Storytellersunplugged

by Gerard Houarner

First off, thanks to the Garden State Horror Writers for having me over last month to talk about writing. It was very cool picking up where I left off on some of these Storyteller postings and shooting the breeze with writers dedicating

This month I’d like to follow-up with some more thoughts on revision, mostly because I’ve been doing a lot of it lately. I finished a big chunk of writing a few months ago and put it on the back burner to cool off, and recently took it out again. This is something many writers recommend doing, but practically speaking, if you’re a working writer with contracts and publishers demanding more work from you, you don’t get the chance – just listen to some of the other folks on SU racing for their deadlines, pouring out the words and moving on to the next project because the rent’s due and the fridge is empty.

Editors pick up on the problem areas, of course. It’s their job. Unfortunately, problems still happen. Everyone has sob stories.

(Everyone has sob stories about meddling editors, as well – it’s a give and take situation where discussion should be encouraged. Sometimes you the writer have good reason to do something a particular way, or happen to know a fact that makes a particular scene or character unique. It’s up to you to defend your stance. But it is true that an editor often acts as the Voice of Reason – we’re just too much inside our own world and need to be brought back to that space we share with readers. I once heard Howard Waldrop talk about his editorial experiences, including Ellen Datlow asking him to revise a story to “give the reader a clue.”)

Well, I’m not in the writer-working-for-the-mortgage league, nor can I share Waldrop’s rarefied literary company. I do write stuff, and it does get sold and published, so I’ve had to deal with revision at my own level.

I think part of the problem with the art of writing is that it’s usually done in such a piecemeal fashion. A painter or sculptor has the “whole” work right in front of them. Most composers can “experience” their creation in a few minutes, unless it’s a symphony, movie score or musical.

Writers not only take as long and longer to finish a piece of work as other creators, but they don’t get the benefit of “living” with their creation. A reader can gobble up a novel in hours, or over the course of a few glorious days. The book lives in a reader’s mind for that time as a kind of alternative reality, a dreamtime.

The writer can’t look at the stack of pages, or a list of file names, and encompass what work’s been done visually. The writer can’t listen to the story’s tune.

In a Locus interview with Jay Lake last year, he mentioned a concept that really caught my attention: Span of Control. Basically, it’s the amount of story he can contain in his head “organically” without thinking about “mechanisms” (I think he means where the story’s going next, plot, twists, threads, arcs, whatever you want to call those structures.) Within that Span of Control he said he was able to maintain his voice; outside of it, the writing degrades.

The way I relate to this idea is in my capacity to “be” in a story, to see it all, complete, or at least have confidence it’s all resolvable and makes sense.

Span of Control for a writer is like an artist looking at the canvas, walking around the sculpture, listening to the song.

You can see how the pieces connect, relate to each other, flow. Yes, I know, it’s not what’s usually regarded as “editing,” but I think this perspective helps.

Working writers may have an advantage over part-timers like myself, on distracting day jobs, although there are plenty of other factors that can cause the same amount of interference – issues with family, house, medical, etc. The point is, the more time you spend in your story, the easier it is to remember it, dream and live it, maintain that Span of Control.

The more you write (the more you practice the skill), the more story you can hold in that SoC (Lake mentioned he’d been able to expand his ability to retain the story information). The more you can hold, the less you need to worry about making critical plot errors leading to problems later, as well as major revisions.

I think particularly for beginning writers, dealing with the frustration of “starting over” on a piece after a few days off and generally dealing with the interference in carrying the whole story in one’s head is a killer. That’s why the advice of writing every day, at a certain time in a consistent place, is so valuable.

I recently enjoyed a certain amount of comfortable SoC by taking a week off and writing and/or revising every day for most of the day. I was able to pick up where I left off much more easily. In a story involving a bit of complicated (for me) historical/cultural research, I was able to sustain the mood/atmosphere I was hoping to achieve. It had taken me two weeks to get half way through the story (part-time writing, half an hour to a couple of hours a few nights a week, a few hours on the weekend). I finished the story in two and a half days, revisions and all, at least for now.

On another, much longer piece, again with a lot of cultural research involved taking me months to finish, I was able to do a complete revision, with some serious re-writing, in a few days.

I could literally pick up on where I’d slogged through areas over a number of weeks, and where I’d managed to carve out time and get through a part of the story in a matter of days. The writing was smoother and there were less errors (pesky pet sex changes, the miraculous transformations of hair color or clothing, name flips).

Another observation: the beginnings of these pieces were usually smoother, more polished, than the endings. Warming up for writing sessions, I go back, pick up what I’ve been trying to do, make changes, revise. When building the story engine at the very beginning, I spend a lot of time going back, tweaking, adding, deleting, refining. The attention makes for writing.

(Not that this piece is any example of “fine writing,” but in putting it together in one sitting, I’ve gone up and down the thing a dozen of times before getting to the end, adding, cutting, clarifying, etc – yeah, it’s not scintillating, and it may not even be entirely logical or coherent, but alas it makes sense to me and you should have seen what it looked like before all those revisions. I couldn’t have even reached the end without the on-the-fly edits.) (Oh, and yeah, I went back the next day to read it cold and try to make the thing make some sense. Just so you know I tried.)

