Category Archives for revision

The First Rule of Beginning a Story . . .

. . . don’t start with strangers bashing each other in the mouth or the nuts or anywhere else. “[I]f you plunge instantly into the action, you risk losing the reader,” writes Damon Knight in Creating Short Fiction. “It is hard to take much interest in absolute strangers, no matter how enthusiastically they may be bashing each other.”

Of course, there are always exceptions to the rules of Write Club, as Chuck Palahniuk demonstrates in the opening of Fight Club:

fight 2Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler’s pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die. For a long time though, Tyler and I were best friends. People are always asking, did I know about Tyler Durden.

Why does this beginning work, though the narrator has a gun shoved in his mouth in the hook? (Also note the comma splice. Does that work for you? Why? I like it; it speeds the beginning, alerts you to the roller coaster ride you are about to begin, and tells you you’re about to get your nose bloodied, or worse, much, much worse.) I think Palahniuk’s beginning works, because, if you are like me, you’re suddenly asking who is this person who gets you a job then shoves a gun in your mouth? What kind of psycho is this? It raises suspense.

But Knight is probably right. You have to begin a story and make the reader care about the narrator. And unless the narrator has a gun in his mouth, you probably won’t be interested. You don’t have to have someone in such dire straits to get your money for  nothing and your beginning for free. You do need tension and suspense or provoke interest, as  Knight confirms, “The opening must establish character, setting, situation, the mood and tone of the story; it must provoke interest, arouse curiosity, suggest conflict, start the movement of the plot—all this in about two hundred words.”

What do you think? What makes a good beginning?

—Todd

Copy editing conundrum 6: Shady Cliche and Stunted Emotions

Episode 6:

It’s been some time since I last posted a Copy Editing Conundrum. So, welcome new readers. Hope you enjoy, and are informed, as well as entertained. Although, technically today’s episode has less to do with copy editing, and much more to do with substantive editing, or perhaps injecting bad substances into published work like Hunter Thompson injected, well, everything, rather than pumping those substances out.

I found this cliche-ridden gem quoted in a Writer’s Digest article on what makes novels sell, and the excerpt is from a novel, or series of novels, that’s making the writer a J.K. Rowling-rich hack. (I write for money; I think writers should make money and a lot of it, but it still irks me that bad writing can make so much money and sell people on cheap emotions.) Anyhow, here’s the passage in question:

Okay, I like him. There, I’ve admitted it to myself. I cannot hide from my feelings anymore. I’ve never felt like this before. I find him attractive, very  attractive. But it’s a lost cause, I know, and I sigh with bittersweet regret. It was just a coincidence, his coming here. But still, I can admire him from afar, surely. No harm can come of that.

Every line is a cliche. It reminds me  of a teenage girl’s diary, or even a prepubescent girl writing about her first crush. And yet, the character is supposed to be an adult woman, confessing her darkest erotic desires. An apparently emotionally-stunted woman. (Have you guessed the bestseller?)

This is bad writing at its finest, reveling in its shiny badness. And I’m disappointed in Writer’s Digest for providing it as an example of tension-filled writing that will make your novel sell. It may help sell, but it’s not tension-filled. It’s not remotely satisfying, at least for this reader. Is this the kind of writing modern readers want, even if it is meant as escapism? I hope not. I hope it’s a passing fancy.

My advice would be to send this passage back and tell the writer to rewrite it until a real character, a real woman with genuine desires emerges from the prose.

Of course, if the whole novel reads like this one passage, the writer could churn out a novel a month, which will make the writer’s publisher happy, as long as readers are buying. And the hack will laugh all the way to the bank.

—Todd

Copy Editing Conundrum 2: Comma Karma

Episode 2

*Here’s the latest Copy Editing Conundrum: it comes from an excellent book on graphic design, The Elements of Graphic Design.

Sequencing information should logically and clearly lead from the primary visual to the headline, then to the secondary visual, caption, subhead, and finally to the text. Each of these pieces should be chosen or written as one part of a single continuous message the purpose of which is to reveal to the reader what the article is about and why it is valuable to them.

My conundrum is this: in the second sentence should there be a comma after “message”? I would insert a comma. So copy editors, what would you do?

