The Writing Walls are Crumbling.

Tags

Biden, bipartisan, debate, discussion, left wing, moving forward, right wing, Trump, walls

I have had a very hard time blogging over the past four years. It wasn’t just Donny and his insane cabal but his many followers. I have unfriended many people during this reign, and I have blocked many of them. And I did try to listen. I tried to understand the divide, not just in America but in Canada and around the world . I have teased and ridiculed not only Donny but these followers. I knew converting the mindless was not possible, but they were never my target. I targeted the middle-of-the road centrists, the non-partisan voters who see truth above party politics. Unfortunately, these people tend to be more laissez-faire and vote less than the indoctrinated [on both sides]. Biden winning the vote feels like a victory but a tainted one. We are not in a good place.

Now that we have a change on the horizon, can I dump the farcical memes and get back to arguing with logic? I hope I can. I hope we all can. I would much rather see far-righters and far-lefties write out what they believe and openly discuss their arguments. I would hope we can all sit down quietly, read others’ stances on issues, and work to some consensus. It is this back and forth playing with ideas that moves us forward. It is how I move my writings forward. I don’t write knock-out stories in one go. It takes many tries of pushing that theme or pushing this character or pushing that conflict. All of my best writing has come from pushing into areas I never ended up in. The same is true, I believe, for moving forward in social and political discourse. Life is story, and those of us who write a lot of story can attest that what we think is best almost always is not.

I could not write much about life these past four years because so many have adopted views of life I do not agree with. And no, it is not just the righties. I am anti-government. When governments in my Canada want to implement new programs, I cringe, because I know my government’s debts will rise with no compensating benefit. Too many pay no service at all to our enormous debts.

What do I want to Write About?

The list is long, and I don’t claim to be qualified to write about much of it. But the following is a quick list.

• Socialism
  • what is it?
  • where should social policies fit in a capitalistic society?
  • what do Liberals really want?
  • what are Conservatives afraid of?
• Competition
  • I am for competition, when it makes sense
  • when does competition not make sense?
  • how do we manage non-competitive units so everyone is happy?
• Executive Accountability
  • this is currently a critical problem in not only America but in Canada and around the world
• Taxation
  • does the low-taxation-of-billionaires model make sense?
  • what is the logical management perspective on achieving good government?
  • of course, taxation of expatriates and management of tax fraud.
• Reading and Writing
  • I work at my writing every day. I have many ideas on making writing more interesting and relevant
  • reading is a forgotten skill. We have millions of experts who do not read anything more than Facebook posts or their favorite news headlines
  • how to correctly punctuate lists 😉
• Racial Injustice
  • unfortunately, the list is endless!
• My many other interests: books, fountain pens, inks, poetry, nutrition, diabetes, and more.

There is so much to write about and such little time to do it. I’ve been sitting on my hands for so long, I don’t really know if I can do this. Is Humpty Trumpty falling off the wall enough to get me back into this? But of course I have to write. The only way we’re going to move forward as a civilization is through discourse and debate. I remember when the Berlin Wall started to come down. It was the day my firstborn entered the world. I was so hopeful. The world really did seem to offer a brighter future. But of course we’ve erected replacement walls, and unfortunately we always will. I think the purpose of my writing and many other blogs has to be the dismantling of walls. These ideological walls need to crumble.

The SAD month of MAY

April was poetry month, and now May is short story month. That’s a short story a day, every day, for 31 days. I’ve done seven NaNoWriMos and eight NaPoWriMos or equivalents. I don’t want to try to name this month. NaSsWriMo?

I sat at my desk on Monday, May 1, 2017, having written 54 poems and a blog post about it, wondering what to write next. Do I pull out 2012 and commit three or four months to fixing it? Do I continue salvaging parts of 2016 to make a short story collection? Maybe I should pull out 2010 or 2014 and have a second go at those unfinished novels. 2016 called the hardest and I’d all but settled on it. That would mean skimming the 50,000 words looking for nuggets. I have pulled the first three scenes as stories already, but where to next? Always the question.

So I did what any good writer would do: I opened Facebook. Almost immediately I found a post by my friend Andrea about a contest in May to write a short story a day. We talked about this in the past on our Sunday morning write-ins, I’ve participated in 15 other x-a-day events, so I didn’t need to think about the implications very much. I went to the Story-A-Day site, signed up, took the first prompt, and wrote a 1489 word story.

Bang. #1 done. It felt great.

