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.
Showing posts with label timeline. Show all posts
Showing posts with label timeline. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Monday, July 27, 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
First lines, last steps
I'm finding myself working and working on the first lines of the book, which is very unsettling. I know it makes sense that as I near the end of the process the theme becomes clearer and the need to clarify the statement of that theme becomes apparent. But I can't help feeling that the first lines, which I wrote first over two years ago, is a pretty basic piece of the book that ought to be settled by now. It's freaking me out a little.
But I'm getting good at ignoring my fears and plowing ahead, and it was illuminating if slow work this a.m. About a two hour session. One hour of plain writing in long hand on paper on the back porch just like the old days, basically rewriting from memory some of the stuff that I've already written several times, but hopefully sharper and more focused. Then another hour of trying to refocus and brainstorm my way out of a problem.
The problem is really the question of what the first line needs to do. Looking at it through the question of "intention," which I've been doing lately as noted before, I might be establishing theme, establishing character, starting the main story, laying out background to the main story, etc. Probably ideally all of these should be done at once in one elegant, vivid line that starts in media res, gives voice to the main character, references the time period and latitude and longitude, creates suspense and promises more action. In reality, as I brainstormed several possibilities, the more I worked to establish character or setting, the more it felt like a slow start. The more I established theme, the more abstract the language was. And the more I succeeded in getting the story started, the more utilitarian the language felt. Anyway, that presumes clarity about what the story actually is--what thread of events we need to pick up first.
I didn't mention establishing voice, and what I'm really leaning toward is the idea that establishing voice is the most important thing -- that the reader can tolerate a slow start to the story if they're interested in the voice. That's a theory, and one I don't have a hundred percent confidence in, but it's what I'm going to stew on until tomorrow, when I'll try again.
I can't believe I'm near the end of June and I'm stuck on the first line of my book. It's not looking like I'll get done this summer. My only hopes is that a breakthrough here will lead to quick clear work later on.
But I'm getting good at ignoring my fears and plowing ahead, and it was illuminating if slow work this a.m. About a two hour session. One hour of plain writing in long hand on paper on the back porch just like the old days, basically rewriting from memory some of the stuff that I've already written several times, but hopefully sharper and more focused. Then another hour of trying to refocus and brainstorm my way out of a problem.
The problem is really the question of what the first line needs to do. Looking at it through the question of "intention," which I've been doing lately as noted before, I might be establishing theme, establishing character, starting the main story, laying out background to the main story, etc. Probably ideally all of these should be done at once in one elegant, vivid line that starts in media res, gives voice to the main character, references the time period and latitude and longitude, creates suspense and promises more action. In reality, as I brainstormed several possibilities, the more I worked to establish character or setting, the more it felt like a slow start. The more I established theme, the more abstract the language was. And the more I succeeded in getting the story started, the more utilitarian the language felt. Anyway, that presumes clarity about what the story actually is--what thread of events we need to pick up first.
I didn't mention establishing voice, and what I'm really leaning toward is the idea that establishing voice is the most important thing -- that the reader can tolerate a slow start to the story if they're interested in the voice. That's a theory, and one I don't have a hundred percent confidence in, but it's what I'm going to stew on until tomorrow, when I'll try again.
I can't believe I'm near the end of June and I'm stuck on the first line of my book. It's not looking like I'll get done this summer. My only hopes is that a breakthrough here will lead to quick clear work later on.
Friday, May 29, 2009
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.
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.
Monday, February 23, 2009
Losing some days, stuck on Ch. 8
When did I originally say I was done with Ch. 8? Last Thursday? I'm still not satisfied with it, but after some more picking at it on Friday, thinking about it over the weekend, and some work this morning, I'm going to move on. Tomorrow I start Chapter 9/Part 2.
I think Chapter 8 probably has been harder because it's the climax of Part 1, and so, similarly to the climax of a whole book, though on a smaller scale, it has to resolve a lot questions elegantly and dramatically. And, unique to a transition from a major Part to another, it has to raise new questions that make the reader want to go on to the next section.
