This week's Poetry Friday is hosted by the delicious poet
Heidi Mordhorst over at
My Juicy Little UniverseSo...rewriting. Can't we just skip it? Can't we just write something brilliant and then jump to that thick-carpeted Hollywood office where we're signing the movie contract based on our book?
I've been feeling discouraged this week, so here's a poem about my work-in-progress, another novel-in-poems which I'd hoped would be finished when I turned in the April 14th draft in my novel writing class.
Finished? Heaven's no! Now that I have notes on this draft, I'm messing with it again. My book clearly needs a little more curry or cumin or molasses or heaven-knows-what. *Sigh*
NOVEL THOUGHT
by April Halprin Wayland
I'm walking quickly on this path
I edit words I see are chaff
I'm making characters three-dimensional
I've integrated the high school staff
(the stereotypes were unintentional)
I've cut the zoo scene and giraffe
though it was beautifully unconventional
I'm trying not to be inflexible—
and keeping it was indefensible
(though parts of it were quite exceptional)
If only I can reach that raft
and climb aboard, untie the rope—
I'll sail off with the final draft...
at least I hope!
x
By: Rob Walker,
on 11/4/2010
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When in my classes, I plead, beg, urge, encourage my students not simply to write but to re-write, many have no idea how much the rewrite means to me; they've no conception of how many rewrites I do to get a page, a scene, a chapter right. Not just right but perfectly right to my final perfect LIKING. Of course, it is not always easy to determine when it's as good as it's going to get, but there comes a moment in the many rewrites of a scene or chapter that screams at you--you're DONE DONE. But then you turn it over to a number of editors, and guess what? You're not done.
However, you've now been away from the story long enough--or that chapter long enough--that you can be objective with it and yourself, so that when suggestions anew are made, you can deal with them without freaking out (as the younger generation is want to say). The story or scene or chapter is not correctable inside your head, and so the first and rough drafts have to be produced before you can ever get to the process of rewriting and revamping and reorganizing and re-this and re-that. Once it is out of the gray matter and on the white page, you now have product to work with...to mold and shape, to hammer and saw...and you see it and feel it as a product rather than nebulous, foggy thoughts and voices careening about your mind's deepest recesses and corridors.
Some authors say they hate the rewrite and this is understandable because once a story's been told (the plot is put on paper), it can't help but get old; it gets older as your rewrite, too. However, in my own case, I get my best lines and most inspiration and insights into character(s) and best plot twists and the occasional ingenious idea or "movement" in the action or situation during the laborious rewrites. Whole incidents not there before worm their way in, insisting on being a part; whole new characters crop up insisting on being in the story. Layers develop and the once straightforward story takes on a character of the onion needing to be peeled away so as to get at the core. Themes emerge that were not there until that sixth, seventh, or tenth rewrite.
This certainly has been the case with my Children of Salem, a purely historical novel set in Salem Witch Hunt days wherein our hero is trying to conduct a courting of his childhood sweetheart when her mother is excommunicated and locked up as a witch....and this was certainly true of my 11-book medical examiner series begun with Killer Instinct and predating Bones and Silence of the Lambs. This was definitely the case with my recently completed and gone on sale Kindle Original entitled Titanic 2012 - Curse of RMS Titanic. The thing grew and grew with each successive rewrite, and I believe and feel with all my heart that it grew for the better and not the worse.
Chapter 30 - wow, OMG....how many times did I have to rewrite Chapter 30, far more than all the other chapters, and why? For one, it needed a great deal of attention from the get-go and a lot of rewriting even before I turned it over to early readers/editors. Knowing I need all the help I can get and not shying from that fact, I had as many folks read the early, ugly drafts as I could manage to find. The book was torn from limb to limb, as my early readers did not spare the rod or spoil the child/book...nor did they spare the slings and arrows for its author. "How couuuld you?"/ "Call yourself an English Professor, do you?"/ "What were you thinking?"/ "Are you sure you want to be a writer?"/ "Ever et raw meat?" ---OK, I exaggerate and none of my early readers are that blunt or harsh, but I KNEW what they were thinking.
