Month: November 2014

Inverted Wordsmithy

Pavowski12 Comments

Editing a novel is not what you think it will be. At least, it hasn’t been what I thought it would be.

I’m about two months deep in the first edit of my draft, and the process has been instructive. Too tentative to wade in with a blowtorch and sledgehammer, I re-read the whole thing slowly, making notes and fixing window dressings, delaying the moment when I’d have to start gutting the structure of the thing, but that time is here, now. I’m about a week deep, and I’m learning some things.

These things are by no means exhaustive, nor do I claim they’re universal–they’re simply some things which have occurred to me throughout the process.

  1. Rewriting is like writing, inverted. Drafting the first draft was a linear task. 1200 words a day, which I could crank out in an hour or so most days. Make the quota and feel super-duper about myself for the rest of the day. Miss the quota and feel like a schlub until I could scramble another twenty minutes later in the day, or crank out more wordcount the next day. But rewriting is an entirely different animal. It’s not just a scramble to get more words down on the page. It’s a scramble to cut out the dead wood. To quote Arachnophobia, “cut out dead wood. Put in good wood.” But that’s a tricky thing to measure. “Okay, I drafted three hundred new words today, but do I include the two hundred I cut out? Or the two thousand I had to re-parse to make sure it still made sense? Or the hour I spent kicking the idea around in my head before I decided to try it in the first place?” I know I’ve spent similar amounts of time on the work as I did in the draft, but the yardstick is out the window.
  2. A bull in a china shop, blindfolded, and on speed. I’ve no idea if the changes I’m making are good ones. When I drafted this thing the first time around I felt more or less confident that the ideas and the progression of the novel were generally sound. Now the jungle has grown thick around me, my map has been swallowed by the raging river, and the slitherers in the night are closing in. Every change I make is a flail toward what I think is the way out, but I have no way of knowing if I’m heading toward the light or further into the depths. The best I can do is trust to my instincts, which have in no way proved that they are trustworthy yet. It’s harrowing.
  3. Motivation is scarce as desert rain. Again, contrast with the draft is the only thing that makes sense. The draft developed a momentum of its own. I wanted to work on it every day. Some days the 1200 word quota passed so quickly I felt like I was selling myself short to write so little. In the edit, I almost feel–dread is the wrong word–certainly an aversion to working on the story. I still want to work on it, but I’m hesitant to begin every day. Partially it’s a feeling of lost-ness, of not knowing where to begin or where to turn next, partially it’s a fear that I’m going to break the damn thing like a priceless Ming dynasty vase and never be able to put it right again. One way or another, I struggle to start, and the starting is the hardest part.
  4. Doubt, doubt, doubt. The draft was riddled with doubt, make no mistake. “Is the story any good, does this character make sense, is this plotline as convoluted as it feels?” Now, as I make changes, the same doubts rear their heads: “is the new story any good, does this action by the character make better sense, have I de-convoluted that plotline any?” But the new doubts don’t replace the old. They move in, cohabitate, and start multiplying like rabbits, giving rise to entirely new doubts: “should I have made that change? Is the new story or the old more reader-friendly? Do you have any idea what you’re doing?” Perhaps if there was a way to monetize doubt, this could all OMG BRB I HAVE TO WRITE THAT DOWN AS AN IDEA FOR A BOOK.
  5. Inspiration from unexpected places. All the gripes aside, I do seem to see the story in a new way every day. Just today, for example, I was absolutely stonewalled and had no idea how to fix a problem in the second act. In a panic I penned a hasty cry for help to a friend, but no sooner had I written the problem out than my brain saw the component parts of the problem, rearranged them with some strange mental geometry, and synthesized a perfectly sensible and perhaps even obvious solution. Said solution even strengthens the story and deepens the development of a character who sorely needs developing. Sometimes you eat the b’ar, as they say.

I think that’s enough commentary on the edit for now. I’ve certainly done a lot of that lately, but in my defense, the edit is looming rather large in my viewfinders. But I’ve got a week off from work coming up, so hopefully I’ll get the chance to mentally clear the pipes a bit and get some good work done on it.

In the meantime, for my next entry, I think I’ll go back to a topic guaranteed to simultaneously gain AND lose readers for the blarg here: toddler bodily fluids. Fun fact: one of the most viewed, and the most-searched topics that lands new people at the blarg, is this post about giving my son an enema. Which goes to show, I guess, that my novel needs more poop jokes.

This post is part of SoCS.

