Paas
Growing up, all the major holidays were dominated by Slavic customs and food. I could tell you about gobs of honey being anointed on my forehead every Christmas Eve . . . and the back-breaking labor that goes into making 80 dozen pirogis from scratch. But instead . . . I'm going to talk about eggs.
I've known my mom my whole life, but still she surprises me once in a while. She is the least sentimental person I know and it's like pulling teeth to get her to reminisce. My father, on the other hand, will talk about the past for hours. But one day last Christmas she proceeded to tell Baby Girl about making Ukrainian eggs by hand. With beet juice. And needles. And hot wax. And it taking forever. DAYS. For each beautiful handmade egg. DAYS! I never knew my mom had this skillset. Probably because she has no intention of ever going through the process again. She knew if she told me, I would BEG her to teach my kids. I still may this Christmas.
Now, when my kids do Easter eggs, we're dropping them in Paas. We might slap some crayon on them before dropping them in. But it's Paas, folks. And they don't end up looking like THIS. (Wait for them to become illustrated! Cool site set-up.)
So it is with books. There are no shortcuts. I think one of the signs of a mature writer is an absolute gut-level understanding that there are zero shortcuts to writing a book. I can't tell you how many new writers I've encountered over the years who typed "THE END" to a first draft and sent queries to agents the next day. It doesn't work that way.
There are no shortcuts. No ways around the painstaking process. No class you take, no workshop, nothing but doing it, laboring over it, layering it with richness. There is no Paas for novels.
Thoughts?
25 comments:
So true. And when you're writing on spec, there's no guarantee that your manuscript will ever collect anything but dust.
This is a good post for me today. At times I imagine authors just sitting down, writing a book from start to finish, in a painless, smooth process. What's wrong with me that I am in such agony with revisions for months?
We love dying eggs so much that sometimes I save a box of Paas and do it again in the fall. Wow--that your mom can creat Ukranian eggs is amazing. My mom knows how to fly-fish. (Not quite as amazing--but I had no idea.)
"Layering it with richness"--this is how I am going to think of my revisions from here on out.
Absolutely true. And periodically someone will say, "Oh, their book is so formula." Well, maybe so, but I'll tell you what. Even knowing your book's "formula" doesn't make it any easier to write.
Jude:
Absolutely.
E
Heather:
Having seen A River Runs Through It, that's one of the things I've always wanted to learn how to do.
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Mark:
Absolutely. It's still written one word at a time.
E
I can't imagine sending a letter out the day after I finish my first draft. I hardly get any sleep as it is.
Writing may not be easy, but at least I know I've done a good job at the end of the day. If I took shortcuts I could never live with myself.
I was cleaning out the attic yesterday and ran across my first manuscript. It certainly wasn't publishable. I don't think I even queried it. What surprised me was how revealing it was of myself and more importantly how much I've forgotten about what it means to be twenty and only a few year past childhood hurts.
If you want to compare it to Paas then let's just say I dropped the egg in the dye cup and opps, it wasn't boiled.
JT:
Gold stars for you! ;-)
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Richmond:
I think sometimes the longer you write, the easier it is to lose autobiographical elements and have it be less about what we really KNOW.
E
So true. I'm convinced a hormone like endorphins are pumped into a writer during the first draft. You start to believe writing has gotten somewhat easier.
And then it's time to edit.
There is no such cut to making your book whole. I've tried all the checklists and tried even harder to stick with them. Sometimes I need to stop everything and iron out a scene. I need to delete and rewrite pages or paragraphs that bother me.
Nope, no Paas.
I can't tell you how many new writers I've encountered over the years who typed "THE END" to a first draft and sent queries to agents the next day. It doesn't work that way.
It was supposed to work for me! I was supposed to be THE EXCEPTION.
Weren't we all?
I love this comparison. When my children and I colored eggs, each of us started the process devoted to artistic greatness. We drew, painted, mixed colors, dipped and double dipped that first egg. We'd get stripes, plaids, --real designer eggs. The second and third eggs usually were copies of what someone else at the table had done. By the fourth egg, the boys merely sloshed eggs through one color, and after six or so, the boys were gone, bored, and saying "You finish." My daughter, however, painstakingly created art. She never quit, even if her design didn't please her, she just moved to the next egg and tried again until she had a dozen masterpieces.
What your post made me realize is that the true artist, the true writer, is always willing to put in the work, sacrifice the time, push through the less than perfect, to produce one masterpiece.
Melissa:
So true that the process, to me, can't involve ticking things off a list.
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Stephen:
Of course you're the exception to every rule. ;-)
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LOL, at first I thought that was a typo and you meant PASS. Now I know.
I bet there's a market for paint-by-number books. We should look into that.
Oh wait. Mad Libs.
Beth:
I have one child very much like that.
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Melanie:
LOL! I remember those being the hits of slumber parties.
E
Beautiful eggs! Wow! That would be something to see done.
I keep pounding away at the same draft until it's completely finished. I will sometimes take each scene and paste it into Super Notecard so I can see the big picture and get a new perspective, and I re-work from the beginning nearly every day, but when it's done, it's done. And if it's not completely done and finished, then when (and why? and where?) would I up and stop and just say "I'm done with my first draft! On to my second!" No one has been able to explain that to me, LOL.
There was one novella, though, that I threw away the entire thing, 75% done, and wrote a new draft. You could almost call that a second draft, but technically, I hadn't finished the first one, so the second would have been my first finished draft... you see my problem.
You are Paas-itively right, lol. Sorry. Couldn't resist.
Like the fitness gurus say, "No pain, no gain," and what painstaking measures it takes just to feel your story finally fits the idea you started out with.
I've found that anything beautiful takes time. Step by step, little by little. Books are beautiful to me. And they almost always start out as ugly ducklings. But you can't push the duckling out into the world, it first has to grow and be groomed.
Natasha:
My second attempt is halfway done and languishes on an old FLOPPY disk somewhere.
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kath:
Yeah . . . stories have a strange way of morphing.
nadine:
Love that analogy. May we all end up with swans.
E
Paas for novels? Hm. Paas for novels. My brain is insisting on working that one over and seeing what spits out. Paas for novels...
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