A Revising Trick

At times rewriting and revising a novel or a book of non-fiction can be tiresome, especially when one reads the material straight through from the 1st page to the last again and again. I trick I use to break the monotony is to skip about, reworking the chapters out of order.  This method refreshes my interest and imagination.

On Revising and Planning

ON RAPID WRITING AND PLANNING AHEAD

Earlier I noted on FB that a reason Isaac Asimov wrote so many books was that he never worried about style or finding the best word to express a feeling or idea. His goal was simply to put the information down clearly.  Another prolific writer was W. E. D. Ross, who wrote many kinds of books under different names. (As Marilyn Ross he wrote a series of romance novels associated with the classic TV series DARK SHADOWS.) Ross said that he never revised a sentence: He believed that the original words should stand because they expressed the original emotion.  A writer whom I was pared with at a table at a book fair at Union college—unfortunately I do not remember his name—told me that he never revised his novels—and he had nine or ten.  Rather he took about nine months to plan each detail assiduously so that when writing he quickly put everything down. I—alas—am an inveterate reviser. I probably go through each of my novels ten to fifteen times. To me one of the joys of writing is reworking sentences and replacing words and adding details to make the prose more effective. Nor do I plan each detail meticulously. I have a general plot in mind, a number of scenes envisioned, and the conclusion set up. Then I leap into the creative waters and start writing, relying on my imagination to get me to the end. (In recent years it hasn’t failed me.) Of course, my rather romantic method of writing has its problems. In revising, I have to be careful that the heroine’s dress doesn’t change from green to yellow during a single scene. But all writers are welcome to their own choice writing techniques.  But I. alas, feel compelled to revise and revise.

Copies of Muirsheen Durkin and The Trickster

Copies of Muirsheen Durkin are in; I have ordered copies of
The Familiar Compound Trickster. I should have them sometime this week.

Ben Jonson and Cataline

Ben Jonson and Catiline

Around 1611, Ben Jonson wrote a play entitled Catiline about the rebellion. It was a notorious failure. One modern critic said that the play was so terrible, students who cheated should be forced to read it. About 30 years ago, I read the play and concluded that it had been falsely maligned. It didn’t seem to be the weighty bore I had expected. Sometime later I reread the play, and my reaction was, “Hey, this play really does stink!” Strange how our reactions to a given work can vary upon different readings. Strange how our appreciations of works can be affected by extra-literary factors, such as colds, toothaches, quarrels, anxiety, weariness, the afternoon doldrums, etc. Strange also how we pay little attention to these factors and assume that everyone equally is open to each literary work any time it might be picked up. I suppose I owe Jonson a third reading of this play to see, if I can, what I really feel about it.

My Novel on Eliot Ness as a Christmas Present?

The Ness Novel

All three of my novels should be ready well before Christmas. But I am somewhat reluctant to recommend the Ness novel as a gift for someone repelled by fictional violence. This novel rivals my WILDERNESS OF TIGERS, my fictional portrayal of Kentucky's villainous Harpe brothers,perhaps the county's first serial killers--in bodies and violence. When I wrote WILDERNESS, I doubted that I would come across a killer as merciless as they, but the then in reaching the second version of my ELIOT NESS AND THE UNTOUCHABLES, i found that new evidence had been found concerning a still officially unsolved series of murders that occurred when Ness was public safety director of Cleveland. Immediately I knew a book was at hand. I might add that I describe none of the historical murders but do graphically portray their results.

   I wrote THE GRAVE AND THE FIGURE EIGHT  in the early seventies in longhand in about 14 thick 8" by 11" student notebooks, skipping every other line for revisions.  I did some revising, but I looked at the ms. and realized that this book would probably rival WAR AND PEACE in length.  Because of my teaching duties and the extreme unlikelihood of anyone publishing such a long work from an unknown, I put it aside and reworked it in the first decade of the 21st. century.  It was taken by a publisher who accepted unknowns, but the price was set so high that few would buy it!  This occurred when ebooks were getting underway. ((It's  available as an ebook now).   I can't prove the following, but I suspect that the company set prices  so high so that the authors would buy books at a discount (still high) and try to sell the publications on their own.

More on the first edition of THE GRAVE AND THE FIGURE EIGHT

The reason I had the book republished is that the original firm published it traditionally; that is, without my having to pay any money. However, the price was set at $29,00, much too high to attract readers to a book by a new author.  Furthermore, a friend and I were inexperienced in proofreading such a long book and believed we could catch all errors on our own. Drat! We let too many slip by. Now I use a copy editor, one supplied by the publisher. Drat! Still errors slip by.  Alas, I've learned that no book has been published that is totaly error free.