posted
I've been working on a paragraph by paragraph rewrite of my first novel (since I got serious about writing. We're not counting the thing I wrote in college, K?) I don't know what if anything will come of it, but it's been a fascinating exercise.
I wrote THE SHAMAN'S CURSE five years ago (almost exactly). Wow, how much I've learned and improved in five years. I clearly had no idea of dialog mechanics and not a very firm grasp of show vs. tell back then.
How much more will I know in five more years? Posts: 4633 | Registered: Dec 2008
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I'm actually doing the same thing with one of my old novels. Some of the old stuff is good, in a generic kind of, why bother changing that way, but most, I find, needs to be completely rewritten. Same story, all brand new words.
For example, I ended a chapter with the sentence, (paraphrased) She exited the house and ran off into the bright sunshine.
And I almost left that one, but with all my writers of the future, Dave Wolverton style of writing swirling around my head, I added her running down the dirt road kicking up tiny dust clouds, the smell of cow manure wafting from a nearby field, a barbed wire fence, and at last a streetlight with cars idling.
However, I didn't just emptily mention them, because she'd been stuck in the house for so long, she had an emotional connection to everything, like the world exploding to life.
Then she studies the drivers and their blank looks while they wait for the light and she realizes that everyone is trapped, it's only the size of their cage that changes.
All that, from replacing one lackluster sentence.
I hope you've found some similar diamonds in the rough of old words.
posted
Writing literature, the long haul it is. I made a study of why general perceptions project that creative writing is easy and a leisurely use of time. Historically, because there's no manual labor involved, writing was considered less onerous than treking across the wilderness with a hundred-pound kit on your back, less demanding than hammering out an iron sword from bog ore, less laborious than working a fifty-acre homestead farm, ad infinitum, and making a living. Writing was not respected as a way to make a living or even an activity for idle times, when you should be laboring away at making something substantive for living wage earning.
Media channels, newspapers, metafictional novels, radio, film, television, created a motif of the writer in retreat barking out a novel like it was a simple matter of stringing together one hundred thousand words over a season, and the mess would automatically be published to great popular and critical acclaim.
Formal writing instruction had been from the dawn times of expression a curriculum of deep and exhaustingly tedious and dry-dull learning of invariant grammar, spelling, punctuation, rhetoric, logic, structure, organization, expression, and penmanship according to rigid rules.
But things changed in the mid twentieth century social and cultural upheaval that was at the core of Postmodernism's challenging and questioning presupposed notions of propriety. Formal creative writing changed from a rigid rule-based instruction, reaching that extreme in the forms of Formalism and Structuralism inspired partly by the scientific method expressed in the mid nineteenth century as a consequence of Mendeleev's Periodic Table of Elements, changed to emphasizing creativity for the sake of encouraging self-worth and self-esteem at the expense of self-discipline. Writing teachers, professors, curriculums, writing program and pedagogy and androgogy philosophies emphasized encouraging writing no matter how disorganized and hence deemphasized the structural fundamentals. Beyond grammar school grades first through fourth, maybe into fifth through eighth, teaching writing fundamentals faded into oblivion. A sink-or-swim mentality replaced advanced writing instruction and learning.
Not to say that the impetus favoring creativity is ignoble; the first principle either structured writing learning or unconstrained creativity serves is developing critical consciousness.
However, both structure and creativity are crucial. Writers anymore have had to go the learning structure development route in isolation. Encouraging creativity at the expense of organization is too in an isolation. Creativity is subjective, personal and by no means universal. Organization has a subjective characteristic but is largely an objective criteria.
The challenges and questions Postmodernism raised have at least revealed that at the core of writing is a need for structure and organization. It is time now for a synthesis of creativity and discipline writing teaching and learning. That for me is the singular answer to Postmodernism's questions and challenges.
Do you feel cheated that your schooling didn't give you the tools to develop creative writing organization and structure? I do to a degree. My early school years did involve writing study that favored discipline over creativity; my middle school years too. But my high school and college years favored creativity and a marginalized discipline. However, from what I'd learned before, how to learn for myself, once I'd gotten over resisting independent study, the possibilities opened up horizons. And I saw that the writing instruction I was receiving offered avenues for that exploration.
The first writing about writing organization text I delved into was The Poetics of Aristotle. It's taken me years to unravel all it has to offer. Ironically, it's not very organized, since the extant text is a thirdhand hand-me-down reproduction of the original. There have been many more texts written about organization that I've read since.
I'm still studying. One text may offer a glimpse into a particularly challenging topic; another might cover the topic more thouroughly. Together, several or dozens of texts may encompass a whole. Resistance is feudal, I realized, to writing study.
posted
I performed a rewrite on my first novel a couple of years ago. The story held up well in my mind (but the writer is generally biased by their own work), however, I ran into the same thing that both Meredith and Axe did... colorless writing and flat dialog.
When I first started writing seriously a bit after Meredith, I wrote 200 plus short stories and those are where I can see the change in my writing (still lousy grammar!).
That's all part of not really getting into writing until you've written a million words. I believe it. In some areas, after writing those million words, you feel more like a pro and in other areas, it's still neophyte time. I suppose that never goes away no matter how good you become.
Posts: 1608 | Registered: Feb 2009
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posted
Then there's personal emotional expression and the creative outlets thereof. Spice a narrative with emotional expression, emotions that society compels us to supress; overcome the flat and lackluster stories we struggle with. If there's human emotion strongly and clearly expressed, even a story about a rock personified may appeal. Let loose emotions!
Posts: 6037 | Registered: Jun 2008
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posted
I'm mortified by nearly everything I wrote before the early 1990s---I reread it, remember what I thought at the time, then wonder why I could possibly have thought this was any good.
I may be fooling myself about what I'm working on now, though...but if I didn't I wouldn't be writing it...
Posts: 8809 | Registered: Aug 2005
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posted
Interesting. I had a 30-year hiatus from writing while I pursued my medical career, raised a family, etc. Last week I took out a folder of a story I wrote in 1979 and cringed a bit at the writing--but the idea at its heart, the soul of the story I still found thrilling. It may be worth a three decade delayed rewrite.
Respectfully, Dr. Bob
Posts: 1475 | Registered: Aug 2010
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