Fall's Back

The calendar has come back around to fall, with its various seasonal trappings. The parade of holidays is underway, the days are shortening, the weather is changing. Here in northern California, the past month has brought a shift to less chance of sudden heat waves and more of sudden rain.

November has several traditional associations, including US elections, so I'll remind you to vote if there's an election happening where you live. I'll also remind you that any writers you know might become especially weird next month, due to November's connection with extreme writing.

If you're reading my blog, you're probably aware of National Novel Writing Month, an annual event that encourages writing a 50,000-word novel during the 30 days of November, for the joy, challenge, and community of it. You may not have heard that the nonprofit organization which provided the infrastructure for NaNoWriMo shut down earlier this year. Despite this unfortunate development, the spirit of NaNo survives. Plenty of writers will still push themselves to meet big goals in November, either solo or as part of a group, whether or not they're specifically counting to 50k. (One place to find resources and an encouraging newsletter is NaNo 2.0, a more modest endeavor launched by NaNo founder Chris Baty and other longtime volunteers.)

The spirit of NaNo always calls to me in the fall, and while I'm not setting myself any word count goals, I will be using November as motivation for increased writing progress. In my last update, two months ago, I shared photographic evidence of the planning I was doing to sort out structural changes and make decisions before moving ahead. The planning stage dragged on for longer than I intended, and I'm ready to get back into serious writing mode.

Show, Don't Tell

On most of my writing days, I don't have anything to show for myself in a literal sense: There's nothing visually distinct about my progress beyond a gradual amassing of words typed. But occasionally I reach a stage where it's productive to get away from my keyboard and screen in order to write nearly indecipherable notes on index cards or sticky notes or other convenient rectangles. And then you get photos!

I started writing this draft a year ago, which is what it is. And hey, look, in that post I foreshadowed that "Once I reach a certain point, I may need to stop writing for a little while and make decisions about some elements that remain vague." So I guess that's what I'm doing now, as well as determining structural changes and mapping out what's ahead.

First I wanted to reread what I've written so far. I also wanted to somehow see the entire work-in-progress at once. My solution for this was to print the manuscript with 16 pages on each piece of paper. That's too small to comfortably make out the text, but I reread on screen while following along on paper to notice things like how much space each scene takes up. I jotted down a lot of big picture notes, and the scale kept me from getting bogged down in individual sentences.

Sticking Points

A few weeks ago, to get myself unstuck on novel planning, I turned to sticky notes.

While I do all my writing by typing into a computer, for the planning stages, I often apply pen to paper. Usually small pieces of paper, like index cards, or small areas of paper, like the margins of a printed draft. My handwriting is barely legible, even to myself, and it's even worse when tiny, but I find a lot of value in scribbling down thoughts, despite the effort required in interpreting them later. Switching away from the keyboard into a mode with something physical to see and touch helps me generate new ideas.

The ideas I'm trying to generate right now involve that novel I've been working on that is still more like piles of sticks than a bridge. I'm in the process of figuring out all the questions about the plot and characters that remain unclear to me, and there are more of those left than I'd like.

As one example, a major part of the story I decided on long ago is that one character is involved in wrongdoing, and then at a particular turning point, another character catches them. But I have yet to construct the exact scenario in which the catching plausibly happens, in a way that couldn't have just as easily happened far earlier in the story. And ideally I want this event to be a result of some events in another plotline, or at the very least not include any details incompatible with those other events. So there are many sub-questions for each of the big questions, and it's a lot to get my brain around. I hoped that unloading some of my brain onto paper might help.

Last fall, I had great success working out the basic plot for this novel by lining up index cards on my rug. This time, I felt like trying a different, more freeform medium, so I arranged sticky notes on poster boards, some in orderly columns and others stacked up haphazardly.

Getting Scary Real

It's the scariest day of the year: The last day to get my novel plans settled before I have to start writing on November 1! (Doesn't that imply tomorrow is scarier than today? Whatever, I have more urgent details to focus on.) Yes, as I teased a month ago, I'm going to use National Novel Writing Month as a reason to stop planning and start drafting this novel (again).

I'll be working on the same project from NaNoWriMo 2021, but my goals are different this time. Last year, most of my ideas about the characters and story were nebulous, and in my pursuit of 50,000 words, I churned out a whole slew of scenes, experimental character sketches, and authorial musings about possible plot directions. It was a fantastically creative month that gave me a solid foundation for working out what I actually want this novel to be. None of that NaNo material (except maybe snippets here and there) is directly usable for the next draft, but it was all useful.

