Tag: editing

It’s Defective!

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My brain, that is.

The number of idiotic occurences piling up in my rearview is only getting bigger. It started about a month ago when I lost my editing notebook. I looked everywhere for it — at home, at work, in the cars, in the bedroom, under the sofa, in the freezer … you know, all the normal places where you might leave the single most important object in the writing of your novel outside of the novel file itself. For all intents and purposes, the thing had slipped from the earthly realm and vanished to join the lost left socks and misplaced ballpoint pens of the world.

But I’m a forgetful sort, so distressing as it was, losing the notebook wasn’t all that surprising.

Then, a trip to the grocery this weekend. We arrive home and unload the foodstuffs and all is well, until my wife goes looking for the mixed nuts. She doesn’t remember unloading them, I don’t remember unloading them. We scour the cupboards, the countertops, the pantry, the fridge; no dice. I go to check the car to see if maybe I overlooked them while unpacking the car. Negative. Finally, she finds them stuck on top of the fridge behind a bunch of half-empty boxes of cereal, because of course mixed nuts belong on top of the fridge where they can’t be seen–where else would they go?

Today, I go to get in the van to head home from work, and it stinks. The inside of the van smells like a dead raccoon moldering in a ditch. This is patently weird because by and large, we don’t eat in the van. The kids do, though, and on reflection I decide it’s possible the sprout spilled some milk and it’s going bad under the seats. On the hunt I go, only to discover, lying between the second and third row seats, a grocery bag with a four-pound pack of chicken. Two days in the sun, rotting away and befouling the plastic bag that’s thankfully still wrapped around it. Let’s not forget that this very chicken was sitting in the floor of the van the very night before, when I was out looking for mixed nuts, and I completely failed to notice it. Of course I don’t misplace a box of crackers which would be perfectly good after a few days in a hot car, or even a box of popsicles which might melt harmlessly in their wrappers; no, I mislay ten dollars worth of chicken which has to be thrown right out.

Well, today wasn’t done with me.

I found the notebook.

This would be a good thing if it didn’t make me feel so very painfully idiotic. It was on my desk at work. Right there, plainly sat on the desktop, albeit obscured under another, larger, notebook. For four weeks, it was right there, within arm’s reach. Were it a snake, as my dad likes to say, it would have bitten me dozens of times over. I’m happy to have it back, but … really? For all the digging through closets and rooting around file cabinets and dumping out of desk drawers, I couldn’t bother to displace one notebook on my desktop?

I’m starting to think it’s not just my aging brain, not just simple forgetfulness or absent-mindedness. I think my subconscious was actively trying to keep the thing hidden away from me all this time. How else could it hide for so long in virtually plain sight? Had I stayed locked in with the notes I was taking, would the narrative-shattering idea which struck me yesterday have ever lit in my brain? I think it far more likely I would have finished my first pass and rolled on with the rewrite without pausing to re-evaluate the work as a whole — something I was forced to do on account of having lost my notes from the beginning of the edit.

Or maybe, as I am wont to do, I’ve made entirely too much of a meaningless coincidence. Things don’t always have to mean things. Nah, it’s probably just my brain rotting away from the inside. I’ll be in the shower, looking for my keys.

A Late Entry

Pavowski1 Comment

I’ve previously noticed about myself that I’m a glutton for punishment.

As it happens, I’m pretty adept at doling it out for myself too. Nobody is harsher with my work, less impressed with my excuses, or harder to satisfy with my accomplishments than me.

And I’ve done a fair amount of kvelling here on the blarg about the knots that working on this novel has tied me into. The self-imposed deadlines, the lingering sense of doubt about whether any of the writing is any good, and the general disarray with which I’ve approached the edit, just to name a few. Last time, however, I pointed out (with not a hint of ego!) that I was done with phase one of the edit and slowly bringing the ship around for the next leg of the journey. That leg starts tomorrow, with all the notes that I’ve made on the draft and the (troublingly extensive) list of holes I have to plug to make the thing seaworthy. In short, the task ahead was looking gargantuan, but achievable.

Then, this morning, I had an idea. A fantastic idea. An awful idea. An awfully fantastic idea, and a fantastically awful one. The idea that I’ve had is an excellent one.

