Tag: editing a novel

Glimpses of Non-Suckitude

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I was beginning to get a little fatigued with this latest edit. Cleaning up the junk language, tightening up all the moments, trimming out the unnecessary. It felt like most of what I had written was crap; that it all needed serious work before it could be “ready”.

But I reached a few passages today that absolutely crackle with life and energy. Passages that had me laughing to myself while I sat in my darkened room reading jokes I myself had written, even though I already knew all the punchlines. Passages possessed of a sort of self-evident, unconcerned eloquent beauty, the like of which I would not attribute to myself. Passages that make me think maybe I’m not so bad at this writing thing after all.

This novel (and this blog for that matter) is keenly interested in the question of inspiration: where it comes from, how useful it is, what it can do for you when you have it. And by and large, I have come to believe that inspiration is just a bunch of baloney sandwiches. You either work or you don’t, but some days are better than others.

Still.

As I read my own work of the last year and a half, it’s encouraging — and kind of awesome — to see those flashes of inspiration peeking out through the cracks.

I like to liken (like to liken, tee hee) writing to a long, arduous slog through vine-darkened jungle, or to a hopeless trek in a desert. And it damn sure feels that way a lot of days. But every now and then, light penetrates the canopy and wakes up the critters on the jungle floor, and the rare flowers open their petals to the light. Here and there, water bubbles up to shape an oasis amid the scorching sands.

For now, though, it’s back into the caves.

Increments

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*Pokes his head out of the editing gopher-hole*

Advice I’ve heard more than once says that you should give your projects time to breathe in between revisions. Like, ideally, you should be able to read it with objective eyes, as if you yourself didn’t slave over it for months.

And I laughed at that advice, because I thought it was impossible. And in a panoramic sense, it is. An author can probably never divorce himself so completely from a work as to not recognize it. (Sidenote: I think that may be the first time I’ve ever referred to myself as an author. Feels cozy.)

But that’s the work as a whole. The prose? Oh my god. I’m sixty pages into the edit and … yeah, it feels like some arsehole idiot who basically knows nothing about writing wrote this thing.

And that’s coming from an arsehole idiot who basically knows nothing about writing.

It’s not bad. But man… if it feels this unpolished to me now … I mean, I have to take that as a sign that I’m getting better, right?

Right?

I’m not saying I’m an expert or anything, but … even incremental progress, yeah?

*Vanishes back down the gopher-hole*

Flawed Instrumentation: First Thoughts on a Late Edit

Pavowski3 Comments

I’m starting another round of edits on my novel, and the pain just comes washing in.

With early edits, that pain was the raw, gnarly hurt of recognizing that I’d written a broken thing; a creature whose own limbs would pull it off balance if ever it tried to walk. The narrative was fragmented. Timelines didn’t add up. Characters would vanish for no apparent reason and reappear just as suddenly with no explanation. Look, no writer sits down and creates a perfect story out of nothingness in an afternoon. (Though, somehow, that’s certainly a misconception I’ve held, and I imagine others do too — that the greats just sit down and pour unicorns and fairy dust out of their heads and onto the page, and send it off for immediate publication.) But it’s a hard pill to swallow when you look at your own work and it’s so … let’s not say bad, let’s say, in need of improvement, the way a trauma victim with a sucking chest wound is in need of improvement.

With the latest edit, though, I’m feeling a different kind of pain. Not so much anymore the pain of oh god, what is this monstrosity I’ve created, but more the sharp sting of disappointment. That feeling you get when your kid tells you they did fingerpainting in kindergarten: you expect to see a painting that’s a little blotchy but still a reasonable facsimile of a house or a fish or a dog or a person, but in actuality all you get is a sad, mottled smear. It’s like, yes, you created something and that’s fantastic and adorable and isn’t it wonderful but at the same time, wow, I mean WOW, it’s obvious that you have no talent whatsoever. (Don’t lie and say you haven’t had that thought about your kid’s artwork. The only shining light is that he’s never done anything before, so he was basically guaranteed to suck … you were just holding out hope that maybe your kid was special but surprise, he isn’t!)

