Sacrilege

As a composition instructor, I occasionally run into some interesting dilemmas when grading student papers.  This term, I ran into one where my decision felt like sacrilege.

I was sitting at home late at night with a pile of essays and a red pen in my hand when I came across one that was unique.  It stood apart from the others because it had a clear, confident narrative voice and a smooth flow to it that none of the other students in the class had managed.  It was actually quite beautiful.  The content of it was a memory the writer had from her childhood about a place where she used to go to imagine herself the monarch of a magic kingdom.  It was filled with charming descriptions, nostalgia, and pathos.

It was by far the most enjoyable student essay that I’ve read in the last twelve months.

There were two main problems with it, though.  The first was the grammar.  Although this paper contained fewer mistakes than many of the essays I was grading, it still had a fair amount of them, and some of them were fairly serious syntax errors that were repeated multiple times.  I had to read the paper twice to find them all because I had become too enthralled the first time to catch them.  Some of the errors had blended in nicely with the story because of their nearly poetic nature; others were so minor that I had simply overlooked them the first time because I didn’t want to stop to mark them while I was reading.

The second problem was the content itself.  Wonderful though it was to read, the content of the paper didn’t fulfill the basic requirements of the assignment.  The essay was supposed to be a compare and contrast paper with clear points of comparison, a strong thesis, and clear transitions.  This paper had no thesis, the compare and contrast was vague at best, and the transition to the second memory she described was so subtle that I missed it the first time around.

I hesitated for a long time with my red pen.

It was such a fun and creative piece of writing that I wanted to overlook most of the errors and give it a high mark.  It was clearly the best written paper in the stack in terms of narrative style and interest, and part of me wanted to argue that it was a good enough excuse to merit a high grade.  On the other hand, the student had failed to accomplish the main goals of the assignment and had enough mechanical errors to go down one and a half letter grades.  If I followed my own grading criteria strictly, the paper was a failure.

Eventually, my objectivity got the better of me and I wrote a red F on the top of the paper beside its numeric score.  My solace came from the fact that the student still had a chance to revise it and turn it in again for a better grade, which the student dutifully did a week later.  The new version didn’t have the same flare as the original, but it met more of the requirements and earned a decent grade.

It still felt like sacrilege, though, siding with correctness over creativity.  I know it had to be done, but it broke my heart.

Linear vs. Nonlinear Writing

A long time ago when I was working on a project no long since abandoned, I decided to write a novel nonlinearly.  Instead of trying to write the book from beginning to end and following the sequence of events as it unfolded, I wrote whatever scene I was inspired to write that day.  It didn’t matter what part of the story it was.  Whether it was the denouement, the exposition, the climax, or any particular turning point in between, I wrote it because I had an idea for it and I wanted to strike while the iron was hot.

There was one clear advantage of this method: it produced some very lively writing.  I wasn’t getting bogged down by the logistics of how to get my characters from one point to another; I simply wrote about the points that I wanted to contain in the plot without concern for segues.  It was invigorating to write whatever I wanted whenever I wanted.

The biggest disadvantage of the method was that I ended up with a series of disconnected scenes that I had trouble organizing and smoothing out into a coherent manuscript.  A close second to this disadvantage was the fact that many of the scenes and characterizations contradicted each other because they were written in no particular order.  Eventually, the prospect of inserting the segues and fixing the inconsistencies became so daunting that the project got filed in the gray box I refer to affectionately as my “graveyard.”

Since that experience, I have been forcing myself to write linearly.  I plot out my story from beginning to end before I start it – leaving room, of course, for an odd moment of inspiration here or there that might alter my plot’s overall direction.  I write the opening scene and progress chronologically toward the ending.  When I got stuck last year in the middle of my sequel manuscript, I jumped to the end and then tried to write progressively in reverse toward the point where I had hesitated originally.  I consider this approach to still be linear even if it was backward, and I have had more success with writing linearly than I have writing nonlinearly over the years.

This week, however, I have decided to take a stab at nonlinear revising.  When I took on the task of revising the manuscript for my first novel back in December 2010, I started working on it from the front and making my way forward.  The plan worked well enough for the first few weeks, but as I became mired in different options I had for rearranging my plot, I quickly stagnated and wandered over to my Xbox in despair.

The problem was that I had too many ideas stirring around in my head.  My brain was coming up with ways to revise the opening at the same time that it was thinking up strategies to make the ending more poignant and cut some of the slow parts out of the middle.  Just the other day, I had a wonderful image in my head of how a scene two-thirds of the way through the book could be changed to get a lot more done in a lot less space, but I resisted the urge to write it down because I convinced myself I should wait until I get there to make any changes.

