Musings on the Path

The Art of Jazz: Learning to Co-Write with a Partner arrived in my e-mail box just after someone else’s draft in a writing group we share struck me as having a lot of potential to go in several ways. Rather than leave parts of it on the cutting room floor, I suggested taking it several different ways instead of tossing parts to focus on one theme. I asked for a copy of the draft and agreed to share my own edits.

My wife and I comment on each other’s writings (poetry, prose, and sermons). That is closer to an editor or critique group. This feels closer to collaboration and/or improvisation on someone else’s theme. Classical music does this all the time, but in separate compositions. This is a little finer grained than that.

One of my favorite fantasy novels is Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s “Good Omens”. As I read more Neil Gaiman, I’m beginning to notice some of Neil’s themes: hidden identities and finding home. I doubt that Terry and Neil wrote entire chapters that the other had nothing to do with.

It will be an interesting exercise.

The editors of Loud Coffee Press entered the competition to do a Western New England University TEDx Talk. In a recent post they shared the process of moving from idea to “show time”. It is a process the TEDx Talk people guided and supported them through.

Maybe that’s something to tentatively put into my bucket list.

Beneath the Skin: Levels of Editing Poems, a guest post by Marilyn McCabe is one of the better sets of advice I’d run across on how to improve a draft. Applies to prose too. She elaborates three levels:

• text on the page – adverbs, adjectives, punctuation, line breaks.
• intention – does the poem achieve what I want/intend.
• ambition – why am I doing this?

Worth a read.