Editing your book is normally very difficult for all kinds of reasons bust most of all because it isn't real and you created this thing out of nothing. It's said and often believed that the toil of the writer comes from the heart and soul and I've written those books too so I know how it feels when it's true. In those babies the writer's opinion is that just about everything is good and to take out anything would be a crime and so it hurts like a bastard when you know that you should. Sometimes it is quite literally 'where do I start'.
'Level Crossing' was not that type of effort. From beginning to end it was a fabrication of my imagination and I struggled intellectually with each word. Harsh; I was constipated and there was no laxative I could take therefore every line was produced with heavy grunting and red cheeks with my head ready to pop off or blow. When it was time to edit, gutting it was the easiest thing in the world because I hated it and what I had to go through to get it on paper. The problem was obvious to me as I went along. I was committed to writing this log if it was the last thing I did all the while feeling that was probably true and that after this there would never ever be another one. I joked to friends that this would be the unfinished manuscript that I would still be talking about ten years from now. I had to purge it before I could move on to anything else. Well I didn't have to and it didn't have to be like that but that's who I am and denying that now I might as well just swallow a gun barrel and end it because it was really over if I thought about it at all.
Friends who I hadn't seen or talked to for months would say 'how are you?' and I would hang my head and mournfully reply 'editing'. I was rebuilding the story I hated so every day was spent in anguish. No moment even for a second of a good day's work I would type and think until my body couldn't stand the position any longer then I would stand up and be done until the same time tomorrow. I put my life on hold for over a year when a year in the life isn't throwaway any more. I used those up already in the last decade in the name of fun only it wasn't all that much worth it but what can I do now but smile and regret it.
The only thing accurate about this work was the theme and I nailed it when I called it an 'existential angst' saga. It is so dark that if there was a market for it the Scandinavian block were the only countries that could possibly be interested. Iceland for sure would get it especially the part about death and dying. Symbolically there is even more merit since my alter ego for the past thirteen years is killed on the first page. I hated it so much this was the only story left to tell. With this much done I am standing at the door step of 1997 and now I am depressed because of what that means to me.
Absent from this story of mine is any trace of a love angle which underlines no muse in my life when I wrote it.. Also M.I.A. no music. There is none in the story and there wasn't even the hint of a few bars in my head. Surprising in that jazz was playing in the background 24/7 or at least during the parts when I was sitting down in front of a keyboard.
So to wrap this up just like the book, the process like the story is all true except that it's not.
Friday, January 20, 2012
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Rabbits and Hats are a Trick
There I was thinking like I was bullet-proof once again when suddenly I wasn't and it was like I'd have to relive the last six years of my life to take a step forward.
When I sat down to write 'Four and a Half Hours' it was no big deal. I said I could and so I did. I wasn't concerned by how long it would take because I knew I was doing it just like one more thing in a crazy busy life. I was living on the coast and though there were problems I felt huge in the circles I was travelling in. A big circle of Western Canada, Seattle, Alaska, The Territories and the Yukon. My god I was a giant. The book was done and I still had everything else going on so I treated it like another notch in my belt not stopping to give it a second thought. It wasn't until my then life stopped dead in its tracks that I considered writing as possibly therapeutic and a good step in rehab. The problem was I couldn't write two words together that made any sense in my head. I consciously avoided any written-word like it was the plague and I metaphorically crawled into a cocoon.
I didn't try to write again until I returned to Ontario in 2009. I'd been back two months when I finally admitted to myself that I should send a letter to my girl friend back in Vancouver. She was the love of my life and leaving her and our possible future together had hurt like hell. I tried to explain.
The letter writing was rough and I joked with her that it would make more sense if I had used crayons instead of a pen as that was how inept I felt I sounded. Barely two pages, I wrote her every week. Pretty soon I was writing twenty page letters as bad as they were.
She had loved reading 'Four and a Half' the screenplay so I told her I'd try writing something like that for her. Two or three months later I sent her 'Long Hair & The Beach'. A month later 'Dancing Bears' was in the mail and two weeks after that 'Harem Scarem'. I was tearing it up. During the NPR interview I thought aloud if returning to a novel format wasn't something I should try even though I was still afraid and unsure of my capabilities now that I had been damaged.
'Magick' didn't take long for me maybe six weeks but I'll say two months with the editing. I hated what this said about us. I wasn't with her any more but as a long distance muse she was the best thing for me. I think she realized what was happening before I did because she said so. Our futures wouldn't be together with her there and me here. Moving for either of us wasn't an option. In grief I wrote 'Maacland' as a tribute to her and as reassurance for myself that I could write a novel again without her in my life. At the very end of of August 2010 I was done and I said to myself that I'd take a break for the film festival. I couldn't write two words together until January 2011 and at that it was like pulling my own teeth.
