What is creativity?
A couple of nights ago I got a wild urge to cook dinner. Years ago I wouldn't have been able to do that without flipping through recipes to find ones that I liked and then preparing the food as the recipes I'd found demanded. That was really all I could do; my knowledge of spices consisted of being able to read the names off of the sides of the shakers. I could tell you for certain that pepper was black when it came out of its container while most of the other spices were green. As I gradually became more familiar, I could even point out that rosemary looked like broken up sticks as it came out while most of the rest looked like broken up leaves. But I learned to follow those recipes closely. Once I recall preparing a dish whose recipe called for 1/4 teaspoon of cooking sherry, and I misread it and added 1/4 cup of cooking sherry. I don't remember what we ate that night, but it sure wasn't my inedible creation.
Over the years, though, I've become much more familiar with cooking ingredients and techniques, and with that familiarity has come experimentation. Last week when I cooked dinner, for example, there weren't any recipes. I decided to try twice-baking red potatoes as well as combining fresh chives, thyme, and lime on the tilapia. Both worked pretty well, though the red potatoes are a little dense inside and are thus harder to prepare that way. Bottom line is that I enjoyed eating it, and my family did too.
Was that an example of creativity? I doubt anyone would say no. Was my following a recipe years ago an example of creativity? That one is a little greyer. My good friends at Google define "creativity" thus: "The use of the imagination or original ideas, esp. in the production of an artistic work." Original ideas...imagination...nope, not present in cooking by recipe. Certainly, whoever wrote the recipe was engaging in creativity, but in mimicking that I don't think I was.
That said, it's interesting to look at where that word came from...specifically, its root, create. To create, according to Merriam-Webster, is "to bring into existence." Simple and direct, that. No mention of originality or imagination. When I take a loaf of bread and I cut it, I'm creating slices of bread. When I follow a recipe, I'm creating. "Creative" is defined by Merriam-Webster as "marked by the ability or power to create: given to creating" which certainly fits me in the throes of my bread slicing and my recipe following. Thus, according to my expert linguistic sources, I'm creating, and I'm being creative, I'm just not using creativity. Got it?
Nah, I don't either. It's a funny language we speak. Regardless, I'm perfectly happy going back into my bubble where creativity refers to original and imagination stuff and where I don't worry about why. I am, however, left with another fine thread of grey area: my accidental experiment with cooking sherry. Was that creativity? It was certainly original, in that I created something that I'm hoping the author of the recipe never, ever intended. It was also, though, accidental, and lacked the imagination piece. It's similar in nature to a photo I once took while driving on Alaska's north slope in the winter (no, it's not always winter up there, but that's a fun myth). I passed by a herd of musk oxen and snapped a photo out of the window. Keeping, um, both hands firmly on the wheel, of course...my story, and I'm stickin' to it. In any event, when I got the picture developed (back in the days when we got pictures developed) I was amazed that I'd also caught orange-painted construction equipment in the side view mirror, thus creating an interesting and visually poetic juxtaposition of old and modern. Created, yes. Creative, yes. But accidental...so...creativity? I don't know.
All this, then, leads me back to the topic of the blog. Certainly I've gotten a few of my ideas from other sources including Greek and Roman mythology, but the story line, the plot, the characters are all original and imaginative. Thus, I doubt anyone would argue with my effort's characterization as an exercise of creativity. The first author I ever met, though, was a boss I had a long time ago. She was beautiful and witty and powerful, and...a published author. I was smitten. I asked her one day, probably in an awed voice, how she'd managed to (gasp) get published, and she explained that it was easy. She'd written to Harlequin and inquired about writing a romance novel, and they'd returned...a recipe. She didn't get too much into the details of the recipe, but she implied that to do so would've been boring anyway. She followed the recipe, mixing together a hero and a heroine and a dark stormy night, baked it for 300 pages, and sent it in.
Creativity? The process wasn't, but the characters and whatever dark and stormy stuff was in the book probably were from her imagination. So...once again, I must close out a blog post with my most common saying: I don't know.
Enjoy the day!
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Monday, June 27, 2011
To edit or not to edit?
I've reached a crucial point in the efforts of Book 1...or Part 1, whichever ends up happening. It's the point where I have to decide whether or not to shell out hundreds or even thousands of bucks for professional editing services, and if I do, to whom. And...I don't know what I'm going to do.
The first, and probably roughest, hurdle to cross over is the fact that the words "editing" and "editor" mean very different things to different people. By and large, the terms "line editing" and "proofreading" seem to have pretty well standardized in meaning throughout the industry. Line editing is the process of going through line by line (hence the name) and identifying all the spelling errors and (my personal bane) comma errors. Frankly, I don't know how they can do that one...I can look at a comma for dozens of minutes, taking it out and reading the sentence, then putting it back in and reading the sentence. Often the two readings have somewhat different results, but I have a hard time going from that to any judgment of "right" or "wrong." Ah, well...an editor I ain't.
