just out there throwing things out. Um, and then sort of collecting them. It's like catching butterflies in a net. And then I was going to say mounting them, but that's like really sad. That's real, real sad. Um—
Rekka (00:16:40):
And, and studying them before, releasing them
A.Z. Louise (00:16:42):
Again. Yes, I am taking, I'm taking each little butterfly, I'm drawing a little picture in my field notes, I'm taking my notes and then I'm setting them free. Um, and then I collate my notes into something that feels whole, if that makes any sense.
Rekka (00:16:58):
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the, the ultimate judge of when the poem is doing what you want is of course you, the composer of the poem. Yes. Um, I, and, and that part makes a certain amount of sense to me. I have, in my poetry that I've written, and we're talking years ago, um, though like making the bed like a week ago, a poem sort of started to come to me and I was sort of like piecing together. Like, I didn't know where it was going, but I felt like, "okay, you know, this piece or that piece might need to change." Um, which was weird for me to be like analyzing it before I ever wrote it down. Cause you know, making the bed. Um, but then in my head I'm immediately going "Okay, but someone's going to judge this without any of the context of where I wrote it from, and to me, the only way to take something that was coming to me from a deeply personal reaction to something was to make it so, either vague as to be universal, or specific as to have a plot structure or something, uh, if not plot structure, then like thesis statement and supportive arguments.
A.Z. Louise (00:18:18):
They give the context to the reader.
Rekka (00:18:21):
Yeah, In your experience, do you feel like the magazines respond better to something that feels, I mean, feels universal or feels deeply personal? Because like, for example, She's Not a Phoenix, which you had published in Strange Horizons is clearly deeply personal.
A.Z. Louise (00:18:38):
Yes, yes. For sure. That's an anger poem, that's a slight poem. I have been slighted!
Rekka (00:18:45):
But it's something I can relate to, even though I do not have the experience that you do, that the poem came from. Um, and I— like, I'm just, I'm in awe of it. And I want to know how you did it and how it, how it developed and like why did Strange Horizons pick it?
A.Z. Louise (00:19:08):
That poem is obviously a metaphor for something that happened to me and—
Rekka (00:19:14):
And our listeners can find it in the show notes it's available online publicly, which is why I'm using it as an example. Um, so that they can go read it and feel the space in the chest where the bird belongs kind-of-thing that I'm reacting to. Like, um, the line in specifics is, um, "My rib cage, a crucible too hot to hold her." Like that is a big feel, you know? And I feel like everybody can relate to that. And I feel like this poem at the same time is ineffable to me because it came from you and I don't know why, even reading it.
A.Z. Louise (00:19:59):
So that one was about feeling betrayed. I am a person who often feels like I'm too much. Um, so that line is about all the times I have felt like I'm too much. And the thing is, is that everyone on Earth has felt betrayed. Most people have felt like they are too much for somebody else. And I feel that one of the beautiful things about Twitter is that, um, it is easy to see that almost every feeling you've ever had somebody else has had too.
Rekka (00:20:38):
Right, yeah!
A.Z. Louise (00:20:38):
And so when I wrote it, it did feel, it actually did feel so personal that I didn't think anyone would pick it up. And then the first place I submitted it took it and heck, Oh my goodness. It's Strange Horizons! I love Strange Horizons!
Rekka (00:20:54):
Yeah. I mean, what a, what a bingo card moment too.
A.Z. Louise (00:20:57):
I was shook. So it was kind of like, "Oh, this is one of those things where somebody tweets something super relatable and it immediately goes viral." Like I felt like I had captured that feeling of seeing a complete stranger on the internet experiencing the exact same feelings I'd had. And nobody, I mean, it's not that everyone has experienced the exact same sequence of events that spurred me to write that poem. But I do feel like even if somebody didn't get the idea of betrayal out of that poem, they probably still felt it. Um, and I'm not saying that you have to make your feelings universal because we can talk about how the entire whiteness and, you know, straightness and neuro-typicality et cetera of publishing frequently tells you that say, your characters are not relatable enough. So I don't think you want to be writing to be relatable so that an editor will read something and say, "Oh, I felt that before, I will buy this poem." Um, but to know that whoever is reading your poem will assign meaning to it no matter what you put in it, I mean, your making-the-bed poem: somebody might get something totally, completely different from what you put into it, but you have to make, um, you'd have to make the metaphors, um, speak. If that makes sense. It's really hard to describe.
