Learning while I reread: Editing vs. Rewrite

Published by Joseph P. | Filed under Writing

Back when I worked at a vanity press, I did a lot of line editing. It wasn’t a task I was utterly familiar with upon taking the job, but thankfully we had a number of freelancers who were more than willing to show me the ropes. The most important bit of advice came to me from an editor out in California (who is a stupendous and underrated sci-fi writer by day): a line edit is not a rewrite. It sounds like common sense, but you wouldn’t believe how many people conflate the two.

A line edit isn’t going to make your story better. It might clear up a few cloudy thoughts, and it might make the story flow better for the reader. If you have serious flaws in your manuscript, however, a line edit will do nothing to fix them.

Think of it like this. I have a friend who works for a computer solutions firm, providing hardware and IT support. They work in a building in Manhattan which is due for inspection in a few weeks. If inspected today, they would fail, no doubt. Boxes of documents block passages — you have to walk sideways up and down the stairs. They’re running six, seven, eight wires where there should only be four. It’s an all-out mess, in other words. How are they trying to fix it? By painting the walls and making other cosmetic upgrades. As if that will fool the inspectors.

Where they need a rewrite, they’re opting for a line-edit. Something tells me that the inspectors, like a reader, will see through this right away. They’ll assess the place as they do any other place, and while they might appreciate the decor, they’ll recognize the flawed underpinnings. In both cases, failure is the result.

I remember sending out a manuscript to this Californian editor. We had agreed on a price, approved by my boss, which was adequate for line editing. When the manuscript came back I submitted it to my boss. He said, “This looks almost exactly the same as when we sent it out. This needs serious changes.” I tried to explain that no editor would make those kind of changes for the pay we offered. This led him into a fit of rage, and yeah, I don’t work there anymore.

Rewriting means you’re taking those wires and making sure they’re up to code. It means filing the documents properly, so you can walk up the stairs like any normal person would. It means that instead of putting a band-aid on the problem, you’re performing surgery. I can think of a number of parallels (repainting the whole wall instead of covering up the blemishes, etc.).

When working on a manuscript, it’s best to not think about the physical rewrite at first. I’m going through page by page, and making notes on a separate sheet. If I tried to rewrite on the spot, it would end up more like a line edit. And that’s exactly what I don’t want at this stage. After I finish fixing the wounds of my manuscript, then I’ll get to tidying it up. But it makes no sense to tidy when it’s just going to get dirty again with the rewrite.

Rereading my first novel

Published by Joseph P. | Filed under Writing

How do you feel when you reread something you’ve written months prior? For me, the feeling has been mostly lukewarm. The short stories I’ve written never seen much better or worse than I had initially envisioned them. I end up saying to myself, “This is okay. Nothing great. Not a butchering of the English language.” That’s not enough. It makes me feel like my work is horribly mediocre. That’s not a good place to be — but it’s totally natural for a beginning writer.

In early July, I completed the first draft of my first novel. It was a great feeling to finally type the words “The End” on the last page. Knowing I was emotionally attached to the document, I stuffed it away for a while. My mind came back to it constantly, which is a surefire sign that I wasn’t ready to look at it again.

Yesterday, I thought about my story, and realized I hadn’t thought about it in about five days. Strange, considering I’d thought about it nearly every day for the past six or seven weeks. I knew it was time. So I went to my local Rite-Aid and grabbed a legal pad and some fresh pens. Time to go over this sucker.

My original intent was to do this in one sitting. I can surely read my own work far faster than another’s work, I reasoned. Wrong. After an hour and a half, I found myself just 45 pages in. So I put a bookmark in it and called it a night. This will probably be a couple of days.

The good part, though, is that I find myself smiling when I get to the good parts. Yes, I have a few pages of notes, and I haven’t gotten to the heavy stuff yet. It’s good to know, though, that I’m capable of looking back on something I wrote and think, “good job.” Of course, as long as the next thought is, “Now go make it better.”