Proofreading, meanwhile, is...um, well, it's also going through the manuscript line by line. The difference between this and line editing was explained on one editor's page as a matter of sequence. Specifically, line editing happens before submission to a publisher, and proofreading happens after a publisher typesets the work. That said, an editor I spoke with last night said very clearly that she had a two-step process in which she line edits the work and then has a proofreader look it over, so...well, I don't really get it. But then again, I'm not sure I need to in this case. Proofreading, line editing, both mechanical in nature, gotcha.
Over and above all that mechanical stuff, though, there's another level of editing. This one gets really muddled really quickly, because different editors a) call it different things, b) differentiate levels of service differently, c) maintain different scopes of service, and d) bring different intrinsic levels of value to the table on the service. I'm talking about what some call manuscript analysis, some call structural editing, and some call market evaluation. At its core, it's that "Oh, this book will do well," or, "Hey, this book is crap," assessment that everybody needs to hear. The differentiation in scope and levels of service happen mostly in the editors' answers to the inevitable next question: "What do I do about it?"
Looked at from a different perspective, I like some books and don't like others. That much is pretty clear from my previous somewhat-opinionated blog posts, right? Never once, though, have I counted misspellings or comma errors, despite my surety that they existed, in my analysis. Yes, I know agents and publishers count those things, if for no other reason than to identify the level of professionalism in the author. But I don't, and I'm the one who bought the book. Instead, I consider the flow of the story, the characterization, and the dialog...all the stuff that a manuscript analysis by whatever name the editor of choice uses should highlight.
Sounds great, doesn't it? All I have to do is send the manuscript in to an editor, who will send it back in X weeks with Y red marks (or, better, Word's Tracked Changes), and once I fix those I'll be publishable. Right?
Hold on there. Keep in mind what I've pointed out before that much of what makes a book great, or a character likeable or readable, is intrinsic to the reader. While the perfect editor will give me the opinion of the "audience of choice," which in my case is the massive public out there, pobody's nerfect. Just a couple of months ago a friend and fellow author had to fire her editor. It wasn't the mechanical stuff, but rather issues with voice, that got between them. My friend, by the way, is a bit more advanced of an author than I am. If you will look back through my earlier blog posts you'll realize that just a few months ago I didn't really know what an author's voice was, and I'm still not sure I can define mine. How, then, do I protect something from the editor's red pen when I can't really grasp on to it in the first place?
There's one other itsy bitsy concern that I almost hate to trouble anyone with, by the way: money. Editing is f'in' expensive, to put it plainly. I'm not saying they don't earn their money, now. I know, from my document editing efforts at work, how taxing it can be to bend yourself over a manuscript and really examine not just every word for spelling and spacing but also every phrase and every sentence for proper, use, of a. comma, or whatever! punctuation is used. No, I think they're earning every penny they make. Which is part of the reason I'm approaching the matter cautiously...they are all priced different. There's one friend I've made on Facebook who does freelance editing, and was advertised as "really cheap." Cool, I like really cheap...so long as I'm getting something good. The other friend who was talking about her was saying somewhere around $300 to $400 for my manuscript, which is about 1/10 what a more seasoned editor would charge for 74K words. That's really cheap. But when I got the actual quote, I found out that the other friend was working with her on a short story, while mine's a novel...apples and, well, IBMs. My quote came in at nearly $600. Now I know that's not a whole lot more than, say, $300, when compared to, say, $3000, but it was bigger enough to make me say "Yeow." My second book is longer, and if it's a proportional thing, that's over $600 for it...total of $1200. Cheaper, indeed, than $5K or $6K for other editors for both parts, but expensive enough now that it's no longer in my mental "cheap" range. Do you know what I mean? "Cheap" is relative not just to other pricing of similar products, but also the size of my checking account. If I were examining a Bentley that sold for $500,000, for example, and you showed me a Mercedes that only cost $50,000, I wouldn't say, "Oh, wow, that's cheap. I'll take two!"
In any event, editing services are expensive enough that I invariably come circling back to the question of whether I really need them in the first place. I really am a pretty solid writer, mechanically speaking. I'm not perfect, certainly, but I think I'm good enough after a revision or two that a prospective agent or publisher isn't going to be turned off by errors. What I need help on, really, is the manuscript analysis, a task that some of my friends have already indicated a willingness to do for free (or, at least, for the cost of a mention in the Acknowledgements and a free copy of the book). But then you get back to the question of what they bring to the table...my friends are really dang smart, but have any of them ever actually published a book? Have any of them participated in the publication of a best seller? No, and no. But is that experience worth one to a few thousand dollars to me? Eeeee, I dunno. I'm gonna have to think on that one a little more.
