The most important thing to revision? Buy lots of ink cartridges and printer paper. You might be tempted to skip this step. Don’t. This applies to both novels and poetry. Print that sucker out. I know, I know, it seems like a PITA to use all that ink and paper on something you just know is perfection.
Trust me, it’s not. Errors are insidious, from little
things like the word ‘out’ instead of ‘our’. Hard to spot. Or transposed
letters because your eyes crossed when reading that particular section. Or
words just flat missing. My favorite in my work is prepositions that go AWOL.
Those suckers scatter like roaches when you turn on the light.
Go Big or Go Home
The advice I scoffed
at—at first—was to change the font of the work to something totally different,
and enlarge. So I changed from Times New Roman to Arial. To Calibri. I still
missed things. But when I changed it to Comic Sans 14 point. Oh, My. Errors
stood out with big flashing signs. “You screwed up here! Notice me!
(Pick the ugly font of your choice. It works.)
It takes a lot of paper to do this. I could use my novel as a doorstop. Or a firestarter. Somedays, it’s Burn, Baby, Burn first and foremost in my brain. Oh, and paperclip every chapter together. Or bull clip it, or put in separate labeled file folders in a drawer. Because when you drop it—and you will—frantic sobbing won’t put things back in order. Neither will the cat that chooses that moment to walk over it and sharpen his claws on stray sheets.
If you hole punch after
editing each page and put it in a binder, make sure you empty your hole punch
sooner rather than later. Because if you accidentally knock the tray off,
little white circles go everywhere. You’ll be finding them for months.
They defeat the suckiest of vacuum cleaners. You could always sprinkle catnip
over it, and hope your static-y cat rolls in them and picks a bunch up. Then you
can vacuum the cat.
So, I’ve been reading submission guidelines while I search for places to home my poetry. A lot of them leave me scratching my head.
“We want poetry that makes our heart go POW and our head pop off the stem of our neck spouting blood like a geyser. We want work that zings our strings and causes a rabid dog to bay at the moon. Send us work that has the diversity of fungal infected wildflowers and the factory installed parts of a slightly used car. Come whiffling through the tulgey wood, and burble as you come, with thematic intent.”
WTF?
All I really want to know is whether the magazine wants free verse, forms, more traditional, prose poems, experimental, or political. Do they consider rhyming poetry? Non-traditional? Edgy? Short? Long? Tattooed on your left hand? How can you tailor your work to the magazine when you can’t decipher the code? Back issues don’t always help.
I’ll take utterly clueless for $500, Alex.
Maybe my poetry magazine to poet translator is busted.
Maybe I’m getting old.
Maybe I should stick to writing fantasy.
Maybe I just throw my poetry at the submissions wall and see what sticks. Yep, I like this option.
When it came time to choose a genre to write in I chose fantasy. As a longtime reader of Fantasy, Scifi, and everything in between, it seemed a natural fit. I was a latecomer to women’s literature and romance. It didn’t hold me the way fantasy did, although I like some romance in my fantasy, and not just Mage/queen/plucky necromancer meets heroic other, falls in love, and produce intrepid little sorcerers.
I love the big,
sprawling messiness of a good fantasy story. The world so different from ours,
yet populated by the same type of people with the same problems. How to escape
evil, which magical academy to attend, how to pacify rampaging dragons, and oh
yes, love among the smoking ruins of a just razed village.
Not a big fan of
dystopian fiction, I must admit. It’s depressing to think of all the ways
civilization could go wrong. The survivors – because it’s always lucky by birth
survivors – trudging through a ravaged landscape, rummaging through
hollowed-out Wal-marts for food and bullets. Fighting off others of their kind
to rise to the top of their pathetic food chain. No groups ever join together
to try to make their lot in life better, to try and jump-start an improved
civilization unlike the one that got them into this mess in the first place.
Are we that narrow-minded a species?
Don’t answer that.
I do have a space
opera novel I worked on and it’s sitting in limbo. It falls prey to the things
I hate about dystopian novels, hence my reluctance to go on with it. Time to
strip it down for parts. Apparently, though, doom, doom, doom makes for good reading.