Chapter 30 - as with other chapters just required so much attention in large part due to the fact I had NO idea what I was talking about. I knew what I wanted to say, what I wanted to accomplish, but as my final editor pointed out, he being a genius with special effects of the science fiction order: "You'd be laughed off the face of the Earth had "THAT" gone to press." Fortunately,
I'm on draft 4 of the NaNoWriMo novel. Still some big stuff to go, but I've been looking at some of little things, too. Like the words that totally creep into my writing without me even noticing. But actually not the first couple of times I've revised. Draft 4, yeah, they're pretty much popping up a lot and now I just really want to get rid of them.Did you notice the stop words in the above
Still working on the Theatre rewrite and yo yoing between turning it into a YA or reducing it to novella length. It changes by the hour.
I'd love it to keep it novel (YA) length, but I'm not certain the book would fit well with Grim or with the next two books I'm planning or perhaps with a large YA audience. I think it may be a small book. The first chapter starts in the trenches of WW1 but it's not a war book - well not an ordinary war book. There are teeny battles and there are soldiers but it's all rather surreal. I worry that starting in the trenches (and my MCs boot snapping a rat's neck) wouldn't appeal to teenage girls (and possibly teen boys), and anyone who is sucked in by the brief glimpse at trench warfare may be disappointed to find themselves in a surreal otherworld forty pages later.
I'm overthinking.
I need to overthink.
I'm being impatient again.
Favourite new line of the week: "Dear, I do believe you left a speck of humanity on his left butt cheek," the old woman said.
Strange Googling of the day: Is buttcheek one word or two?
by Marcia Peterson
Have you ever read an old piece of your work, something from way back, where it seemed as if the words were written by someone else? Reading it again, weaknesses stand out in ways they did not before. Perhaps plenty of good writing is there too. Either way, it's distance from your work that provides the new and helpful perspective. By allowing enough time to pass, you can experience a neutral reading of your writing projects, allowing you to clearly see what to change to make your work the best it can be.
For how long do you need to set something aside before looking it over again? It varies according to the type of writing. In my prior career I wrote lengthy business letters, which I printed out and proofread before deciding they were good to go. With especially long or complicated correspondence I'd wait until later in the day to send it and to my surprise, I'd sometimes find one or two errors that were invisible to me just hours earlier. With other types of writing, such as essays or articles, I've noticed that it can take a few days or weeks until the work can take on the strange otherness that allows me to read it fresh. This new, impartial reading almost always points to places to revise or tighten up to makes things better.
"The more time you allow between writing, rewriting, and rereading, the more objective you will be about what you've written," David Carroll says in A Manual of Writer's Tricks. He recommends a specific waiting period for certain kinds of work. Here is his recommended schedule:
*When writing any report or work of nonfiction: Do not reread it the next day.
Wait at least three days. A week is better if you have the time, and two weeks
better still. Then reread and correct.
*When writing a short story: Wait at least a month before rereading it and rewriting it.
*When writing a novel: Finish it, correct it, re-write it, and put it away for six
months. (An entire year would buy you even more objectivity, but that's asking a
lot.) Then take it down, read, and revise as required.
This approach obviously requires real discipline because it asks that you complete work ahead of deadline. You'll need to give yourself the necessary time between creation and due date to let the work rest, and become somewhat foreign to you. An agent or editor will surely be reading with this sense of detachment toward your work, so the rewards of waiting, then revising are well worth it.
One of the hardest lessons for me to learn as a writer was that every scene has to do more than one thing. I happen to like old fashioned stories that meander along establishing character and place before diving into "the story."
But like everything else around us, pacing is faster these days. Here's how David Farland says it:
A real first scene will...create a setting, develop a conflict, and introduce characters at the same time. It will simultaneously set a tone for the novel and drive the story forward toward its inciting incident.
And people wonder why we get writer's block. That's a lot to expect from the beginning of a book!
I'm rewriting the first scene in a new novel and trying to make sure it does all of these things. Remembering that there's a rewrite coming helps me get past the fear of getting everything right. It doesn't have to all be there on the first draft. Or the second. But before it goes out, that first chapter needs to shine or agents/editors/readers won't keep reading.
