Category: Writing

A Little Trim

Pavowski3 Comments

I can’t be trusted with my own story.

In making a last push to work on the edit, I found myself thinking some truly troubling thoughts. In the past month, I’ve struggled through editing an entirely new character into the innards of the story, and doing so required some deft slices of the scalpel and some not-so-deft whacks of the axe to make room for. And now, like a maniac who’s tasted blood and now needs to slice open jugulars nightly just to feel some semblance of normal, I find myself eyeing that axe again and thinking… I could cut more.

Just a little more. Shave a little off the top. Clip the ends off, neaten this bit out. Trim the dead weight. Sure, the novel as a whole could probably use more trimming, but that’s not what I’m talking about. No, what’s caught my eye is a prize hog. One of the supporting characters looks positively ripe for harvesting.

I had this thought in the first stages of the edit, regarding another one of the supporting cast, but I didn’t pull the trigger. Couldn’t bring myself to wipe her out. Maybe because I was too cowardly to axe a major part of the work, maybe because I didn’t have the confidence to pull it off. For some reason, now, though, I find myself weighing the decision and seriously thinking it over… not because I feel the character needs to go — she’s been a part of the story since the first iterations, back when it was a stage play. No, I’m sizing her up like she’s some challenge, like that ancient fish lurking in the depths of the pond, the twisted ends of dozens of anglers’ hooks adorning its lip. I could cut her out like she never existed, I think… which, as Criminal Minds plays in the background here while I sit on the couch with my wife, sounds like an extraordinarily psychotic thing to say.

No, I think this is more editing loopiness setting in. Cabin fever is snaking its slimy tendrils up my spine after all the time I’ve spent with this story and it’s making me hallucinate. Making me think I see blood pooling behind her eyes, a dead albatross around her neck. She’s probably not so much cursed as I am looking for ways to drastically improve this story amidst my fears that it’s utter crap.

She’ll live, for now.

But I need to keep making progress, finish this edit, and get this thing off to some impartial readers. That axe is looking awfully sharp and awfully inviting.

Infrequent Air Bubbles

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I am so tired. I’m poking my head up through the fog of exhaustion just to send a little signal that I’m okay. Or maybe that I’m not. But I’m still here. And some of the waves may be washing over my head, and maybe there’s a bit of water in my lungs, but I’m still floating, if just below the surface.

I’m a big proponent of the concept that we all have the exact same twenty-four hours in the day, and it’s just a question of what you apply those hours to. I also think I’ve been pretty good about carving out pieces of that time for my various exploits. This week, though, time has got my number.

Necessity is the mother of invention, and I think I need to invent a time machine. I only need to take a few courses in temporal engineering and discover dark matter and invent some new laws of physics. Luckily, I have a rocket scientist reading this very blog, so I have some good backup in that arena. Stay tuned. Or to be more correct, you will have already seen the fruits of my inventions by the time this post may have been written.

Then again, discretion is the better part of valor, and as much as I feel I need to press on and keep working until the work is done, maybe it wouldn’t be a horrible thing to consider a little break. However — and this is one of the things I’m maybe a little bit crazy about — I’m terrified that if I stop pushing forward, all the momentum will bleed out like a punctured waterbed.

On the one hand, part of my brain is telling me that the circumstances I’m claiming are getting the better of me are no better or worse or more demanding than at any other time over the last 8 months of this adventure I’ve been on. On the other, I feel as if the klaxons are sounding and the deckhands are scrambling for the lifeboats as the other part of my brain tells me that no, really I’m trying to do too much. The core temperature is increasing. Bubbles are rising to the surface, fewer and less frequent.

The end of the first edit is so close. Even if I’m artificially claiming that closeness, it needs to be close. I’ve been going back and forth with it so much that like bread left too long in the oven, it’s crusting over and turning black around the edges. I feel like I felt toward the end of the first draft: I’m getting sick of the work and I need a break from it. But the only way out is through, and the quicker I finish, the quicker it’s done.

On the other other hand, it’s possible that all this is simply normal mild parental exhaustion exacerbated by the fact that our 8-month old handed my wife and me a surprise sleep-deprivation treatment last night. It’s possible, in that vein, that I’m just loopy and moderately delirious and is that pink stuff oozing out of the vent? THAT’S PINK STUFF OOZING OUT OF THE VENT OMG IT’S GHOSTBUSTERS 2 COMMAND ME LORD VIGO

…

Manufactured, imagined, or actual, I think it’s fair to say there’s some stress settling in on my brain parts. I need to finish this edit.

Finish Line Full of Magnets

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I’m not a big fan of biographies, but I read Andre Agassi’s autobio a few years ago. Some fantastic stories about how much pain he was secretly suffering through the last years of his career. Some insane tales of a father who made him hit something like five thousand tennis balls every day (if you hit a million tennis balls in a year, you can’t help but become the best in the world!). But for some reason, the thing that most stuck out for me was his take on winning a match.

