Nitpicking

When my son got lice a few years ago – quite common among the elementary school set – I came to appreciate the true meaning of “nitpicking”. Plucking those tiny, disgusting nits from the roots of his baby fine hair was tedious, but necessary work.

Now I apply the term to its more familiar, metaphorical use (Thank God!) as I sit with three copies of my manuscript before me.

Page by page, I review the comments of my last insightful readers, checking their suggestions against one another and my own, trying each tiny shift in sentence construction this way and that, pausing at each question to consider their confusion or ideas, all the while pushing my ego out of the way to be sure that I make the right decision for my manuscript.

It’s tedious work, but invaluable and necessary to give my novel its final polish. These carefully chosen readers each know and love literature in a slightly different way.  They each offer intelligent and careful observations.  Each of them has slightly different thoughts, and different places that bring them to questioning.  That is a comfort.  In my classes, I often say, “Don’t worry too much when one person is confused.  If two or three are questioning, go back and check.  If the whole room is befuddled, take their suggestions seriously.”

So I’m grateful that no one particular thing has troubled or confused everyone who has read the manuscript in the last month or so. Still, each reader has made suggestions and asked questions, some I hadn’t even thought of before. That’s the value of good outside readers. They don’t know your world or your intent, so they see the work fresh and with an open mind. They’re also sympathetic, giving you the opportunity to clarify what’s confused them. Some writers use outside readers after nearly every draft. For me, I like to wait until I’m certain that I can’t get any farther without an outside opinion.

So here I am at the end of my literary journey, giving extra care and attention to each query, no matter how small. I know that my readers’ confusion and insights will help other readers I may never have the chance to meet. Once it’s published, our writing must communicate for us. We don’t often have the luxury to explain.

I embrace this kind of nitpicking with far more willingness than another round of lice. It’s tedious, but in the end I know it will make my novel transparent, gripping and ultimately enjoyable to anyone who chooses to read it.

What I Learned at Author (R)evolution Day – Part III – The Future of Authorship

This is a continuation of the past two posts on surviving – no, succeeding in the challenging new publishing environment. Check out Brave New World of Words – Part I and What I Learned at Author (R)evolution Day – Part II, to see how the conversation evolved.

“Gate-keepers are less powerful. Institutional support by brand name publishers is less powerful. It’s up to the writers and community to make the work really good!” This is the battle cry of the new publishing republic, the aftermath of the self-publishing and digital revolutions. As I heard it explored throughout Author (R)evolution Day, I realized that the community I needed to support my writing life has been right here in front of me all along.

First, think back to my last post when we were evaluating personal strengths and weaknesses. What does each of us do well? Better yet, let’s reframe the question:

What do you need to professionally publish a book?

1) You need a brilliant editor. If you’re lucky, you find that editor at a publishing house (or the editor finds you), along with a copy-editor who’ll make sure you’d not overlooked any glaring errors. More and more these days, we first find these editors in our personal writing community. They may be author-friends doing a quid pro quo. They may be freelance editors or other trustworthy, meticulous readers. In any case, every writer knows that we can’t edit ourselves. We’re too close to the work. We can’t see what’s right or wrong. We need an outside eye. In fact, one speaker noted, “The #1 mistake of self-publishers is overestimating their editing skills. You really need a ‘developmental editor’ who will help shape your book into a powerful, readable and engaging professional work.”

2) You need a professional package, inside, outside and virtually. Whether it’s an ebook, print-on-demand or hardcopy print-run, we’re talking format inside and out, from page layout to cover design. You also need to understand the many new and different digital publishing platforms. If you’re doing it yourself, you need to choose the right self-publishing service that will give you a gorgeous product and make it available on iTunes, Kindle, Nook, and whatever other platform is out there. As for cover, perhaps you have some artistic ability, so you might be tempted to try your hand. But I wouldn’t advise it. Even though I’m a published photographer and also do all the design work for TWC, I’d definitely hire someone else to do my book cover. An agent once said to me, “I don’t judge a book by its cover.” I laughed. Agents generally read books before they have covers! We all know we’re drawn to a book because of the cover first, unless we have a foreknowledge or a personal recommendation. A cover is not something to skimp on.

