#amwriting on revising

Got a new post up today at the #amwriting group blog. This is a companion piece to last month’s line editing post, about the various revisioning passes I make before I get to the line editing.

Read it herehttp://amwritingblog.com/wordpress/archives/16824.

#Amwriting cross-post: Embracing My Inner Editrix

I am about to embark on a project I have never attempted before: line-editing a piece of my own fiction.

I don’t mean to imply that I have never edited my fiction before, but I have not tried to trim and tighten it in a systematic way. My storytelling process was write, read back, change words and sentences that stood out as awkward or unclear, repeat until I no longer found words I wanted to change. That kind of approach renders prose that is good enough–good enough not to catch the eye of my internal critic, that is…but is it really the best my writing could be?

I know from experience that it’s not.

In college, I never took any creative writing courses; the syllabi never interested me. What I took instead were rhetoric & composition courses, with curriculums aimed at the nuts and bolts of prose and grammar and style. In those peer-edit seminars I learned the value of a true line edit–that is, going line by line, sentence by sentence, word by word, and grinding away every last rough spot.  The differences between the original draft and the line-edited draft might be as small as 3%, but it’s an exponential increment, and the full sum of the difference is greater than the number of changes added to the original.

When I speak of line editing, I don’t mean the copy-edit or the proofread; those are both separate passes to catch typographical errors, grammatical misakes, and inconsistencies in the narrative, and to ascertain that all punctuation and stylings conform to the chosen style sheet. No, what I mean is simply an evaluation of each line: is this the best way to say what I mean?

I have a hit-list of issues I know my rough-draft writing has, compiled from classmates in those seminars and reader feedback. I also include some fairly standard editing appraisals that are not problems unique to me.

• passive construction and forms of be - in fiction there will naturally be a lot of “he was” sentences, and that is okay, but sometimes there are better ways to say something.
• adverbs – I don’t discount them out of hand, because sometimes they are qualifying a verb in a way the verb itself does not imply. But as I was told, “Generally an adverb either means you picked the wrong verb, or you’re not letting the verb say what it needs to say,” and more often than not I find I don’t really need that qualifier.
• weak or general verbs – sprinted > ran.
• overlong sentences with too many clauses – my besetting vice. It’s not that long sentences aren’t acceptable, or correct, or even readable, but I do tend to pile them on top of one another, and that makes reading very dense. I try to break up the sentences containing multiple actions or ideas, as clarity might be advanced by separating them, as well as readability enhanced by it. Those sentences best left unbroken must be vetted for clarity and grammatical righteousness.
• semi-colons – (1) are those two sentences really closely enough connected to be joined that way, and (2) how many other semi-colons have you used on that page? It is a punctuation mark that I personally love, but some people read them as pedantic and stiff, so I try to make sure that my usage is confined to the places where any other construction would be diminishment.
• pronoun antecedents and uses of “it” – are all of them clear, not merely in the way that we know people are able to extrapolate when reading in context, but also grammatically?
• cliches – just don’t use them.
• over-use of “that” – this was an argument where the professor took my side against my classmates (they thought I overused “that” to connect clauses), but which I try to be senstive to. Do I really need to use “that” or is the causation/connection clear (e.g., “the one that I want” vs. “the one I want”)? If I need it, is “that” the best word or should it be where/who/which?
• who versus whom – I pretty much have to evaluate every use of either. I generally get it right the first time, but every now and then one of my extra-clause-heavy sentences will confuse me.

The reason I have compiled a list like this is to remove subjectivity from the editing process as much as possible. I don’t have the tendency to regard my writing as sacrosanct, so my issue when editing my own work is not resisting changes but knowing what I meant and therby being blind to what others would see.  There is a divorce that must happen mentally between my experience of writing the words and my experience of reading them; I have to be able to step out of the logic of my mind and examine the words without the supporting framework of life as I know it and language as I use it. Specific questions like these help break the chains of what I know I was trying to say and help me see what I really said.

I confess to finding a certain sadistic pleasure in deconstructing prose–be it my own or someone else’s–and making that white paper bleed with the ink of a thousand cuts. Line editing is not revising in the sense of re-envisioning. It is not a creative act. It is a logical, methodical, and ruthless evaluation of merit. Time to strap on my leather boots and robot-eye. I hear adverbs taunting me, and I must make them scream….

This blog is cross-posted here in its entirety from the #amwriting group blog. Here’s a link to the post there if you want to see it in context.

