writing on writing – The Salon at Elfland

Entry 4, Carpe editorem, occide, part 3.

Now that I’ve confirmed what we already know, that writing is work worth doing; every correction, setback, and mistake makes you a better writer. We can talk about the tricky subject of taste.

I don’t like this is a delicate situation every writer will inevitably come up against. The way it’s handled can make or break a writer’s morale. Whether it comes from a friend, a random reader, or the worst critic of all—the self. Not liking something you’ve written can be disastrous.

I began editing P1 while embarking on a new career path. Unfortunately, I would abandon this career about a year and a half later, but during this period of my life I went through long stretches when I didn’t really do any editing or any serious work on P1. I worked on short stories at this time, although I also worked on Project Paisley’s second work, P2.

A stretch of alienation, as previously mentioned in entry 3, can put a lot of distance between the work and the writer. When I finally went back to P1 I found there was more to love than I had thought.

What I also learned is that there were plenty of things I didn’t like too.

This caused an…interesting crisis.

On one hand, P1 was almost exactly what I want in a fantasy epic. Political intrigue, sword fights, romance, an interesting magic system, etcetera. The problem was that all the cool stuff was tied up with a subpar b-plot that drifted into multiple directions and needed cutting or immediate tie-in.

I wish I could explain what this crisis looked like, but the only word that comes close is despair. I was extremely sad that I failed to bring this crucial plot material into the fold. It stuck out like a loose thread. Pulling it out unraveled parts of the story I wasn’t ready to give up. Leaving it there was a testament to my poor abilities.

After another month of wallowing, I eventually worked up the courage to take a look at my draft. It was still not great. But, this time around I noticed something. Attentive to the dislike I had for certain sections, I read them as a reader would and found myself thinking; “I would have done this” or “it makes more sense this way.”

I remember that it was a Saturday, sometime in Spring, during the COVID lockdowns when I could go outside during my at-home work day and get some sun. I resolved to fix what I didn’t like.

Armed with a blue pen and sheet of white computer paper, I made myself think about my work and how to make it better. I wrote notes, I crossed things out, I made sarcastic remarks to myself. I worked.

It was about this time when I began to see the value of planning. While my “pantsing” managed to hammer out an initial draft, I realized that it was that out-of-control creative process that tangled up the good ideas with the bad ideas. Somewhere between pantsing and planning, there is a happy middle.

When I write, I find that there is a gestational period between the initial idea and the beginning of the execution of that idea. It’s been as short as one evening and as long as several years. During this gestational period, I took up a practice I call wish-listing.

Over the next several days after that initial sit down, I added more ideas to my list. It’s only now that I understand what I was doing there. I was wish-listing.

As far as those needed edits go, I eventually settled on a plan and began to put it into action. I’ve completed the first section requiring some massive rewrites. The rest will involve re-arrangements, cuts, and most likely, rewrites.

No one wants to rewrite thousands of words, but ultimately to solve the problem I created, I had to rewrite it. In order to work on these rewrites, I set aside other works in order to focus my energy on P1.

It’s been increasingly difficult to “get in the mood” so to speak. Working a full-time job can really put a damper on the creative flow. The same happens when I spend long stretches away from my work. I have to spend a little time getting back into the characters. To get back in the groove I use a tactic similar to pre-editing (entry 3) that I call previewing.

During preview I jump back to sections before the area I want to work on. Sometimes, I read things out loud. I try to capture the rhythm and voice of the character I intend to write. Jumping ahead can also help the process. Sometimes I takes an entire Saturday to recapture the voice I want. Other times, it’s easy. Since I can only find time to write on the weekends, this gives me a very short window in which to work.

This was a source of extreme anxiety for me. I began to feel like I was giving up without the dignity of throwing in the towel. My life was consumed by my 8-5. When most people use the weekend to unwind from their work week, I felt like I was starting my work—the real work, the work I love. This made me miss out on relaxation, on the unwinding required for a healthy work-life balance.

Worse, when I did relax, I felt guilty. I felt like I was procrastinating, shirking my responsibilities.

Suddenly, spending an hour reading a novel felt like I was wasting time not working on mine. Hanging out with friends had to be cut short because I had to go home and get something out on a page. I didn’t go hiking or take a walk or do any of the things I loved doing before my full-time.

I taxed my mental health and my physical health. Sleeping issues that I had dealt with in the past suddenly reared up, worrying me more. Something was going to break, and that something was me.

To make a long story short, the break didn’t involve my writing. There are personal factors that went into the long and dark winter that was 2021. Writing was my haven, the place I could control. The only thing in the world that made sense to me. I muddled through 2021, fought my way through the spring of 2022.

It was at the height of this breakdown that I finally gave in. I had toyed with Catholicism for years by then. In April, just a few days after Easter, I caved too the only force that could soften my stubborn heart. Christ struck tinder in the ash heap of my soul and for the first time in a long time I stopped worrying.

Am I going to tell you that I no longer complete an elaborate night-time ritual in order to fend off the Sunday Scaries? No, because that would be a lie. Am I going to tell you that I’m not anxious about my writing, or work, my personal life, politics—no, because that would be a lie. But I don’t let them control me anymore. Not even my writing gets to rule my life. I have a different King now and he wants me to write because he likes stories and wants me to like them too.

During 2022, while I worked through my personal problems, I let myself enjoy writing again. I set the P1 rewrites aside and worked on a couple short stories. When I went back to P1 I fell in love with the story and found a deeper appreciation for the work that I put into P1.