I do like exploring other worlds and cultures in sci-fi also. Big problem there
is the vastness of space and zooming around in it. I get hung up on the
technical (im)possibilities because I know just enough science to be skeptical,
but not enough to make everything plausible. Which is probably why I chose
space opera rather than hard science sci-fi. Much easier to hand-wave the
science like a Jedi excusing droids than get lost in the physics. Even though I
do love me some physics.
Romance novels both
fascinate and repel me. There’s something to be said for the formulaic model
and a HEA (Happily Ever After) at the end. Maybe it’s the optimist in me,
wanting the world to turn out for the better. The cynic whispers in the back of
my mind, you think real life is like
this? Ha! Have I got news for you. Romance dies under the weight of children,
laundry, and whose turn it is to mow the backyard.
Which leaves women’s
fiction, formerly called ‘chick lit’. About women, mostly written by women. A
lot of it is depressing as hell, chronicling modern-day problems in a long, and
death marchy manner. Dead/missing children, cancer, parents with dementia. Why
do I subject myself to that? Because it’s real. I guess I can’t live on fantasy
alone, and sometimes need to come down from my dragon-patrolled castle and deal
with life before I scurry back to my fairy fortified citadel.
All of these genres
figure into my fantasy writing, however. I like building worlds, I like
creating creatures, but I also like my characters to want love along with their
magical abilities. Perhaps love helps or hinders their abilities. Or captures
the unicorn. Or saves a kingdom. Or destroys it utterly. The people in fantasyland
have the same problems you and I have; we just can’t use magic or a sharp sword
to solve them. Although it would be oh so satisfying to turn your boss into a
spotted hog-sloth.
My heroines and
heroes are your everyday folk who just happen to be caught up in something
bigger than they are. Reluctantly shoved into saving the world, they rise to
the occasion or give it their best shot while dodging death. This is what I
want out of the real world. Since we, as a society, currently can’t have nice
things, I want to write stories about a world where it can happen. And once my
letter from Hogwarts gets here, watch out. I’m going to change the world.
Spring has sprung, the grass has riz, I wonder where my story is?
There I was, skipping merrily down the path, sun shining, the
birds maniacally tweeting, and my brand new sneakers soft and bouncy. The path
ended abruptly. I smacked face first into a brick wall, bending my nose 20
degrees out of joint. Where did this brick wall come from, you ask? Why, I put
it there myself. 2/3rds of the way through the Newest Fantasy Novel, my little
happy boat ‘o progress sank like a concrete mafia block with my characters tied
to the sides.
I was stuck.
And not even at a hard part. I was stuck on something that I had
written in the rough draft that sounded fine at the time, but now needed
tweaking. My tweaker wasn’t working. I made four attempts at
cleaning/scrubbing/spackling over the problem area. Nothing took. Me being me, I
went back to the beginning of the novel and read it all again, 35 chapters.
Along the way I went Oh. Hmm. I didn’t realize I did that. Wow, so that’s where
that section derails.
I found my lost thread hidden several chapters back from the
problem. I gave it a yank and it flopped out of the novel to hit me in the face
like a wet fish. Here, dummy, this is where you need to be to get unstuck up
the creek. I had been trying to write past the end point of the issue. Right
there, in my problem paragraph, was the end of the chapter. I was just too
caught up in making it conflict-y, lean and spare that I failed to take the
idea to its logical conclusion. So I went back to the inciting thread, expanded
that part a bit more, so that what comes later makes more sense. I expanded
problem paragraph past its anorexic roots, and it worked. The paragraph was
happy, I was happy. All is right in my imaginary world. Onward!
Moral of my story, it works for novels, and for poems.
Lately I’ve been editing my poems with a chainsaw, when maybe some pruning
shears would have been better. Seed, water, let it grow, then prune. Or if
necessary, add fertilizer and let it expand. Within reason, because man, if you
add too much, or the wrong kind, that stuff can stink. Don’t let your writing
stink. Be a good gardener. Oh, and planting a flower or two along the way for
later enjoyment never hurts.