I love this idea. I think it does wonders for the story and it provides an element that perhaps has been missing all along while escaping my notice. It affords me a way to tie up some loose ends which I will readily admit were a bit hastily tied in the first draft and need some serious re-tying in the second. It gives me a chance to bring some redemption to a character who could sorely use some and some doubt and aspersion for one who is a little too pristine and unsullied. I can get a lot done towards the fixing of this story with the inclusion of this idea.

I also hate this idea. It came out of nowhere and I wonder if including it will feel a little bit Deus ex Machina-ish. Including it will also include the re-writing of several — by which I mean more than I can count on one or maybe two hands and possibly also my feet — critical sections of the book. It will mean lengthening the narrative to make room for the new stuff, and I sort of feel that the story is at a good enough length already. It will mean not so much tweaking and trimming in rewrites as breaking and smashing and gutting.

“It” is a new character, and the idea for him struck me while I was watching, of all things, “Mater’s Tall Tales” with my two-year-old this morning. In short, my novel is about characters living on two sides of a magical divide and figuring out how to make that work — this guy’s role would be to keep the rest of them from doing so. TO BRING BALANCE TO THE FORCE.  Well, maybe to my narrative. He’s sort of an antagonist to the antagonists, but he’s certainly not on the side of the protagonists. To sum it up without giving details away, he’s a monkey wrench. And while throwing this monkey wrench into the whirring innards of my story might do really fascinating things to the narrative, it will without a doubt do to the actual machinery of the story what actual monkey wrenches do to actual machines, which probably involves breaking it beyond recognition before I start putting it back together again.

I may take a day to ponder the ramifications of making this change, because it’s a whole boatload of extra work I was not planning on having as I began the second phase of this edit. Then again, the benefits could be immeasurable. Of course, to continue the monkey wrench metaphor, maybe all it will do is break a machine that’s operating perfectly well on its own.

What to do? At what point is it too late to make changes to the entire landscape of a narrative?

Part of me wants to accept what I have, forget this new idea, and move on with the work I’d set out for myself. Another part wants to run with this idea, invent this guy and stick him into the story, then start the long work of cleaning up the mess that follows. I can’t decide if I’m thrilled or destroyed at the prospect.

Dammit.

Progress Update: Last Chance for Gas

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Today, a pretty big milestone in novel progress.

Thanks to a gargantuan push stemming from a renewal of gumption at the beginning of the week, I processed the last thirty pages of the draft over the past three days and am ready to start on my last phase of rewrites for this first editing pass.

To clarify, “processed” means I read it, cleaned up the stinky bits of language, corrected typos, and fixed the bric-a-brac on the shelves, all the while making notes about walls that need tearing down, wires that need ripping out, and pipes that need sealing. That’s the big, scary work, and that will begin … probably next week. Tomorrow I hope to review the first half of the novel to recreate the notes I lost with my old notes and finish creating an outline of the book as it stands. If I have time leftover, I’m going to map out the character arcs and think about re-ordering some portions of the novel.

To be fair, the processing was the easy part, and the much harder work–rewriting the crap bits, changing major plot points, going back to the beginning to plant seeds which need to be fully grown by the end–is still ahead. That’s the stage that’s truly harrowing. It stretches out on the horizon like an endless desert, and somehow I know there are no pit stops along the way; there will be no gas stations or emergency call boxes if I blow a tire or make a wrong turn. However, the big push this week has me crackling with energy and enthusiasm to keep pushing.

And the funniest thing happened as I was reading the last pages.

I realized that I really, really like the story. And I’m saying that not to toot my own horn, but because I truly think that for all the tribulations and for all I thought the book was awful when I was writing it, upon further review and after several months to get some space, ultimately it seems to me that the novel is not that bad. I’ve still got big decisions to make, the fates of characters to decide. I’ll have to destroy some of the helpless squealing unformed bits that I enjoyed so much at the beginning and create brand new replacement parts on the fly, but somehow that task doesn’t seem so daunting.

And that’s not even the best part.

