This weekend I had occasion to remember that the real reward which comes from finishing a long, exacting edit of a manuscript… is the chance to pour yourself a cup of tea, go back to the beginning, and, with a leisurely mind, approach the problems you can see now that you’ve cleared the old problems out of the way.
Kirby Ferguson’s series, Everything is a Remix, is worth watching if you write, draw, compose, photograph, choreograph, direct, or otherwise create any form of content.
I wonder what influences my writing – there are some books, movies, and pieces of music that I know I reference, but I’m convinced there are others which have become so deeply integrated into my writing style that I don’t even realize the debts I owe them any more.
There’s a Buddhist aspect to this whole idea: action arises out of and in turn gives rise to karma, which persists through time, and spreads through the world. Long after our death, the ideas to which our ideas gave rise ripple on, producing new patterns we never expected.
If you like that video, by the way, watch the rest of the series at http://www.everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series/
Noir and mystery writer Max Allan Collins, who you probably know from Road to Perdition (the graphic novel that was adapted into a Tom Hanks / Jude Law movie), wrote an essay for BoingBoing today on a question he’s asked a lot: “Who do you read?”
The whole essay’s worth reading, but a particular piece caught my eye. Collins follows his friends’ work, and books by authors he liked before he “turned pro” (as he puts it). But since he tends to ape the style of people he reads, while he’s reading them, he avoids new authors. The authors who influenced him as a child, well, he’s already absorbed so much of their style that he feels reading them yields no ill effect.
Something about this rings true to me. A writer’s reading is like an athlete’s diet. When you read a story, you smelt it in your mind, with your experience, into new stories. I don’t avoid new writers, but I do try to be conscious of what I’m reading, and how it affects the choices I make. If nothing else, the books I read while writing dramatically affect the type the editing the prose requires. My current project bears too much of Infinite Jest’s imprint, I can already tell – editing this prose will be a struggle to make it mine.
BoingBoing pointed me to Tim Rogers’ (long) essay, Who Killed Video Games?, about the rise of social gaming, specifically the use of behavioral psychology to convince (the nice way to put it) or con (the not-nice way) people into paying money for ‘imaginary’ benefits like a bigger in-game house, a purple cow, or whatever. I’m not certain about this divide between ‘imaginary’ goods and ‘real’ goods – I mean, maybe you can’t trade your in-game Four-Headed Sharktopus or whatever, that you’ve bred on your Super Monster Breeder Facebook game, to another player, so on some level it’s not *yours* in the way, say, a physical Four-Headed Sharktopus would be (until it ate you). But you recognize the existence of a Four-Headed Sharktopus when you encounter it in-game. It becomes a part of the world you interact with. It’s bound by rules – but so are all real things, like actual honest-to-God eat-your-slippers golden retriever puppies. So, is the Four-Headed Sharktopus real or not?
Setting that aside – Rogers’ essay is a nice counterpoint to the rapturous talk about ‘gamification.’ Yes, better-designed experiences could produce cool effects, like kids who really want to do their homework. But who’s designing the experiences, and why? Experiences produce chemical effects in the body that can be habit-forming – an ‘adrenaline junkie’ could actually be addicted to danger. Weightlifters can come to depend on the post-lifting endorphin rush. Part of the elation I feel after an evening of fencing is emotional, but part’s chemical too. If we’ve reached the point where we can make games that compel participation, we should be asking ourselves – as consumers, as producers, and more importantly as human beings – what the consequences of our actions will be. For example – do we really want kids addicted to doing homework? There’s a world of difference between loving your homework and loving the hard work of creating, building, discovering something worthwhile – the sort of play Neitzsche talks about. Powerful, serious play. Maybe if we make math worksheets as captivating as a Zynga game, we’ll end up strangle people who might otherwise think – ‘under what conditions can we draw a triangle whose angles don’t add up to 180 degrees?’
The whole concept of engagement wheels and intermittent gratification, the image of rats pressing levers until they shrivel and die, puts me in mind of the Entertainment from Infinite Jest, which is so fascinating that once you see it you never want to do anything else again, ever. Which gives me the howling fantods.
This morning BoingBoing ran an excerpt from John Biggs & Charlie White’s book, Bloggers Boot Camp, about the value of writing 1,000 words a day if you want to have a successful blog. It’s worth a read even if you don’t blog, because it applies to any kind of writing – and really, any kind of art – you want to do.
I’ve heard this quote attributed to Ray Bradbury – “Everyone has a million bad words inside them. The question is, how fast can you write through those to get to the good stuff?” There’s an old Chinese proverb about how you can measure your progress at a skill by the thickness of a sheet of paper every day. The cool thing about writing, or drawing, is that you actually can stack up the paper when you’re done.
Just don’t forget to edit.
When Alana tagged me to participate in Speak Out With Your Geek Out, I loved the concept but didn’t know where to start. I have a ton of geeky habits. Obviously, I write science fiction and fantasy. I play Magic: the Gathering, and I pretend to play Go and Bridge. I fence – pretty geeky as Olympic sports go. I ran a three-year-long Star Wars campaign in college using the West End Games d6 rules set, which was totally awesome. I game with my friends on the weekends. I own a kilt, and three swords. I just downloaded Civilization V, and I love playing it with a tablet & stylus because with a stroke of a pen, I can send my armies marching across the surface of the world! For Persia!
But I’m not the most dedicated Magic player in our group. I’m rarely the one to discover new board games, or TV shows. My video game playing pace borders on the glacial, and my knowledge of Bridge, Chess, and Go hovers just above “how does little horsey move?” I read, and I read widely, but so do most people I know.
