Friday, March 28, 2008

The weaker sister

In recent years health problems have devastated my life and forced me to stop doing the things I most passionately love. First flying, then racing were lost to me. My beautiful home is gone, my beloved airplane lies in pieces, my Cobra sits silent in a lonely storage unit, likely never to have my hand on its wheel again.

As my life disintegrated, a new pursuit emerged: writing. Writing is less susceptible to the health problems that have plagued me. As long as I can sit up and move my fingers, as long as I can think clearly, I can still write. Even if I lose my computers again, as long as I have adequate offsite backups I should be able to recover the fruits of my labors.

Still, I've always regarded writing as a pale substitute for the real thing. The weaker sister. I would never have chosen to sit around writing about racing if I could be doing the real thing instead.

So I guess you could say that if it weren't for the illness, I'd never have started writing my novel. Slaving away over a hot computer for hours, only to produce a few flat colorless pages of prose? Give me a drive in a real race car on a real race track any day.

And every hour you spend on the track requires many hours of preparation of your equipment. When I was involved with racing - and before that, flying - there just wasn't time or energy left over for writing.

This feeling has persisted since I had to stop racing and flying. I never stopped longing to be back on the track, seeking the elusive limits of adhesion; back in the air, upside down, pulling G's.

The writing was just a way to experience vicariously what I'd formerly been able to do in real life. Pale and lifeless by contrast, it was the best I could do.

But recently that perspective changed. A few days ago I had something of an epiphany about the writing process.

I've begun to get an inkling of the power of words and the satisfaction which can be had from engaging in the process of forging them together. I've started to believe that performing a writing task well could actually be as exciting and rewarding as hurling a car through Turn 2 at Mosport or Turn 10 at Watkins Glen.

Granted, the experience of crafting a glowing chapter isn't as dynamic as what happens behind the wheel. There isn't the sensory overload, nor is there the elation of cavorting on the edge, peering for a moment into the abyss of physical disaster and then dancing away, eluding the jaws of the demon one more time.

But there is something else. With words you can do things you simply can't do any other way. You can entertain, yes. You can inform. You can appeal, seduce, cajole.

But you can go deeper. You can peel back the facade, the veneer of civilization we all wear, and reveal essential aspects of the human psyche. Fundamental truths which might otherwise remain hidden.

And to do this well, to explore the deepest darkest most hidden corners of the human psyche, you have to plumb your own.

The risks are high; I believe that to write convincingly about the evil men can do, you must explore your own potential. Dig in the muck of your own psyche. Channel the deepest currents of sorrow. Ride tsunamis of howling rage, taste the level of fury that drives the most savage acts.

To reveal the truth through fiction, you must put yourself inside the character, live her every thought and emotion. You must become the hero, become the villain.

And when you do, there is no place to hide. They say if you can dream it, you can do it. Is this true? Murder? Or worse?

To write fiction well is to know yourself. And this may be very dangerous.

This is the power of words.

Writing well is, among other things, a craft. No matter what level of talent you're blessed with, you can improve. With practice, with instruction, with guidance.

With a lot of hard work.

Honing your craft, I've discovered, can be a real thrill.

Drowning your kittens

Ever since I can remember I've had a fear of revising my own writing. I can't seem to rid my mind of the image of the artist who keeps working and working until the painting is ruined.

While I've been working on my novel I've been apprehensive about the revision process that lay in wait for me at the end of the first draft. Lately I've avoided confronting this by focusing on completing the last few chapters.

The other day my excellent avoidance strategy broke down. I was trying to resolve a compatibility issue between MS Word and Open Office Writer that had arisen when I replaced a dead computer. During this process I was opening, saving, and closing various documents.

I found myself rereading a chapter of my novel I had not yet incorporated into the main manuscript. Hmm, I thought. Let me just fix this sentence here. Soon a few minor revisions escalated into a major rewrite of the chapter.

Gee, this revision stuff didn't seem so bad after all. I was pretty happy with this new piece. I decided to incorporate the newly rewritten chapter into the manuscript.

One thing led to another. By the the wee hours of the next morning I'd rewritten the book's prologue and the first two chapters, revised several others, written a whole new one, and composed the first draft of the cover flap notes.

As a result of this experience I've gained a new appreciation of how I've grown as a writer. After three years of reviewing others' work and having my own work reviewed in Joni Cole's workshops, I understand a lot about the process of refining a piece of writing that I didn't know before.

Under Joni's guidance I've learned about getting rid of all sorts of flab, like adverbs, introductory clauses ("As she slid around the corner she..."), and words like "then", "it", "things" and "there are" which weaken the text.

I've learned to make actions more direct ("the phone rang" rather than "she heard the phone ring") and to cut excessive stage direction ("she glanced at her", "she picked up the glass and said").

I've realized you have to "drown your kittens". You look for words that seem out of place or the turn of phrase that doesn't quite fit, bits which stand out, perhaps because they're a bit too vivid, a little too clever.

These are often the parts to which we're most attached, which is why cutting them out is a little like drowning kittens.

Editing my own work was a revelation. I discovered I didn't have to be afraid of destroying its freshness and vitality during the revision process. Instead, the essence of a good scene would be brought into sharper relief as I pruned.

This was an exciting moment. It was as if previously I'd been flailing in the dark; now the light had come on and made plain the sharpness of the instruments I was wielding: the power of words to not just entertain but to reveal and illuminate fundamental aspects of the human psyche.

