Tag: editing

Milestones and Doubt

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I think I finished my second pass at the first edit last night. I say “I think” because I’m feeling a tremendous urge to throw out all the rewrites that I’ve completed over the past six weeks or so, and in fact to toss the entire document in my computer’s recycle bin. Which would, technically, put me back in the re-writing process, although more at the even-before-the-starting-point-of-square-one point than at the fixing-what’s-wrong-with-it point.

I’m pretty sure this draft is worse than the first. Tsunamis of doubt about the changes I’ve made are pummeling the coastline of my confidence in this project. I thought last night about how bizarre and awkward it felt writing the necessary changes into the end of the book. Then I thought for even longer about going back and deleting all my new changes and reverting to the first draft I finished with in July. Then I had a drink and consulted with my wife and decided to let the changes breathe for a little while before doing anything drastic (which is probably always a good policy on both counts: consulting with the wife and letting things breathe).

After pondering on it for a night, I’m going to let those changes stand for this pass. I’m going to take one final pass on the story to address my remaining notes and clean up the language, and then it’ll be time to pass it along to some readers. I’m thinking that can be done by the end of January. I’ve missed my goal to have this first edit done by the new year, but given that I had no idea how much time the edit should take in the first place, I’m not unhappy about that.

I recall, now, thinking back at the beginning of this process that I had no idea how to attack it, and I think the process that I blundered into worked … well enough. That would be a process with three legs:

  1. Read the draft, taking notes on major plot points, inconsistencies, character tracking, and anything else that needs fixing.
  2. Rewrite it, smashing the broken bits to pieces and building it back bit by bit. Crowbar in the changes that need to be made and hack out the stuff that’s taking up space.
  3. Read it again, cleaning up language and fixing any lingering errors.

As has been pointed out multiple times on this blarg, I’m hardly an expert, and I don’t know what I’m doing. However, I spent a lot of time hemming and hawing about how I was going to approach this edit, and if I can have this method in mind for the next time I need it, maybe I can save myself a couple days of strife.

So, on Monday, I start on the third leg. I was going to read with a scalpel in hand, but I think after my last post about how bloated the thing has become, I’m actually going to be using a hatchet.

 

Word Bloat, and a note on New Year’s Resolutions

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Perception is everything. Sometimes the only thing.

I was working on the edit last night, and I realized that I’m a lot closer to the end of the first pass than I thought I was. To be precise, there are still a lot of pages between my current position and the end, but the big rewriting is nearly done, and from there it’s just a pruning of the hedges, a dusting of the shelves, and a putting to bed of the toddlers. Then it’s finally going to be time to show this thing to some actual people to actually read it. Those people will then hopefully have mercy on my soul and tell me only in the kindest of terms how many root canals they would rather sit through before they’d turn to my book.

But the end is in sight. Maybe still a pinprick on the horizon, but at least the horizon is no longer an endless blue expanse — it actually looks as if I may be coming back into harbor after all this time. And that’s awesome. Unfortunately, while I was noticing that the end is in sight, I also noticed the word count in the bottom corner of the document. It may be early in the game to be overly concerned with the word count on the novel as a whole, but like a chipped tooth that you can’t stop running your tongue over, I can’t put the number out of my head. The first draft was finished at roughly 89000 words. Now the thing is just a few hundred short of 100k.

It’s bloating. Slowly expanding in the middle, like a middle-aged married guy. And I worry that with the changes I’m making, it will continue to swell like a corpse in a pond if I don’t take measures to trim it down. It’s part and parcel of this whole editorial process, I suppose, for me to find yet another thing to smother my soul in doubt over.

So now, 40 pages shy of the end of the book, I’ve suddenly become draconian in my examination of the language of the thing. I wield my highlight and delete functions like twin poison-coated samurai swords. Which means I’m going to have to re-read the entire novel again making the same ruthless cuts, lest the first half sound like it was written by a living dictionary while the second half was written by a dictionary with all the adjectives and adverbs cut out.

But enough about the edit. It’s New Year’s Eve, which means it’s time to pop the champagne, break out the sparklers, and fall asleep at 9:30, because that’s how we roll in my house. It’s also time for resolutions, which is a tradition as idiotic as any we have in our funny old culture.