The first, and probably roughest, hurdle to cross over is the fact that the words "editing" and "editor" mean very different things to different people. By and large, the terms "line editing" and "proofreading" seem to have pretty well standardized in meaning throughout the industry. Line editing is the process of going through line by line (hence the name) and identifying all the spelling errors and (my personal bane) comma errors. Frankly, I don't know how they can do that one...I can look at a comma for dozens of minutes, taking it out and reading the sentence, then putting it back in and reading the sentence. Often the two readings have somewhat different results, but I have a hard time going from that to any judgment of "right" or "wrong." Ah, well...an editor I ain't.
Proofreading, meanwhile, is...um, well, it's also going through the manuscript line by line. The difference between this and line editing was explained on one editor's page as a matter of sequence. Specifically, line editing happens before submission to a publisher, and proofreading happens after a publisher typesets the work. That said, an editor I spoke with last night said very clearly that she had a two-step process in which she line edits the work and then has a proofreader look it over, so...well, I don't really get it. But then again, I'm not sure I need to in this case. Proofreading, line editing, both mechanical in nature, gotcha.
Over and above all that mechanical stuff, though, there's another level of editing. This one gets really muddled really quickly, because different editors a) call it different things, b) differentiate levels of service differently, c) maintain different scopes of service, and d) bring different intrinsic levels of value to the table on the service. I'm talking about what some call manuscript analysis, some call structural editing, and some call market evaluation. At its core, it's that "Oh, this book will do well," or, "Hey, this book is crap," assessment that everybody needs to hear. The differentiation in scope and levels of service happen mostly in the editors' answers to the inevitable next question: "What do I do about it?"
Looked at from a different perspective, I like some books and don't like others. That much is pretty clear from my previous somewhat-opinionated blog posts, right? Never once, though, have I counted misspellings or comma errors, despite my surety that they existed, in my analysis. Yes, I know agents and publishers count those things, if for no other reason than to identify the level of professionalism in the author. But I don't, and I'm the one who bought the book. Instead, I consider the flow of the story, the characterization, and the dialog...all the stuff that a manuscript analysis by whatever name the editor of choice uses should highlight.
Sounds great, doesn't it? All I have to do is send the manuscript in to an editor, who will send it back in X weeks with Y red marks (or, better, Word's Tracked Changes), and once I fix those I'll be publishable. Right?
Hold on there. Keep in mind what I've pointed out before that much of what makes a book great, or a character likeable or readable, is intrinsic to the reader. While the perfect editor will give me the opinion of the "audience of choice," which in my case is the massive public out there, pobody's nerfect. Just a couple of months ago a friend and fellow author had to fire her editor. It wasn't the mechanical stuff, but rather issues with voice, that got between them. My friend, by the way, is a bit more advanced of an author than I am. If you will look back through my earlier blog posts you'll realize that just a few months ago I didn't really know what an author's voice was, and I'm still not sure I can define mine. How, then, do I protect something from the editor's red pen when I can't really grasp on to it in the first place?
There's one other itsy bitsy concern that I almost hate to trouble anyone with, by the way: money. Editing is f'in' expensive, to put it plainly. I'm not saying they don't earn their money, now. I know, from my document editing efforts at work, how taxing it can be to bend yourself over a manuscript and really examine not just every word for spelling and spacing but also every phrase and every sentence for proper, use, of a. comma, or whatever! punctuation is used. No, I think they're earning every penny they make. Which is part of the reason I'm approaching the matter cautiously...they are all priced different. There's one friend I've made on Facebook who does freelance editing, and was advertised as "really cheap." Cool, I like really cheap...so long as I'm getting something good. The other friend who was talking about her was saying somewhere around $300 to $400 for my manuscript, which is about 1/10 what a more seasoned editor would charge for 74K words. That's really cheap. But when I got the actual quote, I found out that the other friend was working with her on a short story, while mine's a novel...apples and, well, IBMs. My quote came in at nearly $600. Now I know that's not a whole lot more than, say, $300, when compared to, say, $3000, but it was bigger enough to make me say "Yeow." My second book is longer, and if it's a proportional thing, that's over $600 for it...total of $1200. Cheaper, indeed, than $5K or $6K for other editors for both parts, but expensive enough now that it's no longer in my mental "cheap" range. Do you know what I mean? "Cheap" is relative not just to other pricing of similar products, but also the size of my checking account. If I were examining a Bentley that sold for $500,000, for example, and you showed me a Mercedes that only cost $50,000, I wouldn't say, "Oh, wow, that's cheap. I'll take two!"
In any event, editing services are expensive enough that I invariably come circling back to the question of whether I really need them in the first place. I really am a pretty solid writer, mechanically speaking. I'm not perfect, certainly, but I think I'm good enough after a revision or two that a prospective agent or publisher isn't going to be turned off by errors. What I need help on, really, is the manuscript analysis, a task that some of my friends have already indicated a willingness to do for free (or, at least, for the cost of a mention in the Acknowledgements and a free copy of the book). But then you get back to the question of what they bring to the table...my friends are really dang smart, but have any of them ever actually published a book? Have any of them participated in the publication of a best seller? No, and no. But is that experience worth one to a few thousand dollars to me? Eeeee, I dunno. I'm gonna have to think on that one a little more.
