Archive for the ‘editing’ Category

Simplify

Posted: May 8, 2013 in editing, writing
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Sharpening Her Scythe

Is this what Thoreau had in mind? (Photo credit: Alexandre Dulaunoy)

Stories are not life.

Life is complicated. Life is messy. Life throws utterly random shit at you at utterly random times.

And, in their best form, stories should mirror life. But not all of it. You’re presenting a streamlined version. Life stripped to its essentials as required by the story. In real life, you need to go to the bathroom several times a day. You scratch. You sneeze. You wonder vaguely about life. In a story, you don’t need all that. Some of it, sure, as the occasion requires. But no one wants to read about the protagonist brushing her teeth unless it is in some way essential to the scene. Mundanity and randomness are fine if you’re making a point of it. But they can quickly kill a story and its pace.

You need to take away some of the randomness for the sake of coherence. Otherwise the hero might die halfway through act two because he ate a bad sandwich en route to the bad guy and consequently shit his guts out in a public toilet. The end. Great for absurdists, but unless that’s your genre, steer clear.

This is not to say that characters can’t be complex. They can and should, because people are. But you’ll need to walk that line between realism and fiction. General rule is that inexperienced writers put in far more than they need.* Things never need to be as complicated as you think. You can cut some of that shit without losing anything but filler and confusion.

Put in the shortest possible form: complications are for characters, not writers. By all means, throw complications at them. That’s what they’re for. Just keep an eye on the final form and trim as necessary. You’ll think you’re losing important stuff, but you’re not. You’re just stripping away the gristle and dangly bits.

Cut. Clean. Sharpen. When your story hits someone like an icepick between the eyes, you’ll be glad you did.

*And some experienced writers make this mistake, too.

What’s After Happening Now: Dialect and Operating Principles

Posted: May 1, 2013 in editing
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Newfoundland Trip #24 - 'The Rock'

Ah, home sweet home. Don’t she look inviting? (Photo credit: dibytes)

I had an entirely new experience the other day: I read a screenplay.

Not just for my own amusement, though I did enjoy it. Kat Nicholson, a very talented friend of mine who blogs over here, had asked me to look over one of her screenplays for dialect. See, it is set on the east coast of Newfoundland, where I’m from, and that province has its own…distinctive accent.* Several of them, as a matter of fact. We mostly do it to confuse outsiders. It works very well.

Only a few of the characters, and none of the main ones, really have the strong form of the accent, but that’s enough. Kat knew that she wasn’t familiar enough with the dialect to reproduce it perfectly, so she made the smart decision: get someone who is familiar to check it for accuracy.** So I went through it and changed “where are you” to “where ye at” and so on. Even changed to curses to the pseudo-Catholic sacrilege that I grew up with. There weren’t many changes, and nothing that really affected the story at all, but they still make a difference. Especially if you run across any readers who know the area, or are from it. That’s when you’ll be happy you checked your sources.

You can do all the research you want, and sometimes that’s all you can do on a particular topic. But if you have the opportunity, get someone who knows what you’re talking about to check your facts, your turns of phrase, your basic operating principles. Otherwise you might have the embarrassing experience of being called out on that shit. Or you might just annoy your reader with an inaccurate depiction. Trust me, it happens. I’ve been seriously annoyed by it in the past. Everything from accents to basic physiology to omg that’s not how a goddamn gun works.

 

People make mistakes. I get it. But a smart person gets someone else to check their work so those mistakes don’t get further than they need to.

And now, if anyone gets pissed with Kat over her representation of the dialect, she can just point at me and say, “Her fault.”

*If you want to know how distinctive, check out this video from CBC’s The Hour. Slays me.
**The fact that I live across the street and can easily be bribed by butterscotch cookies is just a bonus.

 

Do Better

Posted: April 24, 2013 in editing
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A standard ice pick

I need more of this. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The most common comment I leave for myself during the editing process consists of two words: do better.

You’ll spot that gem up and down the margins of the print out, scrawled in red ink. It’ll pop up in the digital bubbles of the comments function on the computer. Sometimes it just ends up printed in big ass block letters on a post-it and stuck on my desk.

Do. Better.

I slap this comment on every instance where I think I fell short. The parts it references aren’t spectacularly bad or anything. They’re just…meh. Nothing. Forgettable. Or worse, cliched. They’re all the places that I didn’t bring my A-game. I was going through the motions like an overpaid athlete with a bulletproof contract and a rabid badger of an agent. I did what I had to do, I moved the story along, but I can do better. And I know it.

