My Re-Write Notes Are Rubbish

I was tired when I was last scribbling down changes to be made to Chapter One.

Tonight, as I re-wrote, I came across this note scrawled in the margins.

HOW ELSE WILL PEOPLE KNOW ABOUT IT?

I can only imagine I was reading the chapter and, in my weariness, was struck by an unexplained detail: Just how the hell were these people staying on the ground? What, did they think they could just walk around, their kinetic output reacting with other forces to create movement and nobody would notice?? I must explain this otherworldly force to the audience in detail!

I kid. I am pretty sure I know what I meant. But let this be a warning:

Make your re-write notes very clear, and don't write them when you're deliriously tired.

Or you might end up accidentally writing a physics textbook.

My Thirteen Year Old Self Hates Me.

When I was younger, I wanted to know how you found and kept some Inspiration. I'd lost mine, you see--it had wandered off somewhere, perhaps to hang around with Genius and the Muse in one big non-existence club--and I needed to know how to get it back. Because by George, nothing was going to get written until that inspiration was found, fed and tucked up warm in bed once more, ready for the following hard day's inspirationalising.

If I had the power to send a single .gif image back through time, I would address the following one to myself and send it back to the exact moment that I felt the most 'uninspired'.

I'd probably hate the quote at that age. It goes against everything that my thirteen-year-old self believed about what writing, art and creativity was. Plus, what would some dude from the future know about it, anyway? All this quote does is call me an amatuer in a roundabout way, and damn it, I'm thirteen! I know every goshdarn thing in the world, and screw anyone that says I don't, they're an old idiot.

But older me is persistent and wants to try and help thirteen-year-old me. If I could stress one thing to myself at that age, it would be that all this 'inspiration' that people talk about--especially the ones who seem to have an especially good and intuitive knack for their craft--is just another bit of fiction. Given the opportunity, I would do my damndest to try and convince young me that inspiration doesn't exist. It'd go something like this.

Young Mitch: you're feeling uninspired right now. You have decided that until your ideas begin flowing quickly and easily once more, you won't sit down and attempt to write. I know why you've made this decision. After all, nearly every writer you know or look up to talks about that one idea they had that ran away with itself. It was just so good that it practically realised itself on the page. So naturally, all you need to do is wait for that stroke of inspiration to hit you, and everything will be fine.

Except that, in a month or two when it still hasn't hit, you'll start to get a bit uneasy. Maybe, you'll think, you really are just an amateur. Maybe you're not cut out for this writing lark. If you were a better writer, surely inspiration would have taken hold of you by now and forced a story out of your imagination and on to a page.

But I have good news! They were wrong. All those people talking about inspiration? They're misleading you, albeit unintentionally. There is no inspiration that lasts from first sentence to final paragraph. There's no driving force that will churn out a rollicking narrative in a few weeks, tops. There's absolutely no way to stay 'in love' with your story while you're writing it. The things you're feeling right now--frustration, boredom, distraction--they're all normal. The hallmark of a writer is not that they don't feel all those things. It's that they do feel them, and carry on anyway.

The way you feel right now is how every writer feels. How about that? You thought you were waiting for the moment inspiration turned you in to one, but it turns out that you're already more like one than you could possibly have suspected.

I'd probably still ignore myself.

But all the same, maybe it'd quicken the realisation that was delayed by years of misconceptions about what writing is. If I'd known that 'inspiration' was more often an excuse not to write than any kind of legitimate writerly thing, I might have saved myself some time.

So from now on, whenever someone asks about inspiration, I'm going to tell them the most inspiring thing I can think of. I'm going to tell them that inspiration doesn't exist, and that how they feel right now is exactly how they'll feel after they sell their hundredth novel. Things get easier, you get better, but it never happens on its own.

Let go of the idea of inspiration, and become inspired at how you never needed it in the first place.

Re-Writes of Re-Writes

This will be the fourth time I've knuckled down to re-write the first chapter of my completed MS. Actually, 'completed'--as any writer who's tried their hand at such a thing as a novel will tell you--is not the right word. There's no such thing as complete, just degrees of incomplete.

So technically, right now I'm taking it down from the third degree of incomplete to the fourth.

This is how much I found in one casual sitting that needs immediate change.

Hey there, Chapter One. Fuck you, too! :-D

Those red marks are the things that have to change before I begin re-writing in earnest. This is only the pre-re-write, and it took me three hours.

It's not unusual. I gutted it the first two times. I may yet still do it once more. There's only a few things that you can take away from an experience like this as 'positive'.

