From Cranky Rah's Cave: The Multiverse of Editing

I've been thinking a lot about editing, mainly because I've been immersed in it myself. It turns out that, astonishingly, most people don't like to edit. Writers I know talk about it as a necessary evil or tedious or painful or all three. Since I told The Three that our next step together was to work through entire pieces—including editing—they've been as silent as me on Twitter.

So why is it that my idea of a perfect day is an intense session of editing, followed by an intense session of rock climbing, capped off by an intense session of taco-eating? (Hey, I just described yesterday! Sometimes life really rocks.)

I considered that it might be my German blood enjoying bringing order to whatever craziness my Celtic blood poured all over the page—and there's probably something to that. But what it really is, I think, is the way that I started writing in the first place, writing the same characters over and over in different stories. Sometimes the characters didn't change much from story to story; sometimes a story needed them to be slightly different people; sometimes they had to be very different people.

Nine out of 10 adorable baby turtles prefer left-handers.

There's this theory in physics called the multiverse, which is the idea that there are an infinite number of universes (universi?) out there, so there are an infinite number of variations of all possible realities. In one reality, humans might not exist at all; in another, things might be exactly like they are in our universe, except that I'm right-handed instead of left-handed. (We don't like that universe.)

We only see the universe we live in; we can only deal with the reality we have right now. But characters don't have just the one life like we do; characters live in the multiverse. There's an infinite number of lives they could lead, an infinite number of variations—big or small—that affect the stories we tell about them. One life could be almost indistinguishable from another or seem absolutely unrelated.

(I say seem because there's of course always the heart, the essence of the character, and that doesn't change, regardless of which story you tell about them.)

There are those times when the story you drafted is just a starting point, when you have to throw out the middle or the end (or even the beginning). When it turns out that the journey you wrote first was really just to lead you to the journey you really need to write. It can be sad to lose paragraphs or scenes or entire groups of characters, but every time you make a change, you're just opening up another universe, another set of possibilities.

In the universe of this galaxy, the barista who makes
my flat white looks just like Hugh Jackman.

In the physics multiverse, there is no one right universe, but in the writing multiverse we eventually edit our way to a right universe.

Maybe this seems esoteric, but all this is just another way of saying: Let your characters breathe. Let them explore. Don't let them get stuck in your first vision. Think about all the decisions you've made in your life and the places you might have gone (good and bad) if you had taken a different path at any of those moments. Your characters can do that—and you don't lose anything: All the other possibilities are still out there.

That's why I love editing. There's so much possibility, so much demand for creative thinking, for following the thread of a change and seeing where it takes you. If you're standing there with Robert Frost at the two roads diverging in the wood, you only get to pick one. Your characters can go anywhere.

From Cranky Rah's Cave: New Writing Digs

I'm pretty sure it was Tennyson who wrote, "in the spring a cranky Rah's fancy frantically turns to thoughts of getting the heck out of Dodge." Or something like that.

In any event, it's true: When the weather starts to get nicer, I want to be free. Free! I want to shake the dust of this heavily scheduled life and go somewhere—and not always Scotland, by the way. (Okay, always Scotland, but Rah is reasonable. Rah is rational. Rah knows that she must be way, way richer before she can go always to Scotland.)

This summer has turned out to be a little more heavily scheduled so far than Rah would like it to be, but the Poet-Accountant, Ruby Hazelnut and I did manage to get away for a few days to the beautiful Shenandoah National Park in western Virginia—where, between hiking and horseback riding, I managed to do a little real estating.

I like my cave, but one never wants to get too...cave-bound, you know. One must emerge occasionally from the cave to see what other caves there are out there.

Now, Luray Caverns had a really lovely spot. Lovely lighting; not too cool, but definitely not hot. Internet connectivity might be an issue, but I'm pretty sure I could run a line down.

There was one insurmountable problem, though: dealing with unwelcome visitors. Something like 400,000 people tromp through there each year, which is like 399,999 too many for me.

Next, I thought Why not think outside the cave? Maybe there are other options, some of which don't involve massive quantities of vitamin D to prevent rickets. (Some people say you should suffer for your art, but that's not the kind of suffering I'm into.)

Anyway, so we hiked up the strangely named Hawksbill Mountain (isn't it the case, the Poet-Accountant asked, that hawks have beaks and not bills?) to see what kind of residential opportunities there were at 4,050 feet.

At first I thought, Man, I could totally get into writing up here. The problem? Way too much vitamin D. You've seen my skin, right? I seriously don't want to end up with lobster skin that clashes with my hair. So far, we have rickets versus cancer. Not a pretty choice.

I figured that was it; There's no place like home. A cave in need is a cave indeed and all that. Then we went on our final hike. And there it was! The cave of all caves! Rah's new writing digs!

Do you see it there, tucked under that massive boulder? I'm telling you, this place has everything. Fresh water, a nice sunny spot above (take that, vitamin D deficiency!) and an impenetrable driveway:

Just the place to retreat to while doing that most horrifying of things: querying agents. Gulp.

