PeteHollmer.com

When I got out of school, I rented an apartment with a couple of roommates. Per state law, the landlord repainted the place just before we moved in. And they painted everything. Walls, ceilings, window frames, heater registers, doors… doorknobs. And where one of the windows was cracked open and a dead spider dangled by a single strand, they painted the web and the spider.

Yes, there was a thin coat of white paint on this tiny spider. It wasn’t sloppy, it took effort to paint the spider where it hung and not just brush it away.

They painted a dead, dangling spider. On purpose.

At the time I laughed it off, but have since recalled that image when thinking about project quality, especially when reviewing my own work—particularly editing (since that’s the bulk of what I’ve been doing lately).

It takes effort to correct a shitty sentence, but it takes a larger perspective to recognize when the sentence doesn’t belong there in the first place. Editing isn’t just about cleaning up grammar and commas. It’s also about viewing every sentence in the context of the paragraph and the ones before and after. Does it fit? Does it flow?

• If it repeats information the reader already knows
• If it interrupts the flow of a particular thought
• If it drags out a detail that’s not entirely relevant

…out it goes (or if the information matters, I’ll reduce or reorder it into neighboring sentences).

Someday I’ll be done editing, and hopefully I’ll have cleared out all the spiders, instead of just painting them. Stay tuned.

When Joss Whedon was writing Buffy the Vampire Slayer, he received much praise for his witty writing and the characters’ artful banter. Then he wrote the episode Hush, where a plot device robbed the characters of their voices, and deprived Whedon of his greatest strength—his dialog. Thus constrained, he forced his characters to communicate through other means, and himself to communicate to his audience through non-verbal cues and expressions. Fast forward to the last few years, and we see this skill finely tuned in the character chemistry of The Avengers. Throughout the movie, the characters communicate and define themselves and their relationships on multiple levels, allowing Whedon to tell a complex, character-driven story in a short amount of time.

In the documentary It Might Get Loud, Jack White describes how by challenging himself and making his stage performance more difficult, it forces him to get creative to succeed. By lunging farther across stage, rushing harder to keep time as he jumps instruments, the music he produces is more raw and more real.

Last year, web comic artist Chris Rusche almost gave up on his labor of love http://shotgunshuffle.com/ until fans rallied and convinced him to keep going. Following his archive, you can see his art improve over the years, and he often blogs about pushing himself harder to increase his skill. Rusche’s later strips communicate on multiple levels through dialog, lighting, expression, and mannerism, (as well as easter-egg jokes galore). His strips are frequently a day or two late, but the fans don’t care—the product is that good.

I don’t challenge myself the way these folks do, but their method gives me pause, and forces me to ask that question. How do I challenge myself? How can I push myself farther, to produce something better, not just more of the same quality? I don’t have good answers yet, but thinking about these examples are a starting point, and it’s something to chew on while I edit.

How about you? What artist’s method inspires you? What self-imposed struggles have enabled you to thrive in your craft?

Several years ago I gave voice recognition a try. It looked promising and efficient (and a friend raved about it, but I think that’s because he owned stock in one of the companies). So I did some research, bought one of the more popular versions and installed it on my Windows 98 machine (yee-hah!).

I donned the headset microphone, fired it up, and went through the “teaching” phase, where the software displayed five hundred quotes, famous or otherwise, and I recited them back so that it could learn my accent. That took maybe an hour or two. I also glanced through the tutorial and realized that not only could I dictate the words, but also the editing, i.e. if I paused, then told it, “delete the last four words”, the software would suspend dictation, pick up on the word “delete”, and then delete the last four words I had typed. On the downside, I also had to dictate punctuation, which isn’t a big deal if I were writing a memo, but got tricky during dialog. For instance, to get

“Don’t you think the software might have improved in the last decade?” Matt blurted impatiently.

I would have to say out loud, “Indent open quote don’t you think the software might have improved in the last decade question mark close quote Matt blurted impatiently period.”

…which is a little jarring, but I suppose with a lot of practice I might get used to it.

So I started. I said, “Dante walked into the alley, suspicious of the guy who was following him, period.” This appeared on the page:

Dante walked into the alley suspicious of the guy who was following him.

I wanted to change that though, so I paused and tried the editing commands.

“Insert a comma after alley.”

Dante walked into the alley suspicious of the guy who was following him. Insert a comment after alley

“No, Delete that last sentence.”

Dante walked into the alley suspicious of the guy who was following him. Insert a comment after alley no delete that last sentence

“No no no,” I said, ignoring the obvious.

Dante walked into the alley suspicious of the guy who was following him. Insert a comment after alley no delete that last sentence no no no

“You fucking suck,” I blurted, frustrated.

Buck a buck

And….that ended my brief experiment with voice-recognized writing. Perhaps with a lot of patient teaching and editing, I could get the software to do what I wanted, but I quickly realized it was just easier for me to touch type.

Granted, this was a decade ago, and since then voice recognition has come a long way. Although I’m very comfortable with my current methods (typing allows me to express the forming thought at a comfortable pace), I might revisit it. I can see its advantage in the legal profession, because among other things, the software let you set up templates and hotkeys, where you could say “Insert standard paragraph 1-B”, and it would just dump in predefined, proofread, boilerplate text. So you could verbally drag-n-drop a complete, complex legal document in a few minutes, and then search-replace the relevant terms.

It’s a little harder with novel writing, I imagine, and probably wouldn’t work in a cube farm because of the noise, but are other folks using it? What are your experiences?

-Pete

When my first daughter was born, people came out of the woodwork with advice, but my buddy Kevin gave me this little nugget:

“You’ll want to tell people about everything your kid does. Don’t. No one cares. If you absolutely have to tell a story, keep it to three sentences and make sure it’s funny.”

Three sentences is not a lot. Maybe forty-five to fifty words. Despite the challenge, I saw the wisdom in the advice, and kept my kid anecdotes short.

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