Done. Done?

Today I'm calling an official end to draft 8, which is good news by itself. And I can say that I did the scope of work this summer that I intended in pretty much the timeline I wanted (I'm a couple weeks behind.) which took a lot of discipline and long hours. I feel like I've hardly been outside all summer.

The less enthusiastic way of looking at it is that I wanted to consider this draft the last one before I start sending it out, and now that I'm through it I don't have the confidence that's the right decision. Basically, I feel like there's stuff wrong with the book, but I've lost the ability to find it and deal with it. I need some other perspective.

Which is OK. I can get some. (I'm passing it to a couple readers tomorrow.) I guess I just don't know if it's necessary to wait for their feedback before starting to send it out, because they could possibly confirm my hope that it's ready, or if I definitely should wait because they're going to help me see how much more work it needs.

Alright, a look at the numbers:

-Post-draft depression: Check

-Page count: 316 pp, a decrease of 12, less than I expected based on how it was going in the early drafts. Makes me wonder if I lost some steam on the close line editing as I went on. I definitely had some interruptions that had me taking my eye off the ball.

-Word count: 92,307, a decrease of 4,000. That's like losing 4% more bodyfat after you've already lost a third of your weight. And that's before figuring in new muscle mass (new scenes I added in during this draft.)

Next up . . . I'm not sure. I need to focus on my paying work, so I'll take a few days off at least and probably more. If I'm lucky I'll hear back from one of my readers pretty quickly which will help me make some decisions. I've got some related writing projects I'm thinking about, including developing some of the chapters for submission to journals. Maybe I'll decide to start writing query letters! That would cool. Like I say, it'll be at least a few days before I start to get a handle on what I'll do next.

Wrapping up Draft 7

No one could possibly be interested in this detail, but just for the record . . .

I decided to call an end to Draft 7, and I took it to the copy shop to print out. I'll start marking that up with red ink to create Draft 8 soon. Here's hoping it's all sentence level work.

A tally of where we are on page counts, chapter numbering, etc.:

-Chapters: It is now 17 chapters. That's still counting the epilogue as a chapter. I got there by deleting Chapter 8 and Chapter 10. Therefore, the former Chapters 9 is now 8. The former 11 i s now 9. Every following chapter is now two numerals lower, so that that the last Chapter that was 19 is now 17.

-Parts: It was previously broken in 3 parts. Part I was about the first 60% of the book. Part II was after a break in the time of the present action and went through the climax of the story. Part III was the epilogue/last chapter. I decided to break Part I into 2 parts at a moment after Chapter 4 where there is shift in the pressure on the character. Therefore, what was II is now III and what was III is now IV.

-Page count: 328 pages. That's minus 1 more from some slight edits yesterday and then plus one when I added in the page marking Part II. That's minus 65 from the start of this draft and minus about 212 from the version I finished last December. Which is a 39% cut. My reader back then said he thought "it could be half as long." Short of what he suggested, but it wasn't that strong a suggestion.

-Word count: 96,302. If I remember right, my version last December was about 170,000 words. That's about a 44% reduction. That tells me something that I observed without calculating it before which is that the word count comes down faster than the page count. I think that's because what I'm most likely to cut out is exposition as opposed to dialogue, and dialogue takes more space per word. If I cut a paragraph of exposition, I might get out 8 lines of space and 100 words. If I cut 8 lines of dialogue, I gain the 8 lines of space but about 50 words.

-Schedule: My official start on this draft was June 22. (I did have a few odd sessions in the weeks before that.) So, 31 days exactly. Approx. 23 weekdays. A little slower than a chapter per day. If I had had any paying work going on, it definitely would have taken me twice as long. I put in a lot of p.m. sessions that I haven't normally throughout this process.

-Process: I just noticed back in my post for June 22 that I hadn't decided yet if I would do a certain kind of meta-writing on "intention" for the entire book first or one chapter at a time as I went. I ended up doing the latter. It was very helpful too. A way to sharpen my focus and give purpose to my reading and edits each day. I should think of some similar key lense to focus through on this draft so I'm not reading willy nilly.

Alright, off to the next draft. Deep breath.