When I was writing the first draft, I could feel myself running out of steam by the end. The last twenty thousand words or so felt like the last miles of a marathon; even with the finish line in sight, even riding on the balmy current of you’re-almost-there-itis, I could feel my knees giving out, my quads locking up, my lungs collapsing in on themselves. I felt like the ending I was writing was simply a placeholder, something awful I was writing to simply get the project to a stopping point so that I could rewrite it later and forget I ever wrote something so bad. But reading it the last couple of days, I find that I’m actually a pretty big fan of the ending. The characters end in good places (while good of course doesn’t necessarily mean “good” for the character, but rather “good” for the story), the critical loose ends are tied up, and there’s a nice sense of completeness to the whole thing. My wife thinks I should leave it open for a sequel in case this thing goes all Harry Potter on me, and I think that the potential to continue is there, though certainly the story could (and does) stand on its own.

There are holes to patch. Rotted boards to replace, rough edges to smooth down. But on the whole I think this thing is moving as it should past the ugly formative stages into the workable beta-reading stage. Which is itself simultaneously amazing and terrifying, because that means that I’m going to have to pry my whitened knuckles from its tender edges and let it go out into the world to be read by people who don’t know the time I’ve spent with it, who don’t know the love and the pain and the suffering and the insanity and the laughter and the frustration and the days and nights and the weekends spent living with these characters, exploring all the plotlines, envisioning the world of the story. Nobody can know all that, but they’re going to have to judge it all the same, and my only hope is that when that time comes, maybe they won’t return it to me and ask, “why did you bother?”

For all my confidence at the high points along this journey, I am still terrified that I’ll be unmasked as a pretender at this whole writing gig. I fear that my internal barometer for assessing the story is hopelessly warped and that I have no proper idea what makes a story actually readable or compelling or enjoyable in the least. But this is no time for entertaining those fears. It’s nearing time to cut the cord and throw this fledgling creation of mine out of the nest and see if it can fly.

I just hope that when that time does finally arrive, I can survive the feedback.

Staying Motivated (or, how to keep writing on those days when the writing sucks)

Pavowski9 Comments

I’ve struggled with motivation mightily in the months since I started working on my novel.

Some days I feel buoyed by powerful waves of motivation, a deep, slow-burning desire to write and create and push this thing forward.  On those days, it’s all I can do to get myself in front of the computer before the ideas and the words start clawing their way out of my skull.  The plotlines and characters and conflicts dance around in my headspace subconsciously all day, sometimes resolving themselves in time to be written down in neat orderly arrays, other times becoming tangled and spilling out onto the page like intestines from a vicious gut wound.  Motivation isn’t a question on those days.  I’m going to write, regardless of what else I may have going on.

Other days I’m Sisyphus, and my novel is a big boulder the size of six or seven giant men and the hill I have to push it up is high indeed.  Even thinking about the task makes me feel weary and exhausted, and my mind starts thinking of all the other things in my life that need doing in this moment, and wouldn’t it be easier to focus on those things and then, maybe after I’ve done those things, I’ll feel like writing and I can get some work done.  Except, as anybody who’s ever put something off knows, you arrive at the end of the day and you still don’t feel like working on the novel, and what’s more you don’t have time to work properly on it anyway, and also you feel crappy about the fact that you haven’t gotten anything done with it today.  The simple act of even reading your own work to see where you’ve just come from and where you might go next seems like a slog through an endless swamp.  These days it feels impossible to write.

But the writing doesn’t change.  The book is just a book, just a story waiting to be told.  The characters, lively as they may be, are but lumps of clay looking for hands to shape them.  It’s only my perception of the work that seems to affect my motivation to work on it.  So how do you cultivate motivation?  Here are some humble ideas.

And I realize as I edit this post that while this dubious advice seems to fit for writing, I think it applies for staying motivated at just about anything, and if that’s the case, so be it.