I noodled around with tennis a little bit, and even an idiot like me can grasp the wisdom of what he had to say. I’m butchering his words, but he likened winning a match to a magnet: You’re in the match, and then you catch a little bit of a break and all of a sudden you can’t lose. The closer you get to the finish, the more it pulls you along. But, just like a magnet, the closer you get, the more it resists you, the more it pushes you away, until you’re right at the brink of winning and you can’t conceive of any possible way to get there.

Things, as I may have mentioned before, don’t always have to mean things. Sometimes a bit of wisdom about tennis is just a bit of wisdom about tennis. Then again, I’m an English teacher by trade, which means I can draw meaning from the swirls of foam in toddler vomit. So off I go generalizing:

Finishing this first edit is like winning a tennis match. I struggled mightily for months to find a foothold. I thought my ideas were terrible, my draft was terrible, the plans I had for fixing it were actually breaking it. (I still harbor doubts, but it’s getting a little late for that.) Then — and I couldn’t pinpoint the moment for the life of me — something changed, and I gained in confidence, and I found the work coming easier and easier. It flowed like so much blood from a severed artery.

And then I realized how close I was to the end.

Not the end. The first edit is only the first step in a journey that will no doubt leave me footsore and sweaty, bloody and probably a little disoriented. But the end of a pretty important step. A step at the end of which I am going to unfetter my little creation and let it flap out into the wild, presumably into the maws of several prowling beasts.

I’m going to let people read it. Other people, outside of the insulated, well-padded room I built for myself in my brain, are going to read this story, meet my characters, and start sticking pointy things in their soft bits. And that’s a highly encouraging thing, because I need some serious feedback if I want to make sure the story works. But it’s also a terrifying thing. Like, it might turn out that the story is as compelling as a pile of gerbil turds. Maybe the characters are as likable as Maleficent, you know, before they flipped it and told the story from her side.

Maybe, in short, I’ve spent the past nine months writing, and I’d have been better off doing, I dunno, ANYTHING else. Collecting stamps. Growing a garden. Learning to crochet.

And what felt like a magnet pulling me toward the finish line now feels like a magnet pushing me away from it. I’m terrified to finish, so I’m hiding from the work. It’s easy. There’s no shortage of excuses and reasons to keep me from working on it. But I think the sad, simple fact is that I’m terrified of turning it over and letting it out of my little cage.

But I guess I have to let it go eventually. Cut the cord. Empty the nest.

I’ll probably be done with the edit in a couple of weeks. And that’s awesome.

But terrifying.

But mostly awesome.

But still terrifying.

…But awesome.

Newton’s Laws of Writing

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A while ago, there was this guy.

He sat under a tree for a while — a really long while — until eventually the tree sharted an apple on his head, and instead of just finding a different tree to sit under, this enterprising fargoer went and derived the laws for all freaking motion in the universe from that one little incident. I’m pretty sure he also went on to invent some awful cookies, although the real depth of his genius might be measured by the fact that he convinced people that those little bits of sandpaper wrapped around pseudo-fruit-filling were cookies in the first place, and not, in fact, aardvark turds rolled in discarded cicada husks.

But yeah, his more important contributions to the world were probably the three laws. But what Newton didn’t know (or at least, I have on good authority from this absinthe fairy that’s twinkling around the room at the moment) is that the three laws apply not just to the motion of things in the universe, but they apply to everything. And that means they apply to writers, too. I’m one of those, so here’s how it works:

First Law: An object in motion tends to stay in motion. That’s inertia, which is married to momentum, which is a concept I’ve found myself a little … obsessed is too strong a word … we’ll say “fixated” with here on this blarg and in my writing journey. I’ve written about it a few times before. In the universe, it means that if, say, you’re a planet hurtling through space, you will continue to hurtle until an asteroid many times your size smashes into and pulverizes you in a gigantic horrifying cosmic fender bender, or until a burgeoning sun swallows you up like the gnat I swallowed on my run this morning. To writers, it means that it’s easy to keep writing as long as you keep doing it. In other words, if you’re writing, and you want that writing to turn into something other than pointless scribbles in a forgotten word document, you have to forget the excuses and make sure you write a little bit, like, every day. Or at least almost every day. You’re only human, after all. Unless you’re a planet, in which case, I’d love to read your autobiography, except maybe try writing it in English instead of the eldritch tongue of star screams and soul-tearing that you probably write in.

