Interviewer: How much rewriting do you do?
Hemingway: It depends. I rewrote the ending of Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.
Interviewer: Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you?
Hemingway: Getting the words right.
—Ernest Hemingway, “The Art of Fiction,” The Paris Review Interview, 1956

When asked, as I sometimes am, for “writing advise,” I usually lead with these trite bits of wisdom:

1. Write!

2. Don’t be afraid to turn out a bad first draft, because

3. Writing is actually a process of rewriting.

The first is self-explanatory. Don’t just think about writing or talk about it. Do it! The only way to learn how to write is by the doing, and the only way to do it is to do it, re-do it, then do it again and again until, as the esteemed Mr. Hemingway said, you get the words right. The first draft is the blueprint. The rewriting is the fine, detail carpentry work, if I may get all This Old House on you.

While it was me who suggested this month’s Crazy 8 blog topic–What work of yours would you go back and rewrite if you could?–I realized when I sat down to write my piece on the subject it was a case of having hoisted myself on my own petard. Because the answer is, honestly, everything. Whether it’s something I had written at the start of my publishing career in 1975 or the story I finished last week, I would, if given the opportunity, rewrite every single damned thing I’ve ever published. Of course that’s not possible, certainly not for the 1000 or so comic book stories I’ve written, or for most of the prose, fiction and non-fiction alike, that I’ve done. Most of it is in print and out of my creative control besides, having been written as “work made for hire,” meaning it’s owned and technically “authored” by the publishers who paid me to do the work in the first place.

“I have rewritten–often several times–every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.”
—Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory, Random House, 1966

But re-reading some of my output, is if not painful, at least an effort. I often describe myself as a “retail writer,” a pen for hire. I turn out stories by the word count or the number of pages, usually on a very specific deadline, and get paid accordingly. Sometimes there’s time to rewrite; more often than not, there isn’t. The picture that heads up this post is of the bookcase where I keep what I’ve written. Even taking into account that there’s almost an entire shelf of reprints of other things on the rest of the shelves, and that I didn’t write every story in every comic book or anthology, that still represents a buttload of words. As da Vinci is supposed to have said, “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” If a writer didn’t “abandon,” to whatever degree of satisfaction, any single work, they would never get to the next one.

“I would write a book, or a short story, at least three times–once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say. Somewhere I put it this way: first drafts are for learning what one’s fiction wants him to say. Revision works with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to reform it. Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.”
—Bernard Malamud, “Long Work, Short Life,” quoted in The Magic Worlds of Bernard Malamud, by Evelyn Gross Avery, SUNY Press, 2001

Which isn’t to say I’m embarrassed by these works, whether written forty years or forty days ago. I like to think I did the best I could with what I knew and the skill level I possessed at the time I wrote them. While some of the writing or ideas may make me cringe, there’s always something in it–a sentence here or there, a random chapter, a well-realized character or bit of business–that I can point to that makes it tolerable.

That being said, if I had to choose one work that I would love to have a second crack at, it would have to the 1980 novel Murdermoon featuring Spider-Man and the Hulk, the eleventh (and final) entry in Pocket Books’ Marvel Novel Series. I had written an earlier novel in the series (Spider-Man in Crime Campaign) which, considering my age and that it was the first novel I’d ever done, was an at least readable 50,000 words of pulp fiction. Murdermoon, on the other hand, doesn’t stand up under any criteria. Remember my second piece of advice above (Don’t be afraid to turn out a bad first draft)? Well, Murdermoon was certainly that…unfortunately, given the project’s tight deadline, it was also the only draft. Nowadays, thanks to computers, rewriting and revisions are easily done on the fly; before I start a day’s writing, I revisit the previous day or two’s output and do my revisions as I go along, then do a last and thorough rewrite/revision on the completed piece after I’ve typed “the end.”