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Bars and their settings
I really haven't been a good blogger this week. I mean, there are excuses galore, including a very significant event at work Friday evening that I spent most of the week preparing for. I even had stress dreams, in fact, which are quite rare for me. One of them was really entertaining to the friends at work whom I chose to tell about it...I actually woke up from a dream in which the graduation speaker was break-dancing down the aisle. Sheesh. But I've been working and working and then working more, and on my really minimal non-work time I've been trying to keep revising Part I of the story. *sigh* 'K, 'nuff excuses.
I'm done. Done with graduation for this year, and done with the revision. Both give me a significant feeling of accomplishment. The book...Part I of The Ascent of the Goddess...is now ready for professional editing prior to being used as a query for agents. That's a huge sigh of completion from me. Graduation is the same. Back when I just showed up for graduation, I really had no idea what went into planning and putting on the event. Now I do, though, and I keep questioning why I agree to do this every year. It's tough...very detail oriented. It, like my book, would be much easier to do if it were all I had to do.
The funny thing about this graduation--and trust me, it wasn't really unusual--was the different feelings people walked away from it with. I had a great many people telling me what a wonderful job we had done. It was the best graduation they had ever attended, some said. Yay! From my standpoint, it stank. The people I'd counted on to take tickets and hand out programs decided they'd rather be at the front table. The first speaker missed his cue to have everybody sit down. The commencement speaker went far longer and far less secular in his comments than we'd discussed. The folks reading the names, with one exception, forgot everything I'd said about intentionally slowing it down; it became a race to get the grads across the stage. *sigh* Production-wise, it was a disaster.
Nobody really cared but me.
It's funny how that works. The performer always knows what he or she misses in the performance; the audience rarely does. When I sang on stage in front of lots of people, they'd always tell me what a wonderful thing it had been while I'd heard every missed note. I thought they were just making me feel better till I realized that no, they really had no idea. It's not that they were stupid or didn't understand music...they came for entertainment, and entertainment they received. Their bar was set different from mine. Same with graduation on Friday, really...everybody else's bar was set different from mine.
What will be interesting is how everyone else reacts to the book. Will the audience's bar be set different in this case? Only time will tell.
I'm done. Done with graduation for this year, and done with the revision. Both give me a significant feeling of accomplishment. The book...Part I of The Ascent of the Goddess...is now ready for professional editing prior to being used as a query for agents. That's a huge sigh of completion from me. Graduation is the same. Back when I just showed up for graduation, I really had no idea what went into planning and putting on the event. Now I do, though, and I keep questioning why I agree to do this every year. It's tough...very detail oriented. It, like my book, would be much easier to do if it were all I had to do.
The funny thing about this graduation--and trust me, it wasn't really unusual--was the different feelings people walked away from it with. I had a great many people telling me what a wonderful job we had done. It was the best graduation they had ever attended, some said. Yay! From my standpoint, it stank. The people I'd counted on to take tickets and hand out programs decided they'd rather be at the front table. The first speaker missed his cue to have everybody sit down. The commencement speaker went far longer and far less secular in his comments than we'd discussed. The folks reading the names, with one exception, forgot everything I'd said about intentionally slowing it down; it became a race to get the grads across the stage. *sigh* Production-wise, it was a disaster.
Nobody really cared but me.
It's funny how that works. The performer always knows what he or she misses in the performance; the audience rarely does. When I sang on stage in front of lots of people, they'd always tell me what a wonderful thing it had been while I'd heard every missed note. I thought they were just making me feel better till I realized that no, they really had no idea. It's not that they were stupid or didn't understand music...they came for entertainment, and entertainment they received. Their bar was set different from mine. Same with graduation on Friday, really...everybody else's bar was set different from mine.
What will be interesting is how everyone else reacts to the book. Will the audience's bar be set different in this case? Only time will tell.
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Voices in my head
Sorry for my extended silence, folks...I took a nice three-day weekend out of town. I'm still, in fact, trying to figure out how to claim a trip to New York City as "research" for my novel. It must be possible.... In any event, they made me an offer I couldn't refuse: triple points at the new hotel in Brooklyn.
For anyone who didn't know: it's a LONG drive from Richmond, VA, to Brooklyn, NY. It's a long road, mileage-wise, but then you also have to pass through traffic-ensnared behemoths such as Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, MD. And then there was the bumper-to-bumper crawl on the Interstate as soon as it entered Maryland on the way back. We stopped at the rest stop and asked the friendly(ish) cashier if she knew what the slowdown was. "Toll booth." Oh, I see. Apparently it's a normal everyday thing to crawl down the Interstate at ten miles per hour or less in order to be able to pay the Great God of Tolls for the privilege to drive on the Interstate at ten miles per hour or less.
Strange way of life, that.
