Self-Indulgent Moaning About Revision

The national SCBWI conference is only three miles from my house and I am not there. I am at home engaging in a rewrite that is challenging, frustrating, and going well. It is also sucking up all my time, including the time I generally use to wash my hair and go to the farmer’s market.

Yesterday, I ate Honey Nut Cheerios for lunch. But not at the dining room table.

This is because I am so serious about this rewrite that I have moved my 86 note cards from the floor of my bedroom to my dining room table because, let’s face it, my dog is 15 years old and it’s unlikely I’m going to be able to get him to stop eating paper. And if he eats this particular paper, it will ruin my life.

My husband and I are eating on TV trays. It’s a good thing that our son is working on set 12 hours a day 6 days a week and isn’t here to notice the complete break-down of our usual domestic routines – although the lack of clean towels has been noted.

Every night at SCBWI, another group of people with whom I want to hang out is meeting at the bar of the Century Plaza. First it was the Blue Boarders, and then Los Angeles first time YA novelists, and then Los Angeles YA novelists period, and then the LA Kidlit group. There is a party with a ‘60’s theme where others will, no doubt, dance to White Rabbit. While I’m at home.

The SCBWI, for anyone not heavily immersed in the children’s book writing world, is the Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. Friends and colleagues from all over the country converge at the national conference in L.A. every summer. I love that conference. I get inspired at that conference.

I actually conceived the idea for my first book while sitting at that conference. I met the editor of that very book at that conference. I heard my agent speak at that conference (twice) and dreamed about how wonderful it would be to have her representing my work. And a few years later, she sold Where It Began and this new novel that I am sitting in my dining room reshuffling.

And, all right, the reason I’m not at that conference is, to some extent, the result of the wonderful success and impact of that conference in my life. The same motivations that got me to that conference, also landed me in my dining room with a TV tray eating Cheerios while contemplating my many, many index cards, and writing new scenes.

I am supposed to be here and not there. I am supposed to be doing what I’m doing. Writing here and not having an inspirational good time there.

Damn it, I still want to go play. Boo hoo. Moan moan. But I want to be a writer with a deadline even more.

Suspension of Disbelief When Revising A Novel

Here’s the thing, when you’re sewing, when the dress has pieces sewn on wrong (such as the sleeves are inside out, and the neck facing is on backwards and you forgot one of the darts in the front), what you’ve got still looks more like a dress than it does after you rip the pieces apart and start planning the reconstruction.

Even though, by taking the never-gonna-be-a-dress, inside-out-sleeves garment apart, you have, in fact, moved one step closer to finishing the dress of your dreams.

And this, ladies and gents, is where I am with my revision. I have written some new chapters that I love and eliminated some parts that don’t work, but in order to integrate the new and fix the transitions where the old used to be, I had to do the equivalent of a whole hell of a lot of seam ripping.

And this is the part where suspension of disbelief comes in. Or some metaphorical variant thereof. As in, belieeeeeeeeeve or Tinkerbell falls from the sky and dies, writhing, on your keyboard.

That would be my keyboard.

(It wouldn’t be a mixed metaphor if I introduced The Little Engine That Could here, right, as long as Tinkerbell was passed out in one of the boxcars?)

You have to believe that this thing with the many improved moving parts can, in fact, be put together again in a new, improved version. That new seams can bind together all the old and new and radically overhauled parts, and that the sum of those parts will be, well, seamless. And also a book.

Even More Really Bad Writing Advice

Do we even need a preamble?

Dear Clueless One, 

My 7,500 word picture book, “Give an Aardvark an Ambien,” written in bouncy yet mind-numbing (It’s a bedtime story; I was going for mind-numbing. ) iambic pentameter that came to me in a drug-induced daydream yesterday will be ready to submit tomorrow if only my hairdresser doesn’t take too long with my Brazilian blowout and I have the afternoon to rewrite it in its entirety, choose a really cute font, and promote my self-esteem by chanting forty or fifty unreastic affirmations while having a few drinks.

It is the best book ever written.

Do you think I need a beta reader before I send it off? 

Also, people keep saying not to include art from illustrators who aren’t me unless they have a Caldecott, which I had never heard of so how big a deal could it be, seriously, but my cousin Missy has done a the cutest sketch ever of the scene when the insomniac aardvark goes out back for a smoke. I should send this in and say that Missy has to be the illustrator or I’m “hoppin’, skippin’, jumpin’ down the road and round the happy pumpkin,” (a heartfelt line ripped straight from the oevre) right? 

Signed, Rhyme-Meister

To which I reply

Dear Meister, 

About the beta reader: of course not. It is, after all, the best book ever written. Trust your instincts. 

As for the illustrator, get real! How many pictures of insomniac aardvarks taking a smoke do you think editors have seen? You have a truly unique concept and you will only increase your chances of hooking up with a publisher deeply committed to your vision by acting inflexible, petulant and ever so slightly unhinged. Artistic temperament being what it is. 

Love, Clueless

The Horror of Deleted Scenes

A couple of weeks ago, I did a guest post at the wonderful blog, Words At Home, which consisted of a deleted scene from Where It Began.

Due to the fact that I write in random order without an outline, I have many, many such deleted scenes from which to choose -- some deleted as a result of brief interludes of good judgment and others deleted as a result of the strongest possible suggestions my agent could muster without being undiplomatic or making me listen while she banged her head on her desk.

Anyway, I really did love this scene. It tied up some loose ends and it had an element of characters from different social groups singing "Kumbaya" and, coincidentally, not getting drunk during school lunch. I fought for this scene. I bitched and moaned and mourned while cutting this scene.

And now that it’s back, I’m in a state of Oh My God. Never mind that it actually contains grammatical errors and clunky repetition, but there’s a slight chance that it’s cheesy. Oh My God. Is this cognitive dissonance, I wonder? Do I have to think it’s cheesy because otherwise, noting its wonderfulness and the fact that it’s no longer in my book, I’d be too sad and miserable to go on? Or would a propensity for cognitive dissonance have more sinister implications for how I feel about what I left in the book…?

Self-doubt, recrimination, and hyperventilation probably being worse for branding than the dispensing of Really Bad Writing Advice, I read back through Where It Began in a state of perfect calm detachment, at the end of which I concluded that I still love it a lot.

I am, on the other hand, so glad that I saw reason and deleted what I deleted. And four months post-publication, I am ready to concede that Where It Began would not, in fact, have been all that much better at 986 pages.