What I Learned from the Muse (Part 2)

Revision

While at the Muse and the Marketplace, I went to a few seminars on Revision because of course, this is where the rubber hits the road as far as writing is concerned.

And it's also where things can get awfully muddled... especially if your original vision (see plot post) is a bit murky. It's hard to revise the big stuff, to hold the whole manuscript in mind once you are so firmly-- and emotionally-- attached to it. So I figured I could use a few pointers.

I attended Ann Hood's wonderful seminar (Aptly titled "Revision"). Ms Hood is so charming and witty, I swear I could sit and listen to her describing how paint dries.

But her advice was wonderful, and refreshingly specific.

Here's her technique:

Quit worrying about TIME. Stop rushing to get the revision over with and just figure it will be a long process.

Put your manuscript away for a month or more. Write something else.

Print out whole thing and take it on a "date"—somewhere like a coffee shop where you can work without interruption.

Read as if you've never read it before. Mark your manuscript using a Fix/Cut/Add strategy:

On your first pass through the manuscript, focus on the fix

Here's what to mark:

Word or meanings that are off: Awk.

Underwritten passages: More

Passages that get off track: No

Passages that are working but not done to the best of your ability: close

Cliches

Oft-repeated words (She says you can only use the word "cocoon" once per manuscript)

credit

Restructuring: move

Check facts.

Inconsistencies, e.g. changes made halfway through.

On the second Pass through, Cut ruthlessly

Here's what to focus on:

Repetition: The reader will get it the first time

Stage directions: Just get them into the car, already!

If your mss started in the wrong place, cut the beginning

Adjectives, adverbs, extra words.

Then focus on Adding

For depth—layers of meaning

For clarity

Sounds like a lot of work, right? But that's not all....

Then you focus on the big stuff:

1) Look at how the beginning and ending relate to each other. The last scene should be sort of opposite of the first 1^st (I thought his was a really interesting idea.)

2) Setting. List settings as you read. they should reflect the main character's arc and should NOT be monotonous (10 scenes in a coffee shop are baaaad)

3) List the main characters. And develop an "Emotional timeline" for each. Look at each scene to make sure there is internal movement. You shouldn't hit the same emotional note in every scene. Mark each scene with a + or - to indicate emotional state. Each scene should move character from + to - (or - to +)

Then..

Check Grammar, Spelling Paragraphs, sentence variety etc. Use a highlighter to mark low level language glitches.

Find 3 beta readers who are not writers but big readers. Send them the manuscript. Buy them dinner. Listen to them talk about your manuscript and do not speak. Take notes.

Based on what they have to say, Revise all over again...

Whew!

What do you think? What sort of revision techniques do you use?

Redecorate, Renovate, Raze?

Revision.

I've been writing since the time of my mother's old mechanical typewriter in second grade. And I thought I had the process down.

In fact, I love the process, how you start with the kaBOWm! of brainstorm. All What-if-what-if and then this and that and she could do this and then he'll, etc etc. Your ideas are two by fours in the house you will come to live within. And oh, it's a grand place, its windows lit up in the night. You run room to room, check out the cupboards and closets, jump on all the beds. You love this place! It's perfect!

Then there's the drafting, a sort of slow and steady progress. You settle in. The house doesn't seem quite as shiny-new anymore. You notice the stains in the ceiling and the ripped up carpet in the den, but you keep on. And then it's yours, more or less, and you fail to notice these things. Or anyway, it'd be so hard to make any changes now that you're all moved in.

For many of us, this is the end of it. We live in our less-than perfect houses, loving them anyway, comfortable.

But really, now's the time to revise.

I used to think that I loved this part. I'd spend days and days walking my novel's many rooms, adding a little paint, a new baseboard, a desk lamp might become a telephone might become an open bible. It was sort of fun, and I even felt like every day I was inching towards a better novel.

But that wasn't really revision. It was too easy. It was this:

Redecoration

If your novel is a house, constructed in the rich green land of your imagination, revision is just that: Re-VISION.

You might add another floor (I really wanted to say another story here, but it was too cheap a pun...) expand the kitchen, turn the three lightless little bedrooms into a fantastic den. in other words: You really change stuff.

It's terrifying.

Stuff gets tossed or put in storage, your roof opens to the rain. You fear you've lost the very soul of the place or that you will never, never, never-in-a-million-years manage to build it back up.

Fear haunts the revision process.

It's taken me 30-some years to recognize this. My ineffective revisions, my hundreds of not-different-enough drafts, my word switching and wall-painting... It was all about fear.

(credit)

I didn't trust that better words would come. Each word, each sentence seemed like such a gift.

