kate_nepveu: metaphors for writing

Kate (

kate_nepveu) wrote,
@ 2011-07-07 09:36 pm UTC

Entry tags:

metaphors for writing

About to take a draft brief down to its component paragraphs so I can comprehensively rearrange them. It's not quite pulling a Frankenstein on it, because all the pieces are there, just in the wrong order, but I can't think of a better metaphor. What do you call this process, if you call it anything?

(Interestingly to me, I seem to no longer think of the moment when a case comes clear to me as "breaking its back", but as its having "shaken out," kind of like sifting, I think, all the excess nudged away by my backbrain until I see it plain in a sentence or two.)

And that's enough of that.

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	no subject scifantasy 2011-07-08 01:50 am UTC (link)
	"Jigsawing," maybe? Or just "restructuring." (Reply to this)

	no subject mhoye 2011-07-08 01:55 am UTC (link)
	Burroughs called this the Cut-up technique. (Reply to this) (Thread) (Hide 1 comment) (Show 1 comment)

	no subject kate_nepveu 2011-07-08 07:04 pm UTC (link)
	Except I want it to make sense after! (Reply to this) (Thread from start) (Parent)

	no subject lnhammer 2011-07-08 02:09 am UTC (link)
	I call it "arranging." I tend to end up doing this about halfway through most medium-to-large tech writing projects, of the sort where I start writing down Things I Know about this piece of software. Once I have them all down, then I have to put them into the proper narrative order, where "proper" is not always the most obvious. ---L. (Reply to this)

	no subject cofax7 2011-07-08 02:11 am UTC (link)
	If I'm trimming madly, I use the machete. Re-arranging, maybe the corkboard concept. (Reply to this)

	no subject pendrecarc 2011-07-08 03:01 am UTC (link)
	Both your description and the actual process of writing--in its best moments, the moments when things come clear--remind me a great deal of the point in a mathematical proof where the ephemera fall away from the central argument, and all that remains is to put it down on paper. (Reply to this) (Thread) (Hide 1 comment) (Show 1 comment)

	no subject kate_nepveu 2011-07-08 07:05 pm UTC (link)
	Yes indeed. My math track did geometry freshman year in high school and writing proofs was very influential on me (and then I took a couple of formal/symbolic logic courses in college, too), though I suspect that it was suboptimal for most of my classmates. (Reply to this) (Thread from start) (Parent)

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veejane
2011-07-08 04:04 am UTC (link)

I recall that Kelly Link had to revise a short story like that, and it was the zombie short story, and she went around calling it "chopped up zombies" for a while, having literally printed out the story and cut up the pages to rearrange things. Presumably on a very big floor.

I tend to call it pruning, in the sense that plant limbs can often be rearranged and encouraged in particular directions, not just cut back.

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	no subject kate_nepveu 2011-07-08 07:07 pm UTC (link)
	I thought I could just chop things up, and indeed was thinking about back in the day when people cut up papers and taped them back to together, but it turned out to require a great deal of, I dunno, sanding of edges and adding in spacers, to go all carpentry-like for a moment. (Reply to this) (Thread from start) (Parent) (Thread) (Hide 3 comments) (Show 3 comments)

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houseboatonstyx
2011-07-09 05:11 am UTC (link)

I'm kind of in a similar space on a 7500 word story. There are two subplots I want to insert that will each add a little action scene every few pages. I'm working on where to add these new scenes and what changes -- joining, sanding, spacing -- will be needed around them.

I work in Word 2003 View/Outline. I'm thinking of demoting the whole thing to about Header 3, so as to have room to work up these new scenes in Header 1 and Header 2, then later place and demote them. I might use Header 1 for a summary of each new scene, then Header 2 for the text of the scene.

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	no subject kate_nepveu 2011-07-09 12:22 pm UTC (link)
	Hmm. There's a tool I hadn't used before. We do use headers and levels to break up briefs . . . (Reply to this) (Thread from start) (Parent) (Thread) (Hide 1 comment) (Show 1 comment)

	no subject houseboatonstyx 2011-07-10 03:35 am UTC (link)
	You don't have to keep the headers and levels. You can always switch back and forth among View/Outline or View/Normal or View/Print. At the last stage, you can get rid of the header formatting altogether, by Ctl-A and formatting all to Normal (or whatever style/tag you usually use). (Reply to this) (Thread from start) (Parent)

	no subject (Anonymous) 2011-07-08 05:29 am UTC (link)
	Ever since I started using a computer to write, I've thought of this process as (re)building a brick wall in microgravity. You don't have to tear everything down to the last usable course--just pull bricks out and put them back where you want them, and the rest just hang there rather than crashing down on you. Usually. (Reply to this) (Thread) (Hide 1 comment) (Show 1 comment)

	no subject kate_nepveu 2011-07-08 07:07 pm UTC (link)
	Hee. Now I'm thinking of Tetris! (Reply to this) (Thread from start) (Parent)

	no subject houseboatonstyx 2011-07-08 12:29 pm UTC (link)
	I'd say it was 'sifted' or 'shaken down' or 'winnowed'. The important things come out on top, the less important things get dropped out or dropped down and clump together on the bottom. Kind of like in a centrifuge? Re-structured? (Reply to this)

	no subject silmaril 2011-07-08 01:52 pm UTC (link)
	I like "restructuring," and have had to do something quite similar to that to a paper pretty recently. (Reply to this)

	no subject kjn.livejournal.com 2011-07-08 07:44 pm UTC (link)
	I think Eric Flint has called this structural editing. (Reply to this)

	no subject marydell 2011-07-09 03:54 am UTC (link)
	I call it assemblage, somewhat but not entirely facetiously, because once I've written all the parts of a thing and am trying to shape them into a whole, they often seem like random bits of text that someone else has inflicted on me, rather than my own words. (Reply to this)

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