Vacation is so close, but the slippery little devil manages to slither through my fingers until 4 o’clock. So I work. I have started three projects and completed two other projects. So work and I, we’re jakes for now. I mean there are other things I could be doing, but you know, I’m kinda tired. Time for a wee break.
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I guess we’ll call this the pre-Taos post. I received another rejection this morning, this time after making it up to second tier evaluation. The publisher was kind enough to send the comments from the committee that reviewed the work, and they varied. It serves as an underscore to the unevenness of my appeal at this point– a well-divided verdict.
What is the point of where I’m going with this? We-ell, there were a few pieces that I read in getting ready for the critiques I’ll be doing next week. The workshop submissions were certainly varied, and you now, subjective tastes in part color what you think, as do expectations you’ve had about craft. There were some of the entries that you sped through. I read with pen in hand, poised to make a comment, or fingers placed on keyboard, ready to snap something out in a series of clicks. When you find yourself farther along than you thought you’d be in the story, without noticing you got there, I used to call that falling in.
Now that I’m thinking more in terms of being an author, I call it the glide. Maybe a better analogy is the wave. If you’re going to catch the wave, the surf has to be perfect, and you have to hit it a certain way. If you don’t, you get a trip that isn’t what you’d hoped for. If you do, you glide. At the end of the glide, you assess where you were and where you are. But you didn’t do it during the glide, because you were too busy enjoying the glide.
None of the entries I read that glided are styles I would like to emulate. One of the other really interesting things about these smooth manuscripts is that they capture the glide so well that I find myself surfing, even if it’s not my thing. As one of my fellow workshoppers said to me, “I went through X’s manuscript, and it was painless. Hella scary, but painless.” In order to give feedback, then what I have to do is go back and analyze the shape of the wave. The weight of the surf board. How they made their story glide.
This makes me a better writer. That I can actually see those pieces now makes me a better writer. You can’t analyze everything and then, boom!, you make the glide happen. But you get a little better about identifying what’s in there.
I write first with my intuition and talent. That’s the wave I’m riding, and it’s usually pretty good. But that first time through, I might not hit it quite right. So then, I go and tinker with the other things. The character, the dialogue, the setting, you know, that writing book stuff. My approach to the wave becomes different. I can highlight the intuition and talent with technique to make the glide happen. I’m hoping this is that marriage of talent and craft that I’ve been searching for is beginning to make itself known. I hope.
So. The other thing I’ve been thinking about lately is ornamentation. I’ve talked a bit about this before in costuming. Not every project needs to be ornamented. But every project does need to be like an ogre. It needs layers. You need to think ramifications of things through. If characters are consistent in thought, word, and deed. Whether an action in scene A affects another action. All the stuff that writers are supposed to do. However, we beginners are often so busy looking at the shiny wave that we don’t think about the rest of the ocean, which it is part of.
I guess, going into the workshop, then, I am coming up with what I think are interesting ways of looking at the puzzle of the novel. I don’t suppose I’ll be able to address these things in two weeks. Solving these puzzles is the long arc and curl of a lifetime of waves. A lot of the work I’ve been doing on my art has really stretched me out in different, very satisfying waves.
I think I’ve been thinking about the glide since writing “O-Taga-San” and “Turtle of the Earth,” but it took the words of others to make me realize what it was that was happening there.
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Company for gaming tomorrow. Up at 3:30 am on Sunday. Tonight I’m going shopping for my bear noise makers. I’d like bells, but I may settle for a bicycle horn. Harpo Marx of the New Mexican mountains? We’ll see.
I like the idea of ‘falling in’. That’s harder for me these days, but it’s still a good descriptor.