If I tore down the beautiful parlor with it's lush wallpaper and polished floor, how could I be sure that the room I'd construct in its place would measure up?

I couldn't. I didn't.

This last few weeks, I've taken a break from the gibbons. I've been revisiting an old manuscript, the Novel Previously Known as Idylwilde. A few years back, an agent called me and asked me to revise this manuscript. Of course, I was totally eager to do so. Following her advice, I pryed loose the back porch and nailed it to the front. Then I did a lot of redecorating, lush, pointless, redecorating. Of course, this wasn't enough, and after much hand-wringing (On my part not the agent's) I decided to abandon the place.

But in returning, I finally (finally!) found myself at the heart of a truth:

THE WORDS WILL COME. Maybe not easily, maybe not at first or perfect from the onset, but they will.

In order to do the hard work of revision, I had to trust this. I ripped out fully half of the manuscript and it felt.... liberating.

The novel was creaky with age, its weak spots, so apparent now. I took out my crowbar and got to work, trusting that something better would grow up in its place.

Perhaps it takes many many days of painting and trim to find your inner crowbar.

Okay, enough with the metaphors, already!

Here are a few practical things that helped me get my courage up:

1. Make a separate word document and save all the passages you cut. (Mine is 75 pages now and, probably, I will never look at it again.)

2. Think about the big stuff. If time effort and pain were not a factor, what would make your plot more interesting, exciting, connected, etc? This is the direction you'll be wanting to take.

3. Copy your document and rename it (I find it helps to give it some half-ridiculous name. Sort of like telling myself to loosen up) then slash and burn through the thing just to see how it feels. Take out whatever is questionable, repetitive, excessive, write comments to yourself in caps and yellow highlights, go Mystery Science Theater with it.... because IT JUST DOESN'T MATTER

4. Remember you are a totally capable writer and that the manuscript can only get BETTER. (I guess this might be termed going Stuart Smalley on it...)

4. Figure this type of revision is the writing equivalent to skydiving and just go ahead and do it.

(Yes, I snuck in a whole new metaphor here. Sorry about that. I've cut a ton of them out of the manuscript and had to put them somewhere)

The Upside of Failure

Sorry I've been away so long. No excuses, just a road trip holiday (from which I am still recovering) and a slight rejection induced funk (From which I am also still recovering).

Damn query process. I knew it wouldn't be easy. I totally did. Yet somehow I'd wandered into some happy lalaland where, I believed, things would come easier just because.

Big surprise. They didn't.

This is okay though. I have a direction for my revision now. And if I could find a little time to write, I might even get started on it.

The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades:

And yes, Timbuk 3 was indeed a one-hit wonder from those crazy 80's.

I Did Something Today!

I mean really did something.

I sent out my first full and two queries. The process was a long one; I revised the full manuscript then agonized about my overwritten beginning until my eyes bled. Then I scooted down to the ending, returned to the beginning (more bleeding eyes) and finally, once all perspective had been lost, I took a deep breath, wrote an official-looking "the End" and sent the darn thing out.

All in all I cut about 6,000 words. Family, Genius, Species is now a svelte 86,010 words. Woohoo!... or Whew! anyway.

I plan to send snail mail copies to the other two agents who were near-misses the last time around.

I have hurried up. I am waiting.

They say the best thing to do during this tension-filled wait-and-see-and-send phase is to start on the next thing ("They" being sensible non-emotive people, highly competent people) and yes, I have been thinking through some new ideas...

But really, what else can I think of now that the gibbon is out in the world?

Credit

Here's my infant tally:

Queries sent-- 3

Fulls requested-- 1 (This from the conference I attended)

Rejections-- 0 (Well, the search is a few hours old)

Heightened Tension, Lost Ambiguity?

So, after hanging onto the Netflix version of "The Prestige" for close to a month, my husband and I have finally gotten around to watching the thing. We loved the book and had heard super things about the movie, and so this was, like, the big movie night of the season. (Woohoo!)

Now, I should start by saying that it will be nigh impossible to talk about these works without giving something away. I will do my best, but if you are planning on reading/watching "The Prestige" you should consider this paragraph a long-winded spoiler alert.

"The Prestige" is about two feuding magicians, Alfred Borden and Rupert Angier. These two obsess over each other and expend much energy ruining each other's acts. Borden, a man of many secrets, creates a trick called "The Transported Man" and Angiers, a less talented magician but better showman, upstages him with his own version of the trick. When Bordon destroys this trick, Angiers' quest to one-up his enemy leads him to the real-life scientist Nikola Tesla and to the creation of a gruesome new "trick", "The Real Transported Man".