Minus 62 pp.-Done w/Ch. 14

I floundered around and worked through the rest of Ch. 14 this morning. I cut more than usual, including a really powerful scene that the more I looked at it just wasn't important to the progress of the story. I'm still wondering why I wrote it in the first place. It was an addition in a later rewrite attempting to patch up some other kind of gap, but now with it gone, I don't see any gap. Except that I miss it.

So, that's minus 6 pp. more for a total of minus 62 pp. I'm sitting on 331 pp. I never thought I'd see the day. I mean, in word counts, which was how I originally tracked it, when I was writing the first draft, I had a target of 100,000 words and I ended up going long to 135,000 words, which I thought that would be OK. Then my rewrites drove it up over 175,000 words, which I thought might be too long. Ha. I'm now at 98,000 words! Not only is it acceptably not-too-long. It's getting to be downright short.

The other thing I did this morning was go over a key moment back in Chapter 12 again. I keep having my wife read it, and she keeps saying she doesn't get what I'm doing, so I try again. I'll be lucky if the problem really is just in this one moment and not some deeper conceptual problem that I have dig out of the entire chapter.

Next up, Ch. 15. I think that should go pretty quick. I made line edits on the typescript several weeks ago. Hopefully no real revision needs will reveal themselves as I input those edits.

Refraining from writing and Joseph O'Neill

I've written before about refraining from writing at a micro level, and I came across a related idea today.

One, inspired by something Elvis Costello said about songwriting about giving up the recording every snippet of a song idea he ever had, I gave up the habit of jotting down every clever turn of phrase or observation I had. Costello said this was a kind of wasted energy and if the song was any good he would remember it later anyway. Similarly I've come to feel that all those accumulating scraps of paper, from pads I kept next to every place where I might ever come to rest, didn't do anything to help me produce an actual piece of writing.

Another example is that I no longer leap up late at night when inspiration strikes. My writing time is in the morning, and if I'm in bed at 11 p.m. and get an itch to make progress or have an idea about how to solve a particular problem in the WIP, it used to be I would spring into action out of respect for the impulse. Now I respect the process more. I refrain.

The Elegant Variation is running an interview with Joseph O'Neill, author of Netherland, and they have a discussion about refraining from writing on a more macro level--refraining from even having a WIP. From starting a second novel before you have an idea that really warrants it. He seems to have the counter-intuitive goal of writing less, and there's a certain kind of sense to it.

TEV: How much writing constitutes an average day, whether in hours or in pages. And how much planning or outlining do you do?

Joseph O’Neill: It is far too shameful to start talking about that stuff.

TEV: Keep that in the box?

Joseph O’Neill: Yeah.

TEV: Next question please?

Joseph O’Neill: Well, it’s a disgrace, really. Having said that, I’m a great believer in the essential disgraceful nature of writing. I mean it really should be as close to idling as possible. Of course, I venerate the 300-400-500 words a day sort of writers. I used to be one of them. But at the moment, I’m just too idle to do that.

TEV: Someone, I think it was Fran Leibowitz, talked about the curse of the writing life, that we always feel so felonious because we aren’t writing more often than we are. And there’s not a writer I know who isn’t sort of secretly ashamed in some way of their work habits, that they don’t write enough, or they aren’t disciplined enough.

Joseph O’Neill: I have the opposite. I am secretly ashamed about the fact that I have written so much even thought I have only written very little.

TEV: Can you elaborate?

Joseph O’Neill: Let me put this another way. I think the sort of middling kind of novel that tides you over between novels is not ideal. There’s a lot of that around: “I haven’t got a fantastic idea for my next novel, but I must write 500 words a day. Because if I don’t write 500 words a day, then I won’t have a novel of 65,000 words in the next 18 months. Therefore, I must start writing 500 words a day based on idea X, even though it’s not that brilliant.’

TEV: The system must be fed.

Joseph O’Neill: The system must be fed. Less cynically, there’s the hope that, by writing, you will come to discover that idea X is, in fact, much better than you suspect. So refraining from writing is never, for me, a source of artistic or professional guilt. Of course, to be fair, there may be pressing financial reasons to be productive.

I just remembered that I read a Toni Morrison interview once where she professes a similar Zen-like lack of anxiety about not writing--that she writes when the story is ready to be written, and otherwise she doesn't force it and spends her time on other things that are important to her. I'll have to look that up. It's somewhere in Conversations With Toni Morrison by the University of Mississippi Press.

