Method Monday–Ruthless Editing

Red ink is a good thing

Method Monday is a weekly entry about my writing process. Maybe you’ll find something in my process that’s worth adopting. Maybe you have ideas for me. This week, I discuss editing my work ruthlessly. Enjoy.

In my opinion, editing is the most important part of the writing process. No matter how inspired a first draft feels, I know it cannot be my final draft. When I write a first draft, I try to let it flow as freely as possible. It’s more important to me that I get the imagery or ideas on paper than form or mechanics. Those arrive during editing. Something I’ve been working on when editing, and feel may be more important than the editing methodology I use, is ruthlessness.

Being ruthless with one’s own work isn’t always easy. Sometimes I become emotionally attached to specific words, phrases, or lines. I’ve learned the hard way that hanging on to these favorite bits can be fatal to the poem as a whole. Those lines may be great, but insisting that they remain in a poem in which they don’t belong is foolish. Consciously knowing this doesn’t make them easy to cut, but I’m learning. One thing I’ve done to help myself cut more efficiently is create a slush pile, if you will. In this way, I can focus on bettering the current poem without abandoning these lines completely; they may be appropriate for other works.

You may wonder, how do I know what to cut? The easiest answer I can offer is when in doubt, cut. If you read a poetry anthology (what we may loosely refer to as “great poetry”), notice that great poets do not waste words. Everything serves the greater purpose of the poem. That’s what I want for my poetry. Every word should be the exact word it needs to be, and accomplishing this goal requires ruthless cutting.

In addition to cutting what doesn’t belong, I must make what remains the best version of itself. Young Randall thought only weak writers used thesauruses. Now I know realize that I don’t know every synonym, and I know longer see using this resource as an attack on my creativity or originality. Whether or not I use a thesaurus, the first word I choose to express an idea may not be the best word.

Though it may deviate from the practical advice presented to cut and replace when appropriate, it’s also important psychologically that I edit with a red ink pen. Public schools may frown on red ink and its supposed impact on student self-esteem, but I’m talking about ruthless self-examination. I need to see it. If there isn’t enough red on my draft copy to induce temporary shock, then I know I’m being easy on myself. If I’m easy on myself, then I’m going to present a lesser poem as the finished product. That is unacceptable.

It’s time to become ruthless, time to break out the scissors and red ink.

By the way, if you’re curious about the poem in the image, it’s here.

Write Drunk. Edit Sober.

An alcoholic is someone you don’t like who drinks as much as you do.
Dylan Thomas (1914 – 1953) (quotationspage.com)

Dylan Thomas having a beer.

Alcohol has long held a (honorable?) place in literary culture. Sometimes it takes over. The early deaths of Truman Capote, Dylan Thomas, and many other writers can attest to that. But if you are one who can drink in moderation, go for it. Pour yourself a double and get to work on that novel, short story, essay, or poem.

Alcohol is a social lubricant for me. When I drink, I talk and talk and talk. When I drink around paper, my pen does the talking. A couple glasses of Scotch (neat, please, Mr. Bartender) or a Gin Martini (Beefeater, dry) has helped me through a few blocks.

The greatest risk when drinking while writing, for me at least, is that I lose exactness. My ideas flow as freely as the booze, but my specifics falter. I make careless grammatical errors. I present ideas out of order. I ramble.

That’s why it’s important to edit sober. Take out that draft the next day, if you aren’t too hungover, and comb through it. After you correct the mechanics, you may well have a fine draft. This is simple advice really, but I know several writers who indulge in writing drunk then fail to sober up for the editing process.

Here’s to the brewers and distillers and to good writing! Cheers!

Music While Writing/Editing?

Do you listen to music while you write? While you edit?

I don’t while writing, unless I’m writing in a public place where it just happens to be playing. When I write at home, I either sit musicless on the front porch or at my writing desk. The porch and desk are environments where music distracts me. I start to sing along or dance or lose my words in the lyrics. There’s something different about writing in public, though. I’m one of those writers who sits in corner of the cafe and scribbles notes about the people around me. In that setting, music is part of the experience, along with voices and the espresso machine.

But music doesn’t usually distract me while editing, no matter the setting. Right now, I’m editing an essay for my Advanced Comp II class and enjoying the Beastie Boys’ Ill Communication album (on vinyl, of course). Am I rapping along? Some. Am I dancing in my chair? Definitely. Is the badass music video for “Sabotage” playing in my mind’s eye? Hell yeah! But I don’t feel distracted like I would if I were composing a first draft with these beats. I feel like the music gives me a sort of mental release that frees up my mind to edit better.

Well, I’m going to go flip the LP and get back to my essay.

