In case you missed previous explanations, I do an assignment with Les Misèrables every year with my students. I call it the Yellow Passport as an homage to the paper that Jean Valjean has to abandon in order to live a better life. It comes to represent the problems he had in the past which hold him back. It's essentially a new year's resolution, but in November and December, plus it's a school assignment, so the kids who want to have a good grade are actually going to follow through.
Most of the big assignments I give I've done myself (I have a drawing that I made of Satan for Paradise Lost, and I have chunks of Hamlet memorized, for example), and the Yellow Passport is one that has helped me a lot in the past. Thanks to this assignment, I hardly spend any time at all on Facebook (and I do mean that; I think my grand total a week is maybe an hour, and I've found the only reason I keep the social media site account active is because that's how almost everyone who reads my work knows that I've posted something new). And, though my temper isn't permanently banked, I have improved my interactions with my kids thanks to the Yellow Passport. As I mentioned in the second essay I linked above, I'm doing an edit of War Golem with this year's Yellow Passport. I really do want to get over my editing phobia--or disdain, I suppose? Okay, so yeah, there's a bit of a tangent on this, bear with me: Editing is a blessing of a process. Vocal editing in the nonce is a nightmare--stumbles, stutters, misstatements, and other verbal faux pas will mar a lot of what a person might actually be saying. Yes, there's the advantage of intonation and body language, but there's an irretrievable aspect to speaking: What's said is what's said. You can't go back and tweak and twist and turn. Impromptu speech is a one-shot attempt. In writing, however, there's an opportunity to revise, reshape, revisit, and refine. There's a way to make what's said into something you meant to say. Editing allows that to happen. This is something that I'm gaining as I work through War Golem. I'm given a chance to improve what I've done before. So how is it editing my book again? Well, I think I need to do more research on how other writers edit, now that I have a pretty good grip on how to write. I say this because the process of getting words down on paper is something within my scope. Since college, I've completed over a dozen novels, with a grand total of over 1.6 million words. That doesn't count my short stories, poetry, or abandoned projects, nor does it incorporate my nonfiction writing (stuff like this essay). That's just from completed novels and novellas. That is no small amount, I daresay, and it shows that I know how to get words out. As I've continued to work on new novels, I've streamlined the storymaking process, which has led to a more careful approach to the stories I tell. In my early days, I had a character and an idea and a world and the shape of an idea of something that I wanted to pursue. So I would "pants" my way through--"fly by the seat of my pants"--the book, following that particular day's bit of the story as it came to me. I rarely spent time staring at the blank white screen, but I didn't always know exactly what to have happen next, and I found myself heavily influenced by the most recent thing I'd read or watched--if I'd seen something scary, I would incorporate a monster attack for some reason; if I'd been reading Rainbow Six, I would add in a hostage situation--whether or not that addition would help the story. After I spent a solid three or so years on writing Writ in Blood--still my longest book, even after some serious edits took it to just below 300,000 words--I decided to try something different. I wanted to write more than three books a decade; I needed to write shorter stories. Not short stories, but shorter stories. I started looking at different ways of increasing my output, and I realized that a "fix-it-in-post" mentality was part of the reason that 1) Writ in Blood was so long (I would recognize a problem with the plot and, rather than fix it, I would invent some reason why it was supposed to be that way, which only added to the length of the novel, rather than improving it), and 2) why I hated revisions. They were the deficit spending of writing: I was pushing my in-the-moment problems to my future-self, rather than dealing with them when they showed up. To that end, I began a more rigorous style of outlining. It has been really helpful to me in a lot of ways, not the least because it means that I'm "writing" the book before I actually write it. I can see problems more clearly--that is, an early decision on a certain idea can be shown as flawed simply because I can see the entire story at a glance. That means that my outlines are edited and revised as I go along. Once I lock in a scene by writing it, that becomes the new canon, which means that I can tweak my outline rather than worry about remembering the change when it becomes important later on. By editing the outline--which always changes as the story is composed--I feel more confident that what I've written is what I want to see. In many ways, I write the first draft by writing the outline. Then I write the second draft by actually writing it. Upon finishing the novel, I give it a few months to cool off before I reread it, as if it's an entire book--notes, perhaps, but nothing super specific or line-by-line. Then I go, a chapter a day, through the book and change things. I add details, take away superfluity, and rewrite parts of scenes. The advantage of that is the work of changing the story is done there and then--no kicking the can of responsibility down the road. After