Second Law: Look, the metaphor falls apart here in the middle. This is a stream-of-consciousness post, okay? I only planned it so far. I’m going to be honest. I remember the 1st and 3rd laws of motion from high school physics but I had no idea what the second law was. So I googled it, and found some highly technical descriptions of it, and then I got smarter and wikipedia’d it (is wikipedia’d a valid verb? It should be) and I still couldn’t figure it out. Essentially it’s about force and acceleration (F=ma) and all this other sciencey stuff I can’t be arsed about as a purveyor of fiction and dubious thoughts about writing. How does it apply to writing? Fargoed if I know. Let’s play acronyms. Freaking metal, always. Funky math: avoid. Fight me afterwards. Let’s just forget I talked about the second law. I was just killing time until I got to the 3rd law anyway.

Third Law: For every reaction, there is an equal and opposite reaction. This law explains why people get black eyes from shooting guns, or so I’ve heard. And why, when you’re walking barefooted across the carpet that was harmless before you had kids, a Thomas the Tank Engine figurine can stab upwards with all the force of an icepick wielded by an angry yeti into your tender underfoot. But, see, this one is great with writing, because it works in a couple of different ways. First, there are days when the writing resists you, and the harder you lean your shoulder into it the harder it leans back, unmoving, until you collapse at its feet, sobbing and gibbering about your inadequacies. By the same token, of course, if you don’t try to force the writing — if you write what needs to be written rather than trying to force words that don’t fit — then the whole task becomes ridiculously easier, and in fact, your story can end up working with you rather than against you. Second (and I’m twisting the law harder than a kid I knew in seventh grade, who shall remain nameless, delivering a purple nurple) it means that for every good day, there’s gonna be a bad day. For every day that the words and ideas and plots and characters flow from your fingertips like so much cosmic radiation pouring off of the sun, there will be a day that finds you as productive as my old and worthless cat who just keeps swatting at my ankles and crapping on the carpet. For each brilliant idea that seems to solve all the problems in your story at one fell swoop while choirs of angels sing in the background and golden sunlight suffuses the whole, you will lay an egg from which hatches a deformed, pitiful, limping abomination that squeals pitifully to beg for narrative death. You have to learn to ride the wave when the 3rd law is flowing in your favor and weather the storm when it isn’t.

Writing is a fickle mistress. Luckily, if you are up on Newton’s laws, you can predict some of her irrational moods and get out of the way when she comes at you with a knife. Of course, if you were thinking, you wouldn’t have written a razor-sharp butcher knife into your third act for her to use in the first place, but NO, you just had to have it there for “dramatic tension,” didn’t you?

Oh, THAT’S what the second law stands for.

Female Machete Assassin.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. We’re going with that. Newton’s 2nd law for writers: Female Machete Assassins. Include them in your stories. Or avoid them. Or something.

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This post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. This week’s prompt was “opposite.”

Milestones and Doubt

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I think I finished my second pass at the first edit last night. I say “I think” because I’m feeling a tremendous urge to throw out all the rewrites that I’ve completed over the past six weeks or so, and in fact to toss the entire document in my computer’s recycle bin. Which would, technically, put me back in the re-writing process, although more at the even-before-the-starting-point-of-square-one point than at the fixing-what’s-wrong-with-it point.

I’m pretty sure this draft is worse than the first. Tsunamis of doubt about the changes I’ve made are pummeling the coastline of my confidence in this project. I thought last night about how bizarre and awkward it felt writing the necessary changes into the end of the book. Then I thought for even longer about going back and deleting all my new changes and reverting to the first draft I finished with in July. Then I had a drink and consulted with my wife and decided to let the changes breathe for a little while before doing anything drastic (which is probably always a good policy on both counts: consulting with the wife and letting things breathe).

After pondering on it for a night, I’m going to let those changes stand for this pass. I’m going to take one final pass on the story to address my remaining notes and clean up the language, and then it’ll be time to pass it along to some readers. I’m thinking that can be done by the end of January. I’ve missed my goal to have this first edit done by the new year, but given that I had no idea how much time the edit should take in the first place, I’m not unhappy about that.

I recall, now, thinking back at the beginning of this process that I had no idea how to attack it, and I think the process that I blundered into worked … well enough. That would be a process with three legs:

  1. Read the draft, taking notes on major plot points, inconsistencies, character tracking, and anything else that needs fixing.
  2. Rewrite it, smashing the broken bits to pieces and building it back bit by bit. Crowbar in the changes that need to be made and hack out the stuff that’s taking up space.
  3. Read it again, cleaning up language and fixing any lingering errors.

As has been pointed out multiple times on this blarg, I’m hardly an expert, and I don’t know what I’m doing. However, I spent a lot of time hemming and hawing about how I was going to approach this edit, and if I can have this method in mind for the next time I need it, maybe I can save myself a couple days of strife.

So, on Monday, I start on the third leg. I was going to read with a scalpel in hand, but I think after my last post about how bloated the thing has become, I’m actually going to be using a hatchet.