\The story had nothing to do with anything I’ve written before, but it was based on reality. For that reason alone, I will not share it. Especially where fiction is weaved in, and some of that fiction is not nice. Sorry I had to kill you off, X.

May 2’s prompt fit almost perfectly a scene/story for 2016 I had been pondering. I sat and wrote. I took a break at 500 words to think, ponder, and write nasty political tweets — Even though I gave up my U.S. Citizenship, I still fight for Americans living abroad. And I’ve been quite acerbic lately towards the liberal shills out there supporting #FATCA and calling people like me tax cheaters.

I could not fit today’s prompt into any existing project, which is no concern, but I could fit it into a potential 2017 NaNoWriMo story. I’ve been pondering writing Science Fiction instead of my social conscious urban literary stuff.  I only invested 313 words in it, but I think it is full of theme, conflict, and potential. The conflict is implied: we’re all becoming the same, and what does that mean for humanity. Could be my backbone theme for my seen-book series *grin* It is a very thin piece, trite, but I actually love it. I will try to write more around this piece and other ideas this month and through the busy summer ahead of me. NaSsWriMo might just make NaNoWriMo very productive.

Enjoy

Prompt: People called him The Doll Maker. Nobody ever wondered aloud why every doll had the same face.

“Did you guys see Doctor Davis’ new robots?”

The lunch table paid no attention to him. Jared set down his tray and pulled in his chair.

“He can choose any face he wants with a few clicks but he picks the same face, the same physical features for every one of them. You guys don’t find that odd?”

“Jarrod,” Emily says. “You had a busy morning? You’re late.” She stuffs a roll of California Gold into her mouth.

“You haven’t heard a word I said.”

“Sorry,” she says as she crunches on the crusty, green roll of processed unknowns the government has certified as optimally nutritious for young scientists. She chases it with a glass of fortified water the color of the noon sky as displayed in the wall monitors. “We were just discussing Doc Davis’ new robots. Did you know he ordered them to all look identical? Why would he do that?”

Jarrod picked the gray New Jersey Jets roll up from his gray plate. “It makes no sense. You’d think he was building an army or something.”

Emily inspects her mint-green plate for crumbs but finds none. “I know. It’s so creepy. We’re not going to be able to tell which is which.”

“They’re all fucking robots,” William chimes in with his usual cheer. “Who cares what they look like? You ask for a Solar Coffee, they get you a Solar Coffee. It’s not like you’d have sex with one of them.”

“Speak for yourself,” Emily says.

“They’re all male,” Jarrod says.

“So?” says William.

“They’re all so…unremarkable,” Emily says and smiles.

“He could have selected at least some variety,” Jarrod says.

“They’re robots,” William says.

“What does he have planned?” they all say simultaneously. They stop but don’t laugh.

William picks up his blue Florida Fish Roll from his light-blue plate and looks at it. “Why are they all the same?”

 

My Entire Novel Posted for Your Reading Pleasure:

The following is my entire [current] novel minus the words. It is the punctuation only. This post has been making rounds in Facebook writing circles. Since I code and already have a little word processing test app I’ve been playing with, adding code to strip characters was a trivial step. I have not included quotation marks — I didn’t see the point, yet. This data of course begs the question , “What does this mean?”

Action.
Friction.
Depth.
Rhetorical questions.
Voice.

I already know my writing can be languid (lots of strings of commas). I already know I tend to ask too many rhetorical questions (strings of question marks). I know I use semicolons liberally, but the result doesn’t show it. Of course it is hard to pick out trends visually.

I think this is an interesting path of analysis.Counts, repetitions, patterns.

• I use triadic sentences which should look like “;;.” A quick search in Word reveals 46 instances. Too many?
• My longest string of commas is 15.
• My longest string of semicolons is 6.
• My longest string of periods is 12.
• 821 question marks.
• I abhor exclamation marks, yet I use 142 of them!

Interesting features to investigate and edit. *sigh*

Anyway, enjoy the story.

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Slump Broken

Tags

additive style, blog, novel, reading, the manatee, Writing

I have not been working hard on my novels for the last couple of months. I don’t know what the problem has been. I’m not sure any writer can tell you why they back away from a project. I have been writing, just not my fiction.

This has not been writer’s block. The few times I’ve sat down, I was able to write. But then I later re-wrote it. And I re-wrote it again. I sat at Starbucks and outlined once again, fully satisfied with the scene’s future, and I sat on it. Funny how our guts tell our minds it’s not right.

