Rewrote opening--plus one page

I got back to work this morning. I had that fearful feeling that makes me want to find excuses and avoid the work, but luckily I recognized it for what it is and knew if I could just get started I'd be OK. Looking forward to a solid couple of weeks of specific, focused work.

Today's work was especially scary. I needed to rewrite the opening scene. It's weird to think that I let something so crucial go this long without getting it right--not that it's necessarily right now--but sometimes issues make themselves apparent or cry out loud enough only late in the process. The opening scene as it was is just how I started things off the first day of writing and the book has become something very different in the meantime. It needed a different opening.

I won't go into all that was wrong with it--little things that added up--but the fix was actually relatively simple. I just made the same events more or less happen to my main character instead of him observing them happen to his friend.

Along the way I saw chances for line edits to clean up and tighten the language, so I'm really chomping at the bit to get to the stage where I can focus on that. Hopefully not more than a couple weeks from now. In the meantime I have about a half dozen spots I need to work on similar to what I was doing this morning.

One downside. My rewrite of the opening ended up adding one to my page count. Thpptt.

Dig; don't fix

I've been having a lot of trouble getting started on my rewrite until today. I've been getting up each morning and psyching myself out, giving in to fear and then surfing the internet.

It's because I don't know what to do and where to start. I can see specific things wrong, but I don't know how to fix them.

It finally occurred to me over the weekend that I should do what I was doing in the first rewrite--which is to dig; not fix. Instead of trying to put a layer of smooth coat over, I should be excavating more.

It's another way of saying what I've said before, quoting Jesse Lee Kercheval and Jane Smiley's advice at different points--the rewrite process is a repeated crossing of the border between analysis and creativity. What I need to do now is turn off that analytical part and let the creative part go. I've been afraid to do that because I know it will make a mess--create more short-term problems than it will solve. Even if I can avoid that fear, it's hard to avoid the habit--the impulse to keep trying to find solutions, to anticipate how things are going to work.

But in the long-term, it's necessary to be in that zone of not caring if something is going to work. That's where the discovery happens.

What's discouraging is the feeling that I have been and may remain in that zone forever. I thought that's what the first rewrite was about (and I didn't accomodate myself easily to that after the first draft). I was expecting that by now I would be in the space where I work on shaping and fixing and patching.

I guess I'll just have to hope that the amount of digging necessary is somewhat less and in more obvious places than in the first rewrite so that it goes faster, so that I really do move through a chapter a week (not counting the month it has taken me just to get started.) I doubt it though.

So, today I opened the file, found the first moment where there is a lack of clarity related to something important to the character development, and tried to dig--tried to get into that creative space. I got in about 90 minutes of fair work.

Read The Inheritance of Loss by Kirin Desai

I finished The Inheritance of Loss last night, which I enjoyed a lot. It got me to wondering about the author, and here are some interesting things I read in interviews with her.

As you said, you had an unconventional method for writing Hullabaloo; this being your first book, do you have any advice for aspiring writers?

KD: There are all kinds of theories that you get told in writing workshops--"Write what you know," and that sort of thing, which I don't believe at all. I think one of the great joys of writing is to try and explore what you don't know, that's exciting to me. There are all kinds of little things--show, don't tell--I just wouldn't pay attention to any of that really. I don't think you can write according to a set of rules and laws; every writer is so different. I can't imagine how they come up with these rules--they're really ludicrous. You can't learn to write in that fashion. What inspired me really was reading, reading a lot and learning from other writers. Learning how they are going about something--I was very aware of that when I was writing this book. Every book that I read at the same time I'd think, "Hmm--how do they do this?" Looking at it in that way, from a technical point of view, which we don't usually do as a reader. But really I think that's for me what was important; I was training myself to look at my work with a critical eye.

