Over in the list of this blog’s categories, in the sidebar at the left, you will see “Writing” as a main category and — now, finally — a sub-category called “Merry-Go-Round.”
Actually, that sub-category has always been there. But in a WordPress blog, apparently, a (sub-)category doesn’t show up in the list until there’s an actual post assigned to it. So this is that first post.
Alas, it’s not the “Merry-Go-Round” post I would have preferred to lead with.
Merry-Go-Round is my work-in-progress (or WIP, as writers will sometimes call it). I like to tell people that it’s done, and indeed it is “done” — if by “it’s done” you mean “it starts at a beginning and goes on to an end.” I started it in August, finished the first draft in January, and the second just a month or two later.
At that point, convinced It Was Time To Do Something With The Manuscript, I started to consider how best to market it to agents.
And then I re-considered. Like this:
One draft is a lot of work. Two drafts is a lot of work. And it’s tempting, sooooo tempting, to say it’s enough work. I mean, you read about authors who take years to write a book, take their stories through a dozen drafts or more; and then you think to yourself, Sheesh, are they nuts or what? After all, your own writing and story-telling talents certainly require no such polishing. The words flow without hitch or error onto the screen at your fingertips’ direction, you never once strike the backspace or Delete keys, and although you’re looking at the words in nominal black-and-white your eyes are misled — averaging the effect, so that the words actually appear crafted of silver. You’re not an author, you’re a jeweler.
But then you let the words lie for a few weeks. You go away and you research agents, and you read vast quantities of material about how to approach agents properly and with a modicum of success. And you go back to reading, the real reading you’ve been putting off for months — books by favorite authors whose series you need to catch up on; piles of magazines; bills. (Heh.)
And then your curiosity gets the better of you. You open up the loose-leaf notebook where the most recent draft is stowed. You begin to read.
That’s when the exclamation point goes “Ding!” in your head. If you’re really honest with yourself, you don’t at all get nervous, lose confidence, consign the manuscript to the rubbish bin. After all, how many authors have published anything at all? Let alone six books?
But you do say to yourself, “WTF? I’m better than this!”
Stray, pointless phrases are everywhere in the damn thing: as it were; so it would seem; more or less. Paragraphs in ostensible “action” sequences are a half-page long. Metaphors not just long-dead but well buried have risen from their graves and stalk your pages, sucking the life from them. Main characters are oddly flat and others, on the sidelines, jut out from the story like deformed monstrous Alps. Dialogue sounds like something you yourself would write, not like something you yourself or any other person in recorded history would actually say.
But the main thing, again, is that from all that you don’t conclude, “Jesus Christ — I can’t write for anything!” You say, again, “I’m better than this!”
I picked up a book a few months ago called Faux Pas?: A No-Nonsense Guide to Words and Phrases from Other Languages. (By “other languages,” the author — Philip Gooden, who is a Brit — means “languages other than English.”) It’s a classic browse-when-you-want-to book for writers and other word lovers.
Here’s one of the phrases I saw while most recently flipping through it: recouler pour mieux sauter, which is French and as the book says (I’ll take his word for it) is pronounced “reh-coo-lay poor mi-yer sortay.”
What’s it mean? From the book:
literally to ‘move back so as to jump better’ and describing a tactical withdrawal or stepping-back so as to give a better chance of progress or success later on…
So: that’s where I am with Merry-Go-Round for now. I’ll post more, eventually, when the dust has settled some.
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