Today, I have decided not to do that anymore.  I’ve decided to revise nonlinearly by revising whichever scene my brain is inspired to fix instead of trying to revise them all in order.  By doing this, I hope to discover which scenes can be left out by seeing which ones are unnecessary after I have revised the rest.

Something Old, Something New

It’s meme time again!  The question comes from Booking Through Thursdays:

All other things being equal–do you prefer used books? Or new books? (The physical speciman, that is, not the title.) Does your preference differentiate between a standard kind of used book, and a pristine, leather-bound copy?

Generally speaking, I prefer new books to used books.  I love cracking open a fresh new hardcover and smelling that new-book smell.  I also love running my fingers over the slick new pages as I read and the thought that no one else has ever read the book before.

That being said, I admit that I’m a bit of a book snob.  My favorite editions of books are leather-bounds with gilt pages and black and white print illustrations.  Several years ago, I discovered Easton Press and started and ordering a book once or twice a year so that I could own fancy editions of all my favorites and classics.  I have long dreamt of eventually having a room full of them – fancy wooden shelves lined with elegant leather spines and sophisticated sculptural bookends – and putting a comfy chair in that room just for me.

I have made some progress on this goal.  I have collected many editions, some from Easton Press and some from bookstores that carry their own leather-bound collections.  Since they are expensive, I have no qualms about buying them used at half-price stores as long as they are in good condition and not littered with underlines, highlights, and stains.  I now have almost an entire bookcase full of them, and they are among my most prized possessions.

Of course, this preference of mine only applies to my fiction and poetry collection, and I enjoy a good-looking hardbound book even if it isn’t leather-bound.  I also own many, many well-worn paperbacks of the used persuasion.  I buy used paperbacks whenever I buy books that I intend to use primarily for research or whenever I simply must have more books and can’t afford to buy the more expensive copies.  The fact that I work near a half-price store often makes the temptation too hard to resist.

I guess it’s the romantic academic in me that craves the leather-bound library and the starving reader in me that wants any book I can get my hands on.

My favorite edition of a book that I own is actually both used and leather-bound.  A friend of mine many years ago found a copy of Paradise and Purgatory (two sections of The Divine Comedy) from the 1800s that features illustration prints from the artist Gustave Doré and an old translation of the text that sounds almost Shakespearean.  Though that friend and I parted ways a long time ago, I still cherish the book.  I open it very rarely because the spine is weak, but, whenever I do open it, I am always entranced by the beauty of the illustrations and the poetry of the text.

Dry Spell

So, I haven’t written or revised anything for about three weeks.  Despite the occasional flashes of scenes playing out in my head, I have yet to put pen to paper or fingers to keys in what seems like forever.

“Why?” you ask.

Beats me.  I seem to be experiencing an extreme lack of motivation.

My first impulse is to blame my day job.  I have had a lot to do over the past few weeks, and I’ve been so excited about my progress at work that I haven’t done anything about my work in progress.  On the plus side, my efforts at work have paid off and I have just been rewarded with a promotion.

On the other hand, maybe that’s the problem.  My efforts at work seem to pay off whereas my efforts on my writing projects don’t seem to be doing much of anything.  Rejections from submissions I made last year before I decided on another major rewrite have been trickling in lately, and I missed two of my own deadlines in the last three months.  I had planned to finish my sequel draft by the end of 2010 – which didn’t happen – and I wanted to complete my revisions to the first manuscript by the end of last month.

I haven’t even made much of a dent.

As I mentioned in a previous post, my plan to use word kill quotas to measure my progress and motivate me backfired horribly.  I got stuck working on a scene that I never liked the first time and probably should have cut, and then I skipped past it to the next scene hoping that I could go back later when I was more inspired.  At this point, I have three different files of starts and stops that are disconnected because of scene skipping.  I’ve completely lost focus, and the sporadic thoughts I’m having about my characters and story are actually concentrated on the third book I have yet to start and a later, unnumbered book that I have occasionally toyed with plotting.

I guess my mind is taking the “don’t quit your day job” thought to heart.

It’s focusing all of my energy on work because that’s where I’m getting recognition and rewards instead of working on my writing where I’m getting neither.

So much for the labor of love theory.

No matter how much I love writing and watching my ideas show up on pages out of nothing, I occasionally fall into one of these dry spells where I don’t want to write anything at all.  I’m sure it happens to everyone, but that doesn’t make it any less infuriating.

I’m going to try the “writing at gunpoint” theory later tonight and tomorrow to see if threatening myself with punishments for not writing will get me back in the saddle.  It usually doesn’t, but I’m fresh out of rewards that I want badly enough and there’s always a first time for everything.

Wish me luck.