Wordplay: Helping Writers Become Authors: April 2008

What is art? Why is this seemingly random act of creation found in every society? Why is it cherished, lauded, idolized? Why is it important?

I suppose, for myself, as someone who dares to claim the lofty title of “artist” on at least some small level, it is that last question that rings the loudest. Why is my writing important? Or perhaps more truthfully phrased: Is it important? I write because it is a passion, a compulsion, even an obsession at times. I write because I have to, not because I believe anything I have to say is necessarily important. But, understandably enough, I would still like think it is important. Like most members of the human race, I would like to be able to lay my head against the coolness of my pillow every night, knowing I’ve done something to make a difference in the world—to shed light on darkness—to bring joy in the face of pain—to exchange justice for injustice. But in comparison to the life-saving skills of a surgeon or the soul-saving words of a great minister, my writing seems a paltry accomplishment indeed.

At the very least, I am only an entertainer, spinning make-believe out of the web of imagination. Maybe someone will smile over a funny line of dialogue; maybe my tragic closing scene will wring a tear or two; maybe some turn of phrase will even give someone a new outlook on something. But, the chances are great that my words will be read and forgotten in a few weeks time. Not so very important in the overall scheme of things, is it?
My answer is a simple and absolute: Yes, it is. Aside from its undeniable moral and intellectual influence, art, in any form, is a timeless celebration and commemoration of life.

All of life is an expression. From the moment of our births, we are constantly expressing ourselves—our personality, our moods, our paradigms, our opinions. In a nutshell, one might say that life is expression. And what is art but concentrated expression? In art, our feelings and our experiences explode onto the page (or the canvas or the screen or the keys of a piano) with colors heightened and sounds undiluted.

In art, I am allowed to step beyond my own body, my own existence. When I read a powerful book or listen to a beautiful piece of music, I am given the gift of experiencing things beyond my own understanding. I will never walk the streets of Dickens’s London, I will never know the martial glory of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.” And yet... I have.

I cannot possibly hope to experience everything this world has to offer before I run out of life—nor would I want to. But, in art, I can experience everything. I thrive on music and movies, paintings, and photography—and, of course, the written word. I love beautiful things, intense things, no matter their manifestations.

Art isn’t a waste of life. It’s a celebration of life. Every moment spent with art, in whatever form, is a moment lived to the fullest.

And so, I write. Very likely I will never write anything of lasting import. My outlook on life is probably not so very unique, my ideas not so very brilliant. I hardly expect to dispel darkness, pain, and injustice with the wave of my Pilot EasyTouch pen. All of those intangibles are rather too large for one person to even hope to dent. But I can celebrate the life God has given me in the best way I know do it, and I can share my celebration with those around me.

A life unshared is a life wasted. For those of us with a gift and a passion for the arts, we have the honor of sharing our lives on a broader stage than that which is given to most people. Some of us may reach national or even international acclaim, some of us may actually does make a dent in that darkness. Most of us, however, will work away in the solitude of our own homes, our words reaching out to perhaps only our family and friends.

Speaking for myself, the ultimate destination of my work does not concern me. That is a decision left to a higher power. What does concern me is that, even if only one person can relate to what I have written, what I am sharing—if only one person can join me in my celebration of experience—then the work I have loved and labored over has fulfilled its purpose.

April 27, 2008
6 Comments
K.M. Weiland
Posted in Art

No two writers write in the same way. But even fewer writers edit in the same way. We all wield our red (or blue) pens (or pencils), hacking flabby words and injecting strong verbs and nouns in their places. We all share the end goal of a crisp, clean, beautiful final draft.
And we all pull out rather large handfuls of hair on the road to that final draft. But the methods we use in fulfilling these edits are often quite disparate. Each of us has to find the method that works best for us, and often that method continues to evolve with every passing project. The method that works for me won’t necessarily work for anyone else. But, for what it’s worth and in hopes that you mind pick up a few useful tips (or, at the very least, that you might identify what won’t work for you), this, my friends, is how I edit.

