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.

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.

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.

Cruising now

My theory that the remaining chapters will give me less trouble looks sound for the moment--at least until someone reads it and brings me back to reality. I put in another p.m. session after lunch and in 2 hours worked through and finished Ch. 13. I had notes from my wife reading it several months ago, which mostly amounted to cutting out a lot of background exposition stuff. I took out a lot of it but convinced myself some it is necessary. Regardless, I probably need to print out this and other chapters where I've done this level of work so I can look hard at the sentence-level some more.

The result for now is that I cut an additional 4 pp. That's minus 54 so far and sitting on 393 pp. This is from an already comparatively short chapter. Wow, it's only 11 pp. now. Shorter than I thought.

This chapter and the few following are heavily influenced by a point that Jane Smiley makes in Thirteen Ways of Looking At A Novel. She says that at about 65-70% mark, novels often have a feeling of gathering themselves up and directing their energy toward getting to the end. The pace seems to pick up. I knew that I wanted my Part I to end at about the 2/3 mark and that there would be significant shift in time and change in the character during that period. (I was thinking of To The Lighthouse as a model, when the death of the mother has happened off stage between two parts of the book and we return to characters have changed a lot.) So I figured this transition would be an opportunity to pick up the pace of the narration like Smiley says is often typical. I made a conscious effort when I was drafting (two years ago!) to have the episodes and the chapters come at a quicker tempo.

I guess my now 11-page Chapter 13 is a sign of that. Chapter 14 ought to be. It was once two separate short chapters and I combined them. It's 24 pages right now. I'll deal with that tomorrow.

Losing days--tentatively done with Part I

This week is going a lot slower than I expected. I gave up Monday to catching up on errands, and yesterday I got in the usual a.m. session, but got ambushed with other stuff in the afternoon. Plus, I'm not having a lot of confidence in this chapter.

I "finished" it with an a.m. session today, but I need some perspective on it. It feels too scattered. It's definitely still too long--25 pp. I'd like to get every chapter under 20 pp. in typescript, not for the sake of the overall length, which I am no longer worrying about, but for the sake of balance and because a single chapter can still drag even if the whole book is short enough.

One easy solution to the length would be just to cut out a 5 page section I indulged myself by adding back into this chapter. It was originally part of a superlong chapter in the first draft. That got broken into two pieces, lately called Chapters 10 and 12, and as noted before I ended up deleting Ch. 10 entirely. Now I'm trying to reclaim some stuff I like from Ch. 10 and re-attaching it to Ch. 12.

Overall, I guess I'm still struggling with the question of intention in this chapter. One symptom of that struggle is uncertainty about including that 5 page section. Another symptom is that I'm feeling like the climax of the chapter--which is really the climax of Part I and the nadir of the character's situation--is lacking the punch it should have.

Minus 10 pp. and showing vs. telling continued

I got through Ch. 6 today, focusing as discussed before, and got it down by 2 pp., which totals 10 pp. of cuts, which puts it at 383 pp. Dang. That's almost 200 pp. down from where it was 6 months ago.

A few words about the perennial subject of showing vs. telling and an example of the kind of line editing I've been doing this round . . .

I've been reading an anthology called The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House. (anthology is from the Greek meaning "I liked some of the pieces OK.") The one I read yesterday was "The Telling That Shows" by Peter Rock which argues that the rule about showing/not telling is more a guideline and that sometimes telling is preferable when it is coming from a voice of authority. Or that it's a blurry line between the two concepts--when a narrator speaks with authority the telling is a kind of showing. An interesting idea that I'm willing to consider, and today I came across a particular point in my editing that might be evidence for the theory.

I have a line that has read, "She examined the broken spaceship, and the damage turned her stomach a little." In my read through, I inked in some improvements to that, and I was typing them into the computer file today, but when I came to it I wasn't satisfied with the improvements, which were in the category of adding physical specificity. The spaceship was "on the floor next to her" and damage was to "the expensive toy."

That's less abstract. More showing. But somehow still flat and lifeless. "Examined" is a thesaurus word for "looked at," which is what she was really doing. "A little" is a little too much clutter.

In noodling around with a fix, trying to describe the image that I saw in my head, I hit on the word "miserably" as in "looked at it miserably" but backed off. I probably hold the rule to avoid adverbs more dear than the rule to show/not tell. Then I realized I was really hanging up on avoiding "looked at"--that in going for more active and descriptive verbs as much as possible I was going an inch too far on the show/don't tell rule. What if I just told what she was doing like I pictured it?

What I came up with was, "She gave a miserable look at the broken spaceship on the floor next to her." What I think I've done here is technically changed my original showing version into a telling version but, contra to conventional wisdom, improved it. "Miserable" has replaced "damage turned her stomach," and the less physical, more abstract version somehow feels more precise and knowing and intimate.

