Category: Adventures in the Writing Life

A Sad Fact

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Years ago, for my sins, I was a grad student teaching freshman composition† at a large university. One day, I was cornered after class by a student to whom I had given a B+ on her most recent essay. She wanted to know why, if I hadn’t marked off any errors on the essay, I hadn’t given it an A. I explained that as far as I was concerned, an essay required something more than just technical proficiency to lift it out of the “B” range and up to an “A”.

A stricken expression came over her face. “You mean I have to be interesting, too?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m afraid you do.”

Needless to say, for fiction writing at the publishable level, this truth is not just doubled, it’s squared.  Maybe even cubed.

†I forget exactly what they were calling the freshman English writing class that year — Introduction to Rhetoric, it may have been. The name of the course changes from year to year and school to school, but when you lift up the hood and look at what’s inside, it’s still freshman composition underneath.

Stet

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Stet is Latin for “let it stand.”  It’s also a word of power for dealing with copyeditors who have — in the author’s opinion — overstepped the limits of their job.

A good copyeditor is the author’s friend.  He or she will do things like keeping track of a whole extended family of fictional characters across a multi-volume series, with accompanying fictional place-names and scraps of invented language, so that even if the author fails to do the math and accidentally keeps the same minor character twenty-five years old for almost a decade, the mistake will be fixed before the book hits print.   Characters who enter a scene wearing a t-shirt and jeans will not leave it wearing khaki cargo pants and a flannel button-down, unless they’ve been witnessed changing clothes in the interim.  The setting sun will not shine in through what can only be an eastward-facing window (if the author has supplied enough detail for a reader to infer the layout of the manor house, a good copyeditor will keep that layout in mind.)

In short, a good copyeditor will make you look smarter than you really are, and will ensure that your book is as good as it deserves to be.  If you get a particularly good or face-saving copyedit, it’s a kindness to tell your editor to pass along your thanks to the copyeditor — rather like sending your compliments to the chef — and to mention that if they’re free the next time you have a book come up on the schedule, you’d love to work with them again.

Bad copyedits . . . let’s just say that it’s almost impossible to be a professional writer and not fall victim to at least one staggeringly awful copyedit.    Authors gather in bars and tell copyeditor horror stories.  (To be fair, the group at the other end of the bar is a gang of copyeditors, telling author horror stories.  If no man is a hero to his valet, no author is a hero to his copyeditor.)  At times like these, it helps to keep in mind that the book is, in the end, your book, and to remember the magic word.

Stet.

Not Really a Day for Writing

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Actually, that’s not true.  If you’re doing this thing for a living, every day is a day for writing, no matter how bad the world gets.

But some days, current events don’t leave much room for chitchat and casual banter.

Stay safe, people, wherever you are.

Mirror, Mirror

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One of the hardest things to do with first-person narration (apart from the problem of how to tell the reader about important things that happen where the POV character can’t see them) is describing the narrator’s appearance. With third person, it’s relatively easy — you can slip in a detail here and a detail there as the opportunity arises, or you can say the heck with subtlety and provide a couple of descriptive sentences about the character shortly after he or she is introduced.  But with first person, you’re not just following the character around and eavesdropping on their thoughts when it’s convenient.  You’re inside their head all the time . . . and most people, unless they’re either really vain or really insecure, don’t spend that much time thinking about the fact that they have, say, brown hair and hazel eyes and a nose that’s just slightly crooked because they broke it falling off a seesaw back in second grade.

So what can you do?

Well, you can always not bother with physical description of your first person narrator.  It’s surprising, really, how irrelevant brown hair and hazel eyes are to a lot of story lines.  (For the story lines where they are relevant, the narrator will tell you about them — in fact, if he or she thinks that the crooked nose and the unexceptional hair and eye color are why they are still tragically without a date for the senior prom, they  are probably not going to shut up about it.)

But what you don’t do (and don’t do it with third person narrators, either) is have your first-person narrator look at themselves in a mirror and describe what they’re seeing.  And for “mirror” read also lake, pond, mud puddle, silver bowl, shop window, the eyes of the beloved, or any other reflective surface.  Because that has been done.

A Plaintive Query

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Doesn’t anybody know how to use the past perfect any more?

(I’m reading slush these days, along with everything else.  All aspiring writers should do some slush reading if they get the chance.  It’s an enlightening experience, and far more entertaining than, say, grading freshman essays, which I’ve also done in my time.  Even the worst slush in the world was written by somebody who actively wanted to be putting words on paper, or pixels on screen; even the very best freshman essays, on the other hand, have a certain forced, gun-to-the-temple quality about them.  Also, when you’re reading slush, once you get to the point where you’re convinced that a piece is hopeless, you can stop.  With freshman essays, there’s no such release.)

Mr. Melville Submits a Proposal

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Any writer who’s ever tried to put together a proposal package for an editor or an agent knows the unpleasant truth:  Writing a proposal sucks.  You have to make up a summary version of something that you’re telling at novel length because you haven’t got any way to say it that’s shorter; and you have to put the prose equivalent of false eyelashes and fishnet stockings onto something that is — you devoutly hope — subtle and understated, or at least is naturally flashy and dazzling and not some tasteless imitation of the real thing.

Take heart.  And consider the example of Herman Melville, who in 1850 wrote to his English publisher:

“In the latter part of the coming autumn I shall have ready a new work; and I write you now to propose its publication in England. The book is a romance of adventure, founded upon certain wild legends in the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries, and illustrated by the author’s own personal experience, of two years & more, as a harpooneer. Should you be inclined to undertake the book, I think that it will be worth to you 200 pounds.. Could you be positively put in possession of the copyright, it might be worth to you a larger sum — considering its great novelty; for I do not know that the subject treated of has ever been worked up by a romancer; or, indeed, by any writer, in any adequate manner.”

