And another ten books….

Yeah - I can't stop doing this!  Hopefully, I won't accidentally repeat.  This week's list had 13 on it, so I already know there's a next week coming!

I'm completely resisting commenting on the books.  If you pick them up, then pick them up with no expectations, or as few as possible!

Ten more books that stay with me are:



1. On Writing - Stephen King

2. Religion for Atheists - Alain de Botton

3. Bill Graham Presents - Bill Graham

4. A Good Man is Hard to Find - Flannery O'Connor

5. Just an Ordinary Day - Shirley Jackson

6. Enormous Changes at the Last Minute - Grace Paley

7. Shambhala - The Sacred Path of the Warrior - Chogyam Trungpa

8. The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien

9. Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse

10. Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand

Writing Is Not A Mystery - Forward Ever (Backward Later)

Redrum

Let's talk about moving forward.

In his excellent (and well-edited) book On Writing, Stephen King suggests writing through your first draft without giving in to the temptation to edit as you go.  I wholeheartedly concur. Writing through the first draft without tweaking almost insures there will be a first draft. Editing as you go almost insures there won't be.  Re-read the draft when you sit down to work, and keep writing from the end.  With a poem this is easy.  With a story, screenplay, novel - not so much.

Incessantly tweaking the first act of a screenplay, the opening of a novel, or the beginning of a book may feel like the right thing to do - you want your set up to be impeccable - but it's a great way to get bogged down.  This is an easy way to lose momentum, to lose the forest for the seedlings, and to get bored of the work.  By the time you feel the beginning is done, you may also feel there is no end in sight.

I know a writer who spent over a decade on a first novel.  Draft after draft, re-combing, recombining, tweaking, but never giving it its legs.  All that work still named a first draft.  Given out to readers every 2 or 3 years for feedback, and then back into the cave for 2 or 3 years to fix the first draft, which was nowhere near anything the writer wanted to submit for publication.  

Moving forward involves letting go.  There is a point at which you must let go.  When you leave the planet (and you will, we all do), do you want to leave one book, or a whole shelf of books? 

Think about how many shelves Stephen King's books take up in a library.  He is possibly the most prolific writer in history - I gratefully receive the advice he has shared.   He's never limited himself in form or genre, he simply takes different names when he feels like it to keep some distance.  Maybe you don't like Stephen King books and don't want to take his advice.  Whatever his slant on the universe, can you deny his grasp of human motivations, character, his understanding of sense of place, morality, his power for telling a story with gripping suspense, or his ability to plot narrative arcs so carefully intertwined with his characters' journeys that they seem inseparable?

I'm a huge Raymond Chandler fan, but I've run out of Chandler to read.  I hate that!  If I were a rabid Stephen King fan, instead of a just a respectful one, I'd probably never run out of his books to read!  (Unnecessary aside:  I have this weird habit of saving back one book from living authors I love, so that if they stop writing, I still have one shiny new spine to crack - for instance, I've never read The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison - it's my saved book of hers.)  Things take the time they take to craft, of course, and it isn't a race.  But there is a point at which you must exit the Interstate or you will end up in the Atlantic or the Pacific.

If you're working on a first draft longer than it's socially acceptable to breastfeed a baby, I'm calling you out. (I'm going to caveat that with exceptions for PhD. theses, working moms trying to write in their one lucid hour a day, textbook writers, J.R.R. Tolkien and other extreme cases that involve incredibly time consuming drafts - you know who you are and you are on your own recognizance.)

Let go - you don't need to put it all in the first book. You have more books in you, more screenplays, more poems, more essays, you do.  If you continue in first draft limbo, you won't.  This is a trick you are playing on yourself - telling yourself you are writing, you are a writer, yet neurotically obsessing over your insecurities as manifest by your manuscript.  Yes, I said that.  The monster in a box is back.

I'm admonishing you, because if this is your issue, then you are stuck in something gooey and pernicious, and much worse than the thing that people call Writers Block.  (Insert that Law & Order sound effect here, please...in fact, every time I write Writers Block, you can hear that.)

There is help for this - there are editors, coaches (yes, like me), classes, workshops, there are reading services, there are ways to get creative feedback to get out of the feedback loop in your head.  If you don't avail yourself of the assistance surrounding you, then you are babysitting some part of yourself you are afraid to show to the world, possibly to your own spiritual and psychological detriment.

Journal writing is not for show; it's yours, it's precious, it's private.  When you choose other forms of writing - presentational forms - as your calling, but then withhold presentation in perpetuity, something is wrong.  Remember - you don't have to show it to anybody.  Write it, and if it's too personal, fleshy, raw, terrible, terrifying - put it in a drawer or the electronic equivalent and move on.  However, dancing with this thing you know you don't want to show anyone in some kind of perpetual stalemate is not healthy.

Ask yourself:

Do I enjoy the process of writing?

Do I enjoy the process of writing this particular thing?

Do I get joy from the product of the time I spend writing?

Why isn't it finished?

When will I consider it to be finished?

Is this what I want to write?

Will this ever be something I want to present to the world?

What am I waiting for?

Perfection is the constant stalker of the artist.  If the spectre of this mercenary is hanging over your head while you write - well, that would make it impossible to write anything.  For a minute, turn on the television.  Flip through the channels.  Watch what's on there.  Somebody wrote that.  Somebody is getting large checks for that, buying a house with that, paying for their kids' college.  Perfection?  Occasionally.  Professional-grade?  Yes.  So, what are you waiting for?

Don't try.

