Polishing things

Before I realized that I needed to rewrite my work in progress with a third person narrator, I had polished the draft I had in first person to a high gloss. I’d been through it many times, checking this, fixing that, cruising through sentences for smoothness, honing character development. I got it to the point where I would have submitted it to agents for consideration if I hadn’t come to understand I needed to change it.

So now I’m retyping it, reading every word and changing it as necessary, and I’m alarmed at all of the stupid mistakes I keep finding!

Sure, there have been the occasional typos and misspellings, but the program points those out, and I tend to see them when it does. I’ve found a problem I have is homonyms. I know the distinction between rein, reign, and rain, but in the frenzy of typing I might get the wrong one down and then miss it. I also have a pattern of typing error with words like “now” becoming “not.” It’s not a typo or spelling error the program would catch, but a sentence that should say “You may now proceed,” has a different meaning when it reads “You may not proceed.” If I leave off the “s” of a word’s plural, the same sort of thing happens. I’m only catching these because I’m transcribing now.

The most embarrassing mistake I’ve found (so far) is in the character names. I’ve reported here a few times that I’ve changed most of the characters’ names (first and last) at least once, and I’ve used the program’s Search and Replace function to do it. How, then, did one of my key supporting characters remain Ms. Chambers in a chapter when she was supposed to be Ms. Stoper?

And this was the draft I once thought was ready for submission!

Travel light

In the days when I did some backpacking in the Colorado mountains — where the air is much thinner than a flatlander such as myself is used to — a novice backpacking friend of mine spent days in advance at our base camp finding nooks and crannies in his pack for this or that little item that he “might need” or “enjoy having.” When you do backpack camping, you bring everything you will use to camp on your back. If you can’t carry it in, you do without it.

My attitude about this is that you can endure just about any hardship for a weekend, so I tend to pack light. In fact, another friend of mine and I discussed the lengths some hard-core backpackers go to achieve this. We both had read about people who will cut off the handles of their toothbrushes and put their salt and pepper in small plastic bags (rather than carry the weight of shakers). At first we thought this zeal to be comical, but my friend then observed that if you took everything in your fifty-pound pack and somehow managed to shave 30% from each item, you’d save yourself fifteen pounds, and after a day on the trail, fifteen saved pounds can mean a lot.

This was not the philosophy of my other friend though. He unzipped the many capacious pockets on his pack and found space for extra granola bars or a container of baby powder. More batteries for his flashlight. An extra pair of sunglasses. He was determined to get away from it all and take it all with him, as the saying goes.

As you might imagine, my friend suffered terribly on his maiden backpacking trip. Every extra ounce weighed on his feet and constricted his lungs. He was tormented by his weighty choices and vowed never to pack like that again. As far as I know, he never did either, and that brings me to my work in progress, The Sleep of Reason.

I’m immersed in the rewrite into the third person narration, which is essential for telling the story behind my story. (It will make every single word I’ve written have a deeper and more terrible meaning.) The process is steady, but it’s slow. It is taking time, and an unfortunate consequence of this sprawl of time is that I continue to realize ways that I could “improve” the story or develop the characterization even further. (Right now, for example, I’m exploring ways to make my theme more existentialist.) I am a long way from rewriting the last chapter, and I’m finding ways to enhance it so that it will be even more meaningful.

Sure, this is the nature, and even the benefit, of rewriting, but when do I shout ENOUGH? I have a coherent and whole story. I have solid characters. I have already worked out the remaining needs of the telling. If I did no more to this story, I would be proud of what it accomplished, just as I am convinced it will be published.

So when do I draw the line and say this or that little enhancement won’t be going in? Yes, they might improve the story, but do I have the time and stamina to keep developing it?

I suppose the time to call a halt is when I am through with this draft. (I intend to go through it all one more time just to tinker with the narrative voice, and that will be it.) I have plenty of thoughts pouring into my brain for other stories, and I make my feverish notes about those. When the time comes, I’ll be able to start down the trail of a new work, so I guess I’ll continue to accept whatever enlightenments come my way on the WIP.

The grammar continuum

This is the way I see it: there are uses of grammar, and there are abuses of grammar. An otherwise fine piece of creative writing that is “corrected” to follow the “rules” of grammar is one of the abuses.

The uses of grammar are illustrated by a continuum. At one end sit legal and technical writing. Because clarity of thought and exact expression of ideas are paramount to these kinds of communication, strict application of grammar makes sense. At the other end of the continuum is poetry, which is as free from the formal rules as clouds in the sky. Somewhere about in the middle lie high school term papers and basic journalism. Grammar serves as the low common denominator that high school students must strive for and general readers comprehend.

Fiction writing sits squarely between high school term papers and poetry. Grammar can help along the way, but the rules can be ignored whenever a better way of expressing an idea needs to be used. In fact, creative writing can sometimes strive to be obscure, and grammar can often get in the way of that.

*   *   *

Why do I rant about grammar so much? I use it. I used to teach it. I used to edit for it. I think what bugs me about it is not the grammar itself but the advocates of it. I see again and again blog posts about how critical grammar is to fiction writing, but it seems to be written by people who make only rudimentary, unreflective use of it. I really should get a different hobby than tilting at windmills.

