On the official first day of summer, at least according to astronomers, I'm rebooting my summer plan, which was supposed to get started over a month ago at the end of the academic calendar. I've made the mistake of waiting for certain elements to fall into place before starting the next draft, all the while thinking it would be any day now, and the day never came--thought it still may any day now. It's been quite frustrating and I'm disappointed to have wasted the month this way, but I've decided to cut my losses. I'm starting the next draft with the resources I have at hand. Starting this morning.
My hope has been that I'm at the stage where I can concentrate just on sentence-level work, but I know that's wishful thinking. I think I can say that I'm beyond the "digging and developing" stage and am trying to bring it all into sharper focus. But not just by making sentences sharper. I really need to look at each chapter or episode and decide what the point is and bring the important part into starker relief. I think that's mostly by carving away what's extra, but it also includes revising what's there to hit the beat more energetically.
The way I'm thinking of this is in terms of "intention" which is a notion that I got from reading Susan Bell's book The Artful Edit. She defines it as the overarching aim that guides both the writer and the reader and advises, "Ask yourself when you edit: What is it I want? What am I trying to do here? Where am I going with this?"
I suppose that's not radically different from other goggles I've put on to evaluate the work, like asking myself what the character wants or what problem the scene is complicating and moving forward. But it's a fresh look.
So I'm asking those questions, doing a lot of journaling as I go. I did that this a.m. for the first five chapters, and it was quite illuminating. It really does help me see how the chapters can connect to one another, where they don't yet, and where some material probably won't align with the overall intention and can safely be pulled out.
For example, one of the issues up in the air right now is about the necessity of Chapter 5. Why is it in there? What's it doing that other chapters don't do? After this exercise I have a much better answer to that. I'm not perfectly convinced that the chapter is necessary, but I have a better potential rationale for it, so I'll tackle the revision with this new focus in mind and see if I can make the chapter work.
I'm torn between doing that kind of meta-writing all the way through the book or pausing to make revisions with the focus that I've achieved, chapter by chapter. Right now I'm leaning toward the latter, which would mean starting to revise the first clump of chapters tomorrow. 1-4 are a single unit that need to be revised together. It's probably the area with the most drastic rewriting that needs to happen. Then Chapter 5. And hopefully after that I'll be cruising.
I don't have a realistic sense of the timeline. I just have a longing to get this book done this summer. The kinds of revisions I'm talking about keep increasing in complexity, so I don't know if that's possible. After all, intention is item 1 in Susan Bell's checklist of MACRO edits.
Showing posts with label Susan Bell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Susan Bell. Show all posts
Monday, June 22, 2009
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Fear and intention
I did not get a good start today or ultimately have a very satisfying session, but I guess I should take pride in the fact that I have the discipline to power through it anyway.
I picked another chapter that I presumed and hoped doesn't need a lot of development work so I could concentrate on line editing. (Wrong again.) When I read the first line, I had a very strong sense of being really sick and tired of this book. I allowed myself a few minutes to daydream about giving up on it and starting another book. Yikes.
Back from the brink, though. I put in about an hour of line editing until I got to a point where I couldn't ignore any more that this chapter is a mess structurally. Lots of starting and stopping, no momentum, no sense of urgency. Places where the narrative acts as of something important has transpired but doesn't show it. And this is about 3/4 of the way through the book. The foot should start pushing on the gas pedal a little more by this time.
I didn't tackle trying to fix all that, but I made some notes on possibilities to consider and to get me started fresh tomorrow. The notes had to do with what Susan Bell in The Artful Edit calls intention--"the goal you set yourself for a single aspect of your work . . . It is your mind's highway that runs clear and wide from the first to the last page."
Very basically, I need to figure out what the intention of this chapter is. (I probably have to do the same with most other chapters. And for the book as a whole.) With that more clearly held in mind, I hope to be able to trim and tighten, which should resolve the stuff that was getting me discouraged about this chapter.
I picked another chapter that I presumed and hoped doesn't need a lot of development work so I could concentrate on line editing. (Wrong again.) When I read the first line, I had a very strong sense of being really sick and tired of this book. I allowed myself a few minutes to daydream about giving up on it and starting another book. Yikes.
Back from the brink, though. I put in about an hour of line editing until I got to a point where I couldn't ignore any more that this chapter is a mess structurally. Lots of starting and stopping, no momentum, no sense of urgency. Places where the narrative acts as of something important has transpired but doesn't show it. And this is about 3/4 of the way through the book. The foot should start pushing on the gas pedal a little more by this time.