Let go of the idea of perfection, of an absolute finished (citation:  George Lucas).  Take it off the table.  You are not going to make Citizen Kane your first time out.  That was a fluke of humanity.  Seriously.  So was Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird,  Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind, and Adele's 19.  I mean, seriously - who makes masterpieces their first time out of the gate?  Not very many people.  

Perfection is not the point.  Communication is the point.  Becoming part of the cultural dialogue is the point.  Sharing your vision is the point.  

If the thing you are working on won't call itself finished, is driving you to distraction, is driving you to drink, is making you nauseous, put it away.  Start something new, taking the lessons with you, but acknowledging the ways in which the idea didn't work, or spun out of your creative control, or was not large enough to sustain its form, or was too large for its form, or was beyond the grasp of your skills at that point.  It's totally okay.  You don't have to burn it or anything.  Or burn it, but keep it on a hard drive somewhere.  You can go back to it.  You can steal from it.  You can move on and write the thing that truly wants to be written by you and shared with the world.  Write that.

(And that's a double dose of perfection - Adele singing Dylan.  Enjoy it - don't try for it.)

(This blog is part of a series - you can look the others up on the side, or go to the blog search and type "writing is not a Mystery" - either should work.)

Writing Is Not A Mystery - What's Next?

Lately little sparks of writing wisdom seem to attract themselves to me like staticky socks.  The Jhumpa Lahiri blog on sentences.  William Martell's great article on creating drama in your screenplay that so perfectly illustrates the points I was making in the Go Organic post - that making it harder on yourself  - letting the demands of the situations and the conflicts that naturally arise dictate the writing - can actually make it easier...and better.

We've been in getting started territory for a while now - handling impulses, looking at the thing called Writer's Block, marshaling ideas, locating the energy in the work -  we've covered a lot!  Sitting down and opening the floodgates are the first, second, third, fourth...steps - well they are a large part of the process.

But there's more.

'Writing is rewriting' is what people always say.  And it has its truth.  I think of rewriting as something specific - different from editing, proofing, copy editing, and even different from revising.  I know - it sounds mysterious.  It's not.

Like Ike and Tina, let's start nice and easy, and then, no - I promise it'll never get that rough.



Maybe we should start by defining some of the terms.

Copy editing - Easy.  Simplest thing to do - once you've gotten the ideas out.  DON'T force yourself to copy edit as you go.  You can if you get stuck or run out of juice, but for the most part, leave the typos and grammatical agreement problems where they are until you're writing, finished gathering up the meaning, through stylizing the piece.  Don't break your flow - there'll be time to do it later.

Sure, spell and grammar check will catch some stuff, but you do need to go through it.  There are plenty of things they won't catch - like the difference between using it's and its, or their and they're and there.  Don't ask people to read or give feedback on messy files - it's disrespectful of their time AND it's going to get you the wrong kind of feedback - do you want to know if your piece has typos or do you want to know if it makes sense, has impact, has a good rhythm, is interesting?

If you don't know your basics - learn, find out, and get yourself some handbooks!


Proofreading - We're rapidly losing the distinction between copy editing and proofing.  Proofreading is looking at proofs and correcting them for publication.  For me, it's the last once-over before sending it out, uploading a file, or sending something to the printer.  I think it's a good idea to include this step even in our digital publishing universe.  Honestly, I proofed versions of my book 4 times, and still found a typo a few months down the road in a printed copy!

Don't skip this step if your writing is heading into the world in print form.

Editing - A lost art.  I lament the days of the star editor - like Jackie Onassis whose books for Doubleday were some of the loveliest, tightest volumes.  A great editor makes a good writer great.  Having another pair of eyes - a skilled pair with audience, marketing, and the feel of the read in mind - is priceless.  Before you get to an editor, you've got to do it yourself.

Editing is refining the way you say things, tweaking the order of things, playing with style.  It's taking the bones of the piece and turning them into a skeleton. That dances.  And can grow skin.  It's a huge part of the time you may spend sitting at your writing.

No matter how first-thought-best-thought you may be - you need to edit.  People don't talk about it.  They pretend they don't do it, but the best writers edit, edit, edit.  They may not even know they are editing - they may think they are reading, re-reading and poking around, but that's an edit.

Revising - For my own purposes, I think of revising as what I do after I think I have a good draft, but before I do anything with that draft.  I put it away for a couple of days if I can, and then, feeling as though I've got everything in there I need to, have checked for errors, and have turned it into what I hoped for, I step back into it.  I do this in the hopes that now that my brain has drained all the expectations it was holding for this particular piece, that I will see something else.  Something new.  Something luscious.  Something serendipitous.  Something I just couldn't see before, because I had too much going on in my head.  Revising is a great moment.  It's when you can take that extra step closer to your reader.  It's a great opportunity to become a better writer than when you sat down to write your draft.

Rewriting - Again - for my own purposes - rewriting is a specific idea to me, separate from everything above.  Rewriting is what you do once you've "published" a draft - that can mean sending out a version of a script to actors and director, it can mean standing up on stage reading it in front of people, or just letting some friends give you feedback.

It's an overhaul, based on all that you know now, but didn't know then, all the things you didn't manage to layer in the current draft.  The more complicated and long the original, the more likely it will need a rewrite.  You are not a bad writer if you need to go through drafts- going through drafts is what makes you a good writer because it is what produces good writing.

There more to be said about editing, revisions and rewrites, but at least we have some parameters for what these are.  It's important to realize this process is part of the timeline for your project - don't deliver without going throgh these steps in you can help it.  And you can.

(This blog is part of a series - you can look the others up on the side, or go to the blog search and type "writing is not a Mystery" - either should work.)