Doomsday Book Launch: Outside The Men’s Room

By on December 21, 2012 ·
Outside the Men's Room

Outside the Men’s Room

Last Sunday at our writer’s meeting, a forum which is part pat-on-the-back, part kick-in-the-pants, I announced that, barring any unforeseen obstacles, my first novel would be on Kindle with the final book cover and the last edit. Tim Giron quickly pointed out I had left lots of leeway for not getting it done with the qualifier about “unforeseen obstacles”. He wasn’t the only skeptical person at the table.

See, for the past six months, every time someone asked about the progress of my book, I held up my hand to show about half an inch of space between my index finger and my thumb, saying “It’s this close.”

But this time it was close. After an Editorial Review and the revisions that followed, then a Copy Edit review by an English teacher, and another fresh read by a friend who’d never seen the material before, and then reciting all 100,000 words out loud, I’d handed over the manuscript for one final Proof Edit.

My Proof Editor (aka The Nit-Pick) had completed her review. She’d sent her notes in a file format that was hard to read. We arranged to meet on Monday evening with the expectation there would be a quick once over of the changes, an exchange of funds and the book would be ready for publishing.

In preparation for this last step, I’d deciphered about two-thirds of the changes she’d recommended, and made the revisions. The rest were minor adjustments, style differences by and large.

I arrived forty-five minutes early, eager to get started, very much feeling the finality of soon to be ending this long drawn out process.

She arrived and announced that she lost all her notes in electronic format (don’t ask how). To compensate, she’d started re-reading the book. Then she explained that she had found even more things to question and had accumulated twice as many edits as before with less than half the novel read.

Once again I had fallen into Editing Hell.

Two hours into our review and I was losing my grip on reality. I looked down at the pages of the Nit-Pick’s tiny, hand-written notes about moving commas and word choices and realized we weren’t even through Chapter Six yet.

I grabbed her arm and said “It’s done. No more editing.”

So, stop reading this and go check it out. It’s live now, warts and all.

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Armchair Editing: The Curse of the Amateur

By on April 7, 2010 ·

There’s an old saying about a little knowledge being a dangerous thing and another one about ignorance being bliss.  In the case of storytelling that can lead to a weird limbo of discrimination and discernment.  As your own skill of the craft grows you undoubtedly find yourself appreciating good storytelling more and you’ll have a growing vocabulary to express that appreciation.  You’ll likely also have less and less patience for bad writing or, even worse, lazy writing.  These are probably good things.  The limbo part comes when something isn’t necessarily bad…it’s just not good.  Then your new skills and vocabulary may move you to pretentiously play editor-after-the-fact.  Of course just because your opinion is amateur doesn’t mean it’s invalid.  Opinions on, say…

Stephen King’s Cell was a great short story.  Or it would have been if it wasn’t a few hundred pages long.  It was a good story idea–every single cell phone sends a signal (which comes to be known as the Pulse) at the same time.  That signal turns people into murder machines.  Everybody loves a good technophobic horror story and this made for King’s entry in the Zombie genre (spoiler: they’re fast zombies).  The signal happens in the first few pages and the rest is our hero trying to make it home to Maine from Boston to see what’s become of his young son.  There are eventually explanations floated about what the Pulse really is and where it came from but they struck me as sort of weak.  Clay, the hero finds his son after some close calls and heroics.  The boy is infected but there’s a chance he can be ‘cured’ by reexposure to the now ‘mutated’ Pulse.  Again, not bad, but…unsatisfying.  

At novel length not enough of the causes of the apocolypse were developed (like in The Stand) and the fact that he was trying to get home to his son got a little lost in the adventures of humanity against phone-freak.  Alternatively the whole thing could have been trimmed radically to a shorter work.  Maybe not a true short story but perhaps novella length like The Mist.  It would have meant big cuts but the narrative would have been a lot tighter (‘tight’ will be a common word in your new writer’s vocabulary).