3) You have to get your beautifully edited and packaged work into the world. Possibly hardest for all of us – authors and publishers alike – is spreading the word. That’s why publishers rely increasingly on their authors to do a concerted marketing campaign.  (Yes, for self-publishers, there’s also distribution – getting your book into bookstores – but aside from a kindly local bookseller, most self-published works are sold online at least to start. Let’s focus on getting the word out, since I honestly haven’t figured out how to distribute a hard-copy either, and it wasn’t addressed at the conference. ToC, please put that on the agenda for next year!)

Do you focus on building buzz through social media? Do you build your own website or hire a professional? Do you spend all your time booking in-person author appearances? Do you pay for ads or hand out sample chapters on the street? I swear, I’ve seen authors do it in New York, usually poets or prosthelytizers. I definitely wouldn’t choose that path myself.

So how exactly do you jump-start this marketing campaign? Oddly enough, it should’ve started already. It should start right now, right here. And for those of us at TWC, it already has. I smiled as I took these notes on distilled from several of the Author (R)evolution talks, which apply equally to traditionally published and self-published authors. So everyone, take heed:

THE FUTURE OF AUTHORSHIP

1) Build a Community ASAP - This is a community both flesh and digital. It’s a community like we have – thank the Universe for all of you! – at The Writers Circle. It’s a community of people who are familiar with your work and can give you honest insights into how to make it better. It’s a community that will “like” you and “follow” you and “tweet” about you and maybe even come to your readings and buy your books when they finally arrive on their Kindle, Nook, iStore, or, hey, Barnes & Noble.

When you’re building this community, you want to make friends, not worry about selling books. You want to give as much as you get – maybe more. You want to respond to interesting comments, start great conversations and share cool links and ideas. It’s a friendship, in essence. But you can’t do it only because you’re planning to release a book. Ideally, you should do it because you care.

2) Build an Author Platform - Here’s the area that calls for some relevant expertise or a good reason why you should take the lead in some of the above conversations. With The Thrall’s Tale, I managed to craft myself into a true Viking and history expert. I was even asked to give keynotes, lectures and comment on the MANKIND documentary. How cool is that?

But if you lack an academic focus or the inclination to write about such things, you might start the conversation with your characters. Amanda Havard apparently set up six of her characters with social media accounts and started tweeting and chatting as them, building a community around “real” people who became “real” parts of people’s digital lives. So you can be really creative about this thing, have fun with it, and make it matter to people all at the same time. Here again, stick with what feels authentic to you. I still can’t imagine having done something like that with my first millennium Viking slave girl!

3) Build Social Media Contacts and Nurture Them – Daily. No, more often than that. I hear Ann Rice and Margaret Atwood tweet five or six times a day, and they are “brand name authors”. They already have a following!

I’m terrible about doing the social media thing, but those of you who are following me might notice a slight uptick in activity. (Kick me in the pants if I slack off, please!) I also wrangled my partner Michelle for a totally self-serving training session in HootSuite, a social media aggregate program that is supposed to simplify things. Find a good friend to do the same for you, or maybe grab Michelle at TWC!

4) Then, and only then, hope that your community will buy your work. Of course! But that’s not the point. It really shouldn’t be. The point is to offer up real content, real concern, real energy and real authenticity to a community of friends and followers who just might become readers. And they’ll like your work and tell two friends and so on….

OK, I know. All that sounds exhausting. I’m tired just writing it all down. In fact, one speaker at the conference suggested, “If you’re not a self-starter, don’t self-publish.” Yet it’s really no different than what any wise author does when they get a traditional publishing contract. Believe me, I see it every day with the authors I connect with on Facebook and face-to-face.