Zero drafts are full of this shit, and they have to be. Zero drafts are about getting through the story, in part so I can find out what the hell it is. The prettiness comes later. But when I’m hacking my way through that first rough pass, I’m so busy trying to nail the story to the floor before it has a chance to get away that I fall back into the easy phrases, the lazy words. Nights are dark, people are constantly looking at things, and things are a little too on the nose. It gets the job done, it gets the reader—in this case, me—from one point to another, but it lacks artistry. More than that, it lacks impact. It falls through the brain without a ripple, let alone the ice-pick of revelation for which we’re aiming.

I read about a songwriter once who said that he threw out the first rhyme he thought of every fucking time. No light and sight for this guy. No heart and start. He always looked for something else. Something that wasn’t so goddamn obvious. It’s the same principle at play here. Don’t complicate for the sake of complicating, but learn to recognize the difference between simple and elegant and lazy and boring. The only way to recognize that difference, to train your brain’s nose to zero in on its unique stench, is to go through your own shit and find it. Because, trust me, it’s there.

And when you find it? Simple.

Do better.

Approaching The Speed Of Editing

Posted: March 15, 2013 in editing
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English: The famous red eye of HAL 9000

What do you think you’re doing, Steph? (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I write fast. Everyone knows this. But I edit slow. Really slow. Like ‘plot advancement of an art house film’ slow. It takes forever.

That’s because editing uses a very different brain than writing. It’s more deliberate and precise, but it also burns out faster. Editing takes a lot of concentration, so have to do it in chunks of about half an hour, interspersed with something that doesn’t make my brain creak so much (i.e. writing). This is why I usually have different projects going on at the same time. For example, I’m breaking up the morning’s editing with this blog post. I edit until my timer goes off, take a break, then switch. And so on until I either finish or until the effort of cleaning the insides of all the story lightbulbs makes me snap.*

Oh, yes, the timer. I have one. I use the digital version of the Pomodoro Timer, mostly because it sits unobtrusively in my task bar and I don’t have to think about it.** Also, I find the 25 minutes on, five minutes off break down great for me. Five minutes is long enough to check Book of Faces and Twitter, walk around the room and stretch a bit, maybe get a coffee…but not so long that I lose touch with what I’m doing. I don’t usually use it for zero draft writing; it’s better to dump that mess out in one go. But for edits, and re-writes, I need a little more structure.

The net result of this is that a story that took me two and a half hours to pour out on the page in its initial form will take almost a week to edit into something worth reading.  I took it from a zero draft to a marginally readable one on Wednesday and Thursday, but there’s still more work to be done. Every draft gets a little cleaner, a little sharper, a little closer to the magical point of good enough.

And with luck, I’ll hit that point before the deadline.
*Some clarification may be needed: ‘Cleaning the insides of the lightbulb’ is household slang for ‘taking a task to the point of obsession’. I have lived with two people for whom this phrase was invented just for cleaning the house. It has it drawbacks, but the lightbulb are very clean.

**And the delightfully robotic voice sounds like I’m being told to take a break by HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Fill Needed: Editing the Short Story Zero Draft

Posted: March 13, 2013 in editing
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Rodeo clown Flint Rasmussen

Not Shown: The Main Character. Unless the editing takes a weird turn. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Well, it’s done. The first draft of that short story I was wrangling with last week. And most of the week before. In the kind of twist that my brain loves, the winner of the Draft Cage Match was…a completely different story. This is the equivalent of, at the end of The Hunger Games, having the Punisher appear and gun down the last three competitors simultaneously. Cool? Maybe. But definitely unexpected.

But there’s a draft, and it’s done, and now I need to make it not suck.  Here’s my attack plan:

1) Fill in the holes. My zero drafts tend to be either really wandering or really sparse. This is the latter. About half of it is just dialogue at this point. I need to go back and backfill some of those gaps because, right now, they’re just talking heads. At least one of them has a head. The other might have none, or more than one. Hard to tell.

2) Continuity of Voice. I wrote first person this time, so I need to make sure that the viewpoint character’s voice is consistent throughout. No changing into a hard-drinking, hard-loving rodeo clown halfway through. Unless it’s really awesome. Then it’s okay.

3) Continuity of Rules: Working in speculative fiction is freeing—magic and science and warping the laws of physics, oh my!—but also oddly constricting. You need to know what the rules are before you break them, and then you need to break them consistently. This story concerns a binding contract and certain conditions that have to be fulfilled and loopholes within those rules. I miss one, then the premise falls apart.

