Tag: editing

A Problem with Profanity

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So there’s another problem with the draft.

Maaaybe less of a problem and more of a quandary, if the difference is anything more than semantic.

It’s a problem with language.  A quandary of character.

See, I created this antagonist to be a real bastard.  And to be fair, I think I’ve been successful.  He’s a total jerkface.  A real knee-biter.  Virtually unlikable to everybody in the book except for one, and that one only tolerates him out of some twisted past business relationship… the details don’t matter.  He’s a doodie head.

And I absolutely, 100% believe that each character an author creates is, in some small way or another, an aspect of the author himself (or herself).  I just don’t think there’s any getting around that — pour your heart and soul into the work and, well, you end up with a work that’s full of your heart and your soul, perhaps more literally than you planned.  And this guy is probably me on a morning when the alarm failed to go off and the car door handle broke and the traffic is outrageous and I forgot my badge for work and then I get to work and it turns out to be Saturday.  He’s a grouch and a grump and he snaps at the word go and a big part of what makes him so nasty is that he’s as foul-mouthed as a dog that’s been flossing with roadkill.

And there’s the problem.

No, that’s not the problem.  The language works for the character.  It fits him like a tailored suit.  The problem is, I don’t know if the language fits the book.  And that brings me back to audience.

I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m not sure I know who my audience is for this damn thing.  I mean, I do.  It’s people more or less like me, maybe a bit younger.  And as a reader, language doesn’t bother me.  A good profanity-laden rant is good for the soul, and let’s be honest, as much as it amuses me to toss around the sharknados and fargos on the blarg here, they’re no substitute for the real thing when real emotion is on the line.  But I’m probably not most readers.  Maybe it’s a bit cart-before-the-horse, but I’m really worried that the profanity, appropriate as it is for the character, and fun as it is for me to write (and read), is going to alienate potential readers.

So there’s the quandary.  There’s nothing wrong with the character as far as the narrative is concerned (at least, as far as I can tell at this point in the edit), and yet I feel like his harshness might be wrong for the story.  Which, then, is more important — an authentic character or a more widely-appealing story?  Do I scale back his jerk-facery in favor of making him a little bit less off-putting?  Do I think up alternate ways to make the character unlikable? Plant some puppies in his path for him to stomp on, send him to bars to abuse the waitstaff, have him drive really slow in the fast lane?  Or do I leave him just the way he is , potential offended readers be damned?

Nothing to do for the moment, I suppose, but throw it on the pile for Further Future Me to sort through and decide on later.

 

Character Consideration

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Working on the edit today, I realized a thing.

When I set about the not-insignificant task of changing Accidentally Inspired from a stage play to a novel, one of many changes I orchestrated on the front end (read: before I actually got into the draft and all the pieces started coming off like a bunch of janky flywheels) was the addition of a love interest.

It seemed natural.  Still seems natural.  She’s not out of place in the narrative.  I think I gave her a totally plausible raison d’etre or however you say that fancy French thing.  I like her character, but I’m not like in love with her character (that would mean I had invented a character too perfect and would therefore be a Bad Thing).  She plays a role in the story but is not, strictly speaking, critical to it.  All in all, for a late addition to the party, I’m pretty pleased with her.  However, I’m afraid that she may be entirely out of place in the novel.

I can’t be sure.  I waited a good six, seven weeks to dive in and start the edit, which I think has been enough time for me to distance myself from the prose.  However, in reading this character, I begin to wonder.  When I originally conceived of this idea, oh, let’s just call it ten years ago, the principal ten characters sprung immediately and organically into being.  Each played his or her role perfectly, fitting together like jigsaw pieces.  Now, revisiting the story, changes are inevitable.  As I’ve noted before while I was writing the draft, in its translation to the long-form novel, the story has sprouted new legs and arms, a tail and a few new tongues.  New characters sprung up like strangling weeds, and strangely, each seems to fit the new narrative just as well — if in a smaller capacity — as the originals.  To be fair, the love interest fits in there, too.  But to stick with the puzzle metaphor, the thing is not finished yet.  I’ve got the edges and the corners built, and I’m working my way in to the meaty center, and a lovely picture of a foggy London Bridge is taking shape.  Problem is, the love interest sure looks like a foggy bit of bridge or possibly a bit of misty waterfront, but it’s possible, just possible, that she’s a piece of the Golden Gate instead.  You know, she’d fit the theme, but it’d be wrong to say she was intrinsically a part of things.