This November, I'll be starting the novel fresh, with the goal of writing the beginning of a decent, coherent first draft. I don't expect to write 50,000 words, because that pace might result in generating too many words I have to throw out later. But I do want to use the collective word count challenge to keep me motivated and keep me writing. I'm tentatively aiming for 25k story words. I won't be counting all the notes I'm also sure to write, because tracking those would be more of a bookkeeping hassle at this point.

I've spent most of this year reimagining the novel, figuring out the world and characters, and outlining a plot. In truth, nearly all the plot work happened in the last two weeks, because of the power of a deadline. Faced with a pressing need to make progress, I turned to trusty index cards for the first time in many years. Once I began scribbling (almost illegibly) the ideas in my head onto little rectangles and moving them around my rug (obviously designed for this purpose), it was amazing how quickly the basic shape of the story emerged.

Restructuring a Chapter

I haven't written much for my blog this year because I've been trying to focus my creative energy and time on revision. But when Christopher Gronlund posted a before and after of a paragraph he'd recently improved, I felt inspired to share a rewrite example of my own. I knew I'd made posts of this type before, though I hadn't recalled until locating the two earlier entries that both specifically demonstrate how a passage gets shortened along with strengthened.

Before I could go further with the idea of presenting a section of revised text, I noticed how many big chunks I was moving and deleting in the chapter I was currently working on, and I wondered if I could show off that process instead. The concept got pushed aside while I finished actually wrangling the Frankenchapter into shape. Then some initial work on this post was interrupted by the demands of the next messy chapter. Also, as usual, real life happened in the meantime, including a trip for family celebrations and the first Thanksgiving in our new house.

I've finally set aside the brainspace to finish a visual representation of one chapter, before and after restructuring. Many thanks to my in-house graphic designers and consultants for helping me realize my visualization vision! You can click to view a larger image:

New Bookcases

When we moved into our new house in December, we unpacked most boxes during the first few weeks, but one set lingered in the hallway, all labeled "Books". After considering numerous shelving options and then ignoring the problem for a while, we finally decided which bookcases to buy and where to put them. I spent part of the last week unboxing and arranging books, and I'm happy to have my collection available again (and those boxes gone).

The last time I did a major book reorganization was in 2010. I posted then about putting my collection in order and donating around 150 books. A couple of times since, when the shelves grew too crowded, I pulled out a bagful of books to donate to the library, but otherwise the book situation was pretty stable until the move.

I do the majority of my reading electronically these days, though I still read some print. I find both formats to have certain advantages over the other. (I have absolutely pressed my finger to a word on a printed page, expecting the definition to pop up.) My book buying is also more Kindle than print, so what's on my physical shelves only reflects a portion of what I've enjoyed since I started ereading (also in 2010). But the contents of my collection have never been a pristine snapshot of anything but what I happen to own, since I've always borrowed books from friends or the library, passed along books for the next reader to appreciate, and purchased books I never got around to reading.

I periodically tell myself I'm going to make a concerted effort to read some of the many books I own but haven't read. Now that my books are out of the boxes, on display right outside my office door, I will at the very least intend to make progress in that area. We'll see what happens.

Now how about a look at the new shelves?

The Ikea Hemnes bookcase is a step up from the unmatched, sagging particle board shelves we had before. They were pretty easy to assemble, and we got quite good at it by the third one. The three together fit beautifully into the empty space at the end of a hall, between two doorways.

Spring Is in the Air

It's April, so the cherry blossoms have scattered to the winds, flowers are springing up all over my neighborhood, and sneezes are in full bloom. After years of not enough rain, California has probably finished a season of too much rain, and we're looking at a stretch of pleasant sunny days before my valley inevitably gets much too hot for my taste.

I'm another year older now. I've been celebrating my birthday primarily by eating lots of delicious treats. I also bought myself a few books, celebrated with friends, and have more festivities planned for this weekend. Once again, I find it's good to be the birthday girl.

Between birthday activities and unrelated commitments, I haven't done much writing this week, but in general I've been making steady if slow progress on the revision. As I mentioned before, some of the changes to this draft involve writing entirely new material rather than simply adjusting what's already there. Something I only recently articulated for myself is that I'm trying to write this new stuff not as a first draft but as a fifth/tenth/whatever-this-is draft so that it matches all the parts that have been through many rounds of polishing. That's not completely possible, but I'm getting at least partway there, and it's one reason things are moving slowly for now.

