Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Writing, Revising and Sending Out Those Things We Call Stories

According to my spreadsheet, I have only two stories in the pipeline, but I'm working on three new ones. After reading my good friend Trent's blog, I remembered four other stories that need another look. I think they're good stories, or at least have the potential to be good stories. Apparently some editors think so too. Two of the four stories have received positive comments, but something about them just isn't there yet. As Trent says, the revision process is not easy and is frequently not fun, but sometimes that's what it takes to see what's really going on.

I was watching an interview with Martin Scorsese the other day. He related a story of not knowing what Raging Bull was really about until well into the production. It's like that with stories sometimes. You really don't know what it's all about until you start revising, at least in some cases. That's one part of the process I enjoy. What's difficult is matching up which tools will fix which problem. It sometimes seems I'm trying to loosen a screw with a hammer. You can probably do that, but it can get pretty messy and doesn't give you quite the outcome you wanted.

And then there's the novel revisions. Man, don't get me started. It's like Jenga: change one thing and it affects everything else. But what are ya gonna do, stop?

No way.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

The funny thing is that I got pretty frustrated with the revision process and wrote two new stories in about four days. Before they can be sent out, of course, need to be revised. It's a vicious circle, I tell ya...

Dr. Phil (Physics) said...

Being "forced" to write a complete story in 24 hours at the WOTF workshop was a pretty interesting and cathartic experience. Sometimes you just need to surge words onto the page and not get too self-absorbed in the process. (grin)

Dr. Phil