The long trip did, however, give us the opportunity to get nearly 1/4 of the way through Jean Auel's new book on audio disks. My wife has been a big fan of the series and can quote nearly everything that's happened. I read the first one and enjoyed it but...well, meh. It's not really my cup of tea, since there's no dragons or space ships to be found anywhere in the prose. If only she'd put a hobbit or two and/or a zombie wandering around in the Cro Magnon camps...now that would be cool. But she didn't. It's still a good story, really; I'm just a picky bastard. Clearly others like it, as she's sold over thirty gazillion copies of her books, and that's quite a lot.
Listening to the work did bring to light a couple of things, though. The first lesson a new writer like me can glean is that it's perfectly possible to sell a boatload of books (and, like I said, that's a lot!) that have no plot to speak of. After a few disks, while Heide was changing one for the next (conveniently prompted by the Voice saying "You've reached the end of Disk 3. Please put in Disk 4," answered by my typical "Well, duh"), I asked her, "So, Love, what's the plot of the book?" She looked at me quizzically, and then said, "Well, there isn't one. The story is about how she learns and adapts." Or something like that, anyway; I don't listen so well when I'm trying not to rear-end the car ahead of me on the Interstate. "Why do people listen to the story, then?" I asked. By her answer, apparently, people are fascinated by the details in how Ayla, and by extension the stone age cultures, learn and develop. Hmm...OK. So since I'm showing how Crystal learns and develops, I don't really need the plot I created? My guess is it probably doesn't apply to me, as I haven't already sold thirty bazillion books. That said, I'm enough of a curmudgeon to complain about it when I see it.
Apparently others are, um, curmudgeonly (is that a word?) enough to do the same. On one review forum a writer points out the lack of a plot in the sixth book, and a fairly limited plot development in the others. He's met on the topic by an apologist saying, "There was more to that story than just the plot itself." Well, OK. In truth, it is a decent tale that draws us in to liking the characters quite a lot, so I'll let the plotlessness go for now.
The other thing that I caught while listening is how jarring the third person omniscient voice can be when used incautiously. Some literary experts explain that the third person omniscient voice is the most commonly used, and is the best choice for "epic stories" involving many characters, sometimes separated by a geographical distance. It's the voice in which the narrator...me, in my book, and Auel, in hers...knows everything and tells the reader everything that the narrator wants the reader to know. It's what I've been trying to avoid in the Ascent of the Goddess, for the same reason why I don't like it so much when Auel uses it: it's jarring. We're going along in the story learning all about what Ayla is thinking and doing, and all of a sudden we're inside somebody else's head learning what he's thinking. A commenter on a blog about voices said it like this: "The biggest drawback of third person omniscient is that readers can get confused if the author can’t smoothly move the reader from one point of view to another. It is possible to get mental whiplash when the author is head-hopping." (http://ingridsnotes.wordpress.com/2011/03/31/five-advantages-of-third-person-omniscient-pov/).
Granted, third person omniscient has been used very effectively in many works. Tolkien, for example, used that voice, as did Douglas Adams, Jane Austen, Tolstoy, and Dickens. I'm certainly not going to take a stance against it. I will, however, caution against its injudicious use. It's a natural choice that frees the author from the confines of "what would the main character actually know?" which is actually more of a restriction than it seems, as I've been finding in my own revision process. By using it, then, you're free to take the readers head-hopping all you want. Be advised, though, that some readers don't enjoy that.
And now...time to get dressed for work. Have a great day!
For anyone who didn't know: it's a LONG drive from Richmond, VA, to Brooklyn, NY. It's a long road, mileage-wise, but then you also have to pass through traffic-ensnared behemoths such as Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, MD. And then there was the bumper-to-bumper crawl on the Interstate as soon as it entered Maryland on the way back. We stopped at the rest stop and asked the friendly(ish) cashier if she knew what the slowdown was. "Toll booth." Oh, I see. Apparently it's a normal everyday thing to crawl down the Interstate at ten miles per hour or less in order to be able to pay the Great God of Tolls for the privilege to drive on the Interstate at ten miles per hour or less.
Strange way of life, that.
The long trip did, however, give us the opportunity to get nearly 1/4 of the way through Jean Auel's new book on audio disks. My wife has been a big fan of the series and can quote nearly everything that's happened. I read the first one and enjoyed it but...well, meh. It's not really my cup of tea, since there's no dragons or space ships to be found anywhere in the prose. If only she'd put a hobbit or two and/or a zombie wandering around in the Cro Magnon camps...now that would be cool. But she didn't. It's still a good story, really; I'm just a picky bastard. Clearly others like it, as she's sold over thirty gazillion copies of her books, and that's quite a lot.