But Murdermoon was written in the age of the typewriter and what little rewriting I could do was done in pencil on that first and only draft of the manuscript. There simply wasn’t time to run it through the typewritten a second time and the result shows it. The story meanders, the plot is barely coherent, and the prose even more clunky than was my wont as a twenty-five year old writer. Len Wein, one of the book’s editors along with Marv Wolfman, did single out one chapter, set in a small town where Bruce (the Hulk) Banner wakes up and thinks about perhaps settling, praising it for its Ray Bradbury-ish vibe. To this day, I think Len was being extraordinarily kind.

“I’m all for the scissors. I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.
—Truman Capote in Conversations With Capote, by Lawrence Grobel, New American Library, 1985

Murdermoon is more than half my lifetime in the past and it is and will always be what it is. And the truth is, even if I had a reason to rewrite it, it would still never be all that I want it to be. Someone asked me recently what the hardest part of writing was. I answered that it was making the words sound as good on paper as they did in my head.

I’m currently revising a collection of short stories written since the mid-90s that I plan to bring out through Crazy 8 Press in the near future, my opportunity to rewrite, update, and make better than when they were first published. Of course, every time I look at them, even those I’d already gone over again (and again) I find something else to change and hopefully improve. Pretty soon, I’ll abandon them to publication and move on to the next piece that I’ll eventually be forced to let loose in the world, ready or not.

Like this essay. Another couple of lines and the first draft will be done. Then I’ll put it aside for a bit before returning to it for the second (and third and so on) round until, even though it’s not exactly right because it never can be, I’ll post it and regretfully move on. I know the right words are out there. I just have to keep searching until I find them.

I don’t believe in “writer’s block.” Sure, there are times a writer doesn’t want to write or isn’t happy with what they’re writing or is simply distracted by life from getting the writing done. But it’s been my experience that if you listen to that bit of your brain that tells you, for whatever reason, that right now isn’t the time to be trying to squeeze words out of it onto the page, you’ll be a much happier and, ultimately, more productive writer. If it ain’t coming to you, stop, get up, walk away, and don’t think about it. Take a walk, read a book, go see a movie, browse internet porn, watch some episodes of Father Knows Best (well…he did!)–do anything except try and force yourself to write. Odds are, when you come back to it a few hours later or the next day, you’ll be just fine and the words will, if not flow, at least come without all the angst and teeth gnashing.

Your mileage, as the kids say today, may vary.

In fact, in the case of my Crazy 8 Press novel The Same Old Story, my own mileage varied somewhat from the “few hours later or the next day” average. By several years.

It all started more than fifteen years ago, sparked by stories I had heard over the years of a, shall we say, bit of financial hanky-panky involving a certain editor at a particular comic book company. It was, not to give away too much of the story, an ingenious bit of bookkeeping legerdemain that allowed said certain editor to repeatedly bill his employer and get paid for the same stories, over and over again, without ever having to worry about having to produce those stories for publication. There’s a mystery novel in that, I thought; I just had to wait for it to reveal itself to me.

Unless you’re a comic book fan like me (and most of the rest of the Crazy 8 crew for that matter), you’ve probably never heard of Joe Maneely or Robert Kanigher. Maneely was an artist known mainly for his work at Marvel Comics from 1949 until the time of his death in 1958, when he accidentally fell between the cars of a moving commuter train on his way home to New Jersey from New York. Kanigher was a writer, predominantly for DC Comics, beginning in 1945 and going on to become one of the industry’s most prolific scripters until his death in 2002. Other than both laboring in the same industry, Maneely and Kanigher had little in common; Joe was, by all accounts, well-respected and liked. Bob was, as I knew from personal experience, pedantic, pompous, unpredictable, and often unpleasant. He was also one of the most interesting characters I ever met and I had spent hours in my younger days being talked at by him in the halls of DC Comics.

It occurred to me that Maneely’s death was a great jumping off point for that mystery novel set in the world of the comic book biz. It also occurred to me that, from all reports, no one would have wanted to kill this guy. I could, however, imagine many people having numerous reasons for wanting to throw Kanigher under the wheels of a train. So….I had the aforementioned financial hi-jinks, Maneely’s accidental death by railroad, and a great victim in a fictionalized version of Kanigher.

