Tag: Writing

The Thunderdome of Ideas

Pavowski7 Comments

How do you make sense of the ideas that occur to you?

I’m talking here about stories, lyrics, visions, hell, even blarg ideas. They come from somewhere, and whether that source is some external stimulus like a news story or a fantastic article or a brilliant film or a gripping novel, they all end up getting filtered through the mire of neurons and synapses inside your skull. Which means that from the time an idea first strikes, it gets tossed into the Thunderdome that’s raging inside your head at any given moment.

Maybe I should step away from the second person (pardon me, second person) and stick to the first (oh, hi, me). It’s a Thunderdome in my head. Many ideas enter. Few survive to be acted upon.

Seriously. It’s a wonder I can get anything done. I’m as scatterbrained as they come, so when a new idea strikes for me, it’s thrown into the arena with the other millions of things I’m thinking about, which include, but are not limited to:

  • My kids and whether I’ve remembered to feed them / change their diapers / change their clothes / clean up their messes / set a good example for them / actually know where they are at the moment / OH GOD WHERE ARE THE KIDS
  • The dollars and cents flowing through all the metaphorical holes in my metaphorical pockets (because money isn’t real anymore you know, it’s all just ones and zeros on some bank program and okay this is not a conspiracy theory blog) and all the stress associated with that.
  • The fact that it’s winter, and in the four winters we’ve weathered in this house, we’ve had pipes freeze and burst in the walls twice despite our best efforts, so does winter number five mean that nightmare is coming around again…
  • The kids have been quiet for a while, WHAT IS MY TODDLER DOING
  • The scent of burning that’s coming from somewhere and I can’t isolate it… is it the neighbors burning leaves? A car burning oil? The wires in the walls spontaneously combusting and preparing to burn the house down?
  • The theme song from Thomas the Tank Engine just keeps bouncing around in there for no good reason; it certainly isn’t helping me to focus. (Sidenote: “shunt” is a fun word that sounds dirty but isn’t–meaning to shove aside or divert–try using it at parties!)
  • How the balls did my kid dump an entire two pounds of dog food into the water bowl without me hearing it?

And that’s just the past, say, thirty seconds.

So any idea I’m trying to have, whether related to my current novel or any other prospective novel I may ever conceivably get around to writing if I ever finish this one, has to step into the steel cage death match with these other thoughts if it wants to win my focus long enough to be pondered, let alone written down and saved for later. And these other thoughts take no prisoners. They have nailbats and rusty crowbars and spiked shoes. That Thomas theme song carries around a friggin’ garrote in its pocket and will dispatch an interloping idea without batting an eye.

Somehow… somehow… some ideas make it through the riot of distractions and make it into the novel. I’m working on weaving in a particularly good one that occurred to me a few weeks ago while I was writing a blarg post about how I was stuck for ideas about how to improve my draft. Did it arise out of need? Was it the strongest of a series of weak, malformed conceptions of various other plot points I could have used instead, and the strongest survived? Or did it blunder through, catching the toddlers during a nap and catching that Thomas theme song looking the other way long enough to escape into daylight?

I have no idea where the ideas come from or how they get processed. I feel like if I did I’d be a tremendously better writer, and I could therefore avoid unnecessary and cumbersome adverbs in my prose, like “tremendously,” to choose a particularly egregious offender completely at random. Also egregious offenders: “particularly,” “completely,” and “egregious” (not an adverb but still offensive).

See, the idea to sidetrack into all that nonsense about adverbs came from somewhere, I decided it was a good detour to make and I made it. Somebody (even if that somebody is me) sent that message, and somebody (probably me) received it and acted on it.

Where does that impulse come from?

Is that my authorial text-transcending through-line? Is it an undercurrent of subconscious thematic tendency? Or did whoever’s pulling the strings in my writerly Thunderdome take pity on the adverb idea and give it a set of poison-tipped spiked brass knuckles to help it in the fight?

