I was a design student in college, way back in the stone age when designers and architects drew on paper. There was one professor who would occasionally come into a room where all the students were diligently drawing, bent over their precious assignment. The professor would grab a labored-over drawing, crumple it up and throw it in the trash.
Then he would wave his arms, “Your work is not sacred!”
After a few years, he got to the place where he would only threaten to do that, but the point was still made, at least to some extent.
The same is true of writing; your words are not sacred!
One of the things that happened way back when we humans first started writing things down was that written words were in fact considered sacred. So if a physician wrote down that using leaches could fix broken bones, then by god (often literally) physicians for generations would use leaches trying to fix broken bones. And if some snot-nosed upstart had the audacity to suggest using a splint, he would be shown the sacred text and told to shut up.
Again, your words are not sacred!
An Old, Old Story that Failed
Let me give you an example. Back in my youth, when writers used pens and typewriters, I wrote a story. It was kind of a coming-of-age thing, based loosely on characters from a role-playing game I was in. The thing was: the story didn’t work. Even back then as a clueless beginner, I could sense that. But I didn’t know why it didn’t work.
Well, years later, the story came back to me, and I thought I would try my hand at it again. In this case, I decided not to use the original words at all. I started over from scratch.
You see, I knew that the original didn’t work, so I figured an entirely new approach was in order. So I set out telling the same story of a boy, a priest, and a dragon. Only this time, it quickly got really dark.
To me, though, the story was light and fluffy not dark and gritty. I considered going ahead with this darker version and gave up instead.
Thus, the story sat in my imaginary trunk (see, a trunk full of old stories is another one of those old-author things. These days I just have piles of floppy disks and CDs that no computers can read anymore.) But the story also staying in my head—now that is a really creaky, dusty old trunk there. Needs some oil on the hinges.
Getting Some Agency
In the meantime, I wrote a bunch of other stories. Dozens and dozens. And somewhere in one of my writer’s groups, someone brought up the idea of agency. That is: your main character needs to take action and be an agent for change in their own story.
An excellent example is a movie called Witness, an old Harrison Ford thriller where this Amish kid witnesses a murder. In the end, Ford, the boy, and the boy’s mother (a widow) flee back to Amish country. When the bad guys find them (I mean, the bad guys have to find them), the entire Amish community gathers around and hems them in. Now, the Amish are non-violent, completely non-violent. If someone punches one of them, they don’t strike back. Ever. But in this case, the bad guys will not only have to kill the boy, but forty of fifty other people.
The movie does a very good job of showing what being Amish is about and what it’s like. But it made one mistake: in that scene at the end, Harrison Ford explained to the bad guys what they would have to do to get away. But in an Amish community, that was not his job. It was the community elder’s job.
In some ways it’s small mistake, but here’s the thing: the director and the writers had to put that mistake in the movie. Why? Because Harrison Ford was the hero, and the hero has to have agency in the climax. The hero must act. He cannot let someone else do the job for him.
Now, there are occasions where you can push this a little bit. Arthur Conan Doyle, for instance, in his Sherlock Holmes stories, has Watson as the narrator, and Watson is not the one who solves the cases. But neither is Watson a passive observer. He participates. Read them and see what Doyle did and why it works.
Trying Again
Recently, I dug that old story about the boy, the priest, and the dragon, out of the dim recesses of my mental trunk. I kind of liked the story and thought I’d give it another try.
Again, I did not go back to the original, or even back to that abort darker attempt. I thought about it but decided not. Thus, all the character names are different now. And all the words, of course.
I also had some friends on Facebook, writers and readers of fantasy fiction, talk about how some tropes for non-humans in fantasy don’t really hold up and they should be different. A few of these caught my interest, and I incorporated them in the story.
Even so, after I’d written a few pages, I realized that I had a problem with the agency of the main character. This boy (who’s around fifteen) just watched as someone else fixed the problem.
This time, as a much more experienced writer, I kept writing, and kept thinking about the ending. And at last it came to me: I figured out how to give the boy agency in the ending (and even how not to make it too dark—there was a darker option, kind of a fridging thing, but I chose to avoid that.)
Those Pesky Sacred Words
Once I finished the novelette (just under 12,000 words), I went back through it, fixing, punching it up here, clarifying there: mostly easy stuff I learned from my editor.
But when I did that, I had this nagging feeling that the opening didn’t work.
Here is the original, sacred, opening few paragraphs that once written can never be changed:
A dust plume rose from the road leading up to the village of Bailiard, the ground trembled, and sunlight flashed off steel. An army! Men with swords, spears, and horses coming here to attack us!
I froze, standing on the escarpment over the valley, icy terror running through my belly. The bright sun and dry air illuminated marching men, confirming my fears. Bailiard had no walls and no soldiers. It would be a massacre!
What could I do?
My teacher and mentor, Maighstir Egan, was spending the day in meditation out in the woods. I’d come out to the meadows above the escarpment to look out over the valley and to see if I could find beautiful, dark-haired Wikolia tending her flocks, away from my parents and hers.
Instead, I’d found an invading army.
I turned and ran north and east, uphill into the woods. I had to find Maighstir Egan. He would know what to do, how to help the whole village escape and hide.
I mean this isn’t horrible. It accomplishes all the right things in terms of setting up the crisis. An invading army is a pretty good crisis, after all. It tells you who the main character is, and what the setting is.
I still didn’t like it.
The Fix is In
I looked at the opening paragraphs of this story and thought about them. I did other things for a few days. Then I went back and took my axe to them. Or maybe this time it was more scissors and paste (see, we’re going back to ancient of writing on paper again).
The truth is those words up there, aren’t sacred. And if they aren’t sacred, they can be changed.
Here, then, is the new opening:
I froze, standing on the escarpment over the valley, icy terror running through my belly. A dust plume rose from the road leading up to my home, the little village of Bailiard. The ground trembled, and sunlight flashed off steel. The bright sun illuminated marching men. An army! Men with swords, spears, and horses were coming here to attack us!
Bailiard had no walls and no soldiers. It would be a massacre!
What could I do?
My teacher and mentor, Maighstir Egan, always taught me to think first and act second. Of course, he was spending the day in meditation out in the woods. I’d come out to the meadows above the escarpment to look out over the valley and to see if I could find beautiful, dark-haired Wikolia tending her flocks, away from my parents and hers.
Instead, I’d found an invading army.
Maighstir Egan would know what to do. He would know how to help the whole village escape and hide. I turned and ran north and east, uphill into the woods. I had to find Maighstir Egan.
Better. Much better.
No doubt, you could do better still. But at some point, you have to say good enough and launch that puppy out into the world for people to read.
That’s another lesson, maybe for another day; your story will never be perfect. You still have to let it go. Give it your readers and let them decide how good or bad it is.
Murder Your Darlings
When Raymond Chandler said “Murder your darlings” what he meant was: your words, even if you love them, aren’t sacred. Get rid of the words that hinder your story. Use the words the make it sing instead, the words that make the reader never want to put it down.
Now, go write some sacred texts.