Two chapters in seven days

Real life has interrupted my work for the last week. Since then I've managed to get two more chapters marked up and corrected. That continues to take off about a page per chapter and to take about four hours for each one.

I think over the next couple weeks I'll be lucky to do a chapter every two days. I have to get going on some paying work assignments, so probably I'll just be able to put in a.m. sessions like the old days. We'll call that a conservative estimate, and calculating that way, I have about 14 working days to go. Let's call it 14 days total, since some of the chapters coming up are shorter and can be done a little quicker.

Intense editing

What is it Wednesday? I've been deep in it since last Friday. I've always known that I have more stamina for the close editing than for the more purely creative aspects of the work, and I've taking advantage of that by putting in long hours, including over the weekend.

My time estimates are holding up -- about 4 hours or so for each chapter, half of that marking up the printed typescript and half inputting the changes on the computer. I'm also comparing it closely as I go along to notes from one of my readers. More on what they had to say another time.

So far, I've finished 6 chapters this way and have neglected everything else. I've got a bad case of bleacher butt. The weather hasn't helped. I need to be on the computer a lot and it is just getting to the time of year when my office is hot to be in.

I get a break -- though I don't really want it -- over the next few days. I'll be losing Thursday through Monday to personal and family stuff. If I'm lucky I can mark up a few chapters on paper and have them to type in when I get back Tuesday.

BTW, through the five chapters, I've trimmed another 8 pp. without really striving for that. Just little snips in cluttered sentences here and there. Estimate another 15 pp. off the same way, and I should end this draft at about 305 pages.

Close scalpel work

I feel like I'm finally doing the fine line editing, and it feels good. Many other writers have discussed the pleasures of close editing like this, and I've long known what they meant based on my nonfiction writing experience. It's satisfying to get the language sharpened, though it's a little alarming to find how dull it still is after so many drafts.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about. My character is reading a children's book that is briefly summarized with this phrase: "The boy is part of a rebel group that is fighting the machines." The revision takes out "that is." Thus: "The boy is part of a rebel group fighting the machines." I'm finding several of those kinds of things per page. Also, many of my exposition grafs tend to clarify themselves by repeating a point with a second unnecessary metaphor. Overkill. So I have a lot of lines like that struck out.

So many in fact that in the first 17 page chapter, I subtracted two pages just with these little changes. Amazing.

It's slow work though. So far, including some sessions over the weekend, I've marked up on paper the first four chapters (Part I) and input the changes on the first chapter. Based on how it's gone so far, I estimate about 10 pp. per hour in each mode. Thus about 4 hours total for each approx. 20 pg. chapter. That's a lot of time under the best of circumstances, and it's the kind of work that's hard to do for more than an hour or so at a time. I think it's going to take me about a month. I can only hope that the first four chapters are not typical since they had so many revisions in the last draft and so are somewhat clunkier than the rest. I'm getting really impatient to pick up the pace.

Also, I have some paying work on the line that may start to hog up a lot of time. We'll see.

It's getting hot. Longtime readers will remember that my office is too hot this time of year, so I'm thinking about how to set up my space on the screened porch. Probably tomorrow.

Wrapping up Draft 7

No one could possibly be interested in this detail, but just for the record . . .

I decided to call an end to Draft 7, and I took it to the copy shop to print out. I'll start marking that up with red ink to create Draft 8 soon. Here's hoping it's all sentence level work.

A tally of where we are on page counts, chapter numbering, etc.:

-Chapters: It is now 17 chapters. That's still counting the epilogue as a chapter. I got there by deleting Chapter 8 and Chapter 10. Therefore, the former Chapters 9 is now 8. The former 11 i s now 9. Every following chapter is now two numerals lower, so that that the last Chapter that was 19 is now 17.

-Parts: It was previously broken in 3 parts. Part I was about the first 60% of the book. Part II was after a break in the time of the present action and went through the climax of the story. Part III was the epilogue/last chapter. I decided to break Part I into 2 parts at a moment after Chapter 4 where there is shift in the pressure on the character. Therefore, what was II is now III and what was III is now IV.

-Page count: 328 pages. That's minus 1 more from some slight edits yesterday and then plus one when I added in the page marking Part II. That's minus 65 from the start of this draft and minus about 212 from the version I finished last December. Which is a 39% cut. My reader back then said he thought "it could be half as long." Short of what he suggested, but it wasn't that strong a suggestion.

-Word count: 96,302. If I remember right, my version last December was about 170,000 words. That's about a 44% reduction. That tells me something that I observed without calculating it before which is that the word count comes down faster than the page count. I think that's because what I'm most likely to cut out is exposition as opposed to dialogue, and dialogue takes more space per word. If I cut a paragraph of exposition, I might get out 8 lines of space and 100 words. If I cut 8 lines of dialogue, I gain the 8 lines of space but about 50 words.

-Schedule: My official start on this draft was June 22. (I did have a few odd sessions in the weeks before that.) So, 31 days exactly. Approx. 23 weekdays. A little slower than a chapter per day. If I had had any paying work going on, it definitely would have taken me twice as long. I put in a lot of p.m. sessions that I haven't normally throughout this process.