___

*Note: This is by no means a criticism of the book or its contents. As I say, it’s an excellent book.

 

 

Copy editing conundrum 1: “try to” vs. “try and”

Today, I’m introducing the pilot episode of what I hope to make an irregular feature on this blog . . .

Copy Editing Conundrums

(clap)

At work today I encountered a conundrum: the encroachment with seeming frequency of the bugaboo “try and” vs. “try to”. The first encounter wasgrammar in a sentence I was editing. The next almost caused me to spit out my lunchtime sandwich.

I was reading along in what otherwise seems a fine book, Kelly L. Stone’s Living Write: The Secret to Inviting Your Craft Into Your Daily Life, (Ms. Stone, please don’t hate me; I am a copy editor, so it’s perfectly natural) when I stumbled upon this sentence:

Setting herself up to try and achieve the impossible was, at first, a trouble spot for Amber Leigh Williams, author of Denied Origin.

My immediate desire was to change “try and” to “try to”. Alas, I couldn’t edit this error apparent! By Crom! No hack-n-slash fun for me. Saddened, I closed the book, and thought about writing this very blog post you have before you.

I gnawed on this conundrum for some time, and a-googling I went. Had the world gone mad? Had “try and” officially seeped into the language? I sought experts. OK, one expert—Grammar Girl. Here’s what she has to say about it (click “it” to follow the link).

So, copy editors, what is your opinion? “Try to” or “try and”?

Best,

Todd

 

The Sunday Salon: Story Revision

Today, I finished a revision of a science fiction story “My World Is Not Your World“. It’s my first attempt at science fiction. I would love feedback on it. Chief concerns are plot and condensing the story—it’s really long. But take a look if you want; it’s in the PDF above.

Trial Beginnings

Hello all! Below are links to PDFs of some recent writing I’ve been doing. They are science fiction story beginnings drawn from writing prompts by Joe Haldeman.  I am asking/begging/pleading/grovelling for any interested readers out there to give these “shitty” first drafts (as Anne Lamott might say) a look-see and give me feedback, especially to which beginnings you think have the greatest potential for a short story. Remember, these are drafts—I haven’t proofread them for errors.

Trial beginning 1

Trial beginning 2

Trial beginnings 3a and 3b

The Workshop

By an overwhelming majority 2-1 vote, loyal readers have elected that I keep up with my writing workshop blog.

Because the people have spoken, I will try to keep that blog running.

As an experiment I have posted two stories of my own — one fiction, one nonfiction — for my loyal readers. Please feel free to drop by the workshop, have a look at the stories and critique them if you’d like (at this point critiques will have to be done through comments, until I can further experiment with the site).

Also, feel free to give me comments about how you might improve the site. I need all the suggestions I can get.

More on Exposition and Scene in Creative Nonfiction

In The Practical Stylist (6th Edition) Sheridan Baker offers an excerpt from Loren Eiseley as an example of exposition:

The apes are not all similar in type or appearance. They are men and yet not men. Some are frailer-bodied, some have great, bone-cracking jaws and massive gorilloid crests atop their skulls. This fact leads us to another of Wallace’s remarkable perceptions of long ago. With the rise of the truly human brain, Wallace saw that man had transferred to his machines and tools many of the alterations of parts that in animals take place through evolution of the body. Unwittingly, man had assigned to his machines the selective evolution which in the animal changes the nature of its bodily structure through the ages. Man of today, the atomic manipulator, the aeronaut who flies faster than sound, has precisely the same brain and body as his ancestors of twenty thousand years ago who painted the last Ice Age mammoths on the walls of caves in France.

