Years ago, I had a coworker who loved to cross stitch as do I. Well I did, but that’s not really the point here. She took her stitching projects with her everywhere. I mean literally everywhere. If she just found a quick 15 minutes, she would pull it out of her rather large handbag and go for it, a true jack rabbit at stitching. She would scurry ahead on a project, set it aside, and later come back to it for whatever few minutes were available. She even argued with TSA once on whether her tiny little stitching needle was a banned product or not. She won that argument by the way, proving you can beat TSA.
Our company once sent us to Victoria on Vancouver Island in Western Canada to cover a convention. If you ever get the chance to go, please go. It is amazing. Once considered the fittest city in Canada. Every place is set up for pedestrian use. So naturally I was excited about our one free afternoon to discover the delights of the city. We agreed on a time to meet in the hotel lobby. And when I showed up, there she was stitching. I was stunned. A glorious day, a beautiful city, a whole afternoon to sample its pleasures, and she was calmly sitting there stitching. Really?!
Now me. I wait for that tract of time I can totally devote to a project. Like a turtle, I am slow and steady with my needlework. When my alma mater, Alabama, was having her bad years, I would set aside time to stitch during the games. Now with Coach Sabin, there’s no time to waste on stitching…the games are too exciting. So I found other time periods to work on my stitching. Thanks to Pandora and Youtube, I can sit literally for hours and stitch away listening to music. I like putting out all my tools of the stitching trade and carefully determining where I left off and what I need to do next. Because I wait until a specified time, I generally finish an entire section before putting everything away. I also like the fact that everything is right where I need it. And I certainly do not have to argue with government officials when I want to pull out that little needle and thread it.
Both my coworker and I also wrote. Oddly she was the turtle in writing and I the jack rabbit. I would sit down in front of my computer, open up my documents and write an couple of articles, take a break, write some more, talk to my boss about stuff, write some more, take another break, you get the idea. And btw those breaks were working breaks just in case you were wondering. I wrote and edited most every day. So I could take a pile of say product announcements and whip out several in 15 minutes. My coworker was in marketing. She took time with her words. She had to capture the attention of a client/customer and convince them taking the time to read our publications was well worth it.
So in the final analysis, who gets more work done? Which is the better approach? Honestly, the turtle. You probably thought I was going to say the jack rabbit, but the truth is writing is serious business. You simply cannot write a story or even a scene in 15 minutes. You can try. You can put words on paper. You may even think it is brilliant, but odds are your editor will not!
College professors are notorious for telling their students, do not wait until 3 am to write your semester paper, blah blah blah. We have all heard it and considered it, some of us for about two minutes. The truth is most of us have written those papers in a few hours, thinking it was a snap. Usually the papers came back with a poor grade. Yes, I know, there are exceptions.
I once put a lot of work into a paper on Chinese history. I doubled checked all the names, places, and events. I made sure I had every “i” dotted and every “t” crossed. Because I was a history major, I put quite a bit of effort into addressing the philosophical aspect of historic events. I was rather proud of that paper. And I always had to finish my paper early enough for my roommate to type it. Lookit, she typed way faster than I did! However, she was a typist not an editor.
When my paper came back, I got a 95. Know why? I misspelled “it” every single time. For some reason I cannot fathom to this day, I spelled it “ti.” I am guessing the grad student caught that, because every one was circled in red! I just can’t see a college professor bothering, can you? Fortunately my sense of humor saved me. I mean come on I did everything else right. I mean who had the time to actually circle every misspelled “it?” Just an extra minute or two of editing on my part would have meant a 100 on that paper. I jack rabbited through the editing, believing my “forest” was way more important that that “ti” tree.
Jack rabbiting is about missing the point. The point of your scene, your story, your character, your point of view, your spelling, the list is endless. In jack rabbiting, an author is trying to show the forest, forgetting about the trees. The trees count. They matter. Knowing what your minor characters are all about is as important as keeping your major characters together. Want an example?
Everyone in the known galaxy knows C3PO and R2D2. Yet, they were most definitely minor characters. Sometimes the seemingly meaningless dribble of C3PO clued you into something you needed to know later on. Minor characters often give us the reader/viewer knowledge we can’t get from the major character becomes sometimes that character doesn’t know it yet. That means taking the time to groom your minor characters. George Lucas once said he wrote Episode Four, then realized he needed to explain Vader’s background, which led to the Emperor, which led to C3PO and R2D2 being part of the beginning, which led to Luke’s mother, and on and on. You have to cultivate the trees for the forest to flourish.
That means sitting down and taking the time to do chapter outlines and timelines. It saves a lot of embarrassment when you know where you left that character over there with the cup of tea in his hand. I find this especially true when an author races to the finish line, leaving a lot of unresolved issues. I mean we all knew that sooner or later Harry Potter was going to face He-who-must-not-be-named. But Rowlings’ ending was brilliant, because we know what happened to Harry, and Ron, and Hermione, and well you get the picture.
The turtle approach wins, jack rabbiting you to a smooth publishing experience.
Terri Wagner’s current project, a steampunk adventure, Mr. Gunn and Dr. Bohemia by Pete Ford, will be released later in 2013.