Rekka (00:22:47):
Yeah. It's almost like the way you write it, you make it more personal, but in doing so, you make it more relatable.
A.Z. Louise (00:22:55):
Yes, yes, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. The, the, the more you dig down deep into yourself, the more people will read it and get some crumb of what you're feeling and be able to apply it to their own feelings. And I think that's why poetry is really powerful. And actually I wanted to bring it back to when you mentioned the poetry we're taught in school. Um, because one of the things I was not taught about, because I went to a incredibly white school, I think there were a dozen black kids in the whole school.
Rekka (00:23:29):
That is more than I had in my, very, very white school.
A.Z. Louise (00:23:32):
Yeah. So one thing I didn't have a huge education on is rap and hip hop, and that's poetry! And so popular is because even if you are rapping about something that somebody else has never experienced, people love it so much because they feel it. So.
A.Z. Louise (00:23:55):
Also forget iambic pentameter, to hear somebody rapping, it is the most like awe-inspiring jaw-dropping thing.
A.Z. Louise (00:24:03):
Yeah. I truly wish that my poetry felt like it could slide into that because I love it. So the form of poetry can go so many places and touch so many people. And I feel like that's why it's super important to drill deep down into what you are feeling because you never know who's going to read it and really feel it because one of the poems I love the most is "This is just to say," because my mom was getting her English major when I was a child and she had this gigantic tome, like four inches thick of poetry. And she would read to me out of it, um, for her reading assignments. And one of the poems she read to me was that one. And it reminded me of my grandma's house, um, where we would go in the summer. And it gave me such a feeling of belonging that has stuck with me my entire life. So I am that very corny person, who says that "This is just to say" is their favorite phone, cause it hit me exactly right.
Rekka (00:25:13):
And you know, when you expand poetry into, um, you know, the different forms we've talked about, like, I grew up reading the Highwayman and like, other European poems, and I am—you know, like I enjoyed them. I got stories out of them. There was, there was something in there for me. But as soon as I got out of my, you know, Connecticut life and I went somewhere where I was exposed to other peoples whose experiences I had never been exposed to before. And suddenly my favorite poems were music, talking about things that my poetry classes would never have considered appropriate subject matter. We'll just put it that way. Like I looked at while we were talking, I looked up the definition of poetry because I expected irony. And here it is: A poem is a metrical composition, a composition in verse written in certain measures, whether in blank verse or in rhyme and characterized by imagination and poetic diction." Like, there is nothing in that about connecting to other people and their humanity and relating or anything like that.
A.Z. Louise (00:26:32):
I love it so much. I'm so happy right now!
Rekka (00:26:36):
It's just the worst, right? And I think that's, the problem is like we are, when we are instructed on what a poem is, we, we, I don't know. We get the implication that there are masters of it. And then everybody else who should not even try.
A.Z. Louise (00:26:53):
It, it, I think it's really similar to the way that, I mean, prose is taught, right? You get a book and then you dissect it into a million tiny pieces until it's no longer enjoyable. Um, and that's what your teachers teach you, is like, deep reading. And the thing is, I love deep reading and I love criticizing my favorite things. It brings me joy to pick apart the things that I love. Cause I'm the worst. Um—
Rekka (00:27:19):
No, I do the same thing. Like I exit a movie or something like that, and I absolutely spend the next hour and a half ruining it for my husband and he goes, "But I thought you enjoyed it?" I'm like, "I did."
A.Z. Louise (00:27:28):
Yeah. Yeah.
Rekka (00:27:30):
"But these things could be fixed."
A.Z. Louise (00:27:31):
My story brain completely turns off when I'm in the movie and that over the next week I start remembering things and I'm like, "Oh man, I have to annoy someone with this. Right now."
Rekka (00:27:43):
Yeah. So I understand like enjoying the, the criticism aspect of it. Um, but— I'm sorry, I cut you off to relate to what you were saying.
A.Z. Louise (00:27:56):
That definition is really funny to me because it reminds me of what's in the AASHTO manual, which is the manual of stuff you need to know to engineer a road. Cause I was a roadway design engineer. Um, and the thing is, is that this frigging book is impenetrable and all you really need from it is to know like what's the acceptable width of a sidewalk. It's five feet, because people who use wheelchairs need to be able to properly use a sidewalk.
Rekka (00:28:29):
Right. Let's say "clear space of a sidewalk." Exactly. Cause as soon as people start filling it with lamps and small gardens and railings and uh, let's say sidewalk dining, suddenly.
