Monthly Archives: November 2011
Revision, Revision… (part 1)
There’s nothing like the excitement of starting a new work or the infatuation you might have with having written it. But professional writers are really made by the serious way they approach the revision process.
It’s important to take time with your revisions and not to rush through them just because you want to be done. Most professional writers would not dream of submitting a manuscript until it had gone through four comprehensive revisions – and sometimes more.
STEP #1 – STEP BACK
It’s good to gain some objectivity for your writing by stepping away from the work for a time – a month if you can manage it, a week if you can’t. Letting the work lie fallow for a bit will help you see its flaws more clearly.
STEP #2 – SEE THE FOREST
Read the entire manuscript for sense. Your manuscript needs to be a comprehensive whole before you can start honing in on the details. Look for the following issues, remembering that the reader isn’t in your head and doesn’t necessarily know what you know:
- Are there any gaps in the plot? As you reread your story, is there any place where your reader might grow confused regarding how you got from point A to point B?
- Are there any holes in context? You’ve invented an entire world with your manuscript, and it needs to live and die by your internal rules. And often also by the rules of the world around you. I once read a story that had a man on the West Coast calling a woman on the East Coast to wish her a Happy New Year, and magically, bells were tolling on both coasts simultaneously. Such minor holes in context can hurt your credibility and interrupt our acceptance of the world you’re trying to immerse us in.
- Are there any major character flaws that you need to address? Your characters need to grow, of course, but they must do so within reasonable bounds for the character you’ve worked so hard to develop. A timid character will leap into the lion’s den because her much loved child is in danger – but not because she suddenly has an unexplained burst of bravery.
- Do you need more or less description? Have you given your reader enough to be “grounded” but not so much that it is drowning the story? There is nothing like evocative description to give your reader a sense of “being there” – but it can’t overwhelm the plot. There’s a delicate balance that you need to achieve.
This stage of revision can be a challenge for writers who generally can’t see the forest for the trees at this point. You may need to cultivate an “early reader” or two, who has an eye for the arc of a story and its characters, who will tell you honestly where you are going wrong – and who will praise you when you deserve it!
Next up – Steps 3 and 4 of revision!
What We’re Up Against – Truth & Consequences for Writers, from “The Simpsons”
OK, this is totally out of character for me, but it’s also totally brilliant, so I just had to share. This episode of The Simpsons came to me through very reliable channels. Anyone who is even contemplating authorship will be equally terrified and amused. Click below to launch the video, and laugh while you weep:
Lit-wisdom from "The Simpsons"?
Three Memoir Misconceptions from author/literary agent Paula Balzer
We’re very excited to welcome author and literary agent Paula Balzer to The Writers Circle. Here she shares some wise words about writing memoir. Be sure to check out her upcoming workshop, “Writing & Selling Your Memoir” on Wednesday evenings starting December 1 at our South Orange location!
One of the biggest reasons I love memoir is that I find people interesting. I happen to be writing this in a coffee shop in my town, and I’m sure there are a few people in here right now with fantastic stories to tell. If working with memoir writers has taught me anything, it’s that people are full of surprises. You never know who might end up being the next Elizabeth Gilbert, or who has survived a childhood worthy of Frank McCourt. I’ve also learned that most people have some serious misconceptions about the genre. . . and it’s these ideas that can keep someone from getting an agent, getting published or simply sitting down and getting their story down on paper. What are they?
Misconception #1: Memoir vs. Autobiography
Memoir and autobiography are not the same thing. This is one of the biggest mistakes people make when starting to write their story. Memoir is about a specific period in your life. . . an autobiography covers your entire life! Unless you are Princess Diana or Bill Clinton, no one really cares about what happened on the very day you were born. This actually makes your job easier. . . memoir writers get to start with the good part.
Misconception #2: You Need to Tell Your Story Just as it Happened
Of course your story needs to be true, but more often than not a straight chronological telling of your story is going to fall short. There are many creative ways to structure memoirs. I love thinking about why certain memoirs worked so well. . yes, it’s about the writing, but it’s also about they way the writer chose to tell their story. There are countless ways to tell a story about divorce, a trip to Italy, etc. How can you make your story your own?