This is an effective proposal — the publisher in question bought the book.  Consider what it does:   It lets the publisher know when the projected work is going to be finished; it describes the nature of the book in terms of how it would appeal to the reading public (it’s a “romance of adventure” in an exotic setting — “the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries”); it lets the publisher know of the author’s special qualification through personal experience “of two years & more”; it demonstrates that the author can think of the project in commercial terms and is willing to negotiate.

Wisely, the proposal doesn’t say, as Melville later did when he wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne:

This is the book’s motto (the secret one), Ego non baptizo te in nomine – but make out the rest yourself.†

Melville didn’t enjoy the commercial side of writing (“Dollars damn me,” he wrote — to Nathaniel Hawthorne, again; the long-suffering Hawthorne deserves a gold star) but he could make himself do it when he had to.  And if he could, so can we.

†Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli — “I do not baptize you in the name of the father, but in the name of the devil.” It’s one of Captain Ahab’s memorable lines from Moby-Dick.

Feast and Famine

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I’ve said more than once that there are two basic states in the freelancing life:  the state of too much work and the state of not enough money.  Usually it’s either one or the other, though sometimes, painfully, it can be both at once.

In theory, there should also exist a balancing state of not enough work and too much money, but I don’t think freelancers get to go there.

(Which is a roundabout way of saying that I have a backlog of editorial work that I need to get done, so for the next little while my entries here may be somewhat brief.)

Snow Out of Season

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It’s April, but with all due respect to T. S. Eliot, no one up here in far northern New Hampshire is breeding any lilacs out of any land, dead or otherwise.

Instead, we’ve got the freeze-thaw cycle still going on, putting frost heaves and potholes into all the roads, and turning the frozen ground into deep, thick mud of the sort that used to sink Tiger tanks on the Eastern Front.   When I was an undergraduate doing a seminar on Robert Frost, I thought that mud-time was something Frost had made up for poetic purposes. Then I moved up here, and found out otherwise. (He wasn’t making up the bent-over birches, either.)

It’s always odd when you encounter in real life something which you’ve previously only encountered via art. I can only imagine what it’s going to be like for legions of science fiction fans on the day the space aliens finally arrive.

Leftovers

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We roasted a leg of lamb for Easter dinner.  It would have been a half-leg of lamb — which is more in line with the number of people in the house these days — but the grocery store didn’t have any half-legs left by the time we did our shopping, so a whole leg of lamb it was.  We stabbed it with a knife and put in slivers of garlic, then laid rosemary sprigs on top of it and cooked it at 325F for 25 minutes per pound, and served it up with mint sauce and roasted potatoes and asparagus in hollandaise.

The potatoes and the asparagus are gone, along with the hollandaise, but we’ve still got half the lamb in the refrigerator, and now I’m thinking about leftovers.  Lamb sandwiches, probably, and maybe a shepherd’s pie.

It isn’t just cooking that has me thinking about leftovers.  Writing jobs have leftovers, too — the paths the story tried to take that turned out to be dead ends; the bits of other as-yet-unwritten stories that cropped up in the current project by mistake; the occasional perfectly good, yes-it-really-happened scene that nevertheless had to be excised from the finished text because it slowed things down at a point when they needed to be moving fast, or because it threw unwanted emphasis on something that needed to be kept in the background, or because the book had a firm word count requirement and was already threatening to run long.

But the dead-end paths and the outcroppings of other narratives can often be reworked into fully realized stories in their own right.  In fact, their appearance in a story where they don’t fit can often mean that your subconscious muse is telling you something about what your next project ought to be.  As for those snippets that were removed in the service of the greater good — it used to be, there wasn’t much a writer could do with them except put the pages away in a desk drawer with a sigh of regret, but the internet has helped us with that as it has helped us with so many other things.   Those snippets can now be posted on a novel’s web page as extra treats for faithful readers, or turned into Kickstarter rewards, or compiled into a self-published chapbook and put up for sale by the author.

So don’t throw out those leftovers, any more than you’d throw out a perfectly good half-eaten leg of lamb.

Desk Job

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Sometimes I fantasize about having the ideal desk.  It’s nice and solid, in oak or cherry or some other polished hardwood, and it puts my monitor at just the right height, and it’s got three or four proper-sized drawers that I can put things away in . . . something rather like this one, in fact, which I would buy in a heartbeat if I had all the money in the world.

Since I don’t have all the money in the world, I’m still using the same particle-board desk my husband/co-author and I bought as one of a pair in a 2-for-1 sale at K-Mart the year we took up this freelance writing gig.  It’s not even a little bit ergonomic — the computer magazines were only just starting to take up that idea — and it’s ugly as a mud fence plastered with tapoles (to use an idiom of my youth), and so far it has proven damn-near indestructible.

Taking a sledgehammer to it would be cheating.

I tell myself that with a new desk, a proper desk, I would experience a sudden efflorescence of creative enthusiasm.  I know better than that, alas.  The quality of the desk has little or nothing to do with the quality of the writing.  I did a lot of very good work during the five-year span where I had my computer and printer set up on a table in the kitchen where I could keep an eye on the front door — that being the time period when the two younger children had learned how to work the latch on the front door but had not yet attained the discretion necessary to not go out and play in traffic.

Nevertheless, a writer can dream.