  • Eyes on the Prize: On those days when I just don’t feel like writing, I have to remind myself that if it was easy, everybody would do it.  Anything worth doing is worth working hard for, and the book isn’t going to write itself; the words aren’t just going to arrange themselves on the page for me.  Yes, I may be a bit stuck on the story.  Yes, I might be a bit confounded by what this character is trying to do.  But these are Writer Problems, and it’s a writer’s job to solve those problems.  If I want to be a writer — to have that success, to have that recognition, to complete a Story Worth Telling — it’s no good hiding from the work.  When it gets hard, when it gets overwhelming, when it seems impossible, I start asking myself, “do you really want it?”  And almost always, I find that I can get some work done after all.
  • Plan of Attack:  If you were to ask me if I were an organized person, I would begin by laughing hysterically.  Then I might offer you a picture of my garage, or my desk, or my bedroom, and you’d quickly realize that not only am I not by any stretch organized, I might not even know what the word means.  But organization has been key to staying motivated and keeping the boulder rolling uphill.  But I don’t mean organization in the general sense of having a place for everything and everything in its place.  (I strive for that, but I often miss the target.)  I mean rather knowing what I want to accomplish within a given time frame, having a clear idea of what’s to be done on that day, seeing the obstacles and knowing perhaps not exactly how I will deal with them but at least that I am capable.  Notes to myself are invaluable for this.  Every day of drafting I’d finish with a little note to myself: “introduce this character tomorrow.”  “wrap up this scene tomorrow.”  “go back and establish that the main character carries a Taser in her purse so that she can zap this guy now.”  I need to know what needs to happen next more than I need to know what I’ll be doing in three weeks.
  • Window of Opportunity:  One of my favorite quotes of late says something along the lines of, “never put off a dream because of the time it will take to achieve it.  The time will pass anyway.”  And to say that time is a factor when it comes to motivation is a ridiculous understatement.  You need time to do the work.  You need time to do the other stuff in your life so that you can focus on the work.  And time doesn’t give a slippery sharknado about you or your work.  Time is going to roll on past you like a bus rolling past a pile of dog vomit.  If I’m sitting around waiting to find time to get the writing done, then the writing just isn’t going to get done that day.  I have to decide, early on during the day if not the day before, when I’m going to get the writing done.  Maybe tomorrow I can carve out time on my lunch break.  The day after, my wife has a class, so I can do some writing that evening.  However I do it, I have to seize the time, carve it from the still thrashing carcass of the beast, if I want to write that day.  I have to create the window of opportunity for myself to work in.
  • Achievable Goals: It’s too big to think “I need to work on the book today.”  What the balls does that even mean?  Character outlines?  Plot diagrams?  Word count?  No, if I’m going to be focused and motivated to do the writing, I need a goal to work toward that I can actually accomplish during a working session.  Write 900 words today.  Introduce this character into the scene.  End this scene.  All these little goals are part and parcel of the big goal — work on the book — but the difference is, they are things I can get done.  How do you eat an elephant?  One bite at a time.
  • Embrace the Suck: There are days wherein, despite the best of intentions, I’m going to write crap.  I’ll read back over a passage and wish that somebody else had written it, because surely, surely, I can’t be that bad, that uncreative, that uninspired.  And it’s all too easy to see that happening, to take stock of the growing puddle of sharknado on the page, and say NOPE, the work sucks, I suck, writing sucks.  I’m taking my ball and going home.  And I think that’s a normal reaction (correct me if I’m wrong).  But nobody works perfect the first time around, or for that matter, the second or the third.  There came a point where I realized that it was okay to write something terrible, as long as I was working toward the goal.  It’s easier to rewrite something, to clean it up and tweak it, than it is to start from scratch.  It’s easier to bust a thing apart and start over, even, because you still have all the pieces to work with when it’s time to put it back together.  If I can hold it together and write through the bad days and write when it’s awful, then it keeps the pipes clear for when the ideas want to flow on their own.

To put all this in perspective, here’s a turn that’s happened in the last few weeks.  A few weeks back, I lost the notebook I’ve been using to keep notes for my edit.  I keep notes in the draft as well, but big stuff that needs fixing in the work as a whole went into the notebook.  And it was just gone.  It’s still gone.  And with it went much of my motivation.  I’d lost a significant portion of work, lost a ton of time, and felt overwhelmed at the prospect of going back and doing much of the same work again.  And my work over the past few weeks has suffered.  I’ve been dragging my feet, doing the work at the last minute, doing the bare minimum, even skipping days.  I was dreading the writing.

