Seven years ago, my best friend Jason introduced me to blogging. I started with one called NotWriting.com (Stuff one writer does when he should be writing) and eventually created the one you’re reading now.

For the most part, it’s been a fun ride. A number of people have contacted me, praising my work, and I’ve been able to use the blog as a sketchbook, a testing ground if you will, for various styles and subjects. I made some people think, I made some others laugh. In light of these points, blogging has been a success.

So, then why am I hanging up my blogging cleats? There are many reasons.

• Among the white noise of countless bloggers and Twitterers screaming, “Look at me! Look at me!,” I believe the only way to stand out is to not be a part of that noise.
• I think a hell of a lot of people are writing blogs, but few people are reading them.
• A lot of blogs appeal to very specific audiences and are stultifying to readers not from their tribe.
• The writing and maintenance of this blog dissipates my creative energies, keeping me from focusing on my real writing.
• The quick and easy nature of blog publishing conflicts with how I prefer to write—in drafts.
• I don’t want to contribute to the devaluation of writing as a paid skill by giving away the stuff for free anymore.

Those are the quick reasons, and I realize that some of my statements are debatable. I don’t care. They’re my reasons and I’m not interested in debating them.

As you see, I’ve unpublished most of my entries. If scarcity of a thing makes it more valuable, perhaps some of my entries will rise in value through omission. From now on, I may post an occasional thought or two here, but if I do it will be strictly as its name suggests—a web log, as in “Captain’s Log….” Down the road, I may decide to “reboot” the blog, but only if I come up with a value proposition I care to invest in.

This decision goes along with a monastic paring-down I’ve undertaken recently in all aspects of my life. Last night, after 4+ years, I cancelled my Publishers Marketplace account, erasing my online shingle to the publishing industry, as well as my ads for my PI novel series. Why? Because I didn’t want them hanging in the background, giving me false hope that a miracle-working agent or another movie studio (like Warner Brothers, two years ago) would see my online presence and “rescue” me from ignominy. No thanks, I’ll forgo the false sense of hope and take the ignominy.

Not only am I burning my ships, I’m burning them five miles from land, diving into the shark-infested waters and swimming to shore—with a knife clenched between my teeth. I’m closing up shop on NotWriting. I’m taking down my main website, including most of the free content I had there, and possibly moving some of that content to this blog. I’m giving away three dozen books on writing and the publishing industry because I’ve learned they’re all crap—full of recycled platitudes and Utopian visions of how the industry operates. (They also all send the tacit message that you the writer are not enough, that the answers are always “out there” someplace. Well, friends, let me assure you that the answers are most definitely NOT out there. You have to go within, find your own truth and just keep at it.)

All of this paring-down—particularly of my online presence—will have the effect of making me a little less exposed, a little more scarce. One of my role models for this anti-marketing approach is a painter who lives across the street, D. Francis White. If you do a Google search for this guy, you’ll find practically nothing. But his work (which you can only see in his studio) is amazing, and it’s all master-level quality. Last year, when I offered to create a web site for him, he said he didn’t want one. He wanted to be somewhat difficult to find. (He has a modest display in the pharmacy bay window a block away, with a cryptic set of directions on how to get to his studio.) “Besides,” he said, “I’m not trying to become rich and famous. That’s not why I do this.” His work is incredible—it really is—and I have to wonder how much of its high quality comes from his choice not to dissipate his energies on sales and self-promotion.

My wife and friends have heard me mention the following metaphor several times in the past month; I have a habit of playing with new ideas until they’re in tatters, then groping around for the next one. Here it is: There’s a reason why many Zen monasteries are high on mountain bluffs and that when a prospective student shows up, the monks shout at him and dump water (or worse) on him. It’s to keep out all those who are not truly dedicated. It’s how they weed out the dilettantes.

Make no mistake, down the road, when I have a new work I’m proud of that I’m trying to promote, I’ll be back—in some fashion. It’s just that, in the meantime, this “look at me, look at me” stuff reminds me of the line from Ecclesiastes 1:14: “I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and behold, all is vanity and a chasing after wind.”

I gave the blogging/online promotion thing a go—a 7-year go—and I don’t think I gained a hell of a lot from it. I concluded that I’m better off focusing on my craft, on becoming the absolute best writer (not blogger) I’m capable of becoming. I can’t worry about the market. I can’t worry about whether, and to what extent, people have heard of me. I can’t try to get “their” attention. I have to focus on dedication and the art, and that’s it.