Mentally putting aside a story

Published by Joseph P. | Filed under Writing habits

For the beginning writer, it many times comes to this. You’re plowing along on your story one day, and you hit a brick wall the next. This comes with the natural ebb and flow of writing, but for the inexperienced, it poses a number of problems. The foremost of which: Should you put the project to the side and begin something else? There is no concrete answer to this question. We will explore what it means, though.

As with most articles on Pavlik’s Blog, I’m drawing from personal experience. For the past month I’ve been working on a crime novel of sorts. It’s certainly not your typical thriller/mystery/detective story, but it uses a crime to drive the story. One thing that has always fascinated me is people’s reactions when faced with dire circumstances. Some react like George Bernard Shaw: “The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can’t find them, make them.” Yet others completely crumble in the face of unfavorable circumstances. This presents an excellent opportunity for character exploration.

Friday, while sitting in the airport, I was facing one of those brick walls. During the week, which I spent at a convention in Vegas, full of the requisite drinking and gambling, I didn’t find much time to write. Sure, I could have experimented with drunk writing, but when you get back to your room at 4 a.m. and have to be back at the convention by 8:30, there’s not much time to stop and jot down what you thought of the cocktail waitress’s breasts. So after jotting down 1,000 words on the plane on the way there, and eking out another 500 the next day, I hadn’t done much in terms of creation.

This led to Friday. I hadn’t imagined my characters in two days. I hadn’t thought about the storyline and what could come next, and where I should take the arc. So one can imagine my level of frustration while sitting there, staring out the window because it was the only place I could find a power cord to charge my laptop. About 200 words of drivel spewed from my fingertips, and I closed the laptop. “This isn’t working,” I thought to myself. At this point, my subconscious began to discard the story.

Really, I had every reason to ditch it. There are highlight marks all over the document, in places where I already realize that the dialogue is not believable, and where I have the characters do things they certainly would not do. Those things, I thought at first, are fixable, since they don’t directly lead to action. They’re there to build the story, and can be changed if need be. That’s what a second — and third, fourth, fifth, etc. — draft is for. Still, those narrative frustrations combined with my inability to conceive of the story any longer drove me away from it.

Saturday, I sat down and worked on something else. It wasn’t until I put down 1,500 words in 30 minutes that I realize I needed something fresh. What I had written was a mere exercise in description, creating a scene from a story my friend had told me the night before. It wasn’t a new story, but it was something new. And that’s what I thought I needed. So I sat back down on Sunday and did another exercise. Something new. Over the course of the weekend, my subconscious pinged my conscious and said, “hey, maybe it’s time you ditch the crime story.”

I woke at seven this morning, as I do every weekday, so that I can write from 7:30 to 9:30, or get in 2,000 words, whichever comes first. From 7:30 until 7:50 I just stared at a blank screen. Nothing. I looked at the books on my shelf, usually a divine form of inspiration. Nothing. I thought of the stories my friends had told me over the weekend. Nada. I got up and checked my roommate’s DVD collection. Not a single idea came to mind.

So what did I do at 7:50? I opened up the file of my crime novel. Seventy minutes later, I had 2,000 words down. So strange that only after I had mentally discarded the work that I was able to return to it. I’m not saying that you should mentally chuck something if you want to get un-stuck. Sometimes that can be the worst prescription — which is kind of why this is so remarkable to me. Usually, I like to let stories cool off once I finish before going back to them. Never before have I let a story cool while in composition and been able to get right back into the flow.

When you hit a rut, especially one induced by your own poor habits, it pays to clear your head. Some can accomplish this with long walks, others can do it by immersing themselves in a good book. Me? I just like to go about my normal routine. I pack a day with so many activities that I’m bound to think of something at some point.

Honesty in expression sometimes ::gasp:: involves vulgarities

Published by Joseph P. | Filed under Writing

Here’s a question I’ve been thinking about this morning. When you’re writing, or creating any kind of art, shouldn’t you be nothing if not honest? This thought stems from an email my colleague, Ben, received this morning in regards to our Yankees blog. A reader wrote to inform us that he has unsubscribed from our blog, citing two main reasons. First is that we started a post yesterday with “The Yankees suck.” The second is that we occasionally drop a curse word into our posts.