Names people don’t call me

With much anxiety, I emailed the link to my latest published short story to a friend whose opinion I regard highly. I waited a few nervous days, and then his reply came. He said he didn’t know I wrote fiction.

My first impression was, how could anyone not know I write fiction? But as I considered it, I realized that I don’t make the claim of being a “writer.” I’ve always thought that that was the name you let other people call you. I’m too busy writing (or trying to find the time to be writing, or wishing I was writing) to give myself names. Besides, claiming the mantle of “writer” seems a little pretentious to me in some way. Just write. That’s all.

Some years ago, I decided to declare a threshold, and once I passed it, I could dare to call myself a writer. I would only whisper it, but I’d allow myself to claim the title. The threshold could be met in any of three ways. I could get 100 nonfiction feature articles published. I made it more than halfway there — sixty-something pieces — before I stalled out. I still don’t know why I lost interest in writing feature pieces. Sometimes they actually paid money. I think what happened is that I decided I had mastered the medium (which was mostly local, regional, and specialty publications — I never broke into the national slicks, though I came close once). I could keep on writing for these magazines, but I couldn’t see why.

My second way to meet the threshold I’d decided was to get ten short stories published. This is the one I will likely first achieve. I have seven stories published here and there, and while I have three currently in submission, I also have a half dozen other stories I want to write and polish. There is drive in this area, and I don’t see an end to it.

The third way was to have a novel published. I feel very good about my WIP, The Sleep of Reason. I am certain that when I am finished with it, it will be a publishable manuscript and only my lack of effort at getting it submitted will prevent it from getting published. I don’t think I’ll achieve this threshold first, but I do think I will achieve it.

And then maybe I’ll whisper that I am a writer, but I’d still rather have other people say it about me.

Plugging along

I wish I had something interesting or astonishing to report here about my life in writing. The fact is, I’m in the long grind of rewriting. As I’ve said here countless times (so why say it again, right?), I am now rewriting my novel with a third person narrator rather than the first person narrator I had used in the first drafts. This is coming along better than I feared it would, but at this stage it’s all very workmanlike writing. I’ll need to go through it again to enhance the voice of the narrator, and I’ll comprehend what that voice should be like better after I’ve been all the way through the novel.

I can sit down to an hour or so of uninterrupted time and finish the rewrite of an entire chapter. It’s tedious because I am re-keying every single word (and Chapter 1 was nearly 9,000 words), but I should not complain about the pace. To write a single chapter during the frenzy of the first draft (or the vomit draft as I’ve heard it called) required several weeks of steady work, and most of the chapters were not nearly 9,000 words. So a chapter in an hour, even a tedious hour, it lightning fast. I just wish I could find more of those uninterrupted hours. Even so, I expect to have the final final draft ready for submission well before the second anniversary of my commencement on the novel, which is far ahead of the goal I had set myself. (It’s funny that I had only embarked on this work — to be no more than a novella I thought at the time — merely to get it out of my head so I could work on other things.)

It’s also fun because I can see all of the foreshadowing and seeds of character development that I put in these early chapters. I know what’s coming, so I see how I have prepared the reader for what’s coming. But it’s all still nicely subtle. I’d like to think that my novel will bear careful reading.

So I keep at it. Writing is rewriting, they say.

No name left unchanged

I don’t think there is now a single character in my novel-in-progress who still has his or her original name. I changed my protagonist’s name from Frere (and old family name) to Frye because Frere happens to be the name of a 19th Century painter, and painting is important to the story. (I didn’t want readers to try to figure out a thematic connection between my protagonist and that painter since there isn’t one.) I changed an important character from Eve to Irene. A secondary character became Ms. Stoper, but she was Ms. Chambers before.

About the only character whose name was intact from the start was the antagonist, Edmund Bower. Bower also happens to be an old family name that I slipped in here. After fine tuning everyone else’s name with deep and meaningful intent, I really thought that I couldn’t leave him untouched. And so the other day I began fooling around with some possible name ideas. Nothing much was working. I’d find some thematic word and then translate it into a half dozen different languages, but the results were a) identical, b) obvious, or c) cumbersome. Then I tried to come up with some word that means “indeterminate color” (trust me, it makes sense), but I had no luck. The name Bower is perfectly fine, but with everyone else going around with double and triple meanings to their names, I thought I wasn’t being fair to my antagonist.

Then the perfect name just came to me. At face value it’s just a name, not common but not unheard of either. Given a little more attention though . . .

Update: I’ve since changed his first name too. It’s no longer Edmund.

Update to the Update: And I’ve changed his first name again. The interim name was Laird. How obvious is that for an antagonist?

Chapter One is completed

Here I go again, giving a chapter-by-chapter account of my progress through yet another rewrite of my novel, The Sleep of Reason. As I said in my last post, I haven’t faced any severe difficulty in transitioning my text from first person to third person, but I’m sure it’s raw and clumsy. I’ll need to go through it again to polish it. Again. What a tedious word that has become!

I have two laptops before me. One has the text of the earlier draft on it. I type into the other laptop. You’d think that would be easy, but I’m making huge numbers of typing errors, especially missing the letter “a” when I type. I think it has something to do with having my eyes elsewhere than the screen on which my words appear.

