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 voice inside, the voice outside

My wife read Ch. 12 and I went back to it this morning to make changes based on her feedback. (The chapter got longer by a page and remains lots longer than I would like it to be.)

Jane Smiley advises against having an intimate reading the work in progress, but I've had my wife reading it every step of the way. She heard first drafts read to her over lunch hours after I wrote them, and she's been assigned to read chapters as they get revised through all five drafts since then and to read the whole thing from start to finish a few times. She's given tons and tons of great advice and, probably more important, pointed out problems that I was too timid to face up to. Typically, a voice inside is trying to tell me that a scene isn't working, but it takes another voice that I can't ignore to get me to focus on that problem.

These conversations are very stressful for me and I assume they are for her also, because she must know that I will inevitably be quite depressed by them. Last night is typical. She reads Chapter 12 for about an hour and, hoping to avoid the tension, puts her comments in writing, but I lure her into explaining more. We do a lot of processing, talking through the problems until I see them clearly and have an idea of what needs to change. That's necessary of course and helpful, but it never feels good and I get discouraged at how much further from completion I thought I was when I handed the draft to her to read and how much more work I still have to do. Then I bitch and moan all night. In most cases I get back to work the next day, frustrated but disciplined, and make some more progress.

Well, it's been an amazing amount of time on her part over the last couple years and a lot of work to navigate the rocky terrain of my emotions. She'll deserve a ton of credit for the result. I'm sure I would have given up in confusion a long time ago without her as a sounding board.

Now, one caveat about the usefulness of her or any reader's advice. When she sees a problem she naturally suggests a fix. One scene in today's material, for example, had the character acting in a very emotionless and flat way, and she suggested showing how upset he would be. But the thing is I had him acting flat for a reason--the emotion sets in later; he's having a freeze response at that moment. So the fix I needed was to make clear what I was trying to do rather than to change what I was doing. Oftentimes I have to take the advice I'm getting and back it up a step. I just tell myself, "My reader is helping me see that there's a problem here. Now, what are the possibilities for fixing it other than what they recommend?"

Waiting is the hardest part

Well, actually there are harder parts, but I don't like it anyway. I'm still badly wanting to start flipping through the print copy and making changes. I want to finish it!

But I resist, one, because for practical reasons it will mess things up to be making changes before hearing back from my readers. Two, I've come to believe that it's necessary to approach the thing fresh after a break every once in awhile. With a break, the rewrites, revisions, or edits or whatever are more on point--energy gets channeled into reading it critically instead of into convincing yourself that it's awesome. That critical distance is easy enough to accomplish when you're discouraged and procrastinating for a couple weeks, but sometimes you have to force yourself away, and now is a good time to do that.

I made some notes on that story that I poked around on during my last break over Christmas. I really like the story idea, but my heart's not in it. Can't stop dwelling on the novel.

Read about half of the Susan Choi book last night. Definitely liking this better than the third book, but . . . another time when I've finished it I'll write more on this question of digression. Theres a certain characteristic in story-telling--I wrote about it yesterday--that bothers me and that I could overlook in one book but less so in the other two.

"Finished" with Chapter 6

I just finished the closest thing ever for me to a full working day--about 6.5 hours evenly divided between before and after lunch. As a consequence, I'm ahead of the schedule I predicted on Friday for work on this chapter, having crammed about 3 customary days of work into this one. I'm proud of mysel for that and for powering myself through the few times this morning when I felt stalled and unsure of what I was doing and on the verge of giving up for the day to read political junkie websites all day.

I don't have any sense of whether or not I successfully dealt with all the problems in this chapter. I'm in the "no perspective" zone right now, which I think roughly correlates to how deeply I get into the creative zone. I need a reader to help me get some perspective, and my wife is falling further and further behind.

I do know that the chapter isn't any shorter. Despite cutting out about 3 pages for my scrap pile, the resulting chapter is 4 pages longer than when I started on it last week.

I guess the smart thing is to keep plowing ahead to the next chapter and to not feel too bad if I later discover that I need to come back and work on this (or others) since I've been saving time off my schedule anyway.

We'll see how I feel tomorrow.

Zooming through Chapter 4

I'm in the zone, I guess. I'm putting in a lot more hours working on it, spending a lot of time thinking about it when I'm not working. And I'm cranking through the edits.

I think that's the nature of editing for me vs. writing or rewriting. It doesn't take as much creative energy so I don't get exhausted so quickly. It actually is very tiring, but I don't notice it until I'm done and I can go several hours that way.

But, is editing what I'm supposed to be doing? I'm trouble a little by the thought that I'm neglecting the hard work. Essentially, on Chapters 4 and 3, and chapter 2 to a lesser extent, what I do is read it through and identify around 2 keys spots that are important and not that well developed and maybe 1 or 2 other sections that seem to be in the wrong place. And I make a bunch of marks where at the sentence level things are unclear. Then the next day I go through the computer file working on the bigger picture items first and then--fairly soon--moving on to the sentence edits.

That implies that the couple places that weren't very well developed are the only really serious flaws left in the chapters and it implies that my fairly quick work on them is sufficient. I don't see anything else, but I'm worried that it's too easy.

I'm moving along faster than my wife has time to read it, so I'm flying blind a little bit. I'm getting closer to the day when I'll need to hand off big chunks of it to another reader and get their response.

The total timeline on this kind of work has been about 6-8 hours per chapter. A couple hours or more to read and mark up the chapter, and a few hours to go through the computer file making the changes.

The sentence-level editing I am doing is a pretty rough cut. I do have a list of several bad habits i my sentence constructions that I'll need to spend a lot of time weeding out on my next rewrite/revision.

Related to that is my reading lately of How Fiction Works by James Wood. (I finished it and am reading it a second time as well as all the other essays of his I can find online.) I've been helped enormously by his discussion of the free indirect style. That's given a me a critical vocabulary for thinking more deeply about how I use point of view and how I have been flagging the differences between the narrator and the characters. More on that another time, but essentially I've come to think that I can do a lot better, so I've been experimenting with making some changes here and there as I go with the understanding that I'll be bearing down on that issue when the time for a really careful revision comes.

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?

A reader in mind

You hear this advice all the time--"Write with a reader in mind." I found this interesting thing that John Updike said about it in the Paris Review interviews:

“Hemingway described literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other. When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books in library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teen-aged boy finding them, and having them speak to him. The reviews, the stacks at Brentano’s, are just hurdles to get over, to place the books on that shelf.”
--John Updike

Coincidentally, I was a countryish teenager from a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas, depending on library-bound books for a sense of a larger world. It wasn’t Updike’s books that jumped off the shelf at me, though, and I'm still not a fan.

The library was so important to me as a teenager that I thought seriously about having a big chunk of my novel set in that building, and on a recent trip to my hometown spent a little time walking around the library and getting in touch with it again. The story ended up going a different direction, though.

More on writing with a reader in mind in some other post.