While I'm working from a detailed outline I developed in the fall, parts of the story have drifted away from the plan, as tends to happen. I hit a big plot snag about a month ago, but I eventually wrote my way out of it. Though I'm still winging it a bit more than I was hoping, I'm happy with how the new version of the story is developing. I do have concerns that too much of my novel revolves around chairs, sandwiches, and ice cream, but after all, those are a pretty good set of things.

I hope spring is bringing good things your way as well!

Double Revision

After a wonderfully hectic summer filled with great visits to and from family members, I'm happy to be immersed in writing again this month. I'm enjoying having plenty of uninterrupted time to write, and I'm excited about moving forward on projects with some new goals and motivations.

Recently I received some very helpful advice and encouragement about THE EXTENT OF THE DAMAGE, and that's inspired me to embark on yet another revision. The focus of my previous revision was shortening the manuscript, and I cut over 20% while keeping the plot more or less the same. This time, I have suggestions and ideas about improving some parts of the story that aren't as strong as the rest. I'm planning to add new elements and remove others that aren't working, ideally while keeping the length about the same, which I'm sure will require further use of the compactness techniques I relied on last time.

I started off by rereading the manuscript, which I hadn't really looked at in more than a year. As always happens after time away, I saw plenty I wanted to change, but I was heartened by how much of the novel I was happy with. Before the last revision, my reread of the previous draft put me to sleep at points and left me wondering if gremlins had rewritten my sentences for incoherency. It was an enormous relief to not have a repeat of that experience and to confirm I'm actually making the book better with each edit. I was also pleased to notice that some of my thoughts about improving sentences and paragraphs came out of what I learned from the writing and critique in the class I just took.

I'm now on the next step of revision, the planning stage. I've written before (while in the middle of a still earlier, quite lengthy revision) about the value of planning and the danger it can morph into procrastination. I think I'm doing okay at the moment. I'm outlining the changes I want to make and trying to figure out the best options for the story. Some of my notes are lists of pros and cons for different plot directions. Some include comments like "but is it all just too ridiculously melodramatic?" and "this needs to conclude whatever the conclusion turns out to be". It's a process. I'm making good headway, and the plan is gradually coming together.

I don't think I've blogged at all about the writing software Scrivener, which I began using a couple of years ago, I believe when I was preparing for the previous revision. It's a powerful application with a lot of features, and I'm starting to use more of these than I had before, though nowhere near all of them. Maybe later I'll write about my Scrivener techniques, but for now, here's a screenshot from my revision planning:

My Teenage Loves

After the trauma of sharing those two high school stories about religion and death, I avoided reading further in my old notebooks for a while, but now it's time for another entry in my childhood writing series, so I've bravely forged onward.

My earliest steno notebook contains mostly lists and notes, with some writing in the back, including the first draft of the theater scene from last time. The next is almost entirely fiction. I started my personal creative writing kick during the first year of high school but really got enthusiastic about it in the summer that followed. I've read through all of notebook #2, which takes me through the first half of sophomore year.

Since all the entries are dated, I can see that from summer on, I usually wrote at least a few days a month, with periods of regular daily writing mixed with gaps of weeks when I didn't write. I often worked on the same piece for multiple days, not only in close succession, but also sometimes returning months later. The constraints of a bound notebook meant that if I'd written something else in the meantime, I'd have to continue an older story some pages on, and I didn't mark this in any way, so certain sections of the notebook contain interleaved bits of stories diverging wildly in topic or tone.

I edited as I wrote, which is visible in the frequent crossed out words and sentences, plus occasional arrows indicating parts to be reordered. As we saw last time, I later did more serious revision of selected stories on my computer. Almost everything in the notebook is unfinished. Sometimes my interest in an idea fizzled out after a page, sometimes I wrote many pages and even multiple scenes, but very little became a full story. I'm sure I usually started writing with nothing more than a premise or an opening line in mind, and it can be hard to reliably wring a plot out of that. Today I still have just as many ideas that go nowhere, but I no longer take the time to write them down until I've given more consideration to whether they're viable.

The contents of this notebook are overall pretty boring. The stories tend to star teen girls, often attending a private high school similar to mine or saddled with an annoying little brother. In a departure from writing what I knew, more of these characters drink coffee than I would have expected, since I didn't start enjoying coffee myself until my thirties. Often some promising bit of conflict is introduced, as in the story of three friends discussing a generally beloved teacher who one of them dislikes, but the idea is abandoned before we learn the cause of the turmoil. I suspect I frequently wrote myself into a corner and was unable to imagine the dark secret driving whatever came before.