What important lessons have you learned as a writer?
It hardly seems like it's been three months since I was cranking out 5,000 words a day to finish NaNoWriMo on time. But now I have a little more perspective about my novel and the pros and cons of writing a first draft during NaNoWriMo.First of all, I knew there was a lot of junk in the novel. The needless lists and random song lyrics are all part of the NaNoWriMo ethos. Get that word count up by
OR: A Good Editor is Hard to Find, a Great Editor is Harder Still to Find
by Robert W. Walker
Nothing is harder for a writer to see clearly than his or her own work, to look at it objectively and with laserlike precision so as to make those all important rewrites and to live by the credo that Writing is Rewriting. It is no small task to remove the emotional ties to your book and look on it with a cold, sure eye--with an eye to seeing its flaws. Hard to wear the editor's hat on your own work, not unlike the surgeon who must operate on his own child.
We might just as well be looped on drugs or alcohol to find our way through our own emotional baggage when it comes to our baby--our manuscript, but it does get easier with experience, lots of experience until we start to put into practice all we have ever learned from our editors--every line they ever corrected. We take them all to heart. We learn. Down to how the word HAD is best used and when to take it out if we are paying close, close attention to what our editors over the years have had to say about our style, our sentence structure, our pattern errors, our Voice --and trust me every element of the story from dialogue to details to setting to character development. All of it. And each correction is a little sling and arrow, painful to endure and even more painful because the change or correction is obvious now and so in keeping with the book, and inescapable and truly needed.
Good editors catch errors on every page, and great editors make the book sing at a higher pitch. An excellent editor like an excellent reference librarian is a gem and a wonder and a pleasure to work with. Whenever I edit another person's book, I make every change not for the good of the author but for the good of the book, the betterment of the story. It doe not mean the voice need be lost but rather improved, honed, made tighter and less rambling, less seemingly overblown or bloated.
However, suppose the voice is so bad it can not be fixed? So confusing there is no repariting it. If sentences are choking on passive constructions and unneeded prepositional phrases that cause reader confusion or stumbling, and if the author's authorial voice is less than authorial, say even wishy-washy or equivocating and chockful of qualifiers and lacks absolute control over the material, then it is unlikely an editor can repair it. But most great editors can and will take on such challenges. An editor is as passionate about your book as you are when she or he is in the throes of massaging it and working it over and beating the hell out of it until it is molded and kneaded just right.
Please do leave a comment or question!
Rob Walker
The Knife Editing Services
Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap
As long as I can remember, I have loved writing. I turned those "make a sentence with your spelling words" assignments into short stories. My science reports read like episodes of Wild Kingdom ("brought to you by Mutual of Omaha".) Book reports allowed me to pick apart the language and logic of adults who write for children. If it involved putting words on paper in some creative fashion, I was in the Zone (a phenomena I understood long before it had a name.)
What didn't I love about writing?
Revision.
"Revision" meant everything was spelled and punctuated correctly, the nouns and verbs agreeing. All sentences must be complete; no fragments or run-ons allowed.
I was a lousy speller, in those pre-Spellcheck days. Teachers liked papers with tidy margins, perfect Palmer Method cursive, and no erasures. My papers looked like grey Swiss cheese with streaks of not-quite-erased words, and holes where I'd erased a little too hard. I wrote assignments over and over to achieve the required neatness. No matter how good my writing, it was never neat or legible enough to win the attention I thought I deserved.
Thanks to my early teachers, I learned to confuse revision with "following the rules"(grammar, spelling, neatness). Because I liked making good grades, I eventually forced myself to check every other word in the dictionary and slavishly follow the punctuation sections of my grammar book.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with grammatically correct, well-spelled writing. But in my case, "learning the rules" came at the expense of creative re-thinking. Not once did anyone mention "revision" as a way to make your writing better.
There are kids who don't mind doing things over and over, and there are kids who would rather eat flies than do something a second time. The former kids are the ones who become Olympians, win the National Spelling Bee, solo with the New York Philharmonic at age seven.
