Don't Look Back

 Word count: 297                                Reading time: 2 mins

Years ago my friend Valerio, who was a bit of a petrolhead, used to joke, “I don’t need a rear view mirror because it doesn’t matter who’s behind me.”

 When I write, I look back often to see how I arrived at where I am. Sometimes this is a pitfall that stops me from advancing the story. Maybe that’s why other writers, probably all of whom finish NaNoWriMo in five days, don’t touch their work until it has reached SFD status.  

 Editing is just another part of writing so it’s a non-issue, right? Maybe not. Some people will revise a scene five or ten times while major parts of the book hang like a giant blank canvas. Editing allows them to avoid the steep hills in the road: advancing the story, pulling together the threads of the plot, and developing a compelling denouement.

Still I can’t imagine starting the next part of a novel without reading some of what I wrote the day before. This practice invariably sparks some tinkering and often proves that editing, when done properly, can take more effort than writing. When my rolling revisions stop the work dead, I know it’s time to consider ways to start it again.

At the 2010 Surrey International Writers’ Conference, the marvellous performance artist Ivan Coyote led a session called Writing Boot Camp for Procrastinators. One of her suggestions was to either cover the screen as you type or to change the font colour to white so you can’t actually see what you’re laying down. Her point was that creative potential shines strongest when it’s unfettered, particularly when it's unfiltered by fear.

Do you throw away your rear view mirror and ignore what you’ve already done? How do you push through to the end of your story?

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Photo: Drew Hadley

Reality, what a concept

Word count: 274                                                                                                Reading time: 2 min

Recently a friend said that not everyone reads like I do. Apparently I demand a lot from novels because I want credibility. I don’t want reality to the exclusion of caricature or metaphor or other wondrous literary devices. I’m not looking for it in sci fi or fantasy. But in everyday garden-variety fiction shouldn’t the laws of nature and human nature be evident?

It’s late summer and daffodils are blooming in the garden. Really?

A 19^th century schoolteacher with no income, other than her subsistence level job, is fired. Can she really afford to live on her own, in a hotel no less, for an indefinite period until rescued by a proposal of marriage?

A character goes to a big high school and finds a secret room where she can hide every time her demons overwhelm her. Is it possible only one teenager in an entire would test doors to see if they’re locked? That only one teenager would go places she shouldn’t? Can I believe that this room will remain undiscovered for the whole school year or until the climax, when the protagonist’s tormentor finds her there?

When I hit one of these road bumps, I usually re-read the earlier part of the book to see where I missed the essential detail. Once I’ve satisfied myself that it’s a simple continuity error, I never engage with the story in the same way again.

Do credibility issues suspend your belief in a story? If so, can you remember any really good ones? Or do you just read past structural weaknesses?

Lastly, where have all the editors gone?