Today I'm beginning a new phase. (Or ramping up a new phase anyway -- there aren't really bright lines between each step in the process, so I'm sure I'll be spending a lot more time on previous phases, too.)
I'm starting to work more actively toward the general goal of getting my work out in front of other people. The ultimate goal is publication with the strongest possible distribution of my novel, but the general goal in the short term might include for example opportunities to read aloud, workshops, sharing with friends, developing my query letter, publication of other material (see this recent essay in The New Haven Review for example), and publication of parts of the book.
That last one is what I'm working on today. I've been stewing on how different chapters and even a discarded chapter might work as stand-alone stories that I can submit for publication in literary journals, and today I started working on one. I'm finding out pretty quickly that it's not easy.
First, there's the obvious problem of a chapter referring to events or background established earlier in the book. OK, so now the chapter needs a lot of new exposition to become intelligible.
Two, the drama of a chapter that the reader is experiencing is in large part dependent on the complications that have been introduced earlier. Reading the chapter as something that stands alone, it suddenly feels very flat. The drama has been drained from it because we're missing a lot of information about what pressures the characters are under. In theory, that could be handled with exposition, but the chapter really depends on the reader to feel it, not to be told about it.
Third, is the problem of resolution. Readers of a chapter and a story have different expectations about endings. Obviously, a cliff-hanger is tolerable and even desirable in a chapter but a violation of the compact with the reader in a story. Even when chapters don't have what are commonly called cliff-hangers -- and mine don't I think -- they do have them in small ways. Important things at stake for the character are left as open questions.
Those are just the problems I've figured out for myself so far, but what this suggests to me is that a novel excerpt in many cases doesn't just have to be patched up to make it work as something that stands alone. They have to be rewritten into very different stories with different points. It feels like I'm taking the same characters but having them develop and work on a different set of problems than the chapter does -- that what is important in the chapter is less relevant in the tight timeline of the story.
All of this raises the question of how feasible the whole endeavor is. Of course chapters and short stories are different literary forms, and trying to pass off one as the other is sort of like trying to help your guest visiting from India feel at home by taking them out for sushi since they grew up with Asian food. There may be something in the weave of a given novel that prevents it from becoming anything else without completely unraveling it first.
That's kind of how I felt recently reading an excerpt from a new novel by one of my favorite short story writers -- Lorrie Moore. (She said herself in an interviewer in Believer magazine that when it comes to short stories or novels, "The nature of the idea determines which form or genre it will be in.") She has a new novel coming out in a couple weeks called A Gate At the Stairs and The New Yorker published an excerpt of it earlier this summer as "Childcare." In that form, it was easy to confuse with a short story, and reading it as such felt a little uneven. At times it felt like a novel on slick magazine paper and at other times it felt like a New Yorker story that was pulling its punches. It set up and abandoned relationships with characters that I was intensely interested in, and then the whole thing ended with a thud. I'm taking this as a lesson about the difficulties of excerpting and a sign that the novel will be terrific.
The other thing I'm taking away from my efforts so far is the possibility that the flatness I'm seeing when I read my chapter as a story is a big hint about the chapter being flat. Even with the context of previous chapters to help sustain the chapter in the reader's mind, it may just read that flat still and it may have taken me reading from this different perspective to see it. I don't want to think so, but I'll be looking closely at that, which may send me sliding back like in Chutes and Ladders to a much earlier phase in this process.
Meanwhile, in addition to reading the Lorrie Moore story, I've been hunting around in literary journals for examples of novel excerpts to see how well they stand alone and how they are adapted. It's kind of a specialized literary skill, and I'd appreciate anyone out there letting me know how they have gone about it and how editors respond to it.
Showing posts with label process. Show all posts
Showing posts with label process. Show all posts
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
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.
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.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
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.
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.
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