 For Authors: June 01, 2005 Issue [#396] |
 
For Authors
This week: Edited by: phil1861
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Are we great because we write or do we write because we are great? Are we only great in the eyes of others and must fight succumbing to the temptations of greatness? Do those we call great today believe it themselves or is there a tacit denial to keep oneself grounded? Obviously, one need only see one of these greats for a five minute interview to determine if they believe it or not within themselves. We deride those, and rightly so, who take in their own greatness and flaunt it as if a new set of clothing. We say, “they are full of themselves” and discount any influence they might have had upon us as mere rubbish.
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I have been puzzling over what makes a good story good. I am in the re-writing phase of my NaNo novel with the first pass being correcting word usage and general paragraph and sentence clean up. I am reading aloud when editing and progressing faster than I initially thought I would for this part of the writing process. But, no matter how clean my prose will become my story will essentially remain the same and because of that I have been tempted to fret. “What if’s” rear their insidious heads and distract me from the task at hand of re-writing. I can make the story stronger or weaker based upon what elements I add or subtract from the storyline, but in the end accounting the story itself will not have changed from either a good story or a mediocre one. I cannot judge it appropriately as I am too close to it to declare its genius or its pedestrian qualities. In short, I am powerless to achieve for it anything other than what it intrinsically possesses. Herein lies the first lesson of a writer, write the stories you are given to write and hope nothing more for them. We have all experienced the bitter pill of disappointment as our work fails to measure up to our hopes. We as writers live in a world that is tied to the comparison. We see where others have gone before us and want what they had. We struggle and strive to participate in like manner to the best of our ability or to the strength of our will.
We compare our work to another’s work. We compare our experiences to that of someone else, either great or not in our own estimation, and we bog ourselves down in these thoughts as they relate to our own corpus of material. We read and give advice as to how a story can be better, make more sense, flow, be more descriptive, or if we enjoyed it or not. Yet none of these things can change what the story possesses on its own. We can make something more presentable but we cannot make the story more than what it is. It comes out of us and stretches us sometimes to do it justice, but once it is out it is largely unchanged by us intrinsically.
We ask ourselves if something we’ve written is worthy of being published. This question is moot. We can ask ourselves if it is clean enough to be submitted. Is it still full of errors in spelling and grammar? Is it formatted properly? Are there markets that it can compete in? These are the questions we need ask ourselves instead of the tempting judgment call disguised as our desire and need to be like [insert personage of choice here].
There is an inescapable pattern to these lives that we so want to emulate at times. Each and everything they write is published. Is it that they possess such genius that their body of work intrinsically has that kinetic energy or potential for greatness? Is it that they cannot fail in anything they pen? There are too many variables to answer this question properly in these pages. Experience, knowledge, circumstance, being a known entity, and a good agent/publicist are but a few that produces this phenomenon that most of us can only wish for. Unfortunately it is not an equal contest. I used to believe that talent itself should be its own reward, that a piece penned by the talented should be recognized as such and thus trump all others by its intrinsic value. Questions of good, bad, or worthiness aside the intrinsic value of a piece never changes but the value the writer and reading public put upon it does. It is an unequal contest because it is a competing field of one; oneself. Perhaps if I wrote for the remaining fifty years of my life I would not attain to what another achieves in only ten years. It is market forces and who one knows and the potential for being known that plays into this dream of greatness.
Ever wonder how entertainment begets entertainment? How the son or daughter of an entertainer can easily slip into the mainstream of the medium while thousands struggle in obscurity? A no talent hack is still a no talent hack but an unequal proportion of who you know and who knows you plays into opportunity.
My re-writing of the novel will make something more readable in the end but it will not make the work any more publishable, read “marketable”. It needs to be done, the cleaning and the polishing, the examination of each and every word and the flow of sentences one into another. The decisions to add more description or subtract whole sections need to be arrived at in turn. Like a child birthed and cared for, in the end we can only enhance who they are through discipline and upbringing but we cannot change who they are. Bumpersville, USA will not be any more worthy of publishing by the time I am finished with it than if I just submitted it in rough manuscript form. It will have a better chance of being read possibly, but it won’t have morphed into something else.
I’ve learned that I cannot control the market nor do I want it to control what I write. I’m learning that the stories I will be given to write will be created whole in their storyline and I only make them presentable. It is said of Edison that his experiments with electricity in seeking the right element to sustain a constant illuminative reaction to produce a working light bulb ran into the thousands of attempts. Until one reaches that pinnacle where even the most juvenile of writing attempts can make the best seller lists we must recognize it isn’t about us at all, it’s about the story. Perhaps it will take thousands of such stories before one is given to write something that will be considered ones own opus.
If you have almost given up on writing because of a failure to publish, describe it.
If you have published, whether in periodicals or novels, how many stories did you pen before something was accepted?
phil1861
I’ve done editing plugs before, but was able to find a few new items to share here. There is form and there is function. Form advice is a little like getting medical advice from relatives on what to do about that broken neck; all will agree that something should be done about it like go to the doctor (function) but will each have their own experience and opinion about how to take care of it (form). Here is a combination of form and function advice from various members.
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Questions from last NL
How have you used personal emotion in your creativity?
If not of your own, how do you draw upon emotions power in your work?
rabbitrun
Submitted Comment:
Regarding "writing for success," I just had a discussion last night with a good friend about whether to think in terms of monetary rewards about any success I will have with writing. And my wise and good friend reminded me that considering any marketable value, for what I might do here, could very well destroy the pleasure I will get in creating pieces that I can be proud of, and that furthermore I could be just one the many who have "sold out" their talent.
Rabbit
There does seem to be a fine line separating the success one can have and the motivation to prolong or further that success just for more success, the selling of the creativity for something other than creativity as expression can certainly become selling out.
Raine 
Submitted Comment:
As many writers have often said: "you can only write what you know." This, too, applies to emotions. You can't write about falling in love if you've never done it. You can't write about the wrenching loss death of a loved one brings if you've never shed the tears. We use our own emotions and experiences everytime we sit down and write...
robmartin
Submitted Comment:
Egad! A question about emotion. Of course we Martians (men) don't have 'em (or so the media tells us), but if we did, I can tell you...well, no I can't, cause then the martianly Martians would kick in my door and strap me into a tutu, and I assure you that would make me emotional.
Seriously though, I try to use my characters as filters for my emotional input. I put them in difficult situations and then determine their emotional reactions based on my personal experience (or, to be honest, those gleaned from others I've picked up while eaves-dropping in cafes) combined with the distortion that character's personality, as I understand it, creates.
Ack! What a sentence! Fine, I'm sticking with the Martian approach.
sakurafantasy
Submitted Comment:
Thanks for the wakeup call! I often think 'is this one good enough' over and over. But writing for yourself comes first, and if someone recignizes and likes my work, than making it big would be a bonus. This will make my writing more of a pastime than a chore.
-Sakurafantasy
Angie
Submitted Comment:
I stumbled across a link with an article by Stephen King (one of my favorite authors) that offers tips on how to write successfully in ten minutes. (meaning ten minutes reading time) Thought it might be something worth passing around. http://www.icestormcity.com/rumble/king.html
chacko
Submitted Comment:
Thank you very much for sharing those vauable information( i would like to name it as information rather than thoughts,because it has such a real soul in it and would synchronise thoughts of many people like me with some of the basic needs of writing)
Chacko
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