Last week I wrote a blog post for The Manatee. It was a simple, stupid post, but I thought it was funny. Others have too and it has over 2500 hits. That’s nowhere near great, but it feels good to me. The interesting bit was I wrote it in one sitting, made no revisions, and the editor accepted it as is. I read it again today and I laughed again. I also found no errors or changes I’d make. Believe me, this is positive reinforcement.

I’ve been reading Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. We all know the history of that book, but what I didn’t know was it was written as magical realism in an additive style. If you don’t know what an additive style is, then read Tony Reinke’s blog. I am not enjoying the book, but it is making me ask questions. I want a little more grounding, more story, more empathy. As Bill Shatner says, “I Just Can’t Get Behind That.”

But something says such a voice might be what I am looking for in my next project, an additive style but with friction and trust. By the way, as I listen to Bill, the song is written in an additive style. So today I sat in Starbucks, pulled out TWSBI Micarta fountain pen, and wrote a 500 word story. Then Sean Rouse stopped by and we chatted about writing. Sean was so encouraging, and when he left, I felt elated, motivated, and ready. I went home, had a nap, a great dinner, poured a glass of Magnetic Hill blueberry wine, and finished my Québec chapter. I wrote in a more additive style than I had been, and it felt good. It not only felt good writing it but also reading it. It felt right.

A missing ingredient in my voice? Perhaps. This is a constant game of assessing and reassessing. But I feel good. I feel very good tonight, and it’s not just the wine. Anyway, enjoy the beginning of story I wrote today, written in an additive style. It has not been edited or revised except as I transcribed it. Nearly straight from the pen.

Her load was too big. He’d told that to her too many times, so many times that she stopped listening to him, so many times that he was sure she purposely refused to listen to him. Marion Black may not be the brightest streetlamp on the backstreets of Dallas – it only makes sense that if a lamp is punched, kicked, and clubbed with garden and auto-repair implements enough times, dimness would creep into the shadows of the mind – but if one person in a relationship stops listening to the other, then there is a good chance there is a communication problem and the relationship may be in peril. It only made sense that when he saw the dual forces of her stumbling with her wavering load of apricots, piled higher than her eyes, and the speeding 1988 Oldsmobile Delta 88, green, bigger than his mother’s mobile home, pristine as oil refinery piping before they encroached on each others’ spaces, before the inevitability of collision was imminent, and before she busted the Oldsmobile’s grille, that Marion Black would not move. His hands did not attempt to roll down a window, open the door, or press his truck’s horn (the horn was busted anyway). He wanted to think that he knew such actions were pointless, that he was powerless to save her, that she’d have kissed the Oldsmobile with her lips spread and apricots splattered, but if Marion Black is one thing, it is honest. No such thoughts coursed through his mind, and he was too dim-witted to create any visions to compensate for his emotional void. The truth came a long time after being realized. And the truth was Marion Black didn’t react when she and the Oldsmobile perished – the young driver of the Oldsmobile panicked and swerved into an oncoming 30 foot U-haul van, the front of the Oldsmobile collapsed, and the young lad kissed the back of his engine as it drove into his face. Marion Black never flinched, his mouth didn’t open, and no tears offered to be shed. He never even thought it was a cool – by any objective Texas standard, a slightly overweight woman overburdened with cases of apricots kissing the grille of a 1988 Oldsmobile Delta 88 travelling at 70 mph in a 30 mph zone performing seven and a half summersaults and plunging feet first into a chasing police car and wrapping her legs around the police officer’s face would be considered cool. Marion Black shook his head, said ‘my life as I know it is over,’ started his 1974 Ford pick-up (yellow and rusty), and hit the road. He didn’t even stop at their apartment for clean underwear and a beer. He drove onto highway30, said ‘I’ll follow that thunderstorm,’ and he drove. Three months later he stood in front of a sign that said Welcome to Vermont. He still hadn’t bothered with clean underwear.

The Long, Compound, Subordinate Sentence

Tags

anaphora, climax, dragonette, emphasis, epiphora, epistrophe, foreplay, Letter From Birmingham, martin luther king, music, sentence, sex, subortinating, tension

I had a discussion the other day about sentence length. “High tension prose should use short sentences, and languid prose should use long sentences,” we initially agreed. But then I thought and I read. I won’t deny that long, languid sentences are useful in more passive prose, but not all long sentences are languid. The compound, subordinate sentence is often used to heighten tension, not only heighten it but hold it for a length of time and make the reader squirm.

