The Perfection Quest

I watched The Black Swan last night. Mind-bending.

The movie probably will probably horrify ballet aficionados. It is not really about ballet but rather the obsession to achieve perfection. Natalie Portman plays the lead character, Nina Sayers, to something very close to perfection oddly enough. The movie has interwoven themes on many levels and keeps you thinking long after you leave the theater. This is not the best movie I have seen this year, but easily the most thought provoking. What a relief from the thoughtless drivel Hollywood usually shoots at us through a fire hose.

I will spare you my review of this movie, but as an insecure emerging writer it points to a major battle I face every time I sit down to write, the struggle for perfection of the craft.

When I first started seriously writing fiction I quickly found out there are lots of rules. To be a writer you must first learn the craft.

• Omit needless words.
• Avoid flashbacks.
• Maintain tense.
• Avoid adjectives and adverbs.
• Create natural sounding dialog.
• Show, don't tell.
• And so on.

The rules are legion. So we learn them as best we can and start writing until we finish our story. But then I find out, I am not done. I must revise and revise again until the work is finished.

When is it done? When it’s perfect. When is it perfect? When it is done.

As a new writer we walk right up to this bear trap and step on it. We have works that we massage and massage, following the rules ever more closely. But yet we are never satisfied. If we let anyone read it we get polite reviews.

Perhaps finally we have created a story that is perfectly crafted. But yet we know it is not ready. We continue to revise.

What is wrong?

In our obsession to achieve literary perfection we failed to notice the elephant in the room. What is missing is emotion. Our story may be written perfectly (or not J) but it does not engage the reader.

Does it make the reader cry? Laugh? Feel fear, sadness, sympathy, empathy, happiness, satisfaction, foreboding, or whimsy? No?

In those things lies perfection. Without emotion in a story the only thing left is boredom. In fiction, perfection is reader engagement.

Go back and reread some of your favorite fiction you read earlier in your life. I bet now as a writer you can find lots of craft flaws. But yet the story is successful. The reader wants to turn the pages. Perfection.

The lesson here is to find those reader engagement points in the beginning to determine whether or not the story as it exists is worth pursuing at all. If not, do not flog the dead horse. Put it on the shelf and move on to something else and do not invest any more valuable time on a dead end. Your life is too short.

This abandoned story can be pushed into the back of your mind where it will be worked on without your knowledge. Some day the story may emerge from the ashes anew. Our brains are wonderful devices to aid our writing.

As a writer I still need to strive for perfection, but I need to understand first what perfection is.

Like Nina Sayers I cannot rest peacefully until I find it. To me The Black Swan has a happy ending. Many would disagree. As a writer and fellow artist do yourself a favor and go see it.

Writing, All The Other Stuff – Part 1

When I decided to give writing a try after dreaming about it for four decades I thought the only thing that would hold me back would be my lack of understanding of the structure of the English language. Somehow in school I never was able to grasp it even though I was almost always an “A” student. I write by sound. Sort of like a Jazz artist who cannot read music. Feel free to pick this paragraph apart. See the problem?

But it turns out that this is the least of my problems. Well, if not the least perhaps not the most pressing. There is so much other stuff getting in the way. How about time for example? If you knew when you would take your last breath you could quickly figure out how much time you have on this earth. Assuming you are on earth of course. Say for example you live to the ripe old age of 80. That is 29,200 days, 700,800 hours, 42,048,000 minutes, or 2,522,880,000 seconds. Tick, tick, tick.

Note this is Mark math here and I do not recognize leap year in my calculations. Consider leap days as time bonuses. Enjoy that special day from now on with the knowledge that it is a free day and few things in this life are truly free.

Assuming you were not a child prodigy you are probably going to waste 25% of those seconds growing up. Now you are down to 1,892,160,000 seconds. Some of you may have used some of that time for writing but if you look back on it there may not be very much that could survive an edit by you now. But if you are one of those lucky few you can add some seconds back to my 25% loss generalization. For me it was all a waste. I do remember writing a story in 7th grade that I read aloud. And I remember my teacher saying to me something like “Kid, you got some talent, keep writing.” Sadly, I ignored his plea.

