• Home
  • Books
  • Bio
  • Blog
  • Links
  • Events
  • Contact
Katie Van Ark
Passion on the page

On Procrastination & Revision

2/25/2014

3 Comments

 
Picture
Tonight I'm procrastinating. I am writing, so it's okay, right? Except I'm not writing what I'm supposed to be writing.

I excel at procrastination and, in a masochistic sort of way, enjoy deadlines. Particularly those that hit right on the sweet spot of the blade, that give me the semblance of time for procrastination. They're a great way to get my whole house cleaned, the laundry done, and all the errands run as I engage time in a game of chicken. Sometimes I even get to organize my closet.

I should be working on my next critical essay for Vermont, which I'd hoped to post tonight. I've been re-reading Eleanor & Park, my assignment an examination of how Rainbow Rowell diffuses tension. Love-love-love this book and would just like to say that Rowell is a genius. This is going to be a great essay, but not tonight. Why? I've run into something with which, like many authors, I have a love-hate relationship, that dreaded r-word: revision.

For me revision is like labor, as in the childbirth kind. Something awesome is coming – after painful, hard work. I've written a pile of notes on Eleanor & Park but the essay is definitely at the “shitty first draft” stage. I'm through that first easy stage of labor and things are starting to get uncomfortable. I see tired on the horizon. I'm unsure of exactly what needs to happen when and how it will all sort out. And I can see the full-on hair-grabbing frustration stage coming, the “I swear I am never going to write again, I can't do this” stage. Tonight I'm too tired to push through. I want an epidural.

My girls came too fast for me to ever experience this medical miracle and for those who'd like to stick me right now, almost giving birth in an elevator is a whole different kind of scary you can be glad you never experienced. But for writing, I like to think of feedback as the best way to ease revision pains. Feedback provides a sense of direction, a set of steps to tick off. It's a countdown through the contraction, at least until the next wave of revising.

I don't get an epidural or feedback tonight, so I'm settling for some laughter about revising. I discovered Shannon Renee's tumblr today: http://writingelements.tumblr.com/. (Okay, yeah, sometimes I avoid cleaning house and use the Internet to procrastinate. Especially convenient when I've gotten to the stage where I really do need to sit down at the computer.) I love the picture of Kermit, captioned “My face when I read my old writing.”

For kicks and giggles, I thought I'd post an excerpt from my original draft of Pairing Up, which went through over twenty revisions before its appearance on Swoon Reads. (For YA/NA authors looking for feedback, check out the site. With its five heart rating and comment system, it's like getting your Amazon reviews before you hit Amazon – when you can still revise and do something about them! If your work is already really polished, the editors may pick you for their next list. Unlike the slush pile, though, you can get feedback from other writers and readers on the site, then revise and submit again.) Here's how Pairing Up began in my original draft:

Madelyn Spier smiled at the photograph hanging on the Smiths’ refrigerator. She never tired of looking at it, even though she had an identical copy on the bulletin board in her bedroom, even though she could close her eyes and picture every detail. The two preschoolers in the picture laughed back at her as they marched hand in hand down the ice, outfitted in a rainbow of winter apparel. It might have been a study of contrasts: the little girl petite and brunette, the boy tall and blond, the freshly resurfaced ice against the boards all dirty and scuffed by hockey pucks. The children’s expressions, though, were exactly the same. This, they seemed to say, is true happiness. She agreed.

Twelve years later and she loved the ice every bit as much as she had on that first outing. There was nothing else quite like the sensation of speeding down a pristine sheet of ice, of letting everything go and soaring into the air. Of finding the perfect center in a spin and feeling as though you could circle forever. She loved the feeling of a wind she’d created in her hair, the certainty of her blades beneath her, even the smell of the ice. With up to seventeen hours of practice a week, fifty-two weeks in a year, and twelve years of skating, Maddy had spent over ten thousand hours honing her craft. And she still couldn’t wait for the chance to do it again. “Shake a leg, Gabe,” she called. “We’re going to be late!”

