notebooks.
by phill
photo credit: Paul Watson
I’ve been thinking a lot about the revision process lately. I’m not a huge proponent of revising, which isn’t to say that I don’t think it’s good practice, it’s just that I never get around to doing it. out of the 50 or so short stories, poems, and longer stories I have sitting around the place, all of about 3 of them have actually been looked at with the purpose of creating that mystical second draft. I’ve been chatting to a few of my fellow amateur writers lately, and I think it’s a common attitude. There’s a feeling that every word should be polished to the bejesus before it makes it out the pen and into the memory of paper. As if all the great works of the world were first drafts so incredibly sparkling as to be immediately accepted and published to wide acclaim. It’s a stupid thought process and a stupid attitude to have, because it’s common knowledge that revision is the best thing that can happen to you and your story. Here’s a few quotes about revision:
“Books aren’t written- they’re rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn’t quite done it.”
Michael Crichton“The beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile.”
Robert Cormier
“I have rewritten- often several times- every word I have ever written. My pencils outlast their erasers.”
Vladimir Nabokov
“Writing is rewriting. A writer must learn to deepen characters, trim writing, intensify scenes. To fall in love with the first draft to the point where one cannot change it is to greatly enhance the prospects of never publishing.”
Richard North Patterson
Which is why, mindful of all of the above, I’m marking June as my revision month. I’m going to be going through every single little scrap that I have lying around my hard drive to revise them. In some cases it’ll be literally years since I’ve looked at them, so here’s hoping the fresh eyes will result in them being improved, rather than abandoned.
This kind of brings me around to my love/hate relationship with notebooks (it’s my blog and I can go on tangents if I want to). I know they’re just a bunch of paper, neatly ruled or blank depending on your preference, all bound up in a couple of pieces of fake leather with maybe a small pocket for receipts in the front (if you’re lucky). But to me they embody this sentiment that revision is something that only happens in high school English classes. Somehow there’s an expectation there to make whatever you jot down in them something special. The First Draft Is The Last Draft sort of thing. If I want to make a grocery list I’d just use a piece of scrap paper, because heaven forbid I let something as mundane as vegetables touch the inside of a $1 notebook. Don’t even ask about the Moleskines that Louise gave me for a gift a few months back, they aren’t going to see a single letter in them until I get a Pulitzer Prize-winning idea.
Which is why, after June’s revisions month I’m making July my Scrawl month. Scrawl month will be me writing down every idea that I have for a story or a poem, writing beginnings or endings or scenes or dialogues or anything. I’ll be trying to smash through that notion that every word is sacred and just blasting down whatever ideas I have. I’ll be keeping a notebook on me (I’m already doing this, but tentatively, like training wheels) and not hesitating a bit to whip it out and write something down, no matter what company I’m in or how much shit I will get for doing so. It’ll be a gathering month, and hopefully once I’ve been through it I’ll have a whole bunch of threads that I can use to fashion some new bits and pieces.
So there you have it, my list of good intentions for the next two months. I’m also making an effort to get a bit more health-conscious with my acquisition of Wii Fit (I’m not fooling myself about any ability it may have to help me lose weight, it’s more getting into an everyday routine that I think will be the most beneficial) and doing things like bringing my own lunch and possibly starting to take the bus to uni (my car is a rolling death trap at the moment). Here goes nothing!
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I know that feeling, man. Just about everything I’ve written, with the exception of the few pieces fortunate enough to be published, suffer from the mentality of “It’s already written – why write it again?” I think young writers like ourselves fall in love with the finality of “the end.” That’s why it’s taken me so long to get to work on the second draft of my novel.
Save the Moleskine for your second draft. You’ll probably need a ton of them (like me), but they will serve you well.
Look what I started with my 6mm ruled Moleskines! =P
I don’t know, I never thought it was all supposed to come out perfect at once. All my writing is like constant revision. I don’t get a first draft until all the bits have gone from fragments to fragments in order, to fragments in new order, to expanded fragments, to paragraphs, to rewritten paragraphs, to you get the idea. A first draft for me is something you can read from start to end without missing anything and by then it’s been messed with so much that it’s about 80% finished.
I found my Moleskines more lovable when I said “fuck caring about how they look, this is creativity – it’s SUPPOSED to be messy!” and then just went hell-for-leather.
(I feel like I haven’t seen you online for awhile. You do have my new email, right?)
Turns out I didn’t have your new email, however I am talking to you now and you are drunk and everything is fine (:
I’ve had experiences with that fragmentary style of writing before now, actually quite a few of my short stories will go that way, even if it’s in a single sitting and not quite so defined. I’ll write it out with bits that aren’t quite justified, then justify them, then think of better ways of thinking of things, then cut bits, then etc. etc. and I’ll do a 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and final draft all in one sitting. But those occassions are rare and they’re certainly not apparent when I go for longer projects.
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to completely go wild in a Moleskine–but my notebook is filling up pretty quickly :D
Agree with you on that statement: “It’s already written –why write it again?”
I think it’s the immediacy that a lot of people look back at writing. It takes a lot of skill to develop the distance to become your own copy editor and that distancing is fucking hard. I’m looking back at things that I know in my memory I loved when I finished and didn’t think I could possibly do any better with. Now that I’m looking at them with the benefit of time spent apart, I’m very much wondering what I was thinking, and where I got off pronouncing them done and dusted. There’s a lot of work to do, and maybe even a couple of them that might be expanded and loosed into the wild world of trying to get published. But for the rest there’s still the opportunity to improve on the ideas.
Haha, don’t worry I won’t be using the Moleskines on anything less than a 2nd draft, they’re just too goddamn nice.
