The Confabulator Cafe

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  • Application of Learning (week of 9 April 2012)

    Writing is a skill. Anyone who tells you that writing is just putting together a string of words to make a coherent story is fooling himself. It’s a lot more than that and that fool who’s putting on airs is just looking for attention.

    We know that. Intelligent readers know that, too. Everyone who reads has picked up at least one book, one magazine, one newspaper story and seen bad writing. We identify it in our filmed entertainments, too.

    So, writing is a skill and skills can be learned. Some folks have a natural predisposition to write and write well, others really have to work at it. Regardless of the level one is at, the writer has learned something from another writer. This week we’re asking the Confabulators who they’ve learned from, what they’ve learned and how have they applied it to their writing? We’re also wondering if the person they’ve learned the most from is their favorite author.

    The stories you’re going to read this week are fascinating and revealing at the same time. Come back every day and see who’s saying what and how each individual process differs (or maybe doesn’t) from another’s. The coffee is hot, the conversation is stimulating and we hope you’ll stick around all week long.

  • Who’s Your Favorite Fictional Character?

    The Cafe is full of creatures and people of all sorts, populated by the Confabulators’ imaginations. We do our level best to bring each of them in, fully formed, to enjoy the ambiance of the Cafe.

    This week, after asking several questions about vampires and fantasy novels and such, we’re going to pin our contributors down and ask them, specifically: who is your favorite fictional character? The answers, given our penchant for wild invention, may surprise some us.

     Jack Campbell, Jr.

    I love Grendel, from John Gardner’s Grendel. He is such a complex, unnerving character. As a reader you bounce back and forth between sympathy and hate. He is utterly human in his lack of humanity. Gardner was genius in bringing to life Beowulf‘s monster in a way we have never seen before. I laughed. I loathed. I loved. It was spectacular.

    Sara Lundberg

    Characters become friends when I’m reading. Whatever book I’m reading at the time, my favorite character is from that book. There are a few that have stuck with me long after finishing a book, though, and the one that demands my favoritism is Jericho Barrons from Karen Marie Moning’s Fever series. Just the name itself gives me goosebumps. This is a man who is older than dirt, knows everything, goes after what he wants, isn’t ashamed of what he is, and has more honor than any knight. Plus he’s sexy as hell, to boot.

    Jason Arnett

    I’m a comic book guy, you all know that by now. I’ve never been a huge Batman fan because, well, in order to be Batman you have to be extraordinarily wealthy. Yes, he’s a normal guy who trains like a demon and is, in fact, a supreme bastard. Out of the three things I’ve listed, the only one I have going for me is the bastard thing. I’m more a Superman fan because, well, he’s an adopted Kansan and he and I share some important values. I understand him as an outsider just trying to fit in, trying to do good where he can. As Clark Kent, he has a job and friends. I have a job and friends, too, and I fell in love with a co-worker the way he did. My wife doesn’t get into the same jams that Lois Lane does, but it’s similar. Superman is an ideal of goodness. That’s more my speed.

    Ted Boone

    Wow, tough one. I like a mercenary in the Thieves’ World anthology named Tempus Thales. He’s cursed by a wizard to live forever, be scorned by anyone he loves, and anyone who loves him dies horribly. Such a perfect tragic figure.

    Angela Kordahl

    Anne Shirley still qualifies as my all time favorite fictional character.  She’s bold, talks a lot, and doesn’t let her awkwardness prevent her from leading a full, vibrant life.  She is a writer and a teacher and a mom, and despite the fact that she was created over almost a century ago still provides a model for strong, loving women everywhere.  She manages to imbue her fairly ordinary life with meaning, and I love her for it!

    Kevin Wohler

    My favorite fictional character is Superman. I could (and often do) go on at length why he is such a great character. But it comes down to this: Worldwide, Superman is a recognized symbol of hope and humanity. He is a non-religious example of what people should strive to be: always helping others, doing the right thing, and inspiring the best in others.

  • Your Editor: The Frenemy You Will Love to Hate

    When I first started working at my current job, the HR department emailed everybody what they considered a fun game— find all 10 spelling and grammar errors in a page of text, and you could win a gift card.

    I found fourteen.

    OK, so at least two “errors” were more in the realm of stylistic choices— Oxford commas and so forth— but I won the gift card. And then I became my bureau’s copy editor.

    My style of editing is fairly instinctual. I’m looking for one thing above all else— does it make sense? Would a reasonably intelligent and half awake member of the target audience be able to understand it? I do look for ambiguous language, typos, grammar errors, and logical consistency, but I’m also looking at language rhythm and flow.