I've put those changes in the computer, I have, historically, called it quits. I'd query a little, get rejected less than I queried (most agents don't respond, which technically counts as a no, but feels less concrete), and then move on to the next project. But the Yellow Passport has--I think--changed that. Because I was trying to set an example for the students, I made sure to work on my editing every single day. It was not always easy--in fact, it usually wasn't--but it was immensely helpful. Not only was I trying to incorporate a new habit (the point of the assignment, really, as it's an assignment they're supposed to work on for 24 days straight), I was also seeing my book in a different light. See, the Yellow Passport goal I had for myself was to reduce the grand total of words in War Golem from 101k to 90k. (It only took a couple of days to realize that was unrealistic, so I tweaked it to below 98,500 words, which could happen. I mean, stranger things have occurred.) To do that, I had to start trimming the fat. However, as I mentioned before, I saw that I was actually pretty happy with almost all of the words that I put into the book. Yes, there were some unnecessary adverbs (which I use sparsely (ha! Irony!) for the most part because I try to pick stronger verbs in the crafting of the story anyway), and plenty of passive voice to strike out, but on the whole the story is what I wanted it to be. This has led to an excruciating experience of trying to squeeze the metaphorical blood from the stone--or, in this case, unnecessary words from the draft. I heard of one author who writes all morning and then, in the evening, he takes a Sharpie to his manuscript and excises all but three sentences per page. This is madness to me, and it points toward a worrisome lack of belief in one's abilities. I have plenty of imposter syndrome feelings, but one thing that I don't doubt is that I am the writer of the story and that means that I get to decide what that story looks like. I can weave a worthwhile sentence into the story as I go, if necessary. No reason to assume the worst of my past self. My experience revising War Golem has been a net-positive one. I'm running into the climax of the story--and there may be more tweaks and edits at the latter stage than others, as it's a tricky part of the novel--but on the whole I'm feeling that this has improved my novel. More than that, it's given me confidence that I did, indeed, write the book I meant to write when I started it a couple of years ago. It feels, in other words, like I really am polishing the book, rather than just "editing" the book. The habit of editing has been instilled in me, if only a little bit…though I should confess that the very first day of not having to do the Yellow Passport I skipped that night's work on it. I guess I still have some room to grow. I started off NaNoWriMo strong, and I finished strong. With only a handful of essays written in November because of NaNoWriMo, it's kind of strange to be jotting down a couple of thoughts about the experience instead of hammering away at my Hamlet reboot.
Thought One First off, I definitely made a mistake in my choice for my Yellow Passport assignment this year. (For those not inclined to follow a link, this is a chance for me and my students to find something to work on--an area that we wish to see changed or improved--and make it a new habit during our reading of Les Miserables.) I decided that I needed to get over my aversion of editing, so I've busted out War Golem for yet another passthrough. This time, the goal was to reduce the total words by ten percent--the arbitrary number that Stephen King decided on with his writing and, therefore, has become The Rule™ ever since--in the hopes of being less scary to agents when I start soliciting again. The thing with this process, however, is that it's rather painful. Not because I'm totally in love with all of the words that I've written, but because they're the words I wanted for my story to work. That's why I picked them in the first place. Now, sure, there are always areas where I worded things strangely, repeated a phrase, or somehow left things somewhat messy. That's a given. And that's the stuff that I'm trying to squeeze out of the manuscript. But it's a difficult process. I find myself counting out words to see if a rewrite will scrape one off; I dread the feeling of having to rewrite a section, because I'm confident that I will be adding to my word total. To this end, I've been reading each chapter, sentence by sentence, backwards. This works for me on a couple of levels: One, it strips away the context. I'm not involved in the story; I'm not stuck in the experience with the characters. Instead, I can look at the sentence and ask myself if it's doing what I want it to do, or if there's a way to improve it. Most of the time, it's fine. And, honestly, thus far (I'm on chapter 13 out of 31, though I skipped the first chapter because that's always the one I'm looking at, which makes me discouraged (as that's also the one that agents have looked at the most, and still found nothing to interest them) and so I wanted to come back to it at the very end of the process), editing this way has been helpful. I've yet to add words to a chapter, and though there's no way I can get the book down to 90,000 words, it most definitely will be below 100,000 words. Fantasy novels are allowed to be longer than other fiction, but I've tried really hard not to let the book get too large or out of control on that front. Much of what I want to say I've left out in the first place (another reason, I wager, why I'm not finding a lot of fat to trim from my manuscript). Though this has