(And please let me stress here that neither Kanigher nor Maneely were in any way, shape, or form involved in the real-life editorial fraud. The Same Old Story is a total fabrication that uses bits and pieces of actual events and people to create a whole new story.)

The last piece of the puzzle fell into place when I figured out book’s structure, a way of telling a story within a story that allowed me to dive into the mind of my point of view character, pulp magazine/comic book writer Max Wiser and play with the idea of how writers build fiction from fact and, in the process of cooking up that creative stew, sometimes lose sight of which is which. At that point, maybe a dozen years ago, I started writing. I figured I had my story, its structure, my characters and their motives all worked out. How tough could it be?

The first 15,000 words or so weren’t tough at all. But after that, it was like I’d slammed face first into a translucent glass wall. I could kind’a, sort’a see where I wanted to go, but I was damned if I could find a way over, around, or through that barrier to actually get there. Disregarding my own advise at first, I sat there for a lot of hours looking at the blinking cursor and trying to imagine what word, let alone entire sentences or paragraphs, should come next. Finally, I shoved those 15,000 words into the metaphorical drawer and decided to just let it marinate in my mind for a while longer. It wasn’t that I was having trouble writing–during this time I wrote a couple hundred thousand words on other projects, comic books, short stories, articles, essays, non-fiction books, even a couple of other novels, both based on licensed properties (although neither were ever published, not because of any quality issues but due to financial reverses on the part of one publisher and congenital stupidity on the part of the other). I just couldn’t write this book. And I tried and tried again. And again. I’d periodically open the file and reread those 15,000 words, searching for the flaw, plot hole, or misstep that I thought just had to be there and was keeping me from moving on. But I couldn’t find the problem. Nor could I find the next words to move the story forward.

What I had started with such enthusiasm and high hopes had turned into this obnoxious little creature that gnawed at my creative bone, whittling it down to a thin, fragile strand with all the tensile strength of a piece of No. 2 spaghetti. It was like an insect that buzzes around your ear that you never quite see and can’t swat away. I started to believe that if I couldn’t write this book, my first really serious go at an original novel (as opposed to those licensed properties in which the emotional investment isn’t anywhere near as high), I’d probably never be able to write one. I even considered just deleting the frickin’ thing and forgetting about it. It wasn’t happening, so why spend any more time torturing myself with the sad reality that I just wasn’t up to the task?

I was feeling really sorry for myself. I kept it to myself, but deep down, The Same Old Story was a crushing disappointment that I couldn’t shake.

And then, in the summer of 2007, came unemployment. I had left my editorial position at DC Comics in early 2006 to become Executive Editor of the fake news tabloid Weekly World News, but a year and a half later, the paper folded (see “congenital stupidity, corporate”) and I was thrown, for the first time in seventeen years, back into the freelance life. I had freelance work to do, thank goodness, but I also found myself with a lot of free time on my hands. Enough, I decided, that I should devote a certain amount of it every day to working on something of my own. No deadline, no pressure. Shoot for a measly five hundred words a day on it. Just something I wanted to write, for myself, with no expectations for it beyond the doing of the thing.

At first I resisted going back to The Same Old Story. This sumbitch had already had years to mess with me and I’d be damned if I was going to give it another chance to hurt me.

But…

What harm could one more look do? My self-esteem couldn’t get much lower.

And…

When I came again to that glass wall that had been blocking me all those years, I found that all I had to do was give it the barest little shove and it toppled and shattered. I started typing and the first day’s five hundred words came as easily as anything I’d ever written. The same with the next day’s five hundred, and the next, and the next, until, within a week or two, I was pounding out a thousand or two thousand a day and, in less than two months, I had a finished manuscript.

What had changed? Damned if I knew, but what had been for years the creative bane of my existence was now a finished book…one that I was enormously proud of, not just because I had at last gotten it done but because it had turned out to be the book I had always believed it could be.

The saga of getting it published is a whole other story…as is that of Trout Fishing In Canarsie, another novel, which I started in a white hot burst of enthusiasm several months. Only to find myself racing towards another wall…only this time, I’m hoping I learned something from my experiences with The Same Old Story and won’t plunge into despair over what I now known isn’t really a barrier at all so much as it is a bump in the road. This one, I’m sure, will get written.