A.Z. Louise (00:28:42):
Yeah. Actually.
A.Z. Louise (00:28:43):
I'm sorry. I love accessibility. I — that's a whole other podcast [episode] we need to start.
A.Z. Louise (00:28:48):
The first engineering project I ever worked on was a sidewalk project. So I have a lot of feelings about accessibility for sidewalks and I will fight about it, and how much more frequently they need to be maintained. Let's be real.
Rekka (00:29:00):
Right. Yeah. Um, but I was, uh, I did a major in interior design temporarily before I switched to graphic design. And the, um, the rules of ADA were, um, like gospel to me, whereas everyone else in the room was like, "but I want to do this." So I, I have that. I have that sort of sense of like, "no, no, no, this is how it should be. And this is the bare minimum" versus all that. But this is unrelated to poetry, except that poetry is very accessible. Continue.
A.Z. Louise (00:29:34):
I'm metaphoring again, as you do. When you go into this manual, it's completely impenetrable and there's all this math and it sounds terrible. And it would never, in a million years be accessible to someone who didn't go to engineering school. But once you dig down, you actually have to use a lot of creativity to make your project work, because there's going to be a lot of stuff that gets in the way it's like, "Oh, you know what? The water resources guys are telling me that I have to put a manhole here." Or, "Okay. So the lady over in environmental engineering is telling me we can't disturb this because there's mussels." Um, so you have to use every ounce of your creativity to work around all of these things that are getting in the way of you just putting a straight dag sidewalk, um, and making sure it's wide enough to be useful for humans.
Rekka (00:30:29):
Right. Right.
A.Z. Louise (00:30:30):
That kind of idea is, uh, something I have taken into my creative life, which is that, when you write a short story, you're going to run up against stuff that you didn't mean to happen. Like, one of the things that writers say the most frequently is that "my characters are doing stuff I don't want them to make Them stop!" Um, so, um, you are kind of harnessing your creativity, um, to make it run in the directions that you want. You're kind of guiding the river. Um, and with poetry, you're doing that, but you're doing it in a little bit of a different way because it is so chaotic for me. Just immediate chaos. And you do, you have to go with it a lot more than, um, you might with like a short story or a novel, um, which you might be able to eat into your outline a little bit better. Right? So I think that's why I like free verse, because you take all of the rules and you slam dunk them directly in the trash.
Rekka (00:31:42):
And thank goodness for that.
A.Z. Louise (00:31:43):
Which is very freeing for me, someone who, uh, loves rules. It's also really counter intuitive.
Rekka (00:31:52):
I think in terms of like the, the rhythm of the piece. If even in freeverse, we sort of develop a rhythm to the way our words flow. It's not like no rules at all. It's, "I am going to honor my natural rhythm and the word choice is more important than, you know, how long the line is."
A.Z. Louise (00:32:14):
Yeah. I actually really mess with how long my lines are a lot, because I like a shapely poem. I like it to look nice on the page. But I think the best way to make a lyrical poem is to read it out loud. Because what is lyrical in your own personal voice is very different from what is lyrical in somebody else's. And if someone else reads your poem out loud, it might not sound as good, but you have to be true to your own personal voice, which is one reason that I frequently go to poetry when I'm sick of prose, because as an actual maniac—um, someone who experiences mania—as a complete maniac, I frequently have to wrangle by sentences into a form a non-crazy person, uh, will understand and enjoy. Um, in poetry, I can word it in the wildest possible way and somebody's looking at it might not like it, but they will be like, "Oh, this is, that person's style."
Rekka (00:33:21):
Right, right. It's a relief from fixing yourself for other people.
A.Z. Louise (00:33:28):
Yes. And so the more you are, the more you feel that relief, um, I think the closer you are to the bones of your poem, and I've read a lot of poems that I loved and hated the style, or didn't like the format was in, but because it was in that person's true voice, I was like, "Oh, this poem rules!" So I think that being true to your own voice is much more important than like trying to make it sellable. Because I do find that the weirder I write, the better my stuff sells. Uh, and that applies to, um, short fiction as well. I have started writing much more slowly because I am trying to poem every paragraph of my short fiction. The thing is, is that I get a lot more edits and the edits are, "This sentence is whack!" Because I'm writing more whack sentences. But the story itself is enriched by the poem, the poem that is, that lives within each line and within each paragraph. So, um, it needs more maneuvering. Editors are very helpful about that. They're very sweet.
Rekka (00:34:51):
But the fact is they're picking it up in the first place. So it's not like— having a lyrical quality is not barring you from, from sales. Like it's not like short fiction, it doesn't work and poetry, it does.
A.Z. Louise (00:35:03):
Yeah. I think because more of my true voice comes out when I am being more poetic-cal. Is that a word? I'm a professional writer.
Rekka (00:35:12):
Look, we all know professional writers can not talk.
A.Z. Louise (00:35:14):
Not at all. Or spell, let's be real. I do get a lot of feedback that, "Oh, this line is awkward." And because it is awkward read in somebody else's voice. So that's where the kind of line is. Like, how does the sound read in somebody's somebody else's voice? Which is one reason it's nice to have your computer reads your fiction aloud to you. Yeah. Because then it's like, "Oh." Because I feel like when you read fiction, you are reading it more in your own voice. And when you are reading poetry, you are just letting the voice happen. Yeah. You're just letting whatever voice is there wash over you. If that makes sense.
Rekka (00:35:55):
That, and that explains why you get editors more willing to correct that voice when you have it in prose. Prose, where in theory you have a plot, that they're going to be more willing to red pen it. Than when it's poetry. And therefore it's gotta be— I can't imagine being an editor for a magazine who acquires poetry and then has to somehow comment without completely trampling what's going on in the poem.
A.Z. Louise (00:36:28):
Uh, I, I feel like I'm lucky because my background as an engineer makes me better, I think, at taking criticism because I'm used to having a plan sheet handed back to me with just like red pencil all over it. Um, but most editors are very kind and they will tell you, "You don't have to change anything you don't want to." Um, but you can tell, you can hear the little, like, little tone in the comment. That's like, "I don't know what this means. You weirdo. You're so strange. But I like it."
Rekka (00:37:06):
Yeah. "I'm along for the ride. However, you might need some seatbelts."
A.Z. Louise (00:37:10):
Yeah, exactly. "You might want to strap your reader in on this one with a little bit, a little bit less, uh, poetic license in this sentence."
Rekka (00:37:21):
Which is funny because, um, in my short story prose, I don't feel like I get poetic and it's something I admire so much in a lot of my colleagues' short story prose is like, there'll be a turn of phrase and it'll just be like, "Oh, this is why I write! why don't I write like this?" And, um, so the occasion where I get a comment where it's like, "Wow, this sentence." I'm just like, that's what I'm going for.
A.Z. Louise (00:37:46):
That's my favorite type of comment. And I love it. It feels so good. And I have always been a very utilitarian prose writer.
Rekka (00:37:53):
And that's where I am now.
A.Z. Louise (00:37:55):
Yeah. And I think I started being more poetic in my prose when I started looking at sentence structure, which is completely counterintuitive, but you know how a sentence feels— a paragraph can feel really, really repetitive if all the sentences are structured exactly the same. So by going back and reading more deeply into each sentence for like commas and stuff, I am looking more at the words that I used and "why did I put this word here next to this comma? Why did I choose this word?" And that's where I'm like, "okay, so this sentence can have much more flavor." I write so many creepy forest stories and poems. That's just like my thing, I guess.
Rekka (00:38:49):
You have a brand. It's okay.
A.Z. Louise (00:38:50):
Yeah, I really have a creepy forest and like gay sentient plants brand. Um—
Rekka (00:38:57):
Hey, look its day is coming. This is going to be the next thing. I mean, we actually kind of like started that with Annihilation, with Jeff VanderMeer, like getting his book made into a movie and it's all about like plant body-possessing moss. So let's, uh, let's have more of that, please.
A.Z. Louise (00:39:14):
Yeah that kind of thing is totally my jam. So like, if a sentence is devoid of anything foresty, I will try and slip something in and then suddenly the sentence starts to read really poetically. So, um, I think that because I do write such short poetry, every single line has to be super punchy and has to contain a lot. And it's really easy when you're writing a longer form to accidentally not do that. Which sucks because I just really like to prose straight from brain to hands to keyboard with like no plan whatsoever. And then I go back and I'm like, "where are my metaphors?"
Rekka (00:39:56):
I think so often we focus on things like character development and arc and plot and, um, cutting words, as opposed to making sure our words are doing all the heavy lifting.
A.Z. Louise (00:40:09):
Yeah.
Rekka (00:40:09):
Like I'm really excited. Now I want to go write some poems after talking to you, because thinking about it in like a completely different way for poetry, not in "how short can I make this line," but in "how much can I make this line hurt my reader?"
