More often than not, when I rewrite these posts, they get
longer. My intention is succinctity, but
I have rarely succeeded. More often, I
shoot for seven hundred and fifty words, and it ends up a thousand.
Back up a second! You rewrite these posts?
Yes, Smart Guy. Two
or three times. Sometimes, more.
Imagine that. And they seem so natural and spontaneous.
That’s how they’re meant to appear. In reality, I agonize over every word.
So you’re saying, what
we get to read, there were worse versions of that?
May we move on, please?
Sure. Unless you want to go back and change “May we
move on?” to “May we proceed forward?”
Knock it off! I don’t
always rewrite “sideways” (replacing a word or a turn of phrase with something different
but not necessarily better.) I revise mostly
for the sake of clarity. When I read
over what I have written, I frequently detect conspicuous gaps in the storytelling
narrative.
A substantial amount of my rewriting involves filling in those gaps, so the writing flows more smoothly and the overall piece makes coherent sense. No holes in the logic. No lapses in continuity. (This process inevitably makes the posts longer.)
A substantial amount of my rewriting involves filling in those gaps, so the writing flows more smoothly and the overall piece makes coherent sense. No holes in the logic. No lapses in continuity. (This process inevitably makes the posts longer.)
And herein, I arrive at my point.
And not a moment too
soon.
Okay, I’m ditching you, Italics
Man. From here on, I work alone.
Can’t take it, huh?
I am generally better off without hearing from the less
helpful elements of my brain. Take the
rest of the post off.
I’ll be back.
Not today. Anyway,
I’ve been thinking about this filling in of the logical and storytelling
gaps. And I wonder if engaging in that
meticulous process is not part at
least of what exposes me as an “over the hill” practitioner.
I shall not revisit the much remarked-upon other elements that consign me to the
“once ready for ‘Prime Time’ but not anymore” repository – my lack of fluency
in current cultural referentiality, and my near-Victorian reticence concerning
matters below the anatomical Mason-Dixon Line, to name two biggies.
Back in the seventies, before being elevated to iconic
status, Lorne Michaels would regale me with extended dissertations on the
subject of how self-limitingly conventional I was. (And it wasn’t just him. A magazine journalist covering the Lily
Tomlin Special – my first job ever in Hollywood – labeled me a “young hack.” My
first job! And he didn’t even know me. What, is there “hack” written on my
face? “Oh, yeah. Nothing original’s coming from this guy.”)
Exemplifying his point that the times had changed and not every
hole needed to be filled in because the more media-savvy contemporary audience
accepted the omissions as “givens”, Lorne explained the difference between how
a movie scene might once have been shot, and how the same scene would be shot
today. (Today, being 1974. But ostensibly holding true to an even
greater degree in 2013.) I shall quote
him, though these are unlikely his exact words:
“In old movies, a car pulls up to a house, the driver gets
out, he walks up to the front door, he rings the bell, he waits, and somebody
answers the door. Today, the car pulls
up – CUT TO: – someone’s answering the door.
Everything’s compressed. You
don’t need the intervening steps,
because they are naturally understood.”
As with filming, so with writing. Today’s writers conventionally leave things
out. And if I don’t, I run the risk of
telling my readers what they already know, boring the heck out of them with the
unnecessary inclusions, and revealing myself as transparently behind the
communicational curve.
Read: “Old.”
Remember when I wrote about that song lyric from “It’s A
Wonderful World”, where they say about babies, “They’ll learn much more than you’ll ever know”? Well, this is, “They’ll think much faster than you’ll ever hope to.”
My style is to determine what’s left out, and make sure it’s
included. The question is, “Left out for
who?”, the answer, since I’m making
the decisions inevitably being, “Left out for me.” The thing is, with everything speeded up, what
I’m doing can very easily feel slow.
Can I alter my approach?
I’m pretty sure I can’t, being unable to think like anyone but myself. My only option is to produce the best version
of “slow” writing and filling in the spaces that I know how to do, and hope
somebody appreciates it.
And now, I’m going to read this over and see what I left
out.
Ledger: First Draft – 702 words. Second Draft – 729 words. Third Draft – 765 words.
Not bad.
Unless it should really
have been 350 words.
I wonder if "You don’t need the intervening steps, because they are naturally understood" is a convenient excuse for having to compress things due to more/longer commercial breaks?
ReplyDeleteA half hour show used to run about 25 minutes and now they're down to around 20. So, with 5 less minutes, you have to leave something out.