Tag: metaphors

The Neverending Edit

Pavowski5 Comments

A couple of good (read: productive) days of editing the novel have got me feeling, well, productive about my time off from work thus far, but they also have me mired in doubt. I feel kind of like the horse… was it Artex? … from The Neverending Story, who wandered into the swamp of sadness or whatever and finally got so depressed and full of doubt that he was unable to move and just sank into the depths with hardly a whimper. (By the way, what the hell? Who puts something like that in a movie ostensibly for children? Let’s just have this horse — beloved by one of the main characters of the film — just fargoing give up on life. That won’t scar the children in the audience forever. Come to think of it, that movie as a whole is actually pretty bleak. The entire story world gets sucked up into The Nothing? This vast, invisible, intractable force? Okay, let me un-digress…)

Yeah. Mired. I feel like the leg of the edit I’m working on is a solid one, one that does good things for the story, but I’m afraid that I’m doing it all wrong, and as a result, I’m afraid to take much further action. Fearful of breaking the thing further. Fearful that I’ve sunk in dozens of hours working in the wrong direction. Which is probably why I’ve been hiding from the novel behind all those excuses for the past couple weeks.

But we all know that the only thing hiding accomplishes is wasted time, and running from the inevitable means you only die tired. No, the thing to do is to lean into the skid, embrace the suck, power through the rest of this edit, and brace myself for the feedback to come. Because I’m pretty sure that, after I can get all the sprockets and gizmos stuffed back into the chest cavity and do one more polishing pass, I’m going to send it out to some readers and solicit some feedback from a mind that isn’t mine.

And, boy, oh, boy. That was an idea I had pretty much already decided upon in my head, but actually giving voice to it and putting it in writing fills me with an entirely new sense of dread. For all that I think I’m telling a good story, that I think it works and will resonate with audiences, I simply can’t know.

A metaphor that gets tossed around in my life as a teacher is that “we jump out of the plane and build our parachute on the way down,” which always gets a few laughs but is really a horrible way to approach education. The metaphor is apt, though, for the writing world, I think. I just have to trust that this parachute I’m building won’t be shredded like my confidence when I finally unfurl the thing.

Trying for a short story by the end of the week, but outside of that, I may give myself a few days off from the blarg. All the cool kids are doing it, and there is a lot of action for our family (families) at Christmas. So, you know. This might be my last entry for a few days. Unless it isn’t.

Late-night indecision is fun!

Also, look at the lame-o who calls 10:30 late-night! What a sap!

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.

Sharks.

Pavowski4 Comments

I’m on vacation in beautiful Panama City Beach this weekend, courtesy of a father-in-law who loves it here and takes the family every chance he gets, and a school system kind enough to give teachers a four-day weekend in mid-October.  What’s that?  The kids get the long weekend too?  Meh.

I’ve been here before, but there’s something different about being here as an adult and being here as a kid, or for that matter, a pre-adult.  The opportunities for relaxation are virtually endless.  The beach is powder-fine and not too crowded this time of year, the water is a glorious iridescent bluey-green swirl, the temperatures are warm but not oppressive, the sunrises and sunsets are transcendent.

And I have ruined it all by peopling the waters with sharks.

Metaphorical ones, mind you.  I did see a shark here last time we visited — tiny one, about the length of my arm, just cruising the shallows like a deadly, silent Roomba — but I don’t think those are terribly common to these parts.  No, my sharks are sharks of the mind, because I have done a thing that I swore as a teacher I would never do: I have brought work with me on vacation.

I don’t have any excuse.  It’s a terrible move, but it’s the end of the quarter, I’m behind on grading (juggling 180 students will do that to a man, no matter how well-meaning), and it simply has to get done.  I’ve got a stack of about fifty student essays to grade and a gradebook full of back assignments that have to be put into the electronic grading system before I head back on Tuesday.

So as we pulled in to the condo and took the first breathtaking look at the view from our balcony, I saw not only the vast unknowable expanse of the ocean but also the ominous stack of paper tucked away in my bag.  I saw not only the pearlescent sands where my pasty skin will suffer hideous burns, but also the labyrinth of clicks and categories and long webpage loading times that I must walk to get all these grades put in.

In short, I look at that water and I see mothertrucking sharks.

Because I know that as soon as I let my bare feet sink into that sand, as soon as I dunk one toe in the ocean, the moment I watch my son’s face light up when he hits that beach, those papers and grades and all my obligations are going to melt away from my mind like so much butter on a hot plate.  And then they are going to devour me when I get back to work on Tuesday.  In fact, I’ve already chummed the waters, because in between the last sentence and this one, I brought the laptop out onto the deck with me and the cool night breeze is drifting through what’s left of my hair and the starlight is twinkling on the waves and the headlights are floating slowly past on the strip and all I can think about is how glorious my run will be in the morning and how many hours I can possibly let my son play on the beach before people start to question whether I’m his father.  (You know, cuz his skin will be a delicious ochre color before we leave, I’ve no doubt.)

