The Word Cloud

Sometimes...

Well, it's not the writing I hate, but the rewriting.

I just finished editing Mirror, Mirror today and sent it off to the ABNA competition, as well as an agent I've been corresponding with.  

I should be happy, shouldn't I? 

I keep telling myself that.  Self-editing is a horrible experience.  As I went through the novel, I had to keep telling myself to be ruthless, to remember to do all those things I do when I'm critiquing/editing other people's work.

I'm not happy.

I hate my book.  I didn't before.  To be completely honest, I don't exactly hate it, but as I edited, I found myself protesting as much as I have with editors who have edited my short stories (not my wife - she's always right - but I don't like having her edit too much of my work.  It's a waste of her time, if I don't earn any money from it.  Saying that, of the two stories she's edited, one was almost published, and the second will be in February.)

No, I meant those editors who are also writers of bad fiction and think they know what they are doing.  How did I protest?  By remaining silent as they neutered my prose.  I kept thinking that they must have known better than I, since they were published.  

Then I read one of their stories.  That was a big mistake.  My fingers would have been covered with red ink, not to mention the floor after I slit my wrists. No wonder the publisher went belly up, but I have a feeling that was more from poor marketing.  (Yep, just stick something up on Lulu and someone will buy it.  Wrong.  They never even bothered buying the distribution package that would have had their books listed on Amazon. I insisted that they took the plunge for my novella, but four chapters into the edit, the company was finished.)

Where is this going?

I would rather the editor told me what to do and where to do it.  (Aside from sticking my ms up my backside.)   But until I can afford a regular editor, or a publisher does it, I'm stuck self-editing.  

But why do I hate my book?

Because the more I look at it, the more I want to change.  At a certain point, the scale tips, and I think, why do I bother in the first place?  This is such a stupid book.  It's so embarrassing.  I just want to start all over again.  I'm a better writer than this.

"Steve, you've really set my imagination on fire, I love this." 

That was what one of my readers said.  Now, I don't trust it.  Her reading was before my last two edits, but I didn't change the story substantially.

It is all about trust isn't it?

Trust your readers.  Trust your editor.  Most of all, trust yourself.  Don't wind yourself in knots over editing - or by over-editing.  At some point in the process, you have to give it up.  It is finished.  As a composer, I was able to do that, but as a writer, it's harder, because the feedback is more immediate. I can imagine the sound of an orchestra, but it is difficult to judge until I hear a good performance.  Writing prose takes out the middle-man. You see the end product on your computer screen.

It's finished.  You should be happy.

The odds don't favour me winning the competition, but it's the feedback from the agent that I'm more worried about.  He loved my pitch, but will he love my novel?  From that angle, writing the book was the easy part.

Imagine reaching the summit of a peak only to find that you stand on a ridge a quarter up the mountainside.

Ok, so the novel is finished.

But then I need to convince an agent of its worth, who will hopefully place it with a publisher, who will send it back to me for more editing, and more editing, and ... eventually it hits the shelves.  If it is a good publisher, then comes marketing, book signings, readings, interviews.  That's if it make it. Otherwise, it becomes a dusty nothing that languishes on the shelves of the poor shop owner who dared to try it. 

Still, I should be happy to have finished it.

Yes, if you insist.

I'm frantically trying to finish editing my book by 24 January, but I would rather be working on something else.

I'm sure I'm not the only person out there who can't afford to hire someone to edit their books at £500+ a pop.  Self-editing is horrible, and the result usually is, too.  I've got 7 novels in varying states of editing, but I'm afraid to send any out, as the only "editor" who has gone through them all is me.  A few have been read and critiqued, either completely or in part on some of the websites in which I participate, but no one has sat down and edited them all of the way through.

When editing other people's work, I can be pretty cruel.  I can't just stick to critiquing or copy-editing; I've got to do both.  But when I look at my own work, I just can't muster up the same rigour.  Part of my problem is that I studied in America, but have lived in the UK for 22 years, and sometimes can't tell whether I'm being colloquial in either dialect.  I also get lazy, seeing an issue, but if I can't find an immediate solution, I leave it. 

