Who Owns the Art

When you write a script, it ceases to belong to you as soon as you hand it over to the director and actors. This is fact, and it's a fact that is very, very clear. The only things you control are the words the actors say. To some small extent you control the commas as well. You tell an actor, this is where I want you to pause, by putting in a comma. But even that can be taken away. The director and actors own the script in rehearsal, and the actors own it in performance.

This is a very good thing. It doesn't feel like it at first. You write a script, you give it to people to read out loud, and when they do, you think, this doesn't sound like it sounds in my head, so therefore it's wrong. But you in fact are wrong. You don't get to see it until the performance. Then you say, oh my God, so THAT'S what that can mean. THAT's what I was writing about, this is how it is. 

And then when the actors perform it they hand it over to the audience. The audience feels and thinks, and maybe it's not what the actors wanted them to feel and think. Or maybe it's not what the director wanted them to feel and think, and then it's at three steps removed from what the writer thought they should think. 

And this is good too. It's all come full circle. You thought something up and shared it and got some other people to put stuff in it, and then they shared it, and other people saw it and heard it and connected it to their own experiences and filtered it and hopefully, enjoyed it, learned from it, grew from it. 

The same transfer of ownership happens when you write a short story, poem, essay or novel. You only own it when it's in your hot little hands. As soon as someone else reads it, it belongs to them. It's not as easy to see as the script to actor to audience transfer, but it's the same thing. The reader reads your words and fills in the gaps with their imagination, which is colored by their experience. 

Which is why it pisses me off when writers who get critiqued adamantly defend their work and tell the readers why they are wrong. The readers are never wrong. You may not like it, but you have to accept it. You do not get to dictate how a reader SHOULD receive your work. You can only write and let the reader read. If you don't like what they got from it, you can go back to the work and try again. THAT'S IT.

Daily writing

So, I did write this weekend. Not much, not for very long, but on Saturday and Sunday I wrote.

Lately I'm feeling stalled. Not blocked, but stalled. I've written two stories, and sent the first one to a few friends to read. They each came back with similar feedback, which prompted me to go back to the story and work on it a bit more. Then the second story is almost to the point where I want folks to read it, but only almost.

Exacerbating factors include back-related issues. I spend more time sleeping, more time soaking in a hot bath, and more time fuzzy-minded thanks to muscle relaxers'n'ibuprofens. I think it's ok to have a stalling point, and hopefully soon I'll be back to the hour a day rhythm.

So brilliant it's stupid, and also the reverse

Last night I did not work on character and setting, I worked on dialogue. Which fed into character, at least, so maybe it was the same destination by a less direct path. Meeeh, whatever, it worked for me.

The First Five Pages says dialogue can be instantly reject-o-matic, and an editor doesn't even have to read the dialogue to determine if they'll reject your piece. The editor looks at the page, and if there's a ton of dialogue and nothing else, rejected. And, if there's very little dialogue, rejected. He recommends taking a dialogue-heavy scene and condensing the dialogue to about a third of the original amount, and doing the reverse for a dialogue-light scene.

I looked at my story, and saw a crap-load of dialogue. I condensed it down and added more description, and voila! It reads better.

It's such a paint by numbers exercise that it seems like it shouldn't work, but it totally does. I also related to the idea of looking at words on a page and deciding whether or not I wanted to read more. This is part of my book selection process. I do read a few sentences as well, most of the time, but I will admit that sometimes I flip to a random page, and if the way the text looks on the page doesn't appeal to me (i.e., large paragraphs with few breaks, wah, too hard! Or, line after line of just dialogue, meh, I'm not getting my money's worth) I put it down and look for something else.

I didn't get a whole lot done last night. I definitely need to find ways to spend more time reading and writing. The evening routine, great as it is, does not give me a lot of time. It takes me a while to decompress when I get home, and I'm finding lately that I want to read more just to see how the good writers are doing it.

One option is to challenge this whole idea of needing to decompress. Probably I'm just a whiny bitch and could get started actually working earlier.

Another option is to schedule more weekend work time. Since beginning this effort, I haven't once worked both days of a weekend. A persistent voice in my head tells me I need the weekday routine, or else it won't work, but of course that's a weak excuse.

The upside is that lately, I haven't felt like throwing the computer across the room when I actually get down to it. Once I'm writing, I'm ok. It's just getting to the writing that's the challenge.

No percoset for you!

I saw my doc today to ask for percoset'n'muscle relaxants. My Virginia G.P. is much more on the ball than my NJ one, which is good. He allowed as how percoset just hides pain and doesn't have any therapeutic benefits, so he didn't prescribe it, although he did give me muscle relaxants. I could have argued that hiding pain is a therapeutic benefit, but eh, I can still walk and function, so I'm not going to push the pusher. When I got percoset before, standing and sitting were excruciating - the only semi-comfortable position was leaning most of my weight on my arms on a desk or chair and trying to keep as much weight as I could off my feet. In that case, percoset, yes please and right now thank you. As I am now, I can get by without it.