Among writers, there are approximately five different methods of editing:

1. Write the entire first draft, then edit. (Woe be to this editor if he starts proofreading before finishing the draft, lest he never finish.)

2. Write until you figure out where the story’s going, then go back and edit the first half of the draft to match the rest of the story. (This is often the method favored by “seat-of-their-pants” writers, who find that outlining stunts their creativity.

3. Write to the end of a scene, then edit. (A very linear approach to editing, this allows the writer to establish each building block of his story as he goes.

4. Write to the end of a chapter, then edit. (Extended version of the scene-by-scene edit.

5. Write a little, edit a little. (Favored by both procrastinators and obsessive outliners, this method is probably both the most dangerous and the most precise.)

Were this a multiple-choice test, I’d be forced to check Option #5 as my method of choice. Fortunately, however, in the no-holds-bar world of writing and editing, we’re allowed as many choices as we like. Therefore, the approach I’ve developed over the years tends to encompass all five choices—in reverse order.

I rarely begin a story without knowing where I’m going with it. As a result, I am often freed from the desperate rush to fill that great white chasm of paper between me and The End. Since I know how my story will end and how each scene will build toward that end, I’m free to polish each sentence and each paragraph as soon as it appears on my screen. All things considered, I am a very slow writer. Except on rare occasions when the words (usually dialogue) are flowing almost too quickly for me to record, I will type one or two sentences, maybe even a whole paragraph, then sit for a few minutes, idly rattling my fingers against the space bar and mulling over what I’ve just written. After a tweak or two, I move on and repeat the process.

Instead of re-reading each scene as I finish it, I prefer to read over the page or so I wrote the previous day. Before I continue writing where I left off, I read everything I wrote the previous day (which usually amounts to half a scene), making little changes and checking the general flow of the words.

Over the course of my last two projects, it’s become my practice not to divide my stories into chapters until I’ve finished the project. I simply break at any logical point (in Dreamlander, for example, each “chapter” encompasses one day in the life of my hero), regardless of word count, and call that a chapter for the time being. Whenever I reach one of these logical breaks in my writing, I stop and take a day off from active writing in order to proofread that “chapter.”

One of the best tricks I’ve snagged for my editing repertoire is what I call the “50-page edit.” Every 50 pages, I print my entire manuscript, sit myself down with the hard copy and mark it up with my red pen. Aside from the obvious benefits of word polishing, this allows me to reacquaint myself with scenes I may have written as much as a year previously. I’m able to get a good idea of the overall feel and pacing of the story. Old subplots, snippets of foreshadowing, and minor characters that I may have otherwise forgotten are once more brought to the forefront of my memory. Plus, the week-long break from active writing is often a much-appreciated chance for rejuvenating my brain cells.

Finally, when I’ve typed those coveted words “THE END,” I buy myself a brand new ink cartridge and print the entire manuscript. As a rule, by this point, I’ve read most of the story as many as 10 times, and much of the rough verbiage and weak scenes have already been discarded. After reading through the complete draft two or three times, I pronounce it temporarily finished and, knowing it’s the best I’m capable of by myself, send it off to a few trusted critiquers.

Although this method slows down the first draft, I have to believe it speeds up the overall process. Instead of overwhelming myself at the end of the first draft with plot problems, dead-end subplots, and clunky prose, my completed first draft is a relatively clean, sharp product.

I’ve often read about people who focus on one problem in each edit. For example, in the first edit, they might ignore the plot problems and focus only on typos. But I’ve never been able to do this. If I spot a problem, no matter how small or large, I’ve never been able to pass it by. Therefore, I rarely focus on any one thing in particular in any given edit.

If I happen to stumble across the need for a major rewrite or clean-up (such as I just finished in Dreamlander), I won’t bother printing the manuscript. It’s much, much easier to cut and rewrite major portions of text on the computer. For fine-tuning, however, I prefer to look at a hardcopy. Once the story itself is free of bugs and I’m ready to proofread, word by word, for typos, I use a blue pen to mark beneath each word, ensuring my mind doesn’t read words that aren’t on the page.

