Hey, ho, let’s go!
Reading Assignment for this class: “The Tome” chapter from Teardrop Road
Writing Assignment for this class: The assignment from Class 5 is due today. Send it to jesseteller (at) yahoo (dot) com. Remember to rate and review your performance at the bottom of the assignment.
Digging a Grave
I’m not gonna admit that I’ve dug a grave. It’s a story I don’t wanna get into and I really have no idea about. But I did have a friend who was arrested for drunk driving and he ended up doing community service. They gave him a shovel and dropped him in a grave that had been dug by a backhoe. And he had to straighten out the corners and make the bottom flat. He did it for one day and then requested a different kind of community service. He just couldn’t finish out graves.
Revising a book is very similar. You have a big hole, but it’s not a grave. It’s just a hole. You have a rough draft. But there’s nothing about it that makes it a complete piece. The walls are not squared off and it’s not level on the bottom. And just like my friend didn’t want to get in that hole, I’ve never met a single writer who’s enjoyed the revision process. I don’t really know what revisions are like, so I can’t really describe it. I can just tell you the things that I’ve heard.
Revising Liefdom
I wrote a breathtaking masterpiece, an untarnished, pristine piece of white light of a book. And I figured, I had to go through some steps, cross my Ts, dot my Is. I knew a freelance editor who had connections, and so I sent my pristine piece of literature to her. And I prepared for the glory.
She got it to me three months late. (There’s that accountability thing we talked about before. Have we even talked about that before? I wanna say we have, but I’ve been bouncing back and forth in this curriculum to the point where I don’t know where we are anymore. I know where we are right now. I know the ground we are walking. But I’ve been weeks ahead of us, and I’ve seen the land there. And it is real, emotional, and fantasy. I have been through the battlefield of critiques. I saw what you did to each other. I walked that bloody battlefield, knee deep in mud and howling for the writers you will one day be. And I’ve seen the end. I know what you will take from this class.) And if red ink was blood, then my pristine book, when I finally got it back, was a slab of raw meat. But we’re talking about a diamond of literature. We’re talking about my first book. You hold it up to the sky, twist it slightly, and see multi-colored… does anybody believe me?
So I went through a number of things. The job of cleaning it seemed daunting. I was tired of the story, and I needed a break from the story. And I doubted everything. When I tell you that she ripped this thing to pieces and left it in bloody fibers, I’m telling you, when I got Liefdom back, it was a nightmare. I’ve never seen anything like it.
The doubt settled in. I had to start asking myself whether this was something I really wanted to do or not. Bekah had told Shade that he had to do something. She hadn’t told him he had to write. We had just dropped $3,200 on an edit. I didn’t know what to do.
Logan and KK, I was on Logan Street in Milwaukee, WI, not far from where I lived, and I was at the red light for the cross street Kinnickinnic, which locals call KK. And it hit me like a bolt. I’ll tell you about it now and I’ll try not to cry. I remember the dog that was walking past the car and the guy who was walking him. I remember everything about the car that was stopped in front of me. This moment is frozen in time. It was one of the most important moments of my entire life. And I realized I was a bad writer.
Now, everything I had heard up to that point told me otherwise. But this was not pity. It was a crystal moment of clarification. My talent and the knowledge I had acquired thus far, made me better than 80% of the population of the world. Raise your hand if you want to read that book. Do you want to read a book written by the lower 80%? A book you know is kind of good but not great?
I realized nobody owed me anything. No writers owed me anything. And I was not going to be given anything. I said out loud, but kind of in a hushed whisper, kind of a tone of awe. I just said, “I’m a bad writer.” My wife is in the passenger’s seat. She hears this. She freaks out. She turns to me, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no” and I looked at her and said, “I’m a great storyteller but I’m a bad writer. This is good. I can work with this. I’ve just gotta teach myself how to do this job.” I looked at her and I said, “I don’t want to do the revisions for Liefdom. I want to start something new.”
And that’s how it began. I started teaching myself how to do this job. There’d been no real instructions given to me. I’d had two semesters of college, I’d gone to a workshop, I’d attended lectures, but I didn’t have much practical experience. So the idea was just to write one book after the next, put them in a closet for another day, and start the next one.
After I had written seven books, four of them 800 pages or longer, I decided that I knew how to write a book. I’d figured it out. So, I went back to Liefdom and I read it all. Rinsed off the blood. I read a chapter, opened a blank document in Word, and wrote that chapter again from blank document.
Every writer creates their own method of revising a book. So I’m not gonna sit here and tell you how to do the job, word for word, piece by piece. Flint and steel. Iron rock. There’s a bow. A friend once used a pint of oil and a match. If you take a fistful of toilet paper and you put it under tiny twigs and above those twigs are bigger twigs and above those twigs are logs, some don’t need toilet paper at all, that’s ridiculous. All they need is the rubbing of a stick on a stick.
