by Boyd Morrison

I’m averse to making mistakes, which probably stems from my educational background. I’m an engineer by training. In that profession, errors can have devastating consequences. Miscalculate the thickness of concrete walls, and a billion-dollar oil rig sinks (Sleipner A platform). Change the design of a single bolt, and a crowded walkway collapses (Kansas City Hyatt). Underestimate the effect of cold weather on a simple rubber O-ring, and a space shuttle explodes (Challenger).

So I’ve been conditioned to avoid mistakes at all costs. The problem is that I’m no longer an engineer. I’m now in the creative fields of writing and acting. In my new professions, mistakes are just fine. No one dies. Nothing is destroyed. In fact, mistakes are encouraged. That’s how you improve.

In writing, trying to eliminate mistakes is the mistake. Yes, there are objective errors that you want to avoid in a novel. Don’t put a safety on a Glock pistol. Don’t make your continuity and timelines inconsistent. Don’t change the name of a character halfway through. These are indisputable mistakes, and yet I have seen them all in novels. Bestselling novels.

In one of my own books, THE ARK, I explained that the elevators of a slowing airplane lowered to maintain altitude. Of course, this is incorrect. The elevators should go up to pitch the aircraft up. I’ve flown planes myself. I have a degree in mechanical engineering during which I studied fluid dynamics. I know that it was wrong, and I still made the mistake. No one—including my brother, who is a former Air Force pilot—caught the error until the book was in stores. No one died, and only one reader has ever brought it up (in fact, it’s the only reason I know the mistake happened). However, the error still bugs me.

What’s more insidious for a writer is the avoidance of subjective mistakes. We want to get everything right in a story: characters, plot, twists, literary merit, creativity, emotional resonance. We want the story to be perfect, and impatient people like me want it to be perfect from the moment we start typing it.

But it never is. It can’t be. Ever. I bet you’d only be able to come up with a tiny list of  stories that didn’t have a single thing you’d change. And even then, go look at the Amazon reviews for those books. You’ll find at least a few people (and sometimes hundreds of them) who don’t agree with your definition of perfection.

Voltaire is considered the originator of the phrase, “Perfect is the enemy of good.” We’re afraid that if our story isn’t perfect, it won’t be good enough. The idea for a novel that we have in our minds never comes out on the page like we imagine. Sometimes we can’t write at all because we’ll be disappointed that it won’t come out perfectly formed on the first try.

What we have to come to terms with is that making mistakes is part of the process. That’s how we learn. That’s how we make art. My wife, who is sometimes frustrated when I delay delivering pages to her to edit, gave me a T-shirt for Christmas that says, “Even if it’s crap, just get it on the page.” That notion can be freeing if you take it to heart. You can’t make it better if it doesn’t exist in the first place.

I’m getting more comfortable with making mistakes, but it’s a daily struggle. The lesson slowly worming its way into my head is that to fixate on creating the perfect novel results in creating nothing. So I’m learning to focus on the right thing: getting a story out that reflects my voice, where even the flaws and imperfections are unique to me.

By Mark Alpert

It was a terrible week in the news — the bombs in Boston, the explosion in Texas, the failure of the background-check bill — so it was a great relief to plunge into fiction. And fiction-wise, it was a wonderful week for me, because I completed the first draft of my next novel. My daily word count always rises to extraordinary (at least for me) levels when I’m nearing the end, partly because I get caught up in the climax of the book and partly because I just want to finish the darn thing. I love writing 2,000 words a day, but it also makes me feel bad about how little I write at other times. I say to myself, “Why can’t you write this much all the time? Then you could knock off a novel in two months and spend the rest of the year on your tennis game.”

But it didn’t. At this point I have no idea whether the book is any good, but at least it hangs together. Now I have to wait to hear from my editor. He already read the beginning of the book, and he liked it, but I don’t know how he’ll feel about the end. I’m not even sure how I feel about it. I’m too close to the thing. But I’m cautiously optimistic. The reason for my optimism: bullet ants. The ending has a scene featuring bullet ants. You see, I just broke my rule about never revealing details of a novel-in-progress, but I couldn’t help it. Bullet ants are fascinating creatures.

by Boyd Morrison

We’re readers and writers. We love words. We love their musicality and rhythm, their evocation of achingly beautiful images and thoughts, and their ability to convey us to fantastic worlds and tell exhilarating stories. But what if our love of words transmogrifies into an unhealthy obsession with one word in particular, stalking it like a psychotic spurned by a paramour to the point that it wants to take out a restraining order against us?

I speak from my own sordid experience. I recently received the copyedits back on my latest novel. Overall, the changes were minimal, except for one specific piece of feedback: the copyeditor remarked on my absolute adoration of the word “just.” I thought perhaps she was exaggerating until I did a search for it. In my 93,000-word novel, I had used “just” 232 times.

Some words must be used over and over. There is no substitute for “the,” and any replacement for “said” has to be used judiciously and infrequently unless you’re writing a Hardy Boys mystery. But while “just” has many proper applications, I had employed it primarily to amp up the suspense. Someone had “just a minute” until the bomb went off. Or a person ducked behind a statue “just as bullets slammed into the wall around her.” As I re-read the copyedits, it became comical to see how often “just” appeared, sometimes three or four to a page.

I’m grateful that my copyeditor called them out. A reader who encountered all of them might come to wonder if I had any other way to build the tension in a scene. “Just” still had its place in the novel, but I got rid of half the occurrences.

Repeated use of a word can be distracting and take the reader out of the story, especially if the repetition occurs in close proximity. In a single paragraph of the novel during a fight scene, I used “bashed” twice. I replaced one of them with “kicked.” The online thesaurus gets a lot of use during the editing phase.

Unusual words only have to appear two or three times in a novel to seem overused. In another novel I realized I had used the word “pristine” seven times. My theory is that as I was writing the manuscript over the course of months, I would get to a place where I needed a word to mean “spotless” and thought to myself, “You know what word I haven’t used yet? Pristine.” In another month of writing, I’d forget that I’d used “pristine” and have the same thought all over again. After copyediting, I ended up keeping only one “pristine.”

I don’t think I have a way to turn off my need for repetition. It seems to occur no matter how consciously I try to avoid it. That’s why having an independent editorial eye is so important. I suppose I use similar unusual words and turns of phrases from novel to novel, but no editor that I’ve worked with goes through every book in a writer’s oeuvre to make sure that doesn’t happen. I’m happy enough to minimize them in a single novel.

I’d love to hear from other writers what words you’ve fallen in love with in your own manuscripts. Just try me.

By Mark Alpert