I fear this is one of those unknowable things that philosophers might struggle with through the ages, though they’d perhaps do it more eloquently than with Thunderdomes and brass knuckles. And they’d certainly steer clear of Thomas the Tank Engine and any associated theme songs.

This post is part of SoCS. This week’s prompt was the diabolical homonym quartet of “sense / scents / cents / sent”, a series of words which basically describes why anybody learning English as a second language might end up banging his head against a wall. Because I’m a fool for pain, I used them all.

Shunt.

This One’s a Bleeder

Pavowski2 Comments

To continue my metaphor of narrative surgery, I’ve been working on the edit a good bit the past couple nights, with a few thousand words added in and a lot of trimming and tweaking in the neighboring scenes. But I hit my first really rough patch, and the patient nearly bled out while I watched.

See, there was this one really good scene leading into another really good scene, and the problem with the two was (is) that there’s a character present in the one who I forgot about when I wrote the other. Upon reflection and review, it makes perfect sense for said character not to be present in scene 2, though I rather like her contributions to scene 1. So, one way or another, the appendix must be removed and I have to explain how I removed it. Her. Gah, metaphors.

So I spent my editing time tonight writing a brief intermediary scene wherein the protagonist clumsily gets rid of her. And man… I just think it’s crap. I mean, it does what it needs to do (patching the continuity hole of having her magically disappear from one scene to the next) but it feels so obvious and heavy-handed in the narrative sense of I just needed to get rid of this character that I fear it will break continuity anyway.

Thus, the new scene, created to bridge a gap between two existing scenes and resolve another item precariously perched on the Editing Pile of Stuff now becomes its very own item on the Pile.

I’m tempering my all-consuming self-abuse and the growing screams of the Howler Monkey of Doubt with the knowledge that it’s okay if it’s not perfect at this stage; it can always be polished and refined in later edits. The important thing for now is to make sure that all the musculature is in place and functioning properly; the skin grafts and, you know, general make-it-look-a-little-less-Frankenstein’s-monster-ish-ness can come later.

But man, that’s one raggedy-looking patch job. Almost like I had a grizzled, musclebound soldier on my table with a horrifically injured arm, and I replaced it with a prosthetic molded from a five-year-old girl. Sure, they’re the same parts, but they damn sure don’t match.

Ugh. Have I mentioned that editing sucks so very much worse than drafting?

Thanks.

Pavowski2 Comments

After my monumental gripe with the Holiday season (cringe) yesterday, it seems only fitting to embrace the spirit of the holiday today, so for a little change of pace here on the blarg, here are some things I’m thankful for.

  • I am thankful for my two beautiful children, who, despite their daily assaults on my sanity, are pretty much the most amazing future humans I have ever known.
  • I am thankful for my gorgeous wife, who both calls me on my sharknado and manages to inspire me to be the best version of myself. And who is also one hell of a cook.
  • I am thankful that my wife’s family and mine live within a short hour’s drive from one another, and we are therefore spared the uncomfortable situation of having to choose to spend time with one or the other on days like this. I am also thankful for the two over-the-top dinners we get as a result of this double-dip.
  • I am thankful that despite my recent injuries, I remained in good enough general health to return to running in time to complete a race with my wife and sister this morning, having about as much fun as I’ve had in a while doing something that wasn’t all about my kids.
  • I am thankful for my job. Whether it was something I ever saw myself doing notwithstanding, the stability it has brought to our house has made a lot of things possible over the last couple of years, not least of which are the births of my children and my wife’s continuing education. We are not rich, but we are comfortable, and it’s hard to overstate the depth of appreciation I have for that comfort.
  • I am thankful that, for whatever reason, I decided to embrace my fears and my wants and begin capital “W” Writing this year. It’s been a terrifying and enlightening journey, one that I hope I’ve only seen the first steps of.
  • I am thankful that, despite my position as an English teacher and a self-proclaimed capital “W” Writer, I can boldly and with my tongue firmly implanted in my cheek end sentences with prepositions, massacre the rules of general good grammar, and play havoc with punctuation, and still (I think and hope!) generally communicate in an intelligible manner.
  • I am thankful that there is great love in both my family and my wife’s, and within our own newly created family.
  • I am thankful that my son did not use any swear words in front of the family on Thanksgiving (that I am aware of). If he did, he learned them from TV, not from me.
  • Finally, and before this list gets out of control (because it could), I am thankful for my readers and followers here on the blarg. Yes, this little chronicle is largely a narcissistic endeavor, but I’d be lying–horribly–if I said I didn’t get a thrill from knowing that other people read (and in some cases enjoy) my drivel. If you’ve ever read my work and laughed sympathetically, or clicked that little “like” button, or left a comment, you’ve brightened my day. I want to thank you for sharing a little of your time with me.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Inverted Wordsmithy