Listening to the work did bring to light a couple of things, though. The first lesson a new writer like me can glean is that it's perfectly possible to sell a boatload of books (and, like I said, that's a lot!) that have no plot to speak of. After a few disks, while Heide was changing one for the next (conveniently prompted by the Voice saying "You've reached the end of Disk 3. Please put in Disk 4," answered by my typical "Well, duh"), I asked her, "So, Love, what's the plot of the book?" She looked at me quizzically, and then said, "Well, there isn't one. The story is about how she learns and adapts." Or something like that, anyway; I don't listen so well when I'm trying not to rear-end the car ahead of me on the Interstate. "Why do people listen to the story, then?" I asked. By her answer, apparently, people are fascinated by the details in how Ayla, and by extension the stone age cultures, learn and develop. Hmm...OK. So since I'm showing how Crystal learns and develops, I don't really need the plot I created? My guess is it probably doesn't apply to me, as I haven't already sold thirty bazillion books. That said, I'm enough of a curmudgeon to complain about it when I see it.
Apparently others are, um, curmudgeonly (is that a word?) enough to do the same. On one review forum a writer points out the lack of a plot in the sixth book, and a fairly limited plot development in the others. He's met on the topic by an apologist saying, "There was more to that story than just the plot itself." Well, OK. In truth, it is a decent tale that draws us in to liking the characters quite a lot, so I'll let the plotlessness go for now.
The other thing that I caught while listening is how jarring the third person omniscient voice can be when used incautiously. Some literary experts explain that the third person omniscient voice is the most commonly used, and is the best choice for "epic stories" involving many characters, sometimes separated by a geographical distance. It's the voice in which the narrator...me, in my book, and Auel, in hers...knows everything and tells the reader everything that the narrator wants the reader to know. It's what I've been trying to avoid in the Ascent of the Goddess, for the same reason why I don't like it so much when Auel uses it: it's jarring. We're going along in the story learning all about what Ayla is thinking and doing, and all of a sudden we're inside somebody else's head learning what he's thinking. A commenter on a blog about voices said it like this: "The biggest drawback of third person omniscient is that readers can get confused if the author can’t smoothly move the reader from one point of view to another. It is possible to get mental whiplash when the author is head-hopping." (http://ingridsnotes.wordpress.com/2011/03/31/five-advantages-of-third-person-omniscient-pov/).
Granted, third person omniscient has been used very effectively in many works. Tolkien, for example, used that voice, as did Douglas Adams, Jane Austen, Tolstoy, and Dickens. I'm certainly not going to take a stance against it. I will, however, caution against its injudicious use. It's a natural choice that frees the author from the confines of "what would the main character actually know?" which is actually more of a restriction than it seems, as I've been finding in my own revision process. By using it, then, you're free to take the readers head-hopping all you want. Be advised, though, that some readers don't enjoy that.
And now...time to get dressed for work. Have a great day!
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Road signs
I was driving to work this morning and saw a disturbing sign. It was bright construction orange, and about the same size as one of those "make sure you read the entire text of this sign because you'll need it to survive the next three detours" warnings. But it only contained an arrow, pointed to the left. Yep, that's it...one big black arrow, and very definitely pointed left.
What's that mean? After *mumbledy*-five years of driving, I've come to the point where I easily grasp the meaning of most signs. I mean, there's the easy ones they teach us in those books that we all actually study before the driving test. Funny, isn't it, that millions of American kids have made it through entire literature courses without ever really getting in to the text of those books they ask us to read. Math books, meanwhile, are considered vital to read, at least insofar as the problems at the end of the chapter are concerned...but those squiggles on the pages in between are, at best, just a nuisance. Science texts get some reading, as long as by "reading" you mean "scanning for the formulas in the boxes while looking in the margins for information to be used in the inevitable book report." But the driving booklet? Hell, yeah...we spent hours glued over it, memorizing details about the number of points required to lose the license we didn't even have yet, the percentage of alcohol allowed in our bloodstream once we got to drinking age, etc. And then there were the inevitable two or three pages of pictures of signs that you had to memorize...yellow means caution, red means stop, white with a number is a speed limit sign, and so on. And orange? Orange is construction, and these days that gets you double fines. Ugh.
So I crept up on the left-pointing arrow warily. Was it a warning for a required left turn? Or did it mean that at that spot I needed to look left? There weren't any jumping deer or men with shovels on the sign, so I didn't need to worry about animals or workers to the left. What, then, did it mean???
This relates heavily, of course (yes, you knew I was going there, didn't you?) to the art and science of grammatical construction. That topic is pretty much where I started this blog, and it's where I'll probably end, and it's got several mileposts set out in the journey it describes. I mean, writing is all about the storytelling, right? All that matters is that you can follow the story from beginning to end, right? But how do you do it without knowing what the signs mean?
I saw a post on Facebook recently that claimed to describe why reviewers tend to not review self-published works in a very positive manner. I dove right in, because good reviews will be important to me. To sum up the article while paraphrasing Bill Clinton: "It's the grammar, stupid." The article did a great job of explaining why it's important to those of us who read a lot that the author follows the rules of grammar. For me, it boils down to that signage lesson. I know when to slow down because I recognize a speed limit sign. By the same token, I know when to stop one thought and continue with another when I recognize an end-of-sentence period. The grammar, which includes punctuation, word usage, and other rules, means something. Frankly, if you didn't pay attention to that part of the manual before, you really should go check out the manual again before you take off on a trip.