Minor Adjustments, Major Damage

Pavowski2 Comments

There you are, elbows deep in the carcass of your precious draft, its viscera laid bare before you, your sterile gown smeared with its blood. You look over at the monitors and see the dancing line that is its pulse, hear the slow rhythm of its feeble heartbeat. It’s faint but fierce, clinging to life the way living things do.

It’s laying on your table because it needs help. You’ve sliced it open to see how its insides are arranged and to try to put them back into some semblance of order, but with that first cut all the slimy bits came pouring out like so much spaghetti from an overturned pot, and you have no idea how all this was ever contained in that tiny vessel, nor do you have any idea how you will ever put it back together again. Add to that the fact that you’ve got a few prosthetics waiting to be implanted as well, and the entire ordeal seems about as likely and possible as stuffing a camel wholesale into a shoebox.

So you poke and you prod, and you begin the tedious task of testing what happens when you tug on this muscle, when you nudge that bone, when you tickle this mass of nerves, and watch as the whole organism jumps and dances, demonstrating with shocking clarity all the connections you never saw between this character and that plotline, this complication with that resolution, this joke in the first act with that death in the third. This isn’t just hipbone-connected-to-the-legbone stuff. This is every-blood-vessel-feeds-every-organ-in-the-body. Change one character’s reaction to a simple greeting in the first few pages and the story can end in a completely different place. As intricate and well-formed as the web of story elements may be, it’s imperfect. It needs to be fixed.

You sever a vein here, trim back some muscle there to make room for the new element you have to introduce, and the patient starts hemorrhaging. You get the sense that you’ve ruined everything with one little cut, and blood is rushing to the wound and you can’t see what you’re doing and the only way out is to keep cutting, keep sponging, keep tearing, until the hole is big enough and you can cram the prosthetic in there and begin the bizarre work of reattaching the existent tissue to the alien device, and you’re thinking to yourself, this will never work. It doesn’t fit, it isn’t right, this is a disaster. I’ve killed my story.

But then something strange happens. Through the haze of inkblood and wordgore, you see a sign of healing. The native tissue is accepting the new organ, the capillaries slowly starting to feed it rather than strangle it. The tissue is mending itself, almost of its own volition, as you stitch the narrative flesh back together. As much as you want to save the story, the story wants to survive. The characters adjust the way they react and behave, the plotlines snake and coil into new, more correct pathways, and while the task at hand by no means looks easy, it suddenly looks like it just might be possible. You work and you sweat and you call an intern over to wipe your brow (okay, I have interns in this scenario) and you work some more, suturing and clamping and staunching and stitching, and in what feels like minutes, hours have passed and the patient is stable and has a brand new leg right next to the other three (hey, nobody said I was building a human-normative story here) and if you look at it from the right angle, it might actually be better than the original after all. You close the patient up and he’s stable for the time being and you scrub down and you feel like maybe you’ve done some good for your story despite all your doubts, and then you remember that this is only the first in a six-week regiment of reconstructive surgeries before this patient is cleared to stumble, blinking, into the light of day.

And that prospect is terrifying.

But you’ve survived one day of rewrites, which somehow tells you you can survive another day.

Man. Day one of the serious rewrites is in the bag, and I am exhausted. But I hope — no, I think — that the story is one day better.

 

Baby Steps Don’t Fargo Up My Feet

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I think there’s little as frustrating to somebody who’s been productive as the inability to produce at the level you know you’re capable of.

Okay, that’s vague as anything. Specifically, I’m talking about running. If you follow, you may know that this has been a year plagued with injury for me. First one foot, then the other; the soles, then the ankles, then the heels, until I start to wonder if I’m not so much doing damage to myself as my body has simply passed its sell-by date and is withering and falling apart like a bunch of rotted grapes.

But I’ve been to the doctor, and the doctor said to give running a try again, so run I did. And I’ve gone on two runs now, my first in a month (which honestly felt like an entire season, given all the crazies I was stirring during that month). And they’ve been okay. There’s tightness and there’s uncertainty, but no pain. Such an astounding lack of pain, in fact, that I’m having all the delusions of grandeur that accompany a return to form: “maybe it’s not so bad. I can do another mile!” or “this isn’t so bad. I can go faster!” And while I almost certainly could do those things, that would almost certainly be the most direct route back to injury.

So I am tempering the glee that comes with being able to run without crippling pain by forcing myself to take it slow, listen to my feet, and make sure that I don’t rush myself right back into the podiatrist’s office again.  But taking it slow is an agony. My body chemistry has changed over the last three years, to the point where the run satisfies something like hunger in my brain, and like an alcoholic feeling the pull of a perfectly mixed gin and tonic, I’ve got the scent of these last couple of runs in my bones. The chill bite of the fall air in my lungs, the regular tap of my feet on the pavement, the ebbing drone in my mind as my focus slips away and I embrace the calm.