Thursday, March 6, 2008

Judging your own writing

Recently another writer read part of the novel I'm working on. Afterward she wrote me to say:

OK - here's the trouble with reading your stuff. After I read I don't want to write because my stuff seems one dimensional, shallow, ill-crafted. OK, enough of my pity pot!!! I'll go write some trash...

Here was my response:

Thank you! That is such a compliment.

However, you are not the only one to have that reaction. I often feel the same way when I'm reading or listening to other peoples' writing, including yours. My own stuff seems shallow and one-dimensional by comparison.

I think it's because we know what was behind our own writing, so it's actually more difficult to fill in the blanks and flesh out the characters in our imagination beyond what's on the page. We know damn well we made the whole thing up.

Whereas when reading other peoples' writing, we automatically imagine what the characters are like, what's behind their thoughts, dialog and actions, etc. We're conditioned to do that. It's easier to fill in the blanks, because the images, characters and other triggers didn't come from our own imaginations in the first place, so there's more room to add dimension.

It may also have to do with self-belief. I think it's natural to feel that somebody else must know what they are doing when they create art, whereas we know what we've gone through to create our own, and we know how tenuous it all is, or was, when we started.

But I think as time goes on, that phenomenon may diminish. For me it's less pronounced than it was. I think I've gotten enough positive feedback that I've begun to believe in my own writing. So I'm sometimes able to hear it through other peoples' ears, especailly when I'm reading aloud in a workshop.

Also, I've written so much now, over 100,000 words on the novel alone, that I don't remember everything any more. So sometimes when I'm reading something I wrote a while ago, it seems fresh, almost as if I hadn't written it myself.

In fact, that brings to mind something a wise programmer once told me when I was starting out: after two months, it may as well have been written by someone else. He was talking about programming - and the importance of writing clear and readable code, and commenting it appropriately so the next person to work on it (which might be you) will be able to understand it.

But I think this principle may apply to writing fiction (or nonfiction) too. After you've written enough, you just can't remember it all. So it becomes somewhat easier to read it objectively.

Anyway, thanks again for the compliment. Don't get discouraged; keep on writing! And don't worry. It won't be trash.

Monday, March 3, 2008

An online lending library?

My friend "Raoul Duke" recently sent me this article, which makes an interesting distinction between review and criticism.

Reading this article sparked an idea: why not an online lending library?

When the author of the article mentioned that "Mark Twain's Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses is still considered an examplar of literary criticism," I felt a stirring of desire to read at least part of that book.

However, it's about $20 with shipping from Amazon (currently published as an addendum to The Last of the Mohicans). I don't want to read it that much. So I probably won't.

I often have this urge. I read about a book, want to read it, but it's not available at my local library and I can't justify spending upwards of $25 for it, since I know I'll only read it once.

So why not an online lending library? Call it NetBoox, say, or maybe OnLibe. You pay a monthly subscription fee, which allows you to "check out", say, three books at a time.

But instead of going to the library and bringing the hard copies home, or having them mailed to you, as a few libraries do, you download an encrypted PDF to your computer, read it, and then "send it back", which deletes your key to that PDF, rendering it useless unless you check it out again.

This addresses one of my pet peeves with the sale of electronic media, such as books and music. The publishers think they can get away with selling the electronic version of an item for the same price they sell the hard copy for, while their own costs for electronic distribution are actually far less than for the production and distribution of a physical copy.

So of course nobody buys the electronic version; if that's what they want, they download it for free via Kazaa/LimeWire/BitTorrent instead.

If, by contrast, the publishers passed on a substantial portion of the savings of publishing electronically to the consumer, they'd make a lot more money, because a lot more people would be inclined to buy the electronic version at a fair price rather than pirating it.

What about Amazon's Kindle? It's interesting. But you have to buy the $400 Kindle and then you have to buy each book as well.

I'd prefer the option of just renting the books I want to read. I don't need to keep every book I read lying around on an SD card somewhere.

That's why I get so many books from the library. I can't understand buying a zillion books that I am almost certainly only ever going to read once. Ditto with movies, which is why I like NetFlix so much.

Of course, my multiple chemical disasters, which have cost me hundreds of books as well as thousands of dollars' worth of other personal property, have influenced my perspective on this point, but I think it's still valid. Some people like to have shelves full of books to impress visitors. Others are more interested in just reading them.

Obviously, the royalties to the author (along with the publisher's cut) for each rental would be less than the royalties they'd get for a sale. But there'd almost certainly be a lot more rentals than sales lost as a result of the availability of rentals.

Are Blockbuster and and NetFlix hurting attendance at first-run movie theatres? Possibly. Are the movie studios unhappy about them - and the revenues they generate for the studios through rentals? I don't think so.

And, unlike checkouts from a local free library, which earn the author nothing beyond the initial sale of the book to the library, each e-book rental would pay the author something.

It seems to me that the publishers are missing a big opportunity here. As it stands, the publisher of the Fenimore Cooper/Twain book won't get anything from me.

But if I could rent the book from an online online library whose membership cost me a monthly fee on the order of my NetFlix subscription, they'd get a few pennies. Add this up over thousands of books and hundreds of thousands of readers, and they'd have a useful revenue source.

Books seem ideally suited to a rental scheme like this, because, unlike movies, they are small and can be downloaded quickly, and unlike songs, you usually don't want to read them over and over.

So why hasn't it happened?