If you were to talk to the right person, and they knew what you were asking, you would have twenty different ways to start a fire. Twenty different ways to start a fire. Twenty. You ask the right survivalist, and they’ll tell you that if you melt a handful of snow in your hand until you create a prism of ice, you can start a fire. Ice to flame. Any survivalist can tell you twenty ways to start a fire. I know a guy. They’re proud of themselves, and they should be. But when it comes to revising a story, hundreds. If you start a fire in a pond, it is a great lake where you revise a story. There are so many different ways. Talk to any writer. I’ve got writer friends. I’ve got so many of them, and I could have them all walk through our class. If I took a sledgehammer to that wall, and I took a sledgehammer to that wall, a long line of them could come through and they could stop, stand right here, and one by one tell you how they revise a book. They are, all of them, correct.
Don’t listen to any of them. They’re all Pharisees staring at the Cross. They’re all liars with serpentine tongues, because none of them can tell you how to revise a novel, a short story.
There is in you a specific and unique way that your piece is revised. Don’t listen to the heretics coming through these shattered out walls. In the distance I want you to hear them burning at the heretic stake. Every one of you finds what’s true in you to revise a piece. I can’t help you, and nobody else can. I’ve written 37 books. I’m working on number 38. There’s a dwarf, and a purple antelope like thing. The god of light, and the goddess of nature, and it’s a mess. I can’t tell you how to revise a book the way I can’t tell you what you see in the dark of night when your apartment is gloom. You’re disappointed with yourself or your critiqued draft. You’ve got your palms planted on the bathroom sink and you’re staring yourself in the eye. I can’t tell you. I can’t tell you what you see in that gaze. And I swear to you, I don’t want to know.
I can tell you what I do. My structure, my scaffolding. I build a scaffolding around my masterpiece of a building and just as the march of authors that have come through the broken walls behind me, I find my own way to build the structure of the story. I will tell you how I do it.
I read all the way through the entire book, making no changes whatsoever. This shows me:
(1) inconsistencies,
(2) confusing things I didn’t explain enough,
(3) tangents I got caught on,
(4) visuals I spent too much time describing,
(5) redundancies in conversation,
(6) times I got lost in the setting,
(7) and the big one, if I’m reading for a revision and I read an extremely powerful, emotional scene, and I feel nothing, then that whole scene needs to be rewritten, because I’m all about emotional impact.
I read the whole thing and I don’t take any notes. I’m not good at taking notes. My notes never make sense to me when I come back to them. It’s the DID.
I go to the document, I do a spellcheck on it, get it as clean as can be.
Then I read through and make the changes to 30 pages, and the next day I do the next 30 pages.
Next it goes through three edits.
My wife looks at it, an editor trained in technical knowledge. She makes corrections, asks for clarifications.
I’ve got a professional editor I send all my work to. He reads through it for everything, grammar, the “he nods” and the “gritted teeth” and then he gives it back to me. I make his changes.
I find myself typing “he nods” and “he grit his teeth” “she grit her teeth” “she nods”. I type these when I’m writing my rough draft as little spurts of propellant. If you look at any man-made object moving in space, you might see the expulsion of a bit of propellant that changes the course of the object. That’s he nods and she grits her teeth. I’ll be typing for 1,000 words, 2,000 words, 1,200 words. I’m in a groove, I’m fighting and I’m moving and I’m slashing. I’m making it happen. The words are moving on the page. And I come to a pause. If I stay too long in this pause, I’m in a quagmire. A patch of mud, I’m trying to walk through up to my waist and sinking. So I write “he gritted his teeth” “she nodded”. It’s a bit of a spray of propellant in space. It’s just enough to spark the next part.
You run through my rough drafts, so many people are gritting their teeth nobody has teeth left by the end of the book. They’re all in shards. There’s been so much head nodding that you would think this was a Metallica song, maybe Megadeath, depends on your politics.
What I’m saying is, there will come a time if you write enough content, if you create enough art, there will come a time when all you need is a bit of a spurt, a little bit of a head nod. Right now, you guys have me thinking of “Sweating Bullets” by Megadeth. Mercifully, the guy who wrote this lecture up to now was not going to show it to you. Unfortunately, Prince is gone and he’s looking at his wife and you’re dealing with Shadow now. And Shadow really wants to watch this video. So, it’s the great headbangers of the ’80s. It was a natural impulse for us. You don’t understand. It was a natural impulse for us, and maybe it will be for you too. I’m gonna play “Sweating Bullets” while Prince isn’t looking. He’s not paying attention. He was thinking about his wife. We only have a few minutes here. I’m gonna write this down in the curriculum so he cannot pull it out. So, here we go, Shadow’s addition.