4) Shiny!* Time to break out the polish and get to buffing. Take out the nicks, grind off the unnecessary rough edges**, make it slick enough so that when the gut-punch comes, it’s that much more unexpected.

There’s a lot of work to be done, especially considering the state of the draft, but now there’s a place to start. That’s all a zero draft is: a point on the map to say ‘you are here’ so you can figure out how to get where you want. Now I’ve got to get to work.

What’s that, you say? You can hear something under the floorboards? Oh, that’s nothing. Nothing important, anyway. It’s certainly not the butchered corpses of the last three drafts trapped under there, trying to get out so they can force me to finish them. No. Nothing of that sort.

…Where’s the flamethrower?

*I may have been watching Firefly again lately.
**While leaving in all the necessary rough edges, of course. It’s the difference between a skin condition and a signature scar.

The Trees Are Screaming

Posted: February 8, 2013 in editing, writing
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Screaming Titans redwood being viewed by arbor...

Yep, this one looks big enough. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Cutting apart a zero draft is a lot like butchering one of those mega-poisonous pufferfish for fugu: you must be careful and you must know what you’re doing, or someone’s going to die.

Okay, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration. But only slight. Having taken a look at my zero draft, trust me: I could kill with this.

There are poisonous parts in a zero draft. Big ones. They have to be excised with care and diligence and, most of all, a steady hand. No second-guessing. No hesitation. Or you’ll nick the poison sack and let it leak out into everything.

But the problem can be spotting those problem areas. Sometimes they’re obvious, sure, but they’re not always circled like the cellulite on a celebrity’s thighs on the cover of one of those terrible magazines.* Sometimes you have to dig deeper, really root around in the guts of that thing, and find the dirty parts.

Which is why I have this:

photo

Semi-fresh brain squeezings.

That, friends and neighbours, is a printed copy of the zero draft of The Patchwork King.** It’s roughly the size of a phone book. And I mean a real fucking phone book; given the size of the town I live in, that translates to about six local phone books. This looks like a Toronto phone book. As I look at it, I can hear all the trees screaming.

But it had to be done. Editing on screen is something I can do with smaller works, but not for this. I tried. Ended up skimming and skipping too much. I was leaving too much poison in, and that ain’t going to work. So, hence the phone book.

I’m going old-school on this one. I’ve got a pack of red pens all lined up. And fire pit, just in case it doesn’t go well. It’s calling for a blizzard tomorrow, so it might be a good chance to go Donner Party on it. Brutal, maybe. But that’s the way it goes. Sometimes you have to get your hands on something in meatspace. Sometimes you have to drag it out back and beat it with a tire iron until it works or dies.

Get a good look at it now, sitting there all pristine and pretty, wrapped up with rubber bands. The next time you see it, it’s going to be bleeding red ink and infested with post-it flags, dangling add-in notes like partially severed limbs.

It’s going to be a good weekend.

*If the people who publish those ever get a crippling case of honesty, they’ll retitle them things like Feeling Bad About Yourself and Being A Judgemental Voyeuristic Dick.
**Well, most of it. This does not count the 30,000 words I’ve already cut. That’s right: it was bigger.

The Scene Doctor Is In

Posted: November 7, 2012 in editing, writing
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The Doctor, by Sir Luke Fildes (1891)

Hm. Looks like a bad case of Erroneous Narration (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I wrote a scene yesterday. About 3,000 words, so right in my wheelhouse for a daily writing goal. In fact, I ended up allotting nearly all of my writing time yesterday to this one scene. There’s a lot going on. It contains a lot of necessary mood-setting for the story as a whole, as well as a bunch of information that the protagonist needs to move on with the plot. And it generally sets a tone for what will probably turn out to be a very important setting.

It’s also completely fucking wrong.

I figured that out shortly after I completed it. I just knew. And, also almost as soon as I finished it, I knew what the scene should have been. Really, the beginning and end points of the scene will be the same. The information passed on will be the same. But the method of conveying it will be different. Will involve a different character, which changes the tone considerably.  Frankly, it’ll probably also make it a lot better.*

But I wasn’t pissed about the wasted time I spent on it yesterday, because I know by now that it wasn’t really wasted. Sometimes you have to get something out before you can see what’s wrong with it. Think of it like drawing: you can’t correct a picture that only exists in your head. It’s not real enough. But the second you get that fucker out onto a piece of paper, then you can see the places where it doesn’t work, where the limbs are bent wrong, where the proportions are off. And does that hand have six fingers? Ooh, boy, there’s a lot of work that needs to be done.