I am going to use an analogy some might find offensive: sex. The best sex follows [surprise] a standard story format. It starts out slow and playful, languid foreplay slowly triggers the more intense responses, then as the couple prepares for the climax, they engage in the short strokes, that one long sentence held and repeated that maximizes tension but refuses to release it. And then bang, it’s over.  Over course even better sex has multiple events of this nature – that heightened tension held and savored but pulled back before release, an even stronger buildup for the next engagement and eventual climax.

An example of such an encounter is Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. It begins with a slow, reflective buildup, then about a quarter way through, he hits us with one of his most famous sentences:

But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”–then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.

Now the tension is ready to explode, but he brings us back down a notch and holds us there. He engages us with a series of smaller ups and downs, a long, slow, heightened engagement. Then at the end he hits us with another zinger. It is written as a series of sentences, yet given the repetition, the whole paragraph could likely have been constructed as a single sentence. It has the same effect, the long, heightened tension followed by the quick release, the climax, the conclusion.

I wish you had commended the Negro sit inners and demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer and their amazing discipline in the midst of great provocation. One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths, with the noble sense of purpose that enables them to face jeering and hostile mobs, and with the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer. They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy two year old woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: “My feets is tired, but my soul is at rest.” They will be the young high school and college students, the young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders, courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience’ sake. One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Another example is in the Bible (There are many examples in the Bible). Proverbs 1 sets the purpose and theme of all the proverbs with this wonderful sentence.

1 The proverbs of Solomon son of David, king of Israel:

² for gaining wisdom and instruction;
for understanding words of insight;
³ for receiving instruction in prudent behavior,
doing what is right and just and fair;
⁴ for giving prudence to those who are simple,^[
a]     knowledge and discretion to the young—
⁵ let the wise listen and add to their learning,
and let the discerning get guidance—
⁶ for understanding proverbs and parables,
the sayings and riddles of the wise.^[b]

⁷ The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge,     but fools^[c] despise wisdom and instruction.

This is not languid but a heightened plea to listen, read on, and save your sorry soul.

If we can revisit my first assertion: “High tension prose should use short sentences, and languid prose should use long sentences.” As demonstrated by King’s second example, we can read these long sentences as a series of small, incomplete sentences held together by common themes and repeating prefixes (anaphora, considered a literary technique for adding emphasis). The take home: don’t assume length equals tension.

I’ll leave you with a musical example, Dragonette’s ‘Live In This City’. Notice half way through, at the 1:30 mark, the singer repeats key phrases over and over (the bolded lyrics), almost in the form of a compound subordinate sentence. It does not use anaphora but an implicit epiphora (epistrophe), a repeating ending — ‘You can’t live without’ sung in the background seems to fill the role. The section acts as a long, tension holding sentence before down-trending into the ending. You could write them as “Kings of the indie rockers, you can’t live without me; top of the toilet choppers, you can’t live without me; riots and rebel rousers, you can’t live without me; high roller phantom powers, you can’t live without me; kings of the indie rockers, you can’t live without me; top of the toilet choppers, you can’t live without me; riots and rebel rousers, you can’t live without me; high roller phantom powers, you can’t live without me.” Marvelous technique!

Dragonette
“Live In This City”

I start it up
Turn it over like a general motor
And come down heavy
‘Cause I drop it like a Tomahawk chopper

I gotta keep on doing what I’m doing
‘Cause we’re clapping our hands now
Yeah I found a lipstick that I like
And so I’m walking it downtown, downtown

[Chorus:]
But I only live in this city
Live in the city
I only live in this city
Live in the city
I like to keep the place busy and I do it for free
Cause this city can’t live without me
Can’t live without

Me and my gang and some blonde defender
We wind it up around the center, roll it over to Camden
Just so you know that queen with the face that you call my little pony
We basically invented this place,
That’s why it’s standing room only
Standing room only

[Chorus:]
But I only live in this city
Live in the city
I only live in this city
Live in the city
I like to keep the place busy and I do it for free
Cause this city can’t live without me
Can’t live without

Kings of the indie rockers
The top of the toilet choppers
Riots and rebel rousers
High roller phantom powers
(You can’t live without)

Kings of the indie rockers
(You can’t live without)
Top of the toilet choppers
(You can’t live without)
Riots and rebel rousers
(You can’t live without)
High roller phantom powers
(You can’t live without)

Kings of the indie rockers
The top of the toilet choppers
Riots and rebel rousers
High roller phantom powers

