Breathing Room

I've noticed an annoying thing about my writing in the last few weeks. I guess that how we write--especially in our rough drafts--is related to who we are, and this is sometimes more evident than we wish. I'll tell you what I'm talking about, but first we're going to talk about movie rules.

We all know one of those people who have movie rules. Sometimes they're unspoken, and sometimes they're the focus of passionate arguments about what that person will NOT go to see with you. The rule may be religious (at least one person I know says they won't go to see Rated-R movies on that basis). It may be based on rabid dislike (I don't care how good Inception is, I can not sit in a theater staring at Leonardo di Caprio and be expected to enjoy it or to take him at all seriously. I just keep thinking about how much he looks like a human weasel.). It may be based on lack of desensitization (I didn't watch a lot of TV as a kid, and still don't, and I'm not desensitized to high levels of graphic violence, so I don't enjoy it in movies).

Yes, I am one of Those People With Movie Rules. Most of the above don't even have a chance to seep into my writing. I don't have a problem with graphic violence when it's on the page, just when it's up on a 22-foot-tall sheet of vinyl in front of my face. I guess I could write Leonardo into something, but about the only way it'd fit is if I was writing a Redwall novel rip-off, and I love Brian Jacques' books too much for that.

But the one movie rule that has proved the most insidious is this: I can't stand too much suspense.

I guess that has to do with a mixture of my desensitization problem and my empathy problem. I can't watch movies where people are being humiliated or tortured; they get me honestly upset, and I don't enjoy the sensation. I guess if I found it easier to distance myself, this wouldn't be a problem.

So how does it seep into my writing? I give my characters too much breathing room.

This was brought up by my first reader when I handed him a new story last week, and he noted that I backed off of the rising tension right before the climax. Then I looked at my older story--the one I just got a rejection for--and I do the same damn thing! It's like characters I empathize with being put in tense situations makes me uncomfortable, so I give them a breather. Crazy talk. Who would have thought such a thing could come out, unconsciously, in my writing?

And, of course, it's very harmful to any story to take a big breather unless you're building a stairway of tension--a little tension, then a short break. More tension, short break. Lots of tension, calm-before-storm. Incredible tension, climax! I wasn't doing that, though. I was interrupting the smooth rise of tension in the story just when it should have been at its most intense. To quote the awesome Blake Snyder in his fantastic script-writing book Save the Cat, I was breaking the tension just when "the bad guys close in".

Well, the good news is that now I'm going to get a lot more conscious of this in re-writes and revisions. Maybe someone else will read this and get more conscious about rising tension in their stories. And maybe my own stories will start to drive a little more and meander a little less.

At least, my beta readers sure hope so...

It's the Only Way to Be Sure.

People who've read my earlier posts know that in my other life (dare I call it the "real world"), I paint miniature figures. Yes, I'm one of those. I also teach other people to paint them, and since I took up my writing again I've begun to notice all sorts of parallels between writing and painting. Of course, I'm not the only one to notice them--I just finished The Sun, the Moon and the Stars by Steven Brust, and most of that book is about writing except it's disguised as being about painting. Or maybe it's that painting is similar to writing. Or maybe that all creative vibes use the same energy. Or maybe we're just all desperate to draw parallels...but I digress.

There's such a thing in painting called "over-working" your figure (or canvas). In canvas painting it's the tendency to take your fresh image and destroy it by pushing too far--not stopping when the painting is at an optimal point. It can be the same in miniature painting, people seeking a perfection that they can't achieve. But I'll also use it to describe people who paint the same figure over and over (and over!). They don't learn much because there's only so much that any given model can teach you, no matter how many different ways you paint it.

It's something I often see in beginners, because they're improving so quickly. They'll paint the body and then they'll work on the hair and they'll think "Wow! I learned something on this hair, and the body looks so messy now!" Or it'll be someone who has an image in their head of what the model should be, and they'll sit there, stubborn, and work it over and over and over. Or worse yet, they'll strip the paint off of the model and start over, or buy another copy of that one model and start over. The infamous example was a friend who, every year, brought me a different version of the same dang mermaid sculpt to critique. He'd painted them in slightly different colors, but his technique hadn't improved a bit. He was trapped in that one sculpt. I think I might have looked at him when he brought me the third one and said, "Seriously...if I see one more version of this mermaid from you, I am going to puke. Paint. Something. Else."

So now...go back up and read everything I just wrote about miniature painting and substitute writing. :)

When it comes down to it, we always want things to be as good as possible before we expose them to the world. But when all we do is re-work the same thing, we're trapped. So that brings me to my story.

I recently got a rejection from a top magazine on a story I'd workshopped at Viable Paradise and spent countless hours on revising and re-writing and tweaking. Being me (perfectionistic little git) I immediately hyper-analyzed this rejection note. It seemed, in fact, to expose all of the dire weaknesses of the story to me (add "neurotic" to my list of sins). My first thought was "I could re-write the beginning", but it wasn't like I hadn't done that before. I was at the point where, in painting, we advise, "Step awaaaaay from the mini"--that point where we see the crazy in someone's eye and know that if we don't get them to stand up and walk away they're going to hurl the thing at someone across the table, or at the annoying kid in the game store, or run back into the casting room in search of the closest melting pot. I knew I was casting longing gazes at the gas stove for the hard copy, and wondering if "/nuke" might work on my laptop. It was, of course, that I had just stared at the damn thing too long. I couldn't tell a hole in the plot from a hole in the wall at this point.

Which is when I remembered the brilliant advice. I think I read it first on Uncle Jim's thread on the Absolute Write novel board. Someone had been howling about losing their writing with their hard drive, and he replied (paraphrasing), "Re-write it from memory. You'll find it will be even better than the original."

Well, I was a neurotic perfectionistic rejected writer, and I was suddenly into writing dangerously. Hell, I thought, I could completely delete and re-write the whole first section! Maybe the second section too! I know...maybe it will be a completely different story when I finish!!

Wait...wasn't this what I told my mini-painting students too?

Anyhow, the point is, at the end I realized that I was trapped. I had over-worked the heck out of that first section and I was still trying to beat it into shape, even though I could sense that it was weak and I'd never been completely happy with it. The solution was to highlight it all, hit "delete" and start absolutely fresh, writing from memory, without obligation to use any of the prior writing. And, weirdly, once I made that decision, my head filled with new ideas and great ways I could trim and re-shape the rest of the story to go with that fresh new beginning section.

So what I learned this week is that Steven Brust was right, and that Uncle Jim was right, and that I should not cling to already over-worked writing just because I'd previously done everything but sacrifice a chicken over it. Sometimes you just need to nuke it from orbit.

AFB

(p.s. What I didn't learn this week that I was hopelessly perfectionistic and neurotic. Sorry. Knew that already.)