A detailed descriptive passage, but no motion, and some abstraction. It doesn’t set a scene in the same way narrative summary might. In Write Away, Elizabeth George cites as an example of narrative summary — though fiction —  a passage from E.M. Forster’s A Passage To India:

So the cavalcade ended, partly pleasant, partly not; the Brahman cook was picked up, the train arrived, pushing its burning throat over the plain, and the twentieth century took over the sixteenth. Mrs. Moore entered her carriage, the three men went to theirs, adjusted the shutters, turned on the electric fan and tried to get some sleep. In the twilight, all resembled corpses, and the train itself seemed dead though it moved — a coffin from the scientific north which troubled the scenery four times a day. As it left the Marabars, their nasty little cosmos disappeared, and gave place to the Marabars seen from a distance; finite and rather romantic. The train halted once under a pump, to drench the stock of coal in its tender. Then it caught sight of the main line in the distance, took courage, and bumped forward, rounded the civil station, surmounted the level-crossing (the rails were scorching now), and clanked to a standstill. Chandrapore. Chandrapore! The expedition was over.

A detailed but quick summation of  a train trip. Compare the above to a passage from a scene from Richard Selzer’s “Under the Knife” cited in Tell It Slant:

There is a hush in the room. Speech stops. The hands of the others, assistants and nurses, are still. Only the voice of the patient’s respiration remains. It is the rhythm of a quiet sea, the sound of waiting. Then you speak, slowly, the terse entries of a Himalayan climber reporting back.

The passage further explores the surgery Selzer is describing; it extends it to the dramatic moment the surgeon discovers a cancerous deposit.

These examples are clear to me when another writer points them out. Where I feel I falter is differentiating between fully evolved scene and narrative summary in my own writing.

This week, to reinvigorate the writing juices, I’ve been working on the exercises in Tell It Slant. The first exercise says to go through a piece of your writing, pick out a passage of summary that might work better as a scene, and then write that scene.

Here’s the passage from a piece of writing that I selected:

Of grief I was aware. My August 1, 2006 blog post contemplates what my father might have felt as he lay dying in the hospital. Almost two years after my dad died, I was still haunted by his death. I was not there in the hospital at the moment of his death. I was there several hours before, watching his kidneys fail, his blood rinsing his catheter, while me, my sister, my aunt and my uncle huddled with Dad’s pastor to pray. On my part the prayer was forced; it was to a god long dead, one indifferent to my grief.

Clearly summary of  a dramatic event. Here is the scene I wrote:

For days my father lay semi-conscious in a hospital bed, a rasping ventilator tube unnaturally twisting his lips. The ventilator is off, he is alive, but not conscious, or at least, as far as I can tell, not aware anyone is with him, when I get to his room in ICU that Sunday evening. His body is swollen and distorted. His mouth is probably slack, ringed with the vestiges of peppery whiskers. But the image I remember the most is this: a stream of blood, bright red like children’s cough medicine, flushes through the clear plastic catheter tube and winds its way into a clear plastic box at the foot of the bed. Someone — a nurse perhaps — told me kidney failure is the first sign a patient is dying. Or the last. As the blood spills into the box, its tendrils reach into a pool of brackish urine.

At about this moment, if not before, my aunt, uncle, and father’s pastor materialize. When I see the three of them, I become aware of how thick my breath is with beer. The reverend huddles us up for prayer. Her hand touches mine. She and my aunt and uncle bow their heads. The beer fogs my breath so much the odor seems like a permanent fixture in my nostrils. The reverend is saying something, probably my father’s name, something like blah blah blah your servant Parker. I can’t wait until we break our huddle, I can’t wait until the pastor leaves, I can’t wait until my sister gets here.

What I wonder is if I was successful in revising my initial passage into a scene. Or is the revised passage narrative summary?

The Influence of Anxiety

When I avoid something that I know I must do, I end up feeling guilty.  So every year as summer approached and I had ten weeks of free time, my anxiety level would begin to climb. I knew I had two and a half months in which to write if I wished, and I was terrified to begin because I had a number of fears that I just did not want to face.

— Elizabeth George, Write Away

This morning I picked up and read for a few minutes in George’s book on writing novels to jump start myself into working on my novel, and came upon the above passage, coincidentally after I had been thinking about the necessity of anxiety to the writing life.

If you’ve followed this blog, you know that I’ve gone through periods in which I’ve felt detached from my old self, a faltering sense of self as a writer. A routine appendectomy almost a year and a half ago left me in such a state. Or rather the aftereffects of the surgery heightened a lost sense of self, a lost sense of purpose that had been creeping up on me after a 360-degree career change — launching from newspaper feature writer to adjunct writing The_Screaminstructor to textbook editor to no career at all.