Her basic point here--that the most important part of learning to write is learning to read--I absolutely agree with. It's something I talk about with my freshman comp students all the time. In that field, it's called "reading rhetorically." The other thing I tell them is that all the rules for writing that they get told are really rules for re-writing--that when you are writing you should act as if there are no rules, and then in the revision stages you channel the ghost of English Teacher Past.

Contrary to the impression Desai gives here, I do think it's important for the end product to show rather than tell. But if what she means is that you should ignore that rule while writing and then come back with a critical eye to see what works (presumably discovering that failing to show doesn't work), then I'm with her.

What did you think you wanted to say when you first set out to write The Inheritance of Loss? Do you think you managed to convey all you wanted to?

. . . . As for whether I'm content with the book -- I always have the feeling that something got away. Where is that thing -– the sublime novel? What would it feel like to hold that in my hands? Whenever I come across it as a reader, I read trembling. Like any art form, when it's great, the person experiencing it exists in a form of grace. I hunger for that feeling as a writer as well as a reader.

Are you satisfied with the way your work has developed, as a writer? Do you see yourself continuing to write more in future?

I think this book is better than the last, but certainly I don't think it's perfect. It's the hardest thing to write a perfect book. Yet, of course, as a reader, I hunger for it. It's a constant desire and I know I'll write another book for that reason.

Writing, for me, means humility. It's a process that involves fear and doubt, especially if you're writing honestly. I imagine businessmen feel smug at least twice a day. Writers? The moments are rare.

All of these comments jumped out at me, because they so accurately describe my experience.

Prepping for Part 2

I'm in a different mental space today--just spending hours reading through my outline and related notes trying to refamiliarize myself with Part 2 and thinking about what work I need to do. It's kind of a luxury to just poke around and let the different scenes bubble around in my attention in an unscheduled way. Actually, as luxurious as it feels, it's probably a necessity.

Of course, a big part of the work ahead of me for Part 2 is similar to what I did in Part 1--digging deeper and developing what is there. It has all the same kind of "dead stars" vs. "supernovas" that Part 1 had. All the same problems with lack of motivation and lack of action and a lack of clarity about who the characters are, the lack of focus on particular questions, particular things that the characters desire.

But another big "task" is creating from scratch a subplot that I'm pretty sure I'm going to layer on. I've been stewing on this idea since last September. In terms of word count, it's not that much material that has to be added, but it's figuring out how to weave it in carefully in a way that feels truthful. In a sense this work also is developing what's there, but not really because there is very very little in the first draft regarding this subplot. Just the tenderest seed. This subplot should act to pull my character in another direction, adds to the pressure he's under and lays the groundwork for the ending, which by the way will be a very different ending than what I wrote in the first draft.

2 steps forward . . .

. . . one step back. No worries, though. I feel good about how it's going lately.

The last couple days I've come back in the afternoon and done some work outside of my usual time. Got a head start on Chapter 7 yesterday. This morning when I went to work on it, a problem with the last couple chapters that has been nagging at me was more apparent, and I decided not to ignore it. I ended up going back to Chapter 6, which I had declared done already, and put a patch in there. That helped improve the situation a lot on the issue that was bothering me--the fact that we never really see any consequence to a major development in Chapter 5.

Once that was done, I couldn't turn my energy to Chapter 7 so easily, so it amounted to just an hour of work this morning. I've identified the spot where I can do some development work to show more of the ripple effects of Chapter 5. I don't know exactly what that's going to be be yet, but I'll stew on it over the weekend and start with that Monday. Then on to the end of Chapter 7 which will need to be totally rewritten.

So, with luck, Chapter 7 will be done next Wednesday. If Chapter 8 goes the same way, then I'll be done with Part 1 with a couple weeks to spare before my big trip. I could keep plowing ahead, but at this moment I'm thinking I should use that couple weeks to do some outlining/brainstorming/planning work for Part 2 so I can be as productive as possible during my trip.