But at that moment I thought, “Wow! I could be a writer.” It was as of then my procrastination clock started running. You think you are a proficient procrastinator? I put this off for over 40 years. Try to top that.

So starting at the age of 12 I put off writing for the four decades (actually a little more than 40, but I am allowed to round down, no?) . I am overlapping my 25% waste base line by 8 years so I can add in the 32 year balance. Now I am down to 833,008,000 seconds give or take. Gulp.

Now consider that I will spend one third of those remaining seconds either asleep or lying awake worrying about writing. That leaves me with 582,785,280 possible awake seconds to write. I still have a day job and given my financial situation I will have to work until the end. Considering roughly a 40-hour workweek there goes another 43% of my awake time. Luckiy I work from home, so no wasted commuting time for me. Now I have 332,187,610 left. Gulp again. Unfortunately I still cannot use all of these remaining seconds writing.

What if I do not make it until 80? Holy crap. There goes even more time.

Okay Mark, stop obsessing. I will not bore you further with my arcane, inaccurate number crunching (are you still here?) but you can see my point. When I decided to resume my writing career I had no idea time was my mortal enemy.

Now that I have identified my primary writing adversary I can just imagine him (her?) sitting there across my office on the red couch, laughing at me. He is saying, “Go ahead give me your best shot. You got nothing.”

Darn! Now it’s time to post another entry to one of my other blogs. And I’m hungry and …..

Tick, tick, tick.

Sweating the opening

Work is progressing (ever so slowly) on my first book.

I wrote the first chapter or at least the beginning of the first chapter and then I tweaked it mercilessly. As a new writer I understand this serves two purposes.

First, it will (hopefully) provide an attention grabbing first sentence and page. Second, the beginning will set the tone of the book for the following chapters. Editors are looking for a strong beginning and so are readers. A 97 pound weakling beginning is the kiss of death for any fiction manuscript (unless you are already almost famous). I don't even want to think about the fact that the rest of the book has to be good too.

I have no clue how successful this effort is so far. Witness my first sentence:

"Holy Crap."

The first sentence used to be an action sentence about a tiny boat getting thrown around by big waves. I thought "Pow!". (Or at least "Pop.")

When my first 1K of opening words were critiqued online:

• "Way too much telling."
• "Not feeling it."
• "Too many dialog tags."
• "Not enough dialog tags."
• "Are these the first paragraphs you have ever written?"
• "Your dialog does not sound natural. No one speaks like that."
• "OMG, you throw hases and wases around so recklessly."
• "Start with 'Holy Crap' which is buried in the middle of your first page."

Holy crap.

That last item was the only thing most could agree on. So I moved that dialog line to the beginning of the opening chapter and slept for three days.

Amid the constructive criticism several online reviewers said something like:

• "I can see you are a writer, you really know how to torture your characters."
• "Great story, can't wait to see your rewrite."

Were they playing with me? Were they serious? Gulp. Could I ever recover from this disaster I put into words enough to write something anybody ever would want to read? How could I add meaningful dialog to an underwater scene?

Only one thing saved me. I love writing. Now that I have decided to do it, I breath it. Even if I utterly and completely suck I have to keep going.

I kept on. After four online revisions my new friends decided they had enough of my torture and asked me to stop posting. One of them said, "You can clean this up on the rewrite."

Rewrite? When is the writing good enough to be finished? So far I have not heard a good answer to this burning question. Maybe with my talent, never. I hope not.

I recently submitted my first submission ever. A short story that at least two people liked. As to my bio all I could say was that I loved writing. My angle here is that I am so pathetic, I could be considered for a sympathy publish.

One last thing. I just had to have even more experienced writers critique the opening to my "book".

They both agreed:

• "Never start a story with dialog."

What now?