Problem is, of course, that now the demon of doubt has its scouring claws in my brainmeats over the whole thing, and now my entire take on the character is tinged with the unmistakable feel of overthinking.  Am I resisting her because she’s not a part of the original narrative and thus feels unnatural?  Is she just fine where she is and she’s only tripping my radar because I’m hypersensitive to imperfections in the draft?  Maybe she’s truly honestly unnecessary and I’m ignoring my genuine justified doubt over her in a bid to cater to a hypothetical audience I’ve not even earned yet?  Probably, as with so many things involved in this process, it feels murky because the mushy center of this narrative cake hasn’t finished cooking yet, and I won’t really be able to iron out an answer until I clean up the story a good bit.  Maybe my keyboard needs more chemicals to properly ponder the question.

One way or another, I’m going to have to make a call on this girl sooner or later.  Problem is, having woven her somewhat intricately into the draft, I’m terrified at the prospect of having to remove her thread.  If there’s nothing wrong with her and I cut her out, then I’ve defaced this tapestry ostensibly for nothing.  On the other hand, if she’s poisoned and I don’t cut her out, she could rot the whole project from the inside.

Like so many other things, the best I can do for now is flag her for further consideration and toss her on the pile of “deal with this later.”  That’s a pile of problems I started in the draft and which is growing at an alarming rate since I picked up the edit.  I imagine that in just a little while it will develop its own gravity and pull me through a ripple in spacetime where my story will stretch out to infinity and the only sustenance I’ll have is my own failed, mangled prose, squealing like that belly-alien thing in Total Recall for me to put it out of its misery.

Momentum

Pavowski4 Comments

Lately I’ve been having the hardest time finding the time to write.  This is problematic for me because as much as that’s true — there are a lot of demands on my time of late — I also feel pretty strongly that that excuse is bullsharknado.

The issue of time is coming to a head because this week, I missed two days of editing my novel.  It might not sound like a big deal, but it’s eating me up inside.  The deadline is purely arbitrary; I’m accountable to nobody but myself, yet I’m furious with myself over it.  Ashamed.  And I’m asking myself why it’s happening.  After all, I didn’t miss a day of writing when I was working on the first draft — not a single day outside of the week my daughter was born.

Back when I started this shindig in March and April, I was turning out ridiculous word count for the time I had.  I’d have days where I’d bang out 2500+ words, between the first draft of the novel and the blog.  I’d carve out swathes of time at work, sneak a few minutes here and there at home, hammer out a few sentences in the morning.  Lately it seems I just don’t have the energy for that.  I drag myself out of bed in the morning and it’s all I can do to make myself exercise.  I feel like the day is too full at work to write even a few sentences.  Then I’m home and into the daddy grind and before I can blink it’s 9:30, time to slog it off to bed.

I have every excuse.  On the one hand, life has never been busier.  My responsibilities at work have changed a little bit: I have more students, more papers to grade, and coming up in a few months, some after-school hours to put in as well, and all that adds up to a pretty significant pull on my time.  There’s a second sprout now, and that means more diapers, more tantrums, more feedings, more outings — and of course, the original sprout is only getting bigger and louder and more demanding.  I love them like crazy, but they are little time-eaters.  I’m trying to put in a solid six days of exercise a week (okay, it’s more like five days on a good week) at thirty minutes a day, and that’s closer to an hour on a run day… and then there’s quality time to be carved out for the wife… Where does one find the time to write amidst all this?

But then I second guess myself.  And this is where I’m frustrated (and yet very happy) with myself for reading the writings of Chuck Wendig and Steve Kamb, achievers whose teachings I am doing my best to absorb in this new chapter of my life.  There’s one nugget they’ve both shared that has stuck with me: You have the same 24 hours in your day as everybody else.  I can’t shake that.  Sure, I have every excuse not to get the writing done.  Sure, it’s hard to blame me for missing a workout now and then.  But I know that for every edit I miss, every workout I skip, there’s another guy out there with all the same demands on his time but he’s getting it done and I’m not.  Now, I’m not strictly competitive by nature, but this eats at my soul like a blood-swollen tick.