The new chapter weighs in at 8,936 words. The first-person draft was 8,825, and the first draft of it was an anemic 8,768 words. The beast is growing more woolly. What’s more, somewhere in the middle of those words I realized that I am going to retype every single word, every single character. The last draft was more than 109,000 words. Every bit of it will be typed once again by my crabbed and aching paws. Oh, pity me!

Nonetheless, I still feel as strongly as ever about the worthiness of this novel.

A report on the rewrite rewrite

I’ve barely begun on the rewriting of my novel to have a third-person narrator and  I already see how this is going to work. Basically, my rewrite of the rewrite is going to need a rewrite.

I’ve only made it through about a third of chapter one, but it went smoothly. Granted this is an introductory chapter where my original first-person narrator was providing a lot of back story, so it lended itself to third-person telling — I may have more difficult struggles in the later chapters where he is asking himself a lot of questions. Regardless, I think my worries about being able to re-imagine the story with a different story teller are mostly assuaged.

Still, I think it lacks the narrative voice I want it to have. It’s all very workmanlike, very direct but not very creative. And that is why I will rewrite the rewrite of the rewrite. Once I have the whole novel recast in third person, I’ll go through it one more time to see if I can render the voice with a bit more panache.

I like the voice I achieved in my recently published story, “Moron Saturday,” though that was intended to be comical. I don’t want that tone in this novel, but I think the voice has the right tone in that story. It gives me hope that I can do it.

I suspect it looks as though I’ll never let go of this novel, that I’ll always have some fix I want to make before I dare to submit. I don’t think that’s true, but you’d be alarmed if you heard the cacophony inside my head. That will really only be my third true rewrite. The first was to get the story down and resolve all of the plot and character issues. The second, which I’ve just begun is to recast it in the third person. And the third will be to polish it. Our craft can grind exceedingly fine sometimes.

Cover me, I’m going in!

I embark on the third-person narrator rewrite of my endlessly in progress novel The Sleep of Reason today. I have no idea whether this will be an easy or difficult task. I want to think that I have finished the tale, now I must finish the telling.

I’ve long advocated, however, that a third-person narrator really must be another complete character of the story. Not necessarily a participating character nor even a named one, but a whole person in the mind of the writer (and in the mind of the more perceptive reader, too). He or she will bring a personality to the telling as much as any active character in the story has a personality.

I have mentioned here once or twice that a careful writer ought to have the sound of the narrator’s voice firmly in mind and “hear” it as the words are spilling onto the page. (That’s why it’s called “voice” after all.) Imagine, for example, your story — the very same words — if you heard them narrated in the voice of Sean Connery and then in the voice of Robin Williams. The very same words would have different nuances of meaning, I think, and a careful writer will know what nuance he or she wants to create when choosing the narrative voice. Importantly for my current endeavor, if I have a clear voice in mind before I begin, I will write more consistently, at least from the narrator’s point of view.

I think most of the fiction writing I have done has been with a third-person narrator, so I’m hopeful I won’t have too much difficulty mastering this significant rewrite. Yet I know it will be more than just replacing “I thought” with “He thought” and such. I have the story so firmly imagined with the protagonist telling his tale, that I may have a struggle before me as I try to make someone else tell his tale.

No doubt I’ll keep you up to date on my progress.

First Update: Not ten minutes into my first effort and I ran into a problem! I have TSOR backed up on a spare laptop (my old one), so my plan is to have the 1st-person draft open on it, and I can read the text from there while I type the new text on my current laptop. (I didn’t want to have to print the entire novel on dead trees so I’d have a reading copy at hand.) You’d think that would be easy, wouldn’t you. Two computers, side by side, running the same program. Not so! It seems that I cannot have the same Word program running at the same time on two computers in the same household. I had the blank Word page open on my newer laptop, ready to receive my precious words, but when I tried to open Word on the other laptop, I got a message saying I couldn’t have two incarnations running at once. How did the system know I had it running on two computers? I thought at first that they might be communicating somehow because they were sitting so close together. But then I realized what was happening. Both computers were talking to my home wifi network, and in some diabolical bit of coding, the system spotted this double teaming and disallowed it.

My solution? Disconnect the old laptop from the network. Once I did that, I had no problem having Word open on both computers. Now I need to figure out the subtleties of the screen saver. I thought I fixed the settings on the old laptop to give me a half hour before the screen save made the screen go black, but I guess not. Onward!

Second Update: It wasn’t the screen saver. It was the energy saver. I’ve changed the settings on that. We’ll see how it works.

“Moron Saturday” on Friday

The commedia issue of Danse Macabre (“the premier online literary magazine in Nevada”) is out today and it contains my short story “Moron Saturday.”

While I wrote this intending for it to be read as a comedy, I consider it one of my pieces of “serious” fiction. (Not that I don’t take all of my fiction writing seriously . . .) It’s my retelling of the Diana (Artemis) and Acteon story of ancient myth, a theme that has inspired much great art, and my story.

So perhaps you’ll like this piece. I worked hard on it for a long time.