I found my Moleskines more lovable when I said “fuck caring about how they look, this is creativity – it’s SUPPOSED to be messy!” and then just went hell-for-leather.
This is pretty much my attitude. I’ve been using hardbound sketchbooks exclusively for almost 10 years now, and I’ve never been too precious towards them. Oh, I never lose them, to be sure. But they’re where the fragments and the sketches go, where I doodle and write notes, things like that.
I certainly felt, as many young writers do, that the first drafts were often the most interesting, and I never liked to revise too much. Usually, I credit printmaking for teaching me that it’s OK to “ruin” something, to go back into it and rethink things, to think more through the process than the concept. Revising a story is the same thing as going back into, say, a litho stone and scratching out the bits that don’t work. But it took me a while to think of writing in this sense.
I confess I’ve never been able to doodle. While other people can make little patterns or draw stick figures in the columns of their folders, I just can’t let myself go ahead and do the same. This probably shows how uptight I am, but there you have it. The scratch month part of this exercise is basically designed to cure that–I expect that during the time I’m taking notes and jotting down little ideas I’ll also be doing a few little doodles. I’m not totally useless at drawing, even though I specifically state so here, so maybe a whole book of drawings and ideas and such will make me realise that it’s okay to loosen up and mark a piece of paper without it needing to be a masterpiece. Hell that’s basically the definition of creativity, experimenting without the need for justification or an end result. Just for the heck of it.
But saying that and knowing that are two different things.
Have you ever tried automatic writing or drawing?
It was very freeing for me to learn how to draw or write w/o an image, theme, or narrative in place before I began. You might give it a try.
I’ve been trying to do some revision myself, but haven’t done much other than to post my poems at workshops. At least it’s a step in the right direction.
It really is interesting to look at the revision process. I assume prose takes fewer redrafts (though that probably depends on the writer.), in which case it’s easier to keep all those drafts. I recently learnt that many poets keep every single draft of their poems. And not only that, they track the changes they make in them using MS Word and god knows what else.
I usually delete my previous drafts. :/
I have tried that technique in writing, yeah. It created some seriously strange pieces, but from I think one of them I managed to fashion something. Usually they end up as what I’d class as ‘experimental’ because it jumps so quickly from one thought to the next.
I’ve actually been considering rewriting an idea of mine in that fasion, or at least close to it. The character whose PoV I’m writing within (previously without) has a very limited attention span, and a somewhat childish mind, and therefore it would fit pretty well. However in doing so it’s quite hard to actually progress the story forward in a coherent manner. I’ve been pondering how to do so for a little while now and I’ve come to the conclusion that at the end of the day it’s going to come down to just letting it all out, and then going back and tweaking the heck out of it to make sure it’s readable. So there I am back at the benefits of revision (:
Track changes is a pretty great little feature. It’s sometimes a bit difficult to decipher, but it’s good to just keep it on in the background, that way you know that you’ve got a little gremlin squirreling away all of your changes just inc ase you realise you’ve made a terrible, terrible mistake with changing the PoV to first person (:
Maybe there’s something in deleting drafts though. I mean, having all those changes saved may cause indecision, which could lead to you not fully embracing the new direction that you’re taking. And if you’re not 100% into a new way of doing things it tends to turn out weak. Your process seems to be working so far Aditi, judging by your poetry. I wouldn’t mess with it :P
Man, speaking of notebooks, check this out:
http://www.modofly.net/products/the-mechanism
On one hand, I’m thinking, “My God, $36 for a notebook? That’s a tank of gas!” and then, on the other hand, I’m thinking “OMG DO WANT.”
I’m off to drool a bit more.
I know the feeling of not writing something in a book cause the book is too good for your draft. It sucks and is so silly :P
Man. Those. Are. Pretty. Modding of moleskines is apparently a pretty big trade nowadays. Here’s some more for you to wish for:
http://steampunkworkshop.com/electroetch.shtml
I have the chemicals and materials to do this sort of etching, all I need is the variable power supply which I’m ordering next pay day (: But if I do this, then the notebooks will be so pretty I won’t ever be able to write in them D:
Yup, just gotta push right through it and get all scrappy!
I’m really tossing around the idea of getting one of those huge flip paper easels. That way I can outline shit and and everything. I’m a list person, so I think putting everything in front of me per story on one huge ass piece of paper that takes up almost a whole wall but is neat and organized will do the trick. Characters and their traits, plot points, whatever – everything on one page but neatly organized with cool little arrow points and all that shit that makes sense.
Of course, that also leads to gridded paper and each story being interlocking, which is something I’ve been tossing around, which is appealing, which also leads to grandiose ideas of a novel.
Flipside, if it all falls apart, it’s an easel, the pages flip over, and are also easy to tear off and are disposable. It’s not my fault and the evidence is easy to dispose of.
Seems like a goddamn golden goose.
And oh yeah, we gotta talk on gt about how to add you to my rss or whatever that shit is from blog to blog or whatever. later. Stop mixing chemicals or whatever in labs and I’ll try to put down the bottle and we’ll be productive for an hour at some point.
I had a similar big-arse arty sketchbook notepad thing that I used to actually draw in, and then converted to a jot-pad once I realised I couldn’t really draw to save my life. It works pretty well, but sometimes you can be overwhelmed by the space, if you know what I mean. Mine was A2 or something, so it’s a pretty big blank piece of paper that you’re looking at, and sometimes it can get the better of you to even start. Then again, you also have the advantage of being able to do what you’re saying, make it all connected without the discontinuity of having to flip a page to discover the next little bit of how x relates to y. Advantages and disadvantages, as always.
As for RSS, I use google reader now. I can show you how to set that one up next time you’re online and not grabby (: