|
As I finish up my cutting and trimming, I’ll begin another clean-up pass. I swear these typos pop up like dandelions.
Speaking of finishing up, we’re nearing the end of another schoolyear. The seniors are getting ready to graduate, and then putter off to the rest of their lives. Some of them are headed to college, others to trade schools, and others straight into the workforce. By now, most of the scholarship opportunities have passed, and just about everyone knows where they are going and how they’re going to get there. However, I do like to take the last two weeks or so of my seniors’ time to take a break from English stuff (it’s hard enough to get their interest at the best of times on a text, and the last two weeks are basically impossible for that), and instead, we focus on “life skills” that they may or may not have been exposed to in their high school curriculum: monthly budgeting, housing research, tax preparation, and resume building. I get to talk to them about debt and health insurance and utility bills; I get to help them do online research on housing prices and rent rates; I get to explain tax brackets; and I get to help them make themselves look as good as possible on paper for the day when they have to submit themselves for scrutiny by an apathetic employer. So my students never get to have the excuse of complaining about school that they “never learned anything useful.” That’s not true anyway – the skills learned in core classes are necessary no matter where you’re going – but now it’s painfully untrue, and we can all quit complaining about not seeing the use of what we learned in school! Write your story! -J. E. Ayers
0 Comments
Cutting and trimming, cutting and trimming.
I’ve explained why editing and revising is the most challenging part of the writing process for me. I’ve also mentioned that drafting – getting the story out onto the page – is my favorite part, but I haven’t explained why. Whenever I’m drafting, I can feel warmth in my brain. It’s the “creating” part of this creative process. I can just … make things happen, put the words onto paper, and then it’s done! That’s fantastic. It’s fun to draft stories. It’s work, no doubt about that. I have to set a minimum daily wordcount for myself or else it won’t ever get done. I spend many nights up past midnight to reach that minimum count every day during the drafting process, no exceptions. I work weekends, holidays, and sick days to make sure I never fall short. In some ways, I have to treat it like a job in order to get the draft finished. In other ways, though, as difficult as that can be, as hard as it can be to push through exhaustion and confusion to get the thing done, as taxing as it can be to feel like I’m laboring away for an ungrateful taskmaster (me), I enjoy it in a way that I just cannot with the revising and editing stage. Slapping the story out on the table is the fun part; editing and revising is the slow, painful, and necessary part. Gotta have both, but I can’t help but like the former more than the latter. Write your story! -J. E. Ayers Revision update: I’m running through each chapter of the manuscript and trimming it down, with the (soft) goal of making each chapter half as long by taking out words and phrases. It’s a drastic benchmark that I haven’t reached on any of my chapters, but since reaching the goal isn’t really the point here anyway, I’m good with it.
Unrelated to anything, I’m in a weird headspace with regard to the Marvel cinematic universe. I’ve only seen three Iron Man movies and the first Thor film. I just cannot commit to watching anything else because there’s so much there, and trying to keep up with each new movie’s references, callbacks, and context means I’m going to have to buckle in for hours and hours of movie watching in a very particular order to really get what is going on in each one. For instance, with the third Iron Man movie, I had to look stuff up afterwards to make sense of the stuff that was being talked about. For most of it, I could only be half-tuned to the plot because I had so many gaps. I run into this problem with any long-running series. It’s the main reason I have started Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. There are fourteen books in that series, and not one of them is shorter than two hundred thousand words. I can’t commit to that! I barely have enough time to read as it is; getting locked into a four-million-word saga is just too big of an ask. I get anxious buying too many bananas at the grocery store for fear of them rotting before I can eat them, and this is way worse than that. I don’t really have a point to all of this, just making note of I problem I’ve got. Write your story! -J. E. Ayers Revisions and revisions and revisions.
One of my favorite texts that I get to read through with my senior students each year is Macbeth. I’ve always enjoyed the story and the themes of this play since I first read it in college. Every year, there’s always something else to notice, another character to spend more time dissecting, another scene that seems to take on an even greater significance. In recent years, I’ve started showing the Rupert Goold version starring Patrick Stewart in the title role. It takes the story and sets its aesthetic in Stalinist Russia while keeping all the names of people and places of the original. It’s really dark and explores some of the play’s themes of power, violence, and politics in a memorable way. I used to stream it from PBS’s website, but they took it down. Luckily, our library bought a copy so I still get to use it each year. Shakespeare’s stories have a way of staying with me, as they do with many people. There’s a reason we keep telling and retelling these things, after all, and it’s not just because English teachers like him. The universality of Shakespeare has stood the test of time, and it is a testament to the power of storytelling that four hundred years later, we can still appreciate and enjoy what he gave the world. Even if most of us as writers can’t change the world like he did, we can still create a story or two, and that is worth the effort. Write your story! -J. E. Ayers Nothing to report on the manuscript other than work continues on revision. It really is important to try to come at this stuff as fresh as possible for revision’s sake.
