I admit it. I am the world’s greatest producer of typos. They seem to follow me, haunt me. I am the pied piper of typos. And they drive me batty! They nibble on my soul’s foundation like a horde of hungry vermin. They buzz about my brain like a cloud of blood thirsty mosquitoes. Read my last post. I bet typos infest each line. I bet they’re breathing well in this post too. The thing is, I can eradicate all of them. I simply need to take the time that pooper ( I mean proper ) eradication requires: Edit, Revise, Edit, Revise.
Here is some advice from the masters. I need all the help I can get.
1. “Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.”
- Raymond Chandler
2. “Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.”
- Bernard Malamud
3. “I would rather have one article a day of this sort; and these ten or twenty lines might readily represent a whole day’s hard work in the way of concentrated, intense thinking and revision, polish of style, weighing of words.”
- Joseph Pulitzer
4. “When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.”
- Stephen King
5. “Edit your manuscript until your fingers bleed and you have memorized every last word. Then, when you are certain you are on the verge of insanity…edit one more time!”
- C.K. Webb
6. “There are two typos of people in this world: those who can edit, and those who can’t.”
- Jarod Kintz
7. “An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better, a little better.”
- T.S. Eliot
8. This is my favorite. “Remember the waterfront shack with the sign FRESH FISH SOLD HERE. Of course it’s fresh, we’re on the ocean. Of course it’s for sale, we’re not giving it away. Of course it’s here, otherwise the sign would be someplace else. The final sign: FISH.”
- Peggy Noonan
The one by Stephen King hits home. I have found, in my own work, that one of the greatest blessings I can have is to pick up one of my novels and read it and see and feel exactly what I wanted the reader to see and feel. When you labor — the way you have to — over every tiny, exact detail and movement to orchestrate them perfectly — the whole thing becomes more like a construction site than a flowing novel. But to have all of that disappear when I read and really be able to “get into the story” the way any other reader does — to “see the forest instead of the trees” — now that makes me know I’ve succeeded in writing the book I wanted to write. (Hey, I think I just may do a blog post on this topic! Thanks, Scott.)
A construction…word by word by word. Mind numbing. Yes?
And believe it or not, of all the kinds of scenes I’ve constructed, love scenes are absolutely the hardest for me. Physical fight scenes run a close second, but they do not require doing both physical and emotional at the same time.
But love scenes: Oh my! I had absolutely no idea!. (Let me hasten to insert here that the love scenes in my books are all clean and appropriate for Christian audiences.) But even so, you have two people in this emotionally tumultuous interaction, and you have to be sure to choose exactly the perfect words to describe those emotions, without being “mushy.” But then you also have to be sure to manipulate all the body parts correctly as well. You have two heads, two sets of eyes, two mouths, four arms, and four hands. Each part needs to maneuver appropriately at just the right time and while responding to just the right emotion.
I have had so many times when I would find myself saying, “Wait a minute. Did he have his left arm around her or his right arm? Which hand does he have to use to touch her face? Did she already have her arms around his neck or was her head resting on his shoulder? And then I’d have to go back a couple pages to find out so that I didn’t have them in contortions that no one could get into, regardless of how in love they were.
There was absolutely nothing romantic about orchestrating all the intricate moves, words, and feelings. By the time I was done, I was sure I had completely destroyed all the romance in the scene. But low and behold, when the book was done, and I read through it in its entirety, I felt the powerful emotions and followed every movement with baited breath. That’s when I knew for sure that the story really was alive even though, during construction, it had felt as passionless as working with brick and mortar.
Interesting work … writing.
I guess one needs to become technically emotional…or emotionally technical. Hmmmmm.
Keep at it.
Hey, here’s another piece of great advice. It’s from an anonymous source, but this person was undoubtedly a professional writer. This is definitely one of my favorites:
“Done is better than perfect. Sometime after the 10th revision, you have to let it go.”
I think my years as a newspaper reporter helped me adhere to this one. In fact, in newspaper work, you don’t even have time to revise 5 times, let alone 10. Really pushing a deadline and a word limit forced me to be more ruthless with my own work.
Makes it tough when you want it perfect.
To me the ‘revision/editing’ a writer does to their drafts usually reflects an editing of ideas – an editing of their expression. After those ideas are worked out, beaten down, polished up etc, there are two sorts of proofing yet to do – proof-editing (wording, meaning, sense etc) and literals (fixing literal typos). Two different skill sets. Authors are usually their own worst proof-readers in this sense – having a “third party” go over your material can do wonders. The problem, of course, is paying for it…
I agree, Matthew. Editing your own work is terribly difficult. Here’s to third parties, when you can find one.
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