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Asc2Com (MorganSoft) | 1994-02-04 | 17.6 KB | 239 lines

------------------------------------------ This is the sixth of nine chapters of THINK THUNDER! AND UNLEASH YOUR CREATIVITY Copyright (c) 1989 by Thomas A. Easton ------------------------------------------ CHAPTER 6: EDITING: CREATING BY DESTROYING When we were talking about brainstorming machines, we said that they generate a lot of garbage, just as does the flesh-and-blood popcorn mind. To use this garbage to be creative requires throwing away everything except the good stuff. The process, we said, is exactly the same as that of the sculptor who, confronted by a block of marble, removes everything that does not look like the sculpture he has in mind. For writers, this is the process called editing. Editing may seem to be a destructive process. After all, it requires throwing away many, even most, of the ideas one comes up with. Yet editing is an essential part of the creative process, for it concentrates the effort of creation into one or a few gems that can sparkle all the more intensely for being freed of their drab and useless kin. Bear in mind, however, that the creative process does not end with destruction. Once you have generated a suitable amount of raw material and edited it down to its shiniest components, you must still turn those components into a finished product. That is, you must build upon the gems you have extracted from the raw material before you can have the poem, story, paper, advertisement, or whatever that you wished to create in the first place. This building is the process of elaboration, which we will discuss in Chapter 7. WHAT IS EDITING? Editing is one of the prime functions of the critical mind. It begins only after the popcorn mind has thrown up a selection of raw material--new combinations of ideas, images, or words. This is when the critical mind must winnow the combinations, discarding the obvious garbage and keeping those tidbits it thinks it can develop into something valuable. Yet editing is not simply discarding the obvious garbage. That is simply the first and easiest step. It can also involve seeing that two bits of garbage are, if you but join them together, no longer garbage. This is what many sculptors do when they comb junkyards for bits of scrap metal which they can then fasten together to form striking statues. It is what collage artists do with scraps of wood and paper and fabric, with old doll parts and gears and photographs. Garbage plus garbage is not necessarily just a bigger pile of garbage; it can be genuine creative art. But you wish to be verbally creative. That, after all, is why you are using the THUNDER THOUGHT approach. In this context, joining bits of garbage together means taking two randomly generated sentences that individually make no sense and splicing them in such a way that they do make sense. Consider the two lines: Surrender an weather an ambulance white! A mist collide whose bountiful ambulance? Individually, they are nonsense. Taken together, they are still nonsense. But they contain several images that, together, suggest a day when heavy fog kept an ambulance from answering emergency calls, or perhaps when a car or truck collided with a white ambulance which was difficult to see because of fog. Editing is also the correction of grammar and the insertion of missing details, such as prepositions, pronouns, and even nouns and verbs. It can involve rearranging the parts of a sentence. It is, in general, the development or imposition of form, of structure, and therefore of sense. Applied to the first of the above two lines, it can give you: The white ambulance surrendered to the weather. THUNDER THOUGHT does not worry about such things, partly because building such sophistication into the program would have made it unwieldy and partly because crude grammar and skeletal sentences encourage the human mind to correct and amplify, usually at the same time that it is pitching the garbage out the window and splicing bits of nonsense together. In such cases, you may go immediately from the two lines above to: He collided with the white ambulance hidden in the mist. Unfortunately, winnowing, discarding, and splicing are not things a computer can do, at least for the foreseeable future. The day may come when editing, like popping, can be automated, but that day is not yet. For now, editing requires a human mind. More specifically, it requires a human mind with enough tolerance for ambiguity not to reject the product of brainstorming (human or computer) as so much random nonsense. That mind must be able to look at a strange sentence, paragraph, or idea and ask itself, "How can I MAKE this make sense?" SO WHAT'S DIFFICULT ABOUT EDITING? Does editing sound easy? It is. Yet many people still manage to have a great deal of trouble with it. The reason, as we discussed in Chapter 3, is the fear of self-destruction. In general, we generate the ideas we wish to edit ourselves, out of our own popcorn minds. They are therefore our own ideas, however bad they may be, and if editing demands their destruction, it is also demanding the destruction of our precious selves. It is no wonder that we resist this destruction, nor that--despite the apparent simplicity of the process--we find editing difficult. One answer is never to edit our own ideas. Edit someone else's instead, and let that someone else edit yours. Better yet, let something like THUNDER THOUGHT generate the popcorn mind's garbage, and then, since the garbage is not your own (or anybody else's) and your ego is not hung up on it, you can be as ruthless in your editing as you need to be. You cannot possibly hurt anyone's feelings. Nor, if you wind up throwing away the vast majority of your raw material, do you need to feel that you wasted the time involved in producing that raw material. THUNDER THOUGHT does the job quickly as well as impersonally. Exhbit 6 offers you a sample of the kind of raw material we're talking about. You can generate a similar--but different--sample any time you wish. Focus THUNDER THOUGHT on the subject of your choice by adding to each of the vocabulary lists a dozen or more appropriate words. Then use the "Narrative Brainstorm" menu option to produce a few paragraphs of random prose (the "Poetry" option can give you similar material). ----------------------- EXHIBIT 6: Can you make this make sense? No, your mind is not failing you. The paragraphs below really don't make much sense. They're not supposed to, for they were generated by the THUNDER THOUGHT random-text generator. But read them carefully