I have a really bad habit of reading the books that I buy for people before I give them as gifts during Christmas. It feels a bit like taking a bite out of food you’re handing to someone. I’m not going to stop doing it, though. This year, I bought my dad Stephen King’s The Outsider, which I believe came out way back in May. It’s really good. It’s horrifying and gross and spooky, but that’s what you’re signing up for with King. It’s the first book I’ve read in a while that made me stay awake late into the night reading it. It wasn’t really my choice – I couldn’t sleep because I was creeped out by the book. I figured it was a “hair of the dog that bit you” situation and pushed through until around 3 am. Then I couldn’t stay awake and I conked out. Highly recommended reading. For my own part, I got “Under the Red Hood,” a compendium of a series of Batman comics following the storyline of a mysterious and dangerous vigilante who appears on the streets of Gotham who, to put it lightly, does not share Batman’s compunctions against killing criminals in an effort to deter crime. Another solid read if you’re into Batman lore or comic books in general. Because of these books, I’ve had to put off A Clash of Kings until this week. Back into it I go. Write your story! -J. E. Ayers Haha, I’ve revisited my manuscript with my fresh, fresh eyes, and uh, I’ve got a lot of fixing to do. So now I’ve at least found the answer to why I was getting so many rejections so quickly. I guess I could also be botching the submissions and writing a terrible query, but Occam’s razor says that “When faced with a variety of proposed explanations, your writing being bad is the most likely” (or something like that), so that’s what I’ll be working on. Fourth revision, weeeeeee!
In other news, the winter season is upon us. I love this time of year, and it’s finally feeling like it’s supposed to outside. I’m hopeful for some snowy weather at some point in the next few months, but it’s a faint hope. It’s been a few years since we’ve had anything serious hit us where I live, a fact which is very disappointing to me; when I first moved here, we got winter weather at least once a year. Even in the mildest of those early years, we got three or more inches of snow on the ground at a time. Recently, though, we haven’t gotten anything more than an inch or two that melts the next day. I don’t know who to complain to about the weather, so I’ve resorted to whining at our local weather man on Twitter to do something about it. We’ll see how that works out. I like to get all of my friends comic books/graphic novels for Christmas, and I sent off volume 1 of Erased to a friend of mine. I hope he likes it as much as I did. I’m currently past that part of Game of Thrones (you know the part, that part that makes you want to throw the book across the room because of how unfair it is), and will be starting A Clash of Kings before the end of the month. As I said before, I’m enjoying this reread much more than I expected, but that’s the result of reading good writing, I suppose. Write your story! -J. E. Ayers All right, I’ve officially exceeded my benchmark for rejections on queries. Back to the drawing board; I’m either botching the submission guidelines somehow, writing a bad query, or there’s a problem with the story/my writing. I’ll start with the last assumption first and go back to work.
In my previous posts, I mentioned several authors who have had an effect on me as an author. I want to stop a moment and focus on George R. R. Martin. Specifically, I want to discuss his massively popular A Song of Ice and Fire series. I came across this set of books in college; a quick google search tells me that it was over a decade old by the time I first picked up A Game of Thrones. It’s impossible to talk about Martin’s work without mentioning Tolkien (he’s been called “The American Tolkien,” after all, a name I’m not sure of Martin’s opinions about), who I’ve previously mentioned was a master of world-building, even if the story-telling can be tedious at points. Martin doesn’t have that problem. I’ve started a re-read of all the ASoIaF books. I dreaded it going in, because these books are huge, they are complex, and there are (as of this writing) five of them. Google tells me that there are over 1.7 million words in the series thus far. However, my dread was misplaced. The re-read is entirely enjoyable. Martin’s story is really fun to read, despite the rather grim world he’s built. And that is really where Tolkien and Martin intersect to me: immersive world building. Martin leaves hints and clues of foreshadowing in the pages, and it’s all tied into the history of the world the story is set in. There are broad strokes of the history of the world in these books that are generally true, but there are other points that are contested. That are hundreds of deliberate loose ends, and tugging at these is a favorite pastime of fans of the series as we wait for The Winds of Winter. If you haven’t fallen down any of the numerous ASoIaF rabbit holes on Youtube, I highly recommend it (if you’re looking for something to listen to for hours, I should say). He’s created a world that never existed that thousands of people the world over care deeply about. That’s no small thing. Write your story! - J. E. Ayers Up to thirty rejections now. Starting to think that I’m either really bad at writing a solid query, or there are some serious problems with my first few pages that I’ve missed. I’ll probably take a look at the manuscript before next month. I think there has been enough time since my edits that I’ll be able to look at it with a fresh perspective.
