Tag: writing about writing

This One’s a Bleeder

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To continue my metaphor of narrative surgery, I’ve been working on the edit a good bit the past couple nights, with a few thousand words added in and a lot of trimming and tweaking in the neighboring scenes. But I hit my first really rough patch, and the patient nearly bled out while I watched.

See, there was this one really good scene leading into another really good scene, and the problem with the two was (is) that there’s a character present in the one who I forgot about when I wrote the other. Upon reflection and review, it makes perfect sense for said character not to be present in scene 2, though I rather like her contributions to scene 1. So, one way or another, the appendix must be removed and I have to explain how I removed it. Her. Gah, metaphors.

So I spent my editing time tonight writing a brief intermediary scene wherein the protagonist clumsily gets rid of her. And man… I just think it’s crap. I mean, it does what it needs to do (patching the continuity hole of having her magically disappear from one scene to the next) but it feels so obvious and heavy-handed in the narrative sense of I just needed to get rid of this character that I fear it will break continuity anyway.

Thus, the new scene, created to bridge a gap between two existing scenes and resolve another item precariously perched on the Editing Pile of Stuff now becomes its very own item on the Pile.

I’m tempering my all-consuming self-abuse and the growing screams of the Howler Monkey of Doubt with the knowledge that it’s okay if it’s not perfect at this stage; it can always be polished and refined in later edits. The important thing for now is to make sure that all the musculature is in place and functioning properly; the skin grafts and, you know, general make-it-look-a-little-less-Frankenstein’s-monster-ish-ness can come later.

But man, that’s one raggedy-looking patch job. Almost like I had a grizzled, musclebound soldier on my table with a horrifically injured arm, and I replaced it with a prosthetic molded from a five-year-old girl. Sure, they’re the same parts, but they damn sure don’t match.

Ugh. Have I mentioned that editing sucks so very much worse than drafting?

Narrative Surgery

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I’ve not accomplished much on the novel this week.

I’m terrified because, following in the wake of the question I posed to myself earlier this week, I’ve pretty much decided to take a sledgehammer to my first draft. I’m conflicted about it. The first draft didn’t do anything wrong. I rather like it, if I’m honest. But in the intervening time between when I penned the last period of the draft and I re-read the thing from front to back over the last couple months, I’ve come to accept that while it’s not bad in its current state, there are ways in which it could be so much better.

Problem is, the draft grew the way it did without a care for the changes it might undergo later. It grew a thick protective skin, developed bones and musculature and a web of interconnected tendons and ligaments that bind the whole squalling thing together in the shape of something that surely made sense to me at the time (and still does). But now I can see more clearly that, perhaps, that arm could stand to be relocated to the other side of the body, or that the ears are stapled on a bit too high, or that what the thing as a whole really needs is a scaly, spiked tail. And making these changes to the anatomy of the poor dear is going to require smashing parts of it to pieces. It’s not a change deep enough to throw the whole thing out and start over. But I’m going to have to separate that shoulder joint. That ribcage will have to be laid bare and prised open. That pelvis is going to have to be redesigned. You know, to accommodate the tail.

So I’m standing here feeling a bit like a sculptor standing in front of a great marble statue, tasked with making changes to the very anatomy of the thing, knowing that if I strike wrong, the whole mass of stone could crumble to dust before my very eyes. Okay, a story is a little more resilient and forgiving than that, but when I start making these changes, who knows what other lumps are going to pop up under the skin in other areas of the story?

I’ve been putting off taking that first sledgehammer swing, because I know that when I do, it’s going to consume my life, much the way a busted pipe can do, what with all the leaking light fixtures and waterlogged carpets and exploded drywall. I’ll make that first edit and then the patient will start hemorrhaging ink and plot points and it’ll be triage all the way through until I can get the whole bag of bones put back together in some semblance of rightness and sewn back into its skin.

And it still won’t be perfect. It may need the sledgehammer again, or maybe I’ll be lucky and all it will need is a few flashes of the narrative scalpel.

I had gotten a bit enamored with the idea that the first edit would roll through and, once finished, I’d have in my hands something approaching a state of “finishedness”. But I guess that’s not the way of it at all. The second draft, I guess, is just that — a second draft. Another stab at the target I was aiming for when I wrote the first draft, tempered by time and contemplation, but still in all likelihood a bit wide of the mark. Still, you can’t hit home runs if you never swing, and you can’t rebuild a shattered femur without laying the leg wide open.

So I guess it’s time to start cutting.

Now, where did I leave that bone saw…

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.

Losing it

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For every thing I’ve done right on this first-time-writing-a-novel thing, I feel I’ve done two or three things wrong.  I work at it most every day, but I don’t always work organized.  I take notes as I work, but those notes are not always coherent or even helpful.  I read tons of writing advice, and sometimes I read so much writing advice I overthink when I should just be writing.