been a good thing, overall, it's making it harder for me to know what I mean when I think about "good writing"…and that's a topic, I think, for another day. I kind of need to get on with Thought Two Rewriting a Shakespearean play in novel form is a strange experience. I find snippets of the original creeping in--phrases or images that plant themselves in my mind and grow fruit on the page, as it were. Sometimes I'll think about a particular character detail that happens later in the play, but makes more sense to include it in the chapter I'm working on. Other times I'll find myself turning to Shakespeare to point me toward the plot again, lest I get distracted by some detail or other and lose track of where I'm supposed to go. On that front, writing my NaNoWriMo novel has been really enjoyable: I'm able to reexperience Hamlet and even put a specific interpretation on the story that fits my retelling, even if it distorts the original. That is surprisingly freeing, which I think comes because of the quasi-sacred feelings I have for the play. The inhibitions of worship are unmoored from me as I go through this story. Unfortunately, I didn't put the time and effort necessary into properly outlining the novel. Or rather, I didn't do it the way I've done it in the past. The issue with this, you see, is that I've had to do a lot of tweaks and rewrites to the outline as I went along. This is not unusual--I rarely end the exact way that I originally anticipated when I first started outlining the book. However, I normally jot down those chapters on notecards--just little 3x5s that I've collected over the years--so that when my story starts to follow its own version, I can chuck out the chapters that I don't want any more. Because I outlined on a single Word document this time, I've had to renumber the chapters four or five times this November, tweaking when one event happened in comparison to another, or fusing two chapters together--whatever the case ended up being. That meant that I ended up spending a good portion of time doing a tedious chore that, if I had simply used notecards, would never have happened. (And while I save time by typing, I have a notecard app that would have let me do the same sort of thing digitally as what I do by hand.) Not only that, but the combination of my time with War Golem and then with my reading journal and then my NaNoWriMo…well, I was feeling pretty tapped out, to be honest. My first couple of days were really effective--I took a day off from school, it was over a weekend, and it pretty much was wonderful. Once I got into the grind of school, commuting, editing, and trying to write…well, it wasn't so wonderful. In fact, some of my most embarrassingly bad writing is (I think, anyway) now up on the website under the 2019 NaNoWriMo section, almost all of it done when I simply wanted to get my wordcount done for the day. Speaking of the wordcount, I did "win" NaNoWriMo with 50,080 words total. The novel still needs three or four more chapters--some of them fairly large--to finish off the story. That means I'll probably pick at it and throw up a chapter or two as I end them. It also means that I don't really know how to hit wordcount targets, though I can surpass them. Thought Done It's nice to be finished. I dropped over 1,200 words into this essay, which is a fun muscle to flex that's been languishing a lot this past year. I'm glad that, at least for now, I can say that I'm back into something resembling a writing groove. Here's hoping it stays that way, ya? Pretty uniformly, Les Miserables makes a large difference in my students' lives. According to anecdotal evidence--the best kind, let's be honest--the story of Jean Valjean is one of the two most important books the kids read during their entire high school career (the other being Man's Search for Meaning).
There are a lot of reasons for that. One is that some of them--probably about 10-15% if I had to guess--read the entire, unabridged version of the book. For those kids who read a 1,400 page novel in twenty-four days, there is a genuine sense of accomplishment. Even if the student chooses not to read the full version, our abridgment is 595 pages long; after fourteen days--or almost thirty class periods--everyone feels as though they've been on a long journey. While there are rough spots--some nights' readings are slower than others'--we all feel like we're in a new place for having gone through the experience. That, I believe, is part of why stories about epic journeys (The Lord of the Rings or The Divine Comedy come easily to mind) transport us. The characters have been through a lot, and so have we, the readers. Nothing creates bonds quite like going through hardships with another, and a book like Les Miserables is built upon the premise of exposing hardships. Many students deeply feel for characters like Eponine or Gavroche. Some even sympathize with Javert. But hands down, Jean Valjean--and the impetus for his change, the Bishop--is seen as the paradigm that the students want to aspire to. And I do nothing to quash that. I think there are significantly worse people to want to emulate, and a reformed convict who is, as Combeferre puts it, "a man who saves others" (473). Jean Valjean demonstrates that change is a constant effort, and becoming a better person requires that sort of effort. Hugo writes, as Jean Valjean has to make his hardest, final decision--to allow Cosette to stay with Marius, to move past the care of the old convict--a touching, powerful scene: Jacob wrestled with the angel but one night. Alas! How many times have we seen Jean Valjean clenched, body to body, in the darkness with his conscience, and wrestling desperately