Breakthrough on Ch. 3

Come on NYTimes. You said the Ken Ken puzzles were going to get progressively harder, Mon-Fri. Is that the best you can throw down on Thursday?

I slept like an old man last night and woke up late and cranky. Resumed work on Ch. 3. I was really stuck for awhile. The problem in this chapter is that there are many many events in it that are a little bit important. But no one big even to carry the chapter, apparently. I've tried several different endings over the last few drafts, essentially chopping it off earlier and earlier, on the theory that this and that piece weren't critical. It's true--none of them were critical. But I wanted them in there anyway for different reasons. They just weren't going to work as the climax. But plotwise they come later, so they can't really come after the climax of the chapter . . . .

yada yada. Round in circles, I went. The process for solving this kind of problem is fairly obvious--identify the right focusing question (e.g. What major thing needs to happen here, that happens no where else in the book, to complicate the character's struggle or raises the stakes?) and then hold up everything in the chapter against the standard of that question.

But making one's mind stick on that isn't always easy--at least not without the right balance of sleep and coffee and no other worldly concerns on one's mind. I sit there trying to focus on my focusing question and then my mind wanders to cleaning the dust on the book shelf I'm staring at and to the traffic outside and where will my in-laws park when they come to visit this weekend, etc.

You know what I did? I put a blanket over my head. Really, you'd be amazed to see the physical contortions I go through while I'm writing sometimes. (I crawled under the bed once to try to get in the frame of mind of one of my characters who does that and to imagine what he he's going to do next.) I sat under my blanket like a caged parrot and tried to block it all out, and after a minute the answer to my focusing question came to me and then the technical solutions of what to throw out and where to fold in what I was keeping came to me.

The great news is that (on my printed draft at least) it amounts to about 16 pages cut from a 40-page chapter, which gets it a lot closer to reasonable.

With that and lesser cuts in Chapters 1 and 2, I think I have about 25 pages cut out of the first 125. So 20%. Keep up that average, and I should cut about 108 from 540 to get to 432.

So I think I'll call that my target number in the next draft. 432 pages. I won't really know if I'm getting close until I type in all my changes on the computer, which will be awhile. I figure a couple more weeks of working on the paper copy this way.

Word counts

I counted up pages and words of my most recent draft. I forget the date of my last count, but whenever it was, I've added over 5,000 words and 21 pages since then, more in Part II than Part I.

I know stand at:
344 pp. and 107,700 words in Part I;
196 pp. and 59,670 in Part II;
another 11 pp. in the epilogue;
to total 551 pp. and 170,700 words for the whole book.

I've tried estimating the word counts of some published books to do a conversion, and at best (i.e. shortest) this could be 450 pp. in hardback. More like 500 pp. For example, I'm looking at the hardcover of Richard Powers' The Echo Maker, and I estimate that's about 350 words/page. Divide that into my total word count to get almost 500 pp.

Which is a disaster, I think. It's almost twice as long as I want it to be. How the hell did it get so long? And where am I going to cut? I have no idea.

A Reader In Mind-Edith Wharton's "other self"

I read Edith Wharton's The Writing of Fiction last week and spent a lot of time underlining.

Here's something she says in the intro chapter that seemed to me to relate to the issue of writing with a particular reader in mind, which is a question I've explored in other posts.

There is no doubt that in this day of general 'speeding up,' the 'inspirational' theory is seductive even to those who care nothing for easy triumphs. No writer--especially at the beginning of his career--can help being influenced by the quality of the audience that awaits him; and the young novelist may ask of what use are experience and meditation, when his readers are so incapable of giving him either. The answer is tht he will never do his best till he ceases altogether to think of his readers (and his editor and his publisher) and begins to write, not for himself, but for that other self with whom the creative artist is always in mysterious correspondenc,e and who, happily, has an objective existence somewhere, and will some day receive the message sent to him, though the sender may never know it.

Motivating character with the dragon

Interviewer: When you teach, you talk to your students about “the dragon” . . . . Could you please explain it?

Sue Miller: It’s an analogy for the writing of fiction lifted from Flannery O’Connor—the notion that every character in a story must struggle with something: his dragon. . . . My argument has been that if you really look at any given character, there is . . . a dragon for that character: something born of him that is the thing he ought to be confronting fictionally that you could make him confront. . . . If you look at each character, there is something that’s the pickle he needs to be in in order to make a story happen. . . . The character richly drawn struggles with something which emerges from himself that he ought to struggle with; or at least he learns that he’s going to have to struggle. In a way, what fiction does is watch people struggle.