Copyediting

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
--George Orwell

When I teach freshman comp I often talk to students about how writing is a recursive process—a series of steps that can circle back and repeat itself endlessly.

And in the meantime I’ve been influenced by writers like L. Rust Hills who describe the “integration” of all the elements of fiction.

That quote from Orwell reminds me to anticipate those qualities. If we take sincerity in fiction to be the result of fully knowing and respecting your characters, honestly and deeply imagining the situation they’re in and how they would feel about it and respond to it, then sincerity is presumably handled in early drafts of a book.

However, neglecting to do that and the insincerity that would seem to result in a given episode might only have its first symptom in the language refusing to be clear—something that presumably a writer would pay the closest attention to late in the process. An abstraction refusing to be made concrete, a tangled sentence refusing to come unknotted—I expect these to be wonderful hints that the story itself is incomplete and that I’ve taken emotional shortcuts. I expect the copyediting process to send me back wearily to try again to develop the story and make it more honest, seemingly endlessly.

Or to put it as Joseph Williams does in Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace, “When you revise your early confusion into something clearer you better understand your own ideas. And when you understand your ideas better, you express them more clearly, and when you express them more clearly, you understand them even better . . . and so it goes.”

Focusing questions and progress

I had a brief good start today, and then I got distracted. Anyway . . .

I tried an exercise recently where I just made a list of the thematic and plot questions that my story was struggling with, overall and by section. In the first brainstormed list, I didn't try to focus the questions too much, but bt by this point I know the material well enough that they came out pretty focused anyway.

When I scratched out the questions that seemed like minor concerns, I was left with six pretty clear questions that I could say are the major points. When I studied them, I realized that they kind applied to either part 1 or part 2 or to the book overall, so I labeled them that way. And then it seemed like they each either about plot or theme and broke up pretty naturally without me forcing the issue into three strong pairs. Another way of putting it is that they cover internal and external conflict. They are all about my main character. They are things that every chapter can and should focus on (but don't necessarily yet.)

Next I re-wrote them graphically. I made a big curving line across the page for the whole book and two smaller curves underneath for Part 1 and Part 2. It looks like a wide forehead and two eyebrows. Underneath each arc, I wrote my three pairs of questions.

It felt like progress and my hope is that I have the kind of guidestar that I said I needed in yesterday's post. I feel like I can open Chapter 1 and attack a rewrite of it with a lot more confidence by shaping it to present and start answering the appropriate questions.

Update: This little drawing turned out to be a huge aid in the last year. It finally got me started on my first complete rewrite and guided me in subsequent revisions. Whenever I was dealing with a scene that seemed to go nowhere and do nothing, a glance at this (taped over my computer of course--I even took it on my long trip overseas with me last summer and taped it on the mirror in my hotel room) showed me how to develop the scene to make it work for the plot and character development.

A single powerful metaphor

I don't remember the exact quote, but Toni Morrison talks in one of her interviews about how in the drafting process she's looking out for the one metaphor that will carry her through the book. She says once she has that, she knows what the book is about and the rest just flows.

I thought of that today as I was trying to work on the book--really struggling--and had this image of what it would be like not to struggle. It was a fleeting sensation of having some kind of guidestar that just made it obvious what I was supposed to be doing all the way through the book. I'd be glad to work hard on all the rewriting and revising necessary, if I just knew what to do. My real problem for the last few months is I just plain don't know what I'm doing. This sensation for a second this morning, as I thought I was glimpsing that kind of clear path ahead of me, felt like a major relief, and for a second I felt I just had to have something like that. That it would take away all the burden of this rewrite process.

I don't think I have it though. Maybe I can split the difference and say that I have one for Part 1 and one for Part 2, and even that I'm not sure of.

Being true to the heart of the book

What I feel like writing about today is abstract and unclear in my mind. It's just a sensation that I've been getting, and I don't really have good examples or good vocabulary for it.