The other thing I can’t forget is a thing I’ve learned this year.  Somehow it hit home after 33 years of living on this earth, and now the truth of it is inescapable to me:  Momentum matters.  The things you’ve been doing are the things you will continue doing.  It’s all well and good to make changes in your life: you start exercising, you start dieting, you take up gardening, you begin knitting socks for the gnomes in your garden.  And in the beginning it’s easy to establish new momentum: going for that run or leaving the cookies untouched or pulling the weeds or socking a gnome feels so satisfying because it’s such a sharp departure from the norm.  But you have 34 years of slacker momentum built up, and over time, your old momentum begins to assert itself, and it’s easier to reach for the snooze button than your shoes at 5 AM, it’s easier to reach for the cookies than the celery, easier to just leave the garden unweeded for a few days and easier to let the gnomes go sockless.  Before you know it, you haven’t run in two weeks, and you’re eating cookies by the sleeve, and the garden is one thick knee-high bramble and the gnomes are revolting.

I established some hellagood momentum back in March and April, not allowing myself to miss a single day of writing outside of the week that my daughter was born.  And it carried me through until the first draft was finished in July.  But my old slacker momentum is reasserting itself, and it is casting into doubt everything I’ve accomplished in the meantime.  I sleep in instead of getting up for my 5AM run, and it doesn’t bother me as much as it did the last time it happened.  I miss a day of editing, and I don’t feel bad about it all night.  Momentum matters, and the sharknadoey momentum I’ve spent my life developing is sucking me in with its immense gravity, despite the positive momentum I’ve spent the last six months cultivating.

But the momentum is just the beginning, because soon the momentum changes form and becomes an insidious mental decay.  I start having thoughts like, “maybe the time just isn’t right for me to pursue this dream right now” or “if I slow down, that’ll be okay too,” and the lure of those thoughts is tempting.  Just like my excuses, they could be entirely valid.  But I also know that accepting those thoughts of slacker momentum are only a short hop away from “maybe I’m just not cut out for it at all.”

And then I’m back to the 24-hour problem again.  Because if I’m having doubts about how I’m spending my time, then maybe I’m not spending it in the right ways.  And if it’s hard for me to make the time, to chip it away from the great grey monoliths of my other obligations, then maybe the sad truth is that I just don’t want it badly enough to make it happen.  If I can’t make my 24 hours work toward making me a writer, then maybe the truth is I just don’t want it at all.

But I’m afraid I’m not ready to swallow that particular bitter pill just yet.  Which is why last night I was up until nearly midnight writing this post, and why when WordPress ate it just before midnight, I vowed that I would go through the turmoil, the harsh truth, the unpleasant task of facing my doughy, slacker-momentum riding Asgard in the mirror AGAIN to write it today.  Because it needs to be said.  And I need to be able to come back here and see it.  And I need to remind myself that writing is a thing that I want, and it is a thing worth making sacrifices for, and it is a thing which deserves to be done, even and especially when it’s difficult to do it.

In a movie that I loved, Grosse Pointe Blank, a hitman having a touch of existential angst over attending his high school reunion was advised by his psychiatrist to stop and take stock of his feelings.  Repeat the mantra, “this is me breathing,” and “I’m at home in the me that is on this adventure.”  A simple idea, intended to ground one in the moment, focus on the little things, and not get swept away by the mad tide of life.  There’s wisdom in that, even if it’s not my goal to kill people with frying pans.

This is me breathing.  This is me writing.  I’m at home in the me that is on this adventure.

 

 

Further Future Mes are Fargoed

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It’s happened.  I knew it was only a matter of time — and if I’m honest with myself, it was never that much time to begin with — before I blew a tire.

No, I know, just this weekend I posted about how swimmingly the edit is going, how happy and fun everything is, how much it surprises me that things aren’t as bad as I thought.  But they are.  Things are undoubtedly as bad as I thought and even worse than I feared.