Let’s make sense of it. Just like in the 80s, when we were listening to our music, and our head involuntarily nodded, while Adam writes, he has little spurts of energy. He’ll throw in a “he nods” “she nods” “he grits his teeth” “she grits her teeth” (my wife just had to tell me to hold on because I was talking too fast while I was dictating). This is what it’s from. It’s from heavy metal. My characters nod their head and they grit their teeth because I was a product of 1980s heavy metal. You are a product of something completely different. When I am slowing down and my creativity is lowering, I say to my character, you have just grit your teeth, you have just nodded your head. And because of heavy metal, I am inspired to move on. You thought you were going to get away with not watching Megadeth today. You’re wrong. Here’s “Sweating Bullets” it’s my favorite Megadeth song. Try to guess why.
I never should’ve let the beauty of my wife distract me. I was looking at her and Shadow was talking. I should’ve been paying attention. I have regrets but he makes a good point. You’re gonna need a spurt as your man-made object moves through space. You’re gonna need a head nod or a gritted teeth in your rough draft. We’re not talking about rough drafts anymore. So now I’m telling you to go rip out all of those teeth and cut off that head, because we’re in the revisions now. And things are going to get bloody.
(If this comes up in a test and you call Megadeth nonsense, then I’m coming for you.) But there are head nods, there’s gritted teeth. You’re going to find, if you write enough and you write long enough, that there are certain cues that spark inspiration. With me, if I reach a point in the story where I’m starting to slow down, someone nods their head and that object out in space is propelled forward. If I don’t nod a head, the teeth grit.
I tried to have this conversation with a writer a few days ago. She unfriended me, she didn’t block me. And her answer was, this is what the author does, when talking about what she had described. I’m not friends with her anymore. That happens to me. But she didn’t understand what I was trying to say, because very few people do, and I want you to. Every now and then, when you’re in the thick, and you have a machete, and you’re chopping your way through the story, you’re going to need a sip of a canteen. For me, that sip is he nods, she gritted her teeth. She gritted her teeth, he nods.
In your second draft, slice all of that away, cut and chop. He doesn’t need to grit his teeth. That was for you. She doesn’t need to nod her head. That was your spark. Recognize yours. And slice all of that away, and be glad it was there for you when you needed it. Find an editor who recognizes what you are doing who can delete all of those. Those head nods and those gritted teeth are not for the reader. Those are for you. Because I am, as I write, riding a steel horse. Find your steel horse. It can’t be made of flesh, it can’t be made of bone. Flesh and bone is what we give to the reader. Your steel horse is only for you. No march through shattered walls of experienced writers headed for the burning stake can help you.
After all of this has been done, and my professional editor has cleaned up all my nods and shattered teeth, my wife goes through a consistency edit, counting to make sure the right number of troops have been given to the right army. She’s got a spreadsheet of characters, what they look like, what weapons they fight with, hair and eye color. She comes back and the book is done.
That’s my personal revision process. Yours is going to be different. Maybe you’re like Nalo Hopkinson and you print out your pages and take four different color highlighters through the book, highlighting sensory descriptions. Green is a smell. Yellow highlighter is a touch. Maybe that’s you. Maybe you’re Stephen King and your aim is to cut out 15% of what’s already there. I usually end up adding between 15-20%. Everybody has their own. My advice is to get started, find out what works for you. But I will give you this: don’t cut until you know the meat.
Know the Meat
There was this wealthy woman from my past, perfect picture of the elegant woman, but she grew up country. She grew up hunting deer. Her dad had a garage. He hung everybody’s deer up and carved them all. And he taught her how to do it. She could take a knife and a dead deer, cut it all into pieces, and you think that’s easy but it’s not. You have to take certain meat and you can’t mix this kind of muscle with this kind of muscle, or you get a twisted mess.
The job of a butcher is to know the creases in each set of muscles that provide the best cut of meat. Well, this beautiful, elegant, classy woman described what it was like to run her hand through a piece of muscle and with a boning knife, a carving knife, take that muscle off. She developed her own way of doing it, and she got 10% more meat off the deer she butchered than her dad was able to. He was so proud of her. There was something in the way she described it. She held her hand up. And you could see in her eyes as she was telling me about this piece of her history, that she was seeing raw meat, and there was blood on her hand. On her other hand, the fingers were curled in a very unique way, with her pinky finger doing something I’d never seen it do before and I realized that was the simple and unique way she held her boning knife when she worked on butchering a deer.