I finished the largest chunk of those rewrites back in August of 2022. There’s still more work to do. But I’m taking a break from P1. This isn’t the last entry regarding P1 and Project Paisley. But it is for now.

Ultimately, what I hope you pick up here, dear reader, is that writing is hard. It’s hard work. Don’t let anyone tell you that it’s not. The effort and preparation that goes into writing is enormous. Editing is just as effortful and time consuming as writing itself—sometimes even more so. The emotional exertion can be just as detrimental to your heart, mind, and body as the physical toll of working that shitty retail job you hate.

But just like that job you hate; you have to do the work. The key to staying even-keeled is remembering the job you love is supposed to be done because you love it. You were asked to pick up this cross because the Man we nailed to it knows you can carry it.

Writing demands work, but it should bring joy.

Above: The Marriage at Cana. Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld (March 1794 – May 1872). German. Oil on Canvas. House at Hamburger Kunsthalle.

The following contains profanity.

Let me start this off by stating that I have no problem with curse words. I curse—too much, actually—but I’m not interested in shaming anyone. I am interested in the efficacy of profanity as it pertains to writing.

A long time ago I picked up a book on writing prose. I expected it to be a quick read, it promised a step-by-step guide to writing better, more dynamic prose. What I didn’t expect was for the author to immediately call me a bitch and then tell me to put the book down if I don’t like cursing because the author does a lot of it.

Okay, whatever. I said to myself. I got about a chapter in and realized that almost every paragraph had a swear word in it.

I put the book aside and haven’t picked it up since. I began to question if this was someone I wanted to learn prose from. Not because I don’t like cursing—I don’t, to be honest, but it’s habituated in the culture and I’m perfectly guilty of using cuss words so I’m not judging the author for using vulgarity.

I’m judging the author for writing prose so damn onerous it became tedious to read.

I don’t remember where I heard it, but I picked up a piece of advice regarding curse words and writing. The advice went something like this: “save it for when you really mean it.” I took that advice to heart. There is cursing in my writing, I’ve got no problem dropping a “damn” or a “hell.” Sometimes I even exercise my creative liberty with a “damnation” or a “hellfire.” But before I drop anything harder, I think about the impact of that word.

Words are powerful. There is a reason why some phrases, some sentences, some stories stay with us. Words make an impact, for good or ill.

The Harry Potter series is filled with colorful aphorisms: “Merlin’s beard,” “Merlin’s pants,” “galloping gorgons” the offensive “mudblood.” But the most famous, most powerful cuss said in the Harry Potter series is said by the least likely person, an all-caps piece of formatting art:

“NOT MY DAUGHTER, YOU BITCH!”
-Molly Weasley, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

This was absolutely thrilling to my teenage self. It felt very grown up, very earned. Molly Weasley said what we were all thinking. We’d been on this journey with Harry and friends and Bellatrix Lestrange was one of the villains most in need of some violent correction.

There’s a lot of power behind the fact that this is really the only time a true “muggle-world” curse is used in the Harry Potter books. By saving this pejorative until the end, by having it said by a character no one would expect, by using it on someone who unmistakably deserved it, Rowling punches the word home. It does not become trite and tired, it remains forceful, meaningful. Bellatrix Lestrange was a bitch, she died like a bitch, and Mrs. Weasley is a bad bitch.

From my own writing, I wrote a character who was disgraced royalty. This character hid the effect of that shame by acting disgracefully, using curses, blasphemies, and unbecoming language to make it seem that the shame was a choice, not something forced upon them. The character’s business partner never used foul language and often chastised the other character for their uncouth behavior. Character B was well aware of Character A’s past and knew them to better than a common thug.

To get this theme across, I put a lot curse words in A’s mouth and at some point, during the editing process I heard that piece of advice from above. Suddenly all the piled up “fucks” and “shits” started to become repetitive. Annoying even, like clutter. My prose was overburdened with words that began to lose any semblance of meaning.

A word loses its strength with every repetition. Psychology calls this phenomenon semantic satiation, where a word repeated temporarily loses all meaning. After the fifth of sixth curse in as many (or fewer) paragraphs, I found the curses to be like dirty laundry piled up in the corners of a room. Annoying, nagging, in need of a good wash.

So, I took up the task to remove all but the most necessary swears. I found that this exercise was ultimately better for the work. I came up with charming little ejaculations not unlike Rowling’s “Merlin’s beard” that added cultural flavor to the world. Character B still reacted to these phrases with offense, but I peeled away the meaningless white noise that “fuck” had taken on in the story.

As a bonus, when I do whip out the above curse, it was suddenly and powerfully steeped in meaning. The scene is an airing of grievances. Character A accuses B of wanting to “fuck” and it’s meant in all the dirty, grimy, objectification that word entails. Greatly insulted, B turns the phrase around. This is the only time B curses in the story and it shocks A into silence.

All this is said with a big heaping spoon of it’s my opinion. Still, I think “save it for when you really mean it, when it will be most powerful” is pretty good advice. Perhaps if we all took this advice to heart, our interactions with each other would be less cluttered with nonsense expletives turned filler.

Take the advice, or don’t, fuck if I care.

Above: Illustration of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, the Inferno Canto XV. Gustave Doré (January 1832 – January 1883). French. Engraved Print.

Don’t forget to check out the crowdfunding pages for Anvil Issue 2, where my short story, Afflicted: Nourritures les Ver, will be published! For more info, click here.

Tag: writing on writing

Adventures in Storytelling 5

Entry 4, Carpe editorem, occide, part 3.

Four Letter Words

The following contains profanity.