Wow. I just read that over again and I know my face looks way worse than Kermit's face on Shannon Renee's site. Can anyone say back story dump? And I did not write “shake a leg,” did I? I'll also confess that in the beginning the characters weren't named Maddy and Gabe, either. Their original names are so embarrassing I'm not even ready to share them at this point. (Maybe one day I'll do a quiz to see if anyone can guess them. Here's a clue: a reader asked me if I'd gotten them from The Music Man. Ooh, definitely feel a quiz coming on. Check back, because I've been dying to share the Something Real love and I've got a copy of Heather Demetrios's new novel to give away...)

If you haven't read Pairing Up yet, check out what it's become here. Revision: it's worth it. Now back to revising that essay. Tomorrow. :-)

3 Comments

Exclusive Peek at Figure Skating Past of YA Author Heather Demetrios

2/1/2014

1 Comment

 
Picture
I had the pleasure of meeting Heather Demetrios during my residency at Vermont College of Fine Arts, where she helped me with revisions on my work-in-progress, DANCE WITH ME. When she returned my manuscript, she confessed that she “used to be a figure skater so this was super fun to read!”

Heather's web site has a list of ten interesting things she might tell you if she met you at a party, including that her mom was struck by lightning when she was pregnant with her, but here we're getting an exclusive peek at her figure skating past:

“I skated with the LA FSA when I was in elementary school and part of junior high. When I stopped skating, I had landed my double flip. (But only once! The rest of the time I landed everywhere BUT my feet.) I started skating late - when I was ten years old or thereabouts. Maybe 11. Ultimately, I didn't really skate for years and years, but the time I did was very intensive (those 5:30 a.m. practices, etc.). I was struggling to master my jumps and was about to transition into ice dancing when I had to stop skating due to my family's financial situation. Still, I love it to this day and miss being on the ice. My favorite move was my best attempt at a Nancy Kerrigan Spiral and I loved doing sit spins. I HATED the axel, but loved loop jumps. My favorite memory is of my mom sewing sequins onto a costume while watching me practice. She was a single mom and it meant so much to me that she was making so many sacrifices for my skating. She sat in the cold and sewed so she could support me while I was practicing. It's one of my favorite memories of my mom, period.”

Picture
SOMETHING REAL, Heather's debut novel, isn't about figure skating but skaters will emphasize with the problems faced by main character Bonnie Baker. A skater's falls may be broadcast live and replayed, but Bonnie's whole life has been on TV. When her family's reality TV show, Baker's Dozen, is canceled, Bonnie gets a chance for real friends and maybe even a boyfriend. Then she finds out that her family is going back on the air. SOMETHING REAL hits the shelves on February 4 and is available for pre-order on Amazon right now. For more about the novel as well as Heather's upcoming works, visit Heather online at http://www.heatherdemetrios.com/. You can also follow her on Twitter: @HDemetrios

1 Comment

    Reflections on Writing

    Picture
    I love few things better than a bottomless to-read list of books and firmly believe the world has room for all the stories we want to share. This blog is intended to provide resources and spark discussion about improving writing. Opinions are my own and not intended to discredit anyone else's work, only to open conversation. Thanks for reading!

    Archives

    August 2022
    July 2022
    March 2020
    January 2018
    July 2017
    April 2017
    August 2016
    October 2015
    September 2015
    April 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014

    Categories

    All
    Blog Hop
    Character
    Craft
    Craft Analysis
    Description
    Donald Maass
    Fantasy
    Figure Skating Championships
    Heather Demetrios
    Interview
    Jennifer Comeaux
    Jenny Elliott
    LGBT
    NaNoWriMo
    Premise
    Presentation Skills
    Rainbow Rowell
    Setting
    Skating
    Stakes
    Voice
    What To Read This Weekend
    World Building
    World-building
    Writing
    YA

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly
Photos used under Creative Commons from diongillard, BLMOregon, ebbandflowphotography, French Tart, photographerglen, York College ISLGP, apalca, VinothChandar, 4Neus, ♔ Georgie R, anokarina, martinak15, photosteve101, revjett, Skley, Peter Werkman (www.peterwerkman.nl), Rusty Darbonne, JoshArdle Photography, ashraful kadir, Guillaume Paumier, ChrisL_AK, ryantron., koadmunkee, Jim Larrison, JMR_Photography, ulazarosa, jfingas, Hamed Saber, kyz