Everyone in your novel should be working more.

Today in harnessing horrible Republican ideas for artistic purposes only:

I recently tweeted a discovery I'd made about revision:

The revision process seems largely to be about steadily transforming the protagonist from passive observer to active agent.

— Ann Gelder (@AnnBGelder) September 1, 2015

I would now add that this process also involves winnowing down the number of characters, so that fewer people take on more responsibilities. I find that after a first draft (or even several drafts), I often have two characters essentially performing the same function, and one of them is performing it less well--and doing nothing else constructive. Therefore I have to give one's duties over to the other, which a) gets rid of a boring character and b) creates a more interesting character out of the one remaining.

As you go through this process, think of yourself as the Bain Capital of fiction: swooping down on a perfectly nice, quiet but inefficient little novel, and ruthlessly getting rid of dead weight--who fortunately are not really people in your case. Presto: your novel is now leaner and more productive. Or, as Jeb Bush would have said, had he been an author instead of a really bad politician, everyone in your novel should be working more.

An adverb of note

From time to time I like to say something nice about adverbs. Stephen King has said the road to hell is paved with them, and no one knows the way to perdition better than King. And it's true that writers often employ adverbs for the sole purpose of shoring up weak adjectives or verbs--at which task they are destined to fail every time. However, the rare, weird, unexpected and yet perfectly fitting adverb is cause for celebration.

Today's example comes from Roberto Bolaño's 2666:

Then came an assembly of Germanists in Berlin, a twentieth-century German literature congress in Stuttgart, a symposium on German literature in Hamburg, and a conference on the future of German literature in Mainz. Norton, Morini, Pelletier, and Espinoza attended the Berlin assembly, but for one reason or another all four of them were able to meet only once, at breakfast, where they were surrounded by other Germanists fighting doggedly over the butter and jam.

I absolutely love the "doggedly" there. Of course, I don't know what word was used in the original Spanish, or even if the sentence was constructed in the same way: credit for the adverb must be shared between Bolaño and his translator, Natasha Wimmer. The word just gives the sentence an additional little twist, like fine-tuning a guitar string, that nudges the whole scene into sublimity.

The test of an adverb's necessity is whether the sentence would be the same or stronger without it, and/or if you can find a verb (or, sometimes, adjective) that incorporates the adverb, and becomes more powerful for having consumed it. The image of Germanists "fighting over butter and jam" would still be kind of funny and recognizable. Perhaps "squabbling" or "skirmishing" could be substituted for "fighting," which is not an especially vivid word in itself. But I can't think of a better way to convey the ritualized, determined, petty, hilarious, and hopeless nature of the fight depicted here than with "doggedly." The word gets a boost from the previous sentence, which reflects the relentless march of conferences at which the fight is played out over and over.

But adverbs are the Bigfoot (Bigfeet?) of grammar. They should appear rarely, and be rare and weird themselves. Spotting one should be memorable, and something to tell your friends or blog about.

Staying in touch with your writing

Over the last few weeks I've been fairly consumed with editing work. Which is good! Very, very good! But it has left me a tad depleted on the verbal front, not to mention reluctant to spend any more time in front of a computer screen than necessary. So I didn't work on my novel that much.

However, this wasn't the same kind of hiatus that I've allowed to happen in the past, because I recalled some advice I read years ago. I really wish I could remember who wrote this, but the gist was, even if you can't actually write, find a way to "stay in touch with your writing." So I decided to do that. At least once a day, for maybe fifteen minutes, I thought about my novel--specifically, the point where I'd left off on my revisions. I did this while making dinner, or just before going to sleep. I tried to fully inhabit that place in my novel, without rushing off to take notes or open the file on the computer. So as not to overload the experience with layers of worry, I told myself I'd recall what I'd imagined when the time came, and that the important thing was to be in that place, if only for a few minutes every day.

That seems to have worked. Later in the week, and yesterday, I found an hour here or there to actually open the file and work. And unlike in the past, when I just shoved my own work completely aside in favor of the paid stuff, I was able to dive right back in. I did remember what I'd thought of (and expanded on it). Also, I suspect that setting aside the anxiety about not writing actually helped me find time to work. I accepted that I might only have an hour, or less, but that I could still do something with that time. I didn't spend time lamenting the time I didn't have.


In short, I think worrying about not writing is worse than simply not writing. This doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing enterprise, i.e. either you have four hours a day to work, or you have nothing. Writing can happen in the interstices. So find a way to stay in touch. That's my advice for today.

What is vocabulary for?

Back in the day, when there were no iPads and we did our homework on the backs of shovels using lumps of coal (boy, did teachers hate grading papers then), we once had to do the following assignment: Write a story about something you did yesterday. Then rewrite it, replacing as many "little" words as possible with "bigger" words. This was an exercise in stretching our vocabularies. I can't remember what grade this was, possibly third, or maybe fifth (it couldn't have been fourth, as I had a particularly memorable and colorful--OK, frightening--teacher that year, so I would remember that). Anyway, I distinctly recall hearing another kid reading one of her improved sentences, which came out: "My friend and I purchased each other Christmas gifts." I have remembered this sentence all these years, because of how it grated on my pedantic little ears. What, I silently wondered, was wrong with "bought"? Swapping it out for "purchased" made no useful difference in meaning, and it wrecked the grammar of the sentence besides. But the kid had done the assignment correctly, and so was praised.

