Tag: word count

Broken Ankle at the Finish

Pavowski3 Comments

I know, okay? I get it.

It’s become too much of a motif around here, this procrastination, this failure to complete, this inability to batten the last hatches. If writing my novel has been a marathon, I’ve snapped an ankle in the last mile. Or maybe sprained it. Or maybe I just tripped and fell and I’m only really really tired, and every scratch feels like a gash, and every shallow breath is a gasp. But that’s no excuse for not slogging myself across the line.

There isn’t much left to do. There really isn’t. I can only belabor the point so much. I can only pretend for so long that I’m stuck on an issue — this character isn’t working out so well, or that plot turn doesn’t feel quite right — before the truth bubbles to the surface like an eyeball in your soup: that I’m not stuck on an issue within the novel, I’m stuck on finishing the novel.

Because that’s all there is. This first edit has drawn on like an endless summer, and I’m bogged down just a mile from the finish line. The car’s blown a tire and there’s no phone service, and even stepping foot out into the sun has me sweat-soaked and exhausted. The prospect of knuckling up and walking it out to the finish has me dreaming of shade trees and ice-cold lemonade.

The last issue is this one character. I don’t know what to do with her, and I could conceivably go back and write her into a few more scenes or write her out of the novel completely… it honestly makes no difference to me at this point. I’m almost ready to hand the manuscript off to some beta readers (a term that never made sense to me… I mean, I guess I’d be the alpha reader, but does that really make sense? Anyway…) and just let them tell me what to do with her, but then I know it’s probably not a professional move to hand off a work with glaring, unresolved issues and expect other people to fix them for me.

But even more than I’m frustrated at my block about finishing this thing, I’m even more frustrated at the prospect of not finishing it. I didn’t come this far; I didn’t write 90,000 words and then re-write about a third of them; to give up now. I can smell the blistered pork of the hot dogs, taste the swirled sticky sugar of the cotton candy. (What? It’s totally gonna be a carnival when I finish.)  No, I’m going to finish this damn novel if I have to crawl across the line dragging two dead, broken legs behind me.

And sooner rather than later. Because I’m a little bit burned on it.

Not that that’s not glaringly obvious or anything.

*Removes cobweb from eyebrow*

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.

Inverted Wordsmithy

Pavowski12 Comments

Editing a novel is not what you think it will be. At least, it hasn’t been what I thought it would be.

I’m about two months deep in the first edit of my draft, and the process has been instructive. Too tentative to wade in with a blowtorch and sledgehammer, I re-read the whole thing slowly, making notes and fixing window dressings, delaying the moment when I’d have to start gutting the structure of the thing, but that time is here, now. I’m about a week deep, and I’m learning some things.

These things are by no means exhaustive, nor do I claim they’re universal–they’re simply some things which have occurred to me throughout the process.