He also recommended a couple of orthopedists who specialize in back pain. What a freakin' concept. Are you listening, NJ doctor? Well, no, you're not, but I wish you would, cuz this is how it's done. So the point of orthopedery, as I understand it, is to tell me whether or not I need surgery, and tell me what exercises I can safely do, and/or sign me up for more physical therapy. Frankly, even if they tell me I do need surgery, I ain't gonna do it without waiting a good year or two or three.

The troubling part is my doc told me not to do any exercise until the pain abates. It's good common sense, and I don't want to make matters worse. However. I am overweight. There is no doubt about this fact. There is scale evidence and worse, photo-documented evidence. Overweight exacerbates back problems. This is a fact. And it's going to be tough to lose any weight without exercise. It can be done, but it's tough. Grr.

Read Aloud

This weekend, after a whole lot of procrastination, I read my short story out loud. I was quite scared of this task. I was finally able to do it by telling myself I could only watch Season 4 of Battlestar Galactica if I read my short story out loud to myself first, and that worked.

It wasn't as horrifying as I'd thought it would be, and was quite the helpful exercise. I was able to hear some oddly constructed sentences, and a few typos. The purpose of the exercise is to make you hear the sound of the language, and find places where there might be too much alliteration. I didn't so much notice odd/bad sounds, but I did hear quite a bit of repetition. I've managed to repeat information six or seven times, which is five or six too many. So I went in with an ax and cut a bunch of paragraphs. Yay!

Next up to work on: character and setting.

Last three pages

I'm on the last three pages of my story. Last night I reclined on my bed and watched the sporting dogs part of the Westminster Dog Show. It's become my ritual to watch some TV online before starting to write. I do it because this is the sequence of events for me:

Come home and eat dinner with the fam
Wash the dishes (it's my 'rent' for being a living-at-home loser)
Watch some TV online
Write

I could jump into writing immediately, but I'm too much of a wuss. I'm all, 'meeeh, I need time to veg out, meeeeh.' Normally, an epi of the Daily Show or Lie to Me chills me out and then I can get to workin' on the story. The Westminster Dog Show, though? Not so much. I didn't like it, but I wanted to see who won. It was Stump, who's all right I guess, but I really wanted the golden retriever to win, cuz it was so preeeeetty.

So I was grumpy when I started writing. Then I got grumpier cuz I'm at a tough point. It's the last three pages, where I wrote more terrible dialogue and pulled an ending out of my ass. It was rushed and I didn't do much work to get there. Now I have to do the work. And the way I originally wrote for it to get there wasn't working last night.

The adjective exercise is enormously helpful in this regard, because when you're grappling with a complicated task, it helps to be able to go back to a simple task. When I got too frustrated and wanted to stop I went back to adjective work. It didn't solve all my problems, but it kept me writing long enough to set the subconsious wheels rolling, and this morning I thought of a way to help the ending along that I like better than the original.

Back pain: does it exist?

I am currently experiencing Back Pain: The Sequel. Like most sequels, it's not as intense as the first episode, and thank God for that.

Because I've been so blog-happy, I can now read my past posts on back pain, and on allll the things I was going to do to prevent recurrence. Let's see, I was going to lose weight, strengthen my core, avoid high impact exercise, and pay more attention to the little aches and pains that can signal the bigger ones.

Sigh. The road to hell etc etc. Suffice to say I've been feeling better and I mistakenly thought I was completely fine. So why not go snowboarding? Why not! Why not do a few minutes on the rowing machine? It's such good exercise! Oh self, self, self, how quickly you forget.

So now I'm not in agony, but I am in pain. It's localized for the most part across my lower back, but I do feel a twinge on the right side of my right calf, and I'm feeling it more in my hips than I want to.

When I was first going through this, it debilitated me to the point where I couldn't walk for more than a few steps without crying. I got an MRI, which showed I have a herniated disc in my L5-S1. The disc is bulging and may be impinging on my sciatic nerve.

Now, here's the thing: apparently, you can have a herniated disc and have it impinging on all sorts of nerves and not feel anything. My dad told me he was having pain in his right shoulder, so he got an MRI and found he had a disc impinging on a nerve on the other side of his neck - his left shoulder, where he felt no pain at all. Weird, right?

When my back first flared up, it hurt so much I couldn't think straight. It was the worst pain I've ever experienced. My treatment options that night were some ice packs and some ibuprofen. Ten minutes after I took the ibuprofen, the pain abated to the point where I could sit in a car. I went to the doc the next day and got some mild muscle relaxants and nothing else.