I didn't tackle trying to fix all that, but I made some notes on possibilities to consider and to get me started fresh tomorrow. The notes had to do with what Susan Bell in The Artful Edit calls intention--"the goal you set yourself for a single aspect of your work . . . It is your mind's highway that runs clear and wide from the first to the last page."
Very basically, I need to figure out what the intention of this chapter is. (I probably have to do the same with most other chapters. And for the book as a whole.) With that more clearly held in mind, I hope to be able to trim and tighten, which should resolve the stuff that was getting me discouraged about this chapter.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Clustering and a new chapter
I'm still reading that Susan Bell book a little every day and am really getting a lot out of it -- unfortunately. I wish I had had it when I was working on the first rewrite. I guess right now it's not helping me to spot problems so much as to diagnose problems that I know are there and prefer to ignore.
One of the concepts I got out of the bit I read yesterday was of "clustering." This is in her long examination of the correspondence between Maxwell Perkins and F. Scott Fitzgerald during revisions of The Great Gatsby. An early draft had a section, near the end, where Gatsby starts unloading to Nick all of his life story, which solves characterization and motive and plot problems. But it's an inelegant solution because it's all clustered together, feels like an information dump and interrupts the momentum of the present action. Bell goes on to show the more elegant solutions that Fitzgerald developed in later drafts.
I recognized the phenomenon. I definitely had that problem with one character in particular, and in fact I wrote about trying to address at the start of the last revision. I did de-cluster it a little bit and spread the butter more evenly around the bread. But not completely and perfectly and there are still some lumpy bits.
I think I do a good job of avoiding the sense of an information dump that Bell warns against. However, there is still the problem of seeming to depart from the main story. How do I stay focused on the present action that interests my main character while getting in information about stuff that happens outside his presence?
The problem I'm concerned about is in the chapter that I "line edited" yesterday. I did that work, but I knew in my heart as I did so that there was a deeper structural flow. What's really interesting to me is how these flaws are built in and inherent from the original concept of the book and keep rearing their head like a game of whack-a-mole.
That problem kept me tossing last night. Reading Susan Bell helped me think it through some more and this a.m. instead of trying to "work" on it or "fix" it, I did some freewriting and note-taking to try and sort out some possible solutions. And the solution I'm leaning toward right now, unfortunately, is to write a new chapter. I plan to take the current Chapter 11, to take the little bit of present action that's in there and take the digression/backstory stuff and use those as seeds to develop an episode that involves more present action involving my main character and his development, which should help me sneak in the backstory.
I'm not going to rush into it. Other solutions may come to me. But that's the way I'm leaning. I'm not excited about that. I really wanted to feel like I was done with this kind of development work.
One of the concepts I got out of the bit I read yesterday was of "clustering." This is in her long examination of the correspondence between Maxwell Perkins and F. Scott Fitzgerald during revisions of The Great Gatsby. An early draft had a section, near the end, where Gatsby starts unloading to Nick all of his life story, which solves characterization and motive and plot problems. But it's an inelegant solution because it's all clustered together, feels like an information dump and interrupts the momentum of the present action. Bell goes on to show the more elegant solutions that Fitzgerald developed in later drafts.
I recognized the phenomenon. I definitely had that problem with one character in particular, and in fact I wrote about trying to address at the start of the last revision. I did de-cluster it a little bit and spread the butter more evenly around the bread. But not completely and perfectly and there are still some lumpy bits.
I think I do a good job of avoiding the sense of an information dump that Bell warns against. However, there is still the problem of seeming to depart from the main story. How do I stay focused on the present action that interests my main character while getting in information about stuff that happens outside his presence?
The problem I'm concerned about is in the chapter that I "line edited" yesterday. I did that work, but I knew in my heart as I did so that there was a deeper structural flow. What's really interesting to me is how these flaws are built in and inherent from the original concept of the book and keep rearing their head like a game of whack-a-mole.
That problem kept me tossing last night. Reading Susan Bell helped me think it through some more and this a.m. instead of trying to "work" on it or "fix" it, I did some freewriting and note-taking to try and sort out some possible solutions. And the solution I'm leaning toward right now, unfortunately, is to write a new chapter. I plan to take the current Chapter 11, to take the little bit of present action that's in there and take the digression/backstory stuff and use those as seeds to develop an episode that involves more present action involving my main character and his development, which should help me sneak in the backstory.
I'm not going to rush into it. Other solutions may come to me. But that's the way I'm leaning. I'm not excited about that. I really wanted to feel like I was done with this kind of development work.
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