To my loyal readers, I say thank you from the bottom of my heart, and I ask for your understanding about why I’m doing this. I want to become a better, deeper writer and in order to do that I have to burn some bridges—chief among them, my blogs. If my work has given you any pleasure over the years, I’m glad, and I hope that I can count on you as a reader once I’m ready to put my work back into the world again. Best wishes to you.

This is Orcutt, signing off.

You know a book is a favorite of yours when you have multiple copies of it, and you find some of those copies in the oddest of places:

• under the couch
• in your field coat pocket
• under the car seat
• in the box of cat toys (cats, too, appreciate good literature)
• in a knapsack
• in the freezer (for real; inexplicably, I’ve also found my belt in there)

Over the years, I’ve had this experience with a few books, the most recent being Ernest Hemingway’s memoir, A Moveable Feast. While rereading it a few days ago, I had the serendipitous experience of finding five other copies around our small apartment.

This is not meant to be a book review, nor is it “literary criticism” (I never got that stuff, and still don’t). That being said, for those of you who don’t know this book, here are the facts: It was published posthumously in 1964 to mixed reviews. It appeared first as a serial in Life magazine, then came out in the hardcover pictured below. Most importantly, as executor of his literary estate, Hemingway’s fourth (and last) wife, Mary, engaged in some significant editing of the final manuscript, cutting what many scholars believe were significant sections, including a long apology to his first wife, Hadley, for leaving her.

Hemingway’s posthumous memoir of his early years in Paris. The above was the original cover.

Many scholarly articles have been written about the version of this book that “might have been,” but as insightful as they may be, I’ve never read any of them. Besides, I’m not a scholar. Never liked school much. Tended toward autodidacticism. Like Mark Twain said, “I never let schooling get in the way of my education.”

But I digress. In plain, honest, regular English, not academese, let me tell you why A Moveable Feast may just be my favoritest (grammatically incorrect for emphasis) book of all time.

At least once a year since I was 17, I have read this memoir of Hemingway’s early life as a writer in Paris. That’s cover-to-cover reading. I couldn’t even count the number of times I’ve opened it just for inspiration. The opening alone gets me every time:

Then there was the bad weather. It would come in one day when the fall was over. We would have to shut the windows in the night against the rain and the cold wind would strip the leaves from the trees in the Place Contrescarpe. The leaves lay sodden in the rain and the wind drove the rain against the big green autobus at the terminal and the Café des Amateurs was crowded and the windows misted over from the heat and the smoke inside.

Not bad, right? For me, it’s the first sentence—”Then there was the bad weather.” This is a perfect example of Aristotle’s admonition to begin stories in media res (in the middle of things). Starting out with “Then there was the bad weather” immediately begs the questions of, “Well, what happened before…before the ‘then’? What was the fall like? What happened?” By raising these questions with the first sentence, Hemingway also creates narrative drive, which I’ve written about in greater detail elsewhere.

A snapshot of some of the text.

It’s the language that makes me read this book so often. The lyrical nature of the prose borders on hypnotic. Yet it’s other things, too, like the evocation of place, and the voice, and the precise details. The bottom line is, what the narrator Hemingway does throughout the book isn’t very important; it’s how he does it, the combination of all of the above—the style—that pulls you along helplessly.

In the spring mornings I would work early while my wife still slept. The windows were open wide and the cobbles of the street were drying after the rain. The sun was drying the faces of the houses that faced the window. The shops were still shuttered. The goatherd came up the street blowing his pipes and a woman who lived on the floor above us came out onto the sidewalk with a big pot…. I went back to writing and the woman came up the stairs with the goat milk.

Every time before I begin a new project, or if I’m in the dumps about a current one, I’ll grab a copy of AMF out of the freezer and open it to one of my favorite passages, like this one from the chapter “Hunger Was Good Discipline,” beautifully read by actor James Naughton in the audiobook version:

As a rule, I don’t care for audiobooks, but I bought this one and copied the entire thing over to my iPod. I play it during my long walks through the Millbrook countryside, letting Hemingway’s elegantly simple, detail-driven prose seep into me. It’s a blustery autumn day out there today, a lot like Hemingway himself describes in his story, “The Three Day Blow,” and I think I’ll take a walk later and listen to AMF as the wind shakes the leaves from the trees.

I believe this book is an absolute necessity for writers, for buried within Hemingway’s descriptions of cafés, horse-racing and exotic cocktails are dozens of gems about the craft of writing, like this one…

It was wonderful to walk down the long flights of stairs knowing that I’d had good luck working. I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. . . . If I started to write elaborately . . . I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written. Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline.

