Casting On

I've been having a knitting crisis. You see, I've got nice, neat little stitches, but somehow, the second row after casting on is always a mess. So I jury-rigged a system whereby I was fixing the second row, but my jury-rigged system was a pain--and I had this extreme sense of frustration, like, "What am I doing wrong?"

Mom to the rescue. We sit together at night and knit now that she's staying here for a month, so I had her watch me cast on last night--and "Ah-ha!" I was doing something wrong. My casting-on system--actually my FIRST row--was incorrect. Oddly enough, MOM has a jury-rigged casting-on system that she has been using for 50 years because it was the way HER mother taught her (which thus makes the system 100 years old). But her system works. So . . . problem solved.

Which brings me to writing. Every writer gets frustrated over something. Maybe it's the 100th query that gets no response from an agent, and the writer knows SOMETHING must be wrong, but what the hell is it? Maybe it's the proposal they can't sell from--some writers can nail a proposal that wows editors . . . others just can't. Maybe it synopses. Whatever it is, we all have that one area we know, deep down, we are not doing correctly because damn, that row is sloppy.

And then . . . the "Ah-ha!" moment. Whatever jury-rigged system we have . . . we suddenly have an eye-opening moment. Maybe we get to look at someone else's jury-rigged system. Maybe an editor points it out to us. Maybe our agent does or our critique partner. But finally, we get it.

My "sloppy second row" was passive voice. I can thank my friend Joyce for knocking me upside the head on that one. I was in a writers' group--a large one--and routinely got glowing responses to my short stories. But one day, this woman Joyce said to me, "I heard a lot of 'was' and 'is and passive voice in your story. Let me see it." (We read aloud.) And she circled a SLEW of them in pencil. I was 23 or 24, and as far as I was concerned, how the heck could you write without was and is? I didn't even UNDERSTAND the concept of passive voice. Well, it took me a little bit, but after she SHOWED me how to choose more active verbs, I had a lightbulb moment. How had I not SEEN it before? After that, I was vigilant about it. And as an editor moving on in my career, it helped me evolve . . . I edited the passive out of other writers along the way (at least I wasn't the ONLY one casting on improperly!).

So how about you? Do you have a moment of casting-on illumination?

Head, Meet Desk

Some days, the words just don't come. Demon Baby is finally over the worst of the croup. I actually have had two (count 'em) nights with more than five hours of sleep. But Oldest Daughter is filling out piles of college applications (each costing between $30 and $100--EACH) and requires my help with them ("What is our income range, Mom?" "Am I the dependent of a military veteran?"--why do they need to know all this?!?). And my father, as mentioned recently, requires a long list of things to make his stay a happy one--bologna (Oscar Mayer ONLY--all fat, all beef . . . this TOTALLY grosses me out), tomato juice, apple crumb pie, ice cream, sherbert, ice cream bars, and beer. So the grocery store it was. The Staurday before Thanksgiving. Why not just line me up at a firing range?

And, in words that are striking mortal terror in both MY heart and mind AND the hearts and minds of family . . . I am cooking a sit-down dinner for 18 for Thanksgiving. Me. Cooking. You can pick yourselves up off the floor now. Thank God that in actuality, my mom will do most of it. I am the sous chef. Plus everyone is asking me "Where are you going to FIT 18 people for a sit-down dinner?" My answer? I have no effing idea.

So this is a head meet desk week. I just want to bang it. Repeatedly. I am reworking a much overdue proposal . . . and I have come to the conclusion for the thousandth time . . . .

It is easier to start from scratch than to seriously reimagine something.

I hate going in and cutting and splicing, versus the free-flow of sitting and typing as it comes out of my brain. It's like cooking. If you taste a soup and it's totally ruined with too much salt . . . you're not going to be able to fix it--at least not to perfection. You have to toss out the soup and start from scratch.

This is different from rewrites and different from edits. Reimagining something requires, at times, excising entire characters. Altering characters in profound ways. I feel like I am in a bog.

Head . . . meet desk.

Anyone else?