I sat down and wrote eight hours everyday with nothing coming together. Two or three times I thought I was on to something and squeaked out twenty thousand words. Once I even managed to get forty-thousand words down before I had to tear it up because I hated it so much. I needed a new approach is what I said to myself but the real problem was that there wasn't a shred of a story in my head. That's why no outline or story board; hard to write those things down when they don't exist.
With the letters and then the short cycle time of my three plays and two novels I had grown accustomed to seeing my work finished in very quick order. The gratification of seeing your words between covers is a drug and now with a long cycle time with nothing to show for it, I was jonesing for a fix and chasing my own dragons. When you sense 'block' you grow very afraid especially when block is something you've had bad, like I did for four years. You over-think everything and now what was on my mind was that I had never written anything without a muse in my life. I had no muse. I tried to write.
The drug angle of a fix for my joint seemed like the solution. I thought about it and that's when I decided to blog about the progress of writing my book thinking this would spur me on in spite of nothing there with the shame of admitting it publicly making nothing something. The blog is good for the instant buzz but as a writer it just leaves a big gaping hole where a story should have been. It's two different mindsets and the blog robs your words and ideas that you now can't put in your book because of copyright issues later on. A poor excuse for documenting the process, I had to stop.
I forced myself to sit down, writing about nothing, for day after day in eight hour stretches. When I figured I had written 100,000 words I wrapped it up thinking I find something I could use in the edit. I did. 100,000 words became a 20,000 word story which you might as well shove up your ass. I was back to where I had started.
Except in the nothingness there was something and then I started to write the book that I just finished.
When I sat down to write 'Four and a Half Hours' it was no big deal. I said I could and so I did. I wasn't concerned by how long it would take because I knew I was doing it just like one more thing in a crazy busy life. I was living on the coast and though there were problems I felt huge in the circles I was travelling in. A big circle of Western Canada, Seattle, Alaska, The Territories and the Yukon. My god I was a giant. The book was done and I still had everything else going on so I treated it like another notch in my belt not stopping to give it a second thought. It wasn't until my then life stopped dead in its tracks that I considered writing as possibly therapeutic and a good step in rehab. The problem was I couldn't write two words together that made any sense in my head. I consciously avoided any written-word like it was the plague and I metaphorically crawled into a cocoon.
I didn't try to write again until I returned to Ontario in 2009. I'd been back two months when I finally admitted to myself that I should send a letter to my girl friend back in Vancouver. She was the love of my life and leaving her and our possible future together had hurt like hell. I tried to explain.
The letter writing was rough and I joked with her that it would make more sense if I had used crayons instead of a pen as that was how inept I felt I sounded. Barely two pages, I wrote her every week. Pretty soon I was writing twenty page letters as bad as they were.
She had loved reading 'Four and a Half' the screenplay so I told her I'd try writing something like that for her. Two or three months later I sent her 'Long Hair & The Beach'. A month later 'Dancing Bears' was in the mail and two weeks after that 'Harem Scarem'. I was tearing it up. During the NPR interview I thought aloud if returning to a novel format wasn't something I should try even though I was still afraid and unsure of my capabilities now that I had been damaged.
'Magick' didn't take long for me maybe six weeks but I'll say two months with the editing. I hated what this said about us. I wasn't with her any more but as a long distance muse she was the best thing for me. I think she realized what was happening before I did because she said so. Our futures wouldn't be together with her there and me here. Moving for either of us wasn't an option. In grief I wrote 'Maacland' as a tribute to her and as reassurance for myself that I could write a novel again without her in my life. At the very end of of August 2010 I was done and I said to myself that I'd take a break for the film festival. I couldn't write two words together until January 2011 and at that it was like pulling my own teeth.
I sat down and wrote eight hours everyday with nothing coming together. Two or three times I thought I was on to something and squeaked out twenty thousand words. Once I even managed to get forty-thousand words down before I had to tear it up because I hated it so much. I needed a new approach is what I said to myself but the real problem was that there wasn't a shred of a story in my head. That's why no outline or story board; hard to write those things down when they don't exist.
With the letters and then the short cycle time of my three plays and two novels I had grown accustomed to seeing my work finished in very quick order. The gratification of seeing your words between covers is a drug and now with a long cycle time with nothing to show for it, I was jonesing for a fix and chasing my own dragons. When you sense 'block' you grow very afraid especially when block is something you've had bad, like I did for four years. You over-think everything and now what was on my mind was that I had never written anything without a muse in my life. I had no muse. I tried to write.