As epigrams on writing go, “…write one true sentence” has been profoundly over-quoted, when most of the people who mention it don’t know what the hell it means. I’ve meditated on it like Kant meditated on Hume, and I’m not sure I get it either.

One couplet of Hemingway’s in particular has occupied my thinking on and off for weeks, and that’s this: “What did I know best that I had not written about and lost? What did I know about truly and care for the most?” I believe those two questions, more than any other two that I’ve read, contain some of the best advice to writers—especially struggling novices, like I was when I first read them.

Of this Paris scene, Hemingway writes, “At the head of the Île de la Cité below the Pont Neuf where there was the statue of Henri Quatre, the island ended in a point like the sharp bow of a ship and there was a small park at the water’s edge with fine chestnut trees, huge and spreading….”

A Salon.com travel writer, Don George, eloquently describes his attachment to A Moveable Feast in this article. However, the passage I like the most is one in which he gets to heart of the book—its poetic and nostalgic (but not sentimental) recollection of a simpler time in a man’s life, before his senses were dulled and his passions quashed by practicality:

Doubtless you have your own Paris…it’s the place where life first came vividly to bloom for you, where you walked out the door and fell in love, where you couldn’t believe the exquisite beauty of the buildings, or the clouds, or the sun that shone after the rain.

For me, that place was, and will always be, Boston, where I fell in love with the Red Sox as a boy and where I went to college, where I dated many pretty (and a few crazy) women, where I smoked cigarettes and marijuana and drank, and listened endlessly to The Doors, and stayed up all night, unmedicated and unstable and loving it. I’d tell you more about those days, but sorry, I’m writing about them elsewhere now.

The new cover of Hemingway’s posthumous memoir.

Yesterday, during my little artist date, I made a serendipitous find—a book on novel writing that I’d never read before. It’s called From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction, and the author, Robert Owen Butler, is a Pulitzer Prize-winner who advocates a unique way of approaching the novel.

I have this mysterious ability to open up a new book to the exact page I need to read, and that is exactly what happened yesterday. Right there, in the library, I cracked open the book to the following paragraph:

Let me describe two kinds of novelists. First there are those that preplan. They outline. They know the end before they begin. [...] Then there’s the draft writer, who leads an admirably dismal existence. [...] The draft writer begins a draft for the very purposes I’ve been talking about; he is rightly afraid of being drawn into his mind and his analytical self. [...] So the draft writer feels the necessity of taking the merest hints to start the novel and then plunging in…by any and all means continuing to write and write and write through a great sprawling draft. And the draft writer relishes this. “Ah, I’ve got this mass of stuff, and OK, I’ve got to do the second draft now and the third and the fourth, and the seventeenth, and that’s fine….” —From Where You Dream, p. 86.

Up to now, I have always been a draft writer (see my earlier entry on Polishing). Each of my two detective novels went through 10 drafts before I considered them finished. Now, mind you, only the first five drafts are substantially different from each other; it’s in those early stages that you rethink structural issues, and a lot of scenes that seemed perfect in the beginning don’t make the subsequent cuts. But 10 drafts is still a hell of a lot of work, because regardless how much gets changed from one draft to the next, each one still represents one complete cycle through the book.

As I stated at the beginning of this month when I outlined my writing experiment, my biggest problem with novel-writing has been the GRIND of doing draft after draft. Over and over, while rewriting, I found myself mumbling, “There has to be an easier way.”

Well, there just might be.

On the very next page of Butler’s revelatory book, he discusses an alternative approach to writing the novel. Instead of the outline or draft methods,

You go to your writing space as you would on a day when you’re planning to write words. You go into your trance, just as you would if you were writing your new book sentence to sentence. But that’s not what you’re going to do. Instead, you’re going to do what I call dreamstorming—not brainstorming, dreamstorming. [...] You’re going to dream around in this novel, one level removed from moment-to-moment writing—that is, at the level of scene. You’re going to do this for six or eight or ten or twelve weeks, every day.

You’ll have a [legal pad] in front of you; you’ll make a list. You’re going to write down on this legal pad six or eight or ten words, not many more, that represent a potential scene. Just identifiers of scenes…with some sensual, concrete hook…some sort of sense impression attached to it.

Butler goes on to describe the rest of the process. Basically, at the end of the 6-12 week period of this “dreamstorming,” you, the novelist, write all of these potential scenes onto notecards. At this point, you begin thinking about continuity and organization, but not before.