What am I saying here?  I wonder if there is mileage in setting up a group for editing swaps, i.e. you edit my novel, and I'll edit yours.  It's sort of like a novel dating service, I guess.  Try each other out on a few chapters, and if you are compatible, you agree to edit each others novel over a certain period of time.

Obviously, it is too late for Mirror, Mirror, but after I get the bad news from the competition, that might be the time to swap edits on it.  In the meantime, I have several other books/novellas that I was planning to self-publish under a pseudonym, as well as a collection of short stories.  Those all need editing, although I've gone through some of them as many as twenty times already.  

I've also got to get off my arse, and find a literary agent.  But that's really another issue.  Isn't it?  Every time I get close to sending off a letter of introduction, I decide the novel in question is naive, isn't polished enough, or I don't have enough publishing credits.  It's a confidence issue; I know. But without any significant outside feedback on a complete work, how can I know for certain?

Any thoughts? 

My father used this story to teach scientists how to approach their theses, but I don't know its origin.

 

A fishmonger set up a stall under the sign, 'FRESH FISH SOLD HERE.'

A customer asked him whether he had any other stalls, and he replied, 'No.'

'Well, why bother to write HERE?'

The stallholder was a conscientious chap, and had to agree.  When the same man next visited, the sign had been shortened to, 'FRESH FISH SOLD.'

‘Well, you wouldn’t give it away, would you?’

The patient fishmonger took his knife and cut another chunk off the end of his sign.

‘FRESH FISH.’

All was well until the same gentleman called by for his rock salmon the following week.  ‘Surely you would never try to palm off your customers with last month’s catch?’

The stallholder liked his sign, but admitted that the customer had a point.  He hacked off the other end of the sign.

‘FISH.’

However, they didn’t end up in front of the magistrate for public affray until the next week.  The customer, an editor by trade, smiled and said, ‘Fish?  Why bother with a sign like that?  You can smell it a mile off!’

Spotted the deliberate error yet? 
The wife/life partner/other in the skirt with the elasticated waist, apparently has a floral, shapeless,just below knee length expansive bosom.    Nice one.  It could work too.
Read it, you'll understand.

I know I'm not the only person to have a chuckle at the takeaway menus offering "painapple" for your pizza topping or "mate samosa" for your starter. I also know I can't be the only one who cringes when seeing a huge, expensive-looking shop sign for "Furnature" which is spelled correctly on the other side of the building, as if the sign writers figured they'd go for as many variations as possible in the hope that one would be right. But I do have to admit that I may have taken my urge to correct spellings a little too far when on holiday.

I blame the bingo dabber. It was red, you see, and we all know that red is the colour of editorial corrections (and of blood. Coincidence?) When I saw the flyer on the table, all illustrated and colourful, I just had to act. It was for a Pajama Party.

Pajama. I checked; no, I hadn't inadvertently gone to the US instead of Burnham-on-Sea. I was still firmly in pyjama country (and weather, it was rather brisk) and I had a red pen. I slashed a great swathe of dabber ink over the offending word (twice, they'd used it!) then scanned the rest of the text only to find Duvet. With a capital D. After I'd stopped hyperventilating, I covered their duvet with crimson before making my displeasure known at the use of "out" instead of "our."

I left the amended flyer on the table for the entertainment staff to find. I did feel a tiny bit guilty; after all, the poor sods did have to walk around all day dressed as a pink elephant or a manky-looking tiger, but that's still no excuse for shoddy spelling.

I wonder if my bingo dabber is big enough to handle the "Furnature Warehouse" tomorrow?

Until recently I'd never heard of a writer editing, unless their day job happened to be with a publisher. As I've always used the words, editing is done by editors, and what I do, after I've got the first draft down on paper, is revising. But now I keep hearing aspiring writers say, "I'm editing at the moment." (Just to clarify, I tend to think of re-writing as what I'm doing when I leave behind a story which hasn't worked, and start again with some of the same ideas and characters, and approximately the same purpose, and polishing as the last pass to pick up minor slips and idiocies.)

