aamcnamara | she wanted to feel good about it

This post is large. It contains multitudes.

Fourth Street was, as always, delightful. I'm always pleased to find groups of people who prioritize chatting about fantasy novels (Et Cetera) and writing process (similarly), playing/singing music (even though I rarely know any of the songs, sometimes I can pick up on the chorus eventually), making tea very precisely and then drinking it...

...and, you know, everything else that a convention is made up of. This year we didn't have quite so many in-jokes at the end of the weekend as we did last year, but there was still the sense of community, so it was all okay.

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While at the last panel at Fourth Street, I had an idea for a slightly related question.

How is your revision process (for novels, particularly, but short stories as well) reflected in the material things and/or software structures that you use?

(For example, if a writer restructures their novel in one stage and then goes through to polish, do they use notecards for restructuring, Scrivener, just work it out in a notebook? Do they print it out and go through to polish it, scroll through, check scenes individually?)

...however, it was not really relevant, so I am posing it here instead, or possibly will suggest it as a panel topic for next Fourth Street (if they let us submit panel topics) or WisCon or something. It seems interesting to me, at least. Some writing software is designed for certain things, and some for others, and since writers All Do It Differently, a certain amount of mishmash cobbling together of things is necessary, I should think.

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...I try not to be a pedant, really I do. Mostly my quibbles with grammar arise when it's more amusing to misinterpret a sentence by taking the 'rules' literally--or, on a more serious hand, when something doesn't make sense.

However, once in a while there is just something so egregious that I cannot in good conscience ignore it.

One of these is the trend, possibly current, of "____-making". Happy-making. Sick-making. In a back-cover blurb of a book I took care of at the bindery today, sane-making.

I don't like it. One, because it's unattractive (and breaks me out of wherever I read it to go "aaaugh"), and two, because it's lazy.

happy-making: you mean 'pleasing', I think.
sick-making: you mean 'nauseous'. Or, if you're worried about your readers' brains, nauseating.
sane-making: you mean, possibly, 'sanity-inducing'?

...alternatively, if 'happy', 'sick', and 'sane' are really the specific words you want to use, I promise it is possible to rewrite your sentence so that you do not have to stick '-making' on the end of it.

(Okay, all right, if you're stuck in the compromising position of writing fiction and really that sentence structure is the only one that will work, and that word is the only one that will work... ...no, on second thought, I dislike this construction enough to not care. And I promise that the thematic implications of your blurb are really not all that important.)

In speech, I will accept these. Sometimes it's hard to think of words on the fly, and you can't rewrite sentences. But in writing? I do not like it, and it annoys me.

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I have a few more thoughts about Fourth Street (and conventions in general), Et Cetera, but right now I need to do my Ideomancer slush and work some more on my novel.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Mostly my quibbles with grammar arise when it's more amusing to misinterpret a sentence by taking the 'rules' literally--or, on a more serious hand, when something doesn't make sense.

Oh, yes, that's very true for me as well! (Unrelatedly, glad you didn't have to bike home through the storm on Saturday, and I was glad to see you even if I barely talked with you.)

Hooray, the march of the People For Grammar That Makes Sense! Or that is amusing.

I was pleased I didn't have to bike home through a storm too! And I was happy to see you as well, I'm glad that you got better (enough to come to Fourth Street, at least).

I use different material things and software processes every time I revise a different piece. So. I don't know what that says about the work or me. I can think about it.

alecaustin has volunteered to help with programming next year, so you can poke him with programming ideas if you have them. He is a pretty receptive audience to that sort of thing.

That is intriguing. Is your revision process (mental/structural/whatever) different every time, too, or just the material items and software? I always hear "every writer's process is different", but the implication always seems to be one writer, one process, and it's the same for that writer every time. But of course people are more complicated than that.

Thanks for the heads-up. I'm not sure there's quite enough in that question for a full-length panel, but I will definitely poke him if I come up with anything else.

I think I am fixing different things in each book, so I am using a slightly different material form to do so. Either that or my brain needs tricking.

But one of the things I'm fixing is always in the same category, so maybe not. (This thing: I refer to skeleton drafts vs. kitchen sink drafts. Some people write long, long, flabby prose in their first drafts and need to cut 90% of the adverbs and half the descriptive prose and that long interlude where the characters ate strawberries for no particular reason. Those are kitchen sink drafts. They contain everything including the kitchen sink. Mine are the opposite. They are skeleton drafts. Any advice to cut a certain percentage of the word count of the rough draft would be terrible advice for me, because that is not the direction in which I err in draft form.)