A.Z. Louise (00:40:28):
Yes.
A.Z. Louise (00:40:28):
Okay. Maybe, maybe not every line has to hurt the reader. Maybe not all homes are meant for that, but you know, how much am I going to drag my reader with this line? And if I can develop that skill, one hopes that it would sort of trickle over on its own. And it sounds like in your experience, it does.
A.Z. Louise (00:40:48):
That's like extremely spicy because I started doing a wordsmithing pass whenever I write fiction. As someone who writes poetry and this may come as a surprise, my prose, uh, I'm very bad at writing descriptions. I love writing dialogue. That's just my jam. Uh, so my first pass is always, always, always description because my, my, uh, fiction is almost always 10 to 50% shorter than I want it to be.
Rekka (00:41:21):
The white room syndrome.
A.Z. Louise (00:41:23):
Oh, absolutely.
Rekka (00:41:23):
Especially when, when you love dialogue. And a lot of my, um, my prose short pieces also come to me as like, here's a snippet of conversation and like somebody's witty remark back. Or is it like sometimes it's, it's just the response. I don't even know what the response is to, and then I build a whole story around it. And very frequently, yes, it is a story. That's about a relationship between two people and they are floating in space. Because, you know, it's spec fic so there's stars, not a white room.
A.Z. Louise (00:41:53):
Yeah. It's space. It's space. Usually my description pass coincides with a world building pass, because it's so easy to have all the world building in your head and not on the page at all. So then once that's down, I will do a character pass or a plot pass. Those can happen interchangeably. There's no real rhyme or reason to which one I do first. Usually the one I feel is weaker. It's the one I get first. And then when all of that is done, that's when I do the wordsmithing pass. And I feel like that's a good, a good place to do it because then everything else is as fixed as you could get it. And it also allows you to skim the heck out of your previous reading passes. You don't have to be reading super, super deep and you can just be catching bullet points and then you get less of that feeling of having read your work so many times that it's meaningless.
Rekka (00:42:51):
Yes. Yeah. Anytime you can avoid having to actually deep dive into every sentence. For critical reasons.
A.Z. Louise (00:42:55):
Yeah. And for, for poetry, I write down my first pass and then let it simmer. I will touch it for like a week. So it's like, and then I might write four or five different versions of it and decide which one is better. Let that simmer for another week and come back to it. Because the same thing happens with poetry as with prose. Like, you just looked at it so many times that it's just nothing. You might as well be looking at a blank page. Who wrote this? Not me.
Rekka (00:43:25):
When the poem no longer gives you goosebumps.
A.Z. Louise (00:43:27):
Yeah. I do write a lot of very emotional poems. So like if I don't feel sad after I read it I'm like, "Oh, I read this too many times."
Rekka (00:43:36):
So, you know, you mentioned three or four separate kinds of passes. Do you do that with your poems at all? Or do you mostly do a pass for impactful language? And you figure what you had to say was already in there and it might just be reordering or rewording.
A.Z. Louise (00:43:55):
So, on my second draft of a poem, I that's, when I like identify the problems. sssss. Cause there's usually like one main problem. My frequent problem is that I love poems that just leave you hanging. And it's like, "well, where's the next line?" Um, that's like my favorite thing. And that's one thing I could tell you, editors don't like very much. So don't do that. So frequently, my second pass will be figuring out what is the punchy, uh, button to put on the end of this poem? Um, but usually if I just wrote something like in a fugue state, just like trying to get feelings out, I will probably need to add some metaphors in there. It's just a journal and it's just feelings. And that's where I'm like, "Okay, this is where the gay plants come in. Why am I like a gay plant in this poem?" After that one is where I will start reordering stuff to see where it works best. Because once the words sound really nice, you can start reading it all different orders and decide, "okay, this is where I want it to be." Especially if it's a poem, you want to be able to be read forward and backward. For me, I want all my words to be set before I start puzzle piecing it. I'm doing these very spidery motions with my hands right now.
Rekka (00:45:23):
They are good spider motions. I'm enjoying watching your hands. The process actually sounds pretty similar in terms of how set you want your piece to be. I love that you think about it in terms of "how do I edit this so that I still love it at the end and that I haven't overexposed myself to the story so that it no longer engages my brain critically so that I can create the best thing that I can?" Um, and it's funny that you mentioned, you know, the editors' comments and, um, editors wanting a story that feels like it wraps up at the end, cause I have a cheat for that.
A.Z. Louise (00:46:02):
Oooh. I'm so excited.