The novel details the escalating conflict between the magicians from an ambiguous event in which one holds the other responsible for the ruination of his career and the death of his wife. The great-grandchildren of Borden and Angier investigate how their own lives have been affected by their ancestors' conflict. The events of the past are revealed primarily through the the magicians' diaries. The novel also examines the nature of magic and of magicians and has some very creepy, surreal scenes. It is grand in scale and broad in subject. The relationship between the magicians and their ancestors is constantly shifting about, each is justified and not, standing on principles that are uniquely his own.

The movie was interesting, not only because it was well done, but because Director Christopher Nolan took this complex and multi-layered novel and-- rather than try to duplicate the reading experience on the screen-- simplified the plot, ratcheted up the tension, raised the stakes, and the re-drew the conflicts between the characters so that they were less ambiguous.

The movie version eliminates the magician's ancestors altogether, adds Borden's beloved little daughter (to raise the stakes considerably), a court scene and death sentence (raised stakes again!), and, most importantly of all, shifts the gruesome nature of the "Real Transported Man". The trick was creepy in the novel, but in the movie it is down-right dastardly! The movie also adds a much less ambiguous and satisfying ending-- serious spoiler alert-- with the two magicians basically killing each other off.

So... why am I taking all this time to discuss a book/movie without a single gibbon, purple Buick, or cheesy song? Because it seems to me that the movie version of "The Prestige" did what we as writers are often asked to do: it took a wide-ranging, "deep", ambiguous "draft and created a much tighter, clearer "product".

At first, loyal to the awesome book, I thought this made for less of a satisfactory experience. But I am not so sure now. The movie was so much more defined. The conflict between the magicians had a very clear and unambiguous root, the ending was dramatic and very much earned.

Do we want all our novels to cut out all the extra and ambiguous stuff? No... at least I don't. But I could see how one version derived from the other and so clearly was edited for all the stuff we are told to look for when working with our own drafts.

It was a truly helpful exercise to compare them.

What do you think? Are there other movies out there that seem like better edited versions of the real thing?

One-Sentence Wonderful

Sigh..... Yoda was right.

There is do or do not. There is no try. (I am probably misquoting the great green sage, but my Star Wars crazy kids are not here to double check for me.) Try sucks. Try is driving me a bit crazy these days.

I've spent a lot of time this beautiful labor day weekend tweaking my draft and query letter, researching appropriate agents, tweaking some more... researching, rereading, revising and so on.

At this point, my query is the literary equivalent of marshmallow fluff-- an amorphous mass that can be pulled a little one way or another but has stubbornly refused to be sculpted into anything close to a work of art. Or at least that's the way it seems when I've been so gosh darn close to it a while.

If ever there was a thankless and miserable task, it's putting together a pithy, slam-bang fantastic query letter. There are a hundred great resources out there to help, and yet... the thing just isn't falling into place.

Perhaps if my novel were more high concept, the sort of one-sentence wonderful that would sell itself I wouldn't struggle along like this. But it isn't, or at least doesn't seem like it to me. In fact, after staring at my 3rd draft for a few days and at my lousy query version #73, I have no idea what it is!

So, in desperation, I'm asking you guys -- all 12 of you... :) -- to tell me what's wrong with this query. (Please!)

Here it is:

"Roger “Zorro” Weitz has it pretty good, slumming off the scant profits from Hate You (Gonna Eat Cheese), a hit second only to Muskrat Love in the cornball-rich scene of 1976. But when a near-death experience leads him to a rare moment of introspection, Zorro decides to make a more tangible impact on the world. Believing “cool” is about all he has to offer, Zorro commits to helping his girlfriend Carla’s timid, obese daughter find the attitude and style that could bring about her own hip transformation… even if it means going behind Carla’s back to do it.

Eleven year old Dawn, a budding zoologist and certified genius, is puzzled by Zorro’s sudden attention but intrigued by his mention of a band mate’s long-abandoned gibbon. While she makes no progress whatsoever in “cool” she does learn a thing or two about blackmail, and before he knows it, Zorro is involved in a vaguely illegal rescue attempt, a slow-speed car chase and—most unexpected of all— he’s actually starting to care for the kid.

Readers of Tom Perrotta and Nick Hornby will enjoy Family, Genius, Species, a sort of reverse Pygmalion, replete with cheesy music references, a lesser ape, and a lot of heart. The book is 90,000 words and ready for perusal."

(I've left off the chummy and agent specific greeting and short bio as the crux of the matter is this middle part.)

Any ideas?