Editing: Judged by a Jury of Your Peers

Sorry for the infrequency of blog posts recently. My work schedule has been rather difficult.

If you’ve ever taken a university writing course, you’ve probably gone through a peer review process for a writing assignment. You know the drill: get into groups of 3 or 4, pass your papers around, and listen to people who can’t write a complete sentence speculate about the placement of commas. No substantive commentary. (Not that comma placement isn’t important.) That was often my experience before I got into upper-division English courses. That’s when I stopped viewing it as a chore and made it an integral part of my writing process. I finally had actual peers reviewing my writing. No matter what type of writing you are doing, having your peers review it is beneficial.

Peer review is more than just editing. Editing generally focuses on correcting a work to meet grammatical standards. I don’t want to downplay editing; it’s very important. When I say peer review, I mean your peers. If you are a university student majoring in biology, an English major may well be willing to help you with editing (and probably can be easily persuaded with cash or food), but a fellow biology major (or professor) should be consulted for review of your content and the specific rules of biology papers. In non-academic writing, a poet should seek other poets, a novelist other novelists, and so on.

I’m not suggesting that writers of different types of material cannot present good opinions that will help you, but there is a certain intrinsic value in what your peers can offer. I often write poetry, and though I frequently share my writing with prose writers (and non-writers), I get something else from poets. My fellow poets understand aspects of poetry differently, things that go beyond an academic understanding of the craft. They understand poetry from the inside, if you will. I have a few poet friends whom I can email and get detailed analysis, and I also participate in One Shot Wednesday to gain perspective from a wider poetry community.

Happy writing, friends. Cheers

Perspective–Writing in First-Person

Writing in first-person is about more than just saying ‘I’ instead of ‘he’ or ‘she.’ Seeing a story or poem through a particular character’s eyes both conveys the story itself and tells us a lot about the character. We connect with first-person narratives because they, when written well, are so “real” and personal, but first-person is difficult to write convincingly.

J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye is one of the best first-person narratives. Salinger does a remarkable job of maintaining Holden Caulfield’s voice throughout the novel. This is the biggest trap about writing in this perspective. It’s easy to let the character’s voice merge with the author’s voice. Even if the character is similar to the author, the character is a character and should consistently speak from his/her own perspective. Salinger’s ability to stay in the character allows the novel to become what it is, an exploration of the character, not just a recounting of events in the character’s life.

Some argue that Salinger had such ease with Caulfield because they were similar, but often our character needs to be someone quite different than our selves. I wrote a story a couple years ago from the point of view of a factory worker. I’ve never worked in a factory. I concentrated on my observations of my dad and his friends, many of whom have worked in that environment all their lives. My character had things to say about work ethic, unions, trade policy, and other issues that I can only talk about theoretically. Unfortunately, I did let my character sometimes sound more like an English major than blue collar man.

One novel that makes this mistake of the author’s voice co-opting the character’s is C.S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces. Many of Lewis’ works are remarkable, and the mistakes he makes in this novel show how difficult writing first-person can be. His protagonist is Orual, a Greek princess, but the voice he uses is never convincingly feminine; it’s his overtly masculine voice poorly masked with female pronouns and experiences.

Another problem with Lewis’ novel that occurs in a lot of first-person writing is that the narration and descriptions sound like the descriptions of a narrator, not a character’s perception. Sure, there are reactions from the character to what is happening, but the format of “this is what happened; this is what I think about it” doesn’t work well in this case.

Another great first-person work is Roddy Doyle’s A Star Called Henry which shows us how a (potentially) dishonest narrator can develop a story. The novel is set during the Irish Revolution and is told by Henry, a grandiose, self-deceived character who makes himself out to have nearly super-human strength. Though the context is the Irish Revolution, the real topic is self-formed mythology. Henry develops a mythology about who he is and also a mythology about what it is to be Irish in a post-colonial context.

What we learn from these books is that the most important aspect of first-person writing is consistency. We must remain consistent to the character we’ve created. Everything else is just writing.

Writing: You smell that?

Earlier this week, I posted an entry about using sound (particularly onomatopoeia) in your writing to help the reader more fully connect with your work. Now it’s time to talk about smell. I guess this means I’m writing a freakin’ series now, doesn’t it?

I previously talked about sound being neglected in writing, but I think smell is even more so. Considering that smell is the sense most strongly linked to memory, this is a huge missed opportunity for writers.

So how do we describe smell?

