Novel Remodeling
On Friday I finally got around to getting a printed copy of the latest draft of Flowers for Dionysus, my first novel. That was the fourth, and red-inking for the fifth has already begin. In fact, I will probably get to page 100 tonight at least.
Some interesting things have happened. I wanted to move some things around, and make a few sections leaner. I knew one way to do this was via an idea I had a few days ago; I’d actually add a bit more to the opening, so as to reveal more information more efficiently. I hesitated at first to do this, as the opening page or so of the novel had been in my head almost from the very first moment of inspiration. I’m not one who falls in love too deeply with every word I write, but that opening has felt for years like the opening it was meant to have. I didn’t think I’d ever change that.
Now, I’m on course to do that exact thing.
In the end, I had to admit to myself that it truly would open the door wider, and get the ball rolling faster than my original opening, though. So despite my somewhat sentimental attachment to the opening, I’ve made the notes in red ink to change it.
It’s not just some tightening up, either. The entire opening will be different. I’ll have to write a whole new scene with two of the characters, and tack it on to the existing opening. (Which will become chapter two.) The last few revisions have been mostly cosmetic and grammatical. Some polishing here and there. But when I start the fifth draft I will actually be revisiting the characters in a whole new way. It will be the biggest change, probably, since writing the draft that followed the rough draft.
Of course, that is some time away. I need to red-ink the whole novel before beginning to write the next draft. That’s how I roll with such things. Still, it’s an interesting place to be right now. To not only be changing something that has been a bit of a compass point for literally years, but to come to the realization that the new way is probably going to be better in several ways.
Funny how the opening didn’t seem like it could be improved upon in previous years of working on this novel. Yet sometimes you look at perfectly acceptable front door and decide the entire front of the house, or even the entire house will look better after a change. Not a demolition, mind you. Just a bit of remodeling.
So, I’ve laid the plans for a remodeling of the opening of the novel. We’ll see if once written it holds up. But I have at least several more weeks before I need to worry about it. You can bet, though, it will remain on my mind.
What’s the biggest change you ever made to a manuscript this late in the game?
Review: The Art of Reading
Last night I completed a course on DVD from The Great Courses called “The Art of Reading”. The Four DVD set contains 24 lectures each of about 30 minutes in length. No mail-in evaluations, just lectures designed to be viewed from the privacy of your home. The lecturer was one Dr. Timothy Spurgin, English professor at Lawrence University.
Though I’m not in anyway affiliated with the company that produced this course, Professor Spurgin or Lawrence University, and am not being paid by any of them, I’m officially recommending this course to both those who wish to improve their reading experience, as well as to aspiring fiction writers. Perhaps especially to aspiring fiction writiers.
As the course description that I linked to above notes, there is something here for readers of virtually every level. I didn’t buy the course because I don’t know how fiction works. I read it and write it quite often. Yet when I saw the names of the lectures in the catalog that came to my home earlier this year, I couldn’t help but think that a no pressure exploration and review of the basic components of solid fiction by way of more thoughtful methods of reading it would also illuminate better ways to write it. Three weeks, 24 lectures, and 12 total hours of material later, I can confirm I was right.
Though the lecturer does make mention here and there of how the material may benefit the writer of fiction, you can probably guess that most of the course is dedicated to the reading of it. It’s this focus on reading rather than writing that makes the course so useful to the writer. What do I mean by that irony?
Simply this; by guiding “students” in recognizing signposts and milestones of already established fiction, the course makes one more aware of what goes into a work that has succeeded. Even if one is already familiar with a literary concept, the course lays it out in such a way as to make a reader search for it, as opposed to notice it when it shows up. In so doing, the student becomes more cognizant of both the power and the pleasure in such devices and methods. Since half of writing is reading (as we know), a course on artfully reading already successful fiction makes us aware of what steps we can take to create our own solid fiction, without instructing us directly in “How To Create Your Own Solid Fiction”.