The first draft of the autumn story from last month's post is in here, and to my surprise, there's also a still earlier incarnation of that story. It's much shorter, mainly a riff on the "fall is the season of dying" idea I all but wrote out of the final draft. It features characters I used repeatedly around that time, initially only in stories I told myself inside my head but eventually in some I wrote down. I probably saw some promise in the concept and decided to try it again with characters who didn't bring along all the backstory I'd already developed.

As is the case today, I read a fair amount of science fiction as a teen but didn't write much that wasn't set in the real world. The one piece of science fiction in this notebook is the start of a story set in 2010, 20 years in the future, when the earth is in crisis due to overpopulation and the hole in the ozone layer. It starts strong: "Joanie stared out the window at the gray rain and remembered a time when there was color. From behind her came the sounds of children sleeping fitfully or crying softly." Alas, after a couple of pages explaining how the world went to hell, I stopped writing.

This notebook ends with a lone entry that's pure journal. It comments on what I was up to at that particular moment (watching a Paul Simon concert airing during a public television fund drive) but mostly analyzes my unrequited crush on one of my friends: "Dammit, I love him! Love. Love. That word. Do I love him? Am I 'old enough' to love a man? Oh, sure, why the hell not?" It's full of the turmoil of not-quite-16-year-old emotion, and I'm afraid there's going to be more of that particular agony when I move on to the next notebook.

The story from this book that's most worth sharing is unlike any of the other contents, but it does represent a major aspect of my life at the time. While I angsted over painful unreturned feelings for several friends during high school, my purest love was for the music of The Beatles. It's true that I did sometimes experience so much love for Paul McCartney that I was moved to kiss a photograph of him, but on the whole, The Beatles brought me more joy than anguish. Anyway, here's this thing:

New Leaves and Old Pages

I've been busy this month with various things:

→ Since I haven't worked much on fiction this year, I decided to take a class and give myself motivation and deadlines. I've signed up for an online short fiction class through the Gotham Writers Workshop, a well-regarded program out of New York City. It starts in a couple of weeks, and I'm excited to get started. In fact, I should get started now, because ideally I'll be working on a story when the course begins so I'm ready when it's my turn for critique. Time to turn my writing brain back on!

→ I reached an important milestone in my writing room cleanup project by completing the time-consuming process of filing many years of accumulated documents. Now our household has usefully organized filing cabinets, and I have floor space. There's still work left to get the room arranged the way I want it, but the rest should go quickly, provided I don't lose momentum.

→ I've looked through a bunch of my old writing lately, which is a lot more interesting than the old bank statements. In my high school notebooks, I found the embarrassing stories I shared, plus a list of books I wanted to read. There will more be teenage treasures as I continue my exploration. Additionally, I read a couple of manuscripts I wrote in more recent years, and I'm contemplating what works and what doesn't to improve my future writing.

→ Mid-month, I celebrated my birthday with baking and eating and more eating. A few weeks before that, I gave myself the early present of a new laptop, since my previous one was five years old. I'm very happy with the speed and power of my new computer, and I got it a decal to keep it cozy.

→ I have been doing a lot of walking around my neighborhood and admiring the flowers in bloom. We've had some rain, so my part of California is greener than it's been in a while. I have the window open, and I'm enjoying the spring weather and the view from my writing desk:

Crime Doesn't Pay

In this series investigating my childhood writing, we've lingered in the eighth grade period, studying just a few of the many works to come out of that year's English class. Who could forget the mood of frustration evoked by Mental Turmoil Aboard Flight 103 and its ill-considered revision? Who is eager to forget the soul-bearing honesty of An Introduction to Me and the startling revelations about shopping?

Now it's time to examine the final composition from that class, a 1600-word story that's likely the longest and most complex piece of fiction I'd produced at that point. The last month of school was spent on the various stages and drafts of this assignment, which was introduced this way: "A professional author often uses his/her personal experiences as a source for his/her writing and asks him/herself, 'What if?' Remember one of your own experiences and ask yourself, 'What if?'"

As my story's inspiration, I drew on an event I'd recently witnessed while visiting a different school. I saw two friends pulled aside by a teacher after class and questioned about test answers that suggested there had been cheating. I never learned the truth of the situation or what happened next, so I imagined a possible chain of events for this story. The way things play out in my fictional version doesn't strike me as all that believable today, but it's also not absurdly unrealistic.