    Sure, you can study this. You can sit down with a grammar [0] and styleguide and memorize the rules. But the best way to learn what good writing looks like is to read lots and lots of good writing. Read it obsessively. Read it until the rules of language have seeped deep into your bones.

    Also, read bad language [1]. Try to figure out why it is bad. How would you improve it? Is it confusing? Does it ramble? Does the logic flow? Are there spelling errors? Is it utterly lacking in capitalization, punctuation, paragraph breaks, and other bourgeois affectations [2]? Your goal is to become on of those douchebags. You know the kind I mean. As your edit-fu grows strong, and for extra credit, try turning your attention to any newspaper’s Op-Ed pages.

    Editing your own work is phenomenally difficult. It is impossible to edit and compose at the same time, so don’t even try. They use physically different parts of your brain, so you’ll have to do each in a separate pass. You may find it useful to use a different technique for each pass— for example, I compose on paper, but edit on the screen, then proofread again where possible on paper.

    Also, you will have to create a physical and mental distance between yourself and your work. After you have finished writing it, stick it in a drawer for a while. For a blog post, a couple of hours. Term paper or feature length article, a whole day. Your novel? At least a month.

    Your best editing tool will always be another person. Not a close friend, not a family member, not someone who wishes to spare you hurt feelings. An honorable enemy is best [3]. Someone who is willing to be brutally honest, explain in exacting detail where and how you’ve screwed up, and assassinate your children in front of you. Someone who is willing to tear your ego into little tiny shreds and stomp them into the mud. Choose for your editor the nastiest, most vicious drill sergeant you can find, with all the gentle sweetness of a hungover wolverine. Learn their favorite drink, because you’ll be buying a lot for them.

    Read their comments very, very carefully. Then stick the whole manuscript back into the drawer. Get mad. Rant, rave, wail, moan, gnash your teeth, tear your hair, and clutch your pearls. Tearfully explain to your very best friend that your sunovabich editor Just Doesn’t Get It. Get drunk and have the same conversation with the smelly guy sitting at the far end of the bar.

    A week later, when you’ve finally gotten over yourself and the hangover has abated, pull your magnum opus back onto your desktop and reread your editor’s comments. Figure out where they’re right, and why they’re right, and how to fix it.

    Congratulations. You’ve now achieved the rewrite.

    [0]  Allow me to recommend The Deluxe Transitive Vampire: A Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager and the Doomed by Karen Elizabeth Gordon.
    [1] The Internet being a particularly rich trove.
    [2] Dear Random Netizen: Typing in all lower case was individualistic and stylish when e. e. cummings did it. On you, it just looks like you don’t know what the shift key is for.
    [3] Think the Poker Game of Mystery Writers on the TV show Castle. They’re always eager to tell Castle he’s full of shit.

  • Exercises in Failure & the Editing Process

    I hate editing. I have failed every goal I’ve ever set when editing. I stumble in the same spot every time.

    It’s not killing my darlings. Whatever, kill those bastards. I never liked them anyway.  (Oh my god that’s such a lie, please, come back, babies.) I like going through the novel and finding the things that worked. I like those moments when you realize, “Wow, this is a legitimate novel,” and the moments where you throw the manuscript across the room and scream, “I WILL NEVER WRITE AGAIN.”

    Here’s my process. (more…)

  • Ruling Them All

    I’m a fan of rules. Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing have been invaluable to me as I’ve made progress towards being a better storyteller. Now that I’m in the realm of having to actually edit the things that I’m writing before I share them with anyone, I have a new set of rules to learn.

    The two biggest influences on me as far as editing goes are Self-Editing for the Fiction Writer by Browne & King and David Mamet’s Three Uses of the Knife.

    Both books are terrific primers for the writer who needs to take his writing to another level, the next level, whatever. I won’t go into them because, really, if you’re interested you’ll go find both books, flip through them and see what you think. You may have to go to a library to be able to look at them first (or maybe Amazon) but you definitely should.

    What I want to talk about this week is what I’m doing with my current work in progress because I’m trying something different.

    Instead of reading the story from start to finish, making notes and changing the little things that bug me in the draft, I’m working backwards. At least, I’m reading each chapter, noting what happens and also noting what changes I think should be made, jotting down things like “foreshadow this”. I’m doing this on paper with a red pen, which is terribly satisfying.