It’s like this time about a year ago.  I was driving with my wife to pick up my dad and my brother at the airport.  We took our Camry, which is a tank of an old car, but its tires were nearing the end.  They were so near the end, in fact, that the car would wobble when it got up above 45 miles per hour.  I knew a blowout was likely if not imminent, but I wanted to pretend that things were fine and that the tires were good for a little bit longer.  But sure enough, as we’re tooling down I-75, there’s an unmistakable BOOM flapflapflapflapflap and the car is pulling hard to the right like a hamstrung horse.

This — editing this novel — is a little different, in that I can’t really get proactive and go put new tires on the thing before I set out for the airport.  The edit itself is about fixing the tires, and replacing the motors in the power windows, and that burned out blinker, and the sandpaper windshield wipers, and that crack in the rearview, and getting that shudder in the transmission checked on.  In short, the whole damn car needs work if I hope to sell it, and make no mistake, the ultimate goal is to sell it (the novel, not the car).

Still, I knew the blowout was coming, and today I hit the first.  Probably the first of many.

There’s this moment in the first act.  It’s awfully hokey.  Like, for all intents and purposes, my protagonist and his sidekick basically accept as a given the weird sharknado that’s going down, break out the fringed vests and start singing Bob Dylan like everything’s gonna be cool.  And, to be fair, it helped Past Me to get past that troublesome moment and move on with more conflicts and more plot development.  And the stuff that comes after is good.  Problem is, when Present Me (then Future Me) goes to fix the Koombaya moment by removing the hokeyness from it, the entirety of the pages immediately following begin leaning like a house of cards built on sand in a windstorm.  AND I KNEW IT WAS COMING.  This is the part of the draft where Past Me started leaving a whole lot of messages to Future Me (now Present Me) which are sometimes as helpful as “go back and write a little bit of exposition for this particular thing” but more often as useless as “THIS SUCKS, HAVE FUN FIXING IT LOSER”.  I’d be laughing if that weren’t an actual note I actually came across in my parsing today.

It’s pretty clear that Past Me was just having his jollies on the promise of Future Me coming round to clean up the sticky bits on the carpet, and again, I knew at the time that I was doing just that.  In fact, I remember pretty clearly while I was drafting having a good laugh at what a jerk I was acting like toward this hypothetical Future Me that was going to have to deal with the angry neighbors and the ruined wallpaper.  It makes me want to hit that guy.  Because now I’m looking at a draft — about 20,000 words into it — and it’s as holey as a hand grenade of Antioch.  As porous as the freaking Falcons’ defense.  As flimsy as the Braves’ chances of making the postseason.  (GOD, it was an awful weekend for sports in Atlanta.)

Don’t get me wrong.  I know that the hardest part — the writing, the creating, the sheer calling from nothingness into being of this thing — is behind me.  But the task ahead ain’t all sunshine and lemondrops.  I can’t even say it’s peanut butter sandwiches and leftover pizza.  It’s looking more like a torrential downpour of excrement and a slog through alligator-infested swamps.  And my tires have blown out, so I have to go the whole thing on foot.  Not that my Camry was going to make much progress in a damn swamp… okay, too many mixed metaphors.  The point is, the proverbial sharknado is hitting the proverbial fan and the work is about to get real.

But tomorrow is another day, and it all gets simplified down to manageable bites on my to-do list for another Further Future Me.  Man, I feel sorry for that guy.

In Search of a Bigger Boat (One Week of Editing Done)

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I’m a week into the edit of AI.

It’s odd.

I really don’t know how else to characterize the experience.  It’s just odd.  Odd that I have written this relatively speaking huge-asgard novel which I’m now poring through in order to catch all the mistakes and make it less, uh, sharknado-ey.  Odd that I’m breaking it apart bit by bit with the literary equivalent of a rock hammer to examine all the weird crusty bits.  Odd that it’s been long enough since I wrote it, and the project was big enough, and I let enough time pass that I don’t even recall writing some of what I definitely wrote.  I mean, there were no pen-wielding hobos in my employ.  I didn’t black out during any of the writing (that I’m aware of).  It’s all me, and it sounds like me, even if I don’t recognize it as such.