  1. Rewriting is like writing, inverted. Drafting the first draft was a linear task. 1200 words a day, which I could crank out in an hour or so most days. Make the quota and feel super-duper about myself for the rest of the day. Miss the quota and feel like a schlub until I could scramble another twenty minutes later in the day, or crank out more wordcount the next day. But rewriting is an entirely different animal. It’s not just a scramble to get more words down on the page. It’s a scramble to cut out the dead wood. To quote Arachnophobia, “cut out dead wood. Put in good wood.” But that’s a tricky thing to measure. “Okay, I drafted three hundred new words today, but do I include the two hundred I cut out? Or the two thousand I had to re-parse to make sure it still made sense? Or the hour I spent kicking the idea around in my head before I decided to try it in the first place?” I know I’ve spent similar amounts of time on the work as I did in the draft, but the yardstick is out the window.
  2. A bull in a china shop, blindfolded, and on speed. I’ve no idea if the changes I’m making are good ones. When I drafted this thing the first time around I felt more or less confident that the ideas and the progression of the novel were generally sound. Now the jungle has grown thick around me, my map has been swallowed by the raging river, and the slitherers in the night are closing in. Every change I make is a flail toward what I think is the way out, but I have no way of knowing if I’m heading toward the light or further into the depths. The best I can do is trust to my instincts, which have in no way proved that they are trustworthy yet. It’s harrowing.
  3. Motivation is scarce as desert rain. Again, contrast with the draft is the only thing that makes sense. The draft developed a momentum of its own. I wanted to work on it every day. Some days the 1200 word quota passed so quickly I felt like I was selling myself short to write so little. In the edit, I almost feel–dread is the wrong word–certainly an aversion to working on the story. I still want to work on it, but I’m hesitant to begin every day. Partially it’s a feeling of lost-ness, of not knowing where to begin or where to turn next, partially it’s a fear that I’m going to break the damn thing like a priceless Ming dynasty vase and never be able to put it right again. One way or another, I struggle to start, and the starting is the hardest part.
  4. Doubt, doubt, doubt. The draft was riddled with doubt, make no mistake. “Is the story any good, does this character make sense, is this plotline as convoluted as it feels?” Now, as I make changes, the same doubts rear their heads: “is the new story any good, does this action by the character make better sense, have I de-convoluted that plotline any?” But the new doubts don’t replace the old. They move in, cohabitate, and start multiplying like rabbits, giving rise to entirely new doubts: “should I have made that change? Is the new story or the old more reader-friendly? Do you have any idea what you’re doing?” Perhaps if there was a way to monetize doubt, this could all OMG BRB I HAVE TO WRITE THAT DOWN AS AN IDEA FOR A BOOK.
  5. Inspiration from unexpected places. All the gripes aside, I do seem to see the story in a new way every day. Just today, for example, I was absolutely stonewalled and had no idea how to fix a problem in the second act. In a panic I penned a hasty cry for help to a friend, but no sooner had I written the problem out than my brain saw the component parts of the problem, rearranged them with some strange mental geometry, and synthesized a perfectly sensible and perhaps even obvious solution. Said solution even strengthens the story and deepens the development of a character who sorely needs developing. Sometimes you eat the b’ar, as they say.

I think that’s enough commentary on the edit for now. I’ve certainly done a lot of that lately, but in my defense, the edit is looming rather large in my viewfinders. But I’ve got a week off from work coming up, so hopefully I’ll get the chance to mentally clear the pipes a bit and get some good work done on it.

In the meantime, for my next entry, I think I’ll go back to a topic guaranteed to simultaneously gain AND lose readers for the blarg here: toddler bodily fluids. Fun fact: one of the most viewed, and the most-searched topics that lands new people at the blarg, is this post about giving my son an enema. Which goes to show, I guess, that my novel needs more poop jokes.

This post is part of SoCS.

Progress Update: Last Chance for Gas

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Today, a pretty big milestone in novel progress.

Thanks to a gargantuan push stemming from a renewal of gumption at the beginning of the week, I processed the last thirty pages of the draft over the past three days and am ready to start on my last phase of rewrites for this first editing pass.

To clarify, “processed” means I read it, cleaned up the stinky bits of language, corrected typos, and fixed the bric-a-brac on the shelves, all the while making notes about walls that need tearing down, wires that need ripping out, and pipes that need sealing. That’s the big, scary work, and that will begin … probably next week. Tomorrow I hope to review the first half of the novel to recreate the notes I lost with my old notes and finish creating an outline of the book as it stands. If I have time leftover, I’m going to map out the character arcs and think about re-ordering some portions of the novel.

To be fair, the processing was the easy part, and the much harder work–rewriting the crap bits, changing major plot points, going back to the beginning to plant seeds which need to be fully grown by the end–is still ahead. That’s the stage that’s truly harrowing. It stretches out on the horizon like an endless desert, and somehow I know there are no pit stops along the way; there will be no gas stations or emergency call boxes if I blow a tire or make a wrong turn. However, the big push this week has me crackling with energy and enthusiasm to keep pushing.