So, how to make peace with the demands of the publishing Perelandra where you’re on your own, better or worse, navigating the tumbling boulders and rippling sinkholes and heaves? More wise advice from Eve Bridburg and friends:

Find community and make good friends. For me, this means friends like all of you that I hug the moment you enter the door and am so happy to see when you show up after an absence on our class roster.

Be purposeful so you won’t feel lost. This means setting specific goals and tasks, and limits to those very same. I’m working on it (not too successfully since I barely wrote these past couple of weeks. But I’m going back to it as soon as this post is done!)

Don’t let the tactics lead. Maintain control over what you do and when you do it. Don’t try to do everything because you’ll get pulled under the horse. (Note the lead-horse metaphor? I love these things!)

Do what gives you energy and joy and makes you feel authentic. For me, again, it’s all of you and what we’re building at TWC. I love you guys and would do this even if I never wrote another word – God forbid! It’s a good life doing things I care about with people I enjoy. Who could ask for more?

Celebrate incremental success along the way, like getting out of my comfy rut and going to this conference. Clearly worth the lost time for work given all I’ve learned and all I have to share with all of you.

Last thoughts: sustaining a campaign, whether traditionally published or self-published, is hard. It takes time and commitment. It’s a distraction from your true love of words. But stick with it. Turn to your good friends and network for support. And don’t do too much. Little by little. Tweet by tweet. It’s just like writing: bird by bird.

Second-hand Storytelling

When I created Shira, the heroine who narrated my novel, The Fruit of Her Hands, I found myself wrestling with a fairly common problem for storytellers – how to make scenes that my narrator could not witness as vivid and dramatic as if she’d been there.

Our protagonists cannot convincingly be in every scene, for reasons both practical and contextual. No one would believe, for instance, that a woman during the Middle Ages would be allowed to attend a meeting where men learn that their community is threatened. Yet the story I wanted to tell was in that room with those men. So what could I do?

There are many techniques that writers have employed to describe those scenes. Among them are:

• Recounting what happens through conversations with other characters. In my novel, Shira’s father and husband would be in those rooms, and they would sometimes come home and tell her what happened. This works especially well when the characters are emotionally invested in what has happened, and bring that strong emotion – anger, disgust, joy – home with them.
• Eavesdropping. When Shira walks by a room and overhears what is happening inside, she very naturally lingers by the door, taking care not to be seen by anyone. This gives her a first-hand view of a scene she could not naturally take part in – with the extra spice that she might be detected as she spied upon the scene.
• Through such natural second-hand mechanisms as letters – or, in more modern day recounting, email and news reports. The beginning of Baz Lurhman’s film Romeo+Juliet includes that riveting opening scene, followed by the “chorus” of the news report, which brings the story to cinematic life.  In my novel, Shira’s father-in-law sends a letter telling, in chilling detail, how the Christian clergy interrupted a Jewish prayer service, which helps to show the increasing anti-Semitism of Medieval Europe.

These are fairly standard techniques. However, and in some cases, they simply aren’t sufficient to fully portray the stirring events of the scene. The danger is that they can become flat and distanced, as any story told second-hand is prone to be. To retain all the “juice” of being in the moment, a writer needs to pull a rabbit out of a hat – to use sleight of hand that moves the reader from a second-hand recounting to feeling present in the scene.

When F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby is shot, for instance, Nick Carroway, his narrator, is off-stage. Yet he allows Nick to surmise not merely what happened, but also what Gatsby must have felt during those last few minutes of life:

No telephone message arrived, but the butler went without his sleep and waited for it until four o’clock – until long after there was anyone to give it to if it came. I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn’t believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.

I myself employed such sleight of hand in an early version of my current novel. The hero, a young boy, cannot possibly be present when his father is killed at the Bastille. But, to bring the scene to life, I start with “only later would Christophe learn what had happened” and then, slowly, slip the scene into present tense, as though the boy had actually been there.