After I’ve corrected any problems spotted by my critiquers, I generally toss the manuscript into the closet for a few months until I can gather some fresh perspective. I’ll edit it once or twice more, throw it back into the closet, wait a few months more, then edit again. Stories are never finished until they’ve been forced into the irrevocability of print. Some of my stories I expect to be editing until the day I die.

April 20, 2008
13 Comments
K.M. Weiland
Posted in dreamlander , Editing

Ideas swarm from the writer’s brain like bees from a hive. At any given moment, most of us have snippets of inspiration floating around in the netherworld between our conscious and unconscious. Some of those ideas we develop, some we abandon; some will turn out to be gold, some will be trash. We’ll probably never have time to write the vast majority of these ideas, which is why we must prune so carefully through our hive of our ideas, attempting to focus our attention on only the best.

For myself, personally, I know that no matter how many years I live, I will die with unwritten stories clattering around inside my brain. So, for now, I write like a madwoman. With so many stories to tell and so comparatively little time in which to tell them, I have no time to waste on repetition. I cannot tell the same story twice.

As much as that may sound like a no-brainer, it’s not. And it’s not as easy as it first appears either. All of us are confined to a certain degree by our own experiences and beliefs. Our writing is molded and directed by those beliefs. As a result, we find a boundless variety in the larger world of literature. You and I could conceive the same story idea, we could even follow the same outline, and the end result would be two entirely different stories. That’s a good thing.

What’s not such a good thing, however, is the extent to which these individual experiences and beliefs tend to funnel our stories into repetition. Anyone who’s written more than one story has probably noticed certain emerging themes/characters/settings/plot twists that tend to consistently crop up in his writing. Maybe you’ve even had to trash a story or two because it ended up sounding too much like something else you’d already written.

The more-or-less rigid formulae of most genres only contribute to the problem. Romance and mystery writers, for example, are definitely constrained by the general guidelines of their genres (the hero and heroine must always fall in love; the detective must always solve the murder). In fact, readers generally seek genre fiction because they know exactly what they’re getting. Unfortunately, as the plethora of excellent writers who have carved themselves a niche in genre writing could no doubt attest, finding ways to deliver an original story that follows predictable guidelines is a challenge to say the least.

Being the eclectic (and occasionally eccentric) person I am, I’ve never been able to restrict myself to one (or even two) genres. I’ve written everything from historical to fantasy to contemporary. All this genre-hopping may allow me more flexibility in my plots, but it hardly stops my own personalized redundancies from cropping up.

Without even realizing it, I’ve conjured up stories in far-flung settings with unique characters—only to discover déjà vu waiting for me on the next page. When I find a character, a setting, an interesting bit of back story, or a turn of phrase that I love, I invariably find myself unconsciously trying to recycle it. For example, in Behold the Dawn, my novel of the 3rd Crusade, I found myself writing a subplot for Warin the Templar, a minor character, which involved him becoming disillusioned with a beloved father figure (my antagonist). But as I delved a little deeper into this tantalizing little plot twist, realization suddenly smacked me over the head: this was the same relationship catalyst I’d used between the hero and the antagonist in A Man Called Outlaw. Whoops.

Tempting as it was to continue writing Warin’s little drama, I made myself pull back. After all, this father-figure story was one I’d explored in depth in another book. Why dilute this new story by dragging in old material? I’ve read too many authors who tend to recycle pet themes and situations. A line from the classic musical Singin’ in the Rain rings all too true sometimes: “If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.” It’s inevitable that we will repeat ourselves to some extent, but I have made it a conscious goal to strive toward originality in every one of my stories. And that’s hard.

Despite the wide range of ideas buzzing around in my head, it’s shocking how many of them resonate on familiar themes. And so I must prune my idea collection and force my brain to come up with original character after original character, original scenarios, original conflicts, original dialogue. It’s one thing to come up with one brilliant story, another thing entirely to be able to produce brilliance and originality on a consistent basis. I never want to write the same story twice. It’s a goal I’ll never be able to completely fulfill, but in striving to never repeat story scenarios, I’ve most definitely stretched muscles and forced myself to grow as a writer.

