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Writing for a living there are times when a story needs more than a revision, it needs to be completely rewritten. This point can, at times, come only after a significant amount of work has already been done on a story. It is not an easy decision for writers to make, but it can sometimes be a necessary step in the process of creating a story.
Sometimes the process is a long and hard fought road with no end in sight, such as the experience related by David J. Fuller in a post about his rewriting and revising experiences. In the comments of that post he offers others the best advice he says he ever received about writing: To keep going through the end of the draft, ignoring any problems, to discover what the story is really about.
When the words have been set down and the story seems to have been told, it is time for every writer to take an honest and critical look at their hard work – and tear it to pieces. Chuck Wendic at Terrible Minds offers writers a list of 25 Things You Should Know About Revisions, which in very straightforward, often vulgar terms, explains some of the key points that need to be kept in mind when one dives into the revision process. Among the bits of harsh advice is a line that sums up the truth of revision work; “Go in cold. Emotionless. Scissors in one hand, silenced pistol in the other.”
A writer needs to emotionally separate himself from the story before they revise it. They need to be able to take their most beloved scene or character and cut it out to be tossed aside as unusable.
When a story requires a significant amount of work, it can seem like a writer is starting over from scratch. In truth it is not as much starting over as it is getting a fresh start. A writer knows, when they start writing, that they have something that they want to convey. Sometimes they need only a few minutes to construct the words in their mind and write them out onto paper. Other times they need to write a hundred pages before they know what it was they wanted to say about the subject the novel is focused on. Whatever the journey, the end result should always be to entertain the audience, even at the sacrifice of elements the writer once thought were vital to their story.
Should voters be concerned that one of the men who want to be the President of the United States says he does not recall an incident of high school bullying he is accused of having lead? Rather than deny that he would have done such a thing, Mitt Romney states that he does not recall events described by several former classmates at the all boys prep school he attended in Michigan.
An article published Thursday in the Washington Post described how Mitt Romney’s Prep school classmates recall pranks, but also troubling incidents during Romney’s time as a student at Cranbrook School. Included in the article are the statements of several persons who say that they knew Romney and were witness to (or participants in) the described incident. Romney is alleged to have lead a group of other students, who held down a fellow student while, according to the Washington Post article, Romney cut at the young man’s long blonde hair with a pair of scissors.
News sites such as Reuters explain how Romney apologized for what he defined as “pranks”, and stated that he did not recall the event. This lack of recall, rather than denial of participation, brings to question how many such incidents he might have participated in, or lead, that he is unable to recall what seems to stand out very clearly in the memories of the persons that spoke up about the incident.
Yesterday I went to the theater with my brother, his wife and our nephew to see The Avengers. We had planned to hit the early showing for the regular 2D version of the movie, which would have been fairly cheap for the four of us to see. Best laid plans of mice and men and all that, however, meant that both the 2D and 3D shows for 4 PM were completely sold out by the time we got there. (I really should have bought the tickets online the night before.) As it was, I went ahead and paid an obscene amount for tickets to secure us seats in the 6 PM showing for The Avengers in 3D, better than having to go all the way back home without seeing the movie we had planned on going to see.
That left us with some time to kill and Wal Mart right next door gave us mindless aisle wandering time wasting to fill that hour and a half with. So, we went and looked around Wal Mart, picked up some dinner at McDonald’s, then headed back to the theater to get decent seats for the show.
This is the first time I have been to the new Valley Cinema theater, and I have to say that it looks really nice – despite the mass amounts of popcorn strewn along the counter in front of the ungodly expensive snack counter. And yes, when one bag of popcorn and a soda costs over $12 it is UNGODLY expensive. They make ALL of their money from the snack counter, that’s for certain.
Anyway, armed with a bag of popcorn for the four of us to split and a soda for my nephew we went to wait in line to be let into the theater. That took a few minutes, then we went in search of four seats together. No one else had any preference, so I took my preferred position of near the center of the theater about 1/3rd of the way back from the screen. I’ve found that offers the fewest people in front of me that make seeing the screen difficult for a shorty like me, while still placing me far enough back to see all of the screen without watching a ping pong tournament back and forth to see what’s happening.
I’ve never been to a 3D movie before, and I have to say, it was interesting. There were not as many opportunities to make full use of the technology as I think they could have found, but there were still a few points where something headed toward the viewer and initiated a instinctive mental cringe for me.
