Tag: Writing

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.

TheMe (a Quandary)

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That’s right, enough screwing around. This post is all about THE ME.  The big ol’ me, in all my… whats that?  Oh.  OHH.

Theme.  *ahem.*

Yeah, I guess that makes more sense.

Now, I’m not here to get all heavy-handed about theme.  I may be an English teacher and a kind-of-avid reader and a self-professed almost-amateur writer, but I don’t think the world or any narrative starts and stops with theme.  Not even a rolling stop.  Not even an oh-I-didn’t-know-that-was-a-stop-sign non-stop.  It’s important, sure.  But there’s more to life than theme.

But not that much more, right?  I mean, for any narrative, there’s a theme.  Any story, any poem, any six-second video of a guy texting and walking into traffic and getting obliterated by a bus has a theme.  Theme bleeds out of the story’s every orifice, it leaks out through the eyes and the nostrils and the earholes like a thick Ebola slurry.  It infuses every chapter, every sentence with its rosy, heady fog.  It’s there and unavoidable, like a screaming baby on a 5-hour flight.  You can’t have literature without it.

But how do you create it?

No, I’m really asking.  How do you craft theme?  Or, maybe more importantly, should you even try?

Theme is bouncing around the inside of my skull thanks to a conversation I had a few nights ago with a friend of mine about a story she wants to write.  Interestingly, she and I come from entirely different schools of storybuilding.  Like, she’s been pondering this idea for weeks if not months, has characters and names and costumes and really specific details of the set mapped out, and I… well, when I have an idea, I get about as far as thinking, “maybe it’d be cool if this thing happened and there was a guy with a thing like that” and then I start writing.  She’s analyzing possibilities and eventualities and the implications of interactions between these two characters and the symbolism of this character’s color scheme and I’m wondering if in my story one of the characters can get away with another fart joke.

So I shared with her my particular thoughs on attempting to convey a grand message through the narrative: it feels wrong.  Or, rather, it feels wrong to start there.  I should further clarify that it feels wrong to start there for me.  I feel as if theme, much like the all-female non-reproductive dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, will find a way.  Like weeds in a garden or mildew in a bathroom, it’s always there, lurking just out of sight, waiting for you to neglect it for a scant moment so that it can spring forth fully formed.  Trying, therefore, to cultivate theme makes about as much sense as trying to grow weeds (not weed, STAY WITH ME PEOPLE).  Why put all that effort into something that’s going to happen anyway?  Isn’t it a waste of my time trying to encourage mildew to grow when I could conceivably be building entirely new bathrooms?

But then I take a moment and I wonder what my story is all about.  I mean what it’s about.  You know, the big about, the one that seems super-important after four or five whiskey sours and you’ve just gotten finished talking about how every speck of dust in the universe is connected to every other speck and THAT’S why the government puts those chemicals in the water, man, to keep us from being absorbed by the cosmic ether, even though that’s obviously the next stage in human evolution.  You know, what my story’s ABOUT, man.  And it’s about sticktoitiveness, it’s about determination and the will to overcome, it’s about magical typewriters and Greek gods and mobsters.  It’s about believing in yourself and accomplishing anything, as George McFly once put it.  Isn’t it?

I mean, that message is there, certainly.  It’s a part of the story like bones are part of a person.  It’ll shine through when the editing and the rewriting and the rebuilding are done.  Right?

But what if it doesn’t?  What if, like the tin man, I forgot to build the heart into this thing, and I’m trying to bring it forth into the world to rust and wander aimlessly following the whims of some tart from Kansas?  Rome wasn’t built in a day.  You can’t build a house without a blueprint unless you don’t much care about trifles like structural integrity or roofs that don’t leak or, you know, functional plumbing (there’s a joke in there somewhere about how my story is total unredeemable sharknado, but I won’t be the guy to make it).  I’m counting on the theme to spring forth like flowers after a spring rain, but I’ve salted the earth with my failure to plan ahead.  To nutshell all this, I suddenly feel a bit silly about professing any sort of “expert-ness” about any of this writing business.

