Plotnik quote: authors and editors
Dec. 21st, 2009 09:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blatherskiteBeen away several days working on my fiction. I just came across this lovely quote, which serves as a nice entry back into the blog:
As an editor and author myself, I find that there's an interesting tension in my work between pouring fuel on the fire and trying not to let it produce too much smoke.
The past few months, I've been honoring a resolution I made earlier in the year to get back to writing fiction—to stoke the fire that's been smoldering inside for many years. I've started out easily by taking old stories and novels that I'd completed or partially completed years ago. I'm treating this as the mental equivalent of stretching before a workout—basically, warming up the old mental muscles before starting to write some new fiction.
Tonight, for instance, I finished a marathon session of revising and then proofreading Chords, which is the prequel to Jester. Chords is something I actually started writing more than 20 years ago, and then set aside for something like 15 years before picking it up again and completing it. But it wasn't until my recent resolution that I forced myself to finally go back and finish it. Jester was written in draft form only a couple years after Chords, but again I set it aside. I was simply too busy with too many other things.
Having finished both novels, the fire is now blazing quite nicely—I'm eager to start creating the next one, but there's still one more in the bank that's been waiting a long time for revision, and I owe it an airing first. Dance the Shadows will be very different from the first two, since it's intentionally a "young adult" novel. Many of the same sensibilities exist in that novel as in my other fiction, but there's a very different style and emphasis. Hopefully I'll have time to assemble it by the spring.
The clearing out the smoke part is the editing I've been doing on my old fiction. Being the author of these works gives me a tremendous advantage as editor, because in reviewing the work, I remember the fire and therefore know what it is I'm trying to reveal. It also gives me the significant blind spot of knowing where to look through the smoke to get the clearest view, which is an option most readers don't have. That means I can't edit it as well as someone else.
If you have time and an interest in this particular subgenre of fantasy fiction, have a look and send me your comments. (Or send these links to a friend who enjoys this kind of fiction.) One good friend has already sent extensive comments on Jester that I'll try to get to over the holidays, but more comments are always welcome.
"You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what's burning inside you. And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke."—Arthur Plotnik, editor and author
As an editor and author myself, I find that there's an interesting tension in my work between pouring fuel on the fire and trying not to let it produce too much smoke.
The past few months, I've been honoring a resolution I made earlier in the year to get back to writing fiction—to stoke the fire that's been smoldering inside for many years. I've started out easily by taking old stories and novels that I'd completed or partially completed years ago. I'm treating this as the mental equivalent of stretching before a workout—basically, warming up the old mental muscles before starting to write some new fiction.
Tonight, for instance, I finished a marathon session of revising and then proofreading Chords, which is the prequel to Jester. Chords is something I actually started writing more than 20 years ago, and then set aside for something like 15 years before picking it up again and completing it. But it wasn't until my recent resolution that I forced myself to finally go back and finish it. Jester was written in draft form only a couple years after Chords, but again I set it aside. I was simply too busy with too many other things.
Having finished both novels, the fire is now blazing quite nicely—I'm eager to start creating the next one, but there's still one more in the bank that's been waiting a long time for revision, and I owe it an airing first. Dance the Shadows will be very different from the first two, since it's intentionally a "young adult" novel. Many of the same sensibilities exist in that novel as in my other fiction, but there's a very different style and emphasis. Hopefully I'll have time to assemble it by the spring.
The clearing out the smoke part is the editing I've been doing on my old fiction. Being the author of these works gives me a tremendous advantage as editor, because in reviewing the work, I remember the fire and therefore know what it is I'm trying to reveal. It also gives me the significant blind spot of knowing where to look through the smoke to get the clearest view, which is an option most readers don't have. That means I can't edit it as well as someone else.
If you have time and an interest in this particular subgenre of fantasy fiction, have a look and send me your comments. (Or send these links to a friend who enjoys this kind of fiction.) One good friend has already sent extensive comments on Jester that I'll try to get to over the holidays, but more comments are always welcome.