It’s no guarantee of writing a bestseller of course. But unlike the advise you tend to find in writing courses, blogs, lectures and tweets, you don’t come away with “you have to do this to be a writer”. Instead, you explore what a successful writer has done, and delve into why they do it. There’s no formula, but there are tendencies, and the course points out why these literary tendencies are so often effective.
In short, it allows you to learn through observation about good writing, instead of by direct instruction.
Won’t just reading do the same thing? Yes, eventually. And for some that’s enough. But if you’re like me, sometimes a guided tour goes a longer way than a self-paced one, even when I’m familiar with the lay of the land. Living only two hours away, I’ve been to Washington, D.C. many times in my life, and am quite familiar with it. But I would still learn quite a bit more about it if I took a guided tour of the city. The same is true with fiction.
Yet I don’t respond well to being told “here is the one truth”. I bristle when anybody in a non-scientific field, no matter how well-credentialed, demands I accept everything they say as true at face value. Fortunately, Dr. Timothy Spurgin doesn’t do this. He is perhaps not the most exciting or charismatic English professor out there, but he is quick to point out in the course that there’s more than one way to look at a book, an author, a type of fiction. Again, he guides and suggests more than he instructs, and I found that quite effective.
Truth be told, the fact that he is a rather plain, bow tie-wearing guy that can be caught checking the clock as he gives his lectures to the camera on an obvious studio set almost makes the entire experience more rewarding. No frills. No gimmicks. No academic pretense. No attempts to make the course something that it isn’t. Just a guy who knows what the hell he’s talking about sharing some of it with viewers of the DVD. To paraphrase Hamlet, the material’s the thing.
Some of the later lectures do get a bit less interesting, as he dedicates them entirely to light analysis of particular sections of certain classic novels. These lectures were clearly designed to take the general knowledge gleaned from earlier lectures and apply them directly to specific works, which is a good thought. I concede I may have gotten more out of those lectures had I read the works to which he was referring. Still, the slow-down was noticeable to me in some of these later lectures.
Yet they don’t take away from the course as a whole. You may need a few lectures to get into Dr. Spurgin’s delivery which, though engaging may strike you as flat in a way. But give him a chance. He’s not monotonous, he’s just…plain. And that’s okay. You’re supposed to be taking in the material and not the professor.
I happened to get the course when it was on sale for 50 dollars. (Including shipping.) But even if it’s now about 7o dollars, I’d consider it worth any writer’s investment. I understand some public libraries carry it, so you should certainly see if yours does.
Better reading will lead to better writing. I look forward to applying some of the tools from this course to my writing, and I look forward to a more artful reading of the next work of fiction I pick up.
Have you taken this course? If you have, leave a comment to let me know what you thought. Do the same if you take it sometime in the future. I’d like to know what others think.
Tedious/Productive Weekend
They say the days of blog posts being of a personal nature are over. That there is no longer any reason to post on a blog about our daily lives, because nobody cares.
In that case, feel free to stop here, because I’m going to that very thing. That’s because I spent a good portion of the weekend both rearranging furniture, and building more of it from one of those ghastly kits you buy at a department store. This when I wasn’t cleaning up the back and front yards.
No doubt, you’ve heard about 14 million people lament as to the atrocities of DIY furniture kits, so I’m not going to elaborate on that. Everything I could say about such a frustrating, time consuming, energy draining enterprise has been said in far more clever ways than I feel like exploring.
Suffice to say that the instructions had no words, and I had no patience by the end of the procedure. But I made a promise out loud that I would neither yell nor throw anything during the operation, and that promise was kept, my friends. That the new storage shelf in my bathroom is not put together 100% correctly. But it’s solid now, and secured to the wall. I have a place to put my aftershave and cold medicine without showing it to the world now. I’m satisfied.
Taking apart an old piece of furniture and tossing the pieces onto the wood pile in the backyard was much more fun.
Then there was the home computer I had to move from one place to another. This is the computer that everyone in the house, as well as visitors use. For various reasons over the years, I’ve had to move it several dozen times. No matter how hard I try, this operation must always begin with 20 minutes of untangling wires that end up in knots that would be the envy of the Royal Navy.