Well, yesterday I accepted the fact that the notebook was gone and started a new one.  And yeah, it sucks looking at those blank pages that I have to refill.  And it’s painful writing down notes that I’ve already written and retreading ground that I’ve covered before.  But somehow, just accepting the loss and refocusing my effort has given me the best couple of days of editing that I’ve had in a month.  I’m not saying I’ve done the best work, I’m saying I feel better about the work.  Perception is everything.  I refocused from the lost notebook to getting the book done, I made a new plan around my new notebook, I got serious again about making my own time to work, and I accepted the lost work and moved on.  Suddenly, working on the book is that thing I can’t wait to do again.

Tomorrow, the pendulum may swing back the other way, but I’ll keep working anyway.  Motivation isn’t some magic elixir you can drink and suddenly be filled with purpose.  It’s just another thing to be worked at.

 

Losing it

Pavowski2 Comments

For every thing I’ve done right on this first-time-writing-a-novel thing, I feel I’ve done two or three things wrong.  I work at it most every day, but I don’t always work organized.  I take notes as I work, but those notes are not always coherent or even helpful.  I read tons of writing advice, and sometimes I read so much writing advice I overthink when I should just be writing.

This week, the biggest writing sin yet.  Except if I’m honest, it’s not a this week, it’s more a past-couple-of-weeks thing.

I lost my editing notebook.

My editing process is twofold.  Rather, it was twofold.  I kept notes in the margins of the text as I worked, especially writing down things which were too big to tackle while I’m trying to work quickly through the draft or things I wasn’t sure how to fix.  I also kept my notebook handy, writing down a running list of general things which needed fixing in the novel as a whole; continuity issues, missing elements, character arcs, and a running outline of the book.

Losing this book is driving me up the walls.  I’m so incredibly frustrated.  First of all, for losing all that work that I’ve done and will have to re-do (never mind that I won’t be able to do it the same way next time around).  Second, for the loss of momentum; I haven’t taken notes the same way elsewhere because I keep hoping the thing will turn up and I don’t want to deal with copying notes over or, god help me, keeping two notebooks.  Third, and probably worst of all, I am a jerk to myself.  I mean, a rat bastard.  The Howler Monkey of Doubt has been on a gleeful screeching bender since the book has gone missing: “YOU’RE AN IDIOT FOR LOSING IT, IT MUST NOT HAVE MATTERED TO YOU THAT MUCH, GOOD LUCK ACTUALLY GETTING PUBLISHED IF YOU CAN’T EVEN KEEP UP WITH A LOUSY NOTEBOOK HAW HAW HAW”.  Yeah, that guy always speaks in all caps, he’s as annoying as you could imagine, and he’s in my head ALL THE TIME.

I’ve tried all the tricks.  Retraced my steps.  Looked through all my bags, every drawer in every desk near any place I ever work on the novel.  Checked the cars.  Checked the floor under the desk.  Checked under the bed.  Looked in the tank on the back of the toilet.  Anywhere I might conceivably have been thumbing through the thing.  Not a sign of it.  I’ve uncovered all kinds of things I thought lost or thrown away forever — some very nice pens I thought I’d lost, a few decks of cards I used in class during my first year teaching, my old notebook I used as a soccer coach last year — but not the one thing I need.  It’s either been stolen by a malevolent authorial gremlin or maybe, JUST MAYBE, some clearer-thinking, much more level-headed version of myself hid it away, knowing I’m going about this edit all wrong.

Because make no mistake, I constantly fear that I’m doing all this writerly stuff wrong.  I drafted wrong, I’m taking notes wrong, I’m evaluating the copy wrong, I’m not reading critically enough, I’m reading too critically, I’m working too slowly through the draft, I’m not taking enough time… name it, I’ve had that spot of doubt.  Let’s not pretend I haven’t lost things that mattered before, but they always seem to turn up eventually.  I’m going on about two weeks without my notebook, and considering I was using it just about every day, it’s making less and less sense that I simply mislaid it.

I’m talking this in circles and it doesn’t help, but I can’t adequately describe the depths of my frustration with myself for losing this thing.  Granted, I could probably re-create the notes I’d taken in the book with a night or two of dedicated work, but the simple fact that it’s been lost in the first place has so disheartened me…

Ugh.  If it doesn’t show up over the weekend I’m going to have to start the stupid notebook over from scratch.