CHAPTER EIGHT

THE HINT OF CYCLING

 

 

Very little that is created is created lineally.

But in writing, our audience experiences a very clear order to a book. And if that order isn’t clear, they leave the book.

So it is logical that new writers come at writing thinking they must create the book just as a reader experiences the work.

But thankfully, it doesn’t work that way, as I talked about in the last chapter.

Or, at least, it doesn’t have to.

 

 

MODERN COMPUTER AGE

 

The modern computer age has been both a blessing and a curse for writers. In the days of typewriters, or writing by hand, rewriting was a chore, to say the least, so professional writers quickly learned to not do much rewriting. Especially the top storytellers who were working for a certain amount per word.

They didn’t get paid for rewriting. Only finished product.

The focus was to get it correct the first time through.

That should still be your focus, even though rewriting is easy in this new computer world, and myths of modern publishing expect it.

But back before the computers of the last 25-plus years, making a mistake and fixing it on a typed page was a pain. I know I personally went through bottles of Wite-Out because of my spelling and bad typing.

And the rule of thumb when submitting a manuscript to an editor was no more than ten corrections on a page. If you had more than ten, you had to retype it. And trust me, ten fixed mistakes on a manuscript page looked awful, so I retyped at five mistakes.

And I was a horrid typist. I hated typing, especially retyping.

So my two-finger hunt-and-peck method was slow. Very slow.

But now the fixes are easy.

And that causes the problem of too much rewriting.

But it also allows professional writers a wonderful tool that many, many of us have adopted. The tool is called cycling.

Now to understand this tool and use it correctly, you have to be completely unstuck in the timeline of your manuscript. Timeline of the manuscript is page one, followed by page two, and so on until the end of the book.

Those page numbers should mean nothing to you until the end of the book, and even the order of the chapters should mean little to you.

In creative mode, nothing is set in stone.

You are not locked into the moment you are typing. You can go anywhere in the story and type at any point in the manuscript.

 

 

CYCLING

 

I thought for the longest time that I was the only one who had picked this up. That’s my ego for you. The more I talked with other professional writers, the more I realized that in one form or another, all of us did this.

Let me explain what I do, so you get a clear picture of what I am calling cycling and find a form of it that will work for you.

I start into what I think is the opening of a story or novel. I climb inside a character’s head and get the emotions of the character about the setting around the character, and I type for two or three pages.

500 to 700 words or so.

And I come to a halt.

Every time, without fail. This is now a dug-in habit.

I instantly jump out of the timeline of the story and cycle back to the first word and start through the story again.

Sometimes I add in stuff, sometimes I take out, sometimes I just reread, scanning forward, fixing any mistakes I see.

(Remember, this will be the only draft I will do.)

So when I get back to the white space, I have some speed up and I power onward, usually another 500 or so words until I stop.

Then I cycle back again to the beginning and do the same thing, run through it all until I get back to the white space with momentum and power forward again for another 500 or 700 words.

Then I cycle back about 700 to 1,000 words and do it again.

So if you were tracking how I write a story or novel, you would see me go 500 words forward, back, power to the white spot again, more forward, then back.

I am completely unstuck from the timeline of the novel.

Sometimes, when I get a nifty thought, I type it and then write forward until I get there.

But almost always I cycle back, all in creative voice, never once judging the work, just working to make it clearer, make the character better, the setting richer, and so on and so on.

I could never do this with a typewriter.

Only the last 25 years or so since I got my first computer have I been able to do this.

 

 

HOW CYCLING HELPS WRITING INTO THE DARK

 

When you have no idea where you are going with a story, momentum is often the key to it all.

I have great momentum for about 500 words, about two manuscript pages. Then I run into that “What happens next?” question.

So by cycling back, I am putting the character and the events solidly in my mind by going over them again. And when I hit the white space where I stopped, I have momentum to drive the story forward.

By going back and coming forward again, my creative voice knows what’s going to happen next.

When I am really, really stuck, I often will cycle back a full chapter or so and take a run at the stuck spot, spending 15 minutes or so going over what I have done, touching it, getting my creative voice back into where it was going.

More often than not, that solves being very stuck.

Think of this as the white spaces being small hills and I need to get a run at each hill. And think of being very stuck as a larger hill, and I need to back up farther to get more speed at the larger hill.

 

 

FIXING MISTAKES

 

Cycling, knowing you will be done when you hit the end, makes you fix any problem or mistake instantly, the moment you see or discover the problem.

So say a character says something to another character and your creative voice goes, “Damn it, that wasn’t set up.”

You instantly pop out of the timeline and go back and set it up and then work toward the white space again.

You need to have a character wearing something different for a plot reason that came up in chapter four, you instantly go back and fix what the character is wearing, moving forward again through the manuscript until you get to the white space to make sure all the details match.

You need to look up a detail, you stop, look it up, put it in, cycle back and run at the white space again to make sure the detail is correct.

 

 

DOESN’T CYCLING TAKE MORE TIME?

 

Seriously, I get this question a lot and I imagine some of you reading this are thinking it.

But no, this takes far, far less time to get a story right the first time through than to try to fix it later. And that goes for putting silly brackets around something you have to research later.

Get it right and be done and move on to a new story.

By having that attitude, you power up your creative voice to get it right the first time.

You don’t write sloppy.

You don’t write for a second draft.

Now are some of my first runs through 500 words sloppy? I don’t honestly know. I suppose so because I am not paying any attention, and I know I will cover those 500 words to clean them up at least twice more, if not more than twice, in very short order.

But to be honest, I don’t notice or care. My subconscious knows this will be the only time through and I’m known for moderately clean manuscripts. Not perfect. No manuscript is perfect.

But I’m fairly clean.

So how much time does this take me?

I tend to think I write (that’s finished, after cycling) about 1,000 or so words per hour, typing with three fingers and taking five and ten minute breaks every hour or so.

Sometimes I am faster. Not slower that often.

If I had to worry about going back for a second draft, I doubt I would be writing. I know the story, so it would be boring because I know the story.

I didn’t rewrite when I wrote on a typewriter either.

I never reread my stories after I get to the end.

Why?

Because I have seen every word in the story two or three or four times in the cycling.

And I know I don’t have to.