I was not one of those kids. Since I had mastered the art of being "a teacher pleaser" (ie, spelled right and neatly written), I saw absolutely no reason to re-write anything to make it better. It was already
"better"; the teacher could read it and I got an A. Good, right?
I continued my policy of Get it Right the First Time into high school. I won several state and national writing contests by never revising. I was under the impression that "good" writers always got it right the first time. If I got stuck after the first two paragraphs (which was happening with alarming frequency), I would tear up the story. If I couldn't write that third paragraph, the idea was no good, right?
Then I met the Famous Southern Writer. (Because memories have a way of revising themselves, I cannot swear that this is absolutely the way things happened, so no names will be mentioned.)
One of my writing contest prizes was lunch with Famous Southern Writer. I was fifteen and had absolutely no idea how gifted and famous this writer was. I was much more interested in the prize money that the Writer was to present me at the luncheon.
The Writer liked to talk. A lot. Mostly about how hard writing was. "I write two pages and tear three up. I write the same page over and over."
I didn't think the Writer was making much of a case for writing as a career, to say nothing of being a monotonous lunch partner. So when the Writer took a break to actually eat, I chirped up and said, "Wow. You really re-write stuff a lot. I never write anything more than once."
I might have
By:
Susan Humphrey,
on 9/14/2009
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Writer's Block
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Hello again! Thought I'd better do a catch up and tell you about some more competitions that are running and what I've been up to.
I've been out and about quite a bit, took a fantastic trip down the Manchester Ship Canal on the Mersey Ferry (although we had a bit of trouble at the Salford end with a bridge that wouldn't open for two hours!) and I've been on a small mammals workshop in Cheshire where I got to learn about trapping to find out species live in an area.
I got to see a common shrew and lots of wood mice up close and had to help weighing them and picking them up by the scruff of their tiny necks which is very tricky! It was a really interesting day - with a very early start! I'm sure it'll come in useful for my Dr Midas stories one day too, it's great to get first hand experiences like that.
Speaking of Dr Midas I've been working on the second book again in the hope of entering it for the Times/Chicken Book children's fiction competition (deadline October 30th for whole novel up to 80,000 words - http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article6733392.ece).
I entered the original competition with Dr Midas and the Pirates but didn't have any success and have wanted to try again but as you need a whole book I was a bit stuck. The only other completed children's book I have is the sequel Dr Midas and the Incas. I think it would be really hard to do well with a sequel but then I started wondering if it could be changed so that it read as a standalone which it is for the main part. The biggest hurdle is how to get round the fact that this is adventure starts with Max finding out that his sister Millie has been on a time travel adventure with Dr Midas. He is so jealous that he decides to do the same and steals the time machine.
I've actually entered the first few chapters in another competition and was happy with them but when Iooked at them again I realised the start was slow in the Max and Millie parts and definitely not strong enough for setting up a first book.
So I've re-written the first two chapters so far, now the book doesn't start at Max and Milie's home but at the museum where they are on a school trip. I'm much happier with the new start, but still have a good way to go. I also need to make sure I really keep in my characters heads all the way through. I do think that my writing has really come on since my Cornerstones critique.
Actually I got asked in a job interview last week (sady I didn't get it) how did I know if my writing was any good? It's an interesting question and my answer was that I'd had a couple of competition wins and some good feedback via my website and query letters but mainly I guess because I love reading and I know what makes me give up on a book. Of course it's much harder to judge when your so close to the work, but leaving a good length of time before revising definitely helps.
Anyway I promised aye-ayes, pirates and more comps!
Firstly aye-ayes - I hope you've been watching Last Chance to See with Stephen Fry - it's been a brilliant series so far, but the best is yet to come this Sunday (BBC 2 8pm) because he's going in search of Madagascar's aye-aye. In an interview with the Radio Times he was asked if he had a favourite animal from his trip.
He said: "We met a captive aye-aye eyeball to eyeball - and what strange amber eyes they have - and watched a wild pair from below a tree as they tapped and sucked at a coconuts. They're astonishing, but spooky too. I think the Mme Berthe's mouse lemur takes a lot of beating for sheer, unadulterated cute."
