Missed Stitch

If you are a long-time reader of this blog, you know I like to knit. Badly. I mostly make scarves and hats. I'm working on an afghan. I like to knit because it keeps my hands and mind busy as a way to deal with stress, but not so busy that I can't talk or have music on, or even sit with Baby Girl while she watches TV in my room.

But today . . . my post is less about the rainbow assortment of balls of yarn in my closet (I can tell you, it's a relatively inexpensive addiction, and I cannot pass a store with yarn and NOT buy yarn, even if I have no idea yet what the hell I will knit with it). But it is about . . . the missed stitch. You see when I started knitting, I was just happy to end up with a sevicable SOMETHING at the end. Much like, I think, beginning writers. I didn't see the flaws--or barely did--because I was so delighted I had actually put hundreds and hundreds of knit stitches together and made SOMETHING. Even if it was lopsided. And had holes in it.

Then I learned to purl (for the non-knitters, it's a different kind of stitch). Once you can PURL, you can now do ribbing and patterns and "cool stuff." Much, I am sure, like learning about deeper characterization, or how to show not tell. At THIS point, I would look at my old knitting and want to vomit. Well, maybe that's extreme, but you get the idea. For example, I am knitting my friend Bruce a scarf. For a year now. Because every time I finish one, I decide it's not good enough for him, because he is such an honored friend. Now it's summer, so I have until fall to make one I like enough to give to him. I am on my 4th (count 'em) scarf. I rip the others apart. Much like as your writing advances, you want to chuck everything you ever wrote before and cringe that you actually QUERIED a real, LIVING, BREATHING editor with that piece of sloppy knitting that was your first scarf.

Finally, you start getting really good (I'm at the "not half-bad" stage). But then . . . you miss a stitch. You don't notice it at first, but you get a couple of rows up and realize you have a missed stitch. A mistake. Something that's NOT WORKING. Now, had this been your first pathetic attempt at a scarf, you'd leave it. Hell, it's a scarf. It's SOMETHING. But no . . . now you know. So NOW you have to undo rows, working with a crochet hook to fix the dropped stitch.

Over at Mark Terry's blog (and as far as I know, he doesn't knit), if you read the last two or three posts, you can see he is working on a new book, and he's given it to beta readers and maybe (just maybe) it has some problems.

Now, Mark has two choices. Submit with what's possibly a missed stitch. Or gingerly go through the entire manuscript with some new "fix" or stitch or angle (change the age of the character, maybe? write it geared to a different genre, perhaps?). But the problem is, just as with yarn, you are working with long threads. You have to pull that missed stitch, that problem through the WHOLE thing. You can never, if you drop a stitch, just go to that ONE spot and "fix" it. It impacts the rows above and below. So it is with a fix in a novel. As an experienced editor, a lot of times, I can spot when a writer has applied a "fix" because it's not pulled all the way through. Or it feels tacked on, like just slapping an extra stitch on the end of a row. I've shared here before about working with a writer a few years back who tacked on a HUGE character flaw for his detective because the editors didn't think the detective was unique enough in an overcrowded genre. The add-on was a gambling addiction. But gamblers have a HOST of problems and as an addiction it is considered as tough or tougher than heroin to beat. It also has psychological ramifications. You can't just have a guy like to bet on the NY Giants and one day "get over it" and call it an addiction. It's never that simple a characterization. It's never that simple a fix.

So this is my knitting analogy. Now I am off to work on my afghan. I am using FLEX needles and four strands at once now. In other words . . . I'm gettin' fancy.

Peace,
E

Ripping Out Stitches

I love to knit. This is somewhat of a revelation to me, since I am the LEAST crafty person I know. My mother is this utterly amazing knitter, and she has helped me to learn. Now, I find myself wandering the aisles of Ben Franklin, and one entire wall of my walk-in closet is yarn. One WALL! I get Yarn Lust. I hate to shop, yet a trip to Ben Franklin can take me two hours. My clothes? Order them online. My makeup? I order it online. I mean, I SERIOUSLY hate shopping. Except for yarn.

When I started knitting, I HATED to rip anything out. I was just so happy I had stitches on my knitting needles, that if I made a mistake, I'd kind of doctor it so you wouldn't notice. My scarves were lopsided. Not so anymore. The better I get (better being a relative term), the neater my stitches are. I've graduated to cute hats for my baby, and he will have a hat for every day of winter, I am sure.

Which brings me to writing.

You see, there was a time when I was just happy to have the words and the pages. The first time I wrote a novel, the very IDEA that I could write 300 pages was astonishing to me. Because I had only written poetry and short stories before I wrote Spanish Disco, when I started hitting 80 pages on my novel, I was amazed. And then I kept going. When I hit 200 pages . . . I couldn't believe it. Then I kept going. My writing was lean and spare, and I was writing 50,000 words. It was an adventure.

Since that book, my critique group added a member who can easily toss out 50 pages--just delete them as if they had never existed. The thought made me want to throw up. DELETE whole chapters? MULTIPLE chapters? But if they didn't move the plot along, or they were deeply flawed . . . they went bye-bye. The knitter in me who didn't like to rip out stitches wanted to choke.

But I've since learned. I am working on my next comedy proposal. There is a whole homage to The Wizard of Oz in it. And it's funny. But I realized the set-up was taking too long. As fast as you can say "Toto, we're not in Kansas anymore" I deleted three chapters.

I am working on a YA proposal. Same thing. I am suddenly less attached to my words and more attached to the art of it--to the finished product. If it's not working, I need to mercilessly rip the stitches out. I may save it on my hard drive in case there's something in there--some turn of a phrase I can use later. But most of the time, I don't look back, just as my finished scarf banishes the memory of the lopsided one.

Thoughts?

Learning to Make a Hat

When you are a full-time writer, who loves to read, and who loves to write for fun, but you also make your LIVING at it, sometimes, it seems like your entire world is writing and reading.

As some of my regular blog readers know, the last month or so has been in a word . . . a bitch. I am exhausted, stressed, having memory issues BECAUSE I am so stressed, like walking into the same room five times, forgetting why the hell I was going there in the first place.

Now my parents are visiting and I am getting less sleep than ever. They are night owls. I usually am in bed by ten p.m., but I am staying up late to spend time with them--but still getting up before dawn with the kids while my parents sleep in until 9:00 a.m. I am to the point where sometimes I even wonder if I am making sense when I speak because I am so tired.

BUT . . . one really great thing is happening.

I love to knit. LOVE it. So far, knitting in my world has consisted of making very lopsided scarves with holes where there shouldn't be any. After a while, I mastered scarves that AREN'T lopsided, and they have no dropped stitches. So I decided to up my repertoire to make a hat and a blanket. But this isn't something I find "easy." I can't learn by reading. I have to learn by DOING, and thus I need a knitting mentor to guide me through Hatmaking 101.

Enter Mom. I am halfway through making a hat with three different colors of yarn for my baby. And as she walks me through how to switch out stitches and yarns and master a more complicated project . . . I am reminded how much I ADORE knitting. I haven't knit a thing since Christmas--too busy. Too tired. All the excuses.

But sitting with her until late each night, making a hat, I am reminded that, tired as I am, making time for nonwriting things, nonreading things, is important. It staves off burnout. My garden is also something I adore for the same reason.

So, writers and readers, do you find you have to make time for hobbies so you don't get too burned out? And what hobbies do you have? And do you have to FORCE yourself to make time for them? I wonder, too, if I feel this way because I make a LIVING as a writer and it doesn't seem like a hobby anymore, but something that has to be worked like a business at times, much as I love it.