And the funniest thing happened as I was reading the last pages.

I realized that I really, really like the story. And I’m saying that not to toot my own horn, but because I truly think that for all the tribulations and for all I thought the book was awful when I was writing it, upon further review and after several months to get some space, ultimately it seems to me that the novel is not that bad. I’ve still got big decisions to make, the fates of characters to decide. I’ll have to destroy some of the helpless squealing unformed bits that I enjoyed so much at the beginning and create brand new replacement parts on the fly, but somehow that task doesn’t seem so daunting.

And that’s not even the best part.

When I was writing the first draft, I could feel myself running out of steam by the end. The last twenty thousand words or so felt like the last miles of a marathon; even with the finish line in sight, even riding on the balmy current of you’re-almost-there-itis, I could feel my knees giving out, my quads locking up, my lungs collapsing in on themselves. I felt like the ending I was writing was simply a placeholder, something awful I was writing to simply get the project to a stopping point so that I could rewrite it later and forget I ever wrote something so bad. But reading it the last couple of days, I find that I’m actually a pretty big fan of the ending. The characters end in good places (while good of course doesn’t necessarily mean “good” for the character, but rather “good” for the story), the critical loose ends are tied up, and there’s a nice sense of completeness to the whole thing. My wife thinks I should leave it open for a sequel in case this thing goes all Harry Potter on me, and I think that the potential to continue is there, though certainly the story could (and does) stand on its own.

There are holes to patch. Rotted boards to replace, rough edges to smooth down. But on the whole I think this thing is moving as it should past the ugly formative stages into the workable beta-reading stage. Which is itself simultaneously amazing and terrifying, because that means that I’m going to have to pry my whitened knuckles from its tender edges and let it go out into the world to be read by people who don’t know the time I’ve spent with it, who don’t know the love and the pain and the suffering and the insanity and the laughter and the frustration and the days and nights and the weekends spent living with these characters, exploring all the plotlines, envisioning the world of the story. Nobody can know all that, but they’re going to have to judge it all the same, and my only hope is that when that time comes, maybe they won’t return it to me and ask, “why did you bother?”

For all my confidence at the high points along this journey, I am still terrified that I’ll be unmasked as a pretender at this whole writing gig. I fear that my internal barometer for assessing the story is hopelessly warped and that I have no proper idea what makes a story actually readable or compelling or enjoyable in the least. But this is no time for entertaining those fears. It’s nearing time to cut the cord and throw this fledgling creation of mine out of the nest and see if it can fly.

I just hope that when that time does finally arrive, I can survive the feedback.

The EPOS (Editing Pile of… we’ll say Stuff)

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Let’s get one thing clear: I know nothing about editing a book.  I know a few things about editing short-form writing in general, but when it comes to making a 300-page behemoth readable for the masses, I’m a blind bull in a china shop.  Made of glass.  The shop, not the bull.

Apparently there are lots of ways to do it.  Some read through the thing in record pace to get a sense of the story as a whole then begin fixing bits in the order of direness.  Some slog their way from front to back, chipping away at the glacier as they go.  Others, I dunno, tear the manuscript to pieces and burn it in effigy, inhaling the vapors to enter a trance state that allows them to craft the distilled story.  I’ve never been much of a planner, so as is my wont, I’m sort of making it up as I go.  Regardless of approach, I feel like there’s one thing most authors have in common as they edit.

The EPOS.

Educational Platitudes of Smartness?

Entropic Poignard of Sagacity?

Electrified Prod of Smackface?

As awesome as those sound, for me, it’s the Editing Pile of Sharknado.

