Tag: revising

Weather, We’ve Got Weather

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And I might even have had a blog post last night about short stories, and how long it takes to write one, if we hadn’t been in the part of northern New England that had freezing cold and high winds all day yesterday, and had the power go out for nearly five hours yesterday night.

Which wouldn’t have been bad — only annoying, and boring, and putting a serious delay in all the work I had in hand for the evening — if we didn’t also heat the house with electricity.  We toughed it out by candlelight for the first couple of hours, until our laptops ran out of juice; then we gave up and huddled under the down comforter and all the blankets until the power came back.

Then we spent today playing catch-up, and putting the finishing touches on the short story we were working on when the power went out.  This is a short story that either took us a couple of weeks to write, or took us about nine years.  We would periodically pull it out, and work on it some, and throw out bits and put in more bits, and come up against a brick wall and put it away again . . . and this went on, as I’ve said, for years.†

Then about a week ago, revelation hit and the wall broke and we had a finished draft.  The rest of the work was revision, seven drafts of it.  (I figure I’m in good company; the humorist James Thurber once claimed that most of his seemingly effortless casual pieces for The New Yorker went through at least six drafts before submission.)  Next comes sending the story out on a blind date with an editor somewhere, with all the concomitant angst and uncertainty.

Persistence.  Persistence is key.

†We didn’t have the external spur of an anthology we’d promised the story to, and we’re not primarily short story writers anyhow; otherwise, the process might not have taken so long. A good part of the final, successful effort involved throwing out all of the short story’s misguided attempts to turn into a novel.

Presented for Your Amusement

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Revision:  The Game!

Welcome to REVISION: THE GAME!
You are in a WRITER’S ROOM.
There is a desk here.
There is a chair here.
Exits are W and E.
What do you do?

One of those humorous pieces with a lot of  good advice buried inside it.

This next one is at least tangentially writing-related, but mostly I’m linking to it because it’s funny, and because at various times in my life I too have been trapped in Paper-Grading Hell.

And Then I Was Eaten by a Grue

>read essay
With trepidation, you lift aside the cover sheet. Suddenly, the world around you seems to melt away…

Hell
You are in a maze of twisty little paragraphs, all alike. The path ahead of you is littered with sentence fragments, left broken and twitching at your feet as their pathetic spaniel eyes implore you to put them out of their misery. Dangling modifiers loop happily through the branches overhead. In the distance, that sound of undergraduate feet has turned into a heavy, erratic thwump – swoop – THWUMP you recognise immediately – it’s a badly-indented long quotation, and it’s coming closer.

>run
You wish.

A Surfeit of Good Advice

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Aspiring and neophyte writers are always looking for advice (though sometimes, I suspect, it’s not so much advice that they’re looking for as company in their struggles, and a sign that somebody out there takes them seriously), and lots of people are happy to give it to them.

People tell them, “Avoid adverbs.”

People tell them, “Don’t use the passive voice.”

People tell them, “Make your prose lean and economical; eschew elegant writing and special effects.”

So they weed out adverbs assiduously from their final drafts, and turn every possible passive sentence into an active one, and put their prose on a fitness regimen guaranteed to take it down to zero per cent body fat.  All of this is hard work, and they are proud of it when they’re done.

And usually, their prose is the better for it, because they were, after all, neophyte writers, and stood to learn a lot from that much intense concentration on their texts.

But then they start hanging out with more rarefied givers of advice, who speak disparagingly of the elimination of nuance by the compulsive eradication of adverbs, and who point out that sometimes the passive voice is just what’s needed to convey the relationship between the subject of the sentence and the action of the verb, and who wax eloquent in their appreciation of leisurely, expansive prose.

And the neophyte writers bury their heads in their manuscripts and weep.   Will nobody, they say, will nobody tell them which side is right?

Alas, no.  Becoming a writer means learning to live with uncertainty.  All I can offer are some general guidelines:  don’t use too many adverbs; don’t overuse the passive voice; and try not to use more words than you need for whatever it is that you want to try.  But don’t stop trying.  It’s better to attempt something new and not have it work right the first time than it is to never try anything new at all.

We didn’t become writers because we were risk-averse.