Another lemur fan! There was a great photo of him and zoologist Mark Carwardine with lemurs too.
Soon everyone will know what an aye-aye is! Hopefully they'll want to read adventure stories involving them and other lemurs too! I'm also pleased to read that the title of the next Pirates of the Carribean has been annouced. Apparantly it is going to be 'On Stranger Tides.' I'm glad pirates are still proving popular and marketable, especially as I'm still trying to find a home for Dr Midas and the Pirates! (I've sent it to another slush pile via email.)
Well there's the new Brit Writers' Awards which I saw advertised in Writing Magazine which is supporting this new competition. There are lots of categories including short story, novel and poetry and entry - which is usually £10.95 is free for WM subscribers. There are also young writers categories and schools can register so their pupils can also enter for free. There's a website www.britwriters.co.uk but information is a bit sketchy at the moment. The deadline is December 8th 2009. I'd be interested to know what other people think about this one - there's a big prize up for grabs too of £10,000.
The Sunday Times have also launched a competition for previously published writers - The Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award. There's a £25,000 prize for the winning story and entries can be up to 7,000 words long. For more details visit http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article6817172.ece
The Sefton Celebrates writing competitions are also open for entry again. Deadline is October 9th 2009 and the theme for this year is journeys. There are prizes for poetry, other writing (£2 to enter), and writing by young people (free entry) . Entry forms/details at http://www.seftonarts.co.uk/uploads/file/writing%20comp%20pdf.pdf Well good luck if you enter any of these competitions.
Susan :)
By:
Susan Humphrey,
on 9/14/2009
Blog:
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Hello again! Thought I'd better do a catch up and tell you about some more competitions that are running and what I've been up to.
I've been out and about quite a bit, took a fantastic trip down the Manchester Ship Canal on the Mersey Ferry (although we had a bit of trouble at the Salford end with a bridge that wouldn't open for two hours!) and I've been on a small mammals workshop in Cheshire where I got to learn about trapping to find out species live in an area.
I got to see a common shrew and lots of wood mice up close and had to help weighing them and picking them up by the scruff of their tiny necks which is very tricky! It was a really interesting day - with a very early start! I'm sure it'll come in useful for my Dr Midas stories one day too, it's great to get first hand experiences like that.
Speaking of Dr Midas I've been working on the second book again in the hope of entering it for the Times/Chicken Book children's fiction competition (deadline October 30th for whole novel up to 80,000 words - http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article6733392.ece).
I entered the original competition with Dr Midas and the Pirates but didn't have any success and have wanted to try again but as you need a whole book I was a bit stuck. The only other completed children's book I have is the sequel Dr Midas and the Incas. I think it would be really hard to do well with a sequel but then I started wondering if it could be changed so that it read as a standalone which it is for the main part. The biggest hurdle is how to get round the fact that this is adventure starts with Max finding out that his sister Millie has been on a time travel adventure with Dr Midas. He is so jealous that he decides to do the same and steals the time machine.
I've actually entered the first few chapters in another competition and was happy with them but when Iooked at them again I realised the start was slow in the Max and Millie parts and definitely not strong enough for setting up a first book.
So I've re-written the first two chapters so far, now the book doesn't start at Max and Milie's home but at the museum where they are on a school trip. I'm much happier with the new start, but still have a good way to go. I also need to make sure I really keep in my characters heads all the way through. I do think that my writing has really come on since my Cornerstones critique.
Actually I got asked in a job interview last week (sady I didn't get it) how did I know if my writing was any good? It's an interesting question and my answer was that I'd had a couple of competition wins and some good feedback via my website and query letters but mainly I guess because I love reading and I know what makes me give up on a book. Of course it's much harder to judge when your so close to the work, but leaving a good length of time before revising definitely helps.
Anyway I promised aye-ayes, pirates and more comps!
Firstly aye-ayes - I hope you've been watching Last Chance to See with Stephen Fry - it's been a brilliant series so far, but the best is yet to come this Sunday (BBC 2 8pm) because he's going in search of Madagascar's aye-aye. In an interview with the Radio Times he was asked if he had a favourite animal from his trip.