I’m an English teacher by trade, though, and I can’t shake the simple and obvious comparison that editing this monster is a bit like grading a sharknado-ey sophomore English paper.  Mind you, my grammar and syntax are a touch better than the average 15-year-old’s, but the process is the same.  “Oh, I see what you were after here, but you worded it awkwardly and it feels like pins and needles in my skull when I read this.”  Out comes the red pen.  “Stop showing off your gargantuan vocabulary, you’ll alienate the reader.”  Big “x” through the offending word.  “What the f*$&@ were you thinking?”  Entire paragraph circled and slated for demolition.  Or the ever-enigmatic, simple and yet baffling “no” marked next to a passage that was deemed, for some reason or another, offensive to the eye or mind.

And let’s not sugarcoat things here, there is a LOT of red ink on this draft.

I thought it was pretty good when I wrote it.  To be fair, I still think most of it is pretty good, but I see an almost endless array of ways for it to be better.  Clunky language here.  Overused modifiers there.  Odd out-of-body-experience repetition in this particular area.  Missing elements.  Unnecessary descriptions.  Vagueness.  Overspecificity.  If there’s a writing sin for it, I’ve committed that sin, probably on the Sabbath and while facing away from Mecca.  I may have mixed metaphors as well.  But, on the whole, I’ve not had to make any major changes to the draft or to the copy.  The biggest changes I’ve made so far are the removal of one entire paragraph describing a character — I thought it was better to let the character’s actions speak for her — and the addition of a paragraph bridging the mental gap I made between a character understanding a problem and moving toward a solution.  It was too easy, and upon re-reading it, I realized that in the best of cases it simply didn’t make sense, and in the worst of cases not only did it not make sense, but it was also insulting and cliche in its avoidance of sense.

But the little things are the little things.  I know that the Big Problems are out there in the deep water, cruising the depths and waiting for me to circle back.  These monsters I created in the draft are hungry, and their teeth are fearsome and seeking.  I’m skipping around the shallows right now in a waverunner, but to deal with those leviathans, I’m going to need a bigger boat.

I’m new to this game, but it seems to me like the editing process is highly subjective and personal.  Before I jumped in, I was terrified that there might be a right way and a wrong way to do it, that I’d screw up the pudding and cause the whole souffle to fall if I didn’t tackle things in the proper order and with the proper technique.  But the water is always shocking when you first jump in.  I’m starting to feel comfortable, to establish a routine, and to feel as if I have a decent gameplan in mind for slaying this dragon.

For reference (yours if you’re thinking about embarking on a journey like mine, mine if it changes later and I disavow everything I’ve written to date), here’s how I’m tackling it.

  • I read my draft in MS Word with Track Changes enabled.
  • I keep a notepad open in front of me while I read.
  • I parse about five pages — or 3000 words — per day.
  • Major plot points and character developments get noted in the notepad.
  • Problems with the copy are either addressed immediately (I clean up vagueness or messy language) or highlighted for the second pass.
  • On the opposite-facing page of the notepad, I keep a running to-do list of things I need to fix when I come back for the second pass.  (These tend to be the more involved things that I can’t do in just a few minutes, like giving a better description of a character, or figuring out where and when I need to introduce an element that needs to be present for later in the story.)

It’s tedious, no doubt, and part of me wants to follow some advice I’ve seen elsewhere, which is to just hunker down and read through the whole thing in one go: a couple of days or so, and leave all the fixing for Future Mes to figure out.  But I don’t know if that’s how I work, for better or for worse.  When I clean house (and here my wife is laughing her butt off), I try to clean everything all at once.  I’ll be polishing a countertop in the kitchen, then see a doodad that belongs in the living room.  I stop polishing to return the doodad and I see that the doodads are out of alignment.  So I take a moment to straighten them out, and I discover a missing piece to a set of decorative doohickeys in our bedroom.  Naturally, I stop the alignment of the doodads to return the doohickey, and then I see that the trashcans upstairs need emptying, and soon an hour has passed and my wife is asking me why the hell it’s taking me so long to clean the countertops in the kitchen.

I can’t say it’s the most efficient way to process this first draft, but I think it’s working so far.  At the very least I feel productive, and since this is all about me, I’m going to take that and be joyful for now.

I’ll keep you posted when it’s time to tangle with the sharks.