My wife and I are signed up for a race in a week and a half, and I may actually be able to run at least a portion of it with her. We’ve signed up for another in January. I won’t be running my farthest distances or my fastest paces by any stretch, but I’m pretty confident that simply being out there will be enough. For now, it’s time to suck it up and accept that it’s not the time to run fast or far, and appreciate the fact that I can run at all.

Lettuce Be

Pavowski6 Comments

Chuck’s Challenge of the week: The Stock Photo challenge.

Mine is the photo you see below. The story follows. I fear the end is a little abrupt, but it was really tough keeping this one from running away with me. You know. Like kudzu growing out of control.

VineMan

Lettuce Be

“Hey, Hoskins, leave ‘im alone,” Nelson said.

Hoskins broke off sprinkling water on Green’s head and guffawed loudly; the pun never got old.

Green2378 ruffled his foliage and turned to the men slowly, the way all Greens do, and regarded them indifferently. A Green can’t look at you–not really–but it’s still disconcerting to feel those eyeless stalks straining in your direction. His (all Greens are considered male; Dr. Feingarten, who created the Proto-Greens, could not abide calling them “it”s and never thought to call them “she”s) thin, sinewy dendritic appendages stretched out toward Hoskins.

Green2378 only wanted to communicate, but Hoskins pulled away with a jerk, tripping over his feet and spilling coffee on his rumpled shirtfront. Nelson laughed and held out a hand, allowing Green’s thin spiraling vine-hands to rope around his fingers and slide across his palm. Hoskins felt his stomach turn just watching, but Nelson suppressed a girlish giggle.

“How can you let that thing touch you?” Hoskins asked.

“It tickles,” Nelson said simply. “Kinda like holding a snake. Or maybe a lot of snakes.”

“Creeps me out.”

Nelson shook his head and thought into his fingers, the way the Committee on Green-Human Relations had recommended. “He means no harm, Greenie.”

Green2378 twitched his encephalic bundle, and his leaves quaked with understanding. His vines traced a graceful pattern on Nelson’s hand and Nelson heard a tiny whisper in his head: friends?

Nelson grinned and spoke aloud, folding his other hand over the first and allowing the vines to encircle them both. “Yeah. He’s a friend.”

Hoskins’s face twisted. “I ain’t that thing’s friend.”

“Oh, lighten up. No, not you, Green.”

Hoskins shook his head. “Crime against nature, you ask me. It’s bad enough they walk and talk. Why do they have to cram them into suits?”

Nelson assumed that know-it-all tone he reserved for talking about economic trends and inflation fluctuations. “Studies show that people react more favorably to the Greens when they appear more human.”

Green2378 appeared to be looking back and forth between the two of them. His stalks coiled and uncoiled in what looked like a nervous gesture, not that Greens could feel nerves. “More human,” Hoskins muttered. The Greens only looked more bizarre wearing clothes, to his mind. Green2378 spilled out of a smart-looking pinstriped suit with a neatly pressed shirt and immaculate tie, and looked a good bit sharper than Hoskins did, despite being a sentient tangle of vines.

“Have you ever spoken to one? I mean properly spoken?” Keeping one hand in contact with Greens’ tendrils, Nelson reached out for Hoskins, who shied away with a sneer.

“Come on,” Nelson insisted. “What’s the harm?”

Hoskins’s lip curled, but he couldn’t deny his curiosity. It was, after all, just a plant. What could be the harm? He reached out his hand and suppressed a shudder as Green2378 laid first a few leaves, then a few tendrils, on his fingertips.

Then a whisper bloomed in the back of his mind, a soft insistent voice, like the wind in the trees, though he couldn’t make out any words.

“Go on,” Nelson urged, “say something.”

“…Hi,” Hoskins managed, squinting his eyes shut. The vines were encircling his fingers like dried-out octopus legs. It tickled a little bit, but it wasn’t all that bad.

Green2378 was in love. The taste of Hoskins’s skin was like water and sunlight and rich, loamy soil. He tried to tell Hoskins as much, but his thoughts became a tangle.

Hoskins cracked an eye. Green2378 quivered before him, whispering madly in Hoskins’s thoughts, the words indistinguishable. Then Green2378 reached out another leafy appendage for Hoskins’s hand, and in a flash the vines enveloped him to the wrist.