No matter how long it takes.

The theme for this month’s blog posts by Crazy 8 authors is a look at television science fiction. The problem is, other than Doctor Who and the occasional Outer Limits or Twilight Zone rerun, I don’t watch any science fiction shows on TV…and please don’t bother recommending any to me, thanks all the same. The genre pretty much lost me after the clusterfornications that were Lost and Heroes. Why was I investing my time and sympathies with shows that didn’t know quite what they were or where they were going and would inevitably disappoint? So I save myself the aggravation and growling at my TV by just not watching it to begin with. My recent dip into Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has confirmed the wisdom of that decision.

The problem I’ve always found is that the people producing science fiction TV shows aren’t usually very knowledgeable about science fiction. If they had ever read science fiction, it was probably back when they were kids. But seeing as they’re TV producers, it’s more likely their concept of science fiction was gleamed from the movies and television shows they watched growing up…produced by people who also weren’t very knowledgeable about science fiction. It’s like the way a friend described J.J. Abrams’ take on Star Trek, “It’s as though he heard a capsule outline of the original series as described by someone who watched it in 1967 and based his interpretation on that. Everything is more or less there, but it’s just not quite right.”

To TV and film producers, science fiction is just another medium, along with cop shows, forensic shows, medical and legal dramas, etc. Another example from Star Trek is the famous story of Gene Roddenberry’s use of the line “Wagon Train in space” in his pitch to the networks. For better than a decade, Westerns had been the most popular thing on the tube, so Roddenberry’s pitch line was an obvious descriptor for his show, and if’n you think about it, pardner, wouldn’t’a been so hard to transpose the Star Trek concept to a Western setting, the Enterprise swapped out for a railroad train with a company boldly going to lay tracks where no Europeans have gone before. Or as a period naval drama seeking out new civilizations during the age of exploration. It just shows the interchangeability of backdrops for a lot of ideas in the minds of TV producers.

Of course, what they–i.e. the producers and creators of TV “sci-fi”–consider science fiction is to us–i.e. longtime/lifelong readers of science fiction and even somewhat aware of the history of the genre–a joke. Even my print science fiction aficionado friends who watch televised science fiction and profess to enjoy much of it still spend more time tearing it apart for its lack of verisimilitude to “real” science fiction than praising it for its own merits. Fortunately for the producers, however, the True Fan is, other than as annoying creator of anti-buzz on the internet, irrelevant to the program’s bottom line. The True Fans’ numbers are too small to make a difference to the ratings (or box office) and, besides (Spoiler Alert!) they usually watch the shows anyway, if only to be able pick them apart so they’ll have something to complain about on Twitter…as if the Neilsen Ratings can distinguish between viewers who are tuned in because they like the show or out of sheer spite.

But what I want to see on the screen as a lifelong reader is what I’ve been reading all my life. A miniseries based on Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy? Bring it on! Except…do you know how dull that would be? Asimov’s books were largely talk and thought and, while there may be an exciting way to film it, it’s beyond my meager imagination to figure out how. I’d watch it if someone else solved the puzzle. But how many mainstream viewers would last through the first hour? TV and cinematic science fiction is designed to be a kind of shorthand version of the real thing, built with a general audience to whom “sci-fi” means ray guns, spaceships, and aliens in rubber masks in mind. Old timey non-SF conversant TV viewers remember contemporary programs like Star Trek and Lost In Space with about equal weight. Both were labeled science fiction. But then again, so were The Jetsons and It’s About Time.

So I’m not the right person to ask for my views on the latest “sci-fi” on the tube. I don’t think it’s gotten everything wrong–I call the iPhone my “Star Trek communicator,” their “replicator” has become fact with current-day 3-D printers, and, let’s face it, The Jetsons called a lot of things right about the civil and social applications of science, albeit draped in cartoonish trophs, like turning the fully-automated home into the character of Rosie the Robot-Maid–but enough so that I have, as I said, decided to opt out. Except, as I say, for Doctor Who. But that’s just the exception to my rule.