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In all fairness, I don't seem to either. Care to go exploring? |
| Good morning, friends, and I hope it finds you well. Strange title, eh? I'll cut the chatter and get right to it. I have written, in round figures, from the age of ten to the age of seventy. I'm 77 now, and haven't written anything beside blog posts for near onto a decade, but I share my old stories here, and there are some members of remarkably low standards who think I'm pretty good at it. I've talked with one recently who tells me they're going to read my work to learn how to write. I don't recommend it, and that's sort of what leads me to this post. Let's start with the first confession: I don't edit... Pretty much ever. This is only one of many reasons that I've never found a publisher, but it's the one we're concentrating on today. A look at any of my stories will show you that I write in scenes. I will generally have three to five viewpoint characters, heroes, villains, and peripherals, and generally I will switch viewpoints with each scene. This isn't true for my first-person stuff, but the vast majority is third-person omniscient, and that's how I work. I'll outline some scenes: 1. Joe is visiting his grandfather's sheep ranch by the sea. Out exploring, he finds a decaying box in a sea cave under the nearby cliffs. In it is a key and a note, only part of which is legible. 2. Susan, a local, encounters Joe walking home and introduces herself. She is friendly, but when she asks what Joe has been doing at the cliffs, he becomes defensive... Etc, etc. Outline in hand, I begin writing. I write one scene per session. In the sample above, I would write the scene with Joe finding the box, but the next scene introducing Susan wouldn't be attempted until the next day. Suddenly shifting gears like that throws me into chaos, and I learned early not to attempt it. But the subject is the editing of that one scene. As I begin writing, I have the action in my head. Well, I guess we all have that. I choose my starting point and begin assembling the scene. "Joe does this, Joe does that, he finds the key and pockets it along with the note." Dozens, scores of successful authors have always told me (through books and articles) to avoid editing as you write. Just get everything down on paper and fix it later. Can't. Don't. That's my second confession, and another big reason that I'm not a big-time author. As I write, I'm constantly looking back a paragraph or two. Can't help it. I look back and see where a word I used in this paragraph makes one I used two paragraphs back feel awkward. Which one do I change? Decision made, I change it and continue on. Would a semicolon work better here than a period? Let's try it. Again, issue fixed as I write. By the time I finish the scene, I feel like it's as done as it can be. I have tried to do "professional" edits, whatever I conceive that to be, and what I find is that I "edit" the passages back to what they were before, and need to edit them again, until at about Round Three, I'm "editing" it back to the way it was before I started editing. The upshot of all this is that nearly all of what you're reading in my port (and anywhere else you may encounter it) is essentially first draft. It made me happy this way, and I'm out of ways to change it. What you see is just the way I wrote it the first time through. Oh, I did all that "as you write" editing that all the pros have admonished me against for decades ~ I can't help it ~ but essentially, every scene is the way it was when I stopped writing and moved on to the next one. Oh, I might change an individual word on re-reading, but that's it. I don't think it's braggadocio to say that I've turned a clever phrase or two in my day, but emulating the way I write is a great idea if you want to avoid the circus involved with becoming a famous author! Now, you've been warned. If you enjoy my stories, I'm grateful. If you tell me you enjoy my stories, I'm thrilled and humbled, but if you tell me you're going to learn how to write by emulating me, you need to rethink that. I've routinely broken every rule in the book, and I've never been invited to the dance. I don't think that's a coincidence. Be smart and stay inspired, ~ Jack  |
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