Pavowski12 Comments

Editing a novel is not what you think it will be. At least, it hasn’t been what I thought it would be.

I’m about two months deep in the first edit of my draft, and the process has been instructive. Too tentative to wade in with a blowtorch and sledgehammer, I re-read the whole thing slowly, making notes and fixing window dressings, delaying the moment when I’d have to start gutting the structure of the thing, but that time is here, now. I’m about a week deep, and I’m learning some things.

These things are by no means exhaustive, nor do I claim they’re universal–they’re simply some things which have occurred to me throughout the process.

  1. Rewriting is like writing, inverted. Drafting the first draft was a linear task. 1200 words a day, which I could crank out in an hour or so most days. Make the quota and feel super-duper about myself for the rest of the day. Miss the quota and feel like a schlub until I could scramble another twenty minutes later in the day, or crank out more wordcount the next day. But rewriting is an entirely different animal. It’s not just a scramble to get more words down on the page. It’s a scramble to cut out the dead wood. To quote Arachnophobia, “cut out dead wood. Put in good wood.” But that’s a tricky thing to measure. “Okay, I drafted three hundred new words today, but do I include the two hundred I cut out? Or the two thousand I had to re-parse to make sure it still made sense? Or the hour I spent kicking the idea around in my head before I decided to try it in the first place?” I know I’ve spent similar amounts of time on the work as I did in the draft, but the yardstick is out the window.
  2. A bull in a china shop, blindfolded, and on speed. I’ve no idea if the changes I’m making are good ones. When I drafted this thing the first time around I felt more or less confident that the ideas and the progression of the novel were generally sound. Now the jungle has grown thick around me, my map has been swallowed by the raging river, and the slitherers in the night are closing in. Every change I make is a flail toward what I think is the way out, but I have no way of knowing if I’m heading toward the light or further into the depths. The best I can do is trust to my instincts, which have in no way proved that they are trustworthy yet. It’s harrowing.
  3. Motivation is scarce as desert rain. Again, contrast with the draft is the only thing that makes sense. The draft developed a momentum of its own. I wanted to work on it every day. Some days the 1200 word quota passed so quickly I felt like I was selling myself short to write so little. In the edit, I almost feel–dread is the wrong word–certainly an aversion to working on the story. I still want to work on it, but I’m hesitant to begin every day. Partially it’s a feeling of lost-ness, of not knowing where to begin or where to turn next, partially it’s a fear that I’m going to break the damn thing like a priceless Ming dynasty vase and never be able to put it right again. One way or another, I struggle to start, and the starting is the hardest part.
  4. Doubt, doubt, doubt. The draft was riddled with doubt, make no mistake. “Is the story any good, does this character make sense, is this plotline as convoluted as it feels?” Now, as I make changes, the same doubts rear their heads: “is the new story any good, does this action by the character make better sense, have I de-convoluted that plotline any?” But the new doubts don’t replace the old. They move in, cohabitate, and start multiplying like rabbits, giving rise to entirely new doubts: “should I have made that change? Is the new story or the old more reader-friendly? Do you have any idea what you’re doing?” Perhaps if there was a way to monetize doubt, this could all OMG BRB I HAVE TO WRITE THAT DOWN AS AN IDEA FOR A BOOK.
  5. Inspiration from unexpected places. All the gripes aside, I do seem to see the story in a new way every day. Just today, for example, I was absolutely stonewalled and had no idea how to fix a problem in the second act. In a panic I penned a hasty cry for help to a friend, but no sooner had I written the problem out than my brain saw the component parts of the problem, rearranged them with some strange mental geometry, and synthesized a perfectly sensible and perhaps even obvious solution. Said solution even strengthens the story and deepens the development of a character who sorely needs developing. Sometimes you eat the b’ar, as they say.