The date of Jan. 1 only has significance because we say it does. In the scope of the universe with all its bits of flying dust and nigh-endlessly burning gas and invisible particles and unfathomable tracts of empty space, the significance of one tiny planet making one revolution around one tiny sun has all the import of an ant fart in a hurricane. But somehow, and for some reason, we’ve decided that it’s a good date for “reinventing ourselves” and making vows that have as much likelihood of being fulfilled as my hair has of sprouting into a saucy pompadour atop my dome.

Here’s a hint for resolutions in general: if you’re making them for any reason at all other than because you find it of crucial importance to your life, you might as well write the resolution on a square of toilet tissue, and then use the toilet tissue for its designed purpose. Resolving to lose weight at the new year because that’s what everybody does? Yeah, you might as well just eat a dozen donuts now and save yourself the strife. Quitting smoking on your birthday? Go ahead and stop off for some new lighters on your drive home. If a resolution is worth making, it’s worth starting on it right fargoing now. As in, I resolve right now to stop griping about resolutions and go work on my novel.

See you next year.

The Neverending Edit

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A couple of good (read: productive) days of editing the novel have got me feeling, well, productive about my time off from work thus far, but they also have me mired in doubt. I feel kind of like the horse… was it Artex? … from The Neverending Story, who wandered into the swamp of sadness or whatever and finally got so depressed and full of doubt that he was unable to move and just sank into the depths with hardly a whimper. (By the way, what the hell? Who puts something like that in a movie ostensibly for children? Let’s just have this horse — beloved by one of the main characters of the film — just fargoing give up on life. That won’t scar the children in the audience forever. Come to think of it, that movie as a whole is actually pretty bleak. The entire story world gets sucked up into The Nothing? This vast, invisible, intractable force? Okay, let me un-digress…)

Yeah. Mired. I feel like the leg of the edit I’m working on is a solid one, one that does good things for the story, but I’m afraid that I’m doing it all wrong, and as a result, I’m afraid to take much further action. Fearful of breaking the thing further. Fearful that I’ve sunk in dozens of hours working in the wrong direction. Which is probably why I’ve been hiding from the novel behind all those excuses for the past couple weeks.

But we all know that the only thing hiding accomplishes is wasted time, and running from the inevitable means you only die tired. No, the thing to do is to lean into the skid, embrace the suck, power through the rest of this edit, and brace myself for the feedback to come. Because I’m pretty sure that, after I can get all the sprockets and gizmos stuffed back into the chest cavity and do one more polishing pass, I’m going to send it out to some readers and solicit some feedback from a mind that isn’t mine.

And, boy, oh, boy. That was an idea I had pretty much already decided upon in my head, but actually giving voice to it and putting it in writing fills me with an entirely new sense of dread. For all that I think I’m telling a good story, that I think it works and will resonate with audiences, I simply can’t know.

A metaphor that gets tossed around in my life as a teacher is that “we jump out of the plane and build our parachute on the way down,” which always gets a few laughs but is really a horrible way to approach education. The metaphor is apt, though, for the writing world, I think. I just have to trust that this parachute I’m building won’t be shredded like my confidence when I finally unfurl the thing.

Trying for a short story by the end of the week, but outside of that, I may give myself a few days off from the blarg. All the cool kids are doing it, and there is a lot of action for our family (families) at Christmas. So, you know. This might be my last entry for a few days. Unless it isn’t.

Late-night indecision is fun!

Also, look at the lame-o who calls 10:30 late-night! What a sap!

Running from the Hard Stuff

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I don’t do running posts here so much anymore. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing (probably an indifferent thing ultimately), but every time I find myself writing about running I find myself wondering how much can really be said.

It’s a run. You put one foot in front of the other until you’ve had enough or until you can’t any longer, and um… that’s pretty much it.