If we were to take heed to this man’s email and change the way we run our site, we would be far worse off. Some people might not want to see a pro-Yankees blog stating that the team sucks. Others might be offended that we sometimes string together four letters in succession which some people find offensive. So why shouldn’t we cater to our audience?

To make these adjustments would be to compromise the one thing any artist need to maintain: honesty. When I’m frustrated with my team, I curse. Most of my friends share this sentiment. Most people I talk to at parties, bars, and other social outlets have similar reactions. So why wouldn’t I use this word if it 1) was the first word that came to mind and 2) is appropriate to the tone of the article?

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. ~Mark Twain

You’d think after 118 games of this shit, he’d get it. But no. ~me

You might need to read the whole post to get a feel for the tone, but the use of “shit” there was undeniably appropriate. It expressed the frustration of fan who was, and still is, watching his team die before his very eyes. His team which had such lofty expectations. His team which has been decimated by injuries to its top two pitchers, and which has seen a supposedly powerhouse offense languish as the league average.

In short, it was honest. Had I used “crap” or any other variation, I wouldn’t be writing as honestly, and therefore the work wouldn’t be as authentic. Maybe I’m getting a little deep here, since this is just a blog about baseball. I think, though, that it acts as a metaphor for all writing. Or at least I hope it does.

The emailer sent us this article on vulgarity. It is from a site that has been around for a year, and still has an Alexa ranking of over two million. Not that this blog is doing any better, but the circumstances are not equal. Compare this to the blog in question, River Ave. Blues, which has been around for a year and a half, and has an Alexa ranking of 143,000. Also consider that the intended audience for the anti-vulgar blog, people who want to make money online, is far more widespread than the the intended audience of the obscenity-laden River Ave. Blues.

Why do I bring this up? Perhaps it’s to illustrate the difference between honesty and artificial substitution. From the anti-vulgar blog: “As far as using vulgar language goes, you can expect a far worse punishment then detention. I’m talking about a massive traffic dive.” As illustrated above, that simply is not the case. We’ve been cursing since Day 1. Last August, we had 111,000 page views. This month, not even at the halfway mark, we’re at 193,000 page views. Too bad that cursing caused a traffic dive.

If a curse word is the first one that comes to mind, and if it fits the tone of your piece, then you should use it. It’s the most honest expression of what you’re feeling. And that, as artists, is what we must strive for. Because if our work is not honest, then can it amount to anything worthwhile?

Writing when unmotivated

Published by Joseph P. | Filed under Writing

As predicted, the Boogeyman has struck. After finishing the first draft of my first novel last Tuesday, I’ve been unable to come up with an idea I feel is sufficient for even a short story. It’s been an interesting few days, trying to lay down the foundation for something, anything, and coming up with a little beyond some flimsy characters and unbelievable dialogue. Yet I’ve sat down every day, trying to plow through this, as some would consider it, writer’s block.

It seems everyone has their own thing for dealing with writer’s block. Some say you should sit down for as long as you normally do, reenforcing the idea that this is the time you write every day. Others think you should just type and accept whatever babble spews onto the page. These two actually represent the majority of what I’ve read from other writers. Still, how productive are you being with these methods?

Hugh McLeod, I think, nails it:

If you’re looking at a blank piece of paper and nothing comes to you, then go do something else. Writer’s block is just a symptom of feeling like you have nothing to say, combined with the rather weird idea that you SHOULD feel the need to say something.

Why? If you have something to say, then say it. If not, enjoy the silence while it lasts. The noise will return soon enough. I the meantime, you’re better off going out into the big, wide world, having some adventures and refilling your well. Trying to create when you don’t feel like it is like making conversation for the sake of making conversation. It’s not really connecting, it’s just droning on like an old, drunken barfly.

I kept this in mind today as I sat down at 4:00. I invoked the Muse, and stared at the blank screen. Continuing my old story wasn’t an option today. It was time to start anew. Yet, I had nothing to say.

Well, scratch that. I had an idea in mind, but I had no idea how to say it. So I tapped out a few lines of dialogue, to no avail. The conversation certainly worked, and laid a foundation, but I had no idea how to introduce the narrative.

