Rewrites
I'm a visual writer, so my battle is never about seeing the story. I don't just see it, I live it--and the act of writing makes time move in the storyverse. After 49 years of doing this (I started at 8) that part is pretty much habit. It goes fast, once I see the shape of things. But after I discovered that my drafts functioned as code words* for the visions--a threadbare phrase sufficed to evoke a riot of color woven in complicated patterns--I never felt there was any use in bragging about how much wordage I did every day. Why, when most of it is a swarm of half-watted lightning bugs all struggling to be lightning? And failing?
So I had to learn to rewrite. I began another habit: let things sit for a year or two, or more, long enough to tamp down the images, but when a writer is on contract, there isn't that luxury. And as I get older, and peers begin dropping around me, and the generation before me is steadily vanishing--I won't mention how many memorials I've been to, or sent cards for, just in the past four months--one begins to realize that one doesn't have that nice long road ahead in which to attain mastery. I'm stuck with what I've got--not that I won't keep trying.
Okay, so what have I got? I pondered this in the middle of the night, while I lay there with the fan blowing on me, waiting to cool down enough to sleep. I am nearing the end of a long story that has been cut into four parts, and the first three have been published. So I can't go back and do a Prufrock, "No that is not what I meant at all." It's there, with all the confusions that were clear in my head, and the dramatic tensions in small things that were just boring to some readers.
Instead of getting it all down complete, I've been rewriting and rewriting furiously on this last segment, trying all kinds of tricks to 'see' the words I'm putting down. So anyway, I'm lying in bed, thinking of writing as buying a house. I can see the shape of the house, but nothing of what's in it. The writing is akin to getting inside and scrubbing and polishing and taking saw, hammer, and nails to the wooden beams, the stairs, the rooms, the furnishings until I look about me and think, hey, lookin' good.
But then I invite someone else in. This would be my trusty beta, who just began, blessings be upon the person's head. And those first five chapters come back....and I look about the house again, let's say that the first five chaps are the kitchen, and through these other eyes I discover that what I thought was a smooth wall actually hides a door, so I have to peel back the paneling I worked so hard on, and yep, there's this door to another room. Do I need the room, or should I rebuild the wall to be flat? I look over yonder, and ugh, how could I have forgotten to scrape the fly specks off that window? And wow, I didn't see all the cobwebs right overhead, I was so busy cleaning the grouting between the tiles. So I go right back at it, because no matter how much I liked what I saw, someone else's eyes see differently.
Now, sometimes a beta wants a crimson couch instead of a black velvet divan in the living room, or thinks that changing the curtains for blinds will fix the entire house. That kind of thing, you just have to try to see it that way, and may decide that the velvet divan does look better, but curtains are there for a purpose, blinds would only catch dust, and you hate those bars of light on the floor when the sun is low. But for those cobby corners, the flyspecks you got so used to you don't seen, and especially for the hidden rooms and the trapdoors, oh, it's so good to have those other eyes.
*a very, very painful discovery
So I had to learn to rewrite. I began another habit: let things sit for a year or two, or more, long enough to tamp down the images, but when a writer is on contract, there isn't that luxury. And as I get older, and peers begin dropping around me, and the generation before me is steadily vanishing--I won't mention how many memorials I've been to, or sent cards for, just in the past four months--one begins to realize that one doesn't have that nice long road ahead in which to attain mastery. I'm stuck with what I've got--not that I won't keep trying.
Okay, so what have I got? I pondered this in the middle of the night, while I lay there with the fan blowing on me, waiting to cool down enough to sleep. I am nearing the end of a long story that has been cut into four parts, and the first three have been published. So I can't go back and do a Prufrock, "No that is not what I meant at all." It's there, with all the confusions that were clear in my head, and the dramatic tensions in small things that were just boring to some readers.
Instead of getting it all down complete, I've been rewriting and rewriting furiously on this last segment, trying all kinds of tricks to 'see' the words I'm putting down. So anyway, I'm lying in bed, thinking of writing as buying a house. I can see the shape of the house, but nothing of what's in it. The writing is akin to getting inside and scrubbing and polishing and taking saw, hammer, and nails to the wooden beams, the stairs, the rooms, the furnishings until I look about me and think, hey, lookin' good.
But then I invite someone else in. This would be my trusty beta, who just began, blessings be upon the person's head. And those first five chapters come back....and I look about the house again, let's say that the first five chaps are the kitchen, and through these other eyes I discover that what I thought was a smooth wall actually hides a door, so I have to peel back the paneling I worked so hard on, and yep, there's this door to another room. Do I need the room, or should I rebuild the wall to be flat? I look over yonder, and ugh, how could I have forgotten to scrape the fly specks off that window? And wow, I didn't see all the cobwebs right overhead, I was so busy cleaning the grouting between the tiles. So I go right back at it, because no matter how much I liked what I saw, someone else's eyes see differently.
Now, sometimes a beta wants a crimson couch instead of a black velvet divan in the living room, or thinks that changing the curtains for blinds will fix the entire house. That kind of thing, you just have to try to see it that way, and may decide that the velvet divan does look better, but curtains are there for a purpose, blinds would only catch dust, and you hate those bars of light on the floor when the sun is low. But for those cobby corners, the flyspecks you got so used to you don't seen, and especially for the hidden rooms and the trapdoors, oh, it's so good to have those other eyes.
*a very, very painful discovery