"But It's Fine the Way It Is . . . "

I’m leading a workshop about indie and traditional publishing at the Breathe Writers’ Conference this October. This is my second year being involved with the conference (sat on an authors’ panel last year) and I’m looking forward to it.

It’s also my wife’s second year leading a workshop. Last year, she spoke about finding the time and space to write (she also wrote a book on the topic, which you can buy here). This year, she’s delivering a talk she’s been working on for some time, on a topic about which she’s very passionate: editing your work. Seriously, that’s what she decided to speak on. Editing.

Now, I suppose that makes sense, considering that, in addition to having been called “[one] of the greatest up-and-coming fiction writers today” by the Saturday Evening Post, she has also worked in the publishing industry for more than a decade, in both editorial and marketing capacities. She loves putting words together, then moving them around, then losing some, then nixing the whole thing and starting over. That’s her idea of a swell time.

She also likes moving furniture around, so there’s that.

I, on the other hand, am the opposite. I like to find the best arrangement right off the bat and leave things be. That couch goes there, and it stays there. That semicolon goes there and I have no intention of moving it. If I didn’t want it there, I wouldn’t have pushed the little key with the semicolon on it. Suffice it to say, editing my writing is not among my favorite pastimes.

Let me just quickly acknowledge that different people work different ways here. Some writers do their best work when they just vomit everything out onto the page and then later sift through it for what’s good, rearrange it, etc., like that one scene in Columbiana with the flashdrive and the puke (which is probably a double-loser of a simile, in that it’s both really gross and also a reference to a movie that only like sixteen people ever saw). Others (people like me) like to work it all out internally, running through every idea, word, and phrase mentally (and, sometimes, orally and aurally, using a digital recorder) before putting anything to paper. And by paper, I of course mean this ten-year-old word processor.

Both methods have strengths and weaknesses, but the major weakness of my school is that we tend to convince ourselves that there is no need to edit. When you’ve lovingly, mentally caressed the words into exactly the right shape (note: we have left the “words as vomit” metaphor behind at this point), you are loathe to change that shape or—μὴ γένοιτο!—slash some words out of existence. And when someone else (say, my editor at HarperCollins) wants to get in there with the mallet and the scalpel, my first instinct is to defend with all necessary force. That’s step one: plant feet, raise battle axe, and shout This is Spartaaaaa! I’m only on my second time through this process, but I can already identify the rest of the steps:

• 2. Remember that I am contractually obligated to go through the editorial process and that everyone has do to it and that I’m not a beautiful-and-unique snowflake.
• 3. Bite the bullet and try to change just enough to appease the editor.
• 4. Realize that the book is getting better.
• 5. Go back through with the editor’s notes, with an actual open mind that these changes (the vast majority anyway) might improve the book.
• 6. Finish the back-and-forth with the editor and discover that the book is far better than the one I originally submitted.

I don’t want to move the couches around, but once they’ve been feng shuied to perfection, I do realize they look better and then I find myself ready to viciously defend the new configuration.

Here’s a couple photos to illustrate. They’re totally extraneous at this point, but they were what initially prompted me to write this post, so it seems a shame not to include them:

This is the south wall of my study. It has looked like this for almost a decade (see also: never moving things around). However, I recently acquired a bunch more books, necessitating more shelves (this little square was pretty much the only wall-space not covered in bookshelves).  I knew I’d need to make room for the coffee maker (and, heck, why not also get an espresso machine?), but the rest of the space would still more than accommodate all my new books. Naturally, I was loathe to mess with it, but when my wife started dropping hints about the stacks of books blocking access to her own new bookshelf at home, I finally jumped in and started the project.

Here’s what it looks like now. Upon surveying the completed project, my first thought was, "Wow! It really looked kind of cluttered and junky before, with all that stuff piled and stacked everywhere." I mean, it was fine the way it was and I was happy to look at it every day, but it’s much better now and I would definitely not click the UNDO button, if that were an option in real life.

So the point is: do yourself a favor. Try a little rearranging. Listen to your editor, your critique group, your beta-readers and just give it a try. You may find that you love it. I mean, not that you love editing. Editing is still the worst. But you may love where it gets you.

Hell Frozen Over?