I have a similarly ambivalent reaction to everything else in the story. This is not an amazing piece of fiction. It's packed with cliches both linguistic and situational, starting with the title, which doesn't even fit. Much of the dialogue is unnecessary, causing the story to drag, and I'm not surprised to discover that every pointless exchange survived intact from the first draft to the last.

On the other hand, there's a definite, if plodding, competence to the writing. The plot escalates through a series of events across multiple scenes and then reaches a conclusion. Characters develop. The premise and execution deliver a modicum of suspense. It's really not bad for a 14-year-old, and there's little in the story for me to mock.

The lack of childish ridiculousness means this work isn't all that interesting to read, but if you'd like to observe my maturation as a writer, please enjoy.

Crime Doesn't Pay

"Whadja get?" pestered Jennifer, sitting to my right at our lab desk.

"I haven't gotten mine back yet, dummy," I teased, shoving her lightly.

"Don't call me 'dummy'," she said, practically shoving me out of my chair.

"What did you get?" I asked.

"An eighty."

"Eighty? I can call you dummy if I want to."

"Here, Allison," said Ms. Corbin, handing me my science test.

Jennifer saw my grade.

"You got an eighty, too," she shrieked. "Dummy!"

The girl in front of us turned around and gave us a cold, hard stare. Jennifer stared back at her with her eyeballs almost popping out. Then she turned back to me and moved her mouth like a fish to go with her bug eyes. I laughed.

"Allison and Jennifer, could I see you after class?" requested Ms. Corbin, as the bell rang.

The Gift of Love

I don't normally mark Valentine's Day, but my eighth grade English class did, so this year I have a thematic piece of childhood writing to share in honor of the holiday.

The assignment was to write an essay or poem inspired by Valentine's Day. I guess song lyrics also counted as acceptable:

The Gift of Love
to be sung to the tune of
"I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing"

I'll give the world the gift of love
This St. Valentine's Day.
The feeling of being cared for
Will never go away.
 
This love will envelop the earth
And fill each empty space.
Everyone everywhere will smile,
All people will embrace.
 
There'll be no shouts of anger heard
And all fighting will cease.
All guns will drop from people's hands:
The world will be at peace.

I thought it was nice I came up with an interpretation of the assignment that avoided nearly-fourteen-year-old romantic angst about, say, Justin who sat in front of me in science class and made funny jokes. I started imagining a teacher having to read dozens of such compositions, so then I wasn't too surprised when I read the complete instructions and saw a variety of suggested topics entirely unrelated to romantic love. The sole opportunity to muse on a crush offers, "If you wish, you may answer this question without giving the name of the person."

My poem was an answer to number 8, "If you could give the world a valentine, what you would give and why?" Several others involve gifts, including the somewhat surreal "Pretend you are a valentine gift. What are you? To whom will you be given and why?" The rest relate to hearts, most notably "If your heart were visible for others to see, what would you want us to see?" I really hope some smart aleck wrote about regular beats and properly functioning blood vessels. I'm surprised that smart aleck wasn't me. I bet Justin would have taken the bait.

The instructions indicate we wrote the rough drafts of these compositions during class, then revised them for homework. I approached the editing more enthusiastically than with most of the other assignments, perhaps either because I wrote the first draft with less preparation or because it was poetry:

The Invention of Snow

In this installment of my childhood writing, we'll look at my eighth grade response to an assignment that I and many schoolkids experienced multiple times: the composition of an original myth.

I was well prepared for the task, since I'd produced a detailed report on Greek mythology a few years earlier. But in case I needed help getting into the right creative mindset, the worksheet for the assignment provided a whole backstory: "You are in an ancient Greek village. Several natural phenomena have occurred. These have frightened the villagers who want answers that will help them to understand the natural world around them and relieve their fears. You are the local oracle and storyteller. The villagers have come to you for answers."

This assignment was given in March, while I was presumably hoping to soon see the end of another long New England winter, so I expect the choice of natural phenomenon was simple, though my explanation is rather more convoluted.

The Invention of Snow

Long ago, before snow had been invented, winter's precipitation was simply frozen rain. Getting caught out in a storm was painful, and this falling ice did damage to buildings and trees. The gods, up on Mount Olympus, knew nothing of this, for it was never cold, and it never rained on their mountain.

One winter day, Athena was visiting the earth, disguised as an old woman. A kind farming couple, Phaelus and his wife, Pollus, fed her a humble but hearty supper. As they were eating the meal, Athena heard a crashing on the roof.

"What is that?" she exclaimed.