Rekka (00:46:04):
And it's one you probably already use. In fact, I'm looking at the poem still up on my screen and you have used it here, whether it was like the same thought process or whatever. But I basically take whatever my, um, my supposition at the beginning of the story is, and I rephrase it to create like almost a thesis statement, like reiterate what I was saying. And then, and then it has bookends. And then it doesn't feel like, you know—.
A.Z. Louise (00:46:30):
It feels complete.
Rekka (00:46:31):
Yeah. It doesn't feel like oatmeal running off a plate, it's oatmeal in a bowl. So I'm just looking at your, um, you know, She's Not a Phoenix poem and you have a line repeated multiple times, and it feels like it's got like, "this is my conclusion." Even though the line is very, very weighted with lots of different meanings, it's still a conclusion. Um, because "ah yes, I recognize this pattern and that feels like a properly framed, properly bowled oatmeal."
A.Z. Louise (00:47:08):
Yeah. That was, uh, I wrote that a zillion years ago, but I definitely, or for me, a person with ADHD is a zillion years ago. So like five. Could be dinosaur times, I don't know. But I didn't originally have that frame around it. It wasn't a structure and I kept looking at it. I was like, "this is like, like a wet t-shirt. It is just lying in a lump and it needs to be hung on something like it needs something more to make it feel like a thing and less like, just thoughts."
Rekka (00:47:41):
Well, in my opinion, you definitely found that thing.
A.Z. Louise (00:47:44):
Oh, thank you.
Rekka (00:47:44):
When you tell me that it comes from an angry place. Like, I feel this phrase as like the most like acid-dripping, like denial of the thing it's saying, you know.
A.Z. Louise (00:47:58):
Yesssssssss!
Rekka (00:47:58):
Like, um, the phrase is "it's better this way." And you're like, you understand from this poem, it absolutely is not.
A.Z. Louise (00:48:05):
Yeah. And you know, sometimes the thing you need to hang it up on is like a little bit of structure through like repetition, and sometimes it's, uh, so— I just, I love assonance and alliteration. Ooh. Sometimes it's metaphor. So those sort of poetic, um, tools are what you're using to hang the fabric of your, uh, your poem over. So you're just taking thoughts and it's like building a little tent.
Rekka (00:48:34):
You're creating a frame, you know, that lets people see the whole thing as it's meant to be, as opposed to the wet ball of cotton on the, on the deck.
A.Z. Louise (00:48:44):
I do think a lot of people feel roped in by structure because that's what they learned to write in high school because high school is always like, you have to write a sonnet. And you're like, "uhhh!" I find that limericks are really fun just for a warmup because I find that having constraints actually makes me more creative. Um, but a lot of people do feel really boxed in because that's what they learned. But they associate freeverse with like angsty teens and the worst slam poetry you've ever heard at a cafe. And so people are like, "Oh, if I do this without a structure, it's going to be a hot mess and it's going to expose too much of me. And people will think it is terrible and that it will hurt my feelings a lot because this is my heart I'm putting on the page." Yeah. So there's definitely, I think some people do have a fear of exposing too much of themselves in poetry. And—
Rekka (00:49:50):
But I think that's, you know, going back to what we were talking about before, like that's, what's going to sell a poem.
A.Z. Louise (00:49:55):
Yeah, yeah.
Rekka (00:49:57):
Which is cruel.
A.Z. Louise (00:49:57):
Yeah it sucks really bad, but that's a fear that you have to unfortunately work through. I'm not going to say get over because rude, um, and get over it implies that you simply stop feeling afraid, which will literally never happen because you're always emailing a stranger your feelings. So you will always be a little bit, uh, afraid. And um, so you have to find ways to work through being afraid and if that's structure, then good, if it's going to freeverse, then good. Um, if you have a specific metaphor that you love use that in every dang poem, if it makes you feel safer to send your feelings to somebody. Because artists always have those kinds of style things, like if there's a phrase you love just keep using it and then maybe it will change, but nobody's going to get mad at you for writing 10,000 gay plant poems.
Rekka (00:50:53):
Right. I feel like there's going to be, um, some like mycology references in my poems coming up.
A.Z. Louise (00:51:01):
Yeah. Oh, I, I love a good mushroom. They're they're so fun for metaphors and they glow and they're cute and they're just delightful. Yeah. It's definitely like maybe if you send poems with the same thing in it over and over again to an editor, they will be like, "can you stop sending those plant poems?" But there's so many outlets and you'll be sending so much.