He said: "We met a captive aye-aye eyeball to eyeball - and what strange amber eyes they have - and watched a wild pair from below a tree as they tapped and sucked at a coconuts. They're astonishing, but spooky too. I think the Mme Berthe's mouse lemur takes a lot of beating for sheer, unadulterated cute."
Another lemur fan! There was a great photo of him and zoologist Mark Carwardine with lemurs too.
Soon everyone will know what an aye-aye is! Hopefully they'll want to read adventure stories involving them and other lemurs too! I'm also pleased to read that the title of the next Pirates of the Carribean has been annouced. Apparantly it is going to be 'On Stranger Tides.' I'm glad pirates are still proving popular and marketable, especially as I'm still trying to find a home for Dr Midas and the Pirates! (I've sent it to another slush pile via email.)
Well there's the new Brit Writers' Awards which I saw advertised in Writing Magazine which is supporting this new competition. There are lots of categories including short story, novel and poetry and entry - which is usually £10.95 is free for WM subscribers. There are also young writers categories and schools can register so their pupils can also enter for free. There's a website www.britwriters.co.uk but information is a bit sketchy at the moment. The deadline is December 8th 2009. I'd be interested to know what other people think about this one - there's a big prize up for grabs too of £10,000.
The Sunday Times have also launched a competition for previously published writers - The Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award. There's a £25,000 prize for the winning story and entries can be up to 7,000 words long. For more details visit http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article6817172.ece
The Sefton Celebrates writing competitions are also open for entry again. Deadline is October 9th 2009 and the theme for this year is journeys. There are prizes for poetry, other writing (£2 to enter), and writing by young people (free entry) . Entry forms/details at http://www.seftonarts.co.uk/uploads/file/writing%20comp%20pdf.pdf Well good luck if you enter any of these competitions.
Susan :)
Or, HOW TO PUT IT INTO BOOK WORDS.
As promised, I have cudgelled the brains over my student's question: How do you know what parts to rewrite? How do you know what words to change?
There are, I've concluded, two levels to rewriting: the big and the small.
The big takes in the whole of the book or story – never mind this or that word, does the whole thing work?
The small concentrates on words, sentences, paragraphs at most.
So, to begin small...
One of the most useful pieces of advice I ever came across was: Read your work aloud. It's a good idea to train yourself to hear a voice speaking the words in your head, even if you're reading or writing silently. This helps you to 'hear' the rhythms and stresses even as you invent the words - but it doesn't replace reading aloud.
Feeling your lips, tongue and throat shaping the words you've written, and hearing them, forces you to concentrate on every syllable, on rhythms, and on the sense. Reading by eye alone, you can skim through sentences, and even whole paragraphs if you're a very fluent reader (as writers tend to be). You can miss the small details of sound.
But words are, ultimately, meant to be spoken, not read. Poetry, as a poet once told me, is rhythm, not rhyme – and rhythm is sound.
But, when I rewrite, what am I listening for? How do I know which words to change?
Well, I consider if my words are easy to say, and pleasing to hear. The twelfth Leith Policeman dismisseth us. Beware of such jaw-breakers. What the eye reads easily may be a clog to the tongue – and I want that talking-book deal. So if I catch myself writing a tongue-twister, I rewrite it.
I'm on the listen-out for repeated sounds that jar. 'My keel coursed cruel care-halls - ' The Anglo-Saxons were keen on alliteration, and if consciously done for effect, it can be wonderful. But if I've repeated sounds through carelessness, and it's spoiling the rhythmn or sound, I change the wording
Are the words I've chosen the best ones for the job I wanted them to do? English is crammed with words that are close in meaning, but have their own nuances, weights, textures and colours. 'Amble' has a clumsier and more endearing sound than 'stroll'. 'Lope' is quite different from either. 'Smirk' has very different connotations from 'smile' or 'giggle'. Is there another word that's a closer fit for my meaning? That means the same, but has a better sound or stress for that sentence? Or has a sound that better fits the sense?