Hoskins squeaked out a surprised yell and yanked his hands back, rubbing them furiously together as if to scrub them clean. “What the hell was that?” he demanded.

“I think he likes you,” Nelson said, snickering a little.

“Keep him away from me,” Hoskins said, and stormed off.

Nelson shrugged at Green2378 by way of apology. “Sorry, Greenie. He just needs to warm up to you.”

Hoskins finished his shift that day trying not to think too much about the Greens, but always feeling like he saw 2378 out of the corner of his eye.

*****

That night Hoskins awoke in a cold sweat; he’d dreamt that he was drowning in tangling vines that pulled him downward forever, strangling and choking him as they bore him into an infinite dark.

Outside the window, the trees seemed to loom a little closer to his windows. Hoskins got out of bed to look, and sure enough, down by his front walk, he saw Green2378, still wearing his pinstriped suit, spilling over and merging with the rosebushes.

Hoskins flew into a panic. He called the police and shouted obscenities at the Green from his window, but it didn’t matter. The police had never arrested a Green before and they weren’t about to start now; no Green had ever shown any sign of malice or intent to harm. They didn’t have the brain capacity. No, they assured Hoskins that Green2378 had simply gotten lost on his way home. They told him not to think any more about it. Ignoring it proved troublesome, though, when Green2378 was back again the next night, and the next.

Hoskins was going slowly out of his mind. Green2378 was always there at work, almost stalking him. The weeds were overtaking his lawn and growths of kudzu were beginning to envelop his house, but the police wouldn’t do anything about Green2378. They thought the idea of arresting a plant was funny.

Hoskins had had enough. The next night, he saw Green2378 on his lawn again and invited him in for a cool drink of water. Green2378 greedily accepted, not knowing that Hoskins had laced the drink with enough herbicide to clear a football field. Hoskins tossed the limp pile of leaves on the refuse pile in his backyard and kept the suit for himself.

Narrative Surgery

Pavowski2 Comments

I’ve not accomplished much on the novel this week.

I’m terrified because, following in the wake of the question I posed to myself earlier this week, I’ve pretty much decided to take a sledgehammer to my first draft. I’m conflicted about it. The first draft didn’t do anything wrong. I rather like it, if I’m honest. But in the intervening time between when I penned the last period of the draft and I re-read the thing from front to back over the last couple months, I’ve come to accept that while it’s not bad in its current state, there are ways in which it could be so much better.

Problem is, the draft grew the way it did without a care for the changes it might undergo later. It grew a thick protective skin, developed bones and musculature and a web of interconnected tendons and ligaments that bind the whole squalling thing together in the shape of something that surely made sense to me at the time (and still does). But now I can see more clearly that, perhaps, that arm could stand to be relocated to the other side of the body, or that the ears are stapled on a bit too high, or that what the thing as a whole really needs is a scaly, spiked tail. And making these changes to the anatomy of the poor dear is going to require smashing parts of it to pieces. It’s not a change deep enough to throw the whole thing out and start over. But I’m going to have to separate that shoulder joint. That ribcage will have to be laid bare and prised open. That pelvis is going to have to be redesigned. You know, to accommodate the tail.

So I’m standing here feeling a bit like a sculptor standing in front of a great marble statue, tasked with making changes to the very anatomy of the thing, knowing that if I strike wrong, the whole mass of stone could crumble to dust before my very eyes. Okay, a story is a little more resilient and forgiving than that, but when I start making these changes, who knows what other lumps are going to pop up under the skin in other areas of the story?

I’ve been putting off taking that first sledgehammer swing, because I know that when I do, it’s going to consume my life, much the way a busted pipe can do, what with all the leaking light fixtures and waterlogged carpets and exploded drywall. I’ll make that first edit and then the patient will start hemorrhaging ink and plot points and it’ll be triage all the way through until I can get the whole bag of bones put back together in some semblance of rightness and sewn back into its skin.

And it still won’t be perfect. It may need the sledgehammer again, or maybe I’ll be lucky and all it will need is a few flashes of the narrative scalpel.

I had gotten a bit enamored with the idea that the first edit would roll through and, once finished, I’d have in my hands something approaching a state of “finishedness”. But I guess that’s not the way of it at all. The second draft, I guess, is just that — a second draft. Another stab at the target I was aiming for when I wrote the first draft, tempered by time and contemplation, but still in all likelihood a bit wide of the mark. Still, you can’t hit home runs if you never swing, and you can’t rebuild a shattered femur without laying the leg wide open.

So I guess it’s time to start cutting.

Now, where did I leave that bone saw…