The further along the story I move, the less I go back. I think there’s a certain “tipping point” I reach where I’ve moved beyond the set-up and I’m more involved with the new scenes and what’s coming next. The problem comes in with those middle scenes I finished but don’t revisit to “warm up” because they don’t necessarily have relevant information for what I’m working on at the moment. Scene and act changes are a new beginning, so going back winds up being distracting.

Then comes the race for the end, where my need to finish can lead to tragic errors of judgement. What saves me, at least sometimes, is my habit of going all the way back to the opening and making sure the elements I introduced (imagery, conflicts, whatever) are resolved, reflected, etc.

That still leaves the middle hanging, though.

Details. Bothersome, tedious details. That kind that make the stories “real.” The things that bite a writer in the butt when they’re inconsistent, or just plain wrong, that throw the reader out of the story, or never lets them get into it because there’s not enough and/or they’re not used well. That’s the job, though.

So. Span of Control, as far as I understand the concept, is a nifty tool for writing and revising, both on the fly and at the end before the story goes off to an editor. I interpret it as being “in” the story like you’re in your apartment or house – you know where everything is, or at least know the general area to go look for something, and you’re aware of the color of your walls, what kind of furniture is in the bedroom, what’s in the pantry because, well, you live there. You know who’s in the house (unless you live with teenagers). You use the material at hand, you don’t forget things you might have started or overlook opportunities to make things better or something out of place.

But stuff happens to tear you out of your “story house” all the time. Sometimes it’s the day job. Or medical issues. A leaking roof. Let’s just call it reality.

Unless you can make a full-time living from your writing and have a partner who can run interference for you in dealing with reality, that SoC is going to get knocked around a bit.

And, you might not be able to work your way up to Lake’s ability to keep an entire novel in his SoC. (Hmmmm, SoC. Sock. Unfortunate. But it’s funny, and I’m kind of a funny guy, and there’s really no time to revise SOME MORE, and since there’s no editorial intervention on a blog, I guess you the reader will just have to suffer with that one – hope you’re having fun!)

I think time is needed. A day, a week, whatever works for you, to live in the story from beginning to end.

Yes, of course, you re-read the thing. Cold. From a distance. Outside the SoC dreamtime. Catch those mis-spellings, missing words. Animal sex-changes. Developing editorial talent and a sensitivity to your weaknesses (like word drops, and “reading” those words back in when they’re not actually there during the revision process, leading to colorful manuscript marks) is crucial to presenting a professional manuscript to an editor.

I know a few writers who love this part of the process. They look forward to the cutting, the re-arranging. Others don’t look forward to it but know it’s vital to their making a sale (as Nalo Hopkinson pointed out about herself in a recent interview). Still others seem to do it on the fly, in the dream time – my old teacher Joseph Heller used to talk about finishing a manuscript page, and once it went down on the pile (these were the days of typewriters, folks), that was it, the page was done. Of course, he spent a lot of time on that page. But he could keep what had gone on before, and where he was going, all in his head while he concentrated on that part of the picture. And then there’s always the saintly spouse or companion, the valued band of first-readers who understand what’s trying to be said and know just what to say to help the process along.

But I think you also need to experience the work as a reader will: hold it all in your mind like a passenger who’s going along for a relatively quick ride, not as the builder who’s spent weeks, months, perhaps even years cutting the road through mountains and jungles and those dry, broad stretches of desert or arctic wasteland.

Basically, my point is two-fold: maintaining the SoC helps the writing and editing-on-the go process, and the cold and distant read tests the strength of the illusion you’ve created as well as catches those bumps you might have missed in dreamtime which might push a reader out of the story.

From what I can see, successful working writers schedule revision time as part of the deadline (you guys feel free to tell me I’m wrong) and have the skill to distance themselves and approach the work with “fresh” eyes over a short period, to some extent (reading aloud is probably the best technique – what feels right on the screen or on paper can suddenly jump out wrong when you hear it). I think those guys are also adept at something resembling Lake’s SoC so they can keep the story going while minimizing disastrous stalls or false steps.

Of course, as you can plainly read in this blog, this doesn’t work for everyone all the time. Still, revision on the fly along with revision after creation are skills that separate the published from the unpublished. This kind of work I think helps writers get to the end, and want to get to the end, of a story. And finishing a story is half the battle.

For the rest of us, my advice is do what you can to sustain the Span of Control, through work habits, meditation, rituals, notes, and time away from the real world’s interference. And don’t be too eager to push the story out the door straight-away.

If you have the luxury of putting the story aside for a little while, take it. Put in for a vacation or personal day, use a long weekend, call in sick, and live with your creation. Of course, be ready for editorial guidance suggesting you’ve spent a little too much time inside your world and need to make concessions for the rest of us in the “real world” – you might be just a little too good at SoC. But on the other hand, don’t be surprised by what you might catch that can save you from rejection.