Remember the last time someone told you a story second-hand? Some storytellers are able to pull it off with such verve that you really feel that “you were there.” Others, without quite knowing why, simply leave you cold. As storytellers, we writers must learn the tricks that put our readers in the very thick of the story, even when our protagonists can’t be.

Literary Surgery

I’ve been kind of quiet lately on the blog that I began, but there’s a reason. With everything growing on steroids here at TWC, I’ve been stealing what little free time I have to DO MY OWN WRITING!

Yes, I have not given up and I won’t — ever. I was telling one of you the other day in class that the work of a novelist is the ultimate long distance run. The minute you lose your endurance, you’re lost. You can admit you’re bored, or exhausted, or simply SICK OF IT! But you keep going anyway. As I am, still picking away, word by word.

Still, I long to wax poetical here for just a moment about what I’ve started to call “literary surgery”. It’s the process that inevitably comes when you step back far enough to look at your precious manuscript in all its vast and carefully wrought wholeness and start to realize that it’s got lumps and bumps, bits of story that have grown too long, tangents sticking out to the left and right, detours in the narrative so lovely but irrelevant that you cannot imagine the story without them.

And yet, when you finally find the courage to step back, you must that your creation is a monster.

Well, maybe not a monster. That’s a bit harsh. But you’ve got to do something about those unsightly nodules. That’s what I’ve been doing on the last third of my book. If we can use a theatrical metaphor here, my third act is a bit lumpy. The rising tension is so plodding that most of the audience will take a bathroom break just when I need them to stay put. Not good. I want them riveted to their chairs.

And it’s not even bad writing. Much of it is quite good. But the flow, the direction of the characters, the scenes that build relationship when they should be resolving it. There are even a few new characters I decided to introduce. New characters in Act III had better be PRETTY IMPORTANT! Well, they’re not, I realized as I read through the last 80 pages or so. They are symbolic of a larger issue that is really where the crux of my story must go. They’re incidental and, I see now, so are those passages.

Back to the surgery metaphor, my patient is lying on the table. I’m in scrubs and I’ve got my scalpel in hand. I cannot look at this body as my baby, conceived in passion and lovingly nurtured to full vivid form. I must see this body as flesh, and it’s got to be reformed or it simply will not survive.

OK, at this point, it’s probably more cosmetic surgery than an life-saving operation, but these days, if I ever want to see this book published by a “traditional publisher” (more on that anxiety at a later date), I’ve got to make it the most gorgeous, model-perfect manuscript that any talent scout would care to see.

So time for the knife. I close my eyes, breathe deep, then open them wide and cold and clearly and start cutting.

What I’ve pleasantly discovered is that, when I step back far enough, the new arrangement becomes utterly clear. That section with the new characters – CHOP. I only need a paragraph or two and then move on. And that motivation over there. Reorder it to make it work more quickly. Get rid of that redundant scene. Cut quick, and don’t worry about mending the inevitable tattered transitions. Once the rearrangement is complete, I can go back to the fine handiwork that I love, mending the big ugly chunks so neatly that it seems as if it was conceived that way. There’s the art, trying to stitch back the bits without leaving scars.

Oddly, once it’s done, you realize that that section you anguished over belongs someplace else anyway. That’s when I put it in my “USE LATER” file where it languishes, sometimes coming out for a moment to be tried on and rejected, only to be later discarded completely, cut and pasted in the section called “CUTS”. I rarely delete anything completely. Probably I’m just too precious about my work, but there’s bound to be a gem there that I cannot recreate. (Though most of that brilliance stays down in “CUTS” and never gets looked at again.)

The key is to find the courage and distance to step back and cut things at all. We’re all too close to our writing. We all fall in love, even if we know our work is flawed. These creations are our children and we cannot help ourselves. We made them and we believe in them and we want the world to see their brilliance, too. But the world is harsh. Traditional publishing has always been and is getting harsher. There’s no room for anything but absolute “perfection”, as if any of us know what that is. So I take my scalpel and cut, mold, reshape, slowly stitching back together my Frankenstein’s monster into more of a Galatea.