[Chorus:]
I only live in this city
Live in this city
I only live in the city
Live in this city
I only the place busy
Keep on working for free
Cause this city can’t live without me

[Chorus:]
I only live in this city
Live in this city
I only live in the city
Live in this city
I only the place busy
Keep on working for free
Cause this city can’t live without me
Can’t live without me
Can’t live without me
Can’t live without me
Can’t live without me
Yeah I only live in this city
Cause this city can’t live without me

The long, compound, subordinate sentence is powerful. It is the short strokes of the story. Used with anaphora and epiphora, it brings tension to near climax with its series of dependant clauses and holds it there until finally driving home the resolution or major point with its trailing independent clause. It is not the slow, languid, reflective sentence but in fact a mesh of tightly packed short, punchy fragments. Use it with care!

*as an exercise, find the lyrics to some of your favorite songs and read them as such sentences where the lyrics are the subordinate clauses and the refrain is the pointed, complete clause or conclusion.

2012 NaNoWriMo Version 5 Completed!

Tags

bata reader, manuscript

I feel drained. The 80cm of snow we’ve received since last Wednesday (this is Sunday) have something to do with it. 50cm more are due tomorrow. That’s 52 inches of snow. That’s enough snow to bury children and animals, not to mention cars. I literally have nowhere to shovel this snow. We are talking about cancelling our car insurance for the next three months because we won’t be going anywhere in them.

Middle Of Second Storm

Still, it doesn’t compare to the stress I’m feeling as I finish this edit of the novel I’m working on, my fifth major version in two and a third years. I know there are changes to make: too many ellipses, thinking verbs, rhetorical questions, voice transgressions, theme continuity issues, and story line consistencies. And these are only the headers of my shopping list. Yet the need for input from others outweighs these abstract objectives. At the end of this edit, as I reviewed my notes and made a few more changes, I felt myself sinking into Johnny Weissmuller quicksand.

I think a writer needs to edit from a good place. We cannot be fighting our visions. I feel my story is a piece of art. I feel my story can be an attractive read for millions. Seriously. But I am finding the doubts creeping in. Every page I read makes me question my sanity, my ability to write. I have made so many mistakes! Of course what I need is time away and some concrete feedback.

So I sit here typing this post as the first printed copy of my V5 manuscript prints. It is 126k words, which at font-10 and 1.5 line spacing equals 277 printed pages. I am printing double-sided this time. My previous manuscripts were just too thick. And I did not make the decision alone. I checked with my primary readers for their preferences, and they are fine with reduced note making space. The next steps are to distribute copies to 6 to 8 readers. One EPUB version is already out.

In a month or so, I’ll need to gather the herd. I’d like to take my readers somewhere for at least coffees. I’m thinking a Starbucks on a snowy Sunday morning. I might even rent a room at the library and bring in some pizza. If I host them at home, I could also serve beer. We’ll see. If I get a constant message that it sucks and there is zero hope anybody would want to read it, then they’ll be getting nothing 😉

Novels High School Teachers Teach: version #4 is in the books

Tags

John Updike, Rabbit Run

In The Books

I am writing novels. I wrote a novel just this November for NaNoWriMo. No, it is not a readable let alone publishable story. I think I know the differences. My November drafts are forays, experiments, and practice. I pick a rather random idea and write to it. I do some structural planning, but I do not put much thought into them. This might seem bad, but for me it is good. I have no limits when I write, no outline to guide my creative process. I follow enough scene-level form to keep me on the straight and narrow; I don’t need more.

I have five novels in the works, 2010 through 2014. I ran for a year with 2010 just because that was all I had in the hopper. It grew to 80,000 words and I am still fairly happy with its characters and ideas. But it takes place in Newfoundland, and it makes me uncomfortable. What right do I have to write about that province and their peoples’ events? If you have read February by Lisa Moore, you might catch my drift. By the way, she is coming here in February 2015 and we are so excited!

I also ran for a year with my 2011 novel. It is a long Canadian epic at 120,000 words, and it screams for twenty thousand more. My reading suggests publishers want short first novels, something less risky. And lets face it. Two years of fiction writing does not a writer make. I knew I needed to improve my knowledge and skills of this craft. Craft. Let’s all remember that writing is hard and it takes broad and in-depth knowledge and experience. I wasn’t there yet; I am not there now. There are also rumors of grant money for Canadian stories in 2017, the country’s 150th anniversary. I decided to let it sit.

