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.

The one that got away?

The truth is there have been a great many of them. So many that as I recall them now, it feels like it’s a miracle I got any work at all. But one stands out from the rest, I think. The one about the chain of dinner theaters, which will remain nameless, and the shortsightedness of the legal profession.

About fifteen years ago, a smart, aspiring TV producer with roots in the sports broadcasting world asked me to partner up with him. You see, he had a business relationship with this chain of dinner theaters (yeah, you’ve probably guessed who they are by now) and he had a vision that this chain could be the basis for a successful reality show.

I didn’t want to write for a reality show, I told him. I wanted to do an hour-long ensemble drama based on the broadly sketched characters in the dinner theater. He liked the idea. He pitched it to the management of the chain, who liked it as well.

I wrote a script and surrounded it with a proposal, and gave it to my partner (who is still a friend—the only lasting benefit of the whole shebang). He in turn peddled it at meeting after meeting, deftly unveiling its merits for the benefit of one New York network exec after another.

And one of them bought it.

That’s right. In fact, that exec was going to make our show the first of several dramas his network planned to roll out. We rejoiced. We were going to produce a TV show.

Of course, it wasn’t just our proposal that had wowed the network. It was the success of the dinner theaters, which nationally drew more people in a given year than did the New York Yankees. Still, it was a show, right?

Then we got a call from the management of the chain. Their lawyers had chimed in. “You’ve got a successful dinner-theater business going,” said the lawyers. “Why blur the picture by tying it to a TV show. What if somebody falls off a horse and sues you? You need this headache?”

Never mind that a TV show would only vault the chain to a new level of success. The lawyers prevailed. The chain backed out. And without their immense audience, we had no leverage with the network.

In other words, we were…cooked. Yes, that’s the word we’ll use. Cooked.

A few weeks later, I’m reading Inside Star Trek, a terrific book that I heartily recommend if you haven’t read it already. In the book, Herb Solow, the head of TV production at Desilu in the early sixties, had just come back from New York with orders for two offbeat, hour-long dramas. One was Mission: Impossible, which he had sold to CBS. The other was going to NBC. It was called Star Trek.

Lucy and Desi were pleased. Then their lawyers chimed in. “You’ve got a successful half-hour sitcom business going,” said the lawyers. “Why blur the picture by bringing in hour-long dramas? What if somebody falls off a spaceship and sues you? You need this headache?”

Fortunately, Lucy and Desi overruled their lawyers and produced the hour-long shows anyway, and the rest is history. Their law firm, by the way? The same one that advised the guys at the dinner-theater chain.

The same damn one…

My latest novel, Crossline, is a scifi adventure about two men — a civilian space pilot forced through a wormhole and into a war-torn parallel Earth, and the CEO of the corporation who launched the pilot to begin with — and how their journeys intersect.

But underneath the scifi elements lies a more personal story– a trilogy, in fact — that I wrote in high school. It was my first real attempt at fiction, and, all things considered, it wasn’t half bad.

It was based on the ‘troubles’ in Ireland, which, of course, I knew absolutely nothing about, but when you’re trying to impress a girl, well … you make stuff up and hope for the best. The girl, in question, did like the stories, and she was impressed. But not so much that things went the way I wanted.

And in terms of the written material itself, here’s the real problem:

I lost them.

Or, I should say, I lost parts two and three. I wrote those stories by hand, and then typed them up, because this was back in the mid 1980s, before everything we did was on computers and saved on a hard drive. And, because, I was a putz.

I don’t remember if passed the printed pages onto to someone or I simply left them lying around somewhere, but I didn’t have the mental wattage to make copies or keep track of them. I still have the original — with the truly awful title Skies of Green — but the others are long gone.

For several years after that I tried to recreate them, to expand on that trilogy, but that original magic, even back then, was lost to me.

The core story stuck with me — I always felt I had something there — but I was never able to recapture the nuance, and improve upon it. To write a new version.

So they drifted into the ether for the better part of 20 years.

And then … I had the inspiration for Crossline — the scifi part of it anyway — and suddenly my original story had a new life.

Bringing that story full circle gave me real satisfaction, and a sense of closure.

Yet as pleased as I am with how Crossline turned out, and the excellent response I’ve been getting to it … those original missing pages are still out there somewhere.

And like the girl I was trying to impress, in some ways, those pages – and the words they contained — are the ones that got away.

I am not the person I was at 10 or 18 or 30 or even 50. I am certainly a more accomplished writer than I was in college or even at Starlog Press. Experience, age, and a little wisdom have made me better than I was and I hope with even more time and practice I will continue to grow. I remain justifiably proud of my stories and novels and books through the years, ever since I began with Trivia Mania back in 1984.

Still, there remains one nagging book, one that I truly screwed up and was not the right writer at the right time. Given the chance to redo one thing I’ve ever written, this is the one that immediately leaps to mind.

It was back in the 1996 so I had already been writing fiction for several years and received a call one day from the talented packager, writer, editor, and provider of chocolate Bill Fawcett. He had sold a three book series to Ace so they’d run under the house name David Evans and he needed them done fast. Fast like four weeks fast. Could I do one?

After he explained the premise about the Time Wardens, men and women who traveled the timestream to keep things neat and clean, he then said he picked three cities these stories were to set in. I was offered Time Station: Berlin which immediately brought up John F. Kennedy’s famous appearance and speech where he proclaimed, in German, “I am a Berliner!”, endearing himself to Europe.

I had an idea, an offer, and a stupid tight deadline. There was no series Bible and I, to this day, have no idea who the other two David Evanses were. The Internet was still an infant so the mass amounts of research about Berlin in 1963 and Kennedy’s visit meant time in the library, doing old fashioned research. There was nowhere near enough time to properly examine the city, the street maps, Kennedy’s itinerary, etc. I still had to invent original characters, tighten the springboard into an outline I could follow and write this over a month or so while still holding down my day job at DC Comics.

Why did I accept the assignment? It wasn’t Star Trek. A look at my bibliography will show that my only fiction up until that point was set in Gene Roddenberry’s universe. This was a chance to establish myself elsewhere, even if it was under a pen name. I could use the wiring challenge and the money so of course I said yes.

I gave it my best effort but even then I suspected my best in 1996 was not good enough. Bill accepted the manuscript and I don’t recall hearing much from Ace so I foolishly thought that I did better than I thought I did. The book was released on September 1, 1997 and it wasn’t long before I realized how wrong I was.

My first Amazon review said, “This was my first purchase of a book by Mr. Evans and it will be my last…Having been stationed in Berlin from 1966 through 1972, it quickly became evident that Mr. Evans’ knowledge of the physical layout of the city was deficient.” Ouch.

Another intelligent reader noted, “The premise of the novel itself isn’t bad, but the execution is disappointing, with little of the flair the author demonstrated in the previous book. Time travel is hardly even integral to the plot; it’s a few tweaks away from being a bland historical thriller. It’s especially disappointing as Evans’s rich concept could have supported any number of novels, though given the tepid execution of it here perhaps it is for the best that he stopped where he did.’ Clearly, my fellow Davids did better with the time they had.

The nicest review was found at Goodreads, stating, “In general I like time travel stories and I like this unassuming series. I read the other two long ago and somehow had missed this one. It’s a quick and fun read.”

Other reviews pointed out storytelling flaws and writing lapses that were missed and it hurts to see them so clearly spelled out for me.

So, imagine my surprise to discover this week that just last year, Audible released an unabridged version of the book, narrated by Gildart Jackson. For a mere $17.95 you can hear my writing at its weakest.

The premise remains a solid one so yeah, I’d take a mulligan on this novel.