Quantum Storytelling

The editing process has left me cursing my Minnesotan origins. Anyone who has seen Fargo is witness to the lingual extremes of the region. While the film’s fun-poking at dialect is exaggerated to be sure, there is a nugget of truth in the humor.

Most people who have seen Fargo and find out I’m from Minnesota sometimes comment that I don’t share the accent of so many northerners. While my speech sounds neutral, my writing bears all the bad habits of Minnesotans. This includes weak modifiers and qualifiers–as many as you can jam into a sentence. Minnesotan English is awful in its passive-aggressive nature.

“Well, I really sorta think we oughta try thinkin to try goin about doing that thing, kinda, ya know?”

Why use a few words when you can sorta-kinda-maybe-think-about-tryin’ to use 500?

As I go about editing my novel, I feel cursed to have been born in Minnesota. All the native habits are there. Weak modifiers, superflous nouns and pronouns, you name it.

Any way you can pad, fluff, fatten, and otherwise kill good writing–Minnesotans would be the experts.

Curse thee, Minnesota!

Novelists are encouraged by the format to ramble. They’re encouraged to info-dump. They’re encouraged to go off inside of a character’s head on thought tangents that the reader probably doesn’t care about.

Why? Because novels are fat and require a lot of pages.

I got the Sin City special edition for Xmas, and I’ve been admiring how clean the production was by working from a graphic novel. Both the graphic novel and the movie are squeaky clean–there isn’t anything more than needed to tell the story.

Miller did go off into Marv’s thoughts for a bit, but it’s forgiveable because it’s told in First Person by Marv himself and used to demonstrate his mental instabilities. And there’s way less of it than there would be in any novel.

Why did I write a novel? I should have written a script, comic book, or graphic novel. When I get done slashing my first draft to ribbons that’s all I’m going to have left anyway. Pure action and dialogue are the only things that will be left.

Novels are overrated.

Editing on Cameron Fields & the Thieves of Time has begun!

And wow, do I ever hate what I’ve written. Taking a red marker to every single page. It’s a strange mixture of corrective fun and self-hatred. I still write WAY too passively. Action! Verbs! These things are my friend. I also explain too much. It’s almost painful to read.

I’m trying to keep my head wrapped around everything I need to do. The reason this is difficult is because there are several areas, or layers, that I need address.

Ideas: Private Eye stuff, surveillance, more cool happenings with my McGuffin.

Sectional rewrites; Entire portions that are changed or re-inserted in entirely different, slicker, cooler ways.

Language: grammer, writing itself, etc.

That list is in order for obvious reasons. I don’t want to fix language or grammar on sections that are going to be rewritten. So I’ve got to keep all the layers and contexts of editing in mind.

I’m also reading books on private investigation, special forces, C.I.A., all that great stuff and trying to incorporate cool things wherever I can.

So where writing the story was total fly-by-seat-of-pants chaos, editing is a different kind of chaos. A chaos formed out of several layers of organization mixing with one another. In that sense, it’s not really chaos, but a dense web of narrative information.

When my head hurts, maybe it’s time for mind-mapping?