I realize that to a person who has never written a novel before, all of this talk about lists and sensual impressions, etc. must be pretty dull. But the reason I mention it is that, for someone who has labored through the GRIND of draft after draft after draft after draft after draft after draft after draft after draft after draft after draft (10!), the idea of being able to work out a lot of these structural kinks using the “movie” in one’s mind is very attractive.

Why go through the physical work of typing page after page (many of which may not make the final cut) when you can “read” your book over and over, invent new scenes, move scenes around, and add or eliminate characters before typing word one?

It’s precisely the GRIND that burns me out with novel-writing, which is why, for my next novel project, I’m going to use Butler’s method. So, instead of writing a new “something” today, I’m going to go lie on my bed with a legal pad and record the scenes that occur to me.

A few months ago, I stumbled upon a comic strip by Keith Cronin about the nonsensical world of writing, writers and publishing.

Normally I don’t go in for comics, but Cronin’s humor is so dry and apt that I had to share it with you. It helps if you’re a writer, yet his stuff is broad enough that just about anybody can find it humorous. I’m including two of my favorite 4-panels below:

The above are copyrighted by Keith Cronin. Sweeeet!

For the past couple of months, since I finished the second novel in my detective series, I’ve felt lost. I don’t know where I’m headed.

Part of me wonders if I should put my fiction writing on the back burner and focus on my lucrative commercial/business writing. Another part of me thinks I should just dump writing altogether and get a full-time job in technology again. I’d be making a lot more money, but I know I’d be miserable.

I started a children’s book, got about halfway through, and stalled. I’ll go back to it, but lately I’ve thought, “Why bother?” This attitude of “why bother” also reared up when I got two ideas for screenplays.

A photo I found online that depicts how I feel. Here is the full-size version. Warning: It’s a HUGE file, so it could take a while. 

I know I’m at a point of decision in my life. I’ve been headed in a certain direction for a long time, and now I need to decide if I want to continue going in that direction. The view down the tracks is intriguing; it looks like there may be fun and adventure ahead. Then again, it could lead to a bridge over a crevasse, and said bridge was wrecked by an earthquake.

If I’m going to continue writing, I somehow have to get past the idea that it’s only worth doing if I’m going to see a result—a publisher or studio buys the thing. For a long time, I was content to write for its own sake, but something happened in the long, disheartening process of looking for an agent and, for the past year, a publisher. Sadly, I’m a lot more cynical about the whole industry and have very little desire to write something, to put potentially years of my life into a piece of work, only for the powers-that-be to react to it with indifference.

There are probably many answers to this quandary of mine, but the only one I can think of is to write something so important to me that I don’t care if it gets published. Write something that I just want to get written down for my own sense of satisfaction.

At moments like these, there are two quotes I think about. One, which I’ll paraphrase, asks the question, “What would you write if you only had six months to live? What could you say to another terminally ill person that would matter, that wouldn’t offend by its triviality?” The second quote is by F. Scott Fitzgerald, who said, “You don’t write because you want to say something; you write because you have something to say.”

So what do I want to say? A question much more easily asked than answered.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been on a noir spree. It began when I saw Out of the Past with Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer. Confusing as f-ck, but it has some great lines in it. To wit,

Femme Fatale: I don’t want to die!

Detective: Neither do I baby, but if I have to die, I’ll die last.

After the Mitchum flick, I reread James Cain’s Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, as well as re-watched the films. I bought two of my favorite films—Chinatown and Sweet Smell of Success—and a film noir collection with 10 movies in it. Of those, I hadn’t seen four because they were so obscure: The Hitchiker, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Detour and one in which normally wholesome Mickey Rooney is transformed into a crazed lunatic—Quicksand.

Why do I love these films so? Let me count the ways.

I love the sharp and sassy dialogue. I love the deep shadows and high contrasts in the lighting. I love the economy of storytelling (Detour is only 67 minutes long!). I love that the stories teeter on the edge of melodrama. I love the sexy dames, the bitter broads. I love the tough guys and the rich crooks. I love the clothes—especially the hats. I love the inexpensive sets. I love the cars, the crimes, the comebacks.

But I think most of all, I love that if you freeze a good noir film, the frame is a piece of art in itself. As I understand it, this is because after the war (WWII), many German expressionist artists made their way to Hollywood and influenced the look of these films as directors and cinematographers.

On my office wall, I actually have framed stills from films that I love, including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Used Cars, Goldfinger, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Natural, and The Empire Strikes Back. I know it’s a little geeky, but it’s my only geek vice, I swear.

Well, inspired by all of this noir stuff, I decided to do some screen captures from films I’ve enjoyed so I could show you what I mean by each frame being a piece of art. So, without futher ado, here are some stills from movies I’ve enjoyed. (In some cases, I’ve used someone else’s still because I don’t have it or it’s better than my own.)

Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer in Out of the Past.

Peggy Cummins and John Dall in Gun Crazy.

Peggy Cummins’s marvelous backside in Gun Crazy.

Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster in Sweet Smell of Success.

Lana Turner and her legs in the original The Postman Always Rings Twice.

Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity.

The two of them almost caught by Edward G. Robinson.

Stanwyck and MacMurray in a famous scene in a grocery store.

A still from an unknown noir film.

A still from Fallen Angel. I love the composition of this shot.

The end scene in The Big Combo.

And if you’re interested, here’s a mini-”movie” of the above photos, set to theme from Cape Fear. It may take a moment to load, so be patient.

My first experience with a “blockbuster” movie was Raiders of the Lost Ark, the original Indiana Jones movie. I was exactly 11 years old, and it was my first time waiting on a really long line by myself to see a film. I saw the film at the now defunct Dutchess Mall, and I remember saying to myself as the line inched forward, “This better be good.”

It was.

Since then, I’ve watched it, beginning to end, at least 150 times. This past weekend, I went to see the new Indiana Jones movie, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, hoping it would be good.

It wasn’t.

Like Temple of Doom, another Indy movie that shouldn’t have been made.

Initially, in the post-FX haze that accompanies such movies, I found myself defending the film, saying that while it wasn’t this or that, it was entertaining. It was entertaining. But unfortunately, Lucas and Spielberg set the bar so high with films 1 & 3 that merely entertaining isn’t good enough. Sh-t, Shoot ‘Em Up was entertaining; but it still sucked.

Once the adrenaline rush wore off, however, I woke up yesterday morning wishing they hadn’t made the film and knowing exactly why I hadn’t liked it. Without spoiling the plot for you, I’d like to tell you exactly why Crystal Skull was bad and how it could have been better:

• First, the stakes were never high enough. In fact, it wasn’t clear at all why the crystal skull was so important. What was needed was another short scene with Cate Blanchett’s character in the U.S.S.R., conferring with Stalin on her experiments. Maybe show her engaging in a mind-reading/mind-control experiment and then explaining to Stalin what she could do with the crystal skull, and how they had to capture Indiana Jones (one of the world’s experts) to find it. The bottom line is, I needed to be worried that the Soviets might actually capture the thing, and I never was. (By contrast, in Raiders it’s literally a tug-of-war to the very end as to who will get the Ark.)
• The entire father-son and Indy-Marion subplot was hokey and contrived. More importantly, these things lowered Indiana Jones’s lone wolf status, making him like every other American guy. Great. Now my last image of Jones is going to be him married to Marion and playing Daddy, not battling Nazis.
• There is a total lack of inevitability in the scenes in Crystal Skull. When you watch Raiders closely, one thing you see is the Aristotelean concept of inevitability in plot. Character Action A inevitably, inexorably leads to or causes Event B. In this new film, what you have instead are a pastiche of scenes that seem to have been created around set devices, traps, gimmicks and such—not because the previous scenes made them inevitable. Another film I felt this way about was the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie.
• The digital effects. I’m sorry, folks, but in what is supposed to be a live-action film, I can tell the difference. Digital effects are great with animated films like Bee Movie and the like. But in films that center around an action-based character getting himself in and out of jams, the digital stuff only draws attention to itself, jarring people like me out of the film. When you watch Raiders closely, you’ll see there are only 2 shots in the entire film that look slightly fake—the Jeep-off-the-cliff shot and the melting-faces shot. But because everything else up to that point has been real, the eye forgives them.

  A scene in Raiders where you see the virtues of live-action over digital effects is in the wide shot of the great dig at Tannis. Those guys wielding pickaxes in the background are flesh-and-blood people, not digitally rendered quasi-humans, cut and pasted 10,000 times into the frame and mindlessly performing the same actions. Each of those extras in Raiders brought a tiny bit of individualism to his little character; I can imagine that each of them invented a tiny backstory for their characters, explaining why they swung their pickaxes a certain way or shoveled out dirt. The result is a beautiful shot that looks real.

The main thing I don’t understand is why Lucas and Spielberg felt compelled to make Crystal Skull at all. There’s nothing particularly unique about the plot, and the legion of writers they went through to come up with a decent script shows in the final product, which is little more than two hours of interesting, humorous stunts. All I can say is, thank God they made Raiders. That film is a masterpiece and will, in my opinion, go down as one of the best movies ever made.