But by getting it out, you know what that work is. You’re not just floundering around in theword-mines, looking for a light. You’ve got a light, and it’s showed you something that’s kind of a mess, but at least you know what you’re dealing with now. And it’s a hell of a lot better than just wandering about in the dark.

*The question now is do I go back and rewrite that scene or leave it as it until I come back for a second pass at the book in general. It really depends on what kind of mood I’m in today. I may just leave a note for myself for later dictating the changes, and write the remainder of the manuscript as if they’d already been written. Or my CDO* might kick in and I might go back and redo it. But, either way, now I know.

**Like OCD, but with the letters in alphabetical order, as they should be.**

***Old joke, I know. Couldn’t resist. Besides, I’m using all my creativity up on the novel. Cut me some slack.

Can I Borrow Your Eyes?

Posted: July 20, 2012 in editing, writing
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English: Eyeball

Come on, you won’t even miss ‘em. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Had some questions after Wednesday’s post about first readers, so I did some Internet research on the idea. Apparently there’s a school of thought out there that says first readers are nice, but not essential. That you’re the best judge of your own writing. That you don’t need any one else’s opinion.

Pardon me while I snort derisively.*

Look, our opinion on our own writing is…how can I put this…skewed. We put a lot of work into this stuff, so it’s only understandable that we find it hard to be objective some of the time. Most writers are about as capable of coldly evaluating the shortcomings in their work as a parent is at admitting their kid is really kind of an asshole. Even when it’s staring you in the face, pushing other kids down and stealing their shoes, it’s just too hard to admit.

That’s what other people are for. They can point out the things you miss. And, trust me, you’re missing stuff. So am I. That’s why I have other readers. They’re fresh eyes when you need them most.

Here’s a list of things that first readers can do for you and your writing:

1. Catch Your Mistakes: You know the best way to find a spelling error? Let someone else read your work. You’ve read it so many times that your eye will skip over the place where you meant ‘bludgeon’ and instead wrote ‘bugger’, which raises questions if it’s a cause of death. But a first reader will catch it. And sometimes make fun of you for it.

2. Poke Holes in Your Plot: You might not think this is a benefit, but who would you rather notices a huge seeping plot wound: a first reader or a fucking submissions editor? First readers will tell you what makes sense, what doesn’t, and what is so out to lunch that it doesn’t make sense on this or any other planet.**

3. Turn the Knob to Eleven: I wrote a horror story once, and gave it to Snowman to read. And you know the first thing he said to me when he was finished? “Needs to be more fucked up.” And he was right. It was one of my first attempts at horror, and, frankly, it was less horror and more a mild case of the willies. But I rewrote it with that advice in mind, and now it’s horror. And it ended up getting published in Tesseracts Thirteen with some serious heavyweights in Canadian writing. “Needs te be more fucked up” was some solid advice.

4. End The Affair: We’re not supposed to, but all writers have their favourites. Characters, scenes, lines…we have ones that we really love. But sometimes they’re not as good or as clever as we think they are. And a first reader will catch that. General rule: if you love something, but one of your first readers doesn’t, give it another look and think about it. They might be wrong. But if all your first readers hate it, it probably needs to change or die.

5. Tell You Where You Rose To The Occasion: And, sometimes, you work on something so much you lose all sense of perspective. You think it’s shit, and you’d be better off flushing it before someone else notices the smell. First readers can reignite the good feelings for a story, point out where you did right. That’ll give you your swagger back. And we need swagger if we’re going to do this.

*All right, I didn’t quite manage derisive. I got as far as disbelieving and decided to stop before I sprained something.
**The end bit is especially important for sci-fi.

The Monster’s Eyebrows, Or How Not To Finish A Story

Posted: July 9, 2012 in editing, writing
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Eyebrows can also help portray empathy.

Just a few more…damn it! Now I need to start over again! (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I fucking love editing.

Yeah, I know. Weird: I am it. But there’s something very…freeing about doing all that cutting. Like spring cleaning. It’s a chore in a way, but I love getting rid of all that junk and clutter. Emptying drawers, shredding old documents, dropping boxes off at the charity bins…It’s like casting off a weight I didn’t realize was holding me back. Once it’s gone, I’m lighter.