I still have sixty pages to go, so pray for me that I don’t carve out more damage than I stitch in good.

…Revision, Revision (part 2)

More on Revision from TWC’s Associate Director, Michelle Cameron. If you missed Part 1, check it out here.

Once you are satisfied that the structure, character development, story arc and descriptions stand up to scrutiny, it’s time for…

STEP #3 – SEE THE TREES (and trim many of them)

Now it’s time to polish your work. You do this through judicious pruning, a careful eye for the details, and lots of attention to your fourth grade grammar teacher.

You might choose to take several sweeps of your manuscript to accomplish these tasks – though they’re certain to merge together as you revise:

• Trim the trees – you don’t really need all those words! A good rule of thumb is to look for where sentences are becoming wordy and revise them to be as simple and direct as you can. Realize that, while the reader loves your prose, less of it is generally more. Some things to keep in mind:
  • Are you using strong verbs rather than weak “there is…” constructions?
  • Do you need those adjectives and adverbs? Take them out of your sentence and surprise! You’ll find the sentence is generally stronger without them.
  • Check again – are you writing as directly and simply as you can? You don’t want to pull the reader out of your story to make sense of what you’re trying to say.
  • Wrong word choices – are the words you’ve chosen the right ones? Are there more appropriate choices available? Watch out for blindly substituting synonyms – words have nuances and what might work in one context won’t work in another. (The best way to know the difference, by the way, is to read widely – which, as a writer, you should be doing anyway!)
  • Dialogue – it’s through dialogue that we get to know the characters that people your manuscript. You need to make sure that it strikes a balance between too much and too little:
    • Do we know who’s talking at all times?
    • Have you overused strong dialogue tags such as “exclaimed, protested, shrieked”? Make sure you aren’t relying on the tags to carry the emotion – what’s being said should do that.
    • Can you trim some of those more basic dialogue tags – “he said, she said?” If we do know who is speaking, these tags will just clutter up your writing.
    • Is there enough context so that the reader is “grounded”? This refers back to description – make sure that just because your characters are speaking, that the reader is able to picture where they’re doing so, and what they’re doing as they talk to one another.
    • Grammar – yes, your fourth grade teacher was right all along. Your grammar needs to be pristine because nothing, I repeat, nothing, disturbs a reader more than an ungrammatical sentence. Make sure your sentence structure is parallel and your tenses (past, present, and future) line up throughout the manuscript. All other rules of grammar apply as well.
    • Spelling – the spellchecker is a good first step – but that’s all it is. It won’t catch the difference between right and write – a mistake I’ve made a number of times when righting this. One good technique is to print out a copy of your manuscript and read it backwards (a ruler can help by isolating individual lines of type).

STEP #4 – READ THE FOREST

When you complete all this, you’re still not done. Making changes always carries the risk of introducing new errors. And if you’ve taken my advice to “slash and burn” too much to heart, you may find you have excised some of the music out of your prose.

So it’s time to read the entire manuscript – aloud. If you can do it for an audience, that’s great. If not, head to a quiet room where you won’t be interrupted, supply yourself with plenty of fluids (I always resort to tea and honey for this stage of revision) and read.

You want to listen for any places where you struggle, where you aren’t reading what’s actually on the page. Your voice knows better than your eyes at this point. Trust it and make any further adjustments necessary.

By this point, your manuscript should be polished and ready for readers – whether they be agents, editors, or just family and friends. Could you continue to revise? Sure. But if you’ve gone through these four stages of revision, you should be feeling pretty good about the work. And that means it’s time to let it go, to start something new, and to fall in love with writing all over again.

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!

