The march of progress
I've spent a good portion of this afternoon so far re-reading the second "book" of Sky Song, by which I mean the second hundred pages of the original manuscript I produced (the stuff produced immediately before, during, and after my senior project, before I abandoned it to work on March Day Dawning), and I'm noticing a number of things.
One, I can visibly see the weaknesses in my prose. This is a significant improvement over a few years ago, when I had a vague sense that my narrative could be better but was unsure how to effect such changes. I can identify what I would write differently-- correct awkward sentence structures, flesh out important imagery, multiply the complexity of my narrative. I know how I would tell the story, and I know how I would tell it better. For a long while, improvements in Sky Song were divided into two categories-- conscious improvements of the plot, and subconscious improvements of the narrative and the style. What is exceptionally thrilling to me is that I am now able to see how I could improve the latter two aspects of my story.
You guys may not appreciate how exciting this is for me.
Another thing I've noticed is that the stuff I produced when I was eighteen really wasn't that bad-- a lot of the dialogue is pretty cool, and the pictures that the narrative conjures in my head are still charming and intriguing. It's weak, weaker even than I remember it being, but there's still a lot there to be proud of. A lot would have to change if I were to re-write the story (and I would have to do it from scratch), but there's a lot that I created three years ago that is really worthwhile, and the majority of the plot could remain essentially unchanged. Most of the fundamentals are still legitimate, in my mind.
Anyway. That newly discovered narrative maturity is thrown into sharp relief by reading my earlier work. I've actually improved in the last few years-- I sort of knew this, abstractly, but somehow looking at Sky Song makes it concrete.
I'm still nowhere near Pullman. I don't know if I ever will be. Dude's a king, no joke.
I do feel, however, that I've passed the bar of "legitimately published" quality. That is, once I finish the manuscript for The Silence, once I revise it and play with it and clean it up and make it coherent, I feel as though I could submit it to publishers and they might actually accept it. Now, I understand that one has to be phenomenally lucky to be published in this day and age, and my chances are further hampered by the fact that I am not, in fact, Philip Pullman (or Garth Nix. Or Susan Cooper. Or Lloyd Alexander), but I feel as though I am good enough at this point that if I were to get published, people could pick my book off the shelf and not wonder "how the hell did this guy get a book deal?"
One, I can visibly see the weaknesses in my prose. This is a significant improvement over a few years ago, when I had a vague sense that my narrative could be better but was unsure how to effect such changes. I can identify what I would write differently-- correct awkward sentence structures, flesh out important imagery, multiply the complexity of my narrative. I know how I would tell the story, and I know how I would tell it better. For a long while, improvements in Sky Song were divided into two categories-- conscious improvements of the plot, and subconscious improvements of the narrative and the style. What is exceptionally thrilling to me is that I am now able to see how I could improve the latter two aspects of my story.
You guys may not appreciate how exciting this is for me.
Another thing I've noticed is that the stuff I produced when I was eighteen really wasn't that bad-- a lot of the dialogue is pretty cool, and the pictures that the narrative conjures in my head are still charming and intriguing. It's weak, weaker even than I remember it being, but there's still a lot there to be proud of. A lot would have to change if I were to re-write the story (and I would have to do it from scratch), but there's a lot that I created three years ago that is really worthwhile, and the majority of the plot could remain essentially unchanged. Most of the fundamentals are still legitimate, in my mind.
Anyway. That newly discovered narrative maturity is thrown into sharp relief by reading my earlier work. I've actually improved in the last few years-- I sort of knew this, abstractly, but somehow looking at Sky Song makes it concrete.
I'm still nowhere near Pullman. I don't know if I ever will be. Dude's a king, no joke.
I do feel, however, that I've passed the bar of "legitimately published" quality. That is, once I finish the manuscript for The Silence, once I revise it and play with it and clean it up and make it coherent, I feel as though I could submit it to publishers and they might actually accept it. Now, I understand that one has to be phenomenally lucky to be published in this day and age, and my chances are further hampered by the fact that I am not, in fact, Philip Pullman (or Garth Nix. Or Susan Cooper. Or Lloyd Alexander), but I feel as though I am good enough at this point that if I were to get published, people could pick my book off the shelf and not wonder "how the hell did this guy get a book deal?"
posted by Nate at 9:38 AM
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