Tag: Writing

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.

 

 

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

Pavowski1 Comment

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.

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.

My Wife, the Overachiever

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There is something wrong with my wife.

She’s incredibly intelligent, incredibly patient with our kids, and incredibly talented at putting up with my particular brand of daily nonsense and idiocy.  I frankly don’t know how she does it.  In addition to being a stay-at-home mom and an occasional on-call news writer, she’s in her third year of a Master’s program.  I’ve seen her daily planner and it gives me the spins.

I should point out that this is not me sucking up.  She gave me explicit permission to write about this, though perhaps not to write about it in the way I’m going to write about it.

It’s a not insignificant feather in her cap that throughout this Master’s program she’s maintained straight A’s.  It’s doubly not insignificant in that her program is a program really designed for teachers and sort of assumes she has ready access to the resources of a school, which she does not.  It’s triply not insignificant in that she’s doing the overwhelming majority of the work from home, which means she spends hours daily reading textbooks thick and dense enough to lay a foundation with and then posting responses and building portfolios and collaborating online with her slacker classmates and just generally making me feel like a schlub for putting in my workday at school and coming home too exhausted to do much more than make dinner and sack out.  Add to that the fact that the sprout only wants her to put him to bed anymore and that every other hour she’s either got an infant or a breast pump attached to her chest and, well, I am starting to wonder if she hasn’t in fact been bitten by a kryptonite spider (that’s a thing, right?).

I think we’re both gifted with more than our share of innate intelligence, my wife and I.  The key difference between my wife and I is that she takes her natural ability and slides into the driver’s seat, finding ways to make the best of herself and challenge herself in even the smallest of projects, while I, um, well, I like video games and writing blarg posts about the inconsequential minutiae of my life.   Oh, and I locked OUR ENTIRE FAMILY out of the house not two weeks ago.  She gets straight A’s in her graduate program, and I routinely load the dishwasher and forget to run it, then get mad at the dishes for being dirty in the morning.

Anyway, she’s home with the sprouts today, studying up on educational practices for exceptional education while breastfeeding the infant and keeping the toddler from killing himself in any of the dozen ways that the house presents him with, and she has to take a quiz for her online course.  Well, the instructor called it a quiz, but it was an eighty question marathon that ended up taking her two hours to complete.  I’m going to leave aside the issue of the instructor giving a non-retake-able “quiz” at eighty questions (seriously, who has that kind of time?).  She gets about halfway through the thing and the sprouts start to wake up from their naps and she has to finish the quiz while they’re screaming and slurping at her and throwing things around the living room and making her life unbearable.

She got an eighty-five.

Now, here’s the difference between my wife and me.  If it’s me taking this quiz, and I got an eighty-five in a vacuum, I’m pleased as my dog when we leave the room and our dinner plates are still on the table.  If I got an eighty-five with the sprouts bouncing off the walls and pulling and tugging at me and screaming and I’m in pain from my body producing ungodly amounts of infant food, I expect nothing short of a ticker-tape parade complete with elephants playing trumpets and midget monkeys building a walking humanoid Eiffel Tower.  My wife gets the eighty-five, and she is furious.  I’m talking about there has been no happiness in her life since it happened.  She’s mad as hell that the quiz was misrepresented and she was unable to properly budget her time for it, and she’s concerned because her post-graduate GPA of 4.0 could conceivably be in jeopardy thanks to this one quiz.

She might as well be French-Canadian for all the sense this makes to me.  Don’t get me wrong, I can appreciate a perfect record as much as the next guy, but I will also be the first to point out that the piece of paper you get at the end of a graduate program like this is the same if you squeak by as if you pass with flying colors.  Which is not to say I advocate mediocrity or not living up to your potential; rather, I maintain that you should do your best under the circumstances you exist in and not burn yourself out like the human candle trying to achieve perfection in every aspect of your life.  (In writing that, I feel suddenly as if I’ve outed myself as one of those slackers for whom, as a teacher, I would probably have a few choice words.)

How does she do it?  How can a person chase perfection in so many aspects of her life, and perhaps more puzzlingly, how does such a person end up with a slackerjack like me?  And finally and perhaps most importantly, will she murder me where I sit for giving her a hard time about it in front of my tiny internet audience?