 |
| Still-Life with Bad Writing |
“Cut out the parts of the book that nobody wants to read.”
– Elmore Leonard
EVERY now and then, I like to provide you an insight into my creative process, or lack thereof. The Lose’s great failing when it comes to being a writer involves a complete inability to get anything finished, owing primarily to the fact that I have the attention span of a gnat. This certainly applies to this blog, as I’ve got all sorts of essays drafted and half-finished – stuff about injuries in the NBA and the upcoming baseball season and how the Champions League is rubbish and whatnot – but none of it’s close to finished, and some other bright and shiny object gets my attention and I lose my way. I lose interest in topics quickly – so quickly that I just sort of forget I’m working on something, at which point I wind up stashing it somewhere on the hard drive and forgetting it exists. Over time, this constitutes an enormous backlog of junk, but also results in some interesting ideas that simply got lost in the shuffle, or buried in a file somewhere desperate to be unearthed.
EVERY now and then, I like to provide you an insight into my creative process, or lack thereof. The Lose’s great failing when it comes to being a writer involves a complete inability to get anything finished, owing primarily to the fact that I have the attention span of a gnat. This certainly applies to this blog, as I’ve got all sorts of essays drafted and half-finished – stuff about injuries in the NBA and the upcoming baseball season and how the Champions League is rubbish and whatnot – but none of it’s close to finished, and some other bright and shiny object gets my attention and I lose my way. I lose interest in topics quickly – so quickly that I just sort of forget I’m working on something, at which point I wind up stashing it somewhere on the hard drive and forgetting it exists. Over time, this constitutes an enormous backlog of junk, but also results in some interesting ideas that simply got lost in the shuffle, or buried in a file somewhere desperate to be unearthed.
Last November, in the spirit of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), I adopted a ploy called NaNoRevMo (National Novel Revision Month), in which I went plowing through the entirety of my unpublished creative output and tried to then figure out what was worth keeping, and what was worth getting rid of. To give you some idea of what we’re talking about here, the total word count of my finished, published works (all of which are available through those gadgets on the side of the page) is 355,000. The total word count of all of the crap growing moss on my hard drive was 777,000. That’s a shittonne of stuff: drafts of novels, novellas, short stories, poems, essays, articles, outlines, ideas worth developing, etc. Some of this stuff dated all the way back to 2004, some of it was just a shell and a carcass which I’d picked clean and used somewhere else without even realizing it. In short, it was a mess.
So back in November, I decided that I would read through all 777,000 words of that stuff, figure out what was worth keeping and figure out what had to go. Since I had so much junk to go through, I didn’t actually set out to do any revisions at the time. I simply made notes, intent upon coming back to it later.
It’s now later.
The past few days, I went through my notes which were scribbled into the comments and the margins of these pages. As I went thumbing through all of these pages, it occurred to me that probably the best representation I can present of my creative process would be to gather up all of these comments from my self-critique. What follows is a sampling of my comments, culled from multiple manuscripts. Suffice to say, I’m sort of ruthless when it comes to self-criticism. I don’t ever get my feelings bent out of shape by an editor telling me that my work sucks. Whatever they say, I’ve said worse.
Oh, and these comments and musings all come from the stuff that I ultimately decided to keep and possibly revise. You can imagine how god awful the hundreds of thousands of words were that I threw away, some of which was so badly conceived and executed that I wondered why I’d bothered in the first place. I may or may not have been sober for a lot of this process. I either drank too much or not enough. Quite possibly both:
“Absolute shite.”
“Pompous twit.”
“Absolutely nothing happens here.”
“Saying nothing of use since 1969.”
“Limp.”
“Bad.”
“Lazy language.”
“Got verb?”
“Verbs! Verbs! Verbs damn it!”
“I am a lazy verb. I have lazy verbs. My verbs go lazily into that good night.”
“Change every verb to snarf. It would at least be funny that way.”
“Didn’t I write this once before? If so, I didn’t learn from my mistakes.”
“Why would someone read 113,000 words about this tool?”
“No, he’s not mysterious and evasive. He’s just a tool.”
“Fluffy Jesus.”
“Did I really say that?”
“Tighten up the language. Cut every third word.”
“Purple.”
“Floral.”
“Stop trying to be Shakespeare.”
“To thee? TO THEE? What the hell is that?”
“I have no idea what I’m trying to say.”
“Junk.”
“Gibberish.”
“Squidly writing.”
“God, get a spine.”
“You wrote better sentences when you were 7.”
“I just flat don’t care and neither should you.”
“FUCK THAT ADDS UP TO 22! GODDAMNIT!” (Blackjack game.)
“Much like the light, the car just changed color from green to red.”
“Bad splice of two different stories – there were no cell phones in 1990.”
“That street isn’t in Brussels.”
“He just drank two different beers within three paragraphs. Shit. Maybe he should just go on a bender and drink all of Ireland.”
“I thought these two people liked each other.”