Presumably Sue Miller isn’t talking about watching me struggle, which is what it feels like right now.

I’m looking at this explanation of hers carefully lately because it’s a really helpful metaphor for the aspect of the writing I have to work on next. In the first draft, I thought in terms of “longing.” What does this character long for? Trying to answer that was great for helping me build up tension from one scene to the next to keep the plot going.

Now that I’m working on the rewrite, I’m seeing lots of places where there still isn’t much going on with the characters--not much longing and not much struggle, places where the struggle doesn’t seem very significant or meaningful, places where their longing doesn’t connect to other places, places where they simply aren’t “richly drawn.”

So I’ve been using this dragon metaphor to guide my imagination in the rewrite. What’s the thing that is each character’s core that they need to struggle with?

Number crunching

As I work on the chapters I have little bits that I cut out--nothing like the cutting I'll have to do later I suppose--and I typically just paste them at the end of the document after a mark indicating the end of the chapter. I hang on to them in case I decide later I need them. I also sometimes jump down to that space and type quick notes or do some freewriting of possible new material.

All of that stuff is a mess that is in the way the further along I get, so to clean up I just made a "leftovers" document and cut all of it from the chapters I'm done with so far--chapter s 1 through 4. It totals 32 pages, which is a lot less than I thought it was going to be.

This also makes it easer to calculate the length of the drafts. So, some quick back of the envelope figuring:

-Chapters 1-4 range between 42 and 55 typed pages and average 46 pages.
-That's a total of 185 pages.
-They average 14,890 words.
-That's a total of 59,575 words.

If the work developing the rest of the book has a similar affect on the length of my first draft:
-Part 1 (chapters 1-8) will be 120,000 words or 370 typed pages, which is about the equivalent of a 200-220 page book printed.
-Part 2 is intended to be about 1/3 to 1/4 of the books, so assuming it is 1/3, the entire book would be 180,000 words or 550 pages, which is about the equivalent of a 325 page book printed.

All of which means that it will have grown 50 percent from the first draft and will probably need to be cut down by about the same amount again to be really readable.

August 13, 2007-First draft done!

I finished my first draft today!

135,000 words since April 22. Working every morning, Monday to Friday, except for two weeks when I was out of town.

It feels a little bit anticlimactic because I know how much more there is to do to turn it into something worth showing to anyone else, but when I think back to what my main goal was on April 22, I can’t quite believe I did it. It seemed so improbable back then.

August 11, 2007--Aaaaalmost done

Saturday today. I haven’t regularly written on most Saturday’s and even fewer Sunday’s, but today was conducive to it. About 2200 words in two-and-a-half hours, bringing me right up to the climax of the story.

I’m nervous. I’m not sure I’ve established everything I need to rather than just announced it. I’m not even sure I’ve announced it all, because it’s a lot to keep track of. And I’m not sure how I’m going to get the characters to do what I intend for them—I’m not sure it will be credible given how I’ve developed them.

Oh well, nothing to do but tell the tale and then see what needs to be fixed in the rewrite. Or nothing productive to do. The other choices are giving up or starting over. I think I’ll go on. Probably on Monday but maybe tomorrow.

August 10, 2007

Since finishing my writing yesterday, I have had a terrific sense of acceleration—the sense that the pace of the story and the pace of my thinking about it is speeding up toward the conclusion. It’s on my mind pretty much constantly, or at least it was all day yesterday and overnight.

I had a terrible night’s sleep. I was looking forward to starting on the final scenes today, and I think I must have been obsessing on them in my sleep in a dramatic way, because I woke up about 1:30 and was so wound up I couldn’t fall asleep much again. When I finally got up at about 7 a.m., it was with that dreadful sleepless feeling, so a lot of my anticipation was gone. I ended up having only a mediocre writing session—about 1500 words in 90 minutes fueled on a half a pot of coffee. Now I’m waiting for sleep to come so I can try again tomorrow.

Still I think about two, maybe three, more days of writing should finish it. That’s exciting.

Still don’t know how it’s going to end, though.