Don't shirk the work

To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself...Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.

Mark Twain,
in a letter to Emeline Beach
10 Feb 1868

That quote is the source of the Writebastard tagline, Squandering quires in pursuit of glitter. My interpretation is that yes, quires will be squandered...but you, dear reader, will never see them. They end up in the wastebasket, discarded as part of the process that produces that singular, shining paragraph. Fortunately, I tend to write with a certain efficiency, so I'm not throwing out a dozen pages for every decent page I produce. The tagline is more about a willingness to work hard and discard much of that work if necessary. Just because it's been written doesn't mean it goes in the book. Getting too attached to one's words is the path of madness and nasty fights with editors. (Except dialogue. Nobody messes with my dialogue.)

While discussing his role as Eomer in The Lord of the Rings, Karl Urban talks about how one of the things he appreciates about being an actor is the opportunity to acquire new skills, like sword fighting and horseback riding. As a writer, I get to acquire cool new knowledge of things like Georgian architecture, turn-of-the-century estates of the Hamptons...and Cher.

Now, Cher is not as cool as sword fighting. Or horseback riding. Or...well, a lot of things. But there's a reason I have to delve into her life and work. A long time ago, when I started working on this tale, one of the male characters was a weekend Cher impersonator. If you know anything about the drag scene, you'll know that it's well-populated by people who know just everything there is to know about their divas, and view their lives through the often tragic prisms of their chosen heroines' hagiographies. I knew that in order to pull that sort of character off, I'd need to do the requisite research. And I'll admit it: I chickened out. I lopped the Cher impersonator portion off of the character because I didn't want to sit through the movies and the Sonny and Cher show, read the books, and listen to the albums.

Here's how I've paid for that laziness: the character became one of those empty cyphers I wrote about over the weekend. He's got no life to him, and in a world full of sparkling people, he's dull. He doesn't fit. For 187 pages he's been moving along, doing what's required, but sullenly, without much vigor, because I took away his feathers and his sequins and dressed him in plain leather. Everyone in the book is fabulous but him, which is a serious problem because he's one of the central characters. Even though he's not the narrator, the bulk of the plot flows from his conflicts.

I won't say I've squandered quires on this fellow, but I will have to rewrite every appearance he's made, which means the original versions of those appearances go into the trash. What Twain said is as true of characterization as it is of words, sentences, and paragraphs: I'll be poring through biographies and other media, not to produce lengthy descriptions of my character and his actions, but to capture and present a handful of telling details. A gesture, a line of dialogue, a narrative comment about personality. The point of the research is distillation, not volume.

So, the lesson has been learned: do not make artistic decisions based on the desire to avoid work--and believe me, watching 1969's Sonny Bono-penned Chastity is going to be work. The reward? A fully-realized character, along with a slight uptick in my groovy kitsch quotient.


Thanks to Kevin for the stylin' rhyming title of this post.