Don’t be too general. If something has an unpleasant odor, don’t tell me it “stinks.” Describe to me why it stinks. Use concrete adjectives and figurative language. By concrete adjectives, I mean words like sweet, sour, and so on. Ex: Cutting open the grapefruit immediately released a rush of sweet, tangy odors, and a citrusy tinge that made my eyes water. Figurative language often includes the use of simile and metaphor to describe how something smells. Many a restaurant trash dumpster, for instance, smells overwhelmingly like soured milk. (I’ve worked in my share of restaurants.)

Figurative language doesn’t have to describe the smell so literally, as I’ve done with my dumpster example. It is, after all, figurative language. Ex: Lemonade smells like the summer evenings of my youth, sitting on my grandfather’s porch and watching the sun disappear behind the distant cotton fields.

If you don’t have space to describe it further (i.e. you’re writing a poem in a particular form), at least use a stronger adjective. If it smells really bad, “reek” is often a better choice than “stinks.”

In my post about sound, I suggested sitting somewhere with your eyes closed for a few minutes then writing about the sounds you heard. A similar exercise may be beneficial with smell.

Well, I’ve got to get back to watching the kids, so smell ya later!

Writing: Onomatopoeia

The ticktickticktick staccato of sleet on my roof last night got me thinking about sounds in writing. Writing that appeals to all five senses has potential to reach readers better than single-sense writing in many cases. I’m not saying there isn’t a place for works that focus on one or two senses or three senses, but don’t miss out on the full array of senses just out of laziness.

Using multiple senses is not just for creative writing. Obviously journalism uses multiple senses, but it can also be useful in academic writing (when appropriate in your discipline).

So what is onomatopoeia? Other than a word I always have to look up the spelling for, an onomatopoeia is a word that represents a sound. There’s a large vocabulary of standard onomatopoeia that we share in our culture. Just pick up a children’s book, and you’ll see them–chirp chirp ruff ruff moo moo ribbit ribbit. Sometimes these are good enough. Since they are parts of a shared vocabulary, we can often overlook that they aren’t always accurate representations for sound and mentally produce the correct sound.

But sometimes the best course is to create your own onomatopoeia. It doesn’t have to be complicated. The one in the first sentence of this post isn’t. I just said that sleet makes a tick sound on my roof. It’s a quick, assertive, repeated sound, so I put a few ticks together and added that it had a staccato rhythm.

Though it isn’t necessarily complicated, it does help to practice. I like to sit somewhere with my eyes closed for a few minutes then write about all the sounds I heard.

The following is an excerpt from a poem I wrote called “Louis Armstrong on His Bicycle.” The poem describes a homeless man who is sitting on bicycle outside of an Italian restaurant and starts “singing” along with the live Jazz music that can be heard on the patio.

Live Jazz pours out of the Italian place
onto the patio
where he now leans his bike.
The smoky beat fills him.
He belts out
in that throatysmooth voice
Ba ba da de doo
Ba ba da de dum

Have fun exploring the use of sounds in your writing. And we’ll all practice spelling onomatopoeia, in case it shows up in a New York Times crossword puzzle.

Writing: Equipment Matters

In addition to writing great poetry, mediocre prose, and clever essays, I play tennis. Skill is the most important need when playing the sport, of course, and this is built through a combination of natural talent and practice, but equipment is also important. Different playing styles benefit from different types of racquets and different types of and tensions of strings. I’m an all court player, which means I use a mix of groundstrokes from the baseline and serving and volleying. I was formerly more of a serve and volleyer, but more or less shredding the cartilage in my knees has made that style more difficult. I digress. My playing style requires a racquet that has good touch and doesn’t necessarily produce a lot of power (I do well enough at knocking the hell out of the ball), so I prefer the Prince Precision series of racquets, and I use synthetic gut strings (real cat gut strings don’t fit my vegetarian ethics very well) to enhance my feel of the ball further.

As vain as it sounds, the right equipment is important for writing, too. I cannot convince my mind to write a decent first draft on a computer (with the exceptions of academic essays and blog posts). When I write poetry, I have to write it out by hand, then I type it into my computer for editing and storage. For prose, I prefer a typewriter. Imagine your cliché image of an author with long beard, cigarettes, small desk, manual typewriter, and so on; that’s me, though my beard isn’t too long, yet and only contains a few grey hairs.

I carry a (vinyl-covered) Moleskin notebook with me everywhere I go for writing poetry and jotting down notes for other writing projects. It’s a perfect fit for me. It slides right into my coat pocket or rear jeans pocket. I also carry a black Pilot G2 ink pen because I like both the feel of writing with it and the look of the words on the page. Portability is essential. If I get an idea or have a moment of inspiration, I can take out my notebook and immediately write down my thoughts.