So...enough about signs and grammar for the night. Time to get back to revising.
What's that mean? After *mumbledy*-five years of driving, I've come to the point where I easily grasp the meaning of most signs. I mean, there's the easy ones they teach us in those books that we all actually study before the driving test. Funny, isn't it, that millions of American kids have made it through entire literature courses without ever really getting in to the text of those books they ask us to read. Math books, meanwhile, are considered vital to read, at least insofar as the problems at the end of the chapter are concerned...but those squiggles on the pages in between are, at best, just a nuisance. Science texts get some reading, as long as by "reading" you mean "scanning for the formulas in the boxes while looking in the margins for information to be used in the inevitable book report." But the driving booklet? Hell, yeah...we spent hours glued over it, memorizing details about the number of points required to lose the license we didn't even have yet, the percentage of alcohol allowed in our bloodstream once we got to drinking age, etc. And then there were the inevitable two or three pages of pictures of signs that you had to memorize...yellow means caution, red means stop, white with a number is a speed limit sign, and so on. And orange? Orange is construction, and these days that gets you double fines. Ugh.
So I crept up on the left-pointing arrow warily. Was it a warning for a required left turn? Or did it mean that at that spot I needed to look left? There weren't any jumping deer or men with shovels on the sign, so I didn't need to worry about animals or workers to the left. What, then, did it mean???
This relates heavily, of course (yes, you knew I was going there, didn't you?) to the art and science of grammatical construction. That topic is pretty much where I started this blog, and it's where I'll probably end, and it's got several mileposts set out in the journey it describes. I mean, writing is all about the storytelling, right? All that matters is that you can follow the story from beginning to end, right? But how do you do it without knowing what the signs mean?
I saw a post on Facebook recently that claimed to describe why reviewers tend to not review self-published works in a very positive manner. I dove right in, because good reviews will be important to me. To sum up the article while paraphrasing Bill Clinton: "It's the grammar, stupid." The article did a great job of explaining why it's important to those of us who read a lot that the author follows the rules of grammar. For me, it boils down to that signage lesson. I know when to slow down because I recognize a speed limit sign. By the same token, I know when to stop one thought and continue with another when I recognize an end-of-sentence period. The grammar, which includes punctuation, word usage, and other rules, means something. Frankly, if you didn't pay attention to that part of the manual before, you really should go check out the manual again before you take off on a trip.
So...enough about signs and grammar for the night. Time to get back to revising.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Coffee and writing...need more of both
There are days when I feel like writing, and days when I don't. Today is definitely one of those days.
One of which days, you ask? Hell, I'm not sure I know yet, myself. As the politicians of the world are fond of saying, "I'm not prepared to take a stand on that yet," or maybe just "No comment." Two cups of coffee oughtta be enough to help give me an inkling in the matter, but it's not.
I did manage to get my muse on last night. After making reservations for this weekend's getaway to Brooklyn, I sat down, quieted down, and revised twenty pages worth of text. At some point in the revising, I actually switched into creative mode and tackled one of the manuscript's thornier problems. Some of my readers have told me, see, that at the beginning it's difficult to believe the action, and I agree with them. I had the first scene of the book all planned out in my head when I wrote it...lights go dark, world goes cold, people are terrified, Matt shepherds them to safety after calling his future mages in through his special doorways through space. But when I wrote it, I forgot the part about the people being terrified. I saw it, of course. In my own head, I knew that the crowd was following him warily, asking questions, nearly running off. That was the whole point of some of them trying to start their cars, in fact. I just failed to actually write it, so instead you have a scene where the lights go out, a guy stands up and makes light globes out of nothing and crafts doorways to faraway places, and the people watching it just shrug and follow. Like zombies...hmmmm...I like zombie stories.
No. No zombies in this book...sorry. And no more "oooh, shiny" moments in this blog, at least not today.
Ah, well. The passage is sort of fixed now, though I want to let it settle for a few days and then go back and re-revise. Inserting new text is dangerous. Not only does it need to make sense from a technical "this happened first, and the characters didn't know about that till later" kind of thing, but it also has to match the voice of the surrounding text. In short, I don't want it to be obvious to the reader where I went in and smushed prose in to fill a gap.
Speaking of gaps...there's a big one now between the "full" line and the "filled to" line on my coffee cup right now. Off I go, then, to correct the deficiency, and hopefully along the way to determine whether or not I feel like writing today.
One of which days, you ask? Hell, I'm not sure I know yet, myself. As the politicians of the world are fond of saying, "I'm not prepared to take a stand on that yet," or maybe just "No comment." Two cups of coffee oughtta be enough to help give me an inkling in the matter, but it's not.