And it has to do all that in a way--as always--that integrates plot and character. It's so tempting just to shove the characters around and make them do what needs to be done in order to resolve the plot or move it along, but you end up with actions that don't seem to fit the characters that were established before. I guess that's what I mean by inelegant. I'm trying to get the inelegance out and the sense of integration in.
Anyway, Ch. 8 gets less and less clumsy and more and more dramatically compelling each time I go through it, but it's not there yet. I needed to slow down and take a good crack at it, and I've lost a few days off my schedule.
So, my plan to finish the read-through by the end of this week--4 working days left--is very improbable even without any roadblocks. Even without any personal or professional life, and I've been falling behind in both of those in order to get the work done the last few weeks.
So now I'm thinking the read-through is more likely to take 4 weeks total--until the end of next week. That would be about one chapter per week day from now until then, with a couple days of buffer.
I think Chapter 8 probably has been harder because it's the climax of Part 1, and so, similarly to the climax of a whole book, though on a smaller scale, it has to resolve a lot questions elegantly and dramatically. And, unique to a transition from a major Part to another, it has to raise new questions that make the reader want to go on to the next section.
And it has to do all that in a way--as always--that integrates plot and character. It's so tempting just to shove the characters around and make them do what needs to be done in order to resolve the plot or move it along, but you end up with actions that don't seem to fit the characters that were established before. I guess that's what I mean by inelegant. I'm trying to get the inelegance out and the sense of integration in.
Anyway, Ch. 8 gets less and less clumsy and more and more dramatically compelling each time I go through it, but it's not there yet. I needed to slow down and take a good crack at it, and I've lost a few days off my schedule.
So, my plan to finish the read-through by the end of this week--4 working days left--is very improbable even without any roadblocks. Even without any personal or professional life, and I've been falling behind in both of those in order to get the work done the last few weeks.
So now I'm thinking the read-through is more likely to take 4 weeks total--until the end of next week. That would be about one chapter per week day from now until then, with a couple days of buffer.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
More good parts, less good whole
I finished the rewrite of Chapter 4 today. That's about the first time I've met the most ambitious estimate of my timeline. Three days and done. Ready for Chapter 5.
The experience has reinforced what I've already discovered: this stage of the process is all about deepening and complicating the work. I added about 1,000 new words today. (The whole chapter has more than doubled from its original draft.) And as I make it deeper and more complicated, I make it worse in a critical way. What's happening is that I am inventing and developing more good parts but I'm also wrecking the whole. It's becoming less and less cohesive.
It seems like I'm unraveling the unity it has, but really I'm exposing how the unity that was there was a kind of illusion. A dressed up unity that hides how not much is really going on.
That's scary and uncomfortable, but I'm getting better at just riding that wave and living with the necessity of coming back later to figure out what gets cut and how things get tied together.
The experience has reinforced what I've already discovered: this stage of the process is all about deepening and complicating the work. I added about 1,000 new words today. (The whole chapter has more than doubled from its original draft.) And as I make it deeper and more complicated, I make it worse in a critical way. What's happening is that I am inventing and developing more good parts but I'm also wrecking the whole. It's becoming less and less cohesive.
It seems like I'm unraveling the unity it has, but really I'm exposing how the unity that was there was a kind of illusion. A dressed up unity that hides how not much is really going on.
That's scary and uncomfortable, but I'm getting better at just riding that wave and living with the necessity of coming back later to figure out what gets cut and how things get tied together.
Friday, March 14, 2008
Reorganizing and stamina
I didn't get through the end of the day yesterday before I rethought my timeline again. Still so much work to do on Chapter 1, since the changes I made have implications for the climax of the chapter. So I started the morning thinking I need to go through each chapter carefully.
As I went along I kept discovering more and more problems, but they were less in the realm of development than in the realm of organization and emphasis. I felt like attending to the fact that the chapter is about twice as long as it should be and the main stuff in it takes too long to get to.
So I started moving things around. It's more like editing than rewriting/developing. Very roughly.
