The Failed Writer

Sometimes you feel like the failed writer when you see how well all the other writers are doing. Take grants for example. How the hell do all these writers get these grants? Authors are always thanking this foundation or that for getting large sums of money to work on their fiction. Or the more obvious one...the writers who get a million dollars for a book or a quarter million or a tenth of a million. How do they do that? Or how about the writers who are guest columnists in the NY Times? How did they score that gig? Or the ones that pop up on television. Or hit the NY Times Bestseller list. How did they pull it off?

So you think well I am not doing something. And that something could be a lot of things. Maybe you aren't blogging enough. Maybe you aren't sending out your manuscripts to the right people.  Maybe you don't have a great agent. Maybe you are just writing the wrong types of books. Maybe you have been barking up the wrong tree for years in your pursuit of literary fiction and really someone should have gotten hold of you way back when and said...THIS...THIS is what sells, not...THAT! And you could have made the change then.

But years have passed and you have been pounding away on your piece of stone and your hammer is bent and dull and your stone is chipped and scratched and sort of a dully putty color. But it is your stone. And so you pick up your hammer once again with all these questions smacking around your skull. And you hit that stone one more time. Then again. Then again. For all those questions without answers.


www.billhazelgrove.com

The thousand and one things of rewriting

There has to be a thousand and one things you do in rewriting and more. Thank God you don't have to do them twice. But it is all those changes that comprise the final draft that hopefully will not come back to you again. And it is the tweeks that change the work. The big work is mostly done but then comes all the nuances that make a novel a novel. The minor changes of one word for another or the addition of a paragraph setting the stage or just the breaking down of dialogue and exposition all change the novel in ways that are immeasurable.

It is really at the end that the glaring moments taunt you. After rewriting something ten times or more you think you have caught the big inconsistencies or mistakes but of course they are the ones that are embedded in the text and your eye has become used to them. When they do make themselves known it is amazing because you have read that passage so many times and never have seen it.

Then you start back through swapping out words deleting sentences, breaking up chapters, combining chapters, fleshing out characters. It is amazing how some scenes stay so thin, so under imagined. So you go back at it and basically rewrite those scenes from the beginning to the end. And then of course you have to read it again to get out all the fat again. Fat is a big one. A paragraph bunches up and literally doesn't look right. Crowded. It looks crowded.

So you thin you fatten. The book is an accordion you expand and contract expand and contract. This goes on for months. This goes on for years. And finally you reach a point where you have completed the thousand and one things and you think that is it. No more. I am finished. Until you discover the one thousand and second.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man...the American Dream gone bad