Rekka (00:51:30):
Yes. Because even if they see it over and over again, they may not have accepted it yet. And it may be just a thing for them.
A.Z. Louise (00:51:36):
Frankly, they probably don't even know it's you. I do read slush and sometimes names look familiar, but typically you're just reading based on the merit of the thing itself.
Rekka (00:51:49):
Which is always good to hear.
A.Z. Louise (00:51:50):
Yeah. I mean, that's editors see so many dang poems and stuff. Like if you send two poems that are really similar, they will never notice. You don't have to be self-conscious about that.
Rekka (00:52:01):
How do you filter? Is like there, uh, a transformation process from taking an A.Z. personal moment and turning it into a spec thick piece of poetry?
A.Z. Louise (00:52:12):
I do sometimes send a piece of poetry, wondering if it's speculative enough. Because the line of what is speculative and what is not, is so blurry. Um, sometimes I go ham. Sometimes I will write some feelings down and I'll be like, "I'm angry. It's dragon time." Or, "I'm very sad. I'm very tired. We're gonna write about dirt and worms let's do that." Um, so I think that the most important part of the filtration process is to consume media. And I know that's like something people say all the time, you have to— writers read, you know? Um, but you don't have to be reading strictly speculative poetry. Nature documentaries have given me so much material because when you look at a beautiful eagle soaring, metaphors will come to you. And a beautiful Eagle and a Wyvern are not that different from each other.
Rekka (00:53:15):
Except in the way the word rolls off your tongue.
A.Z. Louise (00:53:17):
Exactly.
Rekka (00:53:17):
Or doesn't.
A.Z. Louise (00:53:19):
Wyvern's a little rough. You might want to go back to dragon on that one. So yeah, I think that, and since imagery is so important, I like to follow, um, on social media accounts that just post really beautiful photos of nature and things like that, or rad, uh, speculative art. Like I love those, um, like sixties and seventies, like fantasy and science fiction covers.
Rekka (00:53:45):
Yeah. Sometimes they are so painful. Like there was, there's a thread and it's just like nipples everywhere.
A.Z. Louise (00:53:51):
Butts all over the place. Butts all the way down.
A.Z. Louise (00:53:53):
Butts and nipples at the same time for the same person, somehow. But yeah, it's bizarre.
A.Z. Louise (00:53:58):
Well the great news is that there are a lot of really cool, uh, erotic, speculative poetry outlets. Um, I had, I had something out with Twisted Moon that is about gay plants.
Rekka (00:54:12):
I feel like I did you dirty by picking the one poem that I could that had no gay plants in it.
A.Z. Louise (00:54:17):
I know, right? No. Um, it's, it's, it's always it's, with me it's gay plants, it's like tearing your chest open, and it's dirt and worms.
A.Z. Louise (00:54:27):
Okay so we got the tearing your chest open part. At least, even if it was a phoenix poem.
A.Z. Louise (00:54:30):
Yeah we've got a bird inside of a chest. Yeah.
Rekka (00:54:34):
So, was that a decision—I mean, you said you did this ages ago, but—was it a decision to make a phoenix because a phoenix is a spec fic element that you could communicate this idea with? I mean, the poem itself does incorporate like the, the bird that you "thought was glass turning into ash." I mean, like there are phoenix elements in it. How early in the process did that come about? Or was it a decision because you wanted to submit it?
A.Z. Louise (00:54:58):
That, I think that what happened is when I got to that line that you read about "my chest to crucible too hot to hold," I was like, "Oh, this bird's on fire, baby." So that was me sort of following, uh, my maybe tortured metaphor down a little rabbit hole and finding a bird in there?
Rekka (00:55:20):
So it's not, like you said, like, okay, search and replace every instance of "Blue Jay" with "Phoenix." It's more than that. It's finding the spec fic element inside the metaphor you already have.
A.Z. Louise (00:55:32):
Yeah. That's, that's what I do a lot of the time. Um, and typically it's an elemental thing. Like I will have a reference to fire or dirt or leaves or something like that. Obviously nature is in my stuff a lot. Or if I want to get really weird and wild, I have one poem about stars. Like just like having a star relationship in space. Like, it doesn't make any sense, but uh, I have mapped feelings onto stars, so now we're in science fiction. Sure. Why not?