At any rate, I dispensed all this “advice” to her.  Put thoughts of theme aside for now; focus on making the story compelling first and let the theme follow after.  Upon further review, I wonder if I sound like that guy at the party wearing the bellbottoms and insisting that they’re coming back into style.  What, after all, do I know about any of this except that I’m having a heck of a lot of fun giving myself headaches and tearing my hair out over whether this story is ever going to actually work.

So, I’m really asking.  Where does theme come from?  Will it bubble to the surface like a bath fart or does it have to be coaxed out of the darkness like a feral kitten?  Do you have to plan for it for a theme to resonate or does it just happen like water spots on your wineglasses?  What, in short, makes theme work?

The EPOS (Editing Pile of… we’ll say Stuff)

Pavowski4 Comments

Let’s get one thing clear: I know nothing about editing a book.  I know a few things about editing short-form writing in general, but when it comes to making a 300-page behemoth readable for the masses, I’m a blind bull in a china shop.  Made of glass.  The shop, not the bull.

Apparently there are lots of ways to do it.  Some read through the thing in record pace to get a sense of the story as a whole then begin fixing bits in the order of direness.  Some slog their way from front to back, chipping away at the glacier as they go.  Others, I dunno, tear the manuscript to pieces and burn it in effigy, inhaling the vapors to enter a trance state that allows them to craft the distilled story.  I’ve never been much of a planner, so as is my wont, I’m sort of making it up as I go.  Regardless of approach, I feel like there’s one thing most authors have in common as they edit.

The EPOS.

Educational Platitudes of Smartness?

Entropic Poignard of Sagacity?

Electrified Prod of Smackface?

As awesome as those sound, for me, it’s the Editing Pile of Sharknado.

Let me reiterate.  I can speak for myself, but I have a feeling this struggle is universal among writerly types.  Here’s how it works for me:

I read the draft.  As I read, I try to read the text with an impartial mind, assessing the elements on their intrinsic value rather than on my own sentimental attachment to them.  As I read, things jump out at me.  Unclear character development.  Missing plot points.  References to things I forgot to include the first time around.  Some mistakes can be fixed on the spot: typos, obviously awkward prose, egregious instances of wheelieing.  Everything else gets a note and goes on the Pile.

At the beginning, the pile was just a few comments, a couple of harmless observations about the dubious state of the draft, a few gentle admonitions to a Future Me about some bits of the draft that need rewriting.  But like all monstrous things, what started off small and innocuous began an exponential growth curve and now seems to be doubling in size every couple of days.  The more errors I spot within the draft, the easier it becomes to spot errors within the draft.  The more I identify elements which need fixing, the more readily I seem to find elements to fix.  As a result, I’ve been working on the edit for about, oh, a month or so now, I’m about 130 pages in, and the pile has grown into a heap and a tower and now seems as immense as Babel stretching toward the heavens.

The EPOS looms and sways; it reaches skyward and some days seems to eclipse the sun.  It’s full of all sorts of advice and admonition: “present this bit earlier”, “expand upon this moment”, “is this necessary?”, “rewrite this whole f&*(!)#$ passage”.  Some can be fixed in a matter of minutes, some will take hours.  It grows by the day, and it seems as if it’s approaching a critical mass, whereupon it will begin to attract further Stuff to itself and begin sucking up random bits of prose from entirely other parts of the story, perhaps from the blarg here, maybe from textbooks in the area… it may eventually start swallowing the pets as they wander too close.

Some days it feels as if the EPOS is growing faster than I even wrote the novel in the first place, like it’s got a mind of its own and seeks to destroy me through the sheer accumulation of my seemingly endless string of inadequacies.  I feel myself working in its shadow, the cool embrace of its inevitability clammy and close around my shoulders as I work at the imperfect mass of my draft with the panic of a surgeon whose patient is dying of a sucking chest wound.  It’s overwhelming and terrifying and oppressive and it’s getting bigger every day.  In fact, the other day the thought flitted through my mind that the EPOS was so big, so insurmountable, that I might never get around to addressing everything I put into it.  That the work that needs to be done for this draft to be decent is work that’s beyond my capability.  That perhaps, as I’ve thought so many times as I’ve walked this path to writerdom, the prudent thing is to face the facts, accept that the time I’ve put in is time wasted, cut my losses and go home with my tail between my legs.