We live in a time of word saturation. Written content of all kinds—blogs, stories, articles, essays, this blog—is freely available for downloading, printing, emailing to friends, or, in the case of some of my former students, copying and passing off as your own work.

For a long time I was resistant to offering any of my writing for free because beginning at 21 years old, I was paid for my words. I was a reporter for a weekly newspaper, and later a daily, and each week I got a paycheck. It wasn’t a lot of money, but even now, 17 years later, I can remember the disbelief I experienced when I opened up that first envelope and realized they were actually paying me to write. What I didn’t tell the publisher was that I probably would have done the work for nothing. (Or maybe for 3 squares and a cot.)

This morning, I stumbled upon a fairly famous rant by American writer Harlan Ellison. I’d heard about this polemic of Ellison’s before, but until I watched it, I didn’t realize how much I agreed with it.

His main point: Writers should be paid for their work. What a concept. He’s right, of course, and his vociferous defense of this principle is making me reconsider how much, and what type of, writing I offer freely myself. Enjoy.

My favorite line in the video is when he says, “Lady, tell that to someone a little older than you who has just fallen off the turnip truck.”

Folks, that’s a writer at work. I just hope someone paid him for this because I don’t want him burning my house down for showing it.

I’m in the middle of polishing my latest novel, and because I find the process so onerous, I’ve decided to take a break from it and write about it instead.

Polishing should in no way be confused with editing. When you edit, in addition to moving passages around and trying different ways of saying the same line, what you’re really looking for are opportunities to cut words. Once you’re able to do what William Faulkner said (”kill your darlings”—those precious pet phrases that don’t add to your story), you begin to look forward to hacking out large chunks of material. Adjectives, sentences, paragraphs, scenes, and sometimes whole chapters can be yanked and you don’t notice. In fact, the work gets better through omission. You’re chipping away everything that doesn’t resemble an elephant. That’s editing.

But polishing is different, and in many ways more difficult. A pain in the ass, actually. It reminds me of something the inimitable Oscar Wilde once said:

“I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.”

I’m not a Jedi writer yet, but back when I was still a Padouin Learner, I thought the above quote was ridiculous. Someone couldn’t possibly have spent that much time debating the merits of inserting or omitting a piece of punctuation. Come on. The fact is, I didn’t know enough about writing yet to understand how true it was.

Polishing anything has a way of aging you.

In the early stages of writing a book, like a burgeoning romance everything is beautiful and full of potential. You’re enraptured by the Idea. The characters pulsate with energy. The possibilities are endless. Then you write a draft. And another draft. And another draft. And each time you create a modified version of the Idea, you deface the Idea a little bit, until you reach a point where you realize your creation will never match up with the Idea, and that the best you can hope to do is present your sullied thing in the best light possible.

By the time you reach the polishing stage, you’re sick of the book. But you have to read it one more time—at least. You literally get nauseous. The process is made even more poignant because you know you’re going to have to face all of the imperfections and failures that, at your current state of writerly development, you are unable to fix. The feeling you get is, I imagine, a lot like the feeling a divorced person gets when forced to see his/her ex-spouse at child visitations.

“Hey, I’m sorry. I did the best I could. Why are you bringing that up again? We’ve gone over this. What do you want from me? I said I was sorry. Goodbye.”

If your story is tight and fairly well-told, by the time you get to polishing, you know you can’t radically improve it. You know that no matter how nicely you buff the sucker, it’s only going to gleam so much. And if it’s a turd, well, forget it. A turd polished is still a turd.

Here are some of the things I focus on during polishing. I call this my Hunting List:

• Removing every unnecessary adverb, which means virtually all of them.
• Removing unnecessary commas to increase reading speed, or putting some in (see above) for clarity.
• Removing extraneous dashes and semicolons.
• Changing verbs from past progressives (e.g., “was running”) to simple past tense (e.g., “ran”).
• Eliminating small, extraneous “word packages,” which often start with prepositions.
• Eliminating as many attributions (i.e., he said.) as possible, but not to the point where it’s ever unclear who is speaking.
• Substituting more picturesque verbs and specific nouns for the lamer ones on the page.
• Clarifying anything confusing and “planting” information that becomes important later in the story.

I read somewhere that every book teaches the writer what he needs to learn to tell that story, but one thing I’ve found is that polishing never gets any easier.

Some of you may be reading this and saying, “Quit your whining. At least you’re working on a finished book.” And you’d be right.

