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Nov. 5th, 2006 05:58 amNews of the day (posted late because LJ was down) is that my brother is safely through his heart operation.
Nov. 5th, 2006
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Nov. 5th, 2006 11:22 pmI am about to email an edited version of a novel to be made beautiful and sent out into the world. When it gets to release stage I will celebrate wildly, I promise. Right now I am deeply contemplative.
When I was editing, I found out that the biggest single problem with my pacing was because I wanted to give my heroine all sorts of nice things to cheer her up. Life was going wrong and I felt sorry for her. I am less nice now. Promise.
This editing insight led me to think about the mantra I have heard a vast amount of recently, to "kill my baby". To cut my favourite bits of writing simply because they were probably self-indulgent.
"Probably self-indulgent" isn't sufficient. I rather suspect a writer needs to see *why* something is a problem before they can deal with it properly. I cut pages and pages because they slowed the pace and because they fulfilled a bunch of nice but unimportant dreams I had for the chief protagonist but didn't actually lead to the resolution. They also didn't contain enough character development to to justify the number of pages I spent on them and they broke a major thread in two for thirty pages.
It would have been destructive to focus on the bits I liked particularly and to cut them just because there was a chance of me being self-indulgent in them. What I had to do was examine each and every block of meaning and check that it added sufficiently to the novel. It wasn't enough to kill morris dancers - each death had to link clearly to at least three different aspects of plot, characterisation, pace, underlying meaning etc. The trouble with my wish-fulfillment is that it only gave maybe one and a half aspects and took far too much space. When I wrote it, the wish-fulfillment created an impression of expressing the remaining aspects in my mind because I wanted so much to give my heroine some small joy, and so I had to edit it heavily. Vast tracts devoted to small joy is not terribly interesting at the point of a novel where the reader expects a major climax.
I seldom like writerly instruction that's one-size-fits-all. I don't like it when someone tells a writer whose strength is in their rich use of adverbs and adjectives to try for a smart spare style, or someone who has a great talent in the rhythms of language to cut sentences and phrases that leave the rhythm choppy and unbearable. My continuing aim is to learn more about what I do in my writing - both the good and the bad - so that when a reviewer or editor or reader complains about something I can weigh the complaint in my mind and give it the right amount of credit and act on that credit. When someone praises me I want to be able to assess the praise, too, and let it help me know my writing and improve it, and not go to my head and stop me learning. And I want people to stop saying idiot things like "Cut this because I know you like it" ie "Kill your baby." That's a surefire way to lose a writer their uniqueness.
If there's something wrong and it looks like indulgence to several readers, it probably means it *is* indulgence. The question is how does that indulgence affect the pace and the plot and the characterisation and the underlying meaning? If I don't know all that, then I can destroy my own writing in the editing.
I can't always voice this. Most of it happens intuitively. I was rather surprised to find that I had found words to explain for what happened when I did my final without-editor pass of "The Art of Effective Dreaming". I'm much better at explaining other people's work than I am explaining the mechanics of my own. That's why I decided to post on it. I don't know if this insight is important to other writers, but it's very important to me.
When I was editing, I found out that the biggest single problem with my pacing was because I wanted to give my heroine all sorts of nice things to cheer her up. Life was going wrong and I felt sorry for her. I am less nice now. Promise.
This editing insight led me to think about the mantra I have heard a vast amount of recently, to "kill my baby". To cut my favourite bits of writing simply because they were probably self-indulgent.
"Probably self-indulgent" isn't sufficient. I rather suspect a writer needs to see *why* something is a problem before they can deal with it properly. I cut pages and pages because they slowed the pace and because they fulfilled a bunch of nice but unimportant dreams I had for the chief protagonist but didn't actually lead to the resolution. They also didn't contain enough character development to to justify the number of pages I spent on them and they broke a major thread in two for thirty pages.
It would have been destructive to focus on the bits I liked particularly and to cut them just because there was a chance of me being self-indulgent in them. What I had to do was examine each and every block of meaning and check that it added sufficiently to the novel. It wasn't enough to kill morris dancers - each death had to link clearly to at least three different aspects of plot, characterisation, pace, underlying meaning etc. The trouble with my wish-fulfillment is that it only gave maybe one and a half aspects and took far too much space. When I wrote it, the wish-fulfillment created an impression of expressing the remaining aspects in my mind because I wanted so much to give my heroine some small joy, and so I had to edit it heavily. Vast tracts devoted to small joy is not terribly interesting at the point of a novel where the reader expects a major climax.
I seldom like writerly instruction that's one-size-fits-all. I don't like it when someone tells a writer whose strength is in their rich use of adverbs and adjectives to try for a smart spare style, or someone who has a great talent in the rhythms of language to cut sentences and phrases that leave the rhythm choppy and unbearable. My continuing aim is to learn more about what I do in my writing - both the good and the bad - so that when a reviewer or editor or reader complains about something I can weigh the complaint in my mind and give it the right amount of credit and act on that credit. When someone praises me I want to be able to assess the praise, too, and let it help me know my writing and improve it, and not go to my head and stop me learning. And I want people to stop saying idiot things like "Cut this because I know you like it" ie "Kill your baby." That's a surefire way to lose a writer their uniqueness.
If there's something wrong and it looks like indulgence to several readers, it probably means it *is* indulgence. The question is how does that indulgence affect the pace and the plot and the characterisation and the underlying meaning? If I don't know all that, then I can destroy my own writing in the editing.
I can't always voice this. Most of it happens intuitively. I was rather surprised to find that I had found words to explain for what happened when I did my final without-editor pass of "The Art of Effective Dreaming". I'm much better at explaining other people's work than I am explaining the mechanics of my own. That's why I decided to post on it. I don't know if this insight is important to other writers, but it's very important to me.