Last week, my son and I went to see Frozen in the theater. I'd only seen the teaser trailer with the living snowman and the dog-like reindeer, so I had little idea what it was about, but it looked like fun. It turns out it's about a misunderstood, quirky princess who feels like life in the palace is keeping her back from truly expressing herself (Cf. every Disney movie ever).

You should stop reading here if you want to avoid spoilers, as I'm about to jump right to the climax of the film. The queen's magic power-slash-curse has frozen the whole kingdom in an eternal winter and accidentally frozen the heart of her sister, who is now about to die as a result. She's been told that only an act of true love can melt her frozen heart and save her life.

Of course, the guy she thought she was in love with is really pretty evil and the "fixer-upper" guy she's been adventuring with (named Kristoff) is clearly her true love after all. The snow clears just long enough for them to see each other, and they are closing in for the kiss.

That's when my pastor-brain clicked: what a great sermon illustration this would be! Not unlike The Matrix when the kiss of Trinity brought The One back after he sacrificed himself, this would be a picture of how Christ (duh, Kristoff as Christ a la The Truman Show) saves us from the terminal ice in our hearts, etc., etc.  But then Princess Anna saw her sister about to be killed by the Surprise Bad Guy and she veered off course, thrusting herself in the path of the sword, turning to ice just in time to stop the blade and save her sister. The sword shattered (for some reason), and my pastor-brain started trying to spin this in a way that would save the potential sermon illustration.

Before it could, though, Anna turned back into flesh and bone, saved by her own act of love, rather than the love of Christ(off).  Then the whole eternal winter (see "curse of sin," a la The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe) thawed and everyone was saved. What a shame: another humanist message encrypted in a children's show, designed to teach kids that the Answer lies within themselves. It sucked that it turned out to be a borderline-satanic story because the music was amazing, the story compelling (by Disney standards), and the jokes side-splitting. Oh well; file it under "anti-Christian propaganda" with most everything else. Right?

My brain started filling in the details: the Ice Queen had created life (at least two sentient snow creatures) and we had seen her holding an orb and scepter, like many Gods (including Christ) have been portrayed, and her father wore a Maltese cross with a dove on it. All of this points toward: you don't need Jesus; you can save yourself. In fact, hadn't she kind of saved God? Now I was getting mad.

This all happened inside my head in less than a second. It doesn't take any time or thought because the neural pathways have been well-worn by a lifetime of similar paranoid thought all around me in the Church: from back-masking records in the eighties to sounding the alarm re: Harry Potter and such more recently. Everything that's not explicitly Christian in message is fair game to be called out as the very opposite.

But WHY? This is exactly the kind of revisionist reader hermeneutic the Church has been railing against in recent years; so why do we selectively reinforce it? Because here's the thing: much like AC/DC never stood for "Against Christ, Devil's Children" (in fact, the name came from the side of a sewing machine!), Kristoff was not named such in order to be a Christ figure, but as an homage to Hans Christian Anderson, who wrote The Snow Queen (along with Characters Hans and Anna). I was importing the very stuff that was raising my ire.

It would be just as easy to go in the other direction: Ilsa, the princess, has been cursed from birth with a dreadful disease that turns everything to ice. After fighting it for most of her life, she gives in to it and embraces it as her identity (singing, "I can't hold it in any more...no right, no wrong, no rules for me...") only to find that this makes everything a million times worse. She is about to perish when she is saved by an act of self-sacrifice, followed by a resurrection. Well, from that angle, this sounds like a downright Christian story!

But it's neither. How about we just let stories be what they are, say what they want to say, and entertain us? If a story is well-told, it glorifies God who gives us the gift to write, read, and appreciate story. And unless it blatantly promotes sin or a false Gospel, we can probably enjoy it for what it is with profit. Rarely does children's fare stray beyond the odd fart joke and, honestly, the intentionally anti-religion stuff (like The Golden Compass, alt title: The World's Least Original Book/Movie) is so rare at this point that we can probably dial back the conspiracy-minded paranoia.

If you haven't seen Frozen, you should go see it soon, even though I already gave away the ending. We braved the epic snowpocalypse after church today and the whole family enjoyed it, this time in 3D! It was even better the second time. I'm glad I didn't let my pastor-brain run out of control on me and taint a really great story, even though we had to deal with a three-foot snow drift over the car upon exiting the theater. Worth it.

The cold never bothered me anyway.



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