My four typewriters usually stay at home. I have a manual black Royal typewriter (1920s?), a faded lime green Olympia portable manual typewriter (1950s?), an Underwood early electric typewriter (1960s?) that’s enormous and doesn’t fully functions, and a 1980s electric typewriter (can’t remember the brand right now). There’s something wonderful, mystical even, about writing on these typewriters. And there’s the music of writing–tickity tickity tick ding schwoop tickity tickity tick ding…

I have nothing against computers. They definitely make the editing process and storage easier, but they just don’t have the same feel when writing.

What is your preferred writing equipment?

Editing: Do it Backwards

Ever feel like even the most pleasurable activity falls into a rut? You’re still successful, perhaps. You still like what you’re doing; your audience still enjoys the end product, but you know it could be better. Maybe it’s time to change positions. I’m talking about the quality of your writing, of course. and about modifying your editing process.

Sometimes I get caught up in what I’ve written and find it impossible to edit sufficiently. I try as hard as I can to read it with a critical eye, red pen in hand, looking for those slight errors that separate good writing from great writing. But I get stuck. The problem is that my mind tricks me into reading what I thought I wrote, or intended to write, instead of what is actually on paper. One technique I’ve found effective at overcoming this issue is reading what I’ve written backwards.

I don’t mean read each sentence backwards. Backwards sentence each read mean don’t I. <— Worthless idea.

What I like to do is start editing at the last paragraph and work one paragraph at a time back to the beginning. This allows me to break myself away from the plot as a whole and look at each paragraph, each sentence, each word on its own.

It’s nice to write a great story or essay, but if you want it to be its best, you must pay attention to these details. Look at the paragraph to make sure it accomplishes its task. A well-written paragraph should have a certain level of independence. Likewise a well-written sentence has a job to complete within the paragraph. I think you see where this is going. Every word is important.

Reading your work backwards is only one editing technique, but I hope that looking at things from this perspective helps.

Cheers.

On Inspiration

Haven’t heard from the 9 muses lately? That’s not a big surprise, is it? Greek mythological figures are notoriously unreliable. Do you really need them to write? Writing definitely feels easier and better when I feel inspired. There’s something inexplicable, mystical even, about being arrested by inspiration, by a glimpse of an idea that makes me pull the car to the side of the road and scribble in my notebook.

But it doesn’t always happen like that. Sometimes writing is hard work. Here are a few ideas to get you through those times when you can’t find inspiration:

1. Keep Writing. Giving up won’t get you anywhere. If you don’t continue writing regularly, despite this obstacle, you’ll lose both the mechanics of your craft and the ability to feel inspiration when it does resurface. When I don’t feel it, I switch from trying to force poetry to writing observations in prose. It keeps my pen moving and my eyes open.
A lot of my poetry is observational anyway, so it helps me to sit in a cafe or mall or park or wherever and simply jot things down. I might not have the perfect metaphor that I would so easily find under inspiration, but writing done during spells like this makes me a better writer. Sometimes what I collect turns into poetry later. I revisit my notes and find myself mentally returned to when I wrote them, and that’s when I can shape them into verse and add all those fancy rhetorical devices like simile, metaphor, alliteration, etc.
Lurking in the corner of the cafe and writing about people not your style? Try structured exercises. The internet has no shortage of writing prompts. Here are some from Writer’s Digest. Even though most of my poems are free verse, assigning myself forms is often helpful. Another way to play with the form idea is to assign yourself a different genre of writing. I write mostly poetry, so I may assign myself fiction or non-fiction prose writing.

2. Give Yourself a Deadline. Self-discipline is not my greatest virtue, so applying external pressure helps me a lot. Maybe your deadline can be self-imposed. I sometimes commit to a contest or submission deadline and, instead of sending something that’s already ready, I tell myself that I must write a new poem, story, or essay. One way to avoid giving in to submitting a previously completed work is to choose a contest/submission that is topical.
Another method of deadline setting I employ is telling my editing friends that I will send them something by a certain date or at a certain interval. This can be easy to skirt with excuses, so choose friends who won’t let you get away with that.

3. Read. If you care at all about you’re writing, you should read a lot anyway, but I think reading is especially important when you feel uninspired. I try to read a mix of books that includes authors who write in a similar style as I and authors who write quite differently. Challenge yourself.

4. Edit. Your work and others’ work. I have a few friends who share writing with each other. It makes us all better, I think. In regard to editing my own writing, I find that lack of inspiration can actually benefit the editing process. It allows me to look at the mechanics of writing. Even if you write free verse or prose, there are mechanics to consider. Your poetry may not have set rules for lines and stanzas, but it does have a rhythm that can be worked on with or without inspiration.

I hope these thoughts are helpful. Perhaps I’ll have more to say on the matter another time.