So I opened up a TextEdit pad, and started typing away at the history of the story that I want to tell. Normally, I don’t do this. I’d rather have a single premise in mind, and just let the story develop itself. Sometimes, though, you’ve got to change things up in order to conjure new ideas. Far be it from me to be so stuck in my ways that I couldn’t do a little plotting. And so at 5:15 p.m., I had a better idea of what I want to say. Hopefully, how I want to say it will follow closely.

If not? Oh well. I’ll just try again tomorrow.

Booker T on success

Published by Joseph P. | Filed under Meditations

In order to be successful in any kind of undertaking, I think the main thing is for one to grow to the point where he completely forgets himself; that is, to lose himself in a great cause. In proportion as one loses himself in this way, in the same degree does he get the highest happiness out of his work.

If you ask any random person on the street whether they want to be successful, I think you’ll find a near 100 percent “yes” rate. Yet few people can even define success, and even fewer know how to achieve it. This provides a good guideline, when combined with Earl Nightingale’s definition in The Strangest Secret:

“Success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal.”

Booker T is certainly speaking of a worthy ideal here, in the form of a cause greater than one’s self. The overall point is that you really can’t aim for success. Rather, success is a byproduct of focus, determination, and hard work.

What are you working on right now? Is it a cause greater than yourself? Can you make it into one? If not, you might want to consider a different line of work. If your current position can’t lead you to the pursuit of a cause greater than yourself, well, then you’re not likely to reap the benefits of success. The good news is that we can change. The bad news is that we’re naturally averse to it. It takes a lot of conscious effort, but it can be done. So what are you doing to pursue your worthy ideal today?

Ahh! Boogeyman!

Published by Joseph P. | Filed under Writing

I had a conversation with my buddy Jon today, and it centered around the idea of Resistance, though not using that term. See, he’s never read The War of Art, mainly because he already understood the idea of Resistance. That’s why he has a mass of completed and in-progress canvases lying around his bedroom. He does his work. And even if he’s scared off for a few days, he always gets back to it.

The subject was my novel, which was near completion at the time of this conversation (noonish on Tuesday the 8th). The transcription is verbatim, though I’ve cleaned up capitalization issues and formatted everything so it doesn’t look like a sloppy instant message.

Jon: I mean, you are about to actually complete a novel. The spectre of unfinished work has been scattered from your proximity. You’ve shooed away the initial boogeyman that likes to whisper the word ‘failure’ into the ear of every beginning artist.

Me: Oh, he still yells it into my year. But sometimes you gotta say ‘fuck the boogeyman.”

Jon: That fucker is deaf, unfortunately. You can yell at him all you want, but he goes nowhere. So shove your completed work in his face. It demoralizes him a bit…but he rarely quits…It’s fun to anthropomorphosize things…especially threatening things.

Whether you call it Resistance or the Boogeyman, it’s the force that works against you when you’re trying to create or do something truly positive. The more selfless the act, the greater the Resistance from the Boogeyman.

This afternoon, at my normal writing time, I sat down at my computer and opened up the file for my novel. As per ritual, I read the last few paragraphs of what I wrote yesterday, and started my new chapter. Just two hundred words or so in, I realized that this was it. The story was coming full circle. If I wanted to extend it a few more chapters, it would have had to be perfect in order to make any sense whatsoever. Maybe Steinbeck had the ability to write a few chapters after the climax in The Grapes of Wrath, but he’s a master. I am still a student. And the student, above all, must know when to shut his mouth.

I plucked out an epilogue, just because I had some time on my hands. It tied up some bits of storyline which I had planned to take care of in the ensuing chapters. But without ensuing chapters, the only thing left was an epilogue. I feel it does a much better job than protracted chapters tacked on the end.

I only wish that accomplishing something like this would make the Boogeyman go away forever. Unfortunately, almost the opposite is true. He’ll be breathing down my throat, taunting me about the inanity of my new idea. Can’t listen to that fucker, though, if I’m going to continue succeeding.

Rebounding from the bottom

Published by Joseph P. | Filed under Personal Development

Even if Chuck Palahniuk hadn’t gone on to write an impressive array of novels, he would have still been a genius for a line in his debut effort:

“It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.”