1) The first chapter is the hardest. You could write it a thousand different ways and no one of them would be perfect.
2) Each time you do this, at least one or two things that legitimately and objectively did not work for the manuscript are gone. Eliminated. Forever cast in to the abyss. You will never be tortured by their inadequacy again, ever.
3)In a way, the hard part of the MS--the creative bit, where you have to be on the ball and come up with solid ideas--is done. You've build the sword, now you just need to sharpen it. It's not all that hard if you're even a little bit serious about making your story the best that it can be.

And now, it's 12:30am. That's another inextricable part of re-writing: late nights. I better get myself to bed before my 5:30am rise for work.

Then I'll come home, and make this chapter awesome. Even more awesome than it has ever been.

How exciting.

Writing Is A Tuft Of Cotton Caught In The Breath Of The Chilly Death Throes Of Summer

A not unusually vitriolic article was published over at The Economist on the topic of NaNoWriMo. It gripes about the 'American' idea that everyone has a story that, if only they could release, would make them a household name. To me, this seems like a gross misrepresentation of what NaNoWriMo is all about, but then again what would I know? I'm just another one of those frothing amatuers.

But here's what gets my goat. Chris Baty is criticised by suggesting that novel writing involves grunt work. You get a bunch of your friends together and talk and write and don't get up until you've written a whole bunch of words. AC from London is quick to indicate that most serious authors (not him personally, by any stretch! Just dedicated authors, you must understand.) would not agree.

Most writers who are dedicated to the craft would beg to disagree. The more apt metaphor is that used by a New York columnist in the 1940s: “It’s easy: you simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.”

Not to be a stick in the mud, but there are two pieces of writing insight on offer here. Chris Baty says that there's no way around sitting down and churning out the words, so you might as well do it. The Much More Credible* New York Columnist says, in so many words, 'Writing is Pain and Hyperbole'.

There is simply nothing of value in hearing someone use flowery, only loosely-based-in-reality terms to describe the art of writing. What does 'Sit at a typewriter, open your veins and bleed' mean to somebody who is trying to further their writing skills? To be blunt about it, it doesn't mean anything. It's as useless as a musician saying that all music is made of love, or a chef saying her primary ingredient is sweat. Perfectly fine as sweeping, pithy commentary on their own work. Completely useless for anyone that want to know the first thing about the craft.

Why do we insist on doing this to writing? And music, for that matter? And anything that involves a speck of creativity? What is so boring and lifeless about the wonderously complex, immersive and fulfilling task of writing a fantastic, saleable and engrossing novel that people feel the need to dress it up in mythical and nonsensical bullshit?

Writing is not blood and pain. Writing is having an idea, using your fingers to write it, modifying your idea over and over again, taking advice on how to modify that idea further, and finally letting a bunch of people read your idea. That's it. Don't talk to me about characters so perfect they write themselves. Don't talk about inspiration that came on a bolt from the blue. Don't tell me about what a conduit you are for the stroy that was already written by the shared experiences of the denizens of this curse called humanity. That doesn't mean anything. That's authors appealing to their own ego, and the ego of others foolish enough to buy in to such rubbish.

Chris Baty knows that. Anyone who's tried to write a novel with realistic expectations ought to know that, too.

As I am constantly reminded when I put these kinds of opinions out there, it's horses for courses. One person's experience is just as valid as the next. So, really, it's up to you. You can sit down with friends, bash out your words and get something done. Or you can sit down at the keyboard and try and figure out what it means to open your veins and bleed, and how that applies to whether or not you need to split this chapter in half or cut a paragraph or two of extraneous prose.

Best of luck to those who choose the second option.

Agentsearch™ Update: It's a No after all.

Well, I posted a little while ago about how my Agent Search was faring. At the time things were quite positive, but I've received the official rejection letters from the agencies in question.

Oh well. This is what all those authors are talking about when they say you need to be persistent.

Positive things to come from this:

1- It was my first ever submission to an agent ever, and it got beyond query and in to full MS review. That's got to be encouraging.
2- I can canvass more agents at once now that I'm not under review from a specific agency.
3- I get to fix a typo that was sitting RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE of my intitial query for the next set of agent eyes. That's going to make me feel approximately 2000% better about the next submissions.

Rather than disappear in to a wine bottle or declare myself more of a musician than a writer anyway, I plan on combing the manuscript this week and sending out a new round of queries on Monday morning.

Crisis Generation will live.