Writing’s probably the thing I’m the biggest geek about, but while I can gush about the act of creation and the joy of holding a pen and the pleasant rush that comes when someone says to you, “That’s really good,” I can’t write that essay at less than book-length.
So here’s my exhortation, the thing that I love and that all of you should try:
Finish your work.
Opening your laptop and starting a story about aliens, or the devil, or aliens meeting the devil, or a murder, or vampires, or whatever – easy to do. Starting a role-playing campaign with your friends – straightforward. Forming a band – all you need is a name (or ten).
Once you’ve started, though, follow through. For writers, that means finishing the manuscript. Love what you’re doing. Don’t doubt. (Doubt comes later – that’s your Inner Editor’s job.) GM’ing a campaign? Don’t leave it a sequence of unconnected episodes, with a hidden mastermind behind every plot. Add tension, complexity, import to the story. Climax. Reveal what’s been kept secret. Slide the players into a quiet denouement. Bandmates – record that album. Write those twenty songs. Play some shows.
You can’t finish everything. You will abandon projects. (Don’t give them up entirely – an abandoned work is only a work you haven’t returned to yet, or a work you haven’t figured out how to subsume into something else.) But you will mark your life by the projects you completed.
Finishing requires effort. Requires expansive mind. Requires the courage to reject older ideas, to delete formative scenes, to realize that maybe you should learn to fingerpick, or keep time, or play a diminished chord. Finishing requires attention to detail, sensitivity to your own goals and motivations, and a blind obliviousness to everything in the world that says you should do something else. Or, if not obliviousness, then at least the knowledge that everyone would understand if you quit, that it would be cool and give you more time to sleep or hang out with your friends – and the determination not to quit anyway.
Finishing, in short, is the geekiest, coolest thing I know.
And it can make your life better. Writing “The End” at six in the morning after a twelve-hour typing binge in my junior year of high school, on a 300,000 word novel I’d started a year before, made me think differently about the way I wrote, and the effect it could have on me and on other people. I started off writing a story about angels and demons and the apocalypse and superheroes, and ended up… still there, but better.
All of you out there with a half-finished novel in the trunk, or a painting not done, or a few songs you’ve never played in front of anyone: try finishing your work. You’ll feel awesome, and I guarantee you there are people who’d like to read/see/hear it.
Edit before you show it to them, though. That’s important, too.
Three years ago I arrived in this city with a couple boxes of books in the back of a car. As of this morning, my wife and I have a one-bedroom apartment with a bookcase on almost every available flat wall. At this rate, in another year we’ll have to replace our furniture with an elaborate bookcase-maze. And this isn’t counting the closet full of boxed books I have in storage back in Tennessee. It was the same in China: arrive in a new place with maybe half a shelf of books, leave with a bookcase and a half. And that’s when living in a city without a single English-language bookstore.
My point isn’t to complain about the number of books we have. I love our books! (Though they make moving a pain.)
But when I visit other people’s apartments, I notice: most of my friends have maybe a couple shelves, unobtrusively stuck in corners somewhere in their living room. These are people who read, who read voraciously, and yet somehow the books seem to roll off them. I don’t imagine they’re throwing the books away (horror!), but I also never hear about mass trips to used book dealerships, or secret e-Bay selling binges. So, what gives? Where do your books go?
Every editing process has its periods of grind and periods of slack: times when the prose sharpens with every keystroke, and times when the entire mass must be left to ferment.
In a fermentation period this last weekend, I picked up Sara Gran’s new book, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead; I’m a few chapters in and finding it wonderful. Hints of Dirk Gently, the Three Investigators, Philip Marlowe, and Haruki Murakami’s nameless protagonists – somehow they all meld into a book that (so far) is intense, inviting, and subtle. I’m even sensing some of Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy concern with the universe as a detective problem – but Gran communicates this concern by writing a compelling story with compelling characters, rather than a freshman-year philosophy class rumination. Exciting to pick up a new book, by an author I don’t know, and find myself infatuated on page 20.
For the last couple weeks, many tumblers have been falling into place in many locks – but at last, I can announce: Tor will publish my novel, Three Parts Dead.
I’m so excited that it’s difficult to figure out what more to write – maybe I should just take a page from Victor Hugo’s publisher and post a single exclamation point. I spend a lot of time in front of my keyboard, and it’ll be wonderful to see the product of that time out in the world. My editor at Tor is really supportive, and excited about the book; Weronika’s been wonderful in shepherding the manuscript through various stages of submission and review. The folks at Operation Awesome made the initial introduction, and if it hadn’t been for my friend Sam Justice’s urging, I wouldn’t have decided to buckle down and query in December. Not to mention the constant encouragement I’ve received from wife, family, and friends down the years, without which I would have thrown my keyboard through the window, and followed it soon after…
And now I start to hear the Oscar band playing off stage, and the host advances with his shepherd’s crook…
The funniest thing about this whole process is that the further you get, the more work there is to do. A long road stretches from here to final publication, and along that road I need to turn in at least one more book (hopefully more than one!) in addition to the marketing, planning, and general madness. Oddly, this prospect doesn’t phase me one bit. I feel like the young gentleman in the painting on the cover of Lord Byron’s Novel, who has obviously just reached the peak of one mountain, and stares out at an endless vista of further mountains to climb.
Well, let’s climb some more mountains.
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Curious about the details? Want a basic description of the plot? Publishers Marketplace has the capsule description, but I think it’s behind a paywall – Weronika’s posted it to her tumblr. Publishers Weekly’s description is in the free and clear on their website.
It’s always nice to return to a manuscript that’s been ‘curing’ for a few weeks, read a paragraph or two, and cackle with glee. No sense being unrealistic – this book has a lot of work yet to go. But it’s reassuring to know that the bones are strong.