The Knitting, er, Writing Life

I'm always impressed by how often writers are creative in other ways. We're musicians, dancers, singers, sculptors, painters, and martial artists as well as story-tellers. (Or maybe these are all other ways of telling stories and it's all the same thing.) Many of us are also knitters or crocheters. That's one of Vonda N. McIntyre's beautiful beaded sea creatures on the right.


I like to knit for a lot of reasons. For one thing, I learned from my mother (and I still have a pair of her double-pointed needles from her own youth). I love the soothing, repetitive movements. I love that I can do it and something else at the same time. I love that when I'm done I have something beautiful and useful to give away. (I do a fair amount of charity knitting, which you can read about here.. I love that friends will scavenge yard sales for supplies for me, thereby creating a living "knitwork" of love throughout the community.

But most of all, I love the enduring lesson of Writing According to Knitting: It doesn't matter how many mistakes you made, you can always unravel the dratted thing and start over. Maybe other people don't need this lesson repeatedly drilled into their brains, but I do. For me, it's the essential underlying principle of revision. If a first draft, like a knitting project, is so well within my skill and comfort zone that I don't make any mistakes, all it takes is a light polish (read: blocking) and I'm done. But I'll never get any better that way. I have to try things I've never done before, often things that call for concentration, consistency, and staying in touch with the tension of my hands or the tension in the story.

It's fine to stretch beyond my abilities. In fact, it's necessary. And delirious and terrifying. But you know what? If I make an awful tangle of it, I can always go back and do it over. And over, until I either set the project aside until I'm more adept or my skills come up to snuff.

So take a flying leap off the edge of reality. Push the envelope harder than you thought possible. Try something you've always believed impossible. Take risks and then grow to meet them.

On Revising Books In Print

Over on SF Signal's Mind Meld, various authors (including me!) hold forth on the subject of revising books that are already in print, and revision in general. Here's my response.


I've seen a number of instances of revising books after publication recently, and I sometimes suspect the phenomenon is akin to the endless rewrites that some beginning writers inflict on their maiden projects. It's easy in today's self-publishing climate to push a book to market before it's ready (or too flawed to reach the professional-publication threshold). Even if the original version went through the traditional editorial process, it may fail to meet the author's expectations and vision. Some years later, it's tempting to want to go back, armed with whatever improvement in skills and critical ability that have taken place in the interim.

Obviously, each case has its own circumstances, but most of the time, I think this is a mistake. One exception is when an author has begun a long-running series early in her career and inconsistencies have crept in as that world and characters have developed, so she decides to make the first novels congruent with the later ones. Revising these works is not necessarily wrong, but it does place the author in a backward-facing position instead of moving forward to his or her cutting edge.

Creating a novel is more than putting text on a page, fleshing out characters, and polishing dialog. It involves the scope and soundness of the original conception. The process of turning an idea into a book is like carving wood. You take a block of lumber and you assess its density and strength, the fineness of its grain, its ability to withstand torsional stresses. If you're starting out with a soft wood like balsa or pine, it won't support a lot of elaborate ornamentation -- you'd be better off with a short story or a "fun and fluffy" longer piece. For a novel that involves complex world-building and multiple point of view characters, nuance and interwoven themes, teak or mahogany or even oak is required to "bear the weight."