    What I’m looking for are several things:

    • Is the POV consistent? I mean: am I head-hopping from one character to another? This is probably the biggest thing that I need to keep working on. If I’m jumping from one point of view to another, is there a reason for it? If not, fix it.
    • I also look for actions that keep getting repeated. For instance everyone ‘turns’ to someone or something else in every Zero Draft I’ve ever written. Along the same lines, actions have to be realistic and possible. It’s usually in the actions of a character that I’ve made some horrible mistake, like having them walk across a room to the glass they set down in the paragraph before.
    • Working backwards, I’m looking for things that are important to the ending in the beginning, so I’m making notes about foreshadowing things or mentioning things that are important at least twice before they become important later. I’ve read that is called The Rule of Three. It works for me, but it isn’t original.
    • Typos. Yeah, I look for typos and obvious mistakes like using ‘she’ when I meant ‘he’ and all the other things that get dropped or glossed over in the Zero Draft.

    By the time I’ve gotten through the entire manuscript, I’ve got a legitimate First Draft. Not necessarily one that I want to show my Beta Readers, but one that I can be proud of and decide whether or not I want to go back through and ensure that the plot makes sense and the story is told. It’s in the First Draft status that I start actually refining the story into something readable.

    This is all very mechanical and these are the rules that work for me. They’re becoming more ingrained as I go along, and I’m afraid it’s not very entertaining at this point. Make no mistake, readers, editing your work is Work. It has to be done. It’s that rare genius who can write a near-complete book in one pass. I’m not that genius.

    I’m just the guy who has to have rules to work with.

  • Editing Is Polite

     

    Throughout most of my writing life, I have been a very rude writer, with a belief that my prose deserved to be read in its full early flowering. My twelve grade college composition class was probably the last time I edited with an particular fervor.  There I did learn to interrogate all writing that I do, as I do it.
    As a result of this, in college I submitted a lot of first drafts for final copies.  The unfortunate truth is that my first drafts were still better than most finals, and I was able to earn A’s and B’s without putting much effort into the editing process.  To this day, I maintain that the easiest way to become a fluid, competent writer (if not a great artist or sculptor of the written word) is to read a lot of good writers and practice thinking in complete, complex sentences.
    Still, this means that my editing secret used to involve no editing at all.  Part of this really is from a crazy, Jackson Pollack impulse that first thoughts are most intense, that writing is the process of recording thoughts upon the page, spilled out in a gorgeous mixed metaphor of color on the page or screen.
    After teaching college English, though, I had more than my fill of reading the work of students who chose the same chaotic  process, with somewhat more dreadful results than my choppy but readable unedited prose.  So, I knew that I had to learn how to edit.  Since that revelation, I have tried a few things, but haven’t hit on a routine yet.  When editing my second NaNo novel, I tried editing sentence by sentence first. I soon realized that I hadn’t taken care of blazing plot holes, so all time spent on sentence-level edits was wasted until I did a major restructuring.
    On my personal blog, I occasionally review books and discuss ideas by people who are currently incarcerated.  So I have had to start doing legal edits there–leaving my writing for a day or two and then rewriting it to make sure that I haven’t gotten carried away with rhetoric and accidentally advocated for something illegal. Usually, these edits force me to focus what I was really trying to say, as well, a side benefit of dabbling in the ideological fringes.
    Right now, I am resisting my urge to ramble and learning how to delete my beloved tangents. Even in this entry I have taken out a couple of paragraphs of related stories that I found terribly interesting but which were undeniably off point.  I am coming to an understanding of how rude it is to force readers to find their way through my thicket of tales, that the polite writer must get to the point and direct each paragraph to the topic at hand.

  • Do as I say, not as I do

    I’m a bad boy, apparently (In the world of NaNoWriMo. Which doesn’t make the “bad boy” title all that interesting. It’s like being the coolest kid at the comic book store: there isn’t that much competition). I do things during November that are frowned upon by the NaNo Powers-That-Be (myself included). I’m a rule-breaker. Who woulda thunk it?

    What’s my crime? I edit while I write.

    It’s a terrible example to set for my fellow November novelists. Editing during the writing process only serves to slow you down, and that’s not what NaNo is about. But I do it anyway. I can’t help it. I tweak, I twist, I tinker. I worry over words, and turns of phrase, and paragraph structure. Every day I re-read the previous day’s work and make adjustments. Sometime I go back even further to add, remove, and rearrange. While some people write linearly, my process is constantly looping and evolving as I progress through the story.