I've been doing a lot of "thinking" about the book. Sitting around with the outline in front of me and saying "what if . . ." There's lots of brainstorming of possible plot developments and then walking through each of the chapters and making notes on what would need to be added or changed.

What I'm really doing is trying to resolve the big problem that is at the heart of this project--that my character isn't very active. That's simply one of the weaknesses of my writing--that I'm more comfortable with theme, setting, character and tone than I am with plot. I can set the soldiers up in the sandbox, but I'm less effective at making them march.

So in my brainstorming I'll come up with something and additional problems will emerge. One, it' s tempting to slide back into my comfort zone--to think about the action the character takes in Chapter 1 but not sustain it and have it keep building in later chapters while I get more interested in exploring the variation on the theme that I've created.

Two, I don't have a good ear for the plot elements or, more important, making sure it's integrated with theme and character and the rest. So the stuff I'm brainstorming feels tinny--tacked on and isolated. It doesn't excite me and adding it in feels like an errand rather than a way to develop the book.

Last--and this is the thing that interests me the most right now--in concentrating on this thing that feels like a chore, it feels like I'm losing track of the heart of the book. I have to keep trying to remind myself what is interesting and powerful and unique about it. (Because the plot stuff I'm brainstorming doesn't feel powerful to me.)

And sometimes I wonder if the heart of the book is exactly the thing I'm trying to "fix"--the tendency for my character not to act. To what extent is that a lack of imagination on my part and to what extent is that the story itself, unique to this character?

Which is another way of saying, I don't really have a resolution to the essential technical problem in the book. What action is required for the book to be interesting; for it to be believable; for it to be true to its own heart and essential character?

I'm at sea a little bit. While I'm trying to figure out what I'm trying to figure out, it's hard to keep up the actual writing habit. I don't know what I'm doing.

Forest for the trees

Well, I "worked" for an hour or a little more this morning, but the process of rewriting that I have been engaged in is suspended. I'm doing a major rethink of the story. Scary but necessary.

The month off--as with any writing--means I'm seeing it with fresh eyes. Right now I am better seeing the forest along with the trees. The hard part is that I don't like what I see. There is something very basic lacking in my story. I've known it all along. It pops into my consciousness occassionally. And now I'm able to grasp it better than I did before . . . hopefully well enough to resolve it.

So this morning I printed out my outline, laid it out on a table in front of me and started doing some basic brainstorming. Talking out loud to myself while I paced around the house. I came up with some possible solutions. They are incomplete and imperfect, but it was good progress for an hour of work, and hopefully it's enough to stew on that the rest of the solution will come to me soon.

Whenver that happens, it would mean some serious rewriting of the chapters I've already worked through. I don't like to think about that.

Since the butterfly flapped its wings

About an hour of work this morning and I finished my first read through and fussing with Chapter 4 and have notes on what I need to work. It needs some thought about character and motivation and then some development based on that, but not so much I hope as in other chapters so I should get through it fairly quickly if I can devote attention to it. I'm coming to my desk in the morning squeezed on the front end by fatigue and lack of sleep and squeezed on the back end by a sense of urgency about other work and home responsibilities, so I'm not putting my best energy into this right now.

What I'm really struggling with is the pace of plot and character development and how that necessarily changes as a result of how previous chapters have been rewritten. I feel like I've done everything meaningful that Chapter 5 is currently designed to do, so I'm worried Chapter 5 is going to feel repetitive. The obvious solution is to cut it. But something is telling me that's too drastic and I need to make it work in there--that if it weren't there things would be sped up too much.

I guess another way to put it is if you can imagine that a one-pound bucket of stuff needs to be established in a given chapter, since I started my rewrite about 3/4 of a pound of the stuff from Chapter 5 has been established earlier. That still leaves 1/4 pound of important stuff to justify Chapter 5, but it would be a pretty thin chapter and sound largely repetitive.