Oh I know, I could bundle them. But I have no idea which wires to bundle in what fashion to make them more easily accessed in the future. Furthermore, with as often as they all need to be moved, and the inhuman contortionist angles at which they end up each time, bundling would make the next move even more difficult. So I don’t. I just spend an hour or so moving everything, and hope it can stay there for at least a year, before limbering up one morning to start the process over again. Spatial relations just are not my thing.
Not to mention the spotty internet all weekend, a cause of which I’ve been unable to deduce. I don’t know as much about computers as I probably should, and mine is years past its prime. But something tells me that the problem isn’t mine, but the provider’s. The provider says it’s mine. So there you go. The connection has deigned to function all day today so far, knock on cyber-wood.
Yet through all of the annoyances and contortions and slow, steady marches towards exhaustion, I had a good feeling last night. I got a lot done that I can see in a tangible way. It was a weekend filled with tedium, but a tedium that by Sunday evening had brought several changes to the house. I’m not handy man, but once in a while I can get things done. Probably in a less efficient and more tiring way than most, but done is done. Dinners taste better at the end of such days. Drinks are more refreshing.
I think we all need a weekend like the one I had sometimes. Where you struggle to get done less then pleasant jobs for which you know in the end you were not built. And your end product may not be as high quality as some others. And you may be more tired than most would be after the same weekend. But you look back on Monday morning, as I have today, and see that much got done. I feel a greater sense of accomplishment sometimes at finishing the dozen tedious tasks than I do accomplishing one important one. And feeling accomplished is feeling accomplished.
Though I still have one more piece of furniture to put together this week. Ask if I feel that upbeat about things once that’s over.
Ever have one of those tedious weekends of errands? How did you feel afterward?
Writings Update
A brief update on how my writings are going, and what my short term plans are.
–On the fiction front, I will soon begin the delayed fifth draft of my first novel, Flowers for Dionysus, the story of a disillusioned community theatre actor who begins to experience unexplained but inspirational events in and around the playhouse.
I’m a bit behind on this, because I finished draft number four about three months ahead of schedule. As a result, I sort of allowed it to leave my consciousness for longer than I should have. In a way this is good, as it provides some distance. But too much distance from a work will dull one’s senses to it, and I can’t let that happen. So it’s back to that within the week.
Structurally I’d say it’s already in fairly good shape, but I think I want to pump up the level of conflict in some places a bit. I think with some doctoring I can also bring a few themes into greater relief.
–Novel 2, (that the working title I have for it), is proceeding again, after some stalling out. You may recall I wrote the first half or so of this novel for Nanowrimo, working from an outline I’d previously composed. From November and until about a week ago, I had only worked on the outline for the second have on a periodic basis, though at New Year’s I set a goal to have the outline finished by May, and the first draft by July.
I think it stalled out a bit because of fear. I’d gotten to a point where I knew it was time to start tying a few things together in the plot, but I began to realize I wasn’t sure how to do it. Unlike the first novel, I didn’t have a dimly lit road that stretched out for miles before me from the start. There were chasms in the action of this one, and for a few weeks there I felt unable to bridge them. I have in the last few days constructed a workable door through which I can now walk the plot. For a while anyway. I can’t see the end, but I can see more than I could two weeks ago.
A bit of a quandary has arisen about Novel 2, though. I’ve always intended it to be a plot-based book with literary quality prose. Dionysus I feel is a good story with an important message, but isn’t literary fiction. Technically, Novel 2 isn’t supposed to be literary either, but I’m starting to wonder if the message of the piece, (one of the reasons I opted to write this novel) is getting lost in the action.
Action is good, of course, and plenty of novels have both action and message. I’m not an elitist, so I don’t think a plot-driven novel needs to lack literary quality. At the same time, if so much running around and good guy vs. bad guy is happening that the theme is less obvious, I’ve shot myself in the foot, haven’t I?