This week, the biggest writing sin yet.  Except if I’m honest, it’s not a this week, it’s more a past-couple-of-weeks thing.

I lost my editing notebook.

My editing process is twofold.  Rather, it was twofold.  I kept notes in the margins of the text as I worked, especially writing down things which were too big to tackle while I’m trying to work quickly through the draft or things I wasn’t sure how to fix.  I also kept my notebook handy, writing down a running list of general things which needed fixing in the novel as a whole; continuity issues, missing elements, character arcs, and a running outline of the book.

Losing this book is driving me up the walls.  I’m so incredibly frustrated.  First of all, for losing all that work that I’ve done and will have to re-do (never mind that I won’t be able to do it the same way next time around).  Second, for the loss of momentum; I haven’t taken notes the same way elsewhere because I keep hoping the thing will turn up and I don’t want to deal with copying notes over or, god help me, keeping two notebooks.  Third, and probably worst of all, I am a jerk to myself.  I mean, a rat bastard.  The Howler Monkey of Doubt has been on a gleeful screeching bender since the book has gone missing: “YOU’RE AN IDIOT FOR LOSING IT, IT MUST NOT HAVE MATTERED TO YOU THAT MUCH, GOOD LUCK ACTUALLY GETTING PUBLISHED IF YOU CAN’T EVEN KEEP UP WITH A LOUSY NOTEBOOK HAW HAW HAW”.  Yeah, that guy always speaks in all caps, he’s as annoying as you could imagine, and he’s in my head ALL THE TIME.

I’ve tried all the tricks.  Retraced my steps.  Looked through all my bags, every drawer in every desk near any place I ever work on the novel.  Checked the cars.  Checked the floor under the desk.  Checked under the bed.  Looked in the tank on the back of the toilet.  Anywhere I might conceivably have been thumbing through the thing.  Not a sign of it.  I’ve uncovered all kinds of things I thought lost or thrown away forever — some very nice pens I thought I’d lost, a few decks of cards I used in class during my first year teaching, my old notebook I used as a soccer coach last year — but not the one thing I need.  It’s either been stolen by a malevolent authorial gremlin or maybe, JUST MAYBE, some clearer-thinking, much more level-headed version of myself hid it away, knowing I’m going about this edit all wrong.

Because make no mistake, I constantly fear that I’m doing all this writerly stuff wrong.  I drafted wrong, I’m taking notes wrong, I’m evaluating the copy wrong, I’m not reading critically enough, I’m reading too critically, I’m working too slowly through the draft, I’m not taking enough time… name it, I’ve had that spot of doubt.  Let’s not pretend I haven’t lost things that mattered before, but they always seem to turn up eventually.  I’m going on about two weeks without my notebook, and considering I was using it just about every day, it’s making less and less sense that I simply mislaid it.

I’m talking this in circles and it doesn’t help, but I can’t adequately describe the depths of my frustration with myself for losing this thing.  Granted, I could probably re-create the notes I’d taken in the book with a night or two of dedicated work, but the simple fact that it’s been lost in the first place has so disheartened me…

Ugh.  If it doesn’t show up over the weekend I’m going to have to start the stupid notebook over from scratch.

Another Dilemma, and a Writerly Question

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Because I like it, and because I have to scratch my own back on this project a little (because nobody else is going to do it for me) I’m posting another favorite passage of the day.  I read this and it just made me smile knowing that this sprung fully-formed from my own personal thought-box.  But the passage comes with its own problem.  Rather, it’s a problem related to the passage by dint of the fact that the passage made me realize the problem.

God, my thoughts on this thing are a trainwreck.  The problem, or rather, the dilemma, is this:

I think the book is full of scenes that are good.  At least, the book is full of scenes which are potentially good.  And I like my main characters.  I love them, in fact.  They’re ridiculous and earnest and silly and flawed and, ultimately, I hope, believable and maybe a little compelling.  My leads, in short, are great.  But as I read the work — and I recall thinking this as I was drafting the thing — I realize that some of my favorite scenes don’t directly involve my main characters.  In fact, the scene I read today is easily my favorite scene in the whole book.  Hands down.  And neither of my main characters is in it.

I’m not saying it’s the best scene in the book, but it’s certainly the one I enjoy most.  So far.  And in retrospect, considering what I remember writing toward the end of the novel, I don’t know that it gets any better than this at the moment.  And this feels wrong.

So for my fellow authors and authors-in-training out there: Is it a problem if my favorite scene in the book takes place between characters who aren’t even on the marquee?

Anyway, here’s the passage:

…for the children of the gods, these tremendous abilities are as natural as breathing, as unconscious and automatic as reaching for a pen to jot down a phone number.  Only when we discover that not only has the pen been removed, but it has been replaced with a snarling, voracious badger can we approximate the feeling that struck Calli in that moment.

 

I’m falling a little bit behind on my daily schedule for editing, but if I can keep finding gems like this along the way, maybe my Past Self can keep my Present Self motivated.