The real solution I suspect--and it's intimidating to think about--is to adjust my thinking away from "what needs to happen" to "what would happen." In other words, stop trying to make the story serve my plan for getting it done and instead focus on bringing out the fullness of the story that isn't there yet. That might mean keeping the episode in Chapter 5 as platform and rewriting it from scratch based on a new understanding of what the characters have gone through in the meantime. That is a ton of new and intense work. I don't mind doing it--I just regret how long it will take.

Revision troubles

There comes a stage, however, when I have made it through to what I hope is the perfect end to a perfect story. I allow myself to sigh with happiness, to sit for a moment awash in the golden glow of my successfully completed work. Then I come back to reality, and the real process of revision begins.

--Jesse Lee Kercheval

Trying to get the big picture

Took yesterday off like I planned, which probably wasn't a good idea, because it disrupted my flow for the whole day. I felt at loose ends and unproductive regarding all my other work also.

Banged away at Ch. 3 today. About an hour and a half.

But what's really going on with me is stewing over big picture problems--like what is the essential plot and problem of this book. I feel like I'm on the verge of understanding about the book in a very different way. Different organizational terms. If I could just focus long enough to figure it out. And I think maybe I'm intimidated because I can see how disruptive that's going to be--all the revision it will necessitate.

It's difficult to explain--especially since I can't seem to focus on it--but it has to do with plot. What happens. I think that as I work I move back and forth between different areas of focus--plot, character, theme, setting, language. One or the other of those presents itself as the unresolved technical problem most needing attention before I can proceed. And right now it's plot. I'm imagining a thick layer that I'm going to add. I'm imagining a possible ending. And I'm becoming more conscious of the fact that that has implications for what should be happening in the earlier chapters. I need to prepare the ground for that ending. The chapters really become ABOUT something that they haven't been about so far.

Ugh. Tired and doubtful. This has been a tough week. I'm going to spend the weekend trying to come to a better understanding.

Slow careful work

Continued working on Chapter 1 today. Probably about 1:45. I've stopped tracking the word count. I know that the whole chapter is 39 full pages now and when I opened the document a couple weeks ago it was . . . 18 pages!?!? Damn. Not that another 19 pages is so much to write in two plus weeks of work, but it all just got add a little at a time without really being deliberate or aggressive about it.

Actually figure about three pages of that was cut and paste from another section of the book that I decided worked here. But still, it's in the neighborhood of doubling the chapter without really adding any episodes, just putting a lot of meat on the episodes that are there.

Today's work was a good example of what's typically happening--going through an episode with some awareness of how it should function in the book and how it's failing to do that and as I read it line by line looking for ways to bring more detail and meaning and life to it. I end up layering on more and more metaphor, more exposition, more backstory, more internal monologue especially.

In the end, most of those layers will need to get shucked off. Presumably adding them all now is necessary in order to discover what I'm really trying to do in each of these scenes. The honest truth is there is a whole lot of really basic stuff about my story that I'm still trying to figure out.

I'm as close as ever though. I ended today but just writing the one sentence summary of the book--the jacket copy--as best I could. And as I did that, it illuminated some of the dark corners of Chapter 1 that don't connect to that summary. Either they don't yet because I still haven't developed them or they are stuff that will have to get cut out.

As a result, I have a clear plan for my work tomorrow, which is always a good strategy for ending the day. My only regret is how long it is taking.

A butterfly flaps its wings in chapter one

More of the same today with a little better result. It really is like a work-out regimen--making very slight gains in strength, endurance and form from one session to the next.

Today I worked for about 1:15, moved through 6-7 pages on the original copy and composed about 670 words of new text. Word counts don't really mean much for this kind of work because clarifying something in the text might hinge on very close editing, which consumes time without producing a lot of words. I just like keeping word counts.

