Feb. 2007 was a little grim for the Peephole. I don’t think I ever went a whole month with just one entry since the blog’s inception. But in my defense, I turned 34, had a big party, dealt with a bad cold, and finished the Painted Man.
Again.
I take heart in the fact that at least I WAS writing, if not here. Based on input from a number of test readers (thank you all!), I did one last rewrite of the book, word for word. I literally scrutinized every sentence, putting each word on trial and forcing it to earn the right to stay. I also added a good 30-40 pages of new text (spread out over the whole book), and cut a significant amount of stuff. Overall, the book is now 13% shorter, and 50% BETTER.
And I did it in 2 months, give or take. Not bad, when you consider the book was 650 double-spaced pages.
I am immensely proud of the book, after four completed novels and a few not-so complete, I think I have finally gotten the formula right. This may be the one that sees print. My agent seems to think so, and he’s been doing this for a while.
Of course, I will never be 100% satisfied. There will always be things I think could be better, but hey, we all have our limitations, and we all have growing to do. What bothers me most about my writing is that the place I am now is where I should have been five or even ten years ago, but for my own laziness and human failing.
I always knew I wanted to be a writer. I can remember writing poems and short stories for school as early as third grade, and having it be an immense source of enjoyment and satisfaction. Ms. French, my Library teacher in third grade actually accused me of copying a poem/story out of a book, because she couldn’t believe I had written it:
The Unicorn
by Peat (age 8)There once was a unicorn,
Playing in the sun.
With his friends,
He had much fun.
His favorite food was hay,
And he ate it throughout the day.
Late one night,
When no one was awake,
He took a bath
in a magic lake.
The next day,
He no longer was a unicorn,
But a little baby
Just born. Granted, it’s no great work of art, but it shows where my head was at, even then. And being accused of copying it made me feel proud enough that I know that poem by heart to this day. I certainly don’t have the original anymore.There are many other instances like this one that I could cite, if not quote/reproduce. I always loved making up stories, and when school assignments offered the opportunity, I always did three times the requirements of the assignment.
But around the time of the unicorn poem, I also discovered comic books, and my focus was split. I became as much interested in art as I was in writing, and while I don’t really have regrets about that, I dropped the old in favor of the new for a while, as children are wont to do. My free time was spent filling sketchbooks and not notebooks.
There was overlap, of course. I wrote long and detailed backstories for my superhero characters, and with my friend The Pickytarian, tried my hand at scripting comics, too.
But still, I lost years of practice in writing, working to improve my art, which, quite frankly, was never very good. The Pickytarian and I were more or less equals when we began collaborating (over 20 years ago, yikes!), but he quickly outstripped me, to the point where I started to feel like I was wasting my time. I was improving inasmuch as anyone would with practice, and probably could have grown into a competent cartoonist, but there was an inventive aspect to it that just seemed beyond me. I can draw what I see very well, but creating what I couldn’t see was an uphill climb for me, something that others in my art classes seemed to do instinctually… or is it instinctively? Does anyone know the difference? Well, whatever. They did it on instinct.
Anyway, I was a HS junior just turning 17 at this point, and thinking about college. For some time, my intention had been to go to art school, but as I started thinking abbout putting a portfolio together, I became increasingly disheartened. Eventually, I decided it was time to accept that art was a hobby and not a calling, and go back to writing.
Writing held no grudges, and welcomed me back. Over the next few months, I spent my (frequently free) nights at my family’s shitty, shitty, shitty IBM PC Jr., typing away. Man, that computer sucked. The hard drive was so small, it could only hold DOS. The word processing program was on this giant Atari cartridge, and everything written had to be saved to one of those giant floppy disks. It overheated after more than 3 hours of continuous use, and I frequently lost whole nights’ work until I learned to save early and often (autosave wasn’t invented until years later).
But despite the limits of primitive 1980’s computing technology, by the end of my junior year, I had completed my first novel, An Unlikely Champion.
It was bad. Really bad. It was about a jock and a metalhead who get kidnapped by an intergalactic wizard and are forced to fight monsters he has collected from all over the galaxy, but only after they overcome their stupid high school hatred and learn to trust one another.
But it was a complete novel, and done before I turned 18. Nothing to sneeze at. I learned a LOT in the process, and knew then that it was my real calling. I immediately started on the sequel, Memoirs of a Wizard’s Apprentice, which was more a straight fantasy story about the origins of that intergalactic wizard, starting with his childhood.
Memoirs didn’t do quite as well, since that summer I started to discover that there were girls dumb enough to date me. I started doing mad and irrational things like selling all my Todd McFarlane Spider-mans and Walt Simonson Thors for date money. As if any dinner and movie was worth giving up the first appearance of Venom. Bah.