So now I wonder if, upon future drafts, I should write Novel 2 with a more specific intention of being literary. It’s been outlined as a plot-based work, so making the conscious choice to go literary with it would require some obvious shifting, and that could be headache inducing. At the same time, it could relieve some of the pressure to construct a rip-roaring, action-packed plot. (Yes, literature can have plot, but it isn’t the bulls-eye ) Truth be told, it’s probably too early to worry about it, but I’d hate to invest all that time in the wrong type of rough draft…
–I’m writing a one-man play based on some material from Shakespeare. I’ll be performing that at some undetermined date in the intermediate future, on one of the stages I appear on most, locally. It will be a fundraiser for the educational section of same. A pay what you will sort of thing. A few days ago, I finished the first draft of section one of that project. I think section one will probably be the longest and most complex, so maybe it will be more smooth from here on out. (“Famous last words”, I know.)
–I’ve entered one of my short stories, Amateurs in the Distance in a contest. Cash prizes. I did research it and it seemed reputable from what I could tell. 20 dollar entrance fee, which to me is steep, so I’m not going to be doing any more paying contests for a while. (I might enter some free ones.) I just wanted to get my feet wet with contests and this short story is one of my strongest from the last year, I think.
–I’ve begun the preliminary stages of researching agents, small publishing houses, and the self-publishing process, all in an effort to see which is right for me. I hope to have that decision sometime this year.
–On the business front, I’ve applied to be a writer for Scripted, though I haven’t heard back from them yet.
–I’m also going to compile a list of people to consider the dreaded cold-calling. I don’t believe in cold calling by and large. I think its obnoxious and not as effective and know-it-alls say it is. But if I keep it local and focused, it may not hurt as much. But it would be infrequent. It’s far from certain that I will resort to it at all as a means to gain clients.
Other then some other smaller things here and there, you’re about caught up on my writing life for now. I will of course keep you posted on how all of it, and new adventures unfold.
Spring Training for Writers
A few days ago, Major League Baseball began this year’s spring training exhibition games.
Spring training games are a strange experience. It’s still Major League Baseball, and fans still attend, cheer on their team, and buy concessions as they do so. Yet the games don’t officially count. These training games, for all of their similarity to “actual” games, differ in many ways from regular season outings. (And not just in that they don’t count.)
They take place only in one of two perennially warm states: Arizona or Florida. The stadiums are much smaller than the team’s regular facilities. For much of spring training, the most beloved and famous players play in a game for only a short while before being replaced by their back ups. (And in some cases, by rookie prospects that actually stand no chance of being with the team when the season opens.) Games are allowed to end in a tie in spring training. A player might take a strategic gamble in spring training that would be deemed too risky in a regular season game.
So the essence of baseball is still there, but less shiny. Yet players are getting the training they need, and we the fans, deprived of baseball for four months, can still cheer on these shadows of our team as we watch the games.
Believe it or not, writers can learn from the watered down Major League Baseball experience that is spring training. While there is no official “off” season for a writer, there is nothing preventing us from staying “warm”. Here are a few ways a writer can go through their own spring training any time of the year.
-It doesn’t count.
The first rule of spring training writing is that it mustn’t count. Even when we say we “write for me” there is that pressure, no matter how small, to consider who will be reading it in the future. Yet we need to stay loose sometimes without the slightest consideration of readers or rules or formulas.
-Stay fit.
A writer must write. As much as possible, so they tell us. When what we’re writing is important to us, or is under a deadline, writing that hard can make us a bit stiff. If we remember to write something that doesn’t count, we keep the writing parts of our mind fresh and moving smoothly, so that when it comes time for the “real” writing, we’re still on a roll.
-Use the big guns sparingly.
