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Category: Revising

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A few thoughts on pseudonymity and updates on reading and writing

I have a couple of longer posts brewing right now, but they are going to take a while to finish. They involve some big ideas, and writing (and thinking!) about big ideas takes time and space. But I wanted to link to this thread now, because these big ideas are related in an indirect way to pseudonymity, and @nycsouthpaw‘s posts on why he chose to use a pseudonym touch on some thoughts I’ve been having. (Another source that I think has interesting things to say on this topic is You Are Not a Gadget, though the world is a little different now than it was when that book was published.)

Maddy McBride is, in fact, a pseudonym. My reasons for using a pseudonym are somewhat similar to @nycsouthpaw’s, but unlike him, I’m not at a point where being pseudonymous is impacting my ability to do what this pseudonym was set out to do. I use a pseudonym to talk about a part of my life (reading and writing) that’s separate from my professional life, without worrying that what I post might impact my ability to do my day job.

But the dividing line between my professional life and my life as a reader and writer of fiction isn’t always so clear, and that’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

Enough of that. Updates on reading: since I posted here last, I’ve read The Book of Hidden Things by Francesco Dimitri (enjoyed it greatly up until the end – I’ll probably write about this at greater length at some point); Pacifica by Kristen Simmons; Raven Strategem by Yoon Ha Lee; and The Four and Twenty Blackbirds Pie Book by Emily and Melissa Elsen (highly recommended for pie technique – specific recipes may or may not be to your taste, but they do a great job of explaining how not just to make a pie, but to create a new recipe). Currently reading, among others, The Death of Expertise.

In other news, I AM FINALLY WRITING AGAIN!!!! (Definitely deserves a few exclamation marks.) Or really, revising. The particular manuscript I am working on is in need of a lot of work, and I’ve had a horrible time making myself get to it – I have so many other writing projects and it’s been easy to put this off. It’s a novel (so it’s big); it will probably never be published, unlike other stuff on my plate; and I have been working on it, on and off, for SO LONG.

But I’d like to finish it, and so I committed to really working on it, at least one hour a day, for the rest of this month.

The first few days were terrible…

But after a few days, things did turn around. It’s funny how revising is a little like kneading bread: at first the words are stiff and resistant, but with some consistent effort usually they’ll become supple and malleable. Fingers crossed that this good stretch of revising continues!

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Autumn

It is still August and the calendar tells me there’s another month or so left of summer. But even here in central New Mexico, where summer weather may persist into the first weeks of October, lived experience reveals the “technically” aspect of calendric facts. No matter what the calendar says, autumn is here. I can see it in the tomatoes heavy on the vine; I can smell it in the late summer wildflowers.

I love autumn but the older I get the more bittersweet it is. Some of this is because I’ve grown into a gardener, and watching the garden die each year saddens me. Some is increasing awareness of my own mortality. But there is sweet that comes with this bitter: the seeds of next year’s garden, the appreciation of my own life.

So too in my reading and writing. With summer’s end I have less time for reading. But I woke this morning re-energized about a ms. which has been languishing for some time. Perhaps the sweet of this autumn, for me, will be in the writing…

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Sometimes it just takes time…

Last week I attended a webinar with Kendra Levin (hosted by SCBWI Europolitan as part of a run-up to their conference this year – wow I wish I could go, they seem like a great group) on the topic of rejection, what it means and how to deal with it. I don’t do a lot of webinars or writing events like this; I did when I first came back to writing, but I stopped after a while. I can’t honestly say why I signed up for this one. But I’m glad I did, not so much because the content was new to me but because, for whatever reason (whether Kendra’s manner, or the other participants, or just being at the right time for my mental state at the moment) it changed my perspective on my writing and where it is right now.

One of the “what rejection means” things that came up in the webinar was pacing. I have a pacing bruise – seriously, I wince when I hear/see the word – because of my experience with the first novel I ever wrote, which was also the first piece of fiction I wrote after a fifteen-year hiatus.

The thing is, when I started the novel, it was an experiment. Could I write a novel? I’d only ever written short pieces before. I started it based on a single image, completely pantsed it the whole way through, and got to the end and realized I loved it and didn’t want to stop. I’d fallen into the world I created. They always say don’t be too attached to your first novel, and I started off right – it was just an experiment, after all – but at some point I fell off that wagon, and I fell hard.

I sent it out to agents, got some interest, revised and sent it out again, signed with an agent – and then, the book got rejected, over and over again (this is not an even slightly unusual story, by the way). Why? You guessed it: pacing.

Despite my being attached to the novel, I wasn’t upset (or too upset) by the rejections. But I was upset by the consistent pacing critiques, because I wasn’t understanding them and I couldn’t figure out what I was missing. Soliciting feedback from other writers (and I hired an editor, too) got me advice like “what they mean is too quiet” and and “read The Hunger Games, that’s what sells.” Much as I love The Hunger Games, that wasn’t the kind of book I was trying to write. I thought maybe the problem was the market not the book. But while I could see that books that were more like what I was trying to write were rare, they were still being published (and in YA at that). So what was the problem?

My agent had asked me to revise to address the pacing issue. I did, but the only thing I could think of to do was to make the action more bang-bang-bang. I wasn’t happy with it; my agent didn’t think it was great either, though he did send it out; and guess what? The book never sold.

This all happened a while ago, but I still can’t hear the word pacing without feeling the sting of that experience, as well as sorrow for my poor first novel.

So – that was a very long introduction! – when another participant asked Kendra Levin about “pacing” rejections, I flinched. But I also listened. Kendra that for her, this often means nothing about the story surprised her – that there could be great characters, and plenty of action, everything could be fine, but nothing surprised her.

This was different, not what I’d heard before about pacing. It wasn’t a lightbulb moment, but I took the idea of “surprise” and stuck it in my keep-thinking-about-this file.

A day or two after I finished a book that completely fell flat for me. I finished, and thought about why it didn’t work for me – and the first instinctive answer that came to me was: pacing.

That was my lightbulb moment: I had become the enemy!

I do think I understand, now (after all this time!) where my first novel failed. It was a first novel, after all, and when I began it I had no idea what I was doing. The whole plan was to learn by writing. I didn’t realize that the learning would continue long after I had shelved the project, but it has.

Maybe I’ll go back and revise it again one of these days. I think I’d know how, now.

But then again, maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll just leave it as it is, for what it is: evidence of learning.

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Submissions

On the edge of this
chasm – wide and deep, opaque –
I cast pages forth.

***
(It’s been a while since I did this much submitting. It is scarier than I remembered. But on the upside, I am working towards that 2017 writing goal….)

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Still here

marigoldsJust busy. I haven’t been able to get much writing done over the last month, thanks to a hectic fall schedule (why do I always forget how busy September can be?).

I have managed to read Cheryl Klein‘s The Magic Words this month though. I’ll try to get a post up about it soon – it’s given me many revision ideas, so I may have more to say about the WIP as well.