"What is what?" asked Pollus, puzzled.

"That noise outside," said Athena.

Phaelus gave his wife a strange look.

"It's only the rain, old mother," he comforted. "It's frozen, of course."

Athena quickly realized how conspicuous she was making herself.

"I am from a warm climate," she lied. "Our rain never freezes."

The farmers seemed satisfied with this answer, and they finished eating peacefully.

After supper, Athena thanked her hosts. She secretly blessed their fields with ever-prosperous crops, and then she was on her way.

When Athena stepped outside, she was pelted with drops of ice. Everywhere she looked, there were broken tree branches.

"Something must be done about this," she thought, hurrying back to Mt. Olympus.

When she reached the gods' palace, she went to see Zeus immediately. She told him about the frozen rain.

"We must invent something more practical and safe," she proposed.

"I agree completely," said Zeus. "I had no idea of the damage that the falling ice was causing. We should call Hephaestus to help us invent an alternative."

Zeus sent Hermes to fetch Hephaestus from his forge. Hephaestus arrived shortly. He brought Aphrodite along. Athena and Zeus explained the problem.

"The new rain should be beautiful," said Aphrodite. "Because the world looks so ugly and dead in the winter."

"And it must be lighter, so that it won't do so much damage," said Athena.

After a little more conferring, Hephaestus went back to his workshop. A few hours later, he returned.

"What do you think of this?" he asked, holding up a large piece of crystal, shaped like the snowflakes we have today.

"Oh, it's beautiful!" exclaimed Aphrodite.

Zeus and Athena admired Hephaestus' work. Suddenly Athena smacked her hand against her forehead.

"Oh, no," she exclaimed. "How could we have forgotten? The rain has to be able to melt!"

The others exchanged embarrassed glances, and Zeus hemmed and hawed.

"The shape is so beautiful," Aphrodite said after a minute.

"Athena, you should weave a star-shape like that out of frost," said Zeus.

Everyone agreed that that was a wonderful idea, so Athena went off to weave the star-shape.

She soon returned, holding the flake gently so it wouldn't melt. It was as big as a hand, and very complex.

The others decided that it was just right.

"But you will have to make so many," said Aphrodite. "Won't it be difficult?"

"We shall appoint someone to make them," decreed Zeus. "And these frost-stars will have to be less complicated."

"Make them small, so they don't have to be so intricate," suggested Hephaestus.

And so it was decided. Athena's daughter Desnowus, who was almost as talented at weaving as her mother, was made the goddess of these flakes. We get the name "snow" from the middle of "Desnowus".

As soon as it becomes cold enough for frost, Desnowus begins weaving snowflakes almost all day long. When she has enough, she glides across the sky, sprinkling them over the earth. That is how snow came to be.

An Introduction to Me, Age 13

Throughout this investigation of my childhood writing, I've been excited to get to the thick folder of eighth grade work. English class that year placed a heavy focus on writing, with an emphasis on the planning and revision stages. I was eager to examine pages of crossed-out sentences and scribbled notes that might reveal my early story development process.

Alas, while at least two drafts of every piece survive, the differences between versions are minimal in most cases, with only a few word choices improved, punctuation errors fixed, and maybe an occasional sentence rewritten. And really, that's not surprising, since I was a 13-year-old kid who'd always been praised for strong writing skills. Why would I bother to alter my stunning prose?

Based on my own experience and what I've observed in others, it tends to take a long time for writers to understand and accept that what pours out in the first draft is often nothing close to the best possible version of a story. Revision is time-consuming, difficult, and frustrating, so it's no wonder we resist it. Still, I applaud the Sudbury (Massachusetts) Public Schools for teaching revision in the eighth grade writing curriculum, even if this step was only cursory in practice:

Book Riot Live Report

The very first Book Riot Live conference was an incredible success, and I'm so glad I was able to visit New York City to attend!

I stayed in New York for the post-con week, hanging out with various family members, attending theater, and seeing sights, all of which was awesome as well. In quiet moments between the continued fun, I jotted down the highlights of my Book Riot Live experience, and I finished assembling this report on the flight home.

The programming at the con was excellent, and my only complaint was that at times there were too many cool things happening at once! I started my weekend -- after eating gourmet doughnuts in a car wash -- with a live recording of the Book Riot podcast. This show keeps me informed about the most interesting news from the book world on a weekly basis, so it was cool and strange to see the faces of the people with the familiar voices. During the Q&A period, I asked the first question, and I was tickled when the hosts recognized me from Twitter! You can listen to the live episode and hear me at about 33 minutes in. (Is that really what I sound like?)