I worked for about an hour and when I came up for air I had the sense that I could keep going for awhile. So now I'm hoping that at certain stages along between rewriting and fine tuning, it will involve a kind of work that doesn't take so much intellectual energy so that I can sustain the work for several hours a day and pick up the pace of progress. It has been my experience in the past with other projects, that I have much more stamina for sentence-level editing than I do for drafting. I hesitate to say when I'll be able to do that, but when that stage comes I'll try to arrange my life so that I can put in hours a day on it.
Right now I have to get to my paying job.
As I went along I kept discovering more and more problems, but they were less in the realm of development than in the realm of organization and emphasis. I felt like attending to the fact that the chapter is about twice as long as it should be and the main stuff in it takes too long to get to.
So I started moving things around. It's more like editing than rewriting/developing. Very roughly.
I worked for about an hour and when I came up for air I had the sense that I could keep going for awhile. So now I'm hoping that at certain stages along between rewriting and fine tuning, it will involve a kind of work that doesn't take so much intellectual energy so that I can sustain the work for several hours a day and pick up the pace of progress. It has been my experience in the past with other projects, that I have much more stamina for sentence-level editing than I do for drafting. I hesitate to say when I'll be able to do that, but when that stage comes I'll try to arrange my life so that I can put in hours a day on it.
Right now I have to get to my paying job.
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Best laid plans . . .
This work is so humbling. During the rewrite process I don't think I've had a single day when I started and ended with the same sense of what the timeline and scope of work are going to be. Every time I think I know what I need to be doing, the path closes up and I have to bushwack until I find another one.
Today, I'm ending with a feeling that I've gained some time back compared to the course I thought I was on when I started this morning . . .
Over the last week or so I haven't been writing any but I have been doing a lot of thinking, note taking and brain storming. I went through my outline of all the chapters and made notes on what needs to be added to bringing them into closer alignment with the main path of the story. Scenes to add. Scenes where the dots need to be connected better. I also did a lot of brainstorming on a complicated subplot and where it will get developed.
That left me feeling like I basically had to start the rewrite over again. For example, Chapter 1 needs XYZ changes to get it focused. That's been scary, so I've been procrastinating. Really I dreaded it. It now feels like it will take years to finish.
So I started today finally, making a fresh copy of Chapter 1 and going to work on it. As I did that, though, I got the idea that maybe it won't be so slow. I needed two basic things to be established. In one case it required a new scene entirely and in another it was expanding and deepening a scene. I did that in a quick hour of writing. Just punch them in there. It's messy. The transitions don't work and the new materials is probably too abstract to be really interesting. They are probably in a tone that doesn't fit with the chapter. The rest of the chapter will need to be checked for continuity with the new material.
But, in a sense, I got done the big changes for that chapter that my rethinking in the last couple of weeks has provoked. If I want, I can go on to do the same thing with Chapter 2 tomorrow. And if the pattern follows, I can do a lot of the big fixes in the chapters that I've already done my first rewrite on in about a week. That would bring me up to Chapter 5, which I've been stuck on for awhile, and continue my rewrite from there, with more focus than I have had up until now.
That's the plan today. Let's see how I get humbled tomorrow.
Today, I'm ending with a feeling that I've gained some time back compared to the course I thought I was on when I started this morning . . .
Over the last week or so I haven't been writing any but I have been doing a lot of thinking, note taking and brain storming. I went through my outline of all the chapters and made notes on what needs to be added to bringing them into closer alignment with the main path of the story. Scenes to add. Scenes where the dots need to be connected better. I also did a lot of brainstorming on a complicated subplot and where it will get developed.
That left me feeling like I basically had to start the rewrite over again. For example, Chapter 1 needs XYZ changes to get it focused. That's been scary, so I've been procrastinating. Really I dreaded it. It now feels like it will take years to finish.
So I started today finally, making a fresh copy of Chapter 1 and going to work on it. As I did that, though, I got the idea that maybe it won't be so slow. I needed two basic things to be established. In one case it required a new scene entirely and in another it was expanding and deepening a scene. I did that in a quick hour of writing. Just punch them in there. It's messy. The transitions don't work and the new materials is probably too abstract to be really interesting. They are probably in a tone that doesn't fit with the chapter. The rest of the chapter will need to be checked for continuity with the new material.