    The result, luckily for me, is a pretty bad-ass first draft.

    Unfortunately, it’s also where the brakes typically engage, completely interrupting the creative process. My first draft, while good, is never perfect (wouldn’t that be something?) and yet I find it very challenging to tear it down and build it back up. It’s like remodeling a perfectly functional house because the flow’s not quite right: some people could easily do that, knocking down walls and rearranging the kitchen appliances. I, however, see a functional house first, and can usually only bring myself to slap a new coat of paint on it (spelling and grammar, or word choice tweaking), or, occasionally, and with great reluctance, removing extraneous stuff. Actual structural changes? Like reframing a character or altering the plotline? Nuh uh. Not up for that.

    It’s perverse, actually, that having an effective process for writing a first draft is actually a handicap when I move on to the editing process. One would think I would learn from previous years, and realize that perhaps I should spend less time editing during my writing, and save it for the actual editing stage.

    One would be wrong, of course.

    Though, actually, thinking about it, things may be looking up with this year’s manuscript. I think it’s a function of a) being incredibly busy during the initial writing process, and b) never really feeling all that attached to the story. At the time of the initial draft, I was disappointed by both of those factors: I didn’t really love my story, and I didn’t have enough time to dedicate to it to get it to a loveable state. Now, however, I feel more free to make the drastic changes that drafts deserve. Need to nix a scene or two? No problem. Character attitude needs a one-eighty? You betcha.

    So, something new. An opportunity for structural editing, due to indifference about the initial process. Odd. All that said, I’m still not done with either the initial draft or the first edit, which are happening in a hodge-podge whenever I can spare the time. But I’m hopeful that, with time, I might end up with a more polished and saleable product at the end of the day. Time will tell.

  • Free Legwarmers

    I have a writing routine which borders on compulsively ritualistic. I always write first drafts with pen and paper. Then I type that up. Then I read it through and decide whether to develop the idea further or scrap it. If it’s worth re-working, I make an outline and decide if the order in which things occur needs to be changed. Usually the events in my story need to be reordered somewhat so I read through a hard copy with a pen, making notes about things that will need to be changed so that the new order makes sense. Then I get to work re-writing. I give myself more latitude at this stage to flesh out things since the framework is set, but I usually don’t really add in many details until the next re-write.

    Yikes, reading that last paragraph made me feel really weird, like maybe everything I write is unread-ably overwritten. Okay, as an experiment then I will just type whatever pops into my head for the rest of this essay and not edit it at all.

    Cutting is not problem as long as I don’t care how long my finished piece is. My instinct is to tend toward brevity, so I often whittle down a written piece to around 65% of its original unedited length. As for setting goals for editing, I really don’t have to force myself much because it is an enjoyable process for me. The hardest part for me as a writer, is squeezing out that first draft. After I have something to work with on paper, the editing and re-writing stages are pretty fun. Polishing something and making it better seems possible whereas creating something out of nothing strikes me as more intimidating and unlikely to be successful.

    I just threw away my notebooks from National Novel Writing Month 2011. I had filled up five spirals. Perhaps the gratification, for me, is in the process of writing more so than the finished product. Don’t worry, I typed all my notebooks before tossing them so nothing was lost except for the paper original. With the amount of space that one project took up on my shelf in notebook form, I don’t believe I could ever have enough room to save all my writing. Besides writing, I spend much of my free time knitting. Knitting is nice because it keeps my hands busy while I think about ideas for writing. A big part of writing for me is stewing over things until I know the most appropriate way to express them. Perhaps appropriate is the wrong word, I mean the most honest way.

    In knitting there is this idea of “process knitting.” It means that a person doesn’t want to keep the finished object, they just wanted the challenge of completing it. These people usually give away what they knit. To some extent I am the same way with writing. I don’t have a strong desire to have other people read what I’ve written, but I do have a strong desire to write it in the first place.

    That reminds me, I have three pairs of legwarmers that I made that I want to get rid of because they were just first drafts. If anyone wants them, let me know.

  • How to Self-Edit: For Non-Pantsters

    The timing for this week’s topic is perfect. I just finished edits on last November’s novel and considered writing this same post for my own blog. So, we’ll do it here, instead.

    I failed to note that I also bought an awesome box so my index card collection has a permanent home.

    First of all, I should warn you that I’m a little spastic in the planning department. My brain needs something tactile to work with to get things moving, and let’s be honest here, I have a serious addiction to office supplies. In order to really understand my self-editing process, you might want to first see how absolutely ridiculous I am with the writing process. You can check it out on my blog here: How to Write a Novel: For Non-Pantsters.