That said, even given the understanding (and it is my constant position) that every run is a good run, yesterday’s was a bit better than average. It’s been a long time since I had a run without any pain — ball-of-the-foot pain, ankle pain, bottom-of-the-heel pain, back-of-the-heel pain — and as a result I’ve approached every run for the past three weeks (following a month off) with a fair amount of trepidation. Fear that my feet are still jacked up and will therefore screw up the run, fear that I’ll do further damage to my feet and screw up any future runs, fear that while taking it easy to avoid exacerbating my existing injuries I’ll stumble into some other entirely new injury.

But, see, there I go, taking a thing that’s incredibly specific and realizing that it’s a lot bigger than I thought. Running in fear of injury has me going slower than ever and heading out on shorter distances than I’ve run since I got started two and a half years ago. And yes, I’ve been successful in avoiding injury that way, but I also feel as if I’m not accomplishing much, either. Rather like a tightrope walker doing practice runs on a line just a foot off the ground. Sure, they’re good for fundamentals and building confidence, but sooner or later you have to go and climb the building again, man.

With that in mind, and after a quick little jaunt on Saturday with no ill effects, I set out for a five mile stint yesterday and allowed myself to go as fast as I liked, rather than reigning myself in like I’ve done for the last three weeks. I wasn’t setting speed records or anything, but I got my pace under ten minutes per mile, which is about a full minute per mile ahead of my pace on any other run I’ve had of late, and about the fastest I’ve gone since all my injuries started. Five miles later, the feet are tight and sore, but not showing any pangs of injury, and here a day later, they’re still showing all clear. That’s room for hope that my injuries may finally be on the ropes.

But where was I? Right. Jumping to conclusions and making metaphors out of molehills. Because I wonder if, not unlike the way I’ve been babying my injury of late, I’ve not been babying my edit of late as well. Shying away from the hard work. Giving myself overlarge pats on the back for accomplishments that really aren’t so grand. Simply pacing back and forth on a line one foot off the ground. I tell myself that I’ve got lots of time ahead, what with the holidays coming up, to make progress on the edit, and I’ve been using that as an excuse to let the hard work at hand slide. I tell myself that I cleared a ridiculously high hurdle and earned a bit of a step back from banging my head against the wall, and now I feel my momentum slipping away. Taking the easy way out.

Back when I started the first draft of the novel, I set what I thought was an ambitious goal for finishing the thing, and I shattered it into thousands of sparkling shards, finishing almost a month ahead of schedule. Then I set a deadline for my first edit, not knowing what the process would be or whether the goal was reasonable at all, and it looks like I’m not even almost going to make that goal. Now, to be fair, the beast has shifted and changed form and whereas I thought I was facing down a steaming, stomping minotaur, I’m actually battling a winged harpy that screeches and attacks from all angles, so I’m not mad at myself for taking more time than I thought I might. Still, if I’m honest, it’s sliding on me. The Grinch’s sleigh sliding inevitably down the mountainside as he clings hopelessly to the rails.

Well, the run can often be instructive, and this weekend’s run is telling me that it’s time to stop handicapping myself, stop shying away from the thing that’s difficult and do it because it’s difficult. My feet are healed (or at least healing) and ready to carry me back to longer distances and faster paces. As for the edit, I think I’ve enjoyed my tiny victory enough; it’s time to face the harpy and buckle back down to work.

The Doldrums

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It’s no secret I’ve struggled with the editing of this novel. The highs are stratospheric and the lows are Death Valley-esque.

But I’m in the midst of an issue that I am unsure of the cure for. I feel rather like I’ve set off on the Oregon Trail, but I didn’t pack nearly enough provisions and all I can do is watch my livestock and then my family wither and die in the wilderness. (You have died of dysentery.)

I had the “brilliant” idea a few weeks back to add a new character to the story. He’d bring balance to the force, I thought, and provide some growth for certain characters while getting in the way of others. He’d plug up plot holes and give me a path to a much cleaner resolution than the one I wrote the first time around. In short, he’d fix my problems.