More importantly I introduced a new element that helps develop plot and characterization and, I hope, starts a unifying thread for all the chapters. Essentially, I executed for the first time on one of the "what ifs" that have been kicking around in my head since I finished the first draft. I have some specific problems that I need to work on--for example that my character isn't as active and responsive as he needs to be for the story to be interesting--and possible solutions to these problems come to me in the form of "What if he . . .?"

What I wrote today was the first introduction of one of those possibilities and in theory it will have a domino effect of changing the rest of the book. It forces me to think of the character differently and introduces a different factor and different potential into every scene that follows.

So, in theory, the rest of the book must necessarily be rewritten to accommodate that change. It's like the rules in every time travel movie--when you travel back in time you must not change the slightest little thing because it has enormous ripple effects on the present. In the case of a novelist doing a rewrite, apparently we deliberately change the slightest little things--and big things too--because we need the generative potential of that disruption.

I still fell a few pages short of finishing chapter 1. Maybe over the weekend. I'm still hoping to move at a pace of one chapter per week. I'll certainly have to do more than one hour/day to achieve that.

Building the habit--rewrite, day 2

Not great progress today, but improved progress, so I'm satisfied. It's like starting a workout routine after many months on the couch. You wish you could run five miles at the same pace you used to do it back before you let things slip, but it takes time to build up to that distance and to build up to that speed.

I was able to write for a little longer today with a little more of the feeling that I was getting in the groove. Nothing to get excited about, but a little better.

Specifically, I worked for an hour, the same as yesterday. But less time was spent reading through and fine tuning existing material and more time was spent creating new material. 600 words today as opposed to 200 words yesterday.

(I know from the drafting stage that I write about 1000 words longhand. I don't know on the computer. But assuming the same, that figures to about 35-40 minutes of "writing" today vs. diddling around.)

Some of it was not necessarily going deeper into the story. It was just adding more detail at the same level. But I could feel a couple moments where I was adding a detail that told us more about the interior reality of the character and his longing and motivation.

Closer. Closer. The main thing is to make it a habit and trust that something good will emerge out of it over the long term. You have to DO it one day at a time without JUDGING the product of any single day.

Rewriting vs revising vs editing

I'm learning something hard . . . The draft isn't there for me to fix. The draft is there to give hints about what I'm supposed to write next.

Let me share a little bit of my first draft to illustrate.

The children in sixth grade at Brookview sensed how fast they were growing up and that their lives were propelling forward into new territory. They had been cocooned together for seven years or—in the case of the new kids who had arrived in first grade—six years, and they were winding up their last weeks of elementary school. Next was coming the junior high school with all of its academic and social unknowns, with many more kids, including kids from some of the schools where they were all snobs, where there would be older kids who they didn’t know, where they would have to go to different rooms and corridors for each class, where they would have gym instead of P.E. and they would have to wear special gym clothes for that and have to shower afterward. It was the last soccer season and last baseball season when they just signed up for it—hereafter they would have to try out for school teams and only the kids who were fast and skilled would get to play. After this year there would be school dances and even parties they had heard about through an older brother where everyone drank J.D. and people made out.

I opened this chapter this morning to think about rewriting, and it was very discouraging, because I remember this intro being colorful and engaging. But it's obviously barf, and presumably there's a lot more of that in the rest of my first draft.

The first thing I wanted to do was to start editing. If you go through one sentence at a time, you'll see lots of opportunities to clean it up. The first sentence is awkward and clumsy, and I could easily rewrite it for more clarity and impact. The second sentence has that problem plus the problem of having extra detail that is probably unnecessary. I could make the tough choice to chop that out. The next three sentences each start with weak verbs and abstract subjects.

And so on, and before long what I'm actually doing is more like editing the book at the sentence level. But what this paragraph--and probably the whole chapter--really needs is a rewrite. And I don't mean a sentence-by-sentence rewrite.

I mean I need to look at it, decide what the real story buried underneath it is--the powerful metaphor, the meaningful plot points, the honest behaviors of the character--and pull those out and write the chapter again to emphasize all that. Instead of trying to make this paragraph flow better, I need to treat this paragraph as a big clue to what the story is really trying to say and then write that down.