But then I stop, because I recognize that voice.  It’s not my voice, it’s the Howler Monkey of Doubt.  And the Howler has some fancy new digs: a tower of Sharknado hundreds of feet high, which affords him a crazy vantage point on the depth of my plight and gives him lots of ammunition for taking potshots at my self-esteem and my sense of accomplishment.  But he’s terrified, as well he should be, because he’s only hoping that I’ll forget something crucial.  The tower isn’t built on the ground.  The foundation of the EPOS isn’t the level of the earth, it didn’t start from ground zero.  No, the tower’s roots are gnarled and knotted at the summit of the once-insurmountable mountain that I climbed in the first place to even get the draft written.  Of course it blocks out the sun — I’m basically soaring at the level of the sun in the first place, just by virtue of how far I’ve come.  The tower is high, but next to the mountain I’ve already climbed, it’s an out-of-order escalator leading to the second story at the mall, and if I let that stop me, then I’m no better than those poor lost souls chubbing it up at the food court.

I feel as if I may have mixed my metaphors again.

The point is, the EPOS is massive.  It’s daunting.  But not nearly so daunting as the original idea of writing ninety thousand words from scratch, not nearly so daunting as weaving this story, flawed as it may be, from the raw silk threads spiraling around in my cortex.  Sure, it’ll get worse before it gets better.  I think it was JFK that said something about doing hard things because they’re hard.  Maybe there’s wisdom in that.  Maybe, with that in mind, I’ll feel a little less bad about all the sharknado I add to the pile tomorrow.

Editing, Day Whatever

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The edit rolls on.

I feel like I’m in an episode of the Twilight Zone, editing this novel.  You know, one of those really creepy ones where there’s nothing overtly terrifying going on, but there’s a subtle horror creeping in at the edges of your vision, lurking behind you in the dark, an intrinsic strangeness to every piece of furniture, every passing stranger, every blade of grass.  I recognize this text.  I’ve walked its halls — hell, I created its halls — and I have a reasonably good memory of doing so.  I remember building this character to do this thing, and developing this relationship so that x can help y do things later in the story.  Nothing wrong there.

But as I read, there are oddities presenting themselves.  Little misplaced things.  Glitches in the matrix.  Loose ends of code.  I see a misspelled word here, a character referring to an event that never happened there, a magically-appeared whatchamacallit over there.  Who left these things strewn about, like so many of my toddler’s toys in the abandoned toy chest which is this monolithic block of text in my word processor?  They’re familiar, yet they’re not.  Strange.

Then, there are the bits of prose which I do not recognize, and those are even creepier.  They fit the tale, they advance the action, they’re even often funny and clever, but they, too, are wrong somehow.  Like an alternate me wrote them.  A me that wasn’t nearly so concerned with plot or character development or narrative unity, but rather focused on witticisms and playful digression and intermittent drizzling dazzlings of poesy.

Like so many other things in the novel, these interludes fit, but they don’t match.  They’re definitely part of the same story and spun by the same hands, but maybe not crafted by the same mind, or at least not the same mind thinking on the same frequency as it was when it wrote the bulk of the story.  So here, the usual quandary: is the rest of the novel — the bulk of the novel — written properly, while these flashes of poetics and digressive humor are out of place and merely distracting?  Or are these misty patches the real essence of my story peeking through, and the rest of the novel is obscuring the heart of the tale with its drudgelike march through the necessary rigidity of the plot?

Thus the ever-growing EPOS (Editing Pile of Sharknado) grows ever larger.  I knew that the first editing pass was going to be harsh times, but that pile is growing exponentially every time I process a few pages.  I know it has to be done — I’ve got to process the whole thing and then I can break out the tools and start putting the monster back together right-side up — but the whole thing feels like one tremendous exercise in procrastination.  I’m working, sure, but I’m not actually repairing the damage.  Semantics, perhaps, but it’s just one more way I’m working against myself on this project.

Of course all this makes it sound like I’m slogging through swamps of sadness and misery working on this thing.  Not the case.  Re-reading my creations, being surprised by the little things I’d forgotten about, rediscovering the little quirks and eccentricities that burrowed their way in, is noting short of delightful, no matter how tedious and daunting the task at hand may be.  I’m a little over a third of the way in.  Keep the head down and keep pushing.

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.