From Cranky Rah's Cave: Waxing Philosophic

Cranky Rah is in the throes of a winter malaise. She should be working on the next draft of The Work in Progress, but the brain is Decidedly Not Interested. This happens from time to time, and it is one of the few things in life Cranky Rah does not stress about. It will come back. She will write. That is what Cranky Rah does.

But it's had me thinking about big questions like Why Does One Want to Get Published? and Why Does One Write?

Abandon all hope,
ye who trespass in Rah's cave.

My awesome writing friend Cool J once heard an author say that you need to know why you want to get published—not judge that reason, just know it. For Cool J, it's the need for the visual artist in her to hold her words in her hands. For me, well, let's just say we're not going that deep into Rah's cave today. Beware the caution tape.

Sometimes when I talk to writers, though, it seems like that's all there is. There's a lot of talk about agents and editors and getting published and fretting about deadlines and working through another draft and, quite frankly, it seems like a lot of Work. The kind of work that makes you wonder why anyone would do it in the first place.

So I started wondering: Why do we write? Not how did we start writing or why do we want to get published or why do we write what we write about, but why do writers put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard? What drives the creation?

Phones hung on walls and had these
things called cords, which basically
handcuffed you to the phone.
I had a bright yellow one.

I don't remember exactly when I started writing, but it was sometime in middle school, when I met Jobie. She wrote stories, and I thought that was neat, so I started writing stories. We spent all summer writing and reading our stories to each other, and I mean that pretty much literally. This was the Age of Atari (an epoch of the Stone Age), before home computers or the Internet. Heck, this was before Call Waiting—and there was the rub: My mom worked part time, and she wanted to be able to get in touch with my sister and me if she needed to. So she required that I not be on the phone for the 10 minutes before and after the top of the hour (like 9:50 to 10:10 a.m.) and for the 10 minutes before and after the bottom of the hour.

Jobie and I spent the 20 minutes of each phone ban writing, and then we spent the next 20 minutes on the phone, reading to each other. Then 20 minutes writing, 20 minutes reading. Over and over. All. Day. Long.

What did we write about? Well, let's just say that within the Age of Atari was the Period of The Lost Boys. Jobie was into vampires way before Stephenie Meyer. I was more into rock stars and this one black-haired boy from school, but they could be vampires, too. Anything was possible.

That's when the populating of my brain started, I guess. I don't write because I have some Great Deep Lesson I want to share with the world or because I want to explore the Big Questions of Life. Maybe that happens anyway in the telling of a good story, but I write because there are people in my brain, and they want out.

Connor might be related to this one.

There's Wren, who lives in a treehouse and wakes up in other places a couple of times a week. Ink, the black-haired boy who hears color. Vivian, who wishes her mom's tattoo wasn't on the cover of that country album, and Jacoby with his mad uncle. Connor, who inherited an island of seals, and Waverly, whose dad digs up dead people.

They're all hibernating right now, which I totally get. It's supposed to snow today. Again. And we're all totally over it. But spring is coming. Soon we will be awash in vitamin D, and everyone will wake up. Maybe they're stirring a little even now, which is good, because it's getting a little cramped inside my head.

From Cranky Rah's Cave: The Terrible Titles Blog Hop

My most awesome writing friend Cool J (also known as Elle Blair) just told me about a thing called the Terrible Titles Blog Hop. This is the idea: Scroll through a work in progress (WIP), and let your cursor land randomly. Wherever it lands becomes a Terrible Title. Repeat about eight times.


Here are mine, from a WIP with the working title Starwood Vine:

• Shoveling Cereal Into His Mouth
• I Climb Trees
• [Redacted because this blog is family-friendly, and those randomly selected words were so not]
• The Poison Apple
• Threw My Pregnant Sister Under the Bus
• Fluffing Away Into the Wind
• Eating Into the Black
• Cut You a Check On Monday

And a bonus one because of the redaction: Watch Them All Be Dead. Probably my personal favorite.

From Cranky Rah's Cave: Quirks and Tells

Cranky Rah's been in the cave writing a lot lately, so let's delve into the stalactite-y landscape of her mind and see what's there (besides tacos).

Ah, quirks and tells. Those little things that make a character real, both to the writer and the reader.

Quirks are a person's weird, unusual habits (don't tell me you don't have any). One of my characters likes to invent and build; he uses his bedroom walls like a whiteboard, drawing schematics and equations on them with a Sharpie (don't try this at home). When he's done with a set of diagrams, he whitewashes over them with paint. When he doesn't have a notebook to hand, he takes notes on his jeans.

Giving a character a quirk or two makes them memorable to a reader; it can also create tension or inspire scenes. When my character starts writing chemical formulas instead of mechanical schematics on the wall, is it just because he's trying out a new science or a sign he's starting to experiment with his crazy uncle's voodoo medicine even though it's nearly killed him before?

Tells are like quirks that give something away. We talk about tells in poker: Maybe a player always sneezes when she has a good hand. My father-in-law whistles thematically (and unconsciously), so when someone tells a story about a house that burned down, about 10 minutes later you'll hear him whistling that song Eternal Flame by the Bangles. This could be pretty inconvenient for an arsonist.

You don't want to overdo it; quirks and tells are a spice. Like cumin in taco meat. Ooo, tacos... Gotta go.