There are writers in my past who I remember with fondness, their stories floating around at the edges of my consciousness whenever I’m writing. I carry them with me whenever I write anything, like the cloud of witnesses from the book of Hebrews, their words and phrases and stories and characters bouncing and touching the corners of my mind as I try to tease a narrative out of thin air. Tolkien, Salvatore, Rowling, Modesitt, L’Engle, Martin, Abraham, McCaffrey, King, Asimov, and many more – the authors who have written the stories that I’ve devoured eagerly over the years and whose styles, whether intentionally or unintentionally on my part, have seeped into how I do what I do – they stay with me. Their stories have stuck in my head for one reason or another. Their characters mattered, and the struggles they faced felt real, no matter how unreal or improbable or fantastical their individual stories were. When a character, author, or story sticks with you, it is a constant struggle to prevent yourself from mere imitation. As much as I like R. A. Salvatore and admire his craft, for example, I don’t want to write as him. I have to work to make sure my efforts create something that is truly mine, even if I’m building on the work of those that I’ve read. To create something utterly original would be truly impossible, but simple mimicry falls short. That’s what all writers have to deal with, I suppose. Let me know if you have helpful hints to threading that needle. Write your story! -J. E. Ayers Marching right along! Ten more queries, and some more rejections. My plan is to send out a total of fifty queries; at that point, I may need to re-examine my writing again. There’s always room for improvement, and I may be missing some style problems. We shall see what we shall see.
I want to take a break from talking about books and writing today to discuss another passion of mine: video games. Specifically, I want to talk about Rocket League, from Psyonix LLC. I really enjoy this game. I enjoy the way the game “feels” as I play it, I enjoy the stress of playing defense as the enemy team closes on my goal with the ball, I enjoy the exhilaration of victory as I knock the ball into the enemy team’s goal – every aspect of this game seems to be designed to appeal to the pleasure centers in my brain in a way that few other games have done in recent years. The odd thing is that I even enjoy losing. I can play this game, lose to a highly skilled opponent, and still enjoy myself throughout the entire process. That’s a weird thing for a video game to achieve, isn’t it? Most games lead to frustration and a negative reaction when you lose. Losing is supposed to feel like a loss, like a failure of some kind. For whatever reason, that does not happen with me when I play this game. It’s a good thing, too, because I’m not very good at it. In the ranking system I don’t think I’ve ever gotten above silver, and that was at the top of my game. But I still play when I get the chance, chasing after that hit of dopamine that the game seems to never fail to provide. Maybe I enjoy losing because I’m not good at Rocket League. I’m not sure, but the end result is the same: loads of fun for me no matter what. Write your story! -J. E. Ayers Six queries sent out, and 3 rejections so far. All professional and courteous, so I’m feeling pretty good about that, but the road ahead is rough. I’m in it for the long haul, y’all.
I’d like to take the rest of this post to talk about one of my favorite authors: J. R. R. Tolkien. I’ve read The Lord of the Rings about 3 times now all the way through in my life, and I just finished my first read-through of his epic history of Middle Earth, The Silmarillion. One of the things that strikes me as odd about Tolkien’s style while reading through LotR is that at some points I feel as if I’m reading a history book – not a textbook, but like a classical, Herodotus-y history of events: duly chronicled, full of seemingly insignificant but painstakingly noted minutiae of details, and sprinkled examples of heroism and mighty deeds noted by the narrator throughout. It does, at points, make for dry reading. This should not be taken as a knock against Tolkien as a writer – I have immense respect for his work, and overall, I greatly enjoy the narrative of LotR – but it is a fact that the epic can be difficult to read through for long periods at a time. I think part of this was probably intentional, for what it’s worth; within the context of the book, as it comes to us, it is supposedly (mostly) written down by Frodo, who himself was well read in many of the texts of Middle Earth. It reads like a history because it’s meant to have been written by a consumer of such histories in the context of the world of Middle Earth. So, points for authenticity there. I say all that to say that while the scope of The Silmarillion is much gradner than that of LotR, it is less difficult to read while paradoxically being even less novel-like in construction. The structure of it is laid out from front to back as a dry mythology/history compendium, but the world-building that goes on in immense and detailed and wonderful. It’s as if Tolkien wrote the story of LotR, and then wrote out another book on the scale of the Old Testament of the Bible as backstory to it. I enjoyed my foray into the history of Middle Earth, and will likely reread it again sometime in the next few years, just as I return to Frodo, Gandalf, and the rest. The stories are not without issues, but they stick, and that’s all that matters in the end. Write your story! -J. E. Ayers |
AuthorJeff Ayers writes books that are pretty good. Archives
May 2024
Categories |