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 Rules for Writing a Novel

Cranky Rah has been kept cranky and in the depths of her cave for the past two weeks by a non-creative editing project. Cranky Rah is now very behind on everything in life except for said non-creative editing project, which is almost (!) finished.

Yesterday, The Further Four came to visit the cave, but Cranky Rah has had no time to draft an astonishingly inspiring blog (or even an astonishingly uninspiring blog) about it because of—all together now!—the aforementioned non-creative editing project.

(Cranky Rah should point out, in case anyone associated with the non-creative editing project reads this, that the non-creative editing is for a Very Good Cause and that Cranky Rah enjoys editing projects very much. Even if her boss on the project, the Perilous P, disagrees with her on comma placement.)

Anyway, lest anyone fear that I have become lost in the beautiful dark depths of my cave, let me post the Three Rules for Writing a Novel, by W. Somerset Maugham. Here they are:

I love this quote. I gave it to The Further Four yesterday and told them this truth: There are millions of writers in the world, and lots of them enjoy telling other writers how to write. But there are millions of ways to write well and what's important is to find the ways that work for you and to not be bogged down by something someone else tells you. All twelve-year-old girls should take this to heart in many, many ways.

So go. Be free. Write.

Where Do We Go From Here? The Hero's Journey, Part 2

When last we saw our hero, she was sitting grumpily around, waiting for us to get her on her journey. I don't know about you, but Cranky Rah's pretty sure we ought to hop to it. I mean, look at her:

The good thing is, our hero is kind of where she needs to be in the first place: at home or otherwise in a place she's always been.

If we're using the vocabulary of a journey (and we are because we're talking about the Hero's Journey), then the action of our story is about where our characters are going, what they do on their way and what they've gotten (or how they've changed) by the time they get there. We also call that plot.

Cranky Rah would like to repeat (because she can be tiresome that way) that our story doesn't have to be an actual journey. But even actual journeys include a metaphorical journey that leads to the hero learning and changing. The Wizard of Oz isn't, in the end, about Dorothy meeting some groovy friends, hanging out with a wizard and getting back home. It's about Dorothy learning a bigger truth: There's no place like home—even when it looks like Kansas.

All journeys start somewhere, usually at home. In the lexicon of the Hero's Journey, we call this the Ordinary World.

The Ordinary World

This is the hero's life at the beginning of the story. It shows readers who the hero is so they can appreciate how she changes. A lot of times, this part of the story gives us a hint that something's not right, that something's about to change.

What's the (Plot) Point?
This is your basic set-up. Show the hero interacting with her life. Is she satisfied or dissatisfied? What's important to her? 

In Cranky Rah's story, we might see her feeling a little itchy, a little uneasy, gazing longingly out of her cave and madly Googling airfare prices. That's just her at home, though. No one really wants to hang out there long, watching that. (And Cranky Rah certainly doesn't want the surveillance.)

So we have to get her the heck out of her cave. She has to experience The Call to Adventure.

The Call to Adventure

This is the action that thrusts the hero into her journey. There's a problem or mystery to be solved, a life to save, a wrong to right, a society to change. Whatever the action, it's upsetting. It's going to rock the hero's world and make her do something she doesn't want to do.

The Call to Adventure can be instigated by a lot of things: a death or injury; a kidnapping (either of someone the hero cares for or the hero herself); a need for revenge; a prophecy; a mysterious message; a move; a breakup—anything that forces the hero to act.

You know this bird, right?
You know where she's about to put her
head, if she can find some sand.

A lot of the time, the hero isn't all that into the idea of jumping in and saving the world (saving the world not exactly being a safe occupation). She might try to duck the Call and see if she can get away with just staying home, but that always leads to something bad—something that forces her to put her foot on that literal or figurative road.

What's the (Plot) Point?A lot of great scenes come out of the Call to Adventure. Show the event that makes the hero leave the Ordinary World. There's a lot of action here, and we learn how the hero behaves under pressure. 

Show the hero refusing to go, and then show us the bad thing that happens as a result. Fate is not going to leave that slacker hero alone. It wants her to get out there and get busy. Otherwise, we don't really have a story.

And Now What?