But surely the important point is that anyone trying to write recognises that getting the first set of words down on paper is just the beginning. Does it matter what we call the next stage? I didn't think so, until I started hearing a scary number of aspiring writers saying "I've written the novel, now I've only got the editing to do and I'll be sending it out." From the talk on such threads it's clear that they see editing as a close-up process: excising unneeded words, bringing out a character more clearly, tightening up sentences. Of course, that's terribly important, and can make a huge difference to how well your story comes over; I often liken it to cleaning the windows on the Orient Express: if they're grubby enough you'll be able to tell mountains from deserts and night from day, but not much more, and who'd buy a ticket if that was all they were going to see? But it seems as if many beginner writers think this close-up attention is all that's needed once the story is basically told.

"Okay, but when did the revising happen?" I want to ask. When did you stand back and look at the whole novel? When did you really examing the structure of the bridge, counting the piers, measuring the spans, testing their structural integrity? When did you prod each character to see if they're really alive, and throw them at each other to check they really would behave as the plot requires? Now that you know what the story's really about, did you ask yourself if you've told it through the right pairs of eyes? In the right tense? Started and finished it in the right place? When did you open your ears and ask yourself if the voices are voices that a reader is willing to listen to, and for a whole novel? "Revising" is derived from Latin, to re-examine, but to me it also has a sense of "re-visit" or "re-vision". When did you revisit all those decisions you made before you began to write or on the fly so you could keep going, and make sure, with all the new knowledge you have now you've got to the end of the story, that they're still the right decisions? When, in other words, did you make sure that the train will actually start, run, stay together and arrive safely at its destination, passengers and all? What about the heavy engineering?

This kind of stuff, which I think of as revising, is what publishers call the structural edit. Since professionals have good reason to work out the most creatively and financially effective way of doing things, it's worth thinking twice before doing things differently. What beginner writers have taken to calling 'editing' is what publishers call the line edit and, if it's a separate stage, will always be the later one. And then the last stage, polishing, is not unlike the copy-edit: picking up dodgy commas, typos, wayward formatting, final checks for the minor idiocies which inevitably creep in whenever you start doing stuff. Checking the toilets, as it were, and straightening the magazines in the rack.

Clearly, macro and micro - engineering and window-cleaning, wood and trees, revising and editing in my terminology - are different conceptually, even if they coil tightly together in the final novel, and some writers would say they do them together.  One writer even suggests that it's only in the close-up work that he uncovers any major structural problems. It's certainly true that if you're struggling to write how a character does something something the plot needs it may be that the character shouldn't do it, and is doing his best to tell you that: you're going to have to change either plot, or character. But the talented and/or experienced writer works with a feedback loop, whether it loops once an hour or once ever six months: big thematic changes, for example, need to be carried through at the level of sentences, while a change of tone which evolves in a particular scene may make you realise that there's something awry in the novel as a whole.

What worries me is to hear so many would-be writers using a word which suggests to me that they simply don't know that the chances of the wood being the right shape from the beginning are small, that it almost certainly will need chainsaw work, and that no amount of trimming twigs is going to make it the right shape if it isn't. I think it's because so much writing-teaching focuses on the small scale. That's partly because prose is easier stuff to read and write and teach on in class-sized chunks, than structure is. And it's partly because of the focus, in teaching beginners, is on how to find material inside and outside yourself, and then learning some tools to shape a single little piece.  So writers embarking on their first novel are often quite aware of the micro-work it takes, but much less aware of the macro: in the Writers Workshop one-day courses I teach, our exercise making people write a two-sentence summary of each of the first five chapters is an absolute revelation to many students.