On Writing Forsoothly

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“Writing forsoothly” is the term we like to use around the house for all the different varieties of bad pseudo-archaic diction that infest modern fantasy — historical and created-world fantasy in particular.  J. R. R. Tolkien is undoubtedly to blame for a lot of it, because his characters do like their elevated language; what unobservant readers miss is the way that Tolkien modulates his characters’ dialogue, moving effortlessly from plain vernacular to almost-archaic high formal speech and back again, depending upon the situation and the company.  Strider the Ranger has a much commoner way of talking than Aragorn the Heir to the Throne of Gondor, but at the same time they’re both recognizably the same guy.

It’s probably unwise to play with writing in extreme forsoothly unless you can at least approach Tolkien’s level of skill and language-awareness.  It’s a lot harder to do than it looks, and the failure mode is dire.  But if you’re determined to give it a try — and nobody ever makes any progress in this game unless they regularly try things that they aren’t certain will work — there are a few things it will help to do first.

One:  Ask yourself, “Is this really the direction my writing talent lies in?” and answer it honestly.  If your interior Magic 8-Ball refuses to yield up anything more specific than “reply hazy; ask again later,” find a kind but honest friend and ask them.  Kind, because you don’t want your self-image pulled down and stomped upon with hobnailed boots; and honest, because you’re not asking them for sympathy, you’re asking them for the truth.

Two:  Prepare yourself.  Read genuine period or formal writing until it dribbles out of your ears.  If you start talking in Shakespearean or Regency English at the breakfast table, you’re probably ready.  And a good thing, too, because at that point your friends and family are either bored stiff with your project, or convinced that you’re going nuts.

Three: Stop researching and write.  Don’t worry about getting all the nuances down perfectly; you can always polish the heck out of the language in your second — or third or fourth or fifth — draft.

Four:  Go find that kind but honest friend again.  This time, ask them if the archaic or formal language in fact worked; and ask them, also, whether they think you got it right but took it too far.  As with so many other things in writing, a light hand is best.

(For an interesting example of archaic diction done well in an unexpected venue, check out the historical romance For My Lady’s Heart, by Laura Kinsale, now available again in e-book format after a long while out of print.)

I Meant to Do That!

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There are some things, as a writer, that you should only ever do on purpose.  A short and incomplete list:

  • Humor.  There’s nothing worse than making people snicker when you were hoping to tug on their heartstrings, unless it’s making them guffaw when you were aiming for elevated dignity.  Accidental humor is often fatally easy — all it needs, sometimes, is a random typo of the “united/untied” or “public/pubic” variety — while deliberate humor can be fiendishly hard even if you’re one of the rare few with the gift for it.  (And in the realm of bad things that can go wrong with deliberate humor — if the little voice in your head says, “Maybe this is a bit too edgy,” then for the love of all the Muses, listen. And remember, as always, John Scalzi on the failure mode of clever.)
  • Ambiguity.  Properly managed, a judicious amount of certain kinds of ambiguity can add depth and texture to your story.  Done badly, all it does is cover your story with an unnecessary layer of shadows and mud.  How can you tell if you’ve pulled it off?  You probably can’t — you’ve got privileged access to the inside of your own head, and can see the stuff you didn’t put down on paper or in pixels.  This is where trusted first readers come in.  If they say that something isn’t clear, don’t waste time explaining how they’ve missed it.  Fix the text so that they don’t miss it, instead.
  • Offense.  Sometimes it’s necessary for a writer to give offense because the target is, no kidding, offensive.  Other times . . . well, writers often have big feet as well as big mouths.  If you did decide to give offense on purpose, don’t bat your eyelashes afterward and claim that you didn’t. That’s tacky.  And if it truly was an accident, then apologize without groveling and try not to do it again, okay?
  • Conspicuous alliteration, internal rhyme, or recognizable meter.   Unless you’re very very good indeed, all of these verbal juggling tricks and somersaults can distract from the point of your story, rather than ornamenting it.  (The late Poul Anderson wrote A Midsummer Tempest, in which some of the characters speak in blank verse written out as prose, but Poul Anderson was good enough to get away with it.)  Accidental occurrences of things like this should be eliminated ruthlessly from the text.  As for doing it deliberately — if you’re a certain kind of word-mad writer, you’ll probably at some point end up trying out the technique.  Just remember, don’t attempt this feat without a net seek out a trusted first reader for help in determining whether or not you’ve carried it off.