Editing is the same. Cutting out all the pieces that don’t fit, piecing together what’s left into a leaner, more dangerous whole, taking a piece from raw iron to a steel blade…there’s a very unique sort of pleasure to that. Different than the initial rush of writing, but just as rewarding.

But there’s a right time and a wrong time to edit. And the wrong time—at least for me—is before I finish the first, or zero, draft.

I know, it’s so tempting. All those little mistakes* are just sitting there, waiting for your loving correction.** They stare at you every time you open the damn document, mocking you with their sheer fucking wrongness. Oh, hi, they say. Remember that bad day you had a while back, when you couldn’t put two words together to save your life? When everything you wrote seemed clumsy and trite? Well, it was! And we’re the record of that! Isn’t that fun?

Assholes.

But if you go back and fix those, then you’ll fix something else. That character that wasn’t quite gelling, the dialogue that doesn’t work, something.

And then something else.

And then you do a complete rewrite of the first chapter.

And before you know it, you’ve lost the story. So you go back and rework the opening again. And again. Sooner or later, you get bored and move on, but it doesn’t matter, because the story is dead.

My friend Sherry (who blogs here) says that editing before you finish the zero draft is a great way to have a lot of really great beginnings. And nothing else.

So step away from the red pen. No one found that harder to do than me. I love editing. The red ink flows like the blood of my enemies. Tearing something apart, stripping it down to the bare bones, and then rebuilding it into a monster… Man, what a high. But do that before the first draft is done, and you’re not rebuilding. There’s nothing there to rebuild yet. You’re like Dr. Frankenstein getting caught up in making sure the monster’s eyebrows are straight*** without taking the time to lace all those bones and guts together right. You’ll end up with a perfect face and nothing to hang it on.

So remember: guts and bones first. Then you can go back and make it pretty.

*’Little’ being a loose term. Some of them just keep getting bigger, like The Dark in that Robert Munsch book.
**Yes, I did go to Catholic school. Why do you ask?
***And, if possible, one uninterrupted line.

The Eight Stages of Editing

Posted: July 4, 2012 in editing, writing
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Lightbulb, in Glass and Chocolate

And then everything turned to chocolate. Brilliant! (Photo credit: JanneM)

1. Challenge Accepted: All right, project, it’s been a while, but it’s time to get going again. You’ve got some…quirks, but they’re fixable. I can totally do this. I’ve got my red pens, my post-its, my notebook…let’s get on this. It’ll be easy.

2. Rough Patch: What the…where the hell did that character come from? And where is this happening? I thought it was a library, but now there’s tigers? And a rodeo clown? What the hell, past self? And the writing… “His hair was decadent”? What the fuck does that even mean?

3. Back in the Saddle: Okay, okay, some parts of this are rougher than a prison physical, but I can keep going. All I have to do is look past the admittedly crappy parts to the bones of the story. Those are good. There’s something worth saving here.

4. Pit of Despair: There’s nothing worth saving here. I can’t believe I vomited up this steaming pile of word fail. I should just stop writing. I am a total fucking failure, and the second anyone sees this, they’ll know. And I’ll be cast out of the tribe of Writer, to wander the outer lands alone and howl my misery until the end of days.

5. House of Cards: Okay, this is a problem, but I’m not giving in. How can I fix it…I know, I’ll just get rid of that character. Always hated the little bastard anyway, so let’s just murder him with a tire iron wrapped in seal fur. Okay. But…wait…no, now that subplot doesn’t work…and the love triangle has just become a lame-ass love…line. And the villain’s motives no longer make sense…and…Argh.

6.The Lightbulb: Holy shit, how did I not think of that before? That’s perfect. It fixes everything. She was an alien all along! This isn’t Plot Spackle, this is fucking Plot Synergy. I can make this amazing!

7. Point of No Return: I’ve come too far now. I have to finish it, if only so I can never look at it again. And when I’m done, I will bury this Frankenstein-ed piece of derivative crap under the porch so no one will ever see it, and pray it doesn’t seed and sprout more stories.

8. The Finish Line: I can’t believe I got through that. And now…now it’s pretty good. I can work with this. I can look at submitting this thing. Let’s see, what do I need….synopsis? One page? Well, I did just do all this work on it. I know the story backwards and forwards and damn near sideways by now. Shouldn’t be too hard to condense into one page, right? Ah, hell, that’ll be easy.*

*It won’t.

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