Even within the confines of genre, the possibilities for new and different stories rings as a challenge. Not only does originality promise to make a writer stand out from a crowd of trite and hackneyed stories, it also opens a whole new world of creativity. The idea that I might be able to write a completely different story every time I type “Chapter One” is heady stuff indeed. In a lifetime that can never encompass all the stories begging to be told, why waste time retelling the old ones?

April 13, 2008
4 Comments
K.M. Weiland
Posted in Originality , Theme

Amongst writers, one of the ever-quotable Mark Twain’s most quoted witticisms is the succinct bit of advice found in Pudd’nhead Wilson: “As to the Adjective: When in doubt, strike it out.”

Ah, adjectives! What writer hasn’t had a joyous fling or two with that most seductive of all parts of speech? In an effort to convey the brilliance and vividness of our prose, we hand out modifiers like candy at a Fourth of July parade. After all, it’s imperative that the reader understand that the barn in question is big, red, and rundown. That the kid on the playground is fighting wildly and ferociously. That the ship’s white canvas sails are billowing in the wind. That’s all need-to-know information, right?

Well, maybe. No one will argue that modifiers clarify mental images. At least, that’s the message we absorbed during all those grade school years of diagramming sentence after sentence chocked full of adjectives and adverbs. What we probably didn’t learn from all those years of diagramming is that modifiers are the sign of a lazy writer. Modifiers break the cardinal rule of storytelling: Show, don't tell.

In the three sentences mentioned above, never once did I show you what the barn looked like, or the kid who was fighting, or the ship’s sails. With the help of my modifiers, you probably got the general idea, but how much more vivid would those sentences have been had I taken the time to show you? What if I had allowed you to see the dust swirling in the shadows of the barn, the pigeons roosting in the patches of sunlight that spill through the holes in the roof? What if you had seen the kid on the playground smacking his fists into someone’s face, blood splattering from his opponent's nose? What if the wind had whipped the ship’s sails, filling them to bursting and churning the waves to froth at the prow?

See the difference? By deleting my modifiers, I was forced to dig deeper for specific nouns (pigeons, fists, nose, froth, prow) and vibrant verbs (swirling, roosting, spill, smacking, splattering, whipped, bursting, churning). These are words the reader can sink his teeth into. Suddenly, we can hear the flutter and coo of the pigeons in the rafters, we can feel the warmth of blood against our skin, we can smell the salt and seaweed of an ocean voyage.

But does this mean that the modifier is dead? Should we avoid them completely? Of course not. Modifiers, like all parts of speech, serve their purpose. Another quote from Twain:

“I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English—it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don’t let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them—then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.” ( Letter to D. W. Bowser, 3/20/1880)

Adjectives and adverbs exist in the English language for the sole purpose of refining it. We cannot show the reader every detail, both due to time and space constraints and the simple fact that some things—such as colors—are impossible to show on the written page without a bit of telling. When added to an already strong scene, modifiers can boost the description into precision and vibrancy.

Take, for instance, one of our example sentences. The new description of the ship doesn’t indicate that the sails are white canvas. I didn’t include those details because most readers will assume this to be the case unless told differently. But what if my ship belonged to the Dread Pirate Roberts who always lofted black sails when he went into battle? Suddenly, we have a vital detail that could only be conveyed with a modifier:

The wind whipped the ship’s ash-black sails, filling them to bursting and churning the waves to froth at the prow.

Notice that this sentence conveys everything the original version did (and more), yet it contains only one modifier.
Even when modifiers are necessary, economy is vital. It’s ridiculously easy to get carried with modifiers. When we write phrases about “the remarkably, incandescently, breathtakingly gorgeous woman,” we not only smother our reader in repetition, we also drown out the already strong modifier “gorgeous.”

So, in short, while we probably need not go to Mark Twain’s suggested extreme of extermination, our writing can only be better for a careful pruning of adjectives and adverbs. Modifiers do their job best when used sparingly.

April 6, 2008
11 Comments
K.M. Weiland
Posted in Grammar , Modifiers

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