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Jan. 4th, 2006 10:14 amMild hiatus due to mild food poisoning. Ah well, I needed an excuse for a day in bed. And Narnia and the company I went with was worth it.
Jan. 4th, 2006
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Jan. 4th, 2006 09:36 pmI am on an editing trip thanks to Donna. I am watching hours and hours of commentaries from the Lord of the Rings trilogy and finding out what decisions were made and why. It is helping me work out what editing decisions I make in my writing and why they work or why they fail.
My favourite moment of illumination so far is from Rhys Davies. He pointed out that something worked perfectly on the page (Galadriel giving hair to Gimli) but that it would not have worked as a visual moment on the screen. Sometimes action works, and sometimes description is essential. Sometimes a scene has to serve three purposes at once and sometimes it becomes too rich and needs to be distilled into its component parts. I don't yet know how I am going to apply this to my writing, but I will be in editing mode throughout January, so hopefully I get to test some of the ideas.
Thinking about it, the most interesting editing advice Peter Jackson gives in his commentaries was when he yearned to forget the original. Get rid of the baggage. Look at the work as if you have never come across it before. I like this: a reader can't know of the emotional intensity that has overcome me in a scene unless I communicate it clearly. But I can't check the clarity of communication unless I forget the intensity I carried round at the time of writing.
It is far too easy to trap myself in the memory of writing.
Editing requires a form of amnesia. Jackson actually verbally wished he could have amnesia for editing in one clip. I develop my own form of distance through time and focus. This is why I have all these novels in various stages of writing and re-writing, and none of them are the one that will emerge next in print. If someone wanted one of those novels now, I would have to learn to obtain that selective amnesia much faster.
The other thing that has really struck me is that the way something is written doesn't have to be firm. Often and often the writing and production team went to the heart of the book to achieve a good storyline, and had to dump canon. I could see while watching the original films that all this was happening, but to hear why something was done and at what stage something was added or dropped was really important. Some of the changes that brought the films into close contact with the emotion of the film were added very late in the piece.
I need to remember this. I tend to want to see my stuff cast in iron before I send it to possible publishers. Yet there is always the chance that a simple addition or neat reshaping or a drastic rethinking of something small will improve the whole. Kaaron Warren has a real eye for these small improvements: the other day she gave me a bunch of small suggestions for "Life through Cellophane" and each of them help make the whole much clearer and sharper.
My favourite moment of illumination so far is from Rhys Davies. He pointed out that something worked perfectly on the page (Galadriel giving hair to Gimli) but that it would not have worked as a visual moment on the screen. Sometimes action works, and sometimes description is essential. Sometimes a scene has to serve three purposes at once and sometimes it becomes too rich and needs to be distilled into its component parts. I don't yet know how I am going to apply this to my writing, but I will be in editing mode throughout January, so hopefully I get to test some of the ideas.
Thinking about it, the most interesting editing advice Peter Jackson gives in his commentaries was when he yearned to forget the original. Get rid of the baggage. Look at the work as if you have never come across it before. I like this: a reader can't know of the emotional intensity that has overcome me in a scene unless I communicate it clearly. But I can't check the clarity of communication unless I forget the intensity I carried round at the time of writing.
It is far too easy to trap myself in the memory of writing.
Editing requires a form of amnesia. Jackson actually verbally wished he could have amnesia for editing in one clip. I develop my own form of distance through time and focus. This is why I have all these novels in various stages of writing and re-writing, and none of them are the one that will emerge next in print. If someone wanted one of those novels now, I would have to learn to obtain that selective amnesia much faster.
The other thing that has really struck me is that the way something is written doesn't have to be firm. Often and often the writing and production team went to the heart of the book to achieve a good storyline, and had to dump canon. I could see while watching the original films that all this was happening, but to hear why something was done and at what stage something was added or dropped was really important. Some of the changes that brought the films into close contact with the emotion of the film were added very late in the piece.
I need to remember this. I tend to want to see my stuff cast in iron before I send it to possible publishers. Yet there is always the chance that a simple addition or neat reshaping or a drastic rethinking of something small will improve the whole. Kaaron Warren has a real eye for these small improvements: the other day she gave me a bunch of small suggestions for "Life through Cellophane" and each of them help make the whole much clearer and sharper.