Going Places

Tips on starting with a bang, from TWC Associate Director Michelle Cameron:

Picture this scene:

A man lands at an airport. The plane taxis on the ground for nearly fifteen minutes, while all around him, people are talking on their cell phones, hoping to be picked up or explaining when they’ll arrive, or just letting the family at home know they’ve arrived safely.

The plane finally taxis to the gate. People take down their luggage and wait, impatiently, in the corridor of the aircraft. Finally, the line begins to inch forward. It picks up speed. Everyone moves out of the aircraft while the flight crew bids them farewell.

The man moves quickly through the terminal, exiting at the security gate. He goes downstairs to the luggage area, a cold, sterile place. He waits for his luggage to appear…

Are you bored yet? I am, and I haven’t even had my character retrieve his luggage, find a taxi, drive though the city, check in at the hotel…

Now, consider this:

A man lands at an airport. Two hours later, in his hotel room, he lies down on the king-sized bed and calls his mistress.

Bam. In two short sentences, we’ve moved the story forward – and haven’t bored the reader (or writer) to death.

It can be difficult for writers to know how many transitional details to add to a story or novel. Sometimes a writer feels obliged to include some of the day-to-day details that, frankly, have meaning in real life but not necessarily in a piece of fiction.

Generally, it’s good to recognize when you yourself are losing interest in just such a transition. That’s usually a great clue to examine why you’re writing such a scene. There are some times when you might want to include the transitional details. For instance, if they give some insight into the character or set a scene that is going to be important for your readers, then it’s worth it. But if they don’t serve the story in any way except to get your character from place to place, consider cutting them and getting right into the action.

How? A simple transitional phrase such as “two hours later” will usually be enough for the reader to fill in the gaps. We’ve all been to airports, we know the mindless details that have to occur as you go from place to place. We’re often happy not to have to revisit them in our fiction.

The best rule of thumb is always – does your transition serve the story? If not, as they say in the movies, “cut to the chase” and get moving.

Huh…? vs. Hmmm…

We writers love the mystery of a story’s unfolding. Half the time, honestly, we’re not quite sure where it’s going ourselves. Isn’t that part of the fun – the exploration and discovery? And isn’t that the same amazing journey we want to share with our readers?

In our attempts to invite readers into the adventure, we strive for thoroughness, complexity, grace and subtlety. But our efforts, however earnest, can sometimes leave our readers overwhelmed or confused.

Don't wake me from the fictional dream.

The Data Dump
Beginning writers often feel compelled to get everything down all at once. I call it a data dump, and it’s a natural tendency. We get so filled with our vision. It’s glorious and we want to share it all. We’ve thought long and hard about our characters and their circumstances. So we write it all out furiously and are only satisfied when everything’s on the page–until we go back and realize that it’s an unsightly mass of thoughts with no tension, no nuance. Everything is just laid out – splat! – without any shape or form.

Historical novelists (and others who rely heavily on research) are particularly prone to the data dump disease, as Michelle and I discussed at our panel last Sunday at BooksNJ 2011. We tend to fall in love with every measly, obscure detail and get so caught up that we forget that most readers don’t want to know how many lice were in the midden pit in a particular chieftain’s homestead in 10th century Greenland. (Yes, I once could have quoted you exact counts, back when I was working on The Thrall’s Tale!)

No novelist wants to offer up for mass consumption a poorly masked treatise. A certain perspective is required to decide how much to give, how much to hold back, and how to layer in just the right details to give the flavor to our thoroughly researched work without making it too rich to swallow. A fiction writer’s first concern must always be characters and conflict, rich emotions and lives that are made, transformed, destroyed…. Truly, don’t we all want to be swept away?

Don’t Hold Back
The next writerly menace is to hold back too much. This is where our readers are likely to say, “Huh…?” Perhaps our character is a speechless orphan who wanders the city streets holding out his hand. Since he cannot communicate, we never know what happened to him. Still we follow because he’s fascinating, sympathetic, forlorn. We are dying for our readers to comprehend his true depth and sorrows, but we give them only in hints and grunts, heart-wrenching looks and shuffling feet. See, dear reader, those huge, hungry eyes?