anyway. Look for pieces that seem at least a little bit related. Then start crossing out words, lines, and whole paragraphs. Replace words. Exchange pronouns, tenses, voices. EDIT these paragraphs until they DO make sense. We write the cloud of a painful mist from a high mountain. Surprisingly, a camp notice the thinly tasty death. A modern food successfully gleam the kingly floor. The robotic cloud stupidly coddle the old tent. Surprisingly, a pain caress a tiredly political love. A profound radio fully preach a high brain. A speedy sword realistically tempt a frozen tree. As expected, the automatic bikini disdainfully burn a vise. In conclusion, a fantastic camp graduate an actively expensive pain. We train the robot of a repellent elephant from a spirited launchpad. We carefully placidly burn the maiden. Surprisingly, the path celebrate the crudely bloody moon. The modern wind incoherently invent a queenly shed. In conclusion, a pointed cloud help a nightly enervating moon. We manufacture the ball of a celebratory boat from a serious incense. An aged elephant artistically coddle a slow heat. Who carefully lovingly coddle a wisdom? In conclusion, the dull floor improve a frequently immediate village. We pacify the cloud of a modern cavern from a dull Mars. Surprisingly, the camp land a queerly serious agony. As expected, a lonely noise uncharitably pound a valley. A work debate an awkwardly enervating injury. In conclusion, the youthful bed waver a uniquely diseased tree. We land the tension of a kingly cloth from a logical camp. As expected, a royal mist helpfully fail a friend. As expected, a galactic plate subtly describe a wrench. She carefully anxiously debate a camp. A rich friend report the loyally elegant camp. In conclusion, a lonely tree help a developmentally punky incense. ----------------------- To see how the process can work, let's simplify the winnowing process. Let us simply select all those random sentences among the raw material that contain the word "cloud." This gives us: We write the cloud of a painful mist from a high mountain. The robotic cloud stupidly coddle the old tent. In conclusion, a pointed cloud help a nightly enervating moon. We pacify the cloud of a modern cavern from a dull Mars. Now, splice these four sentences together, rearranging and modifying as you do so, to get a single final sentence that serves as an excellent example of how the process works: A cloud of robots flew by moonlight from a cavern high in the mountains of Mars. Finally, let the "We write..." in the first sentence suggest the end result. You have the essential image for a science fiction story, or perhaps a painting. Getting that story or painting requires the process of elaboration we discuss in the next chapter. TEACHING EDITING If you are a writing teacher, one of the things you must get across to your students is editing. This is true whether you teach at the college, high school, or elementary school level, and whether you teach creative writing, technical writing, or just plain composition. It takes students years of practice to learn what to leave out of a paper (not to mention how to organize whatever they put in, or how to clean up grammar and spelling). Writing teachers generally teach this lesson by having their students write a paper, and then trying to guide them through the editing the paper always needs. This has the disadvantage that the students, like all writers, think their words are just fine, thank you, and need no fixing up. To get around this disadvantage, you may have the students trade papers and then tell each other what to leave out. Unfortunately, this tactic has the same drawback as asking them to edit their own work: They know their fellow students, and they are often reluctant to hurt their friends' feelings, just as they hate to hurt their own. They therefore pull their punches. They may, in fact, do little more than correct grammar and spelling, which--really!--have far less to do with effective expression than do cutting out the fat and organizing the lean. You can teach editing most effectively if you remove all the emotional, personal identity from the material you ask your students to edit. Give them garbage. Utter garbage. Anonymous garbage. Garbage that neither they nor their friends wrote, and whose destruction cannot possibly hurt anyone's feelings. Computer-generated garbage. Obviously, we are talking about THUNDER THOUGHT, and garbage of the sort we see in Exhibit 6. Give the program whatever vocabulary you wish (remember that a restricted vocabulary can make the computer-generated nonsense at least seem to be about a specific topic). Then generate a page of random nonsense, and give it to your students to edit into sense, just as we did with Exhibit 6. They will quickly learn, just as we saw with Exhibit 6, that editing requires attention to grammar, spelling, and organization, but it is mostly a matter of REMOVING--of throwing out the garbage. When done thoroughly and vigorously, this pruning of our prose produces leaner, cleaner writing, and that is something we all want to see in instructions, term papers, short stories, and everything else, whether our students' or our own. SUMMARY Editing is an important part of what the critical mind does to what the popcorn mind, or the THUNDER THOUGHT computer program, produces. It is the process of discarding the useless garbage, and it is thus essentially a destructive process, but it is also essential to creation. Yet it is more than destruction. It is also revision--the correction of grammar; the addition, deletion, and replacement of words; the splicing of sentences; the rearrangement of both words and sentences. Both the destruction and the revision are difficult because they threaten the sense of self we invest in our popcorn-mind effusions. This is therefore one way in which THUNDER THOUGHT helps the editing process: Because the computer generates what is edited, the editor feels no personal threat and can edit freely. As you might expect, THUNDER THOUGHT can be a great help to teachers who wish to help their students get a feel for editing. It both makes the process painless and amply demonstrates that editing is to a huge extent a matter of removing material that fails to make sense or contributes nothing to the student's paper, poem, or story. ------------------------------------------------------------- Press <ESC> to exit this chapter and BROWSE the next chapter. ------------------------------------------------------------- Complete book and software available from R.K. West Consulting P.O. Box 8059, Mission Hills, CA 91346.