That makes sense. And brains do seem to need to be tricked quite often.

(Ah yes! I have heard of this before, though not quite in those terms. I'm not certain where I fall in that spectrum--quite possibly I put in the skeleton and the kitchen sink and then stop. Or maybe I just find that appealing as a turn of phrase, it's sometimes hard to tell.)

A lack of in-jokes? That's so sad!

*thwap*

But a gentle thwap.

I know! Somehow we survived, but who knows really how.

(Well, I am injoke-starved at the moment. My college friends have such a lot of them, and now I am bereft.)

How is your revision process (for novels, particularly, but short stories as well) reflected in the material things and/or software structures that you use?


mrissa, I write skeleton drafts and tend to use different things to revise, everything from Scrivener to sticky notes to index cards to white boards to cut-up drafts. Oh, and sometimes spreadsheets. I think this is partly to see different things about whatever I'm working on (for instance, I can use different colors of index cards to categorize scenes), but mostly because I need the vision and particularly for me the motion of doing something differently to shake my brain into seeing it differently. It's all about getting perspective for me.

And now I'm being a pedant! But I put sick-making in a different category from the others -- it's 1930s-ish British slang, in my view.

(Ooh, and I even checked the OED -- apparently that's how I get my thrills -- and yes: "1930 E. WAUGH Vile Bodies i. 7 Sometimes the ship pitched and sometimes she rolled... ‘Too, too *sick~making,’ said Miss Runcible, with one of her rare flashes of accuracy." Also from the OED, just to torment you: "1938 DYLAN THOMAS Let. c 6 July (1966) 203 There will be speechmaking, drunkmaking, sickmaking and we must all dress up.")

That said, you are entirely free to hate the construction!

Neat! Even just listing some of the techniques that you use is helpful to me, really (in my Quest to Start Revising A Novel this summer, which is my ulterior motive in asking that question).

Oh, but though we may wish it, we are not all Dylan Thomas. *g*

I'll take the Waugh, though. Thinking back at a couple of examples, at least one was trying for the Waugh sense of the construction... unfortunately, that connection was lost on me and I suspect much of the audience as well, so it just felt pert without any sense of the history. (How to Ditch Your Fairy, if I'm remembering correctly--on the other hand, I disliked a lot of the slang in that book, plausibly on similar grounds. Or that might just be because, as it turns out, I am utterly incapable of parsing the word 'pulchritudinous' correctly.)

Hmm. Anyway, it's interesting to think about the history of the construction. It still annoys me--and I'm pretty sure there is no excuse, ever, for sane-making. But.

I'm glad the revision techniques might be helpful! I've picked them up from other writers as things to try, mostly. I've also retyped sections (or, in bad cases, the whole thing) -- sometimes that shakes up some different process in my brain and makes me question my own words the way I would someone else's story. Collage and playlists sometimes help clarify things in revision as well as in first drafts. Oh, and lots and lots of exercise, especially walking, whenever I get stuck or have to stop and think something through. That works much better for me than sitting still with a pen or laptop. I also will frequently try lots of techniques and not "complete" any of them while working through a difficult revision. I try really hard to remember that these techniques are tools, not goals in and of themselves; sometimes they aren't useful to continue once my brain gets it.

Good luck with the revisions -- let me know if you want further elaborations on any of these.

On the sick-making, thank you for allowing me my pedantry. I think it's most interesting to me to constantly remember that what sounds correct/right/natural to my ear comes from what I've absorbed as language and, hence what I've been exposed to. Sick-making makes me think of Wodehouse, but didn't have that effect on you. It's interesting to remember that the pieces of our materials don't have the same effect, let alone the entire work. If that makes any sense.

Nice. And thanks--I will. I need to sit down and have a serious stare at/Talking To with my novel first, I think, to see if it tells me itself how to revise it, but we'll see how it all goes.

It's fascinating to me sometimes how hit-or-miss cultural cues are. (See, I've read Wodehouse--but just this past year, and apparently at least that bit didn't sink too deeply into my brain.) But yes, certainly; cultural cues are connotations are words, and as writers we play with those... but everyone doesn't have the same deck.

she wanted to feel good about it

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