Let me reiterate.  I can speak for myself, but I have a feeling this struggle is universal among writerly types.  Here’s how it works for me:

I read the draft.  As I read, I try to read the text with an impartial mind, assessing the elements on their intrinsic value rather than on my own sentimental attachment to them.  As I read, things jump out at me.  Unclear character development.  Missing plot points.  References to things I forgot to include the first time around.  Some mistakes can be fixed on the spot: typos, obviously awkward prose, egregious instances of wheelieing.  Everything else gets a note and goes on the Pile.

At the beginning, the pile was just a few comments, a couple of harmless observations about the dubious state of the draft, a few gentle admonitions to a Future Me about some bits of the draft that need rewriting.  But like all monstrous things, what started off small and innocuous began an exponential growth curve and now seems to be doubling in size every couple of days.  The more errors I spot within the draft, the easier it becomes to spot errors within the draft.  The more I identify elements which need fixing, the more readily I seem to find elements to fix.  As a result, I’ve been working on the edit for about, oh, a month or so now, I’m about 130 pages in, and the pile has grown into a heap and a tower and now seems as immense as Babel stretching toward the heavens.

The EPOS looms and sways; it reaches skyward and some days seems to eclipse the sun.  It’s full of all sorts of advice and admonition: “present this bit earlier”, “expand upon this moment”, “is this necessary?”, “rewrite this whole f&*(!)#$ passage”.  Some can be fixed in a matter of minutes, some will take hours.  It grows by the day, and it seems as if it’s approaching a critical mass, whereupon it will begin to attract further Stuff to itself and begin sucking up random bits of prose from entirely other parts of the story, perhaps from the blarg here, maybe from textbooks in the area… it may eventually start swallowing the pets as they wander too close.

Some days it feels as if the EPOS is growing faster than I even wrote the novel in the first place, like it’s got a mind of its own and seeks to destroy me through the sheer accumulation of my seemingly endless string of inadequacies.  I feel myself working in its shadow, the cool embrace of its inevitability clammy and close around my shoulders as I work at the imperfect mass of my draft with the panic of a surgeon whose patient is dying of a sucking chest wound.  It’s overwhelming and terrifying and oppressive and it’s getting bigger every day.  In fact, the other day the thought flitted through my mind that the EPOS was so big, so insurmountable, that I might never get around to addressing everything I put into it.  That the work that needs to be done for this draft to be decent is work that’s beyond my capability.  That perhaps, as I’ve thought so many times as I’ve walked this path to writerdom, the prudent thing is to face the facts, accept that the time I’ve put in is time wasted, cut my losses and go home with my tail between my legs.

But then I stop, because I recognize that voice.  It’s not my voice, it’s the Howler Monkey of Doubt.  And the Howler has some fancy new digs: a tower of Sharknado hundreds of feet high, which affords him a crazy vantage point on the depth of my plight and gives him lots of ammunition for taking potshots at my self-esteem and my sense of accomplishment.  But he’s terrified, as well he should be, because he’s only hoping that I’ll forget something crucial.  The tower isn’t built on the ground.  The foundation of the EPOS isn’t the level of the earth, it didn’t start from ground zero.  No, the tower’s roots are gnarled and knotted at the summit of the once-insurmountable mountain that I climbed in the first place to even get the draft written.  Of course it blocks out the sun — I’m basically soaring at the level of the sun in the first place, just by virtue of how far I’ve come.  The tower is high, but next to the mountain I’ve already climbed, it’s an out-of-order escalator leading to the second story at the mall, and if I let that stop me, then I’m no better than those poor lost souls chubbing it up at the food court.

I feel as if I may have mixed my metaphors again.

The point is, the EPOS is massive.  It’s daunting.  But not nearly so daunting as the original idea of writing ninety thousand words from scratch, not nearly so daunting as weaving this story, flawed as it may be, from the raw silk threads spiraling around in my cortex.  Sure, it’ll get worse before it gets better.  I think it was JFK that said something about doing hard things because they’re hard.  Maybe there’s wisdom in that.  Maybe, with that in mind, I’ll feel a little less bad about all the sharknado I add to the pile tomorrow.