The next day I attended another recording, this one for the interview show Reading Lives. The guest was announced only a couple of weeks before the con, and I was thrilled to learn it would be Angela Flournoy. Back in May, I recommended her wonderful debut, THE TURNER HOUSE, and it was great to hear about her development as a writer and reader.

Fighting the Good Fight: Turning Awareness Into Action was a fantastic panel of representatives from We Need Diverse Books, VIDA, First Book, and the Harry Potter Alliance, all great organizations working to increase diversity in publishing and accessibility of books. The panelists discussed their activism efforts and ways for readers to participate. In particular, there was much talk about noticing and counting who is represented on any list of books or authors, whether it's a personal record of books read or a set of award nominees or guest speakers. Striving for diversity in any such list, and calling it out when it's not there, has a cumulative positive effect. Personally, I've been very happy with how my reading life has expanded since I started paying more attention to who I read and recommend.

I was delighted at the prospect of attending a conversation between Margaret Atwood and N.K. Jemisin, two amazing authors I admire. The subject of the panel was Writing What You Don't Know, but the discussion was a wide-ranging one. I really didn't care what topic these two were speaking on, because everything they had to say was so smart and funny. The event was covered by The Guardian, which recapped the conversation, and I suggest reading that article for some choice quotes.

Thoughts I Had While Young

Earlier in this journey through my childhood writing, I noted that I don't have much in the way of fiction from sixth grade, and the same is true of seventh, probably because my middle school curriculum put a heavy focus on creative writing in eighth grade. We'll get to that soon.

The documents preserved in my seventh grade folder are primarily nonfiction reports and essays, though one exception is an afterword I was assigned to write for the novel SHANE, speculating on what happens after the end of the story. (All I remember of this book is that it involves a guy on a horse, or maybe that means all I remember is the cover.) Throughout my school career, writing an additional chapter to a novel was a frequent (and fun, for me) assignment. If this is a widespread phenomenon, it's just occurred to me that a lot more of us have written fan fiction than we might have realized.

The most "interesting" works from this time period are a number of opinion pieces, but before we check out those essays, I want to share one fact-based report, in part because it has such a ridiculous cover.

Behind the Eye-Mirrors of a Teen Poet

Our most recent look at my childhood writing explored a survey of poetry I wrote for my seventh grade English class. I mentioned that I also kept a personal poetry journal during that time, and today I cracked it open and winced my way through. Unlike most of the other early work I've shared, these poems weren't written for school assignments, so it's possible they've never been seen by anyone else until now. Exciting, huh?

The journal is a cloth-covered blank book I probably received as a gift from a relative, perhaps at holiday time, since the first poem is dated shortly after the beginning of 1988. In fact, it commemorates the start of the year:

Midnight
Inside
Yelling, screaming
Hugging, kissing
Trumpets, whistles, laughing, singing
Outside
In the dark,
All alone,
Without a sound
The new year comes in

The structure of this poem seems influenced by the forms we were studying in class, particularly the diamond poem, but here and throughout this collection, I experimented with different styles. Incidentally, I likely spent that New Year's Eve either watching a Marx Brothers movie marathon or sitting in a wood-fired hot tub surrounded by snow. Either way, there was definitely no kissing involved, but there was certainly some singing.

I continued writing poems in this book throughout 1988, the year I turned 13, but the entries are sporadic, and the vast majority of the pages remain blank. I expect I knew even then that my path to literary fame didn't lie in poetry.

The next poem is the one I retained the strongest memory of and most dreaded facing, though I'm sure I was very pleased with it at the time:

An empty face,
With grief behind the eye-mirrors,
Reflecting back on happy days that bring no smiles.
 
A sad sigh,
Of sorrows and times gone by,
Ne'er to come again.
 
An ache of longing,
Of crying though the tear-well's dry.
 
A black dress of mourning.

That's an Extremely Serious And Weighty Composition right there. You can tell by the "ne'er".

As it happens, I distinctly recall my inspiration for this grief-stricken poem. I'd heard that a neighborhood dog was hit by a car, and later that day I saw one of the kids from that family at school, staring into the distance. Sure, I realized he was probably thinking about lunch or homework, but I connected the look on his face with his recent loss, and I was visited by the muse.

The Incredible Shrinking Manuscript: Case Study

So far in my investigation of how I shortened my manuscript, I've explained the big picture concepts that allowed me to cut 35,000 words without changing the story, and I've delved into the nitty-gritty of some recurring opportunities for compression. To wrap up this series, I'll share a before-and-after excerpt.