But, in a sense, I got done the big changes for that chapter that my rethinking in the last couple of weeks has provoked. If I want, I can go on to do the same thing with Chapter 2 tomorrow. And if the pattern follows, I can do a lot of the big fixes in the chapters that I've already done my first rewrite on in about a week. That would bring me up to Chapter 5, which I've been stuck on for awhile, and continue my rewrite from there, with more focus than I have had up until now.
That's the plan today. Let's see how I get humbled tomorrow.
Monday, February 18, 2008
Timeline and lowered expectations
Right now I'm thinking that a good goal would be to finish my "rewrite" of Part 1--which makes up about 2/3 of the total length--by about mid-May. I'd like to move at a quicker pace, and had started this process assuming a much quicker pace, but experience so far has told me that it's about 3 weeks/chapter. And even then the progress made on that rewrite, while necessary and important, isn't what I had assumed at the beginning. More rewriting will be called for later.
After May I'll have a two-month period where I'm unlikely to work on the book at all because of some other stuff going on. It's possible I can set up a routine to work every day during that period, but this other thing is a rare and important opportunity and I don't want to tether myself prematurely, so I'm planning on that period being unavailable for progress on the novel.
So, assuming a return to work on August 1, I would be fortunate to finish the rewrite of Part 2 sometime between Thanksgiving and December.
That is a very disappointing conclusion to reach after the expectations I started with, but I don't see any way around it. Well, I see ways to improve on it--don't give up those two months this summer, be disciplined about adding some time each day. But I don't see a way to get close to my starting expectation, which was something like one chapter a week, finishing in about 15 weeks or so. I'm already way past that, and I'm still working on Chapte r5.
The timeline for the whole book, all the rewrites that will be necessary, is starting to look more like years than months.
After May I'll have a two-month period where I'm unlikely to work on the book at all because of some other stuff going on. It's possible I can set up a routine to work every day during that period, but this other thing is a rare and important opportunity and I don't want to tether myself prematurely, so I'm planning on that period being unavailable for progress on the novel.
So, assuming a return to work on August 1, I would be fortunate to finish the rewrite of Part 2 sometime between Thanksgiving and December.
That is a very disappointing conclusion to reach after the expectations I started with, but I don't see any way around it. Well, I see ways to improve on it--don't give up those two months this summer, be disciplined about adding some time each day. But I don't see a way to get close to my starting expectation, which was something like one chapter a week, finishing in about 15 weeks or so. I'm already way past that, and I'm still working on Chapte r5.
The timeline for the whole book, all the rewrites that will be necessary, is starting to look more like years than months.
Friday, December 28, 2007
The difficulty of working on two scenes in one day
For the time I put in this morning, I was productive--around 1,500 words of new material that is powerful and interesting. I just wish that I could sustain the effort longer than about 90 minutes.
The amount of time isn't the only factor in what makes me stop eventually. Another factor is the emotional trajectory of the scene I'm working on. In general, if I work up to a climactic moment and finish a scene, it's hard to get started again on another scene. To do that work, I typically slip into a reverie where time passes without my noticing it and the scene I'm writing is very vivid in my mind as if I'm daydreaming it.
Usually when I write the last words of the scene I snap out of that reverie and at that point thinking critically about what needs to happen next and then getting the creative juices flowing both seem like impossible tasks. Sometimes I'm able to stretch my legs pouring another cup of coffee and get started again but usually I tell myself to be proud of my work so far and call it a day, which is what happened this morning.
So if my starting point for the day happened to be 90 minutes of work away from finishing the scene--as it was today--90 minutes of work is all that I end up putting in. It could be more or less, though usually not more than two-and-a-half hours.
All of this discussion is about new work. Sometimes when the energy is low I'm able to work on things that require less energy like some line editing or reading over stuff that has only been drafted without being read again or making notes about what else I need to do. Not today, though. I'm done.