There are plenty of other things that writers should only do on purpose, but the four above are biggies, and should do for a start.

It’s All in Your Head

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Or too much of it is, anyway.  When it comes to stating — or not stating — the obvious, it’s possible to be too subtle for your own good.

I’m talking here about the kind of excessive subtlety that leads to what are sometimes called “head stories” — which is to say, the particular kind of flawed story you get when there are elements of it that are so obvious to the writer that they aren’t mentioned in the text.  They never make it out of the writer’s head; hence the name.

But readers can only read texts, not minds.  If you don’t put that material down on the page — or don’t at least put down enough of it that they can reasonably infer the rest — then they won’t ever know that it’s there.

If you’ve got something crucial to your story that you want the reader to work out by inference from the clues supplied, then you need to, first, make certain that you have in fact supplied enough clues for the reader to draw the desired inference; and second, make certain that you give the reader confirmation at some point that he or she has interpreted the matter correctly.  (This confirmation is one of the strings that can be usefully tied up in the story’s denouement.)

How many hints or clues are enough?  As always with writing, it depends — but three is a nice round number.  Western-influenced people tend to regard three as significant and memorable; we show it in sayings like “Third time’s the charm” or “Once is happenstance; twice is coincidence; three times is enemy action.”  If something is called to our attention three times, we’re going to assume that the writer had a reason for waving it in our faces like that.  Also — when supplying the clues, remember that you have privileged knowledge that the reader does not; therefore, what is screamingly obvious to you may not be so to anybody else.

As a general rule, the answer to the question, “Am I being too obvious here?” is usually, “No.”  If you are being too obvious, your first reader or your editor will probably tell you.

In It for the Long Haul

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It’s one thing to write a polished, even gripping, opening chapter (since opening chapters are the ones most frequently workshopped and otherwise shown around, they’re usually the ones that get the most feedback.)  It’s another thing to maintain that level for an entire novel.

Unfortunately, structure and pacing are important to editors when they get around to judging the whole book.  Editors want to see whether a writer can sustain interest through the long middle parts without letting the pace of the story flag,  and whether he or she can avoid getting distracted by unnecessary details and by subplots that go nowhere,  and whether he or she can resist the temptation to skip important plot and character stuff and rush the story in haste to get to the end.  They also want to see if the writer can in fact end a book effectively — not winding things up too fast, not dragging the end out too long, not failing to supply a sufficiently impressive fireworks show for the grand finale.

In truth, however, messing up the middle of the book is far more likely to be fatal than not being absolutely perfect at the end.  By the time the readers have reached the final chapters, they’ve invested enough time and thought in the story that a lot of technical problems with the ending will be forgiven, just so long as the readers don’t feel cheated of something they’ve come to feel is owed to them by the story.  Any number of really good writers have wobbled on the dismount, as it were — Tolkien ended the Lord of the Rings trilogy at least three times before finally letting his readers stagger off into the appendices, for example, but most of his readers don’t feel cheated by the excess.

But this is why editors want to see the traditional “three chapters and an outline” even for query letters, and why the first thing they’re going to say, when you eventually get a nibble, is, “Send me the whole book.”

The Return of Pie

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We had apple pie for dessert tonight.  My husband and co-author is the household’s designated piemaker, and he does a mean apple pie.  One of his secrets: using two or more different types of apple.  Tonight’s pie featured a couple of Granny Smiths, a Macintosh, and two large Rome apples.  Why more than one type of apple?  Because it give a depth and complexity of flavor that you just don’t get in pies made with a single variety of apple.

And this is related to writing, how?

Just as a pie is better when it’s made with more than one variety of apple, a novel is better when it doesn’t just have a single mood or tone.  Horror is made more frightening by being lightened from time to time with humor; adventure and mystery can often benefit from a dollop of romance.  The contrast works to add depth, and the relief of tension lures readers into a momentary security.  And it’s the momentary security that makes them jump even higher when the surprise twist comes around.

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.