A couple of years ago, during a previous round of revision, I made a similar post, and I considered using the same passage again. However, the new changes don't serve as the best example, so I've picked another section to look at. You can still check out that old post for an illustration of the ideas I've been talking about (as well as an illustration of the infinite repeatability of this process). And in case you're wondering, I chopped 65 more words from that scene, including the narrator sitting down and then a minute later moving to his wife's side, a pair of actions that struck me as glaringly unnecessary.

I selected today's excerpt because it shows off a number of the small-scale strategies I discussed for saying the same thing in fewer words. The scene also makes sense out of context, though I'm riddled with anxiety that out of context, every page of my novel seems ridiculous and uninteresting. You don't need any information to understand what's happening here, but I'll mention that the narrator is the son of the narrator from the scene I used before.

The Incredible Shrinking Manuscript: Big Picture

When I finished the recent revision of THE EXTENT OF THE DAMAGE, I promised to report on how I went about making it significantly shorter. During the first half of this year, I took a 160,000-word manuscript and trimmed it down to 125,000 words. That's a reduction of over 20%, from around 500 pages to around 400. It took approximately 5 months.

The 160,000-word manuscript I started with had been pared down from a draft that was 20,000 words longer, so I'd already taken a good hard look at this text and removed everything unnecessary. My writing style isn't flowery, and I have little patience for scenes that don't advance the plot. I'd written a long book, but I was confident the three intertwined narratives and sixty-year scope of this family saga justified the length. (Earlier incarnations of the novel were shorter, but also far less complex and interesting.)

The new draft of 125,000 words still contains the three storylines and the same multigenerational tale. No major plot events were lost in the Great Shortening of 2015. In fact, no minor plot events perished, either. I cut surprisingly few scenes. Somehow, I didn't have to lose any part of the story to get my manuscript down to a more acceptable length.

So how did I cut 35,000 words without changing the story? I have no idea. Bye, thanks for reading!

Okay, fine. While I'm unable to give a complete analysis of what I did, I can probably explain a few parts of the process to satisfy the curious. I don't have a guaranteed, repeatable formula to pass along for other writers, but perhaps something can be learned from my experience.

The first crucial step was spending time away from the manuscript. Once I began querying this novel, I didn't look at it beyond pasting the first chapters into a great many email messages. Almost a year passed before I read the whole thing again, and that gave me the distance to evaluate the story with a different perspective than I had while deep inside revision. During my year away, I read all sorts of books and wrote things besides that novel, and those activities also developed my critical eye. Upon rereading the manuscript, I was very relieved to discover I still thought I had something good, but I noticed plenty of sections that dragged, plus numerous bits that made me cringe.

Those boring parts were also a relief to find, because they gave me hope that a shorter manuscript was possible, and I used them as a starting point for planning this revision. (I've written before about planning and how valuable it is for approaching a rewrite, or for avoiding ever starting that rewrite.) When I contemplated the sections of the novel that struck me as too long or even unnecessary, I saw scenes and chapters that could be merged, particularly in the middle of the book.

An Adolescent Survey of Poetic Forms

The previous installment of my early writing took us a bit out of chronological order to examine the museum-quality pieces preserved in my childhood home, but today we'll return to our journey through the main archives. We left off with a last look at fifth grade, and I said we were in for some middle school angst ahead.

I may have oversold the angst idea, since the trials of adolescence aren't especially apparent in the school assignments that make up most of what's been saved. I do have a personal poetry journal that probably contains a few emo gems, but I've been cringing too hard to look at properly. We'll get to it soon, I promise.

The most miserable year of my childhood was sixth grade, when I was bullied and nearly friendless (shout out if you're responsible for keeping me at "nearly"). The curriculum that year didn't involve much in the way of creative writing, and I only have one surviving piece of sixth grade work. It's a script called "A Broadcast From Valley Forge" that imagines a television news correspondent visiting General Washington's cold, starving troops to report on the desperate conditions. I have no idea whether the assignment called for this experimental anachronism or if we were expected to write something more conventional, but I do recall delivering this report in front of the class and playing all three parts. I can only imagine what this did for my social standing.

Seventh grade went better, and one bright spot was my wonderful English teacher, Mrs. Mahoney. As a unit in her class, we studied different poetry forms and composed examples of each. Let's see if my poetry skills improved any between fourth grade and seventh grade.