The drug angle of a fix for my joint seemed like the solution. I thought about it and that's when I decided to blog about the progress of writing my book thinking this would spur me on in spite of nothing there with the shame of admitting it publicly making nothing something. The blog is good for the instant buzz but as a writer it just leaves a big gaping hole where a story should have been. It's two different mindsets and the blog robs your words and ideas that you now can't put in your book because of copyright issues later on. A poor excuse for documenting the process, I had to stop.
I forced myself to sit down, writing about nothing, for day after day in eight hour stretches. When I figured I had written 100,000 words I wrapped it up thinking I find something I could use in the edit. I did. 100,000 words became a 20,000 word story which you might as well shove up your ass. I was back to where I had started.
Except in the nothingness there was something and then I started to write the book that I just finished.
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
'Level Crossing' Complete
well sort of, now travelling the circuit of good friends who are my critics for this thing. As I posted on my website, it is being decided if the warts are tumours needing to removed before it can go to press. My early feedback is that the first third is okay/good. That's about when I stopped having fun writing the book so who knows how much will be diagnosed as the existential angst that the story is about and how much is just too much to handle and enjoy. In the meantime I wait and get distance which I need because I don't yet know which is more difficult to wrap my head around: that it is finally done or that I killed off my central character. Jacob West has been my alter ego in every story I've written so this is a very big deal for me and something I do need to think about.
The story was originally motivated by my contempt for Auster's 'New York Trilogy'. I felt it could have been done much better and especially in my view since so many celebrities still claim this is what they are reading. I suspected it was a carefully conceived response to suggest that the celebrity was smart or thoughtful and in this case that the book must be quite good. It was painfully not, to my way of thinking. However having now undertaken my own version, some of Auster does make sense; like how hard it is to sustain this type of story over more than 90 pages. Ergo his trilogy and on the flip-side, what a good boy I am for taking it to novel lengths (though to be fair I had to resort to employing devices). If Wiki wasn't dark today I'd look up Auster's age when he wrote his story and maybe that's the secret for his fame, having done it when he was young but then that still doesn't explain the other thing, so it doesn't really matter.
The nuts and bolts of 'Level Crossing' is the question of identity and communication. I attack the subject from the standpoint of anonymity and misunderstanding. The subtext is a political statement about Chinese consumption and our willingness to sell out. Religion like so many of my other stories is relegated to scorn for the context we have created for faith in our lives. Absent a love story which to me is also telling.
The process from start to finish spanned the better part of fourteen months. I didn't have a plan in any form. There was no plot, theme, point to be made and no story board or template when I sat down at the keyboard. There was just the need, disguised as confidence, to write because something else in my life had gone wrong.The book would be my proof that it wasn't another mistake I had made; only more bad luck and at a shitty time in my life when time wasn't any longer a concept to be debated but something real that slips away.
This is the first post of me then, with no voice now because my talking head is buried, trying to explain what happened and what it means.
The story was originally motivated by my contempt for Auster's 'New York Trilogy'. I felt it could have been done much better and especially in my view since so many celebrities still claim this is what they are reading. I suspected it was a carefully conceived response to suggest that the celebrity was smart or thoughtful and in this case that the book must be quite good. It was painfully not, to my way of thinking. However having now undertaken my own version, some of Auster does make sense; like how hard it is to sustain this type of story over more than 90 pages. Ergo his trilogy and on the flip-side, what a good boy I am for taking it to novel lengths (though to be fair I had to resort to employing devices). If Wiki wasn't dark today I'd look up Auster's age when he wrote his story and maybe that's the secret for his fame, having done it when he was young but then that still doesn't explain the other thing, so it doesn't really matter.
The nuts and bolts of 'Level Crossing' is the question of identity and communication. I attack the subject from the standpoint of anonymity and misunderstanding. The subtext is a political statement about Chinese consumption and our willingness to sell out. Religion like so many of my other stories is relegated to scorn for the context we have created for faith in our lives. Absent a love story which to me is also telling.
The process from start to finish spanned the better part of fourteen months. I didn't have a plan in any form. There was no plot, theme, point to be made and no story board or template when I sat down at the keyboard. There was just the need, disguised as confidence, to write because something else in my life had gone wrong.The book would be my proof that it wasn't another mistake I had made; only more bad luck and at a shitty time in my life when time wasn't any longer a concept to be debated but something real that slips away.
This is the first post of me then, with no voice now because my talking head is buried, trying to explain what happened and what it means.
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