Now, I'm not saying this exercise was a terrible idea--it was just an exercise, and even a rather inventive one. But it did convey the idea that the purpose of using "big" words (two syllables are better than one!) was simply to sound more impressive, more educated. I honestly think that this is still what most students believe when they are made to study "vocabulary" for various tests. I once worked on a vocabulary CD-ROM whose selling point was that it spat words randomly at the user, and he or she racked up points by selecting the correct meaning for each one before time ran out. Now, it isn't news that context makes it a whole lot easier to learn new words, and that a richer vocabulary develops most efficiently, and least painfully, through extensive reading. But the question still remains: Apart from getting through all those damned tests, is the point of improving one's vocabulary really just to sound educated? To impress potential employers and mates with your great big verbal display?

A much better reason--which only occurred to me rather recently--is that language is a set of tools. The more words you have at your disposal, the greater the precision of those tools. If you know only the word "buy," you have a hammer, and you have to use it on everything from a rock to a Ming vase. If you know "buy," "purchase," "acquire," "obtain," etc.--and understand the subtle differences they make in different contexts--you have a scalpel, or a laser beam, or a pair of tweezers, or a brush. Words are for finding and expressing meaning in the most accurate way possible. They're for refinement. A large vocabulary gives you not only options, but a sense that there are options. Maybe you can't even think of the right word immediately--but knowing that it, or at least something close to it, exists will make you pause and work on that particular thought or sentence, until it says what you need it to say. The thought, the sentence, and civilization itself are all better for that effort.

Burying the verb in a noun

I've been coming across a certain stylistic problem, both in the nonfiction I've been editing, and also in, ahem, some fiction. Here's an example:

A flood of relief came over me.

Let us not dwell on where this sentence came from; that is not important. Nor, for our purposes, is the fact that it's a cliche. The problem is that there are actually two verbs in the sentence: a strong, vivid one, which is disguised as a noun ("flood"), and the weak, bland, actual verb ("came"). The overall effect is a wordy and mushy sentence. The fix:

Relief flooded over me.

OK, there is still the problem of the cliche. But now that we have one specific verb, "flooded," we can start tweaking it: Relief poured over me. Relief trickled through my veins. Relief poured over my shoulders like a hot shower. Or maybe we should just leave well enough alone for now...

The point is, I've suddenly become very aware of this problem, so it seems to be everywhere. There may even be a fancy rhetorical name for it. What's nice is that it's easy to fix: just look for weak, flabby verbs like "came" and then search the rest of the sentence for the real verb, which is likely present, but disguised as a noun.

The new novel is napping

On Tuesday I finished the first draft of my second novel. In contrast to the first one, which took six-plus years, this one took less than a year.

One reason is that I had the voice for the new novel in my head right away. It's first person, alternating between past and present. Knowing this meant that a lot of point-of-view problems, as well as tone and mood problems, never arose. First person is quite limiting in other ways, and it didn't work for my first novel; but it seems that if you at least know who's talking and why, you can go a long way.

Another reason this one went relatively quickly is that I've learned to tolerate some remarkably egregious flaws in a first draft. These include:

• A character who, Schrodinger's cat-like, is both alive and dead throughout the first half of the story. I couldn't decide which had to be the case, so I just kept writing till it became clear.
  
  
• Another character who becomes three different people during the course of the story. When she first appeared I had one idea of the role she would play, but she evolved out of that. By the end became both the motive for the storytelling (the "narrative occasion," always an issue), and a fully worthy love interest for the narrator.
  
  
• Not knowing who the killer was until the last paragraph. Maybe still not knowing.
  
  
• The usual instances of overwriting, underwriting, and especially substituting summary for scene. God, why must there be scenes? Why can't everything be summary interspersed with occasional dialog?
  
  
• Massive doubts as to whether the story even begins to make sense on any level.

What all this means, of course, is that revising is going to be a lot of work. But before that is the required cooling-off/baking/resting period, in which I ignore the novel for approximately two months so that I can tackle revisions with a new perspective. I'm shooting for July 1.

PROGRAMMING NOTE: During the next two weeks blogging may be lighter than usual, and/or unpredictable, due to work, travel, and family issues.

Another thing I've learned about writing (which people tried to tell me for years)

The thing is this: read your drafts aloud. I'm not talking about learning to perform your work, which I also wholeheartedly recommend. I'm saying that in the privacy of your little workspace, to your own little self, you should read your work aloud. Fiction, nonfiction, whatever. It is astonishingly helpful.

