Cut your second draft free

When you write a second draft, you are sometimes impeded by the inertia of the words that have come before.

You breeze over the first sentence of your piece -- of course that can't change; it's perfect -- and the first sentence pulls the second along behind it. The second sentence pulls along a third.

Often, the act of rewriting can turn into a series of insertions: you are wedging new fragments between the bricks of prose you've already written.

Sometimes what you need are new bricks.

Next time you're revising something, write the second draft from a blank page. Those brilliant sentences that you have to include? Try writing them from memory. Try writing the whole story from memory.

Let the second draft be its own animal.

(Technorati tags for this entry: Writing)

Yeah, that's my excuse too

William Gibson took a long hiatus from his blog a few years back. In his final post before the big break, he stated:

I've found blogging to be a low-impact activity, mildly narcotic and mostly quite convivial, but the thing I've most enjoyed about it is how it never fails to underline the fact that if I'm doing this I'm definitely not writing a novel -- that is, if I'm still blogging, I'm definitely still on vacation.... The image that comes most readily to mind is that of a kettle failing to boil because the lid's been left off.

He went on to write Pattern Recognition, I believe.

(Technorati tags for this entry: writing, blogging, fiction, writers)

Blogger Emacs client

Posted on the "Blogger Buzz" blog:

Blogger exposes a clean API based on Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) and Google Data APIs (GData). This Emacs module leverages this functionality to enable one to blog from within the comfort of a full-featured editing environment.

Translation:

You can browse, edit, and write your blogger posts all from within Emacs.

Plus: interfaces for gCal and Google Reader.

See the Emacspeak blog for more info.



(Technorati tags: Emacs, Blog, Blogger, Google)

Esquire's Napkin Fiction Project

Thousands of stories have been born in bars, their opening words scribbled on cocktail napkins.

Now Esquire's honoring that tradition with their Napkin Fiction Project.

They sent 250 napkins to 250 writers -- ZZ Packer, Daniel Alarcon, Ron Carlson, Aimee Bender, AM Homes, and Madison Smartt Bell among them -- and challenged each to fill the napkin with a story.

And Rick Moody, that clever man, unfolds his napkin down to crepe-paper-thinness and writes a page in each square, front and back.

Genius, all of them.


(Technorati tags for this entry: Writing, Fiction, Writers)

The Case Against Word Attachments

This guy shares my hatred of the proprietary, bloated Microsoft Word document format, but he takes it a couple steps further.

Whenever someone emails him a Word attachment, he sends them a link to this page The headline? Please don't send me Microsoft Word documents. He makes some great points about the ickiness of Word, some of which I hadn't considered:

Sending Microsoft Word files can violate your privacy.

Microsoft Word is often configured by default to automatically track and record changes you make to a document. What many people do not realize is that this record of changes is actually silently embedded in the file every time you save your document.

Microsoft Word files are a security hazard.

Unlike standard data formats, Word files can contain programming code which can be executed by your computer automatically when the document is opened.

When you use Word, he says, you're getting all these fun security and privacy risks, plus you're using a format that not everyone can read, that's frequently deprecated by new versions of itself, and that might print differently on different machines. Awesome.

One problem with all this: how does he send people to this URL and not come across as a geeky, overzealous dick?

(Technorati tags for this entry: Microsoft Word, Technology, MS Word, Tech, Microsoft)

Another Author's Note from James Frey. Wonderful.

Some things just don't have to be said.

Take the author's note on the paperback edition of James Frey's My Friend Leonard (sequel to A Million Little Pieces). In it, Frey mentions that the book is "is a combination of fact and fiction, real and imagined events."

No shit, hoss.

Thanks for letting us know. Those of us that have been living under rocks for the past six months are eternally grateful for your honesty and candor.

We all figured out months ago that the "memoir" A Million Little Pieces contains boatloads of fabrications. Not least among these is James Frey's so-called "jail time," which turns out to have been limited a few hours in a holding cell: nowhere near the three-month prison term he claimed to serve. He was never actually in prison.

So when the first line of the sequel to Million Little Pieces reads: "On my first day in jail, a three hundred pound man named Porterhouse hit me in the back of the head with a metal tray," you've got to wonder why they needed to tell everyone that the book contains "imagined events."

Screw that, James. Don't waste our time with an author's note. Don't even try to say it's a "combination" of anything. Don't say: "to call this book pure nonfiction would be inaccurate." It's fiction. Fiction, fiction, fiction. Don't waffle. Don't whine. Just don't.

This latest announcement reminded me of an article in the New York Observer last January in which Tom Scocca analyzes Frey's sequel:

Thus, the copyright page of My Friend Leonard informs readers: "Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed. Some sequences and details of events have been changed."