By trying to be subtle, we often end up being obscure. We neglect to take advantage of opportunities to slip in tidbits of back-story, a flashback or two of the past, or something said by a passerby who can shed a little light. If we don’t give something, our readers will eventually lose interest in our carefully crafted prose. They’ll be left saying, “Huh…?” instead of “Hmmmm….” and leave us behind.

Missing Bits
Even when you don’t fall victim to either of the above extremes, there are always little things that we authors understand implicitly but that our readers are completely unaware of. It’s not their fault. They’re trusting us to tell them what they need to know. We might drop hints that are too veiled for their own good, or forget to follow up a critical off-hand comment with proper reinforcement. All of these are cases when our readers are likely to say, “Huh…?” not “Hmmmm…”

Any time we leave our readers confused, we take them out of what John Gardner called the “vivid and continuous fictional dream.” In his classic, The Art of Fiction, Gardner goes on: “In bad or unsatisfying fiction, this fictional dream is interrupted by some mistake or conscious ploy on the part of the artist. We are abruptly snapped out of the dream, forced to think of the writer or writing.”

We never want to draw our readers’ attention out of the book and we never want to draw attention to ourselves. The minute they say, “Huh…?” we’ve lost them. But a subtle or direct hint, an emotionally charged accusation, a dirty look or a crumpled photograph in the orphan’s pocket might reveal the character’s inner workings. It would leave the reader wanting to know more, and then, if we’ve done our job well, they’ll read on.

So how do you achieve the perfect balance between dump and hold? Think of sand through the small cracks between your fingers. You need to drop just enough, but not let the whole thing fall. One writer friend calls it “seeding”; another “tucking”; I often think of it as “layering” or “brush-stroking”. But one way or another, you drop in the details so discreetly that your readers hardly notice as they take it all in, organically understanding the terms and stakes, the characters and their interior complexities, the painful past and foreshadowed fate. We lay the groundwork and then carefully nurture it by giving our readers subtle reminders and more hints, building a stronger picture for them bit by bit until the moment when our story finally comes to full bloom, when everything will come together with the sense of random inevitability. We are swept away and returned. At last, the truth is revealed.

The Power of Revision, from TWC Associate Teacher Michelle Cameron

As many of you know, The Writers Circle is expanding. It’s a thrilling leap of faith for me to take our very personal, very “hyperlocal” community and reach across time and space (OK, it’s only eleven miles…!) to add a new link to the chain.

Michelle Cameron, who has posted as a guest here before, will be teaching two free introductory workshops this Sunday, March 27, at Sages Pages in Madison, NJ. Children from 11:00 AM-12:30 PM will join Story Magic, our multidisciplinary approach to creative writing. Adults will enjoy a more staid but equally nurturing workshop from 1:00-2:30 PM. Please come by, bring your kids (or not!), and welcome Michelle into our Circle.

Meanwhile, I give Michelle the stage once again with some wonderful insights into The Power of Revision:

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I write quickly. Always have. It’s been a lifesaver, because right now, my life doesn’t give me the leisure I’d like to take with my writing.

But while I produce words swiftly and can focus in very short bursts, I do tend toward that infatuation with what I’ve just written that I think plagues all writers. I look at the freshly-minted page and fall in love. It’s the best thing I’ve ever written. It’s sublime. I want the world to read it, then and there.

I was reminded of this when I watched the video, Sondheim teaches ‘Later’ from A Little Night Music:

As Sondheim explains, this song describes Henrik, a sullen, adolescent young man from Scandinavia who is constantly being told “later” by everyone around him, with resulting frustration. Pay attention to the singer’s rendering of the piece. Sondheim allows him to get all the way through it the first time around. Listening to it (and granted, I am musically ill-equipped), one would think the music student had nailed it. There’s no place to go here. It’s perfect, just the way it is. Well, maybe not perfect, but good enough.