That distinction is going to be tough to remember. The temptation as I'm reading through will be to just stop and fix each individual sentence trying to find the right word. But I'm not to the point yet where I should struggle to find the right word. I'm still trying to find out who my characters really are and what they want and what they're going to do to surprise one another.

So all those exercises I'm doing while I have the draft put away really serve two important purposes. One, they help me figure out more about my character and story. Two, I'm trying to get the important stuff established so well in my mind that the urge to tell the real story swamps any urge to line edit the draft on the page. I have to get something into my head more powerful and important than the words currently on the page.

To put it another way, the draft isn't there for me to fix. The draft is there to give hints about what I'm supposed to write next.

Letting it stew

Work on my novel appears to have stopped completely. That's partly because I was sick, partly because I've been busy. But I know the real reason is fear and boredom. As I've written before, paraphrasing Jane Smiley, the fear and boredom are really a symptoms of something else.

So even though work has stopped, I'm trying to take comfort from the theory that it's continuing to stew--that I'm mulling it over and figuring out what the story can be and what it's problems are.

I'm pretty sure that my subconscious continues to work away at it, though you can never really be sure about that, can you? You just get the occassional hint when something pops through to the consciousness, and I'm getting those. Yesterday I had a moment when I thought, "Oh, what if my character . . . . "

The biggest danger is not respecting the work that it takes and making lame excuses. I know I sound like I'm in that space, but I don't feel like I am. So I'm not worrying about it right now.

Everyone's process is different. For me, right now I'm feeling like if I make progress on other parts of my life--shaping my professional responsibilities so that I can take advantage of the writing impulse when the opportunity comes--then that's a kind of necessary progress too.

Hopefully more honest work to report on about my novel soon.

Fault finding

This is certainly a discouraging period, because it’s all about finding problems in the book, and I’m finding plenty.

I think instead of making an organized list of things I need to fix, I should approach it as a list of material to build with.

When I got discouraged during the period that I was writing the first draft, I could ignore that feeling more easily, because I had a mantra. “Just add sentences. Nothing matters except adding sentences.” I need something similar to keep me going, but I don’t know what.

“Just keep _________. The most important thing is to _________.”

What next?: Preparing for the rewrite

I had lunch recently with my friend Tim Parrish, (He has an excellent book of short stories called Red Stick Men from University Press of Mississippi.) His first advice was to take some time off from it before starting the rewrite. No way! I want to make this baby actually say what I intended.

Here’s a little to do list I have for myself over the next week:

• Umm, figure out how I’m going to support myself. That’s kind of a big one.
• Catch up with the typing. I have about four chapters I need to type in.
• Re-read “A Novel of Your Own (II)” in Jane Smiley’s book Thirteen Ways of Looking At a Novel.
• Re-read all my early notes to see what thematic aspirations I had that have fallen through the cracks.
• Re-read all the commentary Tim Parrish made on my other creative work when I took his class a few years ago and translate that advice to the current work. Use it as a kind of guiding spirit.
• Re-read some books that have useful to me in sentence level editing in the past, including Style: Ten Lesson in Clarity in Grace by Joseph Williams.
• Shape up my outline so I can keep track of the cutting and pasting.
• Shape up the editing notes I made when I reviewed Part I before moving on to Part II.
• Draw several items to help me track of continuity errors in the draft: a timeline; a map of the town; a map of the house; a family tree.
• Continue on a regular dosage of reading poetry. I think that will be very helpful when I start trying to shape it at the stylistic level. I’ve mostly avoided reading poetry during the first draft because I could feel that it did get into my head and influence the style. That was a distraction before and could be helpful now. I recently started reading Winter Numbers by Marilyn Hacker (W.W. Norton) and I’ve been thumbing through my old Norton anthologies from college.