New Story!

So I completed my first short story of the year. Hooray! I am currently typing it up -- being a hand-written kind of guy -- and it's breaking 2000 words right now with plenty to go and plenty of room for expansion.

 It's tentatively titled, "The Temple of Guayna Tuampa" and takes place in the same world as my "Empress of the Danforthe" stories. It was a challenge on one of the websites I participate in to write a story in alternate history Earth that included dragons. So I wrote about a temple-busting explorer who encounters a dragon in a temple in South America. It's a pretty romping good time.

 I'm working as hard as ever on the new Milwaukee Writers Workshop venture. I.E., it's a business now (or will be very shortly) and so it's a bit of a mentality shift to go from "Oh, this is just a fun group I run" to "Hey, this is a business, and I need to treat it professionally." Not that I wasn't professional before, but it's a big change, and I think it'll put a good light on us for the future and help our potential. It's exciting nonetheless, and we've got some good help with a new intern who's very capable.

 On a side note, the revisions to "The Mechanics of Man" -- my steampunk rewrite of the infamous "charles" novel -- have been going very well, and I am nearly through the entirety of Book One with my additions and rewrites.

Rewrites

I recently encountered a writer -- and I'm a little loathe to use that word, writer -- who said to me that he refused to do rewrites because he felt that a piece ought to be perfect the first time it's written. My first thought was, "Someone has been reading too many parables about Faulkner." My immediate second thought was, "I have no rebuttal." I am going out on a limb here to say that this person is not a writer.

Why? Because rewrites are almost mandatory in our line of work.

I have never had a piece published that didn't require a rewrite. Even "In A Flash" -- a piece that is only 263 words -- got a rewrite to change a whopping six words from the original. If you're a writer who believes in self-improvement, rewrites are almost part of your fiber.

So here are some tips I give to folks at the Milwaukee Writers Workshop who might not be as well-versed in the art of rewriting.

1. Read your piece like a reader. It's a difficult trait to master, but it's essential. Be subjective about your own work in order to create the best possible piece.
2. Keep the goal in mind. Your story should have a resolution; every story needs one. Is your rewrite getting you to that resolution?
3. Don't over-correct: if you find yourself substituting words, put your pen down.
4. Allow yourself time. A lot of times you can spend too long on rewrite a piece. Sometimes put it down and work on another project (or better yet, submit it).

Just a few thoughts on revision and rewriting. What are your thoughts? What's your process?

Eureka!

In a moment of brilliance -- or perhaps just idiot savant-ness -- I figured out the integral flaw in my very first attempt at a novel. It's a project I've long thought was worthy of having been written but more than once person has pointed out error after error. It was never that I didn't think that the errors were un-fixable; I just didn't know how to do it.

At work last week, however, it dawned on me where the crux lay: the main character's passiveness needed to be changed to make him more active. Now, that might seem like a pretty easy thing to pick out when reading a draft -- and it was -- but like I said the problem wasn't in not knowing the flaw; it was knowing how to fix it.

I think the problem is pretty much resolved now, though, which makes me happy. The main character has really blossomed in my re-writes (and I'm only about 20 pages in, with an additional 10 or so pages of new material). Not only has he become more active in his own story, but his actions make him significantly more empathetic, which was a big issue for people in previous critiques.

As a side note, I took comments from a few people to heart and made what was essentially a Victorian-era pastiche piece (as an homage to Charles Dickens) into a Steampunk piece.

Now, in my defense, I feel like this change is worthwhile. Steampunk is a very broad genre, and I feel like this piece can be made into what some chidingly refer to as 'Li-fi' -- literary science fiction. I'm ok with it being that, because I think that it fits more in line with literary fiction, rather than entertainment fiction.

Today is not a good day

I'm lost. I have four different projects, all of them with very different themes and plots arcs and even genres, and still I'm lost. Granted, in just over two weeks I've churned out nearly 23-thousand words. I'm pleased at the word count. It's good that I've been able to sit and concentrate on getting some words out, but I'm not at all satisfied, for a number of reasons:

1) The writing - as is typical with first-draft material - is shit.
2) The flow has stopped, and I can tell. Where once there was a sense of connection to each piece; now there seems to be just a monotonous typing of words. I think that maybe I derailed myself a bit when I stepped away from the first piece and started the second one, and I've lost a bit of my momentum.
3) I'm questioning my style of writing, which leads me to my real discussion.

For months, perhaps even over the course of years since I graduated and have been writing consistently, I've thought of myself as a decent writer, one with a fair amount of skill and distinct voice. Now I've begun to realize that I am a very stylized writer. I begin with a concept, I continue to build upon that concept and by the end of the story, there's no story. I spend a great deal of time working up to a revelation with my characters - or my readers, or even myself - that never comes. It's disappointing to read story after story of my own material and find that I keep coming up short of my own goals.

So do I revise all of those pieces? Can I go back and begin to rewrite them - completely rewrite them from scratch - as though they were entirely new pieces? Both of those tasks seem daunting, and some of the stories are better left unfinished or unpolished, as I don't believe they're salvageable as they are.

I don't believe that I have the knack to be profound in my material. That's not who I am; that's not what I want to present in my stories. What I do hope for, however, is a sense of consistency that makes my stories mine: a consistency that gives me a voice that is distinct from so much of the monotony that pervades contemporary writing. At the moment, I have no achieved that, as I once thought I had.

Back to the drawing board.