How are your tent caterpillars?

Ernest Hemingway rewrote the ending to A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times. When asked why, he said he rewrote it to get the words right.

Yesterday I walked along a sunny road on the edge of Mount Maxwell. It was bordered by thick rows of enormous foxgloves, some of which towered over my 172 cm / 5’ 8” height. Later, when I mentioned it to my sister, she commented only weeks before when she walked it, she’d had to push her way through all the tent caterpillars.

Word count: 344                                    Reading time: 1-2 minutes

Not long ago my novel Lockdown was in the same state as that mountain trail in the spring: sticky with tent caterpillars. It had been part of me for so long that I was unable to see its flaws. Then I skyped with my editor, Anita Daher and she turned the light on. The spidery webs started to fall away and a few flower spikes nudged their heads into the sunshine. Those blooms only started to open after more rewriting.

The editing process is far from being a pleasant summer’s walk on a favourite mountain trail. It’s more like hiking the same terrain in autumn, winter, spring and summer and contemplating the different perspectives that each rewrite brings.

I think my novel is getting close to its full glory, although I have a draft or two to run through yet. To help get there, I remember the beautiful flowers that rise out of the caterpillar silk. As I work through the next reiterations, I’ll model my attitude on John Irving’s: I think what I've always recognized about writing is that I don't put much value in so-called inspiration. The value is in how many times you can redo something.

How many times have you rewritten your latest scene, story, or book? Are you like Hemingway, rewriting the same page thirty-nine times? When someone suggests you rewrite something, do you perceive that as a punishment or as an opportunity to bring the work to greater power and clarity? Are there bright spring flowers poking through the caterpillar plague?

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Photos from Wikimedia Commons:

Abstract art in the hedgerow by Penny Mayes

Digitalis purpurea by Nevit Dilmen

What's your view?

From where I sit, peering down through the thick evergreens on the side of Mt. Fromme, the cruise ships that slip in and out of Vancouver’s harbour look like toy boats on a glassy pond. They move, sleek and quiet, on the waters of Burrard Inlet.

Then I ride the SeaBus into town. When I’m at water level next to the huge liners, my perception of size changes dramatically. Even the small cruise ships are huge. The big cruise ships are the size of small countries. They are like floating, vertical islands.

Word count: 395                                                      Reading time: 1-2 minutes

Every time I start writing a novel it seems a small task: the simple telling of story. I’m sitting at an elevation of 1,100 feet, watching a story unfold on the harbour below. My last three novels, drafted during consecutive NaNoWriMo’s, took less than thirty days each.

In that short period I invented new worlds, populated them with fresh characters and manned the deck while big adventures rose, reached climaxes, and came to resolution. Pushing the small boat around the pond was light work compared to what came next.

I’m talking about revision of course. Of draft numbers one, two, three and beyond. That’s when the toy boat morphs into something much larger. With every pass, the story deepens, characters fill out and tension tightens. The challenge gets bigger and bigger.

Perhaps that’s why emerging writers need to look to proven authors for help and inspiration. Success provides lessons on what to do when tugboats turn into freighters and they’re no longer as agile and easy to turn as they once were.

• Brian Beker recommends Clean [your writing] up and make it interesting. This involves rewriting until you feel like you need a bone marrow transplant.
• Jane Austen hinted at the same tenacity with, I am not at all in a humour for writing; I must write on until I am.
• And if it all seems to be taking too long, don’t worry about it. Definitely do not rush it. Especially do not rush to self publish. Try to remember Moliére’s words: The trees are slow to grow bear the sweetest fruit.

Where is your writing now? Are you pushing a small boat around a pond? Or are you standing at the helm of an aircraft carrier wondering how you are going to get it into dock? 

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Picture from Wikimedia Commons: Disney Wonder by Shorelander

Is your writing dying?

Every single cell in the human body replaces itself over a period of seven years. That means there's not even the smallest part of you now that was part of you seven years ago.  The Raw Shark Texts, Steven Hall.

Word count: 334    Reading time 1-2 mins.

This means that there is still hope for the novel that I started writing seven years ago. Over the course of time, it has been revised to the point that very little of the original text survives.

This novel has become a bit of an annual tradition that coincides with spring. When the cherry trees flower and sunny forsythia brightens even the dullest day, a sense of renewal, of a fresh start, buoys me. So I revisit the languishing saga. Every year, when I open it again, it feels like I am administering CPR to a failing body.