My 2012 story excited me from its conception. I had nothing but an image in my head on October 15th. After two weeks of active brainstorming and diffuse thinking, the premise came to me. W5 plus how. I was excited that first day of writing, and the excitement stayed with me for the month. Yes, there have been ups and downs. I have asked myself a lot of hard questions. I have put my story and my skills up against firing squads. Like Colonel Aureliano Buendia, we have both survived. Unlike the good colonel, I hope to someday emerge from my solitude. I concluded edit pass number four this past week on December 15th, 2014.

So what to do next? Approach an agent? Pass it on to more beta readers? Let is soak? Stick my head into it again? I have two marked up version #3 manuscripts from beta readers I have not even looked at yet. I pouted for a few days, celebrated my daughter’s 25th birthday on Friday, and I printed out the first six scenes, 83 pages. I went to Starbucks, ordered a Venti coffee, and read the cut off MS. I marked it up as I read with a fountain pen I had lost for seven months (we moved) and an ink I haven’t used in a while.

I found myself marking up many words, phrases, and sentences. I clarified some things and unpacked others. Nothing particularly major but every page was becoming marked up with violet ink. Most changes were to make the sentences clearer. I changed “these” to “those” a few times. I removed much thinking, mostly “know” and “feel.” But I also added some literary flair:

He gave up on being a dad before he met Jill, and she had not changed his mind. “I don’t know how to be the father I never had; I can’t become him.”

I refuse to say if it is good writing, but some of my additions made my heart thump. The good part was I was happy with the story structure. My second and third scenes have always been bloated, and pass #4 was designed to remove bloating. Still, most of my changes this weekend were significant enough to warrant another serious pass. I concluded I need to continue with this edit before I let anybody else read it. I am focusing on the writing and not so much the structure; though I have already killed a significant paragraph. Today I updated 40 pages of changes and modified some of the mark-ups.

I am setting a short deadline of January 15th as my drop-dead date. It currently sits at close to 122,000 words, so this will be an intense few weeks. But it should be a fast edit. Hopefully most of the scene shuffling is over with. Hopefully I can focus on the writing and get it to where it needs to be, to where I want it.

Oh, I made a stunning discovery. I have been reading John Updike’s Rabbit Run and I learned it is one of the early, well regarded use of third person present tense which I use in my story. Like me, Updike drifts up and down in his perspectives. I probably drift more than he does, and I incorporate much reflective past tense as well. Unlike Updike who changes perspectives — sometimes it’s Rabbit and sometimes it’s Eccles — mine stays in one person’s head. In only a handful of places at most do I hint at drifting away. 

One of my beta readers made an interesting comment as we chatted briefly about it. “It reads like one of those novels your high school teacher asks you to read and you never forget.” My line of the year 🙂

Editors, A Mysterious Breed

Tags

Canada Writes, contest, K.M. Weiland

I am almost finished a short, short story of 1,440 words. I plan on submitting it to Canada Writes. As usual, I sought help from beta readers. For the first time, I solicited help from an editor.

Editors. Impressive species. They remind me of sandhill cranes — drab, erect, self-aggrandizing, and uber-pedantic. An editor would slash the previous sentence five ways from Sunday. Mine would anyway.

He is a copy editor for a  newspaper. He is not schooled in the discipline but is a natural. He is the same age as my oldest daughter. He was born without fear. He is clear-sighted, has a perfect ear for prose, and he is expert at riding the conflict fence. Not only does he tell me what he is really thinking, but he makes me feel good about it. He is also in one of my writing groups, we share social time together over coffee or scotch, I am in his book club, and I call him a  friend. Even more dangerous. Only a good editor could edit a friend’s fiction and remain friends. *I’d say the same about the writer, but I have my doubts about him.

What baffles me is how they do it. I mean, I have worked on this piece since early September, have let close to a dozen people read it and give me feedback — see a previous post — and I have scoured over it almost daily. I have taken a couple of short breaks. I have also read up on self-editing. Fred Stenson’s “Things Feigned Or Imagined” has a couple of great sections on self-editing, and I’ve read every article posted by Writer’s Digest or K.M. Weiland. Yet the stuff my editor sends back to me baffles me. Not the content; that’s exquisite. I mean how he was able to discern trouble.

I had the following two sentences.

He staggers to the kitchen, yanks open the fridge door, and grabs another beer. He punches the tab and the drinking hole stares back at him, the empty, steely eye of his beer can.