“This sounds like it came from a web site for dry toast.”
“This paragraph is pointless.”
“Where is this thread going?”
“NOTHING ACTUALLY HAPPENED IN THAT CHAPTER!”
“The plot just went in a circle.”
“The plot just went on vacation.”
“Pace pace pace”
“Tempo! Tempo!”
“This is a comedy, not a Bergman film.”
“Vite vite vite!”
“Do we believe this shit?”
“This makes no sense.”
“If that paragraph made sense, it would still be terrible.”
“Get a new job.”
“Idiot.”
“You said this exact same thing 20 pages ago.”
“You said this exact same thing 30 pages ago.”
“Save this line for a poem.”
“Save this plot point for a novel that doesn’t suck.”
“Save this for a space zombi sex opera.”
“Needs more ninjas.”
“Needs a drunken punch-up.”
“Make it weirder.”
“I think there was a metaphor in there somewhere.”
“It’s a date, not a therapy session.”
“Why would she ever fuck him?”
“Lori wouldn’t marry this guy. She would murder him.”
“It’s at this point that I turned to a life of vandalism.”
“Emotionally dishonest.”
“Intellectually dishonest.”
“C’mon Doug, you’re smarter than that.”
“Bernard shouldn’t be that dumb.”
“Why would these smart women want anything to do with these clowns?”
“The main character is a douchebag. That’s a problem.”
“Not even Al Pacino could make this character interesting.”
“I like this guy a lot less when I’m sober.”
“She’s supposed to be sexy. Stop preventing her.”
“Sex this sloppy deserves such sloppy prose.”
“Oh God this is SO BAD.”
“This could be worse.”
“This is worse.”
“Worse would be a compliment.”
“Congratulations, you were more vague!”
“That’s a big plate of meat.”
“Oh come on, no one says that ever.”
“I obviously cared a lot to write so much about something so dumb.”
“HHHHHHHHHHHHHHTTHHHHTTTHTTTTT66t6666666666666666666Y” (The cat jumped on the keyboard at some point while I was away from the laptop.)
“Barf.”
“Gag.”
“Hmm …”
“Where is this storyline going other than straight through the floor?”
“Why would the reader care?”
“Dear reader, I apologize for wasting your time.”
“Clever reference to something only I care about.”
“You had an idea at some point in time. Lord knows when that was, or if it was any good. Probably not.”
“Piece of shit.”
“PIECE OF SHIT PIECE OF SHIT!”
“Sheep shit.”
“This is horseshit.”
“He wouldn’t say this. He’s too chicken shit.”
“Why isn’t Jay eating here? He’s eating in every other scene.”
“When did he become redneck trash?”
“Trash.”
“BAD! WEAK! GOD HELP US ALL!”
“This sounded better in the original Norwegian.”
“I have no idea what I was thinking when I wrote this.”
“I’ve made poor life choices.”
“This paragraph should read ‘nothing actually happens here for the next six lines in between what Carrie just said, which is cool, and what Doug is about to say, which is also cool, so you, the reader, should just skip over it and maybe go get a sandwich.’”
“Stop inviting the reader not to care.”
“Adam Sol made fun of me once for writing trash like this.”
“I hate everything.”
“Blech.”
“Yeech.”
“God, this is so bad.”
“Six kinds of crap.”
“Now with even more crap.”
“Wait, the character’s name changed. Her name was Jenny before.”
“Gah! Wrong city!”
“When did this fascination with shoes seem like a good idea?”
“I’ve read worse. I’ve also written worse.”
“This is a mess.”
“This belongs in another story.”
“This belongs under the front tire of a car.”
“Burn this script.”
“I had a point to make here somewhere. It’s here. I know it is.”
“What the hell just happened?”
“Carrie called. She wants to be the heroine in a new novel, one which doesn’t suck.”
“Hmm, I seem to skim through the passages where Carrie isn’t on screen. There’s probably a reason for that.”
“Cheese.”
“Expensive cheese.”
“I need a drink.” (This one appears often.)
“Cut it. It’s bad.”
“Cut it. Used it in another piece.”
“Cut it. It was a bad idea 10 years ago and it still is.”
“No one wants to read this tripe.”
“Oh stop it already.”
“50¢ word.”
“$5 word.”
“£10 word.”
“Now with even more dumb adjectives! And scrubbing bubbles!”
“This fight scene is absolute pants.”
“Insanely idiotic.”
“Worst sentence ever.”
“That’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever said.”
“This Amsterdam passage is some of the worst writing ever.”
“Call Anouk and ask her how you say, ‘the author is a dipshit’ in Dutch.” (Edit: Anouk now tells me it’s “de schrijver is een hondenlul,” which literally translates as “the author is a dog’s dick.”)
“This isn’t going well.”
“Hmm, that’s not too bad.”
“More here. That’s good.”
“Nice.”
“Damn, she’s awesome.”
“This is progress.”
“This is good.”
“There may be hope for this mess yet.”