But this still doesn’t change the fact that what I’d rather be doing is staring at a New Idea. A New Idea, standing on a hill in the spring sunshine, the sweet nectary breeze blowing her ginger hair around. She waves to me. The breeze flaps her sundress. She laughs, beckons me with a finger and departs over the hill. I’m about to run after her when I hear Old Idea, my battle axe of a book, screeching at me to come back down and clean the gutters.

I’m feeling ill again. Must be polishing time.

In the Book of Genesis, God tests Abraham’s faith by requiring him to bind his son, Issac, to an altar and sacrifice him. We all know how the story ends: at the last minute an angel intervenes, telling Abraham not to harm the boy.

The point was that God used the thing that Abraham cared the most about—his son—to test his faith. This act has been scrutinized over the centuries by the best thinkers. In fact, one of my favorite philosophers, Søren Kierkegaard, dedicated a very good book to the subject of Abraham’s faith and what it means for Faith in general.

The sentence on the cover says it all: This ain’t light readin’.

The idea of putting our dreams on the altar comes from Abraham’s act. Lately I’ve begun to wonder whether I should be writing fiction, or at least whether I should be making it the main thrust of my writing. I think my fiction is good, and this view has been corroborated by many professionals in writing and publishing, not to mention a number of readers I respect. But as good as it may be, sometimes it’s a question of timing. Folks just ain’t buyin’ what you’re sellin’ right now.

I believe that everything happens for a reason, and to the point of unanswered prayers or unfulfilled dreams, I believe that sometimes God, Spirit, the Force, or the Universe (or whatever you believe governs our cosmic soup) delays giving us our heart’s desires because He or It wants to give us a chance to change our minds. Imagine for a moment if we got everything we wanted exactly when we wanted it. Remember the saying, “Be careful what you ask for because you just might get it”? Being made to wait for our dreams to come to pass gives us an opportunity to change our minds, and I think that’s important.

In my case, I’ve begun to wonder if I want to be writing mystery fiction. I’ve already begun to feel stymied by the genre in that the conventions are pretty rigid and formulaic, and if you have anything serious to say about the world, this clearly isn’t the forum for it. I’ve also begun to question what good my fiction would be doing for the world.

How will another murder mystery help people to improve their lives? How will this kind of writing do anything other than provide people with a temporary escape from the drudgery of everyday life? Not that the ability to do this has no value. It does. I just don’t think I’m content with that.

A part of me misses teaching. Inspiring people. Awakening people to new ideas, things they’ve never considered before. Raising people’s confidence and self-esteem. In short, I’ve been wondering if I should be writing work that teaches more than it entertains.

Today I made a decision. I’m taking what has been my most precious dream for a long time—becoming a successful published author of commercial fiction—and putting it on the altar. If I need to sacrifice that dream to find my true purpose, my true calling, then I’m willing to do it.

I never get sick. I mean never. The last time I was sick was three years ago with a cold, and just before that, a herniated disc. Which is why I don’t know what to do with myself today because I’m sick.

But even though I was sick, I wrote today. You can count on it—on days that I don’t write something for this or my other blog, NotWriting.com, I have written something, whether it be pages in a new novel, a scene in a screenplay, words for a business writing assignment, an entry in my private journal, you name it. The fact is, I write every day. Every day.

Yesterday, because I was confined to bed and didn’t have the patience for writing in html on the blog, I worked in pencil on the synopsis of my new novel. That’s the 1-page single-spaced document that will accompany my book to editors and film production companies. I dread writing the synopsis because a part of me feels that synopsis-writing has nothing to do with novel-writing, and that if a reader wants to know how it ends, I want to tell him, “Read the book.”

But I did it. I wrote, just as I write every day, and I didn’t do it out of a sense of duty or self-discipline. I did it because I truly love to write.

A Royal DeLuxe by a pool. That’s it—no grand
metaphor, nothing. Just liked the picture.

My wife thinks I’m freakishly self-disciplined, and to the outside observer, I can see why she would think this. Every day, around 5am if I’m deep into a project, I shuffle across the hall to my office and get started. But I don’t do it out of a sense of self-discipline. In fact, I think self-discipline is a lousy motivator over the long-term. Self-discipline may get you to sit up in bed, but only love will motivate you to leave the warmth of that bed, get dressed and embark on the loneliest enterprise there is—writing.

Many years ago, I had a revelation in which I finally understood the oft-quoted line by writers and other artists: “Process, not product.” You have to enjoy the process of the craft you’re engaged in and do it for its own sake, not for the final product or its perceived rewards.

Since then, if I’m ever feeling down or lacking motivation, instead of trying to discipline myself to write, I make a list of what I love about it, and always topping the list is my love of what I call “the line.”