But Sondheim, the consummate artist, understands the power of revision. He has a vision of what he wants to hear and makes the performer repeat the song over and over until he achieves what he has in mind, because artistry isn’t just getting the notes right – it’s understanding the nuances that make it a living, breathing thing.

The first interruption of the second rendition of the song comes early. “It’s already too angry,” says Sondheim, wanting the student to understand how Henrik would really sing these words.

Characterization is critical to just about any song Sondheim writes. Giving the actor “someplace to go,” so his anger doesn’t stay at the same pitch throughout, is vital. He has also carefully considered the reasons why Henrik plays his mournful instrument, the cello – as opposed to any other instrument.

Sondheim then gives us a bit of insight into a fairly comprehensive cut that he made to the musical as a whole. Originally, every character was going to be carrying an instrument. “But it got too pretentious and it had to go,” he tells the audience, who laughs appreciably.

What they may not understand thoroughly, though, is the discipline it takes to make a cut of that magnitude. Take a second to ponder this. Sondheim went through the process of selecting instruments for each of the characters in A Little Night Music. It sounds as though he might even have staged it. But he was willing to cut this particular theme – akin to a writer having to write a character out of a novel, something I’ve actually done. Never mind the hours spent to make the selections. If it doesn’t ultimately serve the piece – it’s got to go.

Which brings me back to my original point. Getting the words down is only part of writing. The part that makes a writer into an artist is the ability to wait, to gain some distance, to come back to the draft with dispassion, and then to make sure that every word, character, plot device, and description all work as a cohesive whole.

It takes discipline. It means you often have to wait until “later.” But only there, in revision, is art truly possible.

Taming the Wilderness

All of us struggle with revision. It is undoubtedly the most anguished part of the writer’s craft. Earlier this week, one of our Circle bemoaned the challenge. “I wrote the entire manuscript in a few months. Now it’s taking me weeks just to revise a single chapter.”

Believe me, I understand. I’ve felt the same frustration. But I’ve come to realize that revision is as much about another draft as it is untangling the emotional ties we have to our existing creation.

Writers make much of the daunting blank page. But I say first drafts are incredibly freeing. You can do anything you want, write anything that comes. If you can shut down that nagging inner critic for a bit, trust me, your words will flow and you will undoubtedly think they are wonderful.

But also trust me, first drafts are always – repeat ALWAYS – terrible.

It’s a childish conviction that art is “a matter of instinct—that the artist’s first impulse is most authentic,” as Allegra Goodman writes in her recent Wall Street Journal article, Inspiration Revised. The more mature recognition is that only through revision can we hone our raw instincts into something that vaguely approaches passable, never mind art.

“Even the great ones work for greatness,” Goodman writes, referring to her own youthful realization after studying Keats’ path to poetic god-hood. “What we write instinctively—the story that seems most immediate and personal—is often the most conventional.”

Yes, conventional in form, execution, language, character, pacing, and tone. But in those first impulses are the kernels of something better. The trick is to step back far enough to recognize inspiration’s flaws. From a safe emotional and creative distance, we can begin to consider dispassionately what is wrong and weigh the infinite options for improvement.

Revision is a tricky thing, though. We run the risk of strangling our best impulses and creating something wooden and flat in our effort to remake what inspiration spawned. It’s a careful balancing act to know what to change and how, who to listen to, how far to go, and when to say, “Stop, no. That really is the way I want it.”

Revision is the work of making the words flow naturally when they are anything but. But you don’t have to transform your rocky wilderness into a formal garden. We’re not trying to turn tribal dance into grand ballet. We are aiming for a place that is somewhere in between, where we finally accomplish the vision we were aiming for all along, taming the vista we had originally discovered, but leaving it still unique and perhaps just a little bit wild.