The Long View

I find when writing almost anything -- from a novel to an email -- I can't get interested unless I feel like there's something to discover.  Often it's the writing of the thing that reveals what I intended to say. 

If I already know precisely what's to be conveyed, writing is mere transcription.  There's no fun in that.

10 Rules For Writing

Ten Rules For Writing

1.     Write.  Many writers forget that part.  Then they’re not writers.

2.     Writing is telepathy.  Don’t describe or explain anything the reader already gets -- or the reader will stop getting it.  They’re way ahead of you.  That’s why you don’t need adverbs much.

3.     End your writing sessions before you’re sick of writing -- in the middle of a sentence, if possible.

4.     Writing is an unnatural profession, crippling to mind and body: you are putting your own life aside to live the lives of other people.  Get out in the world as often as you can.  Interact with people.  Touch trees.  See, hear, feel.  Live.

5.     Write more than one thing at a time.  Each project is a refuge from the next.

6.     Write for your friends.  Rewrite for your enemies.

7.     If you think of something, write it down.  Otherwise it will go away, I promise you.

8.     Write like you talk, not like you write.

9.     Never write drunk.  That’s for editing.

10.  Read.

Editing For Length

I've been trying to shorten up novel #2, The Ormolu Clock.  Usually I can hack a lot of material out of a project -- it's a habit from my screenwriting days, when there was a 105-page limit beyond which only cruel sorrow awaited.  You cut anything and everything to get it to length.

Novels don't have to be any particular length, but this one was too long.  It meandered around.  I was basing it on a kind of Dickensian structure, that episodic approach which allows for a great deal of texture and detail with big scene changes.  But it was too rambling, too indulgent.

So I started cutting.  I figured I could easily remove 15,000 words.

I was only able to cut 5,000 words so far, and ultimately that might be it.  Here's why.  The problem wasn't so much the length of the telling, but the duration of events in the story.  I wrote one series of events that takes place over three days; rewriting it to take one day made all the difference, even though it didn't shorten the text very much.  I had another passage that took four days.  Rewrote it to take place in a single night.  It got maybe 500 words shorter, but now it seems far more purposeful and dramatic.

So sometimes, it appears, you can shorten events in a story and get the same effect as shortening the story itself.

Of course, I could be wrong.  It might still be 10,000 words too long.

Words & Music

I let my second novel sit quietly for almost a year.  Last month started editing it again, trimming it down, smoothing out certain transitions, combining scenes, compressing events.  Hoping to send it to agents and similar persons soon to get some second opinions.  Then, with any luck, it's out to market.

Which leads me to the following somehow: Lately I've been writing songs.  Parody songs, because that's how I roll.  But still, they're songs.  This is the result of taking up the banjolele -- you play a certain number of pre-existing things and you start noticing they all use the same basic circle progressions -- I - IV - V - V and whatnot.

Which leads me to this: in music, you can get endless variety out of a kind of tonal Venn diagram in which various keys and chords intersect; in prose, there's a similar structural composition that does the same thing.  You need your happy moments, your sad moments, the tense and relaxed bits, the strident, the melodic.

One writer took this a step further: Anthony Burgess.  He wrote a book called Napoleon Symphony using the Beethoven work Eroica as his outline!  So Burgess, who was an accomplished composer himself,  used the structure, movements, and moods of a classical symphony as the model for a work of fiction.

I'll never do that.  But scratching out little three-chord songs has helped me to understand what a colossal undertaking Burgess took on.