The amount of time isn't the only factor in what makes me stop eventually. Another factor is the emotional trajectory of the scene I'm working on. In general, if I work up to a climactic moment and finish a scene, it's hard to get started again on another scene. To do that work, I typically slip into a reverie where time passes without my noticing it and the scene I'm writing is very vivid in my mind as if I'm daydreaming it.
Usually when I write the last words of the scene I snap out of that reverie and at that point thinking critically about what needs to happen next and then getting the creative juices flowing both seem like impossible tasks. Sometimes I'm able to stretch my legs pouring another cup of coffee and get started again but usually I tell myself to be proud of my work so far and call it a day, which is what happened this morning.
So if my starting point for the day happened to be 90 minutes of work away from finishing the scene--as it was today--90 minutes of work is all that I end up putting in. It could be more or less, though usually not more than two-and-a-half hours.
All of this discussion is about new work. Sometimes when the energy is low I'm able to work on things that require less energy like some line editing or reading over stuff that has only been drafted without being read again or making notes about what else I need to do. Not today, though. I'm done.
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Old journal entries posted out of order--Rethinking my plot
Before I started posting to this blog, I kept some journal entries so I would have material to work with once I got going. They were logs without the web. Some of those original pieces were never posted, and now I'm circling back to post some of interest.
Sept. 4
Sept. 4
I’m not sure where this is coming from, but I’m having a terrific urge to layer on some plot complications. It’s a very creative feeling, but it also feels a little dangerous—like it could be destructive of what I have at the same time. It’s ironic to have this urge since plot has always been my greatest weakness.
One example: In my draft, I have my main character getting a little pre-adolescent erotic charge hanging out with the receptionist at his dad’s office. I put it in to tell myself what his frame of mind is like at the time, but I wasn’t really including it to move the plot and didn’t do anything with it. It didn’t contribute to the story in any way. Meanwhile, the usual tension carries on between my character and his father. It seems to me now all of that can be combined to generate some other plot complications that hadn’t occurred to me before.
On the one hand, I really don’t like the idea that my story would need so much basic structural work. On the other hand, I’m getting a little thrill from a seeming breakthrough in my ability generate more plot complications.
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
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.
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.
Monday, November 5, 2007
Move on or keep working on Chapter One?
Monday morning--Something told me over the weekend to stay with Chapter One even though that would mess up my plan to finish a chapter a week. That plan is arbitrary and really about psyching myself up more than any good thinking about what's really needed.
Still, I don't want to get bogged down here. So I'm resisting the impulse to do too much work on Chapter One. After my work this morning, the way I'm thinking of it now is in terms of "development." My job at this point is to further develop the story--scene by scene. It's not to fix problems or even connect all the dots or to make it logical and certainly not to line edit.
For example, in my Chapter One there are several big chunks of exposition that I have to "fix" at some point--cut them, trim them, make them more interesting. I don't know. Frankly, as long as they are there, you can't call this a very well-written chapter. So the temptation is to fix them now and assure myself that I can write well and that the story will be good and interesting before going on to the next chapter.
But I'm trying to take the attitude that most of those fixes are better addressed in the next round and I have to let them sit for now. Instead I only concentrate on the parts of the exposition that are crying out for more instead of less--where they hint at an something important that didn't really get fleshed out before.
Exposition is just one example. The more typical thing is scenes that have dead ends without accomplishing anything--what I've previously described as "dead stars" vs. "supernovas." Those need to be developed into supernovas.
Another example is any relationship that's introduced--really anyplace where two people spend some time together. In most cases I have the characters going through motions without much feeling or sense of history or sense of being connected to one another. What do they feel about one another? I need to bring some intensity into the room. That's developing the story.
Related to that is something that I'm choosing to ignore for now--introducing the characters. A few of them suddenly appear on the scene, referred to by first name like they are familiar, without their background info. It's been written somewhere, but as I move things around, the logical order gets messed up. Fixing that is not development, and right now fixing that would just be avoidance of the important work.