A few of the lessons learned from The Avengers (trying not to offer anything that would be a spoiler here, so just a few):
- Be sure you know what you are saying when you tell a demi-god to put the hammer down
- Looking to your elders for an example is not a bad thing
- The only order Hulk needs is “Smash”
In the opening weekend, The Avengers smashed the records, hitting an estimated $200 million in ticket sales. According to MTV, The Avengers crushed the previous opening weekend record of $169.2 million that was earned by Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows pt2 last year.
There is no doubt in the minds of any of us that Robert Downy Jr pwnd the role of Tony Stark. He once again brought the man behind Iron Man to life with perfection. All of the cast were in top form, however, and it would be hard to single out any one as being exceptional without also acknowledging the great work of everyone else, so I’ll just say that the casting crew went above and beyond and I am only saddened that Edward Norton did not return as Bruce Banner, but Mark Ruffalo was able to capture a meek timid Bruce Banner perfectly and I do not think I could have asked for a better replacement for Norton since he was not able to reprise his role.
The Avengers is a must see for anyone that loves Marvel heroes, and I only wish that I could afford to go see it again while it is in the theaters.
One of the main points that I have seen in looking into why people procrastinate is that they do not have a good place to write. It seems like everyone is looking for the perfect writing location, and yet no one really knows what that is. How can anyone tell you where it is best to write, after all, when that is something that is so personal to each person?
If you want some inspiration for your own workspace, or proof that you are not the craziest writer ever in your tendencies, then you should take a look at some of the writer’s rooms in the series by the Guardian newspaper on writer’s rooms.
Writer Michael Morpurgo had his own troubles when he wanted to find the best writing place for him to work, even asking a neighbor, Ted Hughes, how he wrote. It did not take long for Morpurgo’s feet to inform him that he was not like his friend who preferred to write while standing at a lectern. Morpurgo’s inspiration came from a picture of Robert Louis Stevenson. In the picture the author sat propped up by pillows in bed with a writing book rested on his knees. Morpurgo mimicked his idol’s style – until ink on the bedsheets led him and his wife to create an actual retreat house styled after the Anglo-Saxon chapel of St Peter-Ad-Murum.
Morpurgo is not the only writer to create a style that makes him comfortable in his writing. Clive James is an inspiration to any packrat-style writer who has a workspace crammed with unfindable scribbles and assorted odds and ends that pertain to writing. In an article in the Guardian, Clive James describes his collection of assorted odds and ends and scraps “I can’t remember why any of the stuff is here, except that I never have time to throw any of it away, because I’m too busy.”
While it is nice to work from home, it can also be filled with distractions of all kinds. For writer Louis de Bernieres, the secret to working from home is to get as far away from home as possible when he wants to write. In fact, there are many cases where writers take over a garden shed to escape from the distractions found within the house.
Writing in bed, writing in a garden shed, creating a special little cottage in which to write. Is any of this actually necessary? No, not really. John Grisham is just one example of writers who manged to write a novel during a busy schedule. He would sit down in stolen time between court hearings and meetings to write on legal pads when he wrote his first book.
There are many examples of writers who wrote their first book during stolen moments on scraps of paper.
The basic point seems to be that there is no right place to write. So, what is needed to write? If there is no single connection between successful writers and where they write, how can there ever be successful writers? Because they write. No matter if they have found their perfect writing place or not, they write. It is the process of placing words together, no matter how they are recorded or where this happens. Dictations into a recorder or longhand writing in notebooks, the key to writing is the act of writing, anywhere, any time, no matter if the writer is in their ‘perfect’ place or just has a few minutes to wait. If a writer wants to succeed, they need to get the words down while they are still looking for that writer’s paradise where they can feel comfortable creating their work.
Forget the office and get right on that writing.
Sometimes I feel like procrastination is the name of the game, even though I really do not try to procrastinate. It just kind of happens. Life has a nasty habit of getting in the way of a writing career and leaving no time in which a person can actually sit down at the computer and get work done. I tip my hat to all of the 9 to 5 workers out there, I really do, because I am having trouble finding the time to fit a bit of writing work into a 24 hour day, much less 8 straight hours a day, 5 days a week dedicated to my working.
I really need to figure out how to convince the rest of the world that I actually DO have a job though, because this has got to stop being shoved around toward “When it can be done” to make room for what other people need me to be doing for them. So, goal right now, reclaim my job and stop letting others pile work onto me simply because they think I should be able to do things for them instead of working on my writing. It is a career, dang-it, so I need to stop letting other people treat it like it is not.
Yeah. I’ll let you know how that works out for me. If I can actually find the time to get regular updates posted here, then you will know that I have managed to reclaim my work time.
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