A Google search for this string, wrapped in quotes to ensure exact matches, returns 40,500 results. While many of these display the quotation a la carte, many of the results are articles which talk about what this concept means in everyday life. Of them, I can’t help but wonder how many actually get it.

What does it mean to lose everything? To Jack, in Fight Club, it meant the combustion of all his material possessions. That’s not the universal meaning, though. Each one of us is going to define this concept differently. It’s in how you personally define it that will begin to determine whether you’re remarkable or you’re mediocre.

I have had a number of experiences which I though constituted hitting rock bottom, but in retrospect they don’t seem to come close. It’s more like I’m scraping the sandbar, while the vast blue ocean below still awaits.

There was the time during my junior year in high school when I nearly lost all of my friends. I didn’t though. Just scraped the sandbar. After I had graduated, I found difficulty finding a job. This led to a complete breakdown, where I wrote out some incoherent babble that not even I could relate to a week later. Not soon after the “breakdown,” I found a job.

The time when I truly thought I hit rock bottom was towards the end of my tenure as a managing editor of a self-publishing. My boss went on verbally berating tirades on a near daily basis, and had one night assigned me enough work to carry me until midnight, then told me to come back in at six the next morning to start the next project. After fretting about how I’d pay rent, I decided to forget all that and do what I needed to do. I called him in a cursing fit and never returned. Looking back, I’m not sure I even scraped the sandbar there. In fact, I got a job offer the very next day. So how low had I gone?

Ian Claudius talks about his rock bottom moment when he received a reply to an email from Tucker Max. I was similarly cut down by Mr. Max, whom I consider one of the unique minds of my generation. In a discussion of new media, he told me:

“You are looking at the strategy backwards.”

Nothing hurts worse than that. It means I was completely missing something. I still don’t know what it is. But I’m working hard as hell to find out. I dedicate as much work to my own personal development every day as I do my “job.” Trust me, that takes a lot out of a guy. This might not have been a rock bottom moment, but it certainly created a sense of urgency to learn the material relevant to what I want to accomplish in life.

In Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl talks about his fellow prisoners’ experiences with these rock bottom moments, and how the preceding and ensuing suffering helped them keep on and maintain faith. Yet he notes that one does not necessarily need this suffering to find meaning for himself. So maybe I haven’t hit rock bottom, and maybe it’s not necessary.

This just means that I have to work more at self-motivation in order to continue succeeding. I say “continue succeeding,” because as far as I’m concerned success is an ongoing process. I write every day. I’m going back over older things I’ve written and either editing them, gutting and rewriting them, or completely scrapping them. I’m writing on this blog three to four times a week. I’m keeping up a relatively torrid reading pace.

Yet I’m not satisfied. There’s always more that can be done. The issue, to me, is figuring out which stuff is worth it, and which is just a waste of my time. But I’m getting better. And tomorrow, I’ll get a little better than that.

Writing For Others

Published by Joseph P. | Filed under Meditations

“…I began learning that those who are happiest are those who do the most for others.”
Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery

I think this is an especially important idea for writers. While the motivation to write might stem from a personal passion, good writing must connect with others. I’m almost convinced that 90 percent of the writers who fail do not understand this concept. As an author, your manuscript is not about you. It’s about how it connects with your readers. If you want to write flowery prose for yourself, go and buy a diary.

Probably the best advice you’ll ever hear

Published by Joseph P. | Filed under Meditations

From Ben Corman, yet another guy from Rudius Media that I’ve begun reading.

Don’t be afraid to suck. Building a new media presence, writing a novel, starting a business, learning to juggle — you don’t develop any of these skills without actually doing them. And when you first start anything, unless you’re some sort of savant, you’re going to suck. That’s not the worst thing that can happen.

The novel I’m writing right now? Total shit. But that doesn’t mean I’ll stop writing it. You only improve by doing, and doing implies from start to finish. The hope is that the next novel is a bit better, and the next one a bit better than that. Then, in a few years, maybe I’ll have something people actually want to read. But I’ve got to earn it first.