Misconception #3: You Don’t Have Enough Time
I know, writing a memoir sounds like an insurmountable task. However, if you’re organized, and approach your material carefully, you can avoid hitting some of the more challenging obstacles throughout the writing process. I’m a big fan of editing your material (i.e. your memories!) before you start writing. While writing a memoir is never easy, I can certainly show you how to avoid common pitfalls and maximize the time you do have to write.
Paula will also be teaching a one-time workshop on memoir on March 4 from 2-4PM in Madison, NJ, as part of TWC’s Speaker Series. Check out this and all our upcoming events at www.writerscircleworkshops.com.
The Authentic Illusion
Everything is illusion, the Buddhists tell us – our lives and loves, our fears and troubles, the very earth and air and we ourselves. None of this is real. This concept is intended to help us let go of our attachment to longing, hunger, desire. But to fiction writers, it is almost a validation of our work. If everything is illusion, then the fictional world has as much significance as any.
Think of the word “fiction” – something feigned, invented, a made up tale. And yet, in fiction we often discover and express the most profound human truths.
Fiction functions to create its own reality and, through it, to reflect on mankind’s foibles and trials, and to touch the human heart. There is power in this experience for both writer and reader. There is also freedom, sometimes learning, and often pleasure. Some novels are entertainments – escapes. We enjoy stepping out of one illusion into another, and for those brief, shining hours, we exist within them completely.
What does this say about the nature of reality, so easily created, so easily left behind? If anything, fiction serves to confirm the illusion of maya, as it’s called – as insubstantial and yet convincing as life itself.
In a recent conversation between Jeffrey Eugenides and Colm Toibin published in The New York Times, Jeffrey Eugenides said, “There is something about reality, and especially about human consciousness, that can be accurately described and the novel is the best way to do it.” Toibin added to the discussion, “The essential impulse [to write] is to rehaunt your own house, or to allow what haunts you to have a voice, to chart what is deeply private and etched on the soul, and find form and structure for it.”
In the illusion that is life (“real” life), there is rarely form or structure. Life comes to us randomly and it is up to us to make sense of it in whatever way we can. Only in the distilled, premeditated fabrication we call the novel can we cut away the tangles, straighten life’s many nubbly threads and look at our illusion from a tenuous (and somewhat safer) distance.
That distance doesn’t promise perfect clarity. It offers the same challenge as middle-aged eyes. If we hold the paper a little far, a little close, somewhere in between, we will see and understand what was there all along, that we couldn’t quite make out before.
This is one of the the great challenges of fiction – both reading and, more importantly, writing it. Well-wrought fiction should not be wooden, predictable or definite, even though we’ve learned to trust that good fiction should, in the end, make sense, more or less. As writers, it is our obligation to give the reader that sense of inevitability, as we emphasize themes and craft motivations for our characters, consistencies of purpose that in “reality” are rare, but in novel writing are inherent and essential.
We wish our own lives could seem this way. On our deathbeds, perhaps we imagine that it will all make sense. Or perhaps this is clinging too much to samsara, the Buddhist term for the eternal state of suffering. In good fiction, we treasure ambiguity, complexity and a sense of “chance” that the story may not go the way we expect or the way we want it to. This reflection of “reality” makes fiction all the more believable, and therefore relate-able – all the more authentically approximating the uncertainties of life itself.
Whether we are creating it or experiencing it, our fiction becomes our reality. Any writer will tell you that, when we are deep within our work, real life and real time completely fade. We are operating on a different plane, literally smelling, tasting and feeling our created world. Our characters become living, breathing people. They wake us up at night with something they just have to tell us. And yet, they only exist in our minds.
“You’re alone in a room with the stuff that won’t go away,” said Eugenides. As writers, we experience that stuff – those memories of the past, those concepts and characters – like whispers in the dark. They are as real to us as the life we wake up to each morning, so powerful that we fixate on them until we become possessed, obsessed enough to finally sit down at our keyboard or with a pen and try to make this other level of illusion real.
The job of the fiction writer is to create a completely believable illusion. And, if we work hard enough, if we’re really lucky, someone else just might one day find our words and choose to enter our illusive world.