against it. That night, however, Jean Valjean felt that he was giving his last battle. A poignant question presented itself. He had reached the last crossing of good and evil. He had that dark intersection before his eyes. This time again, as it had already happened to him in other sorrowful crises, two roads opened before him; the one tempting, the other terrible. Which should he take? Hugo continues (of course he does; you don't get to 1,400 pages by being laconic) for some time, considering and analyzing Valjean's struggle. It's one of the hardest parts to read, because the reader already knows what he's going to do: He will pick the harder path, the one that will help the person whom no one else can help. He will remove himself from Cosette's life because she no longer needs him. It's a decision that will kill him. I don't want to undermine that with the observation that Jean Valjean is a liar, despite his promise to become "an honest man". There's room for discussion, I think, about what that might mean--especially because I'm not privy to how the original French works--but on a very basic level, Jean Valjean runs from his yellow passport--the thing that symbolized his hated, convicted past--and rebuilds himself. We want to exonerate the man for this. He has done so much--done so much good--through his decision to become better. He lifts a town out of poverty, shows mercy to a pitiful wretch in the form of Fantine, saves a mentally disabled man (Chapmathieu), rescues Cosette from horrendous abuse at the hands of the Thenardiers…and all of it done because he lies about who he is. Again, I think we want to show where letter vs. spirit of the law arrives. I understand that impulse; I yield to it annually. Surely there's room for a man who has done so much good to be given a little slack when his entire life is looked upon? And there's validity to that argument. Nevertheless, I can't get it out of my head that he has built his entire reputation on a lie. He was never anything but Jean Valjean, no matter how many names he has throughout the book. Perhaps Hugo is trying to show that a life filled with selflessness and piety, a life dedicated to bettering other people's circumstances, is what matters more than where that life came from? I can get behind that…but there's always a niggling suspicion at the back of my mind that he's a robber--that we're allowing the apotheosis of not just a convict (he's done his time, so that's less important to me), but a con-artists. To bring this particular point to my students' attention could yield a fascinating conversation, but--in a strikingly ironic parallel--I choose to omit this lens in the classes that I teach. I would rather let this angle of Valjean's life die alongside his name (which is erased from the tombstone) rather than dwell on it. The students deserve--especially at this time of year, when things are heavy and gray outside, the weather biting and cold, and the interminable grind of daily work makes them feel as though the reprieve promised by Winter Break will never come--to have a person to emulate, to look up to, to aspire to be like. They deserve to have a hero, especially since they tend to be sparse in our modern world. Hamlet isn't a man I'd want to be friends with, and the most admirable character in Paradise Lost (as we read it) tends to be Satan (and wanting to be like him leads to all sorts of problems, if you ask me). Dante isn't much of a hero--he's not much of a character at all, from what we're able to get--and I don't think my students look to men like Robespierre for guidance on how to behave. In other words, my curriculum disallows any sort of role model to show up during the first semester. So Valjean is useful in being an example of a flawed individual who nevertheless strives to do the right thing. And, perhaps, his surrender to Javert is the most significant part of his journey, as it's a moment where he finally gives up the lies…only to have the expected punishment fail to materialize. I don't know, honestly (a feeling I often get as I crest 1,000 words in my essays and I realize that I haven't arrived anywhere for the effort). I'm not planning on changing the way I teach the book, nor do I want the students to have anything other than respect for a man who seeks to do good: God knows that I'm not much of an example to them. So what do I hope for? Well, that the students' lives are changed by the literature they read. So what am I worried about? Well, I'm a pretty hardcore deontologist, to say nothing of being a part of a school whose motto--frequently invoked to the students--is about Truth (with a capital T), as well as Honor. I'm worried what it means to have a person whom we admire failing to do those two things clearly and well. Isn't it a type of hypocrisy? At the end of the semester, I want the kids to have had a chance to see growth in a character and growth in themselves. If nothing else, I at least have that. Coming to the end of a school year is different than coming to the end of a calendar year. In the case of the former, there's good weather, vacations planned, and the feel-goods of graduation to look forward to. In the case of the latter, there's more coldness, the hope that it only snows on days that I don't have to leave the house, and single-digit hours of sunlight in the rest of the calendar. While Christmas may be a beacon of happiness to many, I'm often more than a bit of a humbug--mostly because I believe in a holiday, rather than a holimonth--and, even if I were a bigger Christmas fan, that particular day is nestled so deeply in the darkness and snowbanks of winter that it's almost an incidental by the time it finally arrives.