Rekka (00:56:10):
Yeah. No. And it still sounds to me, like most of these stories could get picked up in a literary poem magazine if you went that path because these metaphors— like, it's not like famous poems that we were taught in school don't reference stars, you know, it's not like they don't reference dragons. And how far toward spec fic it is, sounds like it's really debatable, honestly, because so many poems are metaphorical.
A.Z. Louise (00:56:42):
Yeah and sometimes I will write a poem where the only thing that seems speculative about it at all is the title, because I noticed something similar to folklore in there. Um, or something like that. Like I wrote a poem recently where I, I wrote the whole thing out and I was like, it feels mildly speculative, but isn't fully there yet. Um, but it's really, really similar to, um, the story of the snow queen. So, um, I titled it in reference to that. Has it gotten picked up yet? Absolutely not. But, um—
Rekka (00:57:18):
But it doesn't feel like an incomplete approach to that way of doing things.
A.Z. Louise (00:57:21):
Yeah. And the thing is, is that there are so many outlets out there that somewhere that says they take something like slipstream or, um, you know, like surrealism, they would be more likely to pick up something that only has a wisp of speculative elements. So I usually have a large bank of poems. And then when a call for submission comes along, I'll just yeet. But if I have something that I don't know how to place and I really want to that's when it's Submission Grinder time, baby!
Rekka (00:57:56):
Yeah. That's more poetry, obviously, than we've ever discussed on this podcast. And I loved every minute of it because... This is poetry centric, but I still feel like it's excellent advice getting in there and feeling your words and... Um, letting the reader feel your emotions through them is always good advice because we love when we feel things.
A.Z. Louise (00:58:22):
Yeah. You read to feel an emotion.
Rekka (00:58:25):
Yeah. And I think readers enjoy that moment that we referenced earlier when you're like, "Wow, that sentence." I think readers love that too. And um, so it's, it's good for everyone to get in your emotions and to be vulnerable as much as, um, as you think that doesn't feel right when you're going to market and trying to sell something. It's what we're all searching for, is that connection that someone else is feeling that too. And I am, I am feeling all squirmy and happy because I feel like maybe I'm not such a bad poet and maybe I do have some words to share and maybe that story will end up being, you know, a poem that I can share or if not, like I'm like just going to let the words start flowing a little bit more and, and write them down rather than just being like "oh that'd be a good poem."
A.Z. Louise (00:59:14):
My last thought on that is that some poems I write without meaning to send them anywhere at all. Some are just for you.
Rekka (00:59:22):
For you. Yeah. I think that's how you can allow yourself to be vulnerable from the get go. If you don't tell yourself like, "Oh, that one line is headed for Strange Horizons."
A.Z. Louise (00:59:34):
Yeah, and it's healthy to have things that are just for you, it's not healthy to try and monetize everything. As much as we live in capitalism and that's necessary.
Rekka (00:59:42):
Yay, Capitalism. But you did mention that sometimes you start your poem and it's more like a journal.
A.Z. Louise (00:59:46):
Yeah.
Rekka (00:59:47):
And, um, that's, I think that's healthy. That's a healthy way to approach any writing project is like, "this doesn't have to sell if I just want to live in it for a little bit. And then later I can decide, um, or..."
A.Z. Louise (00:59:59):
I have tons of trunked stuff.
Rekka (01:00:00):
Yeah. Yeah. And, um, it's healthy.
A.Z. Louise (01:00:04):
Trunk City in this computer.
Rekka (01:00:04):
Yes. I just really enjoyed that conversation. So thank you so much for coming on.
A.Z. Louise (01:00:07):
Thank you so much for having me.
Rekka (01:00:08):
And for all the bonus advice about editing and revising that I wasn't expecting to.
A.Z. Louise (01:00:13):
I wasn't either.
Rekka (01:00:15):
Thank you so much for coming on, A.Z. I really had fun.
A.Z. Louise (01:00:17):
Thank you, me too.
Rekka (01:00:33):
Thank you, everyone for joining us for another episode of We Make Books. If you have any questions that you want answered in future episodes, or just have questions in general, remember you can find us on Twitter @WMBcast, same for Instagram or WMBcast.com. If you find value in the content that we provide, we would really appreciate your support at patreon.com/WMBcast.
Rekka (01:01:00):
If you can't provide financial support, we totally understand. And what you could really do to help us is spread the word about this podcast. You can do that by sharing a particular episode with a friend who can find it useful, or if you leave a rating and review at iTunes, it will feed that algorithm and help other people find our podcast, too. Of course you can always retweet our episodes on Twitter. Thank you so much for listening and we will talk to you soon.