He thought these verbs were too strong for where they were in the story. He felt the rise in action broke the tension prematurely. I read it and the rest of the section. He was right. What baffles me is I knew he was right all along. I knew these verbs were wrong and subtracted from my later explosions. I had felt it many times, but I did not recognize my feelings. He found other places where I distracted the reader, spend too much energy on getting points across, used wasted, superfluous adjectives. He messaged an answer to one of my challenges that he had read the sentence five times. He said that he follows the rule if he has to read something more than once, there is a problem and it’s his job to root it out.

That’s what I fail at, stopping. I let my uneasiness be passed over. I don’t stop and smell the flowers, or stinkweed. Again, I know this. I think I have acknowledged this before on this blog. And I don’t know how to train myself to stop, or if it is even a good thing.

Seriously, is it good to be able to stop and smell the flowers? Is it good to be able to read your most subtle reaction, stop, analyze them, and investigate the source of their being? It is for an editor, but is it for the writer? Once I learn, can I ever lock the editor out of the room? Don’t I need him to take a vacation while I write?

I often stray when I write. I step sideways, and backward, and sideways the other side, and even forward. I explore character and plot when I write, all while trying to keep to an objective of story, character, and scene. If I let my editor question everything I write, I wonder if much of what I write would never find the surface of the page?

I worry too much. Yet I worry, and worry is good. I hope.

If you have techniques for making yourself aware of issues in your prose, please tell me. Suggestions like my editor’s — if you have to read it twice, there is a problem. That will now stick to me until I die, but there have to be more of these techniques. These little mental reminders. Filters I can turn on and off as needed.

Oh, and I am extremely happy with my story as it stands. I think it has chances. If not this contest then in a literary journal. I think the story is ready. I just hope the jury is up for being slammed upside the head.

Thank you my editor and editors everywhere.

Social Media Sucks

I’m not referring to its general uselessness but its aid to aspiring authors.

It comes down to two questions: what do we need as writers and where do we fill that need?

When it comes to writing, aspirants like myself need much help, and there are many ways to categorize this help. I’ll start top-down.

First, we need to understand what story is. We all know inherently what constitutes story. When we read, hear, or view one, we are moved. We react. Story is part of our genetic makeup. We have been telling story as long as we have been communicating with each other with words. Four million years? Six thousand years? Apply your own understanding of human history, but story has always been there. We all know story, yet hardly anybody can define story without help. Very few people can tell story effectively. Even fewer can write good story. Modern story is told with ancient techniques, but we have refined our understanding of story so that it is now considered a complex field of study worthy of advanced educational degrees o– MA, MFA, PhD., and this refinement is hidden within the philosophies and tomes of our history. Everything we now understand about story has its roots in Aristotle’s Poetics. Story is opsis, melos, lexis, dianoia, ethos, and methos, otherwise known as spectacle, melody, diction, thought, character, and plot. These elements are arranged in order of importance with the most important — plot — at the end. Story falls apart without plot, but story can fly with weak spectacle. Great stories address all of these elements.

I wish it was as easy as remembering six concepts. It’s not. Drama is more than high-level story. Drama is created at scene, paragraph, sentence, and word levels. Each level of refinement brings its own dramatic challenges. Fail to write effective scenes, and your story becomes mush. Your paragraphs do not sing and pulse with rhythm, well, aloha reader. You fail at comparing and contrasting, figures of speech and other literary elements, foreshadowing, backstory, consistency, and connecting dots, your story falls apart. If you fail at grammar — and too many writers do — then you’ve lost your reader before you’ve started. Can you name thirteen sentence structures? Can you describe when to use each type of structure? Do you understand voice, and not just the point of view considerations? Does your writing come from one voice or does it transcend? Have you incorporated the chorus? Why or why not?

Most writers have little idea about what I just rambled on about within their own stories. Most writers I see in social media circles seem to simply write a book and throw it out there. Most of social media writing groups consist of writers looking for validation of some mysterious ability they possess and is clearly evident in their prose if you would only buy their $0.99 book.

Writers in social media circles do not discuss these fundamental elements of writing fiction, not regularly. These writers want ideas for world-building. These They want help in picking names for characters, advice on overcoming writer’s block, or story ideas. These writers want you to share in the fun they experience at the keyboard. These writers search in the dark for lost keys, in a hurricane, on a beach, naked and afraid.

I have given up on them. In a half-year of trying to gain knowledge from writing groups, I’ve abandoned them. I clicked “leave group” and turned off notifications.