For years I resisted this advice, because it would, you know, make me feel like a dork. It is odd to worry about feeling like a dork even though--or in this case because--no one can see or hear me being a dork. Apparently if a dork falls in the forest, etc., he or she is even more of a dork.

Anyway. My other objection to reading aloud was that it wasn't really necessary. I can *pretend* to read aloud using the little voice that's always yammering on in my head, which is very similar to my actual voice. But that's not true. For one thing, you can't skim when you're reading aloud. You have to say (and therefore read) every word. And boy, do you catch mistakes that way.

But reading aloud is not only important for copyediting purposes. Whatever type of writing you're doing, hearing the sound and rhythm of your words will make a big difference. I read a draft out loud just this morning, and there was this one sentence at the beginning of the last paragraph that went "clunk." When I wrote it, I thought it was audacious and charming. But then it went "clunk." So I thought about it, and realized that in fact it didn't fit. It clunked because it made no sense, and when I took it out, harmony and rhythm and sense were restored.

This is not to say your rhythm should always be smooth. Sometimes you want a word or line to be jarring. But there's good jarring and bad jarring, and bad doesn't just mean the sound is off. Likely as not, the sense is off, too.

I just read this post aloud. I made several changes.

The most important thing I've learned so far (about novel writing)

The Guide to Literary Agents blog has a recurring feature called Seven Things I've Learned So Far. Last week, novelist Alexander Yates posted a great list. His #1 is also mine:

1. Revision is important, but finishing your draft is more important. I learned this the hard way. It took me five years to finish writing my novel, but in retrospect two of those years were wasted (or at least used very ineffectively) on obsessive over-revision.

Oh, how I can relate. I would estimate five of the six years I took to finish my first novel were spent on the first 50 pages. And I tossed almost all of that work in the end.

Here's the thing. People did tell me this. I read and heard countless admonishments to first novelists not to fall into this trap. But my excuse was, I had to "understand what I was doing before I could proceed."

Now, there is a point to that. You do need *some* idea of what you're doing before you get too far along; otherwise you could drive your clattering jalopy of a novel right off a cliff. Early on, you will need to do a certain amount of rewriting and redirecting and just plain noodling around. At the same time, it's important to accept that your first several chapters will always be far from perfect. In fact, they will be the farthest from perfect of all your chapters. As Yates says, "first chapters are supposed to stink."

But what do you do, as you're cruising into page 100, and you suddenly realize several events back in the beginning no longer make any sense? Well, in the past, I would have gone back and revised *everything up to page 100*--to the level of line editing. Oh, God, the years! Lament! Howl!

Anyway, the solution in this situation is to *make a note.* Write your notes in a separate file, or by hand in a notebook (I prefer this method). You might say something like: "Necklace cannot be discovered until *after* body is found." If the matter feels particularly urgent, add exclamation points or highlighting or draw a box around the note. Then go back to page 100 and *keep going.*

Because--get this--when you've finished the entire draft, you may realize you were right the first time: the necklace shows up *before* the corpse does, just as you originally suspected. Or you might have come up with a different scenario all together. There was no necklace in the first place! You can delete that entire paragraph! Imagine how painful that would be if you had spent six months rewriting that damn paragraph. As I did.

Anyway, read Yates's whole post. It's good. And I hope we've saved at least one of you out there some time.

Random tidbits about books and writing

It's Friday and I have no hope of sustaining a coherent stream of thought for more than a few sentences. Here, then, are some short and random tidbits, a. k. a. stuff I found on the Internet, about books and writing. You may hear my friend synapses sizzling in the background.

• Via Dee S., Kirkus Reviews has a book blog. In retrospect that is not surprising, but it was news to me.
  
  
• Via Nathan Bransford, Bill Morris at The Millions tells us that for new authors, bad reviews increase sales by as much as 45%. For us unknowns, that is GREAT NEWS. Instead of fretting about Michiko Kakutani shredding our babies, we can now *hope* she does.
  
  
• Also via Nathan B., Brad Phillips at Pimp My Novel offers us Nine Ways to Give a Better Reading. This backs up my encomium to a certain spoken-word performance earlier this week. If you can't take an acting class just now, Phillips suggests listening to good actors read books on CD.
  
  
• My So-Called Freelance Life by Michelle Goodman is a really, really, really good book on becoming a freelancer. I got it at a really, really, really good bookstore in the Los Feliz neighborhood in LA called Skylight Books.
  
  
• Apparently Los Feliz is pronounced "Los Feelies." Color me surprised!
  
  

That's all I got. See you Monday.

The all-but-lost art of editing

Via Ruth O., here's a thoughtful piece in The Guardian about the changing role of editors. It's mostly a sad story, but not entirely.

It reminds me of why I love editing other people's work. It's the deep engagement with another person's thoughts, which you also get in reading--except you then usually get to talk to the other person, and together you bring those thoughts out into the open.

Also to be an editor means to believe in the promise--rather than the inevitable failure--of language. One person can't always find the right words, but two (or maybe more) together sometimes can.