Yet, at my school, both the calendar- and school years end with finals (which is different than district schools around me, which end the first semester after the Winter Break is over). This parallel in timing doesn't tend to reflect a parallel of emotions. I often feel a bittersweet feeling at the end of May, as the departure of the senior class is always one that is exciting and sad at the same time. December, however, is a bit more of a slog. Yesterday in my Shakespeare class, I made it a point to give my "last lecture"-style reading of the Shakespearean sonnets--particularly 130--to my students. When I had finished giving them my interpretation of the Bard's words (closing, "In the name of William Shakespeare. Amen."), I told them that was it, I had finished everything I was planning on and we were done being a class. They still have a final to do, of course, but in terms of us being in the standard teacher/student paradigm, there wasn't anything else for me to add. We were done. But the finality of that observation was lacking some of its punch that I get in May. Then, I get to say to the students, "And then you won't be my student anymore," which often gets the kids who enjoyed my class to have "the feels". In December, it's "Then you won't be my student…unless you take another class from me. Or I see you in the hallway. Or I sub one of your classes for some reason…" and it lacks some of that emotional punch. Nevertheless, this year's "ending" was fitting. I finished talking about Les Miserables with my 10th graders, had a fellow Shakespeare scholar I met at the Wooden O Skype in to my Shax class to talk about her perspective about the Bard and representation in media, and laughed through an enjoyable day with my creative writing class. It felt…finished. Complete. This was particularly powerful when I looked at the end of Les Miserables with my students. We read an abridgment of that behemoth, but it still takes us 14 or 15 days of reading over 40 pages a night to get through the whole thing. We discuss a lot about the book, as well as reviewing information about the French Revolution and Napoleon. Having tackled so many different ideas--from the definition of beauty and whether or not mercy is a deserved thing to child soldiers and why we feel sympathy for certain characters over others--during the three weeks of work means that, when Jean Valjean is dying and Cosette and Marius are weeping over him, there's really a sense of finality. There's a belief that something large and important has transpired. That the students have, like Valjean, come to an ending where their work and effort is finally rewarded. Okay, I don't know if the kids feel that way, but I certainly do. This year, I did a couple of things differently. For one, I played the final minutes of the film adaptation with Hugh Jackman as Valjean. On the whole, that film has too many problems to be used in my classroom, but the last seven minutes or so are too powerful to skip. I showed it, and even though we hadn't watched the entire film, there were people who were moved to tears by the end of the scene. It creates a reverential atmosphere, and I don't think it necessarily has to do with the invocations of God (though the final line before the ensemble joins in, "To love another person is to see the face of God" is one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard sung). Instead, it's the emotional transmission of what they'd read in the book, enacted for them by incredibly talented actors and singers. The other thing I did differently--at least, for my last class--was to erase something that had been on the board for the entire unit. See, I keep a running list of Jean Valjean's names--he has, in our version, six or seven (depending on how you count them)--so that the students can see how hard he struggles to complete one of his goals (to escape man, or rather, to forget his name). The list is up on the board long enough for it to be visual noise--basically ignored because it's there all of the time. So, at the right moment of the conversation, when talking about how Jean Valjean's tombstone is a blank rock, with not even any writing on it anymore--for the poem with which the book ends is said to have been written in pencil and likely effaced--I point out that his name has finally been lost to everyone. At that moment, I hurried to my whiteboard and wiped the entire list away. Some of the kids called it "The most dramatic moment of the class", which could be read in different ways. I prefer to think of it as a positive thing--though, with teenagers, it can be hard to know for certain--and one that I'm logging away to do again next year. Anyway, the day is now over--the semester is over, save for a handful of finals and grades to finish up--and though I don't have the same sense of permanence that the end of Semester 2 gives me, I'm feeling surprisingly positive and happy with the way this year has shaped up… …thus far. Check back in May. We'll see how I feel come summer. ==== Hey, friends. I have been releasing essays on my website for a couple of years now at a pretty steady rate. I'm happy to do so, as it benefits me as a writer and (I hope) you as a reader. I also think that, as a writer, it's okay if I believe that my work has some value monetarily as well as emotionally. To that end, I've created a Ko-Fi account, which is basically a way to give an online tip to a creator whose work you appreciate. The idea is, you can buy them a cup of coffee. (That's what the name of the website sounds like, if you're curious.) I'm not charging for any of the content on my website; instead, if you'd like to toss me a cup-le (see what I did there?) of bucks to show your gratitude, that would be cool. I'd totally appreciate that appreciation. If you don't? No problem. We can still be friends. As always, thanks for reading! |
AuthorWould you like to support my writings? Feel free to buy me a coffee (which I don't drink, but I do drink hot chocolate) at my Ko-Fi page. Thanks! Archives
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