After that comes the part that everyone thinks of as revision: editing, polishing and proofreading. That’s where I call back in my inner perfectionist (keeping it on a very short leash) to start noticing all the times I used the same unusual word twice in one chapter, or just have a godawfully awkward sentence construction, et cetera, et cetera. Not to mention the times where a scene has lapsed into two disembodied voices chatting at one another (ugh).

This is why writing is much more of a test of stamina than intelligence or talent. Nearly everybody’s first drafts are weak, with maybe a few flashes of brilliance. The number of subsequent drafts you can do (and of course the amount of work you put into each one) and the quality of attention you bring to the whole process determine the outcome far more than what you originally scribbled in your journal or typed out in the initial heat of inspiration.

So if you’re in the middle of a project, KEEP GOING.

On the plus side, getting a new operating system has also forced me to degunkify my desktop, which also serves to clear my head via a process of sympathetic magic. Being gone for seven workdays (eleven calendar days!)* has also helped with the head-clearing. And now I get to learn some new computery stuff about the operating system and new versions of various software tools I use for work (Windows 7 and Adobe CS5).

The head-clearing quality is especially welcome as I dig into novel rewriting before and after hours (I’m changing the ending as well as continuing my previously planned rewrites) — about 9 weeks of work.

When I arrived in Kansas, I learned that they set the grasslands on fire here on purpose, typically early in the spring, to clear out the dead stuff and make room for new growth. It’s called a controlled burn. It’s a useful concept, and beautiful to see in real life: both the sweeping flames and huge columns of smoke (DON’T try to drive through the smoke) during the burn itself, and later the lush new green that makes the hillsides look like they should have hobbit children playing on them or maybe riders of Rohan thundering across them.

But maybe that’s just me.

*I was at the CSSF2010 Repeat Offenders workshop (for science fiction and fantasy writers, not convicts), which was a worthwhile endeavor, BTW.

(That was in 1656 so I’m using “remember” a bit loosely, since none of us was there. Anyway.)

Twitter provides a needed corrective for the expansive nature of electronic communications. When you are printing a book, a newsletter, or a brochure, fairly quickly you get to the point of paring down content, condensing, and providing only the most valuable information, in order to save on printing costs (if nothing else).

On the web, you can bloviate nearly infinitely, although if you do, your communications will fail because people’s attention spans and patience are both limited.

The discipline of saying something of substance in 140 characters is the same discipline you using paring down a line or a stanza in a poem, where compression is a critical skill — and it often happens in the rewriting, not the drafting. It’s also a critical skill in prose, but one that tends to get short shrift. When we find a prose writer who can do it well, we tend to call them “lyrical” as a nod to that poetic skill; Amy Hempel is a good example — if you think of others, add ‘em in the comments.

p.s. – you can follow me on twitter here: http://twitter.com/skanning

What struck me is that the story’s author tried to disguise the fact that the “peddlers” were inspired by the Roma people (it comes out in the comments) — changing names, accents, appearance, et cetera, but didn’t seem to think about overturning the stereotype itself. I believe this would be possible to do with a minimum of disruption to the story, while still doing all the things artistically and creatively that the author seemed to want to do in it.

The story proper begins, “It was the right sort of day to sell a child to the peddlers.” The mother of a truly horrible child finds some peddlers and trades the kid for various goods. The story continues with the wicked child doing horrible things to the peddler and his wife, until they leave her hanging in a bush to trouble the next person to come along.

But what if the peddler didn’t just simply agree to buy the child? What if the peddler had sorta-kinda gone along with the suggestion, then gone back to his wife and said, “Holy sh-t! This lady wants to SELL us her kid! Where do these landspeople get this stupid idea?” They discuss the matter and decide a woman who would sell her child is surely not a fit mother, and it would be best to go along with the scheme and raise the child as their own.

Suddenly this fictional story takes place in a world where one group has a bias against another group that perhaps doesn’t match reality, thus calling into question the stereotype. Without this tweak, it’s assumed that yes, it’s perfectly sane to expect to be able to sell a child to a peddler, so the stereotype stands as reality.

The best stories, the ones I aspire to read and write, can really mess with our heads in wonderful ways, undermining our stereotypes and assumptions and generally rearranging our mental furniture (with or without our leave). This can happen for the writer as well as the reader – if the writer is paying attention as she writes.

My favorite example of this is Ursula le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy, in which the barbaric people have light-colored skin, hair and eyes, and the civilized, sophisticated people are the people of the Archipelago, who have dark skin and kinky-curly hair. Reading it as a kid, I didn’t quite realize what was going on until a few dozen pages in, at which point I had an A Ha! moment. In that moment, I realized that I had a (previously) unconscious bias: I had assumed the main character and his people were like me, and they were, they were fully realized characters with hopes and dreams and flaws and messy lives – but they also weren’t. They looked different from me. They weren’t white.

That was a powerful moment for me, and it has kept me on the lookout for my own unconscious bias since then. Sometimes I fail, and sometimes I manage to bring my bias to light, where I can examine it critically and maybe chip away at it for next time. I hope not to fail publicly, but that’s part of the risk of publishing your writing – you can neither bury your mistakes like a doctor or plant trees and shrubs around them like an architect, you just have to hope they go out of print.