Ditching the junk

Lurking in your work are likely flashes of truth and beauty. Odds are good that they're buried under a load of junk. Your junk.

If you lack faith in your readers, you do a lot of explaining to them. This would make sense if you were teaching grade 9 English, but you're not.

If you lack faith in your ideas, you repeat them. Again and again. Over and over. See how annoying that is?

The antidotes for this faithlessness will be personal. Good editing requires detachment. There are a few tricks that can help (which I'll share next post). But there is one pre-requisite before any of these will work, and that's time.

You can't edit something you just wrote. You can and should proof-read it, but that's not editing. Your only hope of seeing your work as others see it is to put it in a drawer and forget about it.

For how long? Here's a rule of thumb: One month for short stories, 2 for one-act plays, 6 for longer plays, and a year for a novel.

A year.

Why?

In a year you will become a slightly different person. And you need those new eyes to show you what your old self couldn't see. Because your new self will see the junk covering up whatever your old self wanted to say.

My Microwave

My $800 microwave died four months ago. Its metallic corpse is still mounted above our stove. Like an exotic thoroughbred, it was elegant but frail, and fell ill if handled without ritualistic care and attention.

Life without a microwave was unthinkable. We consoled ourselves that we could drag our old one (an unsightly plastic workhorse), out of the cellar in an emergency, until we bought bought our replacement.

Imagine our shock to discover that you don't need a microwave. Period. You can defrost your breakfast blueberries on the stove top in the same time that it takes to zap them. Bagels are tastier from the oven, as is anything involving cheese. Popcorn without the chemicals is a revelation. Other foods no longer taste like science experiments.

There's even a convenience advantage to ditching the microwave. Thirty seconds too long in the mike can be a disaster. Five minutes too long in the oven is (mostly) no big deal.

Life without a microwave is not only manageable: its better.

I haven't missed the microwave once. Really. The old one is still in the cellar. I would never have thought that was possible, if it hadn't been forced on me.

Sizable chunks of your writing (and mine) are just like that microwave.

Next post, we'll talk about how to find them.

Filling up the Bank

This morning, I had 2 clear hours when I could have been writing.

I didn't.

Instead, I surfed youtube for every inspirational movie or voice performance I could find.

Sometimes you have to take it in before you can put it out.

Like Me

There are a lots of strong views on writing about race. They don't come from people Like Me.

When I was little, no one was like me. Of course, all parents say: "You're very special, dear - there's no one just like you." Generally, this is a patent lie.

Most kids had virtual doppelgangers - same blond hair, same dimples. Same cowlicks. OK, maybe they weren't identical, but the likeness was so close it forced Moms to use that weasel word: "just." And that was in my school alone. Nation-wide, I knew those kids would resemble gazillions of others.

There were no kids like me, because there were no couples were like my Black father and White mother. On TV, at least, we could watch The Jefferson's long suffering neighbours. But they didn't live in my neighbourhood, or any neighbourhood. They were fictional and childless.

Now, we're everywhere. Some of us are famous; Barack Obama, Malcolm Gladwell, Tiger Woods, Halle Berry. Many of these people side-step the issue by being known as black.

That's not a lie, but its also not the whole story.

I wish I'd known more of us. I'd have asked a lot of questions. Like, how did they answer stupid questions about their "nationality" or "background" ? I found my own road, but it would have been nice to talk to a fellow traveler.

Characters or Concepts

In script writing class, we share our initial ideas together.

This process used to scare me. I now liken it to a circle of eager farmers comparing the seeds which each cradles in the palm of his grubby hands.

Some of us talk about concepts. Class struggles, redemptive missions, the tense pull between nature and technology. The ideas sound lofty. The better ones have the potential to be spun into essays, or even textbooks.

Some of us talk about characters. Jill's still secretly furious with Emma, who had an affair with her husband twenty years ago. John got the promotion Marco wanted. Leanne fancies her priest.

The characters often sound cartoon-ish. Worse still, they reveal things about their creators. Like the time our obese classmate mournfully outlined a character who needed to escape the heavy woes "weighing her down." The rest of us steadfastly did NOT make eye contact with each other.

Here's what I've noticed, over my two years in the class. The concept plays may shoot up a few hopeful scenes, but eventually they wither and die. Every last one of them.

The character plays don't all grow to maturity. But at least some of them do. They have a fighting chance.

Let your characters tell you the story.

Concepts may have gotten you A's at school (especially when you lifted your prof's) but, as the basis for a story, they suck.

46

My age.

I remember my own mother at 46. I was 19. Invincible. My Mom, newly divorced, worried about whether she could get a job or date. Or make new friends. Or dance. Ridiculous, I thought. She's only 46.

Only 46. I'd like to reinhabit the glibness with which I spoke those words.

46 is old enough to give rise too the question: Why haven't you? As in why haven't you won the Nobel prize? Or had one of your novels published? Or even finished one?

Because lots of people have done all those things (except winning the Nobel), by this age.

Why haven't I? Why haven't you?

The answer we're afraid of is: Because you can't.

That's why authors first published in middle age cheer me enourmously. Thank you, Annie Proulx.

It can be done, even if my mother never really did learn to dance.

True Confessions # 2

I'm an adult-onset atheist.

I was an easy sell for the warm and fuzzy parts of religion. But not for nothing am I a lawyer. I can recognize a losing argument.

Religion endures. Not for much longer, perhaps, but its had an awfully good run. Sure, lots of the Bible now sounds bizarre. Like offering your daughter to satisfy the sexual appetites of house guests or the death penalty for wearing mixed fibres. Or human sacrifice. The Bible's world was different from ours.

How different? Well, 100 years ago we seriously debated whether women should vote. 250 years ago, slavery made a lot of sense to a lot of people. 2000 years ago, 1000 was M.

Now, imagine the world was 1000s of years ago. The earth is flat, and almost everything in it is a mystery. You likely believe in lots of Gods, on the QT, even if you're Jewish. Your tribe is your universe.

That's the world of the Bible. A world I love.

Not for the mind-numbing genealogies. Not for the obsessive-compulsive brutality of Deuteronomy and Leviticus, or for the psychedelic sadism of Revelations.

I love the stories. Jealous Cain. Joseph, weeping on his reunion with the long lost brothers who almost killed him. Esther's courage. Jacob's love for Rachel, burning bright for all those years that he tended her father's sheep. The good Samaritan.

Thousands of years ago, without pens, pencils, books, or paper, people recorded these stories. They're still compelling.

That's more than miraculous enough for me. If I have faith in anything, I have faith in stories.