TFW the “best part" of your book just doesn't work (Monthly update #15)

Also: Shoe0nHead, Trump, Voltaire, and my 2022 reading list

It’s unfortunate, at least in terms of efficiency, but the only way I know how to fix a piece of writing is to rewrite it, beginning-to-end.

I know writers exist who are able to write the whole thing in their heads before they even touch a pen or a keyboard, but unfortunately for me, my brain doesn’t think in words (I’m one of those “no internal monologue” people the internet loves to make fun of for whatever reason). Things like outlining, making notecards, writing treatments or character sketches—that stuff can be useful, but only as an exercise. I really have no idea whether something works until I’m seeing it on the page, and the only way to make sure it works is to type it over again. (If it’s boring to rewrite, it’s almost definitely boring to read.)

All of that is how I ended up spending all of November—and likely most of this month as well—doing the thing I swore I wouldn’t do: redrafting the novel I’d just finished, beginning-to-end, all over again.

This is the book I’ve been talking about on this blog since almost the beginning, the one I was celebrating “finishing,” back in mid-September. I took a couple weeks off from it, re-read it, tried to do some light editing…then gave up and decided that the only way to make it work was to write another draft. Now—I did think the draft I had was sort of good, so I promised myself I’d do a speed-rewrite: retype the thing as fast as I could, only fix the truly glaring issues, maybe get it done in a month. And I was on track to make that happen! Until I got to “the best part.” Which…sigh.

It turned out that what I thought was “the best part” of the book was…not the best part.

Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised by this. It was my favorite part, after all, partly because it was the most ambitious part—the moment when I reached for the proverbial brass ring, taking a story that was otherwise a silly, satirical fairytale, and turning it into a psychological horrorscape for a solid fifty pages. It’s the book’s “stunt” section—the sort of thing that, if you pull it off, elevates the work from “entertainment” to “art,” but if you don’t pull it off, just turns the whole book into an exercise in who-the-hell-gave-this-pretentious-dweeb-access-to-Microsoft-Word.

So I rewrite it until it works, I guess!

There are all sorts of theories of art-making and art-critiquing out there, but the older I get, the more I think Aristotle pretty much had it right: the “final cause” (i.e., the purpose) of art is to give an aesthetic or emotional experience to the audience—and if you don’t succeed at that, nothing else matters. Not self-expression, or sending a message, or achievement, or moneymaking, or accolades, or being one of the kool kids, or being the smartest person in the room, or anything else. All that matters is, does the thing work?

Sometimes it doesn’t. And sometimes it really doesn’t, and you can’t even figure out why. And when that happens, I only have one recourse: (sigh) rewrite the thing until it does.

I wish there were another way. But there ain’t isn’t. 🕹🌙🧸

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Two years ago: Every book I read in 2022, ranked (definitively)

This is supposedly a writer’s blog, so I try to write about books every once in a while; unfortunately, no one cares about books, so I usually end up writing about other things in order to bring in more readers. Back in 2022, though, I had an unexpected hit with this piece, in which I wrote a three-sentence review of every single book I’d read in the year of our Lord 2022—from the best (The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman), to the worst (The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett), to the okay-est (Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia). I didn’t expect it to get much traction, but as of now it’s still among the top fifteen features here, so I guess people were pretty interested in what I’d been reading. Go fig.

I tried duplicating the success in 2023, with posts about both everything I’d read and everything I’d watched…to mixed results (the movie/TV list was a lot less popular, which really surprised me). I’m curious as to whether you guys still want more of this—there’s a poll below, so feel free to voice your opinion.

One thing I keep hearing white people say is that they “ought to read more books,” and as someone who’s got books to sell, I agree. There’s no secret to it, though—just turn off your TV, and your phone, and your iPad, and your Switch, and your PS5, and your smart fridge, and—y’know what? This is getting exhausting… (Read more here!) 🕹🌙🧸

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Poll of the moment

Would you guys be interested in yet another “everything I read” / “everything I watched” post for 2024? Or has that idea run its course? (Note: I read way fewer books this year than the last couple…for a lot of reasons. So it would be a shorter list. I don’t know if that’s a plus or a minus.)

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🎄Reminder🎄: I’m always taking submissions for my monthly column, Ask a church receptionist, where I (a real, honest-to-God church receptionist who literally wrote the book on the Bible) answer all the questions you were afraid to ask about the Bible, Christianity, and everything else!

We started the Christmas season off with a great question about “Mary, Did You Know?” and we’ve got time for one more holiday-themed question before the day rolls around! Got a question about shepherds, wise men, or mass baby murder??? Send it to luke.t.harrington@gmail.com, or just click the button below:

Be sure to tell me whether you want me to use your real name, a pseudonym, or whatever else.

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Stuff I’ve been enjoying lately

I’m sure we’re all sick by now of relitigating last month’s presidential election, but this video has been stuck in my head for the last two weeks, so you can all deal with it. The TL;DW here is that there’s been a groundswell of populist sentiment over the last decade, and the Democratic Party has had numerous opportunities to get out ahead of it…but instead has tripled down on being the party of trust fund babies with gender studies degrees and no one else. Turns out that most Americans are not trust fund babies with gender studies degrees, and a lot of those un-trust-funded and un-gender-studied people vote [insert surprised Pikachu face here]. I’m not a Trump supporter and I’m not looking forward to four more years of the guy, but there’s zero mystery as to why he keeps winning.

I dunno, I’ve got a decent amount of sympathy for YouTube veteran Shoe0nHead’s left-populist leanings (and her off-kilter sense of humor), so if you don’t, you mileage may vary. If nothing else, though, you get to see Shoe in possibly the best flapper getup this side of the turn of the millennium. So there’s that. 🕹🌙🧸

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⬅️ In case you missed it: What the heck is “Manipulate🕹, Moonsplain🌙, Murder-Bears🧸”?

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Favorite comment of the month

“That we can’t save the world until we all learn to tend our gardens?” I just love that you said this. I had a great teacher in high school who taught Voltaire exceptionally well, so the notion of learning to tend our own gardens has always been very meaningful time! —Lynda E. Rucker 🕹🌙🧸

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