The Horror of Old Drafts

I'm ever in the state of redrafting. Writing is rewriting, and practice makes perfect, some would say. Sometimes I read old drafts just to remember where the stories were when I first thought of them. This evening my purpose in reviewing old material is to redraft -- I'm trying to fix the climax, and about eighteen months ago I deemed it appropriate to write this line:

"Their exclamations of desperate happiness mix with the intensity of their relief and amazement."

Huzzah. Congratulations, I said absolutely nothing. What exclamations? What did they say? And how did they express their relief and amazement? Did they do anything at all? More significantly, when these two volatile ingredients mixed, what was the outcome? Gnashing of teeth or a quick trip to cloud nine?

It's a classic case of telling and not showing, the biggest difference between stories that make you say "meh" and stories you recommend to a friend.

Grumble.

Robert Frost

My mother made me memorize Robert Frost. The two poems I remember are The Road Not Taken and Stopping by Woods.

I didn't get it. A horse thinking it queer that a writer stops in the woods to watch them fill with snow? At the age of twelve, I thought that was kind of queer. The poems were just simple stories, and while I understood some of the allegorical content, I couldn't grasp the beauty of the language. It was just words.

I'm not sure why, but Robert Frost has been in my head for the last few days. Between the woods and frozen lake, the darkest evening of the year. It could have something to do with the blizzards that have recently brushed through my locale; Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. Or maybe it's just idle thoughts of a 9-5 laborer, pondering his situation, wondering what might come next.

Either way, words fell me. No matter how much I quote Monty Python, it's still funny. Now matter how many times I stumble over Shakespeare, it's still stunning. And no matter how little I understand of Robert Frost, it's still beautiful. Beautiful like I could never imagine before I tried to write it myself.

It's November... and Nanowrimo!

Nanowrimo.org

Day 3: I'm on schedule. I've selected a story outside my normal genres, but I'm not sure if I should call it historical fiction or something entirely different. What might you call a modern-day Jane Austen story with a man as the protagonist?

The Name of the Wind

Have you ever noticed how most every debut novel is jam-packed with admiring quotations from substantial someones? Wouldn't be nice to know which novel was actually as good as the fly-leaf quotations say it is?

Patrick Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind is every bit as good as the flyleaf says. Very probably, it's the best book I've ever read. Go buy it.

Scones

On frequent occasion, my lovely wife undertakes a random task of domestic experimentation. This usually involves something crafty, and always something new. This week, it's been, "how do we put this mountain of raspberries to use?"

Easy, right? Open mouth, insert raspberry. Mush between tongue and roof of mouth. Savor flavor. Swallow. Repeat until mountain is gone.

That's how I would have done it, but my domestic creativity ends with mixing various types of salsa to obtain new flavors for my tortilla chips. Is that even creative? It reminds me of mixing all the fountain pops together when I was six. Mountain Dew, Slice, Root Beer, Coke, Diet Coke, Tahitian Treat, all in one glass... ah, that was good stuff.

No, my wife made scones. I mean, really good scones. Like, the type of scones that make Starbucks scones seem ordinary. White chocolate, raspberry scones. And she made lots. I quickly determined that selecting a menu for the next few days would be incredibly easy. I was in a state of euphoria that might possibly emulate a heavenly afterlife.

Yes... I WAS euphoric. I'm not any more. Tragedy has struck. See, there's only one left. One little scone, hiding in old tupperware on the top shelf of the refrigerator. Calling my name. Please eat me.

She froze them all. Froze! As if the juicy, tender succulence of white chocolate chips and perfectly ripe raspberries can ever be the same! Each scone is now caged within a devilish layer of aluminum foil and ziplock plastic. The experience can never be the same, and not wholly in part because I must now DEFROST a scone before I can experience its delicacy. Woe is me.

I must plot the timing of the consumption of the last unfrozen scone. Tomorrow morning, perhaps, before the wife wakes, I will make it mine. Hmm. Or maybe right now.

Amren, Redraft 4

It's been almost 10 weeks since I mailed Amren to an editor. Haven't heard a peep. That's to be expected.

And so it's on to redraft #4! The process of writing book two and planning both two and three have done tremendous things to point out the issues in book one (I suppose, technically, I should still be calling these lengthy documents "manuscripts"), and since the current incarnation hasn't gotten a response, it's time to make it better. My list of areas up for axing isn't long, but it seems that every bullet point represents weeks of work, so I'll be prioritizing and handling one at a time lest I get lost in the deluge of sub-par text.

In the event I get a much anticipated but unexpected e-mail from an editor, I guess I'll have to ask him which variation of the story he wants...

Noveling

I’ve always had a certain sense of [very possibly misplaced] pride in being a hobby artist. The kind of pride that says, much like my previous post, I’d rather be hungry and creative than wealthy and employed at Doldrums.

I’ve become kind of a fan of Brandon Sanderson ever since meeting him at MiniCon. I’m about the worst fan in the world being as I haven’t read any of his books yet, but his first, Elantris, is slated for my literary consumption later this year. Sanderson is well known for writing 13 novels before finally publishing his first, but even he admits this was probably because, rather than editing current projects, he would quickly move on to the next, determined to fix the issues in the next book.

While speaking of this and of writing as an art at MiniCon, he pointed out how new writers frequently differ from other types of artists in their approach to the sale of their first work – no painter finishes their first painting and rushes off to the gallery, hoping to sell it for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Writers… sometimes do. And while the comparison isn’t entirely even (it doesn’t normally take a painter several years to finish their first painting), Sanderson’s comment about the need to refine your art form doesn’t vanish once a writer sets out to pen large manuscripts.

Noveling is an art form entirely separate from writing, and while many writers possess the talent necessary to write the quality of text needed for a novel, fewer have the gumption and perseverance [should that be reckless stupidity?] to complete a novel... and even fewer have the blind belief in themselves necessary to write more than one.