And the Characters Take Over...

Isn’t it weird how characters can take control of a project, and you as the writer are suddenly just a tool in process of creation, like a brush in an artist’s hand? This has happened to me many times through the years, but most recently on a revision of my thriller manuscript. There were a few tweaks I planned on making, but as I reviewed my pages, strengthening and tightening my prose, my characters unexpectedly began to flirt.

Maybe sitting untouched and lonely in a computer file for months without any attention led them to personal explorations when I wasn’t looking; maybe they just needed time to grow on each other. A major age gap was abruptly forgotten, as the dialogue dripping from my female lead’s tongue was not that of her age. She had been younger this whole time, and I had pigeon-holed her else-ware. The poor woman was probably screaming at me to ID her this whole time, like a girl on the brink of her 30^th birthday buying beer.

But now I know. My characters corrected me. Ages now accurate, love interest defined, they flirted and playfully bantered across my pages, creating a sexiness my manuscript had lacked. What fun!

As an update, I finished my edits today. What version of my novel this is I couldn’t tell you, easily past draft five. Looking back, it seems so odd that I felt proud of my “finished” book in the spring of 2008. It was an accomplishment, but now it’s finally ready. I think… I hope…

Writing: what a beautifully schizophrenic, maniacal process.

Has this ever happened to you?

La Fin: When to Stop Scribbling

There is that moment when the final sentence has been typed, where the writer sits back and basks in the glory of accomplishment. The seemingly impossible has been achieved. Where others have failed, you have succeeded. The project that gave you sleepless nights, that made you feel schizophrenic when your characters spoke to you, that sometimes produced a drug-like state where words trickled off your finger tips onto the keyboard like you were a tool in the process rather than the creator – that project, your novel, is done. But is it really?

“Finished” is such a fickle word for the literarily inclined. Just because that last line is written doesn’t mean that the project is anywhere close to ready. For someone in that purgatory between finishing the last page and editing the manuscript to a point where an agent pounces hungrily upon it, this poster (http://www.826national.org/content/258/novel-poster-picture-gallery), with proceeds going to 826 National (http://www.826national.org/), made me really happy and made me ponder.

To me, there are many levels of finished. There is first-rough-draft finished. There is adding-character-profundity-and-vigor finished; typing-up-loose-plot-points finished; conclusion-of-grammar-and-spelling-check finished; line-by-line-poetic-brilliance finished, (the last I strive for and pray to achieve).

As a writer, when is it time to call the manuscript done, or is it ever time? To all the writers out there, what would you say?

New Twain in the Times

Our cars may not fly, but with every passing year technology does make our world more and more like the world of the Jetsons. Little Elroy reads his books on screen, and we all have handheld gadgets that facilitate our daily affairs.

Yet technology has recently allowed us a glimpse into the intriguing literary past. Anyone who has ever written a high school paper, shaped a brilliant manuscript, or simply shook his or her head at the language of certain television advertisements understands. Whittling words is a skill and an art. Mark Twain above so many others understood this, and now we can see a bit more from his standpoint.

Last week, the New York Times published notes from the personal library of Mr. Samuel Langhorne Clemens himself. These were not his forgotten stories or unfinished outlines. These were his critiques of published writing that were not up to snuff – to steal an idiom from his century.

Who were the targets of his brutal critiques? Samuel Johnson, Rudyard Kipling, and Robert Louis Stevenson were, among others.

“The English of this book is incorrect & slovenly & its diction, as a rule, barren of distinction,” Twain wrote in Lew Wallace’s 1906 autobiography, Wallace, of course, also being the author of Ben Hur.

Sometimes blunt, often brutal, and always sincere, the man the world knows as Mark Twain had a thought or two about what makes writing great. These books were examined and released in photos via the New York Times in honor of the one-hundredth anniversary of his death on April 21^st.

A man of critical tastes but honorable intentions, Twain once wrote in The Prince and The Pauper, “When I am king, they shall not have bread and shelter only, but also teachings out of books, for a full belly is little worth where the mind is starved.” Twain certainly didn’t starve minds in his day, and due to this latest release, our want of worthy words has been satiated again.

For more: http://documents.nytimes.com/twain-books?ref=nyregion

The Odyssey

Odysseus faced the Scylla and Charybdis. Gulliver handled the Lilliputians. Benjamin Herson and Jeff Deck confronted the erroneous employ of the English language. The great blind poet couldn’t have written it better… or could he?

I just learned of their book, “The Great Typo Hunt,” which is set to be released in August. Herson and Deck road-tripped, finding 437 typos on billboards, landmarks, and various signs across the country. In fact, they corrected 236 cases of improper punctuation, spelling and syntax, earning federal vandalism charges. All of the evidence proving their crimes was easily gathered in photos from their own blog.

Personally, I wondered about their choices. When a Las Vegas show dubs itself the “Greartest Show on Earth,” was it in need of correction or just avoiding trademark infringement with Ringling Brothers, figuring the people seeing that sign on The Strip would already be three sheets to the wind and not notice?

Did they dash into grocery stores, changing every “Ten Items or Less” check-out sign to “Ten Items or Fewer”? (Richmond will miss you, Ukrop’s, and your proper word usage.)

Did they scribble away at unnecessary quotation marks that made signs somehow suspicious? (My favorite is an oddly creepy billboard for a church in North Carolina that’s been up for years: We “love” all people.)

Intrigued by this story, I wanted to know more. After a quick Google search, I discovered that Herson and Deck aren’t alone on their quest. In Boston, there’s the Grammar Vandal (http://thegrammarvandal.wordpress.com/); there’s an active presence by ‘GrammarCops’ on Twitter, linking to a blog with over 18,000 visitors (http://grammarcops.wordpress.com/); these perfectionists are patrolling all over the place. And for some perhaps crazy reason, that makes me happy