Now that she's been forced out of her comfort zone (The sun! The sun! It's so bright!), what happens to your hero? This is the meat of the journey, all those plot points that keep the story moving. Is this where you start ripping your hair out or gnashing your teeth because you can't figure out how to flesh out the plot? Don't. Your hair's already groovy, and your parents have spent a lot of money on those teeth. In our next and final post about the Hero's Journey, we'll talk about how to drive your hero forward.

Sheep? Heroes? It's all the same to Jack.

Where Do We Go From Here? The Hero's Journey, Part 1

Cranky Rah loves to get out of her cave if it means going on a journey. The Great Ocean Road in Australia, the tiny walled town of Rothenburg, Germany. The Rocky Mountains, the Okefenokee Swamp. The Highlands of Scotland, of course.

Maybe this is why I dig the Hero's Journey so much—and why, as The Three know, I can go on about it. When I do go on about something with The Three, I usually ply them with cocoa and treats (okay, they bring the treats; I just give them excuse to bake something chocolate). Since it appears I can't deliver cocoa through cyberspace (is that why there's chocolate on the floor under my desk, or was that just the Poet-Accountant eating ice cream at 6 a.m. again?), I'll break this into three posts. Today, we'll just tackle the question What the heck is this thing, the Hero's Journey?

You can read entire books about the Hero's Journey (I particularly like The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers by Christopher Vogler), but I broke it down a little for The Three. I also focused on the first half of the journey for them because the first thing The Three told me when we started getting together was that while they love making up characters and developing backstory, it's the plot that snags them—figuring out how to make the ideas they have happen in a way that makes sense, figuring out where those characters are going to go.

First, the backstory of the Hero's Journey: The mythologist Joseph Campbell studied myths from around the world and believed that the reason certain stories are repeated over and over in vastly different cultures is because they deal with universal questions: Who am I? Where did I come from? What is good and evil, and what should I do about it?

Not Godzilla,
but copyright free!

Most stories are, in essence, about a search: a girl searches for love or freedom or herself; a boy searches for the mother who abandoned him or to make a name for himself or to discover the antidote to a poison; a detective searches for a murderer; Japanese citizenry search for a way to escape Godzilla. This search is what we call the Hero's Journey, and you'll find it in The Odyssey, Shakespeare, Cinder, Agatha Christie, Shrek and The Hunger Games. Some books and movies are obvious journeys, like Star Wars, The Lightning Thief and The Lord of the Rings. Others don't involve a physical journey but are Hero's Journeys nonetheless, like Iron Man, Pride and Prejudice and Divergent. All very different stories, but all with similar characteristics.

Here's the Hero's Journey in a nutshell: A hero starts out in her ordinary world but soon ventures (or is dragged) into an unfamiliar world where she must accomplish a task. She encounters challenges and tests, and she confronts a villain or villains. In the end, she either succeeds at her task or doesn't, but she's grown, her outlook on the world has changed and life will never be the same again.

Don't be turned off by the words hero and villain. By hero, we mean the main character; the person the story's about; the person who has the most at stake and who will change the most by the end. There are lots of different types of heroes, including dark, troubled anti-heroes who are their own worst enemy and heroes who aren't particularly heroic. And by villain, we mean the character who's getting in the main character's face in some way; a villains doesn't always need to mean the main character harm.

Also, don't be turned off if you think this all sounds a lot like an adventure story. It's true that the Hero's Journey is easy to see in quests like Star Wars and The Wizard of Oz. If you read about the Hero's Journey a lot, you'll come across words like supernatural and fabulous forces and battle language like victory and power. But the Hero's Journey is just as relevant to stories that don't have a physical or mystical quest. The Hero's Journey is, at its root, a character's inner journey. Writers who are sitting around scratching our heads and wondering what's going to happen next can use the Hero's Journey as a guide for developing a strong plot and memorable characters.

Another kind of caveat,
the ungrammatical kind

Before we get into the ooey-gooey viscera of the Hero's Journey, there's one caveat (there's always a caveat): This is an art, not a science. The steps I'm going to outline are just pieces in a puzzle. Each one can be left out, twisted or put in a different order. It's up to you, after all: You're in charge. (Bwa-ha-ha!)

In the next post, we'll explore plot and how to get your character on her journey.