First of all, know the meat. Every fiber and every joint. Read your entire book as many times as you need to. Don’t start cutting into a revision until you know exactly what you’re looking at. And as I said before, everybody’s gonna be different. So try to figure out how your fingers would curl as you hold your knife, because you won’t hold your knife the same way I do.
I told you of my scaffolding of the great building I am constructing, you’re not welcome. With palms planted on the sink, you stared into your own eyes. I do not want to know what you found there. Your rough draft is a horse you have built out of steel. It has to be flesh by the time it reaches a reader, because that reader wants a snort, a stomp of the hoof, a jerk of the head. That reader wants to know that horse is alive. That reader wants to ride away into whatever they are facing. I have a video I want to show you now. Every one of you has heard this song, or at least that’s my guess. I want you to hear this song now as a writer revising their work, turning their steel horse into something of flesh and bone, that a reader can ride away on. Because that is what they want. Think of Battle Cry. Think of my friend the nurse and the life she saved. We are talking about death and life.
Wanted Dead or Alive
This video has every emotion that you’re gonna go through as you carve, as you add, as you subtract, as you wait for your editors and your readers and your reviewers. If you watch this video, you’ll understand the entire revision process. By the end of this class period, you’ll be ready to get on your steel horse and ride.
“I’ve seen a million faces, and I’ve rocked them all.”
I have written 6.1 million words. I can’t tell you how many characters I’ve created. That number is lost to me. R.A. Salvatore spent his entire career focusing on the character Drizzt Do’Urden of the Do’Urden family. The Do’Urden family is the ninth most powerful house in the city of Menzoberranzan. Did you know that Menzoberranzan has one great pillar and the most powerful male wizard casts a fireball spell on the, come on, really? R.A. Salvatore built his entire career on a single character. He is so much more popular than me. He is so much wealthier than me. None of that matters. All that matters is the characters. You’re not there yet, but you’re gonna realize that all that matters is the characters. Aaron the Marked and his nurse. Sob and her pain. Peter Redfist and his perfection. Jordai Stonefist, the advisor. All that matters is the character. The relationship you have with the character, and the bits and the slices that you make, the elegant hand covered in blood that brings the character to your reader.
I’m running out of time. I only have a few moments left. I have to teach you how to make a steel horse into a breathing, snorting, kicking creature. Do you know if you walk behind a horse in the wrong way, you’ll get kicked? If you walk behind a horse in the wrong direction, you’ll get kicked. Steel shoe to the chest, the throat, the face. Revision is the same way. If you do it wrong, your reader is going to walk behind your story in the wrong way. And they’re going to get kicked. They’ll get kicked whether you have shown them a steel horse or a snorting horse of flesh. When they walk back there, the politics won’t matter, and they won’t be sweating bullets. All that will matter is that as they walk behind your story, they will need it. It will be death and life. Your story is wanted. Dead or alive.
When you’re done with the revision, do something for yourself, something fun, something life-affirming. I hang out with my wife and I have a drink. And we talk about how awesome I am. She can sit through my bragging. She’s my soulmate, she adds. She adds ways that I’m a badass that I hadn’t considered. This is what you’re headed into.
Don’t aim for perfection, aim for your perfection. A woman I respect more than any other editor or literature teacher I’ve ever met told me that when it comes to editing and revision, there is no perfect document. This is not the kind of woman who gets mystical and magical and starts talking about genius and exactly how things are done. But she said, “Your comma’s always gonna be out of place for a particular reader. They’re always gonna think there should be an and where there isn’t.” I thought about her words a lot. I thought a lot about what she was saying to me. And what I figured out is that there is no perfection. There’s only expression. And when I’m done with my book, it had better express exactly what I want it to express and nothing more. I don’t know how many revisions you’re going to have to go through to get that.
We’re gonna talk about commas later, but that comma better put the pause exactly how you want it. Because first comes the reviewers, then the mass audience. But in the end, I have this theory about writers. You can apply it to any other occupation you want. Death, judgment by whatever entity you believe in, or none. But I think before a writer gets to his afterlife or her afterlife, they have to read everything they’ve written. And they had better not be sweating bullets. They had better be riding off into the distance on a horse that used to be steel. They have to be content with everything they’ve done. Or for the rest of their afterlife it’ll gnaw at them. So when it comes to revision, revise for your afterlife. And hold your knife just so.
Writing Assignment
Four pages about what you don’t like about your piece. Only me and The Grad Student will read it, no one else will ever know. Four pages on what you don’t like or hate. Due four classes from now.
Reading Assignment
Reading assignment for next class: “The Beginning of My Life” and “Family” chapters from Teardrop Road
Seeds of Tarako will have to be read by Class 17.
—Prince
Jesse Teller 
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