But if the smaller stuff is easier for teachers to handle, I'd suggest that it's also easier for the writer to face dealing with, and that's where you need to take your Anti-Writing Demon by the throat and kick him out of the room. It's frightening for a beginner writer to stand back and try to recognise if some of those fundamental decisions have turned out not to be right. Taking a long, hard look at the heavy engineering may mean you realise that a) you've got the wrong train for the route, or the wrong route for the train and b) you may need a consulting engineer to work out what to do next. It's much easier to concentrate on excising passive constructions, and whether they really did use 'wonder' to mean 'speculate' in 1710. Unfortunately, there's no point in polishing the windows for the best view of the approach to Venice, if the train won't pull your passengers up the first incline out of Victoria, let alone get them safely and happily to Istanbul.

"I fear my enthusiasm flags when real work is demanded of me" H.P Lovecraft, 1890 - 1937

*Stands up*

My name is Ely, and I overwrite.

From the tiniest shimmer of the dust mote that floats elegantly down from an incandescent heaven to the overpowering maelstrom of the storm that rages with a power that defies all overhead, I overwrite. Adjectives, adverbs, overextended metaphors, overblown synonyms that have been sought desperately for in my well-thumbed thesaurus are all my friends; dear, dear friends I have spent a lifetime collecting, devising, enjoying.

But, alas, unlike my idols Lovecraft, Poe and Stoker, we do not live in a time where a love of language is de rigueur. To write because you love words is not enough. For fear of being rather melodramatic, I would describe myself as a bit of a shadow out of time  (nudge nudge, wink wink); an anachronism who needs to let go of these archaic mentors and begin to live in the literary now.

But how to cut those ties? To cut loose that which brings fire to your belly? To prune, yet feel you are not losing that which defines and inflames  you?

That, I do not know. It escapes me, cantering into the depths of the maelstrom above with a gleeful kick of its heels, defying me, challenging me: come and find me, but do it with less reliance on adverbial phrases and passive passages beginning with words that end in 'ing'.

Time to put the thesaurus back onto the shelf, methinks...

 

Editing your own work can oftentimes be a daunting task; however, there are some basic guidelines you can follow while writing and editing your work or that of others, which can make the process much less challenging. The following guidelines, as well as some accompanying examples, have been cited directly from William Strunk JR. and E.B. White's "The Elements of Style: 50th Anniversary Edition", a definite must-read for every writer and editor!

1. Form the possessive of singular nouns by adding 's, unless it is the possessive of an ancient proper name.

For example: James's house Moses' laws

2. In a series of three or more terms with a single conjunction, use a comma after each term except the last. This is often referred to as the "serial comma."

For example: apples, bananas, and oranges purple, yellow, and red

3. Enclose parenthetic expressions between commas.

For example: My brother, John Smith, is a well-renowned police officer. While we were on our way to New York, a tiring drive, to say the least, we stopped many times to enjoy the scenery.

4. Place a comma before a conjunction introducing an independent clause.

For example: The road was slippery, but we continued to drive to the movie theatre. The house was a beautiful sight, and the gardens were absolutely magnificent.

5. Do not break sentences in two. Basically, do not use periods for commas.

For example: Incorrect: She was an interesting talker. A woman who had traveled all over the world and lived in half a dozen countries. Correct: She was an interesting talker, a woman who traveled all over the world and lived in half a dozen countries.

6. Use a colon after an independent clause to introduce a list of particulars, an appositive, an amplification, or an illustrative quotation.

For example: Lisa's grocery list contained a mere three important items: bread, milk, and eggs.

7. Use a dash to set off an abrupt break of interruption and to announce a long appositive or summary.

For example: His first thought on getting out of bed—if he had any thought at all—was to get back in again.

By no means are these seven items an exhaustive list of things to look out for while writing and editing; however, they're definitely a good place to start. I will be sure to revisit this topic again in a future blog to highlight more items to take note of during the editing process.

Okay, so you have received your feedback from your editor quite some time ago. Hmm...

