You can't edit a blank screen

Writing your novel is the hard part, right?

Uh, no.

Let's not confuse 'hard' and 'work'. Writing a novel requires a lot of work. A LOT. Endless hours by yourself in front of some sort of writing device, delving into your mind and shaping characters who will never live unless you give them life. Thus do many writers have a God complex. 

Not me, of course, just everybody else.

Fiction writers know the act of creation, although by no means easy, has the redeeming effect of being invigorating and rewarding. After all, how many people have ever finished writing a novel? In terms of sheer numbers, more than you might think, but as a percentage of the population, very few. This is why so many non-writers stand in silent awe of those who start and finish a novel, it is something they could never imagine doing. If you conjured a unicorn they would be no less impressed...okay, maybe the unicorn thing would trump writing a book, but not by as much as you think. And, they believe, if they ever could find a way to write an entire book, once finished the hard part would be done.

Au contraire.

Editing is far harder than writing. See, most people write their first draft just to get the story down in some form or fashion. It doesn't really matter if the grammar is proper or words are misspelled or any of that stuff. Think about it, when you tell a story, do you use words like 'was' or 'were', or say things like "she miraculously survived a potentially bad situation." I do. I think everybody does. And when you're writing your story you can do it, too.

It's AFTER you've written your book those things become mortal sins. Passive voice, adverbs, too many adjectives, there are as many rules for writing as there are writers. And the time to worry about that stuff is in the editing process, which comes after you're done writing a first draft. That's when you can boil down your job as a writer to three words: edit, revise, repeat. Edit, revise, repeat. You do that, over and over and over again, for as many times as you can stand doing it.

How do you know when you're finished? When the thought of doing it again sends you to the bathroom with a feeling of getting sick.

No more No's!

I didn't make it to 200, folks.

Truth is, I really only made it to about 5 before a wonderful publisher made me an offer. They were exceedingly patient, and I am forever grateful for that patience. Maybe we can work together one day, but there were three issues on which we could not agree. This happens in business, even when both parties want it otherwise.

I did make it to 57 No's before that thing happened which all writers sweat and pray for: an offer from a great publisher with the terms you need to conclude an agreement. In my mind, we were a match from the word go.

Yep, I am now a signed author with Dingbat Publishing, who also publishes that tornado of energy, Gunnar Grey. Standing The Final Watch  is scheduled for release on July 18th and I am damned proud. It's like waiting for a child to be born.

There's about 20 people to thank in my journey, actually more, but first I want to give a shoutout to #pit2pub , the twitter event that brought this about. If you don't think twitter pitch events work, you're wrong. From that event I got requests for 3 fulls and a partial, and Dingbat was one of them. The lesson here, for me and everyone else, is that Twitter Events Work!

That's not to say other methods don't work as well or better, but I know a lot of my friends get frustrated with the lack of results. All I can counsel is patience, because it worked for me and it can work for you, too.

July 18th is like my new birthday! Bring on the cake! 

To 'was' or not to 'was', that is the question.

Should you avoid using the verb 'to be' in your fiction?

Rules for writing...how many can there possibly be? You want to appear as professional as possible for that agent or editor who is going to be looking for any reason to toss your hard-written manuscript on the trash heap, so you keep every rule that you've ever heard or been taught in mind as you write. And if you're an aspiring novelist, you've at least heard some of them and gotten bogged down trying to follow them as you work.

Show, don't tell.
Don't change Point of View (POV).
Never, ever, ever...ever, use adverbs. They are Satanic and will doom your soul to the fires of eternal damnation. No less an icon than Stephen King says so, and he should know.

But as bad as those may be, and if you stick around long enough you'll have it drilled into your skull that all adverbs are BAD, there is one thing you must never do. It's even worse than using an adverb. If an adverb creeps into your work, Satan himself might notice. Using Passive Voice, however, guarantees that not only will he notice, he will have God's permission to do terrible things to you.

Like filling your inbox with countless rejection emails, because agents and editors hate passive voice more than anything else. And the most common form this mortal sin takes is the use of the verb 'to be', in all of its conjugations. Am, are, were, was...these will absolutely, 100% assure that an agent or editor will see your manuscript as that of an amateur, thereby making it rejection bait, and gleefully cackle as they hit 'delete' on your query.

You've heard this, right? If you're a serious writer, you've had it happen to you.

But is it true? Does this rule actually apply to anybody, or is it an initiation prank they play on new writers? Because a cursory glance at some favorite authors during a trip to the local bookstore yesterday makes me wonder.

'Was' is usually the word that brings editors and agents swooping down on your manuscript like hungry raptors pouncing on the hapless writer. So I took a quick survey to see if this holds true in real life. Let me clue you in to the results ahead of time: it does not.

Keep in mind, these are mostly authors I read, enjoy and follow. In short, I want them to be great. I am NOT criticizing them, I want to read these books. More to the point, all of these people get paid serious cash for their work.

In his new book, Make Me, Lee Child's first sentence is 'Moving a guy as big as Keever wasn't easy."
Michael Connelly's 4th word in The Crossing is 'were'.
Mark Greaney uses 'was' on the first page of Back Blast.
Jeffrey Deaver and Ace Atkins both use 'was' on the first page of recent novels.
In Sacred Time, Ursula Hegi uses 'was' in the first sentence, as Cynthia Harrod Eagles does in Hard Going.
Lois McMaster Bujold starts The Sharing Knife with "Dag was riding."
Michael Parker began All I Have In This World writing "The town was small."
The first 'was' shows up in sentence two of John Ringo's Emerald Sea and in sentence three of Simon Brett's The Strangling On The Stage.
Joe R. Lansdale kicks off Devil Red with "We were parked."
Harlan Coben puts it in the first paragraph of Fool Me Once with "...she wasn't listening."
The second sentence of James W. Huston's The Blood Flag is "There was no moon."
And finally, Harper Lee uses 'was' on the first page of Go Set A Watchman.

Does this mean that all of the editors involved in these books, and all of the agents selling them and all of the publishing houses spending all of that money to print them, do so to promote inferior works? No, of course not.

Clearly, sometimes using 'to be' or one of its forms is fine. However, the point of this quick survey seems to indicate that 'was' might be okay for some writers, but not for others. Can this be true? And if it is, is it because they're bestsellers? I can't believe that, because wouldn't their books get more attention? Are big bucks authors allowed to be sloppy or lazy? I don't think so, even if they were so inclined, which I also doubt.

So what's the point? I'm not sure, really, but certainly I'm going to be a little kinder to my first drafts in the future. If 'was' shows up, not shooting the computer screen anymore seems like a good start.

Now, about those adverbs...