    Got it? Terrifying, isn’t it? I fully accept that there’s something more than a little off in my head.

    Like the planning I do before I write, there are several steps I take for editing. They’re probably just as time-wasteful and self-indulgent.

    1. Do absolutely nothing with the novel for at least a couple of weeks to a month. This is important. Let it breathe. During this time, I let a few critiquers have at it, with the understanding that it was a raw first draft.
    2. Read through the critiques and set them aside to marinate. (You’ll KNOW when the advice is right. If you’re not sure about something someone says, let it go for now.)
    3. Once out of the post-novel-writing coma, open the document back up. Puke if necessary, but come right back. This needs to get done.
    4. Time to get out my beloved index cards! Yay! While I have a stack of events and chapters from when I was writing, they aren’t accurate anymore. Things changed, scenes happened I hadn’t expected. It’s okay. Start a new pile, one card for every chapter as it’s currently written.
    5. To celebrate the sale of my first novel, I bought a bigger whiteboard, as well as a big container of magnets. I put all the cards up on this big whiteboard, pinned them with magnets, then leaned the whole thing against the wall to examine it. With it all laid out in rows, I clearly saw a few plot holes, as well as a lack of tension in the middle.
    6. Rearrange the cards, write new cards to fill holes and put them where they need to go in the lineup. Leave it for awhile while you pace back and forth mumbling.
    7. Take the cards down and put them in a stack. Starting from the beginning of the manuscript, work through all the cards, in order, making the changes according to the new plan. Don’t skip any passages, even if you think no structural changes need to be made. Every change you make causes air bubbles in the future which must be smoothed as you go.
    8. Send it to your most brutal critiquer.
    9. While you wait, go back over all the critiques you had in the beginning to make sure you didn’t miss anything. I was shocked at how many typos and inconsistencies they caught that I STILL hadn’t fixed. Fix All the Things. Keep going over everything until your eyes bleed.
    Here's the inside, complete with all the cards from two books. Notice how book two has nearly twice as many cards. My addiction is growing.

    By this time, I’ve actually gone through the entire manuscript four or five times, at least.

    So, I go through it again.

    And you know what? It’s still not perfect. There are still typos I missed.

    The point to the entire thing, no matter how you go about doing it, is not to make it perfect. The point is to make it the best novel you possibly can. Sloppiness isn’t cool. But the need to be perfect will freeze you up.

    I know this post doesn’t give you any handy tips about what words to weed out, how to build better tension, or even what mistakes to look for in an early draft. There are plenty of books and websites teaching craft. My weird methods aren’t necessarily the most efficient, but they do one thing all the how-to books in the world might not help with: they give you a place to start.

    And sometimes, that’s all you need to go off and find your own way to do it.

  • No secrets here

    Editing secrets? I don’t have any editing secrets. In fact, I am really excited to read everyone else’s posts revealing their editing secrets this week so that I can steal them.

    I have no editing process because I have yet to significantly edit anything. In general, when I’ve “edited” a manuscript, I’ve made cosmetic changes: grammar corrections, delete extra adverbs/adjectives and unneeded passages, and make the remaining sentences prettier. Maybe tweak dialog a bit. But I honestly haven’t ever taken the editing process past surface level.

    Don’t get me wrong. I’ve tried. I always make notes for bigger edits, send out my manuscript to my trusted writing friends for their feedback, and I always have big plans for revision. At first. But then I get overwhelmed and never make them. The Novel Graveyard gets bigger every year as I write and drop project after project.

    Maybe nothing I’ve written has been worthy of the edits needed. Maybe I’m just a lazy writer because I won’t actually do the hard work that’s needed to perfect a manuscript. Maybe it’s my fear of success as much as my fear of failure that keeps me from ever polishing anything beyond Zero Draft status. I don’t know.

    My editing goal, of course, is to someday edit a manuscript within an inch of its life and actually submit it. Hopefully someday I’ll get out of the lazy chair and do that. In the meantime, I have smaller goals: like write some short stories and edit them. And edit them again and then submit them places.

    I suppose my biggest editing secret right now is that I need practice. And confidence. My fellow Confabulators assure me that working with something smaller than a one-hundred-thousand word manuscript will give me the editing skills I need, while getting published will give me the confidence I need. Baby steps, right?

    For now, I am listening to all of my fellow writers’ editing secrets with open ears. Enlighten me, friends.