Tag: editing process

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To Be Is to Have Been

I know that I am not alone in reliving past blunders, small embarrassing mistakes in social situations that I cannot undo or get over. I re-embarrass myself repeatedly in my mind to no purpose at all. I just make myself unhappy. Did I really make that bad joke? Could I not have held that fart for just another minute?

Characters in novels make bad decisions all the time. Some of them might lead to disastrous, even traumatic results.

I can only imagine what it must be like to experience true trauma, how my memory might haunt me forever. 

I believe in neither curses nor blessings, but reliving trauma is the curse of memory.

Of course, memory is also a blessing. We remember good things, happy things, triumphs and moments of joy as well as simple contentments and feelings of well-being. Sights, sounds, and smells can be remarkable triggers to activate memories we didn’t know we had, memories that help us understand that the past has a purpose, that to be is to have been.

And every time we remember something, we bring it to life, re-experience it, re-invent it even. That last part, invention, is a link to creativity. We fill in gaps in memory out of necessity and add details that never occurred or emphasis that may not be appropriate. Memories change and memory can become a capricious, even unfaithful servant. As we age we develop the habit of helping rather than relying upon our memory.

That’s not a bad thing, though, as an imperfect memory is probably the best kind. Remembering every instant of our lives, however mundane, triumphant, or traumatising, would be nightmarish, the stuff of science fiction-horror.

The enigma of memory lies in the necessity of both remembering and forgetting. If we don’t remember, we have dementia, and we’re in serious trouble. If we can’t forget, we are reliving trauma with every breath.

Good characters in novels have backstories. Good writers let characters forget things, and remember things from a point of view, and ignore things, with an overall effect that in some contexts, they are thoroughly unreliable.

Now, perfect action-hero characters never forget. That’s dull. (See Too Good to Be True  ) Characters who forget important things are hard to believe as well. That’s frustrating.

Forgetting, though, for a writer can be a boon. Forget what you wrote last month and you can look at it with fresh eyes today. One hopes the result will not end in trauma.

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The Most UnKindest Cut

All of the best lies are those we tell ourselves.

Julius Caesar thought that his wife’s portentous dreams, the soothsayer’s babblings, and the bad weather were all nothing, that the Ides of March would come and go and he would continue on his path to absolute rule with the help of his good friends in the Senate.

Because my life and goals are rather smaller than Caesar’s, so are my lies. 

“This is happening,” I think to myself as I pass the 10,000 word mark in a new project. “It’s real.”

“No doubt about it,” I say at 20,000 words. “Voice, plot, setting FIRMLY established. Stay on course.”

“One third done,” I think at 30,000 words. “At this point it’s almost time to consider the next project as I bring this one to its inevitable conclusion.

I was at this point recently when I slowed to a crawl, writing nothing, editing bits here and there. It was then when I began to inhabit my own private way-station, a place where fictional characters wait in anxious queues shuffling from gate to narrative gate in search of a destination worth the trouble of the journey. It is a place I cannot write my way out of, where my characters go not to die, but to languish unfinished, their thoughts, their wants and fears forever unexpressed for the simple reason that they are just not making the grade.

It’s not their fault. They’re good characters. Well written, you know, with back stories and lives and voices and relationships. But something has happened that has prevented them from taking over the novel. They are not driving the action, forming their future and leaving narrative wakes that sweep readers along with them, behind just far enough to pique their interest.

And so it begins. The slaughter.

Descriptive paragraphs disappear, chapters are deleted, sub-plots evaporate, settings melt, and characters are proscribed.

“Look, with a spot I damn him,” I say to myself, except that it’s with a keystroke. Shakespeare always comes in handy when there’s deadly work to be done.

Building Rome is hard. Changing Rome is messy. 30,000 words quickly become 20,000. But when the bloody business is concluded, I am free to go new places, free to make new decisions unbeholden to old ones. I may end up in a better place.

If you think about it, if Caesar had made a few more well timed cuts, his ending might have been happier, too.