By the next weekend, I was back to square one, and had to get serious muscle relaxants and codeine. So why, if I needed the heavy drugs a week after the incident, did I only need a few ibuprofen the night when the pain was the most intense? I discussed it with my dad, and apparently most pain doesn't really exist. It should be a signal that something is wrong with your body, but sometimes it isn't. Sometimes, if you think the pain is going to go away, it will. If you don't, the nerves keep firing and muscles respond by spasming, pinching the nerves more so the pain increases. So when I first had issues, I took the ibuprofen expecting it to help, and it did via the magical placebo effect. Then later I learned that the pain was beyond OTC meds and they stopped working.

And the way that painkillers work is odd. I don't know a ton about it, but each class of pain killer works in a different way. Some interrupt the signals from the nerves, and some work more with your brain, so you still feel the pain, but you don't care about it.

I looked on WebMD for back pain treatment options. They say that back pain goes away in three to six months, with or without treatment. So I'm experiencing pain, and whether I can choose to have it treated or not, it'll go away.

Personally, I'm very much in favor of not feeling pain. I think pain is physically and mentally tiring, and if you're tired all the time, you can't heal as efficiently. Also, I think bad things are vicious circles, and it's important to interrupt the cycle if you can. If pain is a signal that something is wrong, and you recognize it and fix the underlying cause, then you shouldn't have to feel it over and over. So Dear My Back: message received. Thank you. Please stop calling.

Gross

I've started and abandoned three posts this week. But this one's too important to abandon!

I've noticed I'm drooling a lot in my sleep lately.

That is all.

More arduosity

Last night I didn't feel like writing, but it was a different I-don't-feel-like-writing feeling than I've had before. Previously, it's been 'I suck and this piece sucks and I should just go watch TV and not add any more suckiness to the world.' Last night it was more like, 'I totally did lots of work on the piece, and it was great, and I should relax and not work on it now because I deserve a day off.' But you're not allowed to do that, so while I did get started a bit later on account of I had to watch the latest episode of Lie to Me on the interwebs, I did pull up the doc and get to work anyway.

Wednesday night I took adjectives out of the first three pages. Last night, I got to a page that doesn't have many adjectives because it has a ton of dialogue. I didn't like the dialogue. The First Five Pages has about five chapters on dialogue, which I didn't review ahead of time, but I know I committed many dialogue sins, so I got down to it. I still took out adjectives, which led to axing entire paragraphs, but I also changed the characters' lines a lot. I think the conversation makes more sense now, and flows better, so that's good.

It's slow going, though. I have 16 pages, single spaced, and about 7,000 words. After a couple of hours last night I'd gotten through page 8. It was a tad frustrating, that. I guess I still expect the process to be fast, like, here's a short story, BAM! Here's another one, BOOM! But alas, not so much. I wrote the draft quickly, and allowed myself a lot of leeway in order to do so, and now the going back and fixing is taking time. I still think that's a good way to go; if I let myself get stuck on silly things like plot points making sense and characters sounding like real people I wouldn't have gotten past page 4.

The habit is getting more habitual tho', and it is easier to sit and write for a while. Daniel Pinkwater has an essay about how he trained himself to write. He decided to practice sitting at his desk for two hours, and didn't allow himself to do anything BUT write. If he didn't write, he still had to sit there. I'm trying to adopt that method too. It's going ok. (I sometimes check Facebook or gmail real quick-like in the middle of writey time.)

My biggest fear about this story is that when I'm done with it, it'll be missing story basics: someone who wants something, encounters an obstacle, and takes action to get past the obstacle. However, I like it enough that I'm not going to worry about it. If I get done and that's the case, I'll put it away and go on to the next.

Ruining Poems with Adjectives!

Twas brillig and chilly, and the slithy, lithe and slimy toves were gyring, gymbling and dancing in the wet, sloppy waves.

Every single borogove was mythic and flimsy, almost mimsy, if you will.

In addition, the momes rathed furiously, totally and completely outgrabe.

Adjectives

I did the adjectives exercise with my story last night. It wasn't exactly difficult, but it was arduous. I was cutting and pasting into a separate doc without a mouse, and then I gave up on that and just deleted the adjectives. Also, and this is embarrassing, but I had to stop more than once and decide if a word was an adjective or not. S-M-R-T smart!

But here's a list of what I got from the first three pages:

jerky
unhappy
ok 
obligated
in person
sometimes
infrequent
mostly
officially
wasted
very pleasantly (wasted)
extensive
mild
dangerous 
basic 
vast
tastiest
pleasantly
smashed, wasted
thigh high
striped boycut
long
sleepless
loudly
perfect
big sad
arrogant playboy
no good
always
dirty
most of the time
all the time
casually
racist
specifically
offensive
socially skilled
in seconds
instant
interesting
funny
complete
serious
chronic
different

Now, the exercise asks the writer to look at the list of adjectives/adverbs and see which ones are cliches, and figure out better, non-cliche words to use. I don't see a ton of cliches here, although 'vast' and 'arrogant playboy' have got to go. What I see are common, boring words. 