At least I think so. It's a theory.

Anyway, these are the kinds of micro edits that are taking up a lot of my attention lately, in addition to the "intention" macro-question that I've talking about.

Tentatively finished with the mark up

Against my better judgment, I'm declaring myself done with this read through and mark up process. There's a lingering problem in the last chapter on a par with other problems that I have fixed along the way and that I ought to fix now. But it's the end of the week, and I want this not to be hanging over into the next week. Maybe I'll find time to think it through and tidy it up over the weekend, and I can always do it in a spare afternoon while I'm involved in the next round.

Next up, inputting all the changes I marked on the printed typescript into the Word doc. I'm wild guessing when I budget three weeks for that. Let's say by April 20.

The simple changes are going to be tedious and just require brute force to crank it out. (I'll probably burn my eyes out doing it. I went to the eye doctor the other day to talk to him about my eye strain. He reluctantly gave me a prescription for computer reading glasses but says the only real solution is spend less time on the computer.)

And the less simple changes--places where I cheated along the way and just made notes like "foreground x element in this section"--are going to require concentration, and it's impossible to estimate what kind of road blocks I'll hit then.

My initial goal during the process just finished was to cut 100 pp. At one point my trend was running higher so I though I might cut 135 pp. or more. There was less to cut as I got closer to the end, though. I ended up with an estimated 112 pp. cut, which would leave me with a typescript of about 427 pp. That's just eyeballing from the pencil marks on the printout though. I won't really know until all the changes are in the computer.

All right. Fresh start Monday. Pile the mess next to my computer and start again at page 1. I think of this as stage B of the sixth draft.

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.

Still on Chapter 2

Well, the comments my wife had on Chapter 2 over the weekend convinced me that I need to do a little more work.

The obvious need, which I took care of this morning, was to straighten out the order of presentation. There was too much jumping back in forth in time so that it was was difficult at a basic level to understand what was happening in time.

I also trimmed out two scenes--deleting most of them and incorporating parts of them into other scences--which reduced it by about 2 pages. (1%! Big whoop.)

So now it is hopefully much more intelligible. I'm going to see if my wife can spare some time tonight to look at the first half of the chapter that was so confusing and confirm that.

What I fear, though, is that it is more obvious where it fails to be meaningful. I have a nagging sense that I'm evading spots where I know in my heart it is not really developed well. But I really want to keep moving forward, so I think that's what I'll probably do tomorrow.

I've been thinking more and more lately that it's time for another reader. I'm trying to postpone that as long as possible, but it's on my mind a lot.

"Finished" with Chapter 2 yet again

Today went like planned and I finished the work I had in mind for it. I found it didn't need (as far as I could see) as much development/digging as Chapter 1, and with luck that will be the case with the rest of the chapters.

When I started this week, I thought I would be cutting out huge amounts, but most of it stayed, and the few pages I did cut got replaced with fuller development in other places, so that it's about a page longer than the last draft--49 manuscript pages, which is way way too long.

So, same routine as last week and as through most of the process of the first rewrite. I'll show it to my wife over the weekend, make note of what weaknesses she's finding in it and then decide whether to put it aside and push on to Chapter 3 or linger some more on this chapter.

I'm feeling good about the work I got done during a four-day week like this. The discipline and habit are the main thing--working steadily every morning. It's good to have that back again.

I'm starting to hope for the possibility of knocking out one chapter per week this way during the rewrite process. That would mean 15 weeks total, starting two chapters ago, 13 weeks to go--slightly less than a semester, which would mean being done with this rewrite before Christmas.

"Finished" with Chapter 1 yet again

I put in a standard five mornings this week, including a full day today, and worked through the second rewrite of Chapter 1, finally, after a month of hesitation.

The main thing I did was delving deeper in the spots most relevant to what seemed to me the biggest problem with the chapter, which was unclear motivation for some of the characters' actions and lack of clarity about what was actually happening. That was really first three days, and yesterday and today I went through and bandaged up a lot of transition problems. There was a little bit of cutting along the way, but the chapter still ended up growing by two pages. I guess I cut about five pages and wrote about seven while I was at it.

Now I'm aware of a couple problems in it still--that it is way too long, for one thing, and that even with more clarity about what happens there's not so much clarity about why it's important or interesting.

So it is "finished" only in the sense that every chapter was finished as I went through the first complete rewrite. I'm going to have my wife read it over the weekend and give me her feedback, with the intention of making notes for a later pass at it, but in all likelihood I'll be compelled to tackle some issues right away. So I expect I'll be still working on Chapter 1 next week.

Anyway, I'm back to work on the novel. That's something to be grateful for.