You have a certain knack for description, or dialogue. There’s something distinctive to your writing that makes it memorable. But it can take a hell of a lot of effort to bring it about. As a writer, effort is good. Never lose that ethic. But you need to just keep the gears oiled once in a while. Write a few short stories where you don’t put in each and every last ounce of effort. Aim for coherence, purpose, conflict and such, but don’t aim for your best. Or if you do, keep it to one line or description. Then go back to basics. Write on auto pilot for a while. You’re keeping the muscles loose, not weight training.
-Take risks.
As I said, during spring training you’ll find batters swinging for the fences more often, and at moments when true strategy would say that making light contact is preferable. Pitchers toss pitches they’d have no business throwing under regular season attitudes. More runners will try to stretch that double into a triple. Players take more risks in spring training. Not with their bodies, but with their strategies.
You should take great risks in your spring training writing. Forget the style guide. Have more than one point of view in a single paragraph. Start a story with a long flashback. As an author go ahead and butt into the action like you’re not supposed to do. Or here’s a wild one; write a whole story that tells, and doesn’t show a damn thing. (I bet that would come as a wonderful relief!) It doesn’t count, remember? Just see what it feels like to do all of the things with your writing that you’re told not to do all of the time.
-Strange bedfellows.
Teams that don’t often meet during the regular season, (sometimes for years) will play each other in spring training. That’s because the divisions and leagues of the regular season don’t apply. In spring training, you have the temporary Cactus League (made up of teams that train in Arizona) and the temporary Grapefruit League (made up of teams that train in Florida.) Spring training games stay within these unofficial leagues. You have the unique chance to watch your teams play against those they don’t play often otherwise.
As a writer, you can join a Cactus or Grapefruit League by writing a story in spring training that you wouldn’t normally write. If you’re a thriller author, pen a romance for spring training. You literary fiction types might want to toy with a sci-fi tale. Writing is a time-consuming task, and if you are a genre writer, much of your energy and time is going to be taken up with stories within that genre. So give yourself some spring training time, and write a “this doesn’t count” story in a genre totally different from your usual. Do this even if you haven’t read much or anything in that genre.
-Rookie prospects.
You’ll often find rookies that are in the minor leagues playing with the Major League team during spring training. Sometimes this is done to see if the rookie might be ready to enter the Big Leagues. Sometimes it’s to fill a hole on the roster for any given day. Sometimes the rookie knows he will be called up that year at some point, and is given the chance to see some major league level playing in spring training before he actually starts playing against it later in the real season.
You may not realize it in quite this way, but as a writer you also have rookie prospects. Your prospects are the story ideas you have tucked away in your mind, or written in your idea notebook, (you do have an idea notebook, don’t you?) but haven’t begun yet. In other words, a story concept. In some cases perhaps a treatment that’s a few sentences long, or the roughest of all outlines is there, but no prose has been committed to paper or screen yet. It remains a concept because you either don’t have time to pursue it, or you know it isn’t quite ripe yet.
Write a version of it during spring training. A sloppy, broad, perhaps uninspired version of it. Something that isn’t even a rough draft, because a rough draft is the first stage in bringing a story to the forefront of your work. No, this spring training writing is just to try the concept out. See if it has any legs at all.
You can quit this in the middle, or skip the climax and try out just the ending. The point is to just kick the tires a bit on that idea you’ve had for a while. You don’t need to start to take it seriously right now, but if you feel during the test run that it might have some wings, perhaps you can push it up higher in the cue. Or if you start to sense it has nowhere to go, you can cancel it totally, and make room for another idea.
-Have fun.
This may be even more important that “it doesn’t count”. While Major League players aren’t out there just goofing off, the best will tell you that it is a game, and you need to be having fun with it all, or go do something else with your life. The fun-to-work ratio is however probably skewed ever so slightly more towards fun during spring training.
In this, you have the advantage over baseball. You can in fact totally goof off with a spring training piece. You can be silly, write it with one hand tied behind your back, or try to avoid the letter “e” if you want to. For a writer, spring training can be 100% fun, and still accomplish its goal of keeping you sharp, loose and fit for the writing that “counts”.
But remember to have fun with the writing that counts too.
Ty Unglebower 