I think that’s enough commentary on the edit for now. I’ve certainly done a lot of that lately, but in my defense, the edit is looming rather large in my viewfinders. But I’ve got a week off from work coming up, so hopefully I’ll get the chance to mentally clear the pipes a bit and get some good work done on it.

In the meantime, for my next entry, I think I’ll go back to a topic guaranteed to simultaneously gain AND lose readers for the blarg here: toddler bodily fluids. Fun fact: one of the most viewed, and the most-searched topics that lands new people at the blarg, is this post about giving my son an enema. Which goes to show, I guess, that my novel needs more poop jokes.

This post is part of SoCS.

Narrative Surgery

Pavowski2 Comments

I’ve not accomplished much on the novel this week.

I’m terrified because, following in the wake of the question I posed to myself earlier this week, I’ve pretty much decided to take a sledgehammer to my first draft. I’m conflicted about it. The first draft didn’t do anything wrong. I rather like it, if I’m honest. But in the intervening time between when I penned the last period of the draft and I re-read the thing from front to back over the last couple months, I’ve come to accept that while it’s not bad in its current state, there are ways in which it could be so much better.

Problem is, the draft grew the way it did without a care for the changes it might undergo later. It grew a thick protective skin, developed bones and musculature and a web of interconnected tendons and ligaments that bind the whole squalling thing together in the shape of something that surely made sense to me at the time (and still does). But now I can see more clearly that, perhaps, that arm could stand to be relocated to the other side of the body, or that the ears are stapled on a bit too high, or that what the thing as a whole really needs is a scaly, spiked tail. And making these changes to the anatomy of the poor dear is going to require smashing parts of it to pieces. It’s not a change deep enough to throw the whole thing out and start over. But I’m going to have to separate that shoulder joint. That ribcage will have to be laid bare and prised open. That pelvis is going to have to be redesigned. You know, to accommodate the tail.

So I’m standing here feeling a bit like a sculptor standing in front of a great marble statue, tasked with making changes to the very anatomy of the thing, knowing that if I strike wrong, the whole mass of stone could crumble to dust before my very eyes. Okay, a story is a little more resilient and forgiving than that, but when I start making these changes, who knows what other lumps are going to pop up under the skin in other areas of the story?

I’ve been putting off taking that first sledgehammer swing, because I know that when I do, it’s going to consume my life, much the way a busted pipe can do, what with all the leaking light fixtures and waterlogged carpets and exploded drywall. I’ll make that first edit and then the patient will start hemorrhaging ink and plot points and it’ll be triage all the way through until I can get the whole bag of bones put back together in some semblance of rightness and sewn back into its skin.

And it still won’t be perfect. It may need the sledgehammer again, or maybe I’ll be lucky and all it will need is a few flashes of the narrative scalpel.

I had gotten a bit enamored with the idea that the first edit would roll through and, once finished, I’d have in my hands something approaching a state of “finishedness”. But I guess that’s not the way of it at all. The second draft, I guess, is just that — a second draft. Another stab at the target I was aiming for when I wrote the first draft, tempered by time and contemplation, but still in all likelihood a bit wide of the mark. Still, you can’t hit home runs if you never swing, and you can’t rebuild a shattered femur without laying the leg wide open.

So I guess it’s time to start cutting.

Now, where did I leave that bone saw…