Not long after this, I actually started to get laid on a regular basis, and writing became the furthest thing from my mind. I went away to college soon after that, and as any freshman away from home for the first time can tell you, there isn’t room for much else that year.
I wrote some in college, mostly bad short stories and poems for class that weren’t worth the paper they were printed on, and porny stories for girls that were more designed to get them into bed than they were to further my writing skills (for some reason, women don’t like watching porn nearly as much as they do reading it).
One thing I DIDN’T do in college, because I am a lazy fuck, was major in writing. Oh, I took some writing classes, but there was no comprehensive Creative Writing major at UB, and it was easier to just major in English and spend my time chasing girls than it was to go to a guidance councilor and ask for help in CREATING a major (even though I totally could have done that with a minimum of effort). Ass.
But in college there was D&D, and that counted for a lot. I became the Dungeon Master (DM) extraordinaire, and refused modules, preferring to craft worlds all my own for my players to explore. DM’ing gave me the crucial world-building experience necessary for a good fantasy writer, but I was badly out of practice with prose, and my plotting, while cunning, was somewhat scattered because inevitably, your players leave the path you’ve carefully laid out for them at almost every turn.
Dungeons and Dragons also gave birth to my character Aldun Orion, who I started scribbling little stories about, with no real path or plan.
While this was going on, I graduated college, got my first job, lost my brother, moved away from home, etc. It was YEARS before I gave any realy thought to writing again, just trying to get by and figure out life stuff.
Then around 1998, my friend Myke e-mailed me and said he wanted to be a science fiction writer. He e-mailed the first half of the book he was working on, and asked me to edit it (I was working as a professional editor at the time).
I really enjoyed editing his stuff, and that woke the writing bug in me. He asked what I was up to, so I dusted off some of my old Aldun Orion scribblings and sent them to him with the caveat that they were just something I was doing in my spare time and not a serious effort. His response?
“Peat, if this is how you goof around, I would LOVE to see what you can do if you make a serious effort.”
That one sentence was a HUGE kick in the pants. A year later, I had written a 200,000 word Aldun Orion novel, Heart’s Guard. A year after that, a second one, Snowcrest. It was still just a hobby, but I was enjoying it immensely, and could feel myself getting better all along, mastering storytelling techniques through trial and error that I should have learned in school if I had been taking the right classes.
I tried to compensate, taking some continuing education classes in writing at NYU, but those taught me nothing. It was just a place for bored and retired people to get others to pay attention to them.
I did, however, write a homework assignment in one of those classes that spawned The Painted Man, so I guess it wasn’t a total loss.
In the meantime, Myke was seeing some commercial success as a writer, publishing several short stories and winning the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future award. I wanted to throw my hat in the ring, too, and he was always supportive and encouraging, but I just didn’t feel like I was ready.
As a published writer, Myke was a member of SFWA, the Science Fiction Writers of America. He took me to one of their parties, where I met a number of agents and editors, a few of them giving me their cards and telling me to send them something when I was ready.
Eventually, I held my breath and sent out the first draft of The Painted Man to an agent. He wrote me a lovely letter telling me that he liked the idea, but that it just wasn’t good enough to sell.
So I sent him Snowcrest, which I still feel is some of my best work. This fared a little better. The same agent bounced it, but this time he read the whole thing, and took me out for coffee and a lecture.
As he put it, the problem wasn’t my prose or my ideas, it was that I was lacking some of the basic storytelling craft I needed to get my ideas to translate properly into a cohesive and compelling story. He recommended I read Writing to Sell by Scott Meredith.
It’s a good book. There were a lot of things I didn’t agree with, but there was also a lot of really good examples and suggestions about writing a cohesive novel that I really took to heart. Pick up a copy. Amazon has them used for as low as $0.36!
Armed now with shit I should have been taught in school, I rewrote The Painted Man, changing about 70% of it. I kept the same setting and themes, which were all good, but I took out all the clumsy errors I had made because I was lacking in storytelling craft.
On the third draft, which I just completed, I honed even that, turning what was once a pretty but dull knife into a sharp weapon ready for action.
And now, I step into battle.
Ironically, the Pickytarian followed a somewhat similar path to me, forgoing his calling as a comic book artist for years, and then having to play catch-up, mastering skills that should be second nature by the time you’re in your 30’s. Now, at the same time I am looking to publish my first novel, he has a publishing deal for his first comic, Division 18.
Maybe we’ll succeed. Maybe we’ll flop. But what’s important is that for all the stumbles and delays, we never gave up.
Posted on March 3, 2007 at 12:18 pm by PeatB
Filed under Craft, Life, Musings, Writing
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