This might be a time to panic with all these sharks circling about.  Or maybe it’s time to remember that these are only metaphorical sharks, and as such pose as much threat to me as a whiff of vegetarian pasta.  (Unpleasant, but not ultimately harmful.)  Times like these call for bigger boats, or maybe just bigger glasses of wine.

Mm, wine. Time to chum the waters a little more.

This post is part of SoCS.

Launching the Edit Express

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It’s underway.

I’ve read about three hundred blog posts and articles and comments on editing your novel and come to the conclusion that it’s just time to jump in the deep end and get on with it.  No sense in beleaguering the issue and putting it off — I had a secret goal to complete this novel within the span of a year, and if that’s going to happen, it’s time to get on the stick.  Leading up to it, I was terrified.  Sure I’d be unable to identify the errors or that I would wrongly let the crappy stuff slide through or worse, that I’d stomp out the good bits.

Well, I’m three days in.  The water was a shock at first, but I’m acclimating fast.  I’ve no idea if I’m doing it properly or not.  Basically I’m reading the first draft, jotting notes on a to-do list, and trying to track the major developments to make sure they make sense.  I’m also tidying up the copy as I go, fixing the finicky bits and cleaning up obvious errors and boring prose.

Some of the stuff that needs attention jumps out at me.  I overused the HELL out of the “sigh”, be it the exasperated sigh, the relieved sigh, the boy-that-turned-out-exactly-the-way-I-expected sigh.  So a lot of those sighs are in serious need of makeovers.  If there’s a better, cleaner, more interesting solution that comes ready to mind, I fix it.  If not, I highlight it for attention on the next pass.  There’s also some occasional redundancy that I wouldn’t have necessarily expected from myself — hey, everybody thinks he writes pretty decently and clearly the first time through, right? — which is easy enough to fix.  Like, I encountered a sentence today that said something along the lines of, “He picked up the glass and took a sip as he picked up the glass.”  Past me, in full-on Id-Writer mode, wrote that, thinking it was, you know, not total nonsense.  I guess the flow of the first draft isn’t always so clear and collected.

Then there’s other stuff that hides in the weeds, hoping I’ll glide past without noticing it.  I parsed a sentence wherein my hero “sat down at his desk, clutching her note in his hand,” and was about to keep on reading when I realized there had been no mention of a note in previous pages.  I asked the Id-Writer about it and he produced some vague snarls and growls that might have communicated something about a note and how it ended up in the hero’s possession, but it was about as easy to decipher as a bunch of feathers and teeth cast on a scrying table.  There are portions of the draft where Past Me left a trail of breadcrumbs for Future Me (now, I guess, Present Me) to follow: “go back and write in a scene where he cuts off the finger of his greatest rival,” for instance.  This was not one of those times.  So I’m in the dark about whatever brilliant idea I thought I had at the moment I was having it, and now I get to go prowling through the woods after it with the dim flashlight of my dubious memory.

The upshot of the process so far (and I know, I know, I’m a whopping three days in, what do I know yet about upshots — the sharknado hasn’t even speculated about the eventuality of getting real yet) is that I feel like I’m doing a pretty solid job of stomping out the charred, overcooked bits of prose where I was obviously buzzing the tower.  There haven’t been a lot of them — yet — but there are passages that stick out like a thumb that was hit with a hammer, treated with salve, became infected when the salve entered the bloodstream through a papercut, and then got hit with a hammer again.  Obviously out of character for the story or even for me.  There have literally been moments when I sat at the desk wondering if it was really possible that I wrote the words on the page in front of me, even though to think otherwise is ludicrous.  But then I think about that Id-Writer on his chain in the unlit basement and I recall those days when I’d churn out a thousand, or twelve hundred, or sixteen hundred words without even realizing the passage of time…

Not to make light of a serious mental condition, but I am starting to wonder, are writers in general as schizophrenic as I feel?  I honestly feel that the first draft of this novel was a conglomeration whacked together by not just me, but by three or four different versions of me, each with a different sense of humor, sense of timing, sense of language.  Then I wonder if that fragmented perception is a strike against the novel intrinsically (the story itself is fraught with problems that make it feel fragmented) or against the Me that wrote it in the first place (I’m fragmented as a writer because I don’t know myself or my voice or how to even tell a fargoing story yet).  Then I wonder if I’m not overthinking the whole thing (not that I’d ever be guilty of that) or even using parentheses too much (as if that were even possible).