Anyhoo, you have cogitated at length and you are now tasked with filling in those 'missing gaps' in your play which add to it's fieriness. Funnily enough, these were the self same ones that you edited out previously to adhere to the 'one two hour' or 'two one hour' episodes. Something had to go and although the play was found wanting as a result of this editing, everything else you left in was essential to the story telling and has pretty much been approved.

Where to go from here? Having added in only the essential gripping dialogue and action to gain the approval of those in the know, you are now twenty minites over. Sure it's what's required, you think, but it's twenty flippin' minutes over!!! Nothing else can go. If you do edit more you'll be down to text-speak or back where you started.

So, do you submit it as is breaking all the rules  about a maximum of two hours but knowing it's better for it's inclusions? Or do you take them back out and submit the version that doesn't quite say it all?

Help please!

Ta everso.

Kim

Well, after quite a bit of hassle, we're now back in Germany on a lovely campsite.

It was our wedding anniversary yesterday, so we went for lunch in a nearby restaurant.  I had pork fillet with 'spatzle' - noodles to you and me.

Why do the Germans eat such a lot of pork? Everywhere we go there's pork on the menu. I haven't seen lamb at all, and only seen beef once!

On the way through Germany, we drove along the Mosel, which was beautiful with miles and miles of vineyards. We've also driven along the Rhine, been through the Black Forest, to the Argau, down to Bodensee, then through Bavaria and into Austria, which was great fun - not!

Because the motorhome is over 3.5 tonnes, we had to buy a 'Go Box' for Austria, which bleeps everytime you go past a gantry and you have to pay for the roads you use. The problem we had was, when we crossed the border from Germany to Austria, we had to find a filling station who sold the bloody things, then when we did find somewhere, they wanted us to pre-load it with €80, which was enough for about 500 kilometres. We wouldn't be doing anything like that amount of miles, so, we tried to find another  place to get one. The next station didn't sell them. The next one did but they also wanted €80. Apparently, that's the minimum you can put on it.

Now bear in mind we are doing this trip on a budget, that's a lot of money to us - we could have 6 nights camping for that. We had no choice but to buy it though, because without one we could be fined, so after coming out to discuss things, hubby went back in, only to be told their power had now gone, so they couldn't sell us one. So, we drove to another station, who didn't do them.

I'm a great believer is 'signs'.  In other words, if something seems to be conspiring to stop you doing something, you should take note, and I was beginning  to think that maybe we weren't meant to be in Austria.

Anyway, the next place after that did have one, so we got it, put it on the windscreen and drove on looking for our campsite. It was a bit weird when the box thing bleeped every few minutes.

We finally got to the campsite at 7:00 pm, only to find they had no wifi or internet and we couldn't get a TV signal. Great! 

In the summer when the weather was good and it stayed light until 11:00 pm, no internet or Tv didn't bother us too much, as we sat outside with a glass of wine - or two - watching the world go by and chatting. We were also in Spain and Portugal, and there were other UK people there too.

In Austria, it was raining, dark, and we were the only UK people on the whole campsite, so we were stuck in the van with nothing to do - well we have books, but we've done a lot of reading already!

So the next morning, we decided enough was enough and we headed back to Germany. We made sure we stopped on the way and got our money back for the 'Go Box' though - we got €56 back.

The site we are now on, has free wifi, we can get a TV signal and the weather is good.

See, I knew we should have taken notice of the 'signs' and just gone back to Germany!

The Austrian government don't make it easy for tourists that's for sure. Even cars have to have a Vignette sticker, which you pay for on a monthly basis, so we won't be going there again.

The plan now is to stay here for a bit, then maybe go back to France for a while, then we'll decide what to do after that. We're trying to work out what to do for the winter, but I think we may end up going back to England.

One advantage to being stuck in the van is that I get a lot of editing done, but even that gets to be a chore when you're doing it night after night.

This trip has certainly been interesting so far - we've been travelling since 6th April, and had a super time, but all good things must come to an end I suppose. Gosh it will be weird living in a house again after spending months living in a motorhome! 

Well, TTFN, catch you later,

Kat x