Now, I’m about a week into trying to shoehorn him into this thing and… oh, man, I just don’t know. On the one hand, I feel he certainly has the potential to do all the things I wanted him to do, but in his current form he’s doing them about as well as a guy with no hands can read braille. Which is to say, all he can really do is lean into the story and mash his face against it. It’s torturous work trying to make him interface with the existing plot and characters in any meaningful way that doesn’t feel totally artificial and tacked-on. It’s mentally exhausting pondering the ways to make all the things that have to happen happen (untangle that, grammar checkers), and much like a hapless tracker in a driving snow, I keep retracing my steps. I’ve rewritten one series of two pages four times now, and it’s impossible for me to tell which version is any better than the others. You add to that the fact that every little change I make here means other dangly bits and loose ends elsewhere in the story have to be busted apart and rejiggered, and the whole mess has devolved into one great giant gumption trap, to borrow a term from Robert Pirsig (from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance).

To nutshell and paraphrase, a gumption trap is a small problem that trips you up in a big way, then pretends to be bigger than it is to make itself seem unsolvable. The example I recall from the book was rounding off a screw on an engine compartment panel, thus effectively sealing the panel shut. Not only do you have the problem of unscrewing a screw with no head, but you can’t even begin to think about how to solve the problem that you were trying to get into the engine compartment for in the first place until you can deal with the tiny screw. It swells so large that it fills your vision, and you lose all sense not only of any possible solution to the problem itself, but also of your entire ability to achieve the thing that the problem got in the way of in the first place. You can spend hours staring at a gumption trap, pondering and scheming and hypothesizing, and end up no closer to solving it than the moment after it sprang itself. Yep, that pretty much encapsulates my feeling on the novel right now. A broken motorcycle whose engine I can’t even look at.

So the edit is a problem. But what’s doubly troubling is that I can’t even measure the progress I’m making. For every step forward, I have to take about three steps back. But then I can steal the good ideas I had for this other idea and divert them to this other other idea to make it work better, so I mentally copy and paste a little and gain back a step or two. But then that idea breaks down and I feel the urge to undo what I’ve done, and that brings me back to the original thing which I then also subsequently want to undo, so I write it again. On an internal level, I know that there’s “work” being done here, but it’s impossible to quantify it. Some days I add to the word count of the original. Some days I subtract. Today all I’ve been able to do is stare at the page while the characters swirl around my head and shout obscenities at me about how useless it is to have them swirling around my head all day. They want to fix their problems. I want to fix their problems. Problem is that for those problems to get fixed, ultimately the road leads through me, and I feel about as qualified to sort out any narrative snarls as a seal is to help you with your math homework, which is to say, not at all, unless that homework involves a bunch of fish and barking, which my story does not. GET OUT OF HERE, IMAGINARY SEAL. YOU’RE NOT HELPING.

Triply troubling is the fact that I can feel the morass of this thing sucking at my boots as I try to wade across it. With each step, I feel a bit more gunk collecting on my undersoles, a bit more narrative dead weight hanging like an albatross about my neck. Momentum matters, as I’ve pointed out before, and my momentum on this thing feels like it’s barely crawling forward, if it’s moving at all.

In short, I’m stuck in the doldrums with this thing, and there is not a breeze in sight to catch my drooping sails and propel my scurvy-ridden crew out of this mess any time soon. To complicate matters further, for some reason my running playlist keeps throwing at me the song that’s inspired the next novel I plan to write, which makes me want to think about that story instead of this one. I know that that way madness lies, because the moment I take my focus away from the current project, it’s going to start to sour in the sun and I might never return to rejuvenate it.

No, this is no time to abandon the Project, or turn my back on it even for a moment, no matter how much its quagmire is pulling me down. Solutions will present themselves. Once I can solve the project of this shoehorn character, I suspect that the rest of the edit will look like a field of candy corn by the end. Of course, that simile only works if you like candy corn. Anyway… I’m working on it. I’m blarging more about it. That always seems to help knock the ol’ cobwebs loose. And I’m trying not to think too hard about it, because like any gumption trap, the more you bang your head against the thing the less capable of fixing it you become, until all you want to do is throw the whole contraption in the fire, and that’s a thing I don’t want to feel compelled to do. Because if presented with the opportunity, the Id-Writer may just snap his chains, jump the fence, and do exactly that.

I have to remind myself to breathe and to keep writing. Eyes on the prize and all that tripe. It’s still first stages. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Just keep writing. Keep working. I’m at home in the me that is on this adventure.

BREATHE.