In December 2010 at the 92^nd Street Y in New York City writer-artist Lynda Barry and illustrator Maira Kalman spoke about their artistic processes. In particular, they talked about how a piece can feel like it’s dying and how rescuing it is what makes it work.

“It’s literally every day, I’m dying, it’s dying,” Kalman said. “Then something happens and it’s like, 'OK, it’s going to be OK.'”

To me, that’s what perseverance and rewriting is about; it’s digging for the moment when everything feels OK again. Just this week my writing partner, who has probably read the entire seven-year-old novel three or four times, suggested a change at a pivotal point in the story. It wasn’t how I imagined the narrative unfolding but as I revised, new perspectives on the story opened. (Thanks, Allison!) The branch of the cherry tree that looked lifeless last week is now covered in blossoms.

Is there a manuscript sitting on your shelf that you have abandoned because it looked, to all appearances, dead? Should you try to breathe some air into its lungs and hope for a ROSC (return of spontaneous circulation)? Could yesterday’s fallow ground open with flowers?

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Photo: Cherry Blossom in Branch Brook Park, NJ by Siddharth Mallya from Wikimedia Commons

Time and tide

Word count: 253         Reading time: 1 minute 

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again. – Oscar Wilde

Revise and revert: I know the exercise well. It’s not usually a simple comma that gets removed. More than once I’ve spent half a day revising a scene only to realize it was better before I started to play with it. I’ve torn whole books apart and rearranged them, only to put them back together again with the slightest of changes. Now that you mention it, I am thankful for the gift of word processing. 

I say half a day but I can’t be sure. Time loses meaning when I’m swept away by a story, either the telling or retelling of it. As Mary Novik explained, through her character Pegge Donne, in Conceit: It was true that, when I picked up my pen, it was sometimes hours before I counted a minute gone. Like eating a fresh buttered pike, I could not stop until my belly cried out it was glutted.

Right now I’m revising a novel. For the fourth, fifth, or maybe even the sixth time? The fact is I love the characters and they drift around me like phantoms wailing to be heard. So when I pick up the hard copy to move a comma or two, the clock stops ticking and the walls recede. 

Are you lost in any projects right now? What stops time for you?

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Photo by: Kris Jacobs

The unexpected

Word count: 428            Reading time: 1-2 mins

On a recent ferry ride home from the Gulf Islands, I sat in front of a couple who talked non-stop the entire trip. They spoke French with soft Parisian accents and as I eavesdropped, trying futilely to pick out words, maybe even sentences, I pictured them as the epitome of Gallic sophistication: young, stylish, poised.  

When we approached Vancouver and everyone started to head back to the car deck, I got my first good look at them. They were seniors. Senior seniors at that. He was short, stout, and balding and wore a Harley Davidson hoodie stretched over his pot belly. His jeans were rough and torn but not in a fashionable way. He walked round-shouldered and slumped. Her thin, brassy red hair lifted off her head in a frizzy peak. The Kelly-green vest she wore clashed with the gaudy orange underneath it. Enough gold hung around her neck to pay the National Debt. I laughed at my clichéd assumption and enjoyed the surprise of how they really looked.

I love surprises in fiction too. But I don’t like being deceived or manipulated. I don’t want to get to the end of a story or chapter and find out that sequence was just a dream. I don’t want to be led to believe that the main love interest was cheating on his or her partner only to find out it was just a close friend or relative who was being embraced so passionately. And I sure don’t want a new character or device introduced at the end of a novel, a Deus ex machina solution to a complicated problem.

As I work, I love uncovering the surprises in my own stories and characters too but these appear slowly. In the first draft I find out who the players are. The second draft helps me get to know them better. It’s only in the third or fourth revision of a novel, as I push along the question of what if, that my characters start to reveal their idiosyncrasies and unusual interests. Between each revision, I follow the advice of Steven Pinker and give them all a rest, “Write many drafts, separated by a long enough interval so your writing will seem strange to yourself.” When I go back to a work after a long interval, it’s like opening the box of Christmas decorations from the far corner of the basement: full of delightful things I’d forgotten were there.

Where are the surprises in what you are writing? How do you uncover them?

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Photo by: Royce DeGrie