Next, the writer is 'posed to see how the story reads without the adjectives. Here's where the task is really onerous (hard, difficult, arduous, a lot of work): when you take an adjective out of a sentence, often you have to go back and rewrite that sentence! So like, "She felt sad and lonely" becomes "She felt       and       ." And you have to rewrite that shit! No kidding! 

That was my favorite part; seeing how I could rewrite with no adjectives. I do like how it reads. I think too many adjectives is a lot like expository dialogue. You insult the reader by saying the day was cloudy, cold and overcast, when you could just say it's overcast and let them draw their own conclusions about the cloudiness and coldness. 

So tonight I'm continuing with taking adjectives out, and then I get to put some back in. Yaaaaaay!

The story

This morning I printed it out, and I put it in my purse to take it work with me. Now, I'm not going to read it over lunch or anything. I just wanted to have it.

I t hink I might have a pate hangover

Yesterday my folks took me out to Le Refuge in Alexandria for a pre-birthday dinner. The reason we didn't go today was two-fold; Wednesdays are lent days, and we didn't want my dad to have to order frog's legs again, and my seestor has to travel this week, and needs today to pack. Here's what we had:

1 bottle of white wine (I forgot to check the name before I started drinking, and then was too drunk after awhile to care. Woohoo!)
1 bottle of red wine (Hughe et someone? It was good)
Appetizers:
Me: pate de compagne
Seester: Cheese plate
Dad: Endive salade
Mom: hearts of palm salade

Main courses:
Me: salmon en croute in champagne cream sauce. (Hell. YEAH.)
Seestor: beef wellington
Dad: roast duck with raspberry sauce
Mom: roast lamb in mushroom sauce

Then we stumbled home for cake'n'presents. I'd requested a grocery store white cake with the sugary lardy kind of icing, and the folks obligingly gave me an edge piece with yellow roses, so the ratio of icing to cake was about 4:1. I got good stuff present-wise; in addition to the pink octopus, I got some nice books, a coupon for a massage (which I will need after snowboardin' this weekend) and an ipod arm thingy.

This morning I am hungover and burping pate. French food is rilly good, but ees a leetle reech for moi.

Hee!

This about sums it up...

Done!

I finished my story last night. Well, maybe I just ended it. I got to a point where something unexpected happened, and it seemed like an ending. It's probably not - it's probably the kind of thing where the reader's going to be all, 'well THAT came out of NOwhere, what the eff, this story sucks." But, I like it, so when I revisify I'm going to try to build to the ending I wrote.

So, revisification things:
1. Go back and reset the dominoes so they fall to the new ending. I think they'll just have to be readjusted. I don't think I'm creating a whole new line of dominoes. I do think the line may have to be lengthened in order to them to fall where I want them to.

2. Read the story out loud. This is an exercise from The First Five Pages. It has to do with hearing how the words and sentences sound.

3. Take out all the adjectives and put them back in again. Also from The First Five Pages.

4. Take out and put in dialogue. Also from The First Five Pages. Right now, my story is very heavy on dialogue, very light on character/setting description, so this will be necessary.

So that's the plan. Tonight o' course I'll be dining in state rather than revising a story. Pour the wine and flambe the goose, for I am almost one year older! Laissez les bon temps ROULEZ!

I am all talk, and also, I am all sleep

I planned to finish my story this weekend, but only planned in the sense that I thought, 'that'd be a good thing to do this weekend.' I didn't actually make a plan for how I was going to accomplish this, and so it didn't come to pass.

I did stay up until midnight watching Dr. Who Season 4 with Lil' Italian Redhead, which, omgsoawesomeponieslol!11! Then I managed to sleep in until NOON on Saturday. I'd expected to sleep in, but until maybe 9 or 10am... I guess I was pretty well tired. The rest of the day was devoted to glamourousness preparations, as Atomicate and I were going to my company's 10 year anniversary party at the Clarendon Ballroom. Serious glamorfication took a couple of hours, and then serious canape-eating happened at the event, which was very nice I must say. The free booze and hors doovers were plenteous and delicious.

Sunday I had to go to Old Navy and buy much-needed work clothes, and then I went for a walk with Mrs. Pinchloaf and watched the first half of the supabowl with her and Mr. Pinchloaf and the Pinchmuffin. Go Stillers!

Meanwhile, my story sat on the computer, all unfinished. Note to self: actually make plans to accomplish things rather than just talking 'bout it.

So NOW I want to finish it this week. The writing time will be tonight, Wednesday night and Thursday night, and then will start, and I'm serious this time, the revisification. The ultimate goal: to have it ready for crit by Feb. 25th.