All this, and I’m all of, oh, about six thousand words into the draft.  It feels like the start of a long road trip in a car with a gaggle of mildly psychotic socially inept know-it-alls.  Except in this metaphor, the radio is busted so we’ve got nothing to do but listen to each other kvell about the various problems with the blah blah blah and what each of us would do to fix the yada yada yada and what we really like about the et cetera.  And it’s a long fargoing way to Vegas.

Not sure why we’re headed to Vegas in this metaphor, but it felt right.  What happens in the editing mobile stays in the editing mobile, unless somebody dies or vomits.  Then we stop for air fresheners.

Holy Sharknado, it’s Really Happening

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I was writing along today, enjoying myself, working on a cute little scene between the hero and the love interest, and WriteMonkey’s little heads-up display bar ticked over.  It does this constantly, tracking word count, the time I’m writing in the current session, the time until the next save (WM can be configured to save automatically, as often even as every five seconds.  This is a feature I laughed at when I first started writing with it, but it has actually saved me a couple of times.  Not the every five seconds thing.  That’s excessive to the point of lunacy.  The automatic save thing.  Every thirty seconds has been more than sufficient.).  Nifty little program, as I’ve said before.  But today’s little tick was more significant than most, because today the progress meter ticked over to 50%.

See, way back when I started writing, I set a goal of ninety thousand words for this little endeavor I’m tarrying away at, the way a man who’s never run a step in his life might stand at the start line of the Boston Marathon and say, okay, the finish line is out there somewhere.  The way I imagine the Apollo astronauts looked up at the moon and said, “There it is.”  The way, perhaps, that my dog watches the mail truck driving by and thinks, “one day.”  At the time, it seemed lofty, massively optimistic, and even a little foolish.  A goal so distant and unattainable it might as well have been on Pluto (alas poor Pluto, we hardly knew ye).  WriteMonkey merrily and quietly accepted the leviathan goal I had set for myself and popped a happy little 8% indicator down in the corner.  Every day I write a few more words and it increases, one tick at a time. 

That was (wait, let me check) 44 days ago.  44 proper days, mind you, not 44 writing days (weekends are for not working!).  44 days!  A month and not quite a half to hit the halfway point.  I’ll save the champagne and the sparklers for a more momentous occasion, but suffice it to say, I am pretty jazzed.  Having been a runner for a little while, running metaphors spring naturally to mind; it’s like reaching the turnaround point on a long run.  It was hard work to get here, and it will be hard work to get back, but there’s nothing for it – nobody’s going to drive out here and pick my tired, dehydrated asgard up.  Mile 13.1 of a marathon: you’ve come this far, it’s nonsense to even think of not finishing now.

It’s hard to believe that I’ve written so much.  Forty-five thousand words is no small chunk of writing.  I don’t want to dump on myself too badly, but I’m a little bit surprised that I’ve done so well.  Frankly, I expected of myself a lot more waffling, a lot more excuses, a lot more days when I just didn’t feel like getting the work done, and a lot of not actually meeting my goals.  At the risk of sounding like a jerk, I know Past Me pretty well, and that guy is LAZY.  But Past Me is trying to change his ways, Present Me is holding the course, and Future Me is reaping the benefits of our sticktoitiveness.  Granted, our sticktoitiveness is creating for that guy an ever growing pile of hog slobber that he’s going to have to go wading through to find the tasty bits, but hey, that’s a problem for THAT GUY.

It’s pretty overwhelming to look at how far I’ve come and how much (or rather how LITTLE) I have left to go.  It almost makes me sad to think that I’m entering the downward slope of this thing.  To think that in 45 days (assuming I stay productive over the summer, KNOCK ON FARGOING WOOD) I could have a finished draft of this story that I never actually thought I’d get around to turning into a book … I just don’t know what to say.  It suddenly feels real in a way that it hasn’t really felt real despite all the work I’ve been putting in.

Who knew that this was something that was legitimately within my capabilities?  I sure as sharknado didn’t.  I fully expected, on a level I didn’t and haven’t and probably won’t talk about, to end up in a ditch after a few weeks, sobbing internally as I walked away from the smoldering wreckage of another failed project.  I still feel like I’m cheating fate a bit to be where I am.  I spend my writing time trying not to think about how far I’ve come and thus how far I have to fall.  If I don’t think about it so much, I can keep walking the tightrope.  If I don’t look out the window, I don’t have to think about the plane crashing into a mountain.  If I keep putting one foot in front of the other, I just might reach that finish line after all.

Forty-five thousand words to go. Suit up.