From my recent studies of Buddhism I’ve gathered that a detachment from the Self is just what a body needs. I’m not sure how this is a good thing. It seems to strip you of purpose.

Which is what I feel — stripped of purpose. I should be revising my novel today. But I came to a point in the revision yesterday when I lost interest. I lost interest in the characters. I lost interest in the story. I lost interest, worst of all, in the process. I began wondering, Why am I writing this novel anyway? and Why am I writing at all?

When I first set out to write the novel, I knew why I wanted to write the novel.

First, I wanted to tell a story. A particular story. A fictionalized version of a romance. Though not a romance novel. Something along the lines of A Farewell to Arms or James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime (a grammatical aside: Why does “pastime” have one “t”?). A serious look at love and the relationships between men and women.

Second, I wanted to involve myself in the process of writing a book again. I had immersed myself into writing books before, completing two manuscripts, neither of which went beyond first drafts. This time I set out to immerse myself in the process, determined to stick it out draft after draft until I had something perfect enough to submit.

After a false start or two, I finished the first draft in about a year. Within another year I had teased out a second draft.

I set the book aside for various reasons after I finished the second draft. For the most part, I needed a break from the book, although a career change, then a period of unemployment, another career change, several moves, a marriage, and further unemployment, along with an extended bout with detachment from my writerly self also contributed to the manuscript gathering dust.

As I think about it, I set the book aside because I felt detached from my writerly self. For some reason, my desire to write had grown stale. The energy I got from writing had flattened. I tried to galvanize my desire: blogging more, writing a long piece on my first experience under the knife, writing and submitting a short piece about my struggles with religion, writing a couple of freelance pieces.

These things briefly electrified my system. Still, something was missing. Time? No, I had plenty of time, especially because I wasn’t working.

When I first set out to write, I always felt anxious about finding time to write. I chipped out times to write, scheduling around work schedules and family. Once I set a schedule to write, like Elizabeth George, I would feel guilty if I missed a set time to write. Anxiety would build up. The anxiety would get to me. It drove me to the desk, to the keyboard. I had to write. Otherwise I would feel guilty, and overcome by the anxiety that I had failed myself as a writer.

Now I have time to write (and yet that free time creates another form of anxiety—the stresses of not having a job). For several months now, I’ve been writing, a set schedule, working around time spent looking for a job.

Up until a few weeks ago, I worked enthusiastically on revising my novel. A renewed sense of purpose came after receiving a critique of my manuscript and some encouragement from debut novelists Karen Harrington and Joe O’Connell.

That renewed sense of purpose spurred a whole new vision of the novel. I still had a vision of a serious novel about romantic relationships, but one that was funny, and not morose and bordering on the nihilistic. Now I have a vision of something closer to Nick Hornby’s How to be Good.

Over the past few weeks, however, several things have overwhelmed my psyche.

Like the band Styx, I think I have too much time on my hands. Paradoxically, all the years I that I worked full time and scheduled in time for writing, I craved working independently as a writer: I wanted writing to be my full time job. At the moment, I don’t have anything to schedule around. I’ve been losing the feeling that if I don’t write I have failed myself as a writer. I miss and crave the anxiety of making time to write.

Also, not working has conjured up a whole new state of being, a whole new state of anxiety, one that’s not good for the writing life. Or for the self at all. Almost daily I experience a free floating purposelessness, as if I’m living in a nihilistic vacuum. There are moments when I really have no idea what I want. In this state, I’m numb to writing.

Over the summer, one event numbed my psyche against writing more than anything since: the hope of returning to work, to my old newspaper job, got crushed by an absurd rehire policy. Rejection by my former employer — a place where I developed my writing more than anywhere else — was a kick in the sternum. Besides easing the stress of not having a job, this rejection cast more doubt than anything else on my ability to write.

A new anxiety cropped up. Each time I’ve sat down to write since the rejection, doubt has cropped up.

Yesterday it surfaced again as I started working on my novel. My imagination seemed to fail. I lost interest in the process. Suddenly I’m facing a fear I’ve neglected to face: The question of whether or not I’m a writer at all.