Two chapters in seven days

Real life has interrupted my work for the last week. Since then I've managed to get two more chapters marked up and corrected. That continues to take off about a page per chapter and to take about four hours for each one.

I think over the next couple weeks I'll be lucky to do a chapter every two days. I have to get going on some paying work assignments, so probably I'll just be able to put in a.m. sessions like the old days. We'll call that a conservative estimate, and calculating that way, I have about 14 working days to go. Let's call it 14 days total, since some of the chapters coming up are shorter and can be done a little quicker.

Intense editing

What is it Wednesday? I've been deep in it since last Friday. I've always known that I have more stamina for the close editing than for the more purely creative aspects of the work, and I've taking advantage of that by putting in long hours, including over the weekend.

My time estimates are holding up -- about 4 hours or so for each chapter, half of that marking up the printed typescript and half inputting the changes on the computer. I'm also comparing it closely as I go along to notes from one of my readers. More on what they had to say another time.

So far, I've finished 6 chapters this way and have neglected everything else. I've got a bad case of bleacher butt. The weather hasn't helped. I need to be on the computer a lot and it is just getting to the time of year when my office is hot to be in.

I get a break -- though I don't really want it -- over the next few days. I'll be losing Thursday through Monday to personal and family stuff. If I'm lucky I can mark up a few chapters on paper and have them to type in when I get back Tuesday.

BTW, through the five chapters, I've trimmed another 8 pp. without really striving for that. Just little snips in cluttered sentences here and there. Estimate another 15 pp. off the same way, and I should end this draft at about 305 pages.

Close scalpel work

I feel like I'm finally doing the fine line editing, and it feels good. Many other writers have discussed the pleasures of close editing like this, and I've long known what they meant based on my nonfiction writing experience. It's satisfying to get the language sharpened, though it's a little alarming to find how dull it still is after so many drafts.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about. My character is reading a children's book that is briefly summarized with this phrase: "The boy is part of a rebel group that is fighting the machines." The revision takes out "that is." Thus: "The boy is part of a rebel group fighting the machines." I'm finding several of those kinds of things per page. Also, many of my exposition grafs tend to clarify themselves by repeating a point with a second unnecessary metaphor. Overkill. So I have a lot of lines like that struck out.

So many in fact that in the first 17 page chapter, I subtracted two pages just with these little changes. Amazing.

It's slow work though. So far, including some sessions over the weekend, I've marked up on paper the first four chapters (Part I) and input the changes on the first chapter. Based on how it's gone so far, I estimate about 10 pp. per hour in each mode. Thus about 4 hours total for each approx. 20 pg. chapter. That's a lot of time under the best of circumstances, and it's the kind of work that's hard to do for more than an hour or so at a time. I think it's going to take me about a month. I can only hope that the first four chapters are not typical since they had so many revisions in the last draft and so are somewhat clunkier than the rest. I'm getting really impatient to pick up the pace.

Also, I have some paying work on the line that may start to hog up a lot of time. We'll see.

It's getting hot. Longtime readers will remember that my office is too hot this time of year, so I'm thinking about how to set up my space on the screened porch. Probably tomorrow.

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.

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.

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.

Line editing and other work

More work today like how I finished last week. I picked a chapter unlikely to be cut or to need much development work and just concentrated on line editing.

I had visions of wielding an expert hammer and chisel that let the masterpiece underneath the lumpy stone emerge, but I'm having trouble getting into the right mind set. I don't think I'm seeing the language critically enough. I feel like I'm coasting. It's too familiar maybe. So far, the changes aren't very aggressive. On the other hand, maybe I've done such a good job up to now that it doesn't need much of that kind of work. That's wishful thinking I suppose. It will probably just take time to train my brain to get in the right critical zone. When I do, I may have to circle back to these first chapters and work on them again.

So I got a complete 21-page chapter done today. (Chapter 6 in the current numbering.) However, it took more than just the regular a.m. session. I had to come back to it after that break to finish the line editing. Also I didn't just stick to line editing after all because I found another relatively small clarification/development problem that I needed to let sit over lunch and then come back to again. I have an uneasy feeling that the chapter as a whole doesn't have the tension it should, so maybe it will need more development work after all.

I'm finding more continuity problems. A piece of gear in the plot is stored in a hallway closet in this chapter but I know at another point I have it in a bedroom closet. Again, how did I never notice this before?

Made some more notes over the weekend on the second book. I'm thinking a lot lately about genre.

Artful editing

All week I've been reading a fascinating essay posted in parts on The Elegant Variation. (Part 1 of 4 starts here.) It's an excerpt of a longer essay by Susan Bell, author of The Artful Edit, in a new anthology called The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House. Inspired by this essay, I now have both those books on order. I wish I had had them the last month while I was cooling my heels before starting the current draft.

The essay is a close analysis of the revisions that Fitzgerald made to The Great Gatsby in response to feedback from his editor, Max Perkins. The working relationship itself is fascinating to learn about, but what I found most inspiring was the human familiarity of Fitzgerald's draft.

It's comforting to know that at key moments in his draft he tended to some of the same awkwardness at the sentence level and the same clumsy "clustering" of plot points. He found astoundingly artful solutions to these problems by the time he finished the final draft, which the rest of us can only hope for. That's if we develop the critical eye to see these problems in our own work to begin with. But the problems were there in the draft. It's nice to know we have that much in common at least.

Continuity

I had an amusing little encounter with a continuity problem during my work this morning. There's a scene that takes place in a car over about six pages. Near the beginning, I mention the car being put in gear and in so doing I mention reaching to the steering wheel column. The shifter is on the column. (Probably an automatic, though a few trucks have had standard transmissions with the shifter on the column.) At the end of the scene, I have a character moving from the passenger seat to the driver's seat by crawling "over the handbrake and stick shift."

I know how this happened is that I decided at one point to change the make of this car, and when I did so I did a little research and looked for images on google and ended up using that to revise one scene but forgot about the other.

What's amusing to me is that this kind of thing is still in there after so many readings. How have I not caught this before? And what else is lurking in there? Whenever I catch something like this in a published novel I'm always puzzled that the author and editor, who are presumably intimately familiar with every detail in the book, didn't catch it before, but I guess from this side of the table I can see that there are so many details to keep track of it's almost inevitable that I'll miss some.

Back to work--line editing

I found a way to make some progress today without having all the comments back from my reader, and I got in a good a.m. session like has been my habit in previous drafts.

I realized that there are some key episodes in the book that are very unlikely to be cut and that I could probably risk doing line editing in those spots. As I was saying all through the last draft, I'm eager to start working at the line level and trying to get the language to pop a lot more. I want to be doing the scalpel work. On paper, with a red pen. As long as there was still "developmental" work to be done, I postponed that.

So that's what I did this morning. Really it was one complete chapter, Ch. 4. Since in the last revision, I shortened most of the chapters and broke up long ones into shorter chapters, I think it's going to work out that they can be worked on in one session. This was a 20-page chapter and I worked through it in about 90 minutes.

So, this strategy should keep me busy for a few days next week. There are a handful of places where I can probably safely do this kind of work without getting too far ahead of my reader's pending comments.