Do the sentences have a good natural rhythm? Reading them aloud makes this obvious. Am I running out of breath before reaching the end of the sentence, or the next natural pause? Does the sentence have the natural swing of speech's rise and fall? When I read it aloud, does the stress fall on the most important words – the words I really want people to hear? If the answers are 'no', then shorten the sentence, or divide it into two; change the word order, or find other words.
But having said all this about making a sentence easy to read, sometimes I want to make a sentence clumsy or difficult. If I'm describing drudgery, then I want the words I use to be slow, awkward, clumsy, tired. I might want the sound and rhythmn of my words to reflect the sleek quickness, the harshness or the cold of their sense. If what I've written doesn't do that, I try to find words that do.
A frequent consideration is whether the phrase I've used is a cliché – a phrase too over-used and stale to make the reader stop and think about the sense. It isn't easy to avoid cliches, and I am certainly guilty of using them often. For one thing, they're often true – as white as snow, as cold as ice. But I am honour bound to try. So I give the brains another pummel, and see if I can come up with something fresher.
Finally, I check if I mean what I've said. Words can get away from you. A friend of mine, a teacher, once read in a pupil's exercise book: 'I was lying on the settee watching the telly eating peanuts.' She wrote in the margin: 'My telly prefers chocolate.' But it's all too easy, in a moment of carelessness, to mangle your grammar, and say something you never meant to say. So I watch out for this kind of slip and – rewrite it.
Enough for one posting. I don't imagine for a moment that I've said all there is to say on this subject, but something like this goes through my head when I'm rewriting. I'd welcome any additions and expansions – even corrections.
But I hope I've gone some way towards answering my student's question: 'When you rewrite, how do you know what words to change?'
In my next post, you lucky people, I'll consider the book or story as a whole. Unless someone else wants to do it?
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By:
Susan Price,
on 2/6/2009
Blog:
An Awfully Big Blog Adventure
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When I was a child, our house was littered with drawings, on used, opened-out envelopes, or old wallpaper, and even drawing-pads. My brother drew dinosaurs or battles (and battling dinosaurs), my sister drew swimming seals or people, and my father's drawings were usually of aeroplanes or birds.
They all had one thing in common: there would be repeated attempts at the drawings. My Dad, for instance, would do a sketch of the whole plane, and then, underneath, another drawing of its undercarriage, and another of its wings. He hadn't been happy with the first drawing, so he practiced the bits he felt needed improving. Turn the paper over, and there would be another, larger, better drawing of the whole plane.
These sketches taught me something without my ever realising I'd learned anything at all - 'You won't get things right the first time, so repeat them until you do'.
My own drawings were usually of people. As a child, I drew far more than I wrote; in my early teens, I drew and wrote about equally. After my first book was accepted, when I was sixteen, writing took over from drawing (and I haven't seriously drawn anything for about thirty years now). But the lesson that I never knew I'd learned moved with me from drawing to writing. If I wasn't happy with something I'd written, I rewrote it – and if I still wasn't happy, I rewrote it again, and again, many times if need be, until I thought I couldn't improve it any more.
I didn't think I was doing anything noteworthy. Rewriting was part and parcel of writing. It was just what you did; as much a part of writing as using a pen.
Years passed, and, in the way of impoverished writers, I started teaching Creative Writing. But between you and me, gentle reader, I was puzzled as to what 'Creative Writing' was exactly. And even more puzzled as to what I could teach my students. If I had ever stopped to think about what I did when I wrote a book, I couldn't remember doing it.
I consulted a few 'How to Write' books, to find out what those authors told their students, and it was enlightening. “Oh, I do that! Who'd have thought it?” I resolved only to steal those 'creative writing' tips that I could honestly say I used myself. (So you'll hear only a perfunctory mention in my classes about keeping notebooks, or meditating, or doing ten minutes of 'automatic writing' every morning.) My classes were about setting scenes, writing dialogue, building plots. It never occurred to me to tell anyone to rewrite, because to me rewriting was writing. I didn't think anyone would need to be told that.
Slowly, over weeks, it became apparent to me that the idea of rewriting had never, ever occurred to many – not just a few, but many – of my students. A lot of them seemed to think it was cheating. A real writer, they seemed to think – Thomas Hardy, let's say – just sat down and wrote Tess of the D'Urbervilles straight off, from beginning to end, never blotting a word; and then he packed it off to his publishers who printed it without asking for a single change. That's the kind of genius he was. That's the way a real writer works.