So where am I going for help? I am re-discovering forums. Absolute Write has some very knowledgeable peeps. Other forums are also popping up. Forums are good at a few things social media groups fail at: they persist  information and they categorize it.  If there was a discussion of correct comma usage five years ago, it is still there for me to read. In social media, it is gone from my view within days at most.

One thing social media has helped with is spread the fiction writing bug. I believe that writing story is catching on again. I believe that people are discovering that a life without story is shallow, that a life full of story is compelling.

My main source of nuts and bolts help is in books and blogs. Whenever I find a used writing book, I snap it up. When I address a weakness in my writing and find that one book that fills the gap, I buy it. I have bought one new book in the past two years. I now have over fifty craft books.

Writing blogs are everywhere. If you cannot find them, you are not looking.

I get involved with real people. Hold on, I need to count my fingers … I belong to four (five under broader criteria) writing groups, three book clubs, and am a board member on a literary festival. I get people to review my writing and I offer to review other writers’ works. My team knows they can slam me hard and they do. And I grow with every word of feedback. I grow every time I read to a group. I grow with every book discussion. I grow with every book I read, every scene, paragraph, sentence, and word I read. I grow when I write.

I have never grown from any interaction with a social media writing group. They are now history with me.

Doing it the write way!

Last Monday or Tuesday, maybe Wednesday — sheesh — I began another edit of my novel. I have a couple of manuscripts out to readers, but the story called to me. This might go against all sound advice, but I completed a development edit on August 31, and the story was more or less fresh in my head. I debated giving it a long timeout, say three months, but I knew there were sections that needed surgery. At the end of my story, looking back, I knew of several scenes that needed either modification or removal. Reparative surgery or amputation. I debated waiting for feedback to confirm my suspicions.

I decided to re-read my first chapter.

I should backtrack a bit. I’ve been reading Neil Gaiman’s ‘American Gods’, Francine Prose’s ‘How to Read Like A Writer’, and Ray Bradbury’s ‘Fahrenheit 451’. I had literary words in my head. I had Gaiman’s efficiency, Prose’s extreme literary examples, and Bradbury’s almost hyperbolic style hitting me all at once. I had focus on words, sentences, and paragraphs. I was focused on the writing, not the story. I felt I was in a zone.

I have also been working on a short story extracted from my novel. One of my readers told me a short scene I shared read like a short story. But it was only 500 words. Hmmm. I found another dangling scene and glued them together. It was an improvement, but it didn’t quite work. (see my previous post) The story also primed my thinking on my novel, and reaffirmed my need to get back at it.

I created a new file and began. I assumed a position of a content and line editor. I asked two questions: does it read well and does it belong? Maybe these do not belong in the same edit, but that is what I asked. The very first answer of the very first sentence was no, so I re-wrote my opening lines. I smiled. I felt good. I kept going.

Scene number three was my first challenge. I felt many times it needed trimming but could never find it, could never slash any of it. As I read it, it became very clear that much of it was crap. It was crap content and it was crap writing. I cut, cut, and cut. I then jumped ahead to a scene I knew needed a beat-down. I had just pounded one scene, so let’s roll. Let’s rumble why we’re in the mood. I chopped, chopped, chopped.

I am now 27k words in and have removed almost three thousand words. Yes!

But I added my short story in. It is a chapter in my novel. And this brings two dilemmas:
– do I remove bits of reference material needed for the story but not for the scene; because they were introduced in the novel?
– what will this do to my publishing chances? How does the copyright thingy work? Is it good or bad to publish a chapter as a short story?

I am discouraged I write so poorly, but aren’t we all? Anne Lamott in ‘Bird By Bird’ claims all our first drafts are shitty and not to worry about it. Good writing takes much effort, may rounds of editing, many attempts at trying new words and phrases, of experimenting, of working at it. Determination results in more creativity any noetic miasma might. So I plod forward and don’t look back.

Last night, after a weekend away, I edited a key scene. I asked myself “did I really write this?” It was good. Seriously, it was very good. It gave me chills. I woke this morning at 4:30 and jumped back in the pool. I re-edited the same scene and felt just as good. I edited the next scene, and … I removed it. It was part of my short story. I welded the remnants to the next scene, and read through it twice. I made some sentence changes. I moved me almost to tears. I smiled. “Fuck I’m good,” I thought, and slapped myself.

No I am not. Not yet. Never will be good. Quality writing occurs with a quality process. Focus on the process John. Do it the write way!

If you are beta-reading my last draft, sorry about this, but I will not likely use much of your feedback. Well, maybe I will, or maybe I will have already.