“The line” is that one sentence, that one piece of description, that one snatch of dialogue that comes out of nowhere and surprises you. You, the writer, have no idea where it came from; you know it’s good, that’s all. And ultimately, I think it’s that love of the line that keeps writers writing. You simply have to love language, and if you don’t, nothing short of self-flagellation would make you do this.

Hemingway’s posthumous memoir of his early years in Paris.

Each year, I’ll reread a few books where the gorgeous prose inspires me: Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, T.C. Boyle’s East is East, Nabokov’s Lolita, and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (or Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina—depending on whether I want to read about the infidelities of a French or Russian woman). And more than the characters or plot, what you’re reading for is the love. To witness great writers’ love for the art and how they expressed it.

I didn’t feel well today, but I wrote. And I wrote because I love writing.

Because I spend 75% of my time on the computer writing, for years I’ve allowed myself to get suckered into purchasing (yes, actually buying—I refuse to pirate software) the latest version of Microsoft Office. Now that Office 2008 for the Mac is out, I briefly considered picking it up. Very briefly.

In a previous entry I described the three writing programs I use most often: WriteRoom, Pages (part of Apple’s iWork suite), and Final Draft. Conspicuously absent from that list is MS Word.

Office 2008 for the Mac. I’m
running out to get it now—NOT!

Unless the fellows in Redmond, Washington get their heads out of their asses and figure out what people who actually write want in a program, Office 2004 for the Mac will be my last Microsoft purchase.

I’m tired of their shipping faulty software and letting “early adopters” (never me—I know better) find the glitches and essentially fix it for them. I’m tired of “productivity software” that is anything but productive and in fact ends up wasting your time as you jerk around with it, trying to get it to behave the way you need it to. And I’m tired of programs like Word that are written for the lowest common denominator—for people who don’t know the difference between a gerund and an ampersand.

So, listen up, Microsoft. In case no one’s told you before (like they haven’t), here are the features writers of book-length work want in a program. In some cases, Word has these features, or similar ones, but they’re so deeply buried in the program, or presented via a clunky, obtuse interface, that they’re useless. Here’s my list:

Continued…

No, I’m not referring to the sick practice of using razor blades on myself—although there have been times when I’ve been tempted to. I’m talking about cutting words.

A month ago, I received the most helpful rejection I’ve ever gotten from an agent. The agent, who shall remain nameless, said that while my novel was good—well-written, great characters, entertaining story—it was overwritten in many places, meaning over-described, over-rendered.

Good advice is only helpful if the person to whom it’s directed is ready to hear it. Turns out, after so many no’s, I was ready. I looked at my manuscript with an absolutely ruthless eye. If the chapter, scene, sentence or word wasn’t fulfilling a purpose, it got its ass cut.

Luckily I’m blessed with a brilliant wife who is a natural editor, and said wife just happens to be unemployed at the moment. Over the past month, Alexas and I would sit down each morning and read the book side-by-side. Each would make recommendations for cuts, and then we’d argue about it for the rest of the day. And then one of us would give in. Usually me.

I went into this edit with an ideal in mind that I’ve termed The Fred Astaire rule. I don’t know if it’s apocryphal or not, but I once read that when shooting wrapped on one his films, Astaire would tell the editor, “Make it as good as you can, then cut ten minutes.” My plan was to cut the bit of excess verbiage lying around, then reduce the book further by 10 percent. I thought additional cuts would be impossible. I was wrong.

In the end, I took a 93,000-word manuscript down to 74,999. Do the math and you’ll find that’s over 18,000 words, or almost 20 percent. The book now reads almost twice as fast, leading me to come up with the following formula:

Where

RS=(((OWC-NWC)/OWC)*100)*4

The formula is BS, but the idea is simple. If you take the percent reduction and multiply it by 4, you’ll get an idea of how much faster the book reads. For example, if you take a 100,000-word book and cut it to 80,000 words (a 20% reduction), the book will then read approximately 80 percent faster.

Along the way I kept an Excel file that tracked the cuts and gave me a running total. Geeky, yes, but it gave me empirical evidence of my daily progress. Besides, I like counting words. You can see a JPG of this file here.

Now you’re probably asking yourself, why is he telling us this? Who cares? What’s his point?

My point, which I had to learn the hard way, is this: Most of the time you can cut more. In the case of my book, I was able to cut so much that I’m now embarrassed I sent out the previous version.

But I’m profoundly grateful to the agent who gave me true, constructive criticism. I feel as though I’ve turned a corner and that representation for this book is just over the horizon. At least Sweetie, my faithful cat, thinks so.