If my students wrote a story, and found themselves dissatisfied with it, they concluded that it was another failure, put it away, and tried to forget about it. The next thing they wrote, that might be perfect.
“Couldn't you,” I suggested nervously, not at all sure I was on firm ground here, “couldn't you rewrite it?”
They were astonished. But they'd finished it! And it wasn't any good. What was the point of wasting more time on it?
“But nothing I've ever written,” I said, “was much good in its first draft. But if I like the idea – if there are bits that are good – I rewrite it, and improve it. I've rewritten some things dozens of times over. I rewrote the whole of GHOST DRUM six or seven times, and I rewrote the ending many more times than that.”
Some of the class were quite excited by this revolutionary idea. Others were as plainly horrified, reminding me of a little girl in Year 4 of a school I once visited. Her story was so good, I told her, that she should rewrite it. The look she gave me would have reduced a lesser writer to a pair of smouldering boots.
But having belatedly realised that rewriting was actually a tool of the writer's trade that I'd never before suspected I was using, I became evangelistic about it. “Rewrite!” I cried to each new intake of students. “You must rewrite!”
And then one of my students stopped me in my tracks by asking, “But how do I know what parts I have to rewrite? How do I know which words I should change?”
Well – er – quite. Obviously, these are the technical complexities Jordan was referring to when she spoke of her ghost writer 'putting it into book words'. When a writer, like wot I am, takes the raw first draft and puts it into book words, what exactly is it I are doing?
I hadn't a clue. Look, I only write the stuff – I don't waste my time thinking about it, any more than a ditch-digger thinks much about ditch-digging. She just heaves another shovel-ful of mud.
But there were my students, waiting for an answer. So I gave thinking about it a try. And boy, did my brain hurt...
To be continued....
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Hi, April. What a chock-full post. I love the sensory details of "Cotton Candy." And your poem -- amazing what a fresh point of view can bring to a tradition.
What a happy, wonderful, celebratory post on many levels! Thanks for the smiles, the Chandra, the Wayland, the good, good words. :)
And YAY for the poet blog hop!
From cotton candy to marching at the pier - lovely poems to enjoy today.
Children's authors and poets don't swear. Ha! Love your process, April, and your results. Three cheers for Mortimer! xo
Hope you had a wonderful Tashlich! And thank you for the shout-out on my Blog Hop post (going up on Sept 21)!
Hi April,
Thanks for the Poetry Blog Hop invite, though you will definitely be a tough act to follow!
And thanks so much for sharing these poems. I was especially struck by this line from yours:
>>I sing in salty seagull tongue.<<
Good New Year to you!
Happy New Year and Happy Blog Hopping, April! (I think Mortimer would be the perfect meme BTW)Thanks to your poem choice, "Cotton Candy". I now have a hankering for cotton candy...a guilty pleasure. =)
I'm going to send your poem to some friends who I know will appreciate it! Love the photo of Mortimer -- adorable :-)
Correction: I meant Friday, Sept 20--my Blog Hop post will go up on 9/20 as you reported correctly, April!
Gang and Gangettes! Happy New Year to all ~
Join the Children's Poetry Blog Hop whenever and wherever you'd like.
It'll be like tossing confetti in the air and seeing where it lands.
Gang and Gangettes! Happy New Year to all ~
Join the Children's Poetry Blog Hop whenever and wherever you'd like.
It'll be like tossing confetti in the air and seeing where it lands.
Hi there April. So many great things to love about this post. Happy New Year to you! And congratulations on your new picture book. Very lovely! And the children's poetry blog hop is also ingenious! Cute Mortimer.
What an uplifting, tasty, wonderful and rich post, April! Thanks for sharing all this deliciousness. You've set the blog hop bar high, too.
"Shalom to slowly sinking sun..." mmmmmmmm.
A very rich post, April! Thank you for the cotton candy, the pier, Mortimer (what a great name!) and the blog hop information!