I’m about twenty pages in, and my fingers are aching from squeezing the pliers on all the rotted teeth; the blowtorch is sputtering, running out of fuel from searing off all the calamitous verbosity. (Calamitous Verbosity is totally the name of my new band.) I’m reading along and … man, I think the story’s good, but it’s just so cumbersome. So much junk language. So many rambling, do-nothing sentences. So much that’s vague or obvious filler or even worse, a ham-fisted attempt to sound poetic or clever or profound, like an NFL linebacker trying to dance in Swan Lake. It’s like, I can see what you’re going for there, but … no.

What freaks me out is that I already did a polishing pass at the end of my last edit. I read all this over several months back, thought, yep, that sounds like I want it to sound, and stamped it for approval. So now, I’m faced not with the regular, looming specter of self doubt that goes along with all writing, but with the deeper, insidious doubt of wondering whether I ever doubted myself enough in the first place. I once thought this thing was good, and I can now see it was not.

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That’s a harsh pill to swallow. I feel like I’m flying in an airplane, and I can look out the window and clearly see the ground a few hundred feet below, but all the instrumentation is telling me I’m thousands of feet up.

Two ways, then, to look at this situation, I think:

  1. My instrumentation is flawed and not to be trusted, ever.
  2. My instrumentation is flawed but improving.

Maybe I got a bad reading before, but I’ve got a better reading now. Maybe when I did those first edits, I hadn’t allowed enough time to pass to get a real, solid, objective look at the thing.

Or, maybe (how dare I even dare to think it) I’ve gotten better in the interim, and I legitimately am looking back at the admittedly inferior work of a fledgling writer, having learned a few things, having a little bit stronger sensibility.

Or, further maybe still, maybe the thing really is just a steaming pile of sharknado.

Difficult to say at this point.

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Cold Storage

Pavowski4 Comments

 

When we talk about writing, we’re usually focused on the glitzy stuff. LOL JUST KIDDING, as if there’s anything glitzy about sitting in our darkened rooms, pounding feverishly on our keyboards until we collapse from exhaustion and despair.) That act of raw creation is what non-writers think about, it’s what burgeoning writers focus on, it’s indelibly the picture of what a writer does. Rightly so.

If only I could look like such a boss when I write.
If only I could look like such a boss when I write.

Sitting down to write the draft, spilling the words forth onto the page is what it’s all about. Whether it’s the unstoppable flood of a river smashing through its dam or the pained trickle of a man with a swollen prostate, the writing is what matters. Word count. Finished chapters. The flutter of ink-stained pages landing on the pile.

But it’s not the whole picture, not by far.

The first draft, magical though it may feel, results in something you wouldn’t want to bring home to meet your parents. Like a Frankenstein’s monster made of mismatched limbs or a garage-built car constructed from nothing but spare parts, the first draft is imperfect, incomplete.

What the monster needs, though, is not to get fixed right away. What the monster needs is some time in cold storage.

My wife makes a hell of a cheesecake. The process is simple: whip all the ingredients together, smash them into a mold, bake at 350. But it’s not done after it bakes, not nearly. It comes out of the oven and goes straight into the fridge to draw all the heat out of it, to actively stop that act of creation that causes all its components to chemically react. Only then — only after it’s lost all the heat of its making and had a chance for its parts to settle, compact and congeal — is it ready for the finishing touches, its layer of cream frosting, its drizzling of cherry syrup.

The time not cooking, in other words, is just as important to the finished product as the cooking itself.

So it is with writing.

You pour the raw ingredients of character and conflict into the mixing bowl and beat furiously for the first draft, then toss it into the oven of creation for a while for those conflicts to bake, boil, and bubble over. You drain yourself as a writer and channel all that energy of creation into the making of this thing. And then you throw it in the freezer.

Take it off the fire of creation. Remove the heat of your emotions for all its little parts. Give it some time alone to settle, and more importantly, give yourself time to cool off. Put those emotions about the story into storage and do your best to forget about the damn thing for a while. Only then can you come back to the story level-headed and clear-sighted enough to put the proper finishing touches on.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I think we’ve still got a bit of leftover cheesecake in the fridge.

This post is part of SoCS. Head to LindaGHill‘s blog to check it out and get involved. And, yeah, I’m still taking something of a break from my standard re-motivational weekend rambles; it feels odd to write about writing when I’m not actually writing much. Regularly scheduled programming will return someday.

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.