I did manage to get my muse on last night. After making reservations for this weekend's getaway to Brooklyn, I sat down, quieted down, and revised twenty pages worth of text. At some point in the revising, I actually switched into creative mode and tackled one of the manuscript's thornier problems. Some of my readers have told me, see, that at the beginning it's difficult to believe the action, and I agree with them. I had the first scene of the book all planned out in my head when I wrote it...lights go dark, world goes cold, people are terrified, Matt shepherds them to safety after calling his future mages in through his special doorways through space. But when I wrote it, I forgot the part about the people being terrified. I saw it, of course. In my own head, I knew that the crowd was following him warily, asking questions, nearly running off. That was the whole point of some of them trying to start their cars, in fact. I just failed to actually write it, so instead you have a scene where the lights go out, a guy stands up and makes light globes out of nothing and crafts doorways to faraway places, and the people watching it just shrug and follow. Like zombies...hmmmm...I like zombie stories.
No. No zombies in this book...sorry. And no more "oooh, shiny" moments in this blog, at least not today.
Ah, well. The passage is sort of fixed now, though I want to let it settle for a few days and then go back and re-revise. Inserting new text is dangerous. Not only does it need to make sense from a technical "this happened first, and the characters didn't know about that till later" kind of thing, but it also has to match the voice of the surrounding text. In short, I don't want it to be obvious to the reader where I went in and smushed prose in to fill a gap.
Speaking of gaps...there's a big one now between the "full" line and the "filled to" line on my coffee cup right now. Off I go, then, to correct the deficiency, and hopefully along the way to determine whether or not I feel like writing today.
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Rediscoveries
I know I posted yesterday that revising the novel can be drudgery work, but today I really ought to point out that sometimes it's not. To be honest, yesterday I was working my way through a scene that required significant rewriting, and while writing a scene is a joyful experience, rewriting the scene can be a little tedious. This scene, in particular, I'm tempted to just take out of the book. What's needed is either that, or the addition of a second scene later on to tie it into the story. For those who have pre-read the story, I'm talking about the Atlantis scene, and it was admittedly skitchy in the first place. I'd intended to get deeper into the scene, but midway through realized that the story needed to jump elsewhere, and so it just got left hanging, the reader asking "what the heck was that all about?"
I did finish re-writing the scene, anyway, and I'm still planning to write in the second trip to Atlantis to finish the issue off...at least for this book...later. It's not a huge issue, though it's an interesting part of the story to me (the guy who, admittedly, already knows the story), but it's an important hook for a writing exercise I'm planning for the future. I'll just write it and see if it deserves to stick around, I suppose.
In the meanwhile, I've gotten back to really enjoying the revising. It's been a few weeks since I finished writing it, and if you add a few weeks to get to the time when I wrote the part I'm revising now, you've got enough space that my poor old addled brain has already forgotten some of it. That makes it a joy to read, as I rediscovered a scene tonight that I'd entirely forgotten I wrote. It's a nice one, I think, that shows both Matt and Crystal doing what they do best...smart-alecking away at each other. The one following is another cool one I hadn't thought about in a while, where two main characters finally come to terms with each other. I like that scene a lot, which makes it even more fun to revise.
I can't help but wonder if Stephen King, in his book On Writing, didn't have this little incentive in his mind when he said a new author should wait a few months before going back and revising it. Yes, as he explained, the time between does provide for some forgetting of the text which in turn makes me more sensitive to problems while I'm re-reading the story, but it also brings a fair amount of joy once again as I rediscover the story.
And so...back to the revising/rediscoveries.
I did finish re-writing the scene, anyway, and I'm still planning to write in the second trip to Atlantis to finish the issue off...at least for this book...later. It's not a huge issue, though it's an interesting part of the story to me (the guy who, admittedly, already knows the story), but it's an important hook for a writing exercise I'm planning for the future. I'll just write it and see if it deserves to stick around, I suppose.
In the meanwhile, I've gotten back to really enjoying the revising. It's been a few weeks since I finished writing it, and if you add a few weeks to get to the time when I wrote the part I'm revising now, you've got enough space that my poor old addled brain has already forgotten some of it. That makes it a joy to read, as I rediscovered a scene tonight that I'd entirely forgotten I wrote. It's a nice one, I think, that shows both Matt and Crystal doing what they do best...smart-alecking away at each other. The one following is another cool one I hadn't thought about in a while, where two main characters finally come to terms with each other. I like that scene a lot, which makes it even more fun to revise.
I can't help but wonder if Stephen King, in his book On Writing, didn't have this little incentive in his mind when he said a new author should wait a few months before going back and revising it. Yes, as he explained, the time between does provide for some forgetting of the text which in turn makes me more sensitive to problems while I'm re-reading the story, but it also brings a fair amount of joy once again as I rediscover the story.
And so...back to the revising/rediscoveries.
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