So today, I spent about an hour and a half, read through the chapter, diagnosed several problems and named the three specific things that fall into the area of development. I estimate it will take about two hours of work to do that work. And THEN I'll move on to Chapter Two.
So . . . "rewriting" at this point is looking like this:
Still, I don't want to get bogged down here. So I'm resisting the impulse to do too much work on Chapter One. After my work this morning, the way I'm thinking of it now is in terms of "development." My job at this point is to further develop the story--scene by scene. It's not to fix problems or even connect all the dots or to make it logical and certainly not to line edit.
For example, in my Chapter One there are several big chunks of exposition that I have to "fix" at some point--cut them, trim them, make them more interesting. I don't know. Frankly, as long as they are there, you can't call this a very well-written chapter. So the temptation is to fix them now and assure myself that I can write well and that the story will be good and interesting before going on to the next chapter.
But I'm trying to take the attitude that most of those fixes are better addressed in the next round and I have to let them sit for now. Instead I only concentrate on the parts of the exposition that are crying out for more instead of less--where they hint at an something important that didn't really get fleshed out before.
Exposition is just one example. The more typical thing is scenes that have dead ends without accomplishing anything--what I've previously described as "dead stars" vs. "supernovas." Those need to be developed into supernovas.
Another example is any relationship that's introduced--really anyplace where two people spend some time together. In most cases I have the characters going through motions without much feeling or sense of history or sense of being connected to one another. What do they feel about one another? I need to bring some intensity into the room. That's developing the story.
Related to that is something that I'm choosing to ignore for now--introducing the characters. A few of them suddenly appear on the scene, referred to by first name like they are familiar, without their background info. It's been written somewhere, but as I move things around, the logical order gets messed up. Fixing that is not development, and right now fixing that would just be avoidance of the important work.
So today, I spent about an hour and a half, read through the chapter, diagnosed several problems and named the three specific things that fall into the area of development. I estimate it will take about two hours of work to do that work. And THEN I'll move on to Chapter Two.
So . . . "rewriting" at this point is looking like this:
- Open the computer file with the chapter and save a new copy.
- Go through it looking for scenes that need to be developed. About 5 pages of review and about 500 words of new material per hour.
- Make notes about other problems need to be fixed.
- Go through it to spot the essential things that need to be developed for the rest of the book to make sense.
- Write those.
- Approximately 10-12hours per chapter. Which could be about one chapter/week with more stamina than I have right now.
Monday, October 29, 2007
Starting the rewrite finally
During last week and over the weekend I came to the decision that I needed to start the rewrite, even though I don't know what I'm doing, and today I started.
I put in about one hour of work first thing after my coffee. I opened the first chapter, save a fresh copy of it and just started going through it line by line. Most of the time I was making sentence-level adjustments, and I did that knowing that it's way too early to worry about that kind of revision, but it seemed like the only way to get started and find my way into it. One danger is the sense of contentment that method might bring. I need to find the big picture problems, and sentence-level editing might actually cause me to miss them.
In any case, I found at least one biggER picture problem, if not necessarily the kind of problem I ought to be focusing on. But the decision I've come to is that what I ought to be focusing on is an unknown. I'm not smart or experienced enough to make the kind of evaluation and plan the work accordingly. And since I don't know what I ought to do, the only thing to do is just to go forward blindly.
Not absolutely blindly--I do have some critical faculties and have done some thinking. But I'm moving forward with a lot less of a plan than I expected.
Another way of thinking about it that is finally dawning on me is that I'm in a totally unfamiliar process right now. If you imagine starting the draft of a book and how that feels like wading out from the shore into a vast expanse . . . this is like that except it's with the sense of never having tried before and never having seen the water before and not knowing what wading or swimming or treading water even are.
Another comparison . . . you know how when you're a teenager first getting that urge to be a writer? (Usually a poet.) And you open up your school notebook to a blank page with a pen in your hand. What is unique about that moment I think is that it's a moment when you have a tremendous creative urge but it's not yet connected to writing itself--to the knowledge of what writing is or the sense that you could be a writer. It's like the blank page is seducing you but you don't know know enough about sex to recognize what it is. I remember wanting just to move the pen over the paper and create images with words, but I didn't have any sense that there was such a thing as writing and writers.