Fine. Then comes the opening sentence: "On my first day in jail, a three hundred pound man named Porterhouse hit me in the back of the head with a metal tray."

In other words: "On my first day in jail*, a three hundred pound man** named Porterhouse*** hit me in the back of the head**** with a metal tray*****."

*The author never went to jail.

**Weight is an estimate; also the author, not being in jail, never met such a person.

***Not his real name; also the author never met such a person.

****Because the author's head was not present in jail, such a blow did not actually land.

*****The composition of the tray is a guess, because the author did not actually get hit by it, because the author was never in jail.

So. The author's note in the paperback edition: Who are Frey and his publisher trying to inform, here? What are they trying to clear up? Don't tell me they placed the note in there for "legal reasons" -- Random House's lawyers have clearly been asleep for years if they allowed Frey's memoirs to be published in the first place.

Do they really think that author's note is placating anyone? Moreover, do they really think anyone is still duped, and that they're owed an explanation?

No. You don't need an author's note: re-classify the book as fiction, drop Mr. Frey on his ass, and be done with it. People have figured out that he's a liar. When you let him write an author's note, you're just giving him another chance to defend himself.

(Technorati tags for this entry: James Frey, Fiction, Writers)

CVS and MS Word

I've had a few hits on the blog lately from people Googling for "cvs ms word" and the like. I'm assuming these intrepid technologists are looking for ways to do revision management with Word documents, and the post they're landing on doesn't necessarily help them out much. So I feel like I should explain a little more about how to use CVS with Word.

First of all: CVS might not even do what you want.

All the great parts of CVS and version control software -- being able to review differences between versions, for example, or merging multiple versions of a document, or checking out an older version -- will be lost to you. If this type of revision control is crucial, and you need to see at a glance exactly which lines changed between one version and the next, you might want to try using Word's "track changes" features.

If Word's change-tracking features won't cut it for you (they're hideous, don't feel bad), or if you're just using CVS to hold multiple versions of your documents and don't mind not knowing exactly what changed where, CVS should work fine for you.

CVS commands work as expected with Word files, and you shouldn't have any trouble checking MS Word documents into and out of your repository. People use CVS with binary files all the time (keeping track of .jpg image files on a webserver, for example), and as long as you keep detailed log notes about exactly what you changed, it should work okay.

There are a few caveats, however: in particular, you'll want to use the -kb flag when adding binary files to the repository, so that CVS doesn't try to expand any text that it thinks are keywords.

The technical details about all this are best left to the professionals, so I'll direct you to the wiki version of the "official" CVS documentation, originally by Per Cederqvist.

Here's a quote from the wiki about how to store binary files such as Word documents in CVS:

There are two issues with using CVS to store binary files. The first is that CVS by default converts line endings between the canonical form in which they are stored in the repository (linefeed only), and the form appropriate to the operating system in use on the client (for example, carriage return followed by line feed for Windows NT).

The second is that a binary file might happen to contain data which looks like a keyword (see section Keyword substitution), so keyword expansion must be turned off.

The '-kb' option available with some CVS commands insures that neither line ending conversion nor keyword expansion will be done.

Here is an example of how you can create a new file using the '-kb' flag:

$ echo '$Id$' > kotest $ cvs add -kb -m"A test file" kotest $ cvs ci -m"First checkin; contains a keyword" kotest

If a file accidentally gets added without '-kb', one can use the cvs admin command to recover. For example:

$ echo '$Id$' > kotest $ cvs add -m"A test file" kotest $ cvs ci -m"First checkin; contains a keyword" kotest $ cvs admin -kb kotest $ cvs update -A kotest # For non-unix systems: # Copy in a good copy of the file from outside CVS $ cvs commit -m "make it binary" kotest

When you check in the file `kotest' the file is not preserved as a binary file, because you did not check it in as a binary file. The cvs admin -kb command sets the default keyword substitution method for this file, but it does not alter the working copy of the file that you have. If you need to cope with line endings (that is, you are using CVS on a non-unix system), then you need to check in a new copy of the file, as shown by the cvs commit command above. On unix, the cvs update -A command suffices. (Note that you can use cvs log to determine the default keyword substitution method for a file and cvs status to determine the keyword substitution method for a working copy.)

(Technorati tags for this entry: CVS, Microsoft, MS Word, Microsoft Word)

Persistence and the Process

Let nobody tell you otherwise: getting a story published is a hell of a lot of hard work.

