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How Carving a Pumpkin Can Change Your Life

05 Wednesday Oct 2016

Posted by Nancy Bach in The Writing Journey

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artistic, critic, Halloween, masterpiece, pumpkin, revising, revision, stories, Writing

Yes, it’s true.  Carving a pumpkin can truly change your life.  Especially if you’re using a really sharp knife and it slips…

But seriously.  I spent some rather unproductive time last night attempting to create a pumpkin masterpiece.  Now, we ALL know I have no artistic ability whatsoever.  I can draw neither a straight nor curvy line, cannot paint, cannot sculpt, and am not in any other way artsy or craftsy.  I wasn’t only a pariah in gym class… art class was my second least favorite subject.

And yet, as Halloween is my favorite holiday, each year I desire to create that perfect, most sincere Jack-O-Lantern.  In my mind, I am imagining this:

awesome-jack-o-lantern

And each year, I pretty much end up with something like this.

ugly-jack-o-lantern

This year, I finally figured out how it happens.  It’s all about revision.  Yes, there, I said it.  A dirty little writer word.  See, what happens is that I keep feeling unsatisfied, so I keep trimming and deleting and refining and modifying, until… well, it’s like cutting your own bangs, isn’t it?  You want them to be even, but you’re not a professional stylist, so you keep making tiny adjustments when you find they’re not quite right on that one side and then you look in the mirror and you find you’ve got this:

bad-bangs

Yeah.  Stories, bangs, pumpkins, it’s all the same.  And it doesn’t stop there.  For me, anyway, since nothing is ever perfect, and I’m one of those people who need to fix/manage/control my world, I try to tweak everything.  Constantly.  Like, to death.

So I’m trying to teach an old dog a new trick.  Maybe, just maybe, my crappy pumpkin carving, while still probably crappy, is okay.  Maybe the heart and soul that I put into it will trump my relatively paltry skill at carving.  Maybe, by practicing pumpkin carving every day in the weeks running up to Halloween I’ll improve my skill.  Or maybe, just maybe, I need to learn to let what I create be whatever it is and be satisfied with it, knowing that I am my own worst critic and that it probably isn’t anywhere near as bad as I think it is.  (Although in the case of pumpkins, I might have to accept reality… )

I mean, yes, we always want to improve and that’s not a bad thing.  But if we’ve tried our best, constant cutting and trimming and correcting may just end up destroying what we set out to create.  Not just in art, not just in writing, not just in pumpkin carving, but in everything.

So this year, I’m going to go buy another pumpkin.  And I’m going to carve it the best I am currently able.  I’ll even post pictures.  It might not be a masterpiece, but I guarantee it will be sincere enough to make the Great Pumpkin happy.  And for once, this year, I will be too!

Illegitimi non carborundum!

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Well, the way it started… And then… But meanwhile… So finally…

29 Sunday Jun 2014

Posted by Nancy Bach in Uncategorized

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

conjunctions, editing, fiction writing, nansampson, nansampsonauthor, novel writing, revising, revision, Writing

Image

I’m finally getting through the last of my beta comments on my soon to be published mystery novel.  It has been so wonderful at the same time it’s been unbelievably hard.  Yet, the final set of comments were quite the most instructive.  The first few sets, while really incredibly valuable, mostly addressed spelling, grammar and those ‘well, duh’ spots, where I lost the plot, or made little (or not so little) mistakes.  All important stuff that I could not have lived without.  The final beta reader, however, honed in on my ‘bad writer habits’.  Trust me, when you’re confronted with those nasty things, there is a moment where you think, ‘oh dear heavens, I totally suck’.

After that initial reaction, though, you become eternally grateful to that beta reader for teaching you an invaluable lesson.

What, you may ask, are my nasty little bad writer habits? The biggest one is beginning sentences (sometimes five and six a page) with a conjunction.  Page after page after page.  You know those words.  And.  But.  Well.  So.  I even caught myself doing it in this post and had to go back through it and change them all (See, SW? I’m making progress!). 

Then there are the deadly “ings” – the overuse of “ing” words.  Dozens of those to plow through.  Or more.  I’m too scared to count them right now.

The prospect of going through every page in my WIP to find them and, in most cases, fix them, is daunting indeed.  Makes me want to buy a ginormous (jeez, that word made it through spell check… when did that become a real word?) bag of cheesy popcorn and eat the whole thing in one sitting. GAH!!!!!!!

I gave myself today off.  Tomorrow, however, is another day.  I will be using my trusty word processor’s “find” function to its maximum capacity – burning through the literary equivalent of dilithium crystals.  I hope the word engines can take it.  I may even have to call Scotty in Engineering for ‘more power’!  (Sorry, yes, I know, I had to reach for that one.)

What are your bad writer habits?  Is there a word or set of words you have to excise from your writing during revision?  Or are you the sort who can catch them as you write?  I’d love to hear about your bad writer habits – I’m sure I can learn from them.  Plus, it serves the purpose of making me feel not quite so incompetent!

Illegitimi non carborundum!

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