Starting this rewrite feels like that moment. When I started the first draft, I didn't know I could finish it, but I at least knew what I was embarking on and that I was attempting to use skills that I had been honing. With the rewrite, it's almost like I don't know what that job actually is. I don't know what it entails or what it looks like or feels like. I don't know that anyone has actually done it before. It's an unarticulated part of the process.
So I came to about the sixth page or so to a point where the characters move from one space to another and it was clumsy. No transition. No rationale. No reason for them to do that. So I stopped, put several hard returns in the text to create some space, and started writing. I just wrote what my character was thinking and feeling and deciding. I ended up adding . . . not so much. A couple hundred words. But it was created from a fuller understanding of the character than I had at the end of the first draft. And it starts to commit the story to a more dramatic and active relationship between the characters.
After writing that new graf, I paused. An hour was up. Work beckoned. I decided to pause there for the day. I didn't get a lot done, but I learned a lot and I got started. I'll pick up in the same place tomorrow and hopefully build up my stamina as well as my understanding of what I'm doing.
I put in about one hour of work first thing after my coffee. I opened the first chapter, save a fresh copy of it and just started going through it line by line. Most of the time I was making sentence-level adjustments, and I did that knowing that it's way too early to worry about that kind of revision, but it seemed like the only way to get started and find my way into it. One danger is the sense of contentment that method might bring. I need to find the big picture problems, and sentence-level editing might actually cause me to miss them.
In any case, I found at least one biggER picture problem, if not necessarily the kind of problem I ought to be focusing on. But the decision I've come to is that what I ought to be focusing on is an unknown. I'm not smart or experienced enough to make the kind of evaluation and plan the work accordingly. And since I don't know what I ought to do, the only thing to do is just to go forward blindly.
Not absolutely blindly--I do have some critical faculties and have done some thinking. But I'm moving forward with a lot less of a plan than I expected.
Another way of thinking about it that is finally dawning on me is that I'm in a totally unfamiliar process right now. If you imagine starting the draft of a book and how that feels like wading out from the shore into a vast expanse . . . this is like that except it's with the sense of never having tried before and never having seen the water before and not knowing what wading or swimming or treading water even are.
Another comparison . . . you know how when you're a teenager first getting that urge to be a writer? (Usually a poet.) And you open up your school notebook to a blank page with a pen in your hand. What is unique about that moment I think is that it's a moment when you have a tremendous creative urge but it's not yet connected to writing itself--to the knowledge of what writing is or the sense that you could be a writer. It's like the blank page is seducing you but you don't know know enough about sex to recognize what it is. I remember wanting just to move the pen over the paper and create images with words, but I didn't have any sense that there was such a thing as writing and writers.
Starting this rewrite feels like that moment. When I started the first draft, I didn't know I could finish it, but I at least knew what I was embarking on and that I was attempting to use skills that I had been honing. With the rewrite, it's almost like I don't know what that job actually is. I don't know what it entails or what it looks like or feels like. I don't know that anyone has actually done it before. It's an unarticulated part of the process.
So I came to about the sixth page or so to a point where the characters move from one space to another and it was clumsy. No transition. No rationale. No reason for them to do that. So I stopped, put several hard returns in the text to create some space, and started writing. I just wrote what my character was thinking and feeling and deciding. I ended up adding . . . not so much. A couple hundred words. But it was created from a fuller understanding of the character than I had at the end of the first draft. And it starts to commit the story to a more dramatic and active relationship between the characters.
After writing that new graf, I paused. An hour was up. Work beckoned. I decided to pause there for the day. I didn't get a lot done, but I learned a lot and I got started. I'll pick up in the same place tomorrow and hopefully build up my stamina as well as my understanding of what I'm doing.
Thursday, October 18, 2007
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.
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.
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.
Sunday, September 23, 2007
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.
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