Belated Pointer – February #Amwriting Post Up

In honor of Mardi Gras Day I put up a post on the #amwriting blog about how writing fiction is another form of masking. And was too busy spending the day masking, as I have every year for the past six and God willing will for every Fat Tuesday of the rest of my life, to put up a link to it. So, sorry about that. You can read it here.

I #AmWriting about the Continuing Relevance of Chapters in Ebooks

In which I accidentally argue myself into considering chapters to be useless artifacts of a bygone era.

Not bothering to excerpt it because it’s 1:30 a.m. and I am tired. So just go read it if you’re interested.

Asking the Important Questions at #AmWriting

My second piece for December is up today at the #amwriting group blog. I am cross-posting it here because I think it will be of special interest to some of the people I know check in here. If you want to see the post over there, here’s the link.

Aaaand here’s the post:

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I’ve seen a couple different articles in the past fortnight about optimal creative times, and how they usually occur at an inverse of optimal reasoning times. The frequent example given is that if morning is your most productive time for problem solving, then afternoon or evening is probably a better time for you to do creative work.

While I don’t disagree with the basic idea—that creativity uses a different part of the brain than reasoning/analyzing and will thus peak at a different time of day—I found myself questioning the conclusion of the articles as applied to being a writer, namely, set aside time to write during that “creative phase” of your day.

I questioned this advice because by far my most productive writing period is the same part of the day that includes my best cognitive work.

My biggest take-away from the logic course I took in college was this: if you accept the premises given then you are bound to reach the same conclusion. Thus the place to mount a logical challenge is not the logic itself but the premises.

The logic of these articles seems to be: reasoning and creativity peak at opposite times; writing requires creativity; you want to write at the time you will be most productive; therefore you should write when creativity is peaking. If the two premises are true, then I cannot argue that logic. I agree with the first premise. The second, then, must be the problematic one.

Which brings me to a question I haven’t seen addressed much in the how to write circuit—is “creative writing” actually a creative activity?

I have never before questioned that it is. My whole life I’ve been told that writing is a creative act, an artistic expression. The very term we use for fiction, and certain types of non-fiction, creative writing, embeds in its very definition that the act is creative. (To clarify—I am using the word “creative” to mean imaginative, expressive, abstract, unique…all those qualities we ascribe to artistic types and the work they do. In a very base linguistic sense, creative also means “to create,” so all writing is creative in that it creates from nothing, something. But that is not the definition we mean when we use the term creative writing.)

I wonder now, however, if writing is creative at all, for me.

When I write what I term “forward progress” on a story—writing from the beginning forward, in the style of a finished piece—the act is calculated, rational. Each sentence is written after mental analysis of the best way to impart an idea. The words are deliberate, chosen to most succinctly say exactly the idea I wish to express. This type of writing almost always stands; that is, I don’t go back and rewrite the sentences, change the words, reorganize the grouping of ideas, because generally speaking I do not need to. I said what I needed and wanted to say the first time. The only changes are minor cosmetics, the taking off of one thing after I have dressed, so to speak.

The only time I can effectively write like this is first thing in the morning, when my mind is primed for the heavy lifting of logic and reasoning. Given enough time, I can grind out 2000-4000 words before my brain atrophies. Yet if I try to write like this at the end of the day, the words don’t make sense, my brain feels like so much mush churning about, and I am lucky to get 300 words in two hours.

Does this sound like a creative act to you? It certainly doesn’t to me.

But there is another kind of writing that I do, what I call “scene sketching.” Almost invariably this is nothing more than conversations I hear in my head and transcribe. Most of the time when I have the urge to write in the evening, it is to write scene sketches, and boy, do they come easily. This writing does feel creative.

The problem I face is that I could never finish a book, even a short story, if I relied upon evening jam sessions alone. There would be no description, no grounding, no explanation of who people are and what brought them to that place. I suppose in some post-modern deconstructionist way that could make interesting pieces, but that is not the kind of story I want to end up with. At some point I have to sit down when I am at my most cognitive and write in all the stuff that won’t come in an imagination-storm.

Obviously my writing process incorporates both types of writing. But the truth is, I could write novels without putting down a word during those creative flurries. To me those flares of creativity are about the story; yes, they are necessary to write a novel, because without them what story do you write about…but they are not at all necessary to the actual act of writing.

Yeah…I think I have to reject that questionable premise. Writing is not creative. It’s the cognitive summary of the creative process. At least for me. But what about you?