Bounding back from revisions

Writing is re-writing, but once you've done your rewrites it's time to move on into the next book, story or article. A fresh start on a new project can seem tempting while you're digging out of the problems of revising drafts. Once you're clear of that book, though, starting can be difficult.

Over at the blog Be The Story, author J. Timothy King offers several layers of advice on how to beat the post-revisionist blues. He shares more than 10 aspects to consider about tools to approaching that new work. One that stands out, for me after my first novel Viral Times, is to stop judging the completed work.

Have a look at King's post. It's adapted from How to Lift Depression ... Fast by Joe Griffin. As creators we tend to put a lot of our self-worth into our work. While the judgment is an appropriate part of the work, that kind of criticism tamps down our spirit to return to new creations. Let the best response to completing your work be encouraging, even if the writing is far from perfect. Writers improve their ability by writing. Authors have more than one project inside them.

Are we reading differently?

The evidence in today's audience suggests the answer is yes. A fun article on Tim Bray's Ongoing blog suggests that our language skills are hard-wired to grasp conversational writing, because 90 percent of human language history used only talk to communicate.

There’s nothing much on the Net that’s without precedent in spoken language. What’s new is that written discourse is becoming less like oration and more like conversation. It’s not clear that this is bad.

Then there's Karleen Koen, a novelist who's working on her fourth book, historical fiction based in France. She writes on her blog

As I polish (which means cut, smooth out, delete, write new things that make the reading slick) I do believe people are reading differently, with less patience -- and the inherent problem with a historical novel is that a writer has to set up the background so the reader understands the world he or she is entering, and that can’t be done in a quick paragraph or two. Or at least I can’t do it.

There will be readers who love to immerse themselves in a book, get lost in the pace. But are there enough of them now, growing up in a Twitter generation, to give writers a livelihood? Bray notes that books are losing market share and adds, "Unsurprising, because when you start at 100 percent, there’s nowhere to go but down. Books are now competing, on a fairly level playing field, with the Net media: blogs and Twitter and mailing lists and fora of other flavors."

But a certain kind of story can only achieve its potential as a book. A good friend of mine just landed a nice contract for a first book. It will be an impressive debut when she finishes. A literary pace will probably govern her writing, though. Are you patient enough to give yourself over to a pace that will match your vision for your work? One clue: How long can you sit in the chair and just write, or just revise? I don't know many novelists who tweet on Twitter.

Sol Stein on humanity and authority

My good friend and fellow novelist Larisa Zlatic sent me an excerpt from a good writing book by Sol Stein. Her excerpts from Stein on Writing include these:

The first step in revision is to make a judgment about your main characters. Character problems must be dealt with before beginning a general revision. This method of revision makes certain that you have humanized your characters.

Do you think about them in situations that are not in your book? If so, good. It means your characters are alive in your mind and should come alive in the minds of the readers. If you can’t think of an important character in situations away from the story that character may need more work. Ask these questions:

• What is about your character that you like especially? Is it also your own trait? If yes, it is a symptom of the autobiography trap, creating a character that is too like yourself. Resolution: give a character a trait (positive or negative) that you absolutely don’t have.

• If you’re going on a vacation how would you feel if your character were going along? Would you look forward to that? You may need to add some sparkle to your character, some interesting eccentricity, personality characteristic that will make his company more enjoyable.

I have Stein's How to Grow a Novel on my bookshelf, and Chapter Eight offers on advanced point of view. He summarizes the explanation of how to distinguish first from third from omniscient, then he says, "I can't recall a manuscript that didn't have a couple of glitches in the handling of point of view. Sometimes dozens. The need to be caught in revision. The novelist's authority depends on it."

Authority in writing transmits the "dream state" to the readers, the means to lock them into the world you've created. And believe me, I'm working on maintaining authority in Viral Times right now.

One chapter at a time, revising goes

I've assembled a schedule to get me to the end of Viral Times, the novel project of my past six years. Two hours a day, five days a week, three or four chapters. Taking a carving knife to 129,000 words. Not so bad, if you look at science fiction standards, where 120K is the top end. I always wanted to start at the top, after all.

It's especially educational to revise writing that you penned more than four years ago. Talk about a cooling off period...

Chapter 25 is now complete, with 22 more to go in about six weeks. I'm in the oldest material now, one of the five attempted starts to the book. (It's finally got a prologue, so there's no doubt where it begins.)

The good news is that the writing to come will get easier to revise, because it's fresher. If there's a shiny center to this cloud of words, it might be in seeing how much my craft has grown up. A funny thing to consider, growing up, when you're already past 50.

"You just have to take it bird by bird, buddy." That's the advice that Annie Lamott's dad gave her brother, who had procrastinated on a school paper about birds. In Bird by Bird the boy had dozens of books on the table and it was time to finish. For me, too. There's another, newer book, about a much older time, waiting inside.

Prologue possibilities

I am taking a good hard stab at a prologue for my novel Viral Times this week. In the process I've discovered how few writing books address the nuances of this pseudo-beginning for a story.

Revision and Self Editing has a two-page section called "The Use and Abuse of Prologues." Good stuff. I found the advice in Manuscript Makeover even more helpful. "Some agents refuse to read manuscripts with prologues," Elizabeth Lyon warns, but the section also explains in significant detail how you can avoid undermining yourself by using a prologue. Also, Beginnings, Middles and Ends has good instruction on the subject.

In summary, a prologue has its mission: Tell parts of the story the reader wants to know before the main story commences. Set a tone with the best language you can craft. Raise questions, too, so readers are motivated to continue.