This will tend to be more noticeable in movies with their more rigid screenplay structure.  If a filmmaker is gonna go long on a first act he better be giving us something worth watching.  You will also find yourself less willing to cut a guy slack for leaving in scenes that don’t need to be there.  Boondock Saints was a new take on the vigilante story with engaging dialog, interesting characters, and a tight (there’s that tight again) narrative pace depsite the audience experiencing much of the movie after it’s happened (if you haven’t seen it just trust me, it’s a sort of flashback structure).  Of course with a first time filmmaker and limited distribution it took DVD to make it a hit and a cult film. 

Boondock Saints 2:  All Saint’s Day was…less successful.  I knew it wouldn’t have quite the same punch as the first one, you can’t write a cult classic on purpose after all; but in this one I never really bought the brothers’ motives.  It was supposed to be revenge/justice and clearing their names but after a few menacing glares their steely resolve gets lost in the comic stylings of the new Mexican Saint, Romeo.  It reappears jarringly when they threaten to give a wiseguy 9mm stigmata.  Then redisappears just as quickly.  Then their father, Il Duce shows up and has a showdown because the whole thing was really about him. 

If it sounds muddled, it was.  But even before the movie was over I knew it didn’t have to be muddled.  It just needed editing and some of that would have been the classic darling murders.  There’s a dream scene where Rocco (who died in the first movie) comes back and has a shot with the boys.  He says he was proud to stand with them and then they go on a long rant about what makes a man.  What men do and what they don’t do.  It moves over the whole city from high rise rooftop to artfully lit warehouse.  It doesn’t belong there and a good editor would have cut the scene right after they drink their whiskey.  Four minutes saved and much more dramatic punch. 

Oh, well.  It’s unavoidable so you might as well learn from it.  These points make for good discussions with other writer’s and ‘what if’ sessions.  How would you do it differently,  what would you keep, etc.  You might want to keep it between writer’s though.  Normal people will tend to think you’re a pretentious prick and may even resent you pointing out holes in stuff they used to enjoy.  They might even be right.    

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“More matter, with less art.” (Hamlet II.ii.95)

By on August 12, 2009 ·

Some people are natural storytellers.  There are others, however, who can take an otherwise interesting experience and turn it into Purgatorial drudgery for the listener.  My mother is one of those people.  Like any good son, I love my mother, but I figured out at an early age that my mom has a tendency to ramble a bit.  Most of her stories do have a point, and given enough time, she may eventually get around to telling you what it is.  In the meantime, be prepared to listen for a very long time.

Looking back, I think I gained whatever editorial skills I possess from listening to my mother’s meandering conversations—a necessity for anyone in the house who hoped to retain some degree of sanity.  For my mom, it’s all about the blizzard of details she inserts into any story she tells.  A trip to the supermarket turns into an odyssey of roads taken or not taken, accidents avoided, bargains sought, prices compared, people encountered.  And interspersed throughout are digressions concerning dates and times and weather conditions and distant friends and coworkers and relatives that have nothing to do with the tale she’s recounting but somehow find their way into the stream of conscious narration that is my mother’s storytelling.  The trick for the listener is to sift through all those details and figure out which ones are truly essential and which, although they may be interesting in isolation, are not particularly vital to the story at hand.

Those of us who write are often guilty of the same garrulousness.  We take the root of an idea and we let it grow in whatever form or direction seems appropriate, and before long, we have pages filled with words.  This is good because instead of a blank page, we now have something we can actually work with.  The problem then becomes sorting through all those words and taking out the ones that are downright distracting or don’t really enhance the work as a whole.  This, of course, is the painful part.  We like our dazzling descriptions and snappy lines of dialogue that flesh out our intricately crafted plots and subplots and bring our host of characters to life.  Still, the question we must ask ourselves (and the question my mother never seems to ask) is this:  Are all those details absolutely necessary?  Would the story be better served, and the writing itself be made infinitely more interesting, if we stripped it down to the barest level possible and built our ideas around what remains?  Perhaps in the world of writing, it’s best to remember the old show business motto, “Always leave the audience wanting more.”      

 

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