The Zen of Making Books | Part Two
Content.
That’s why people buy a book. It isn’t a fancy cover or splashy title.
Content.
When getting ”The Zen of Shaving One’s Balls” compiled, that is what I kept reminding myself. My second collection of poetry, ”it’s about no longer being a bastard”, had a very definite theme. The narrator goes through a healing process in that collection, and you can’t help but feel for him/her. I like that there is power in that collection merely from the fact that you have emotionally invested yourself in this person. Readers assume I am this narrator, which forces them to feel even more for the pieces.
The thing with ”The Zen of Shaving One’s Balls” however, is that there is no running theme… no rhyme or reason, so to speak. I wanted the collection to be a wild assortment of powerful, serious and utterly zany pieces. Part of the reason for this is because my writing has been so erratic over the last couple of years. I don’t mean this to sound negative. Not at all. In fact, I love that my writing has not followed any true paths as of late.
The reason for this is that I have been working so hard on developing my writing in terms of different voices. Like a painter working on perfecting (in so much as we can) different types of techniques and brushstrokes, I have been working on developing my voices, that they don’t sound all the very same. To that end, I have been writing under various pseudonyms. When an idea comes to mind, I think about which voice would have a more powerful way of conveying an emotion, and I write as that person.
It sounds convoluted, but you’ll have to trust me when I tell you it works. As writers, we all have those voices in our head which come out on paper as characters. What I am trying to do is give those voices more liberties… a little life… a time in which to create.
It has been a wonderful tool in terms of helping me write better and it has produced a fairly eclectic body of work. And what better home for these pieces than ”The Zen of Shaving One’s Balls”.
Formatting the collection was quite simple, as I already had a template from my previous collection. I merely inserted the pieces, separating them into two categories (the relatively sane and everything else), then sorting them alphabetically. I saw no point in sorting them by subject matter as the pieces are so diverse.
Despite the fact that I was using an existing template, this process still took some time. The thing is, this is the meat and potatoes of the book. Again… content. That’s why people buy a book. I wanted to make certain that the content of this collection was something that could hook people… and I believe it will.
This meant going through all of the pieces and like a film editor forced to make cuts, I removed pieces which I did not feel were quite strong enough to warrant a place in the collection. I edited over and over again to catch as many of the spelling and grammatical errors as I could (though there must still exist some… I am, after all, only human).
When finally this process was completed, I set to printing.... and printing… and printing… oh, the printing.
Join me in the next part as I take you through the first cut. If there is any aspect of bookmaking which makes you feel as though you are creating something real, it is that first cut.