You've got to research magazines, find markets that are publishing stuff that complements your own style, pound out well-crafted cover letters, address countless SASE's, and lick-and-stick a whole lotta stamps. Not to mention the fact that you've got to keep doing this, week after week, even when all you're getting back are rejection slips.

If you're serious about writing, you've got to keep fighting for your work. There's no magic publishing fairy that'll dump her pixie dust on you. There are no shortcuts. If you want it, you've got to keep sending out your work. Ten rejections, twenty rejections, fifty rejections: it doesn't matter. Write, rewrite, polish, send.

A writer friend sent me a memorable quote in an email last week:

"I think publishing is largely systematic persistence, and the trick is to make this structure serve your creative process."

So true.

Here are a couple of things to remember when sending stuff out for publication:

1. Everyone gets rejected, even talented writers.


2. You're not just trying to publish one piece -- you're also trying to establish a relationship with an editor so that he/she will be inclined to publish something of yours in the future.


3. Offering work for publication should become a regular part of your schedule, a regular part of your creative process.

(Technorati tags for this entry: writing, publishing, fiction, publishing tips )

Wordstock 2006

All writers and book-lovers in the Portland area: you need to go to Wordstock this April. It's a two-day book fair, featuring readings, workshops, book signings and cocktails with all sorts of great writers, including Ira Glass, Joyce Carol Oates, Dave Eggers, Gore Vidal, David James Duncan, Scott Nadelson, Pete Fromm, Steve Almond, Charles D'Ambrosio, Craig Lesley, Geronimo Tagatac, Kim Stafford, Ursula K. LeGuin, Dorianne Laux, Yusuf Komunyakaa, Thisbe Nissen... and more!

There's also a Wordstock writing contest. Winners will get to read their work during the festival -- sharing the stage with the great writers listed above(!) -- and get to pocket like $50 as well.

The catch? While your submission can be fiction, non-fiction, or poetry, it's got to be 500 words or less. And it's got to incorporate one of the following phrases in the text:

* "I felt so out of place."

* "One thing about my mother/father . . ."

* "She/he/I shot straight up in bed."

* "It was the first time."

Oh, and it's got to be submitted by the first of April. So hurry!

(Technorati tags for this entry: Writers, Book Festivals, Writing Conferences, Writing Contest)

The Wine Cellar

So let's say you own a vineyard, right? I know, I know: you're not a Napa kind of guy. Just go with me here, alright?

So you own a vineyard, and you've just finished bottling some damn good wine. I mean, it's really good stuff. You bottle it up, slap the labels on, and then you have to let it sit in the cellar for a couple of years. It's gotta age. It's gotta ripen. It's gotta mellow.

And let's say that a few days after you put the batch of wine in the cellar, you find yourself thinking: "Damn. I did a *great* job with that wine. Really fantastic. I bet that's going to be some astoundingly good stuff." And you're tempted to pop on over to the wine cellar, grab one of those bottles, pry out the cork, and sample some. Just to see if it's as good as you think it is. Just to revel in your wine-making genius.

Stupid, right?

You uncork that bottle, you're ruining the wine. You're killing it before it gets a chance to mature. You try to sneak a peek, and you'll be wrecking your handiwork before it's got a chance to reach its full potential.

The not-so-subtle metaphor here: treat your writing like wine. Let it mellow before you dig it out and sample it, or you're going to ruin its flavor.

When you finish a first draft of a piece, stick it in the bottom drawer of your desk. Shove it way in the back of your filing cabinet. Cover it and forget about it for about a month. Once it's had a chance to ripen in the dark for a while -- and never before this! -- you pull it out and begin revision.

Putting your first drafts away gives you some distance on your words when you come back to them. When you read over something you've just written, you're tempted to think: "Someone call the MacArthur Foundation. I am a literary god." And, hey, that's a good thing: your head's still ringing with that creative buzz.

But a month later, those same words aren't quite as amazing as you thought. There are holes. There are problems. You're trying to be too cute. You're generally falling over yourself. But also: a lot of it ain't half bad.

The trick is to get enough emotional distance from your work so that you're more willing to recognize the good bits, and you're more willing to hack out the bad bits. And there will be bad bits.

Which is why when you uncork something too early, there's a good chance you'll ruin it. You start flogging away at a piece you've just written, and you might end up highlighting the wrong things. You might end up slicing out the good parts. You're too attached to the piece, and you have no idea, really, if it's any good or not.

Right now I'm revising a vintage 2004 short story, and I'm damn glad I let this one sit for a year and a half. I can see so much more clearly now where the problems are and what the story needs to be. If I'd rushed into revision, I would have torn this baby apart.

(Technorati tags for this entry: Fiction Writing, Writing, Revision, Writing Tips)