-Process: I just noticed back in my post for June 22 that I hadn't decided yet if I would do a certain kind of meta-writing on "intention" for the entire book first or one chapter at a time as I went. I ended up doing the latter. It was very helpful too. A way to sharpen my focus and give purpose to my reading and edits each day. I should think of some similar key lense to focus through on this draft so I'm not reading willy nilly.

Alright, off to the next draft. Deep breath.

Burnout?

I'm really having trouble applying myself this week--lots of fear and boredom and feeling easily distracted. I do have a lot of confidence about the book right now, however. It's the sense that I know what I need to do next and wish it was just over. It's different from the fear that comes from not knowing what's wrong with the book and how to proceed.

I think I recognize the feeling from a few different periods in this process, especially when I was transitioning between drafts. I usually ended up taking a couple months off. Which is fine, and I don't feel bad about it, but I was hoping not to start that break now. I want to use the next month to get the book in as good a shape as possible before handing it off to my friend who is reading it. I anticipated I would start one of those transition breaks then.

This could be just a few off days, but there are several other things that have been and will interrupt momentum, including a short holiday week next week, so I'm afraid it will degenerate into a long break if I don't muster a lot of discipline. But if it really is burnout, maybe I should let it.

Nervous about Chapter 7

Not a lot of work today. I read Ch. 7 to prepare for the next rewrite, and I'm intimidated by how much work it needs. Right now it is a draft in the most customary sense of the word--a failed attempt at an unclear idea. To make it work I'll really need to dig deep, and the trick in these cases is not to think at all about making it work. You have to give yourself permission to make a mess.

Which means it's hard to set a schedule. Hopefully it won't take a lot of time, but this isn't like a to do list.

My schedule is about to change anyway. I picked up another paying gig today, so I'll be distracted with that until at least the end of next week. No more all-day sessions. Hopefully I'll be able to put in my usual 90-120 minutes each morning.

Two steps back

Worked on chapters 4, 5 and 6 today. Once I started reading through Chapter 6 yesterday, the problems in it seemed pretty severe and thinking them through sent me back to try again on scenes in previous chapters.

In particular, I've tried 2 different endings of Chapter 5 a couple times each. One ending is more dramatic but harder to pull off convincingly, so I keep chickening out and going for the weaker ending. (Essentially, I'm afraid to bring too much grief to my character too quickly. It seems like more than he can bear. And if he can't bear it, the pressure will build up before I can get him to the end of the story.) But then when I got into Chapter 6 I persuaded myself that I needed that more dramatic development to have happened, so I went back again and tried to make it work.

Chapter 6 has been my biggest pain the butt since I first started drafting it almost 18 months ago. It was first time that my writing schedule went off the rails and I ended up spending about twice as long on it, writing about 3 times as much as necessary. There's a lot of good material in it, and I've often thought that it would be good starter dough for a different story or book project. But so much of it doesn't fit with this book.

I think this is a function of it being in the voice of a secondary character. I have a few chapters, this one included, where I shift to another character's point of view. That requires getting in touch more with their motivation, which requires thinking about their backstory and so on. The hard part is figuring out how much of the character sketch work is needed in the draft in order to carry the story along convincingly. It's a tough balancing act when you switch to another character's POV like this.

That and other problems have me slowing way down as I come through the chapter again. This chapter probably more than any other needs actual rewriting--not just digging deeper and developing the potential in the episodes--but rethinking what the episodes are for in the story line and writing them over again.

So, I've got a lot more work to do on this than I wish I had. Friday now. I better plan on it taking all of next week. Similar to what I was thinking last week about Chapter 5, which I "finished" on Tuesday but found myself needing to go back and fuss with this morning.

Internet research

I've been working hard yesterday and today on Chapter 5 like I had planned. I've had some noisy distractions because of work on the house, but I've made do. A couple more hours should get me through the work I anticipated on this chapter, but we'll see. I don't know if today is possible, and I'm planning to write off tomorrow as a loss because of some errands.

I get a kick out of how internet research must change the work of novel writing. As I drafted, I stayed away from the internet, but while I'm doing the rewrites on my computer, whenever I'm wondering anything about a detail in my book, it's a quick check on Wikipedia, and I usually end up learning a lot of other fun stuff that I'm tempted to weave in like a show off.

I often turn to the web for questions of style and spelling. (A handy tool not everyone knows about is in google if you search with "define: your word" it will return results with formal definitions of that word.) Today I wanted to check on the proper format for a famous department store that may or may not have periods and spaces in how they use their name. I found it easily, but then I thought, that's how they do it now, but maybe it wasn't the same in the period the book is set in. So I searched a little deeper and found a catalogue from that era and ended up flipping through the pictures, including of the ladies underwear and swimsuits of course, just like my pre-teen character would have done.

So I'm getting the format right, I'm immersing myself in period details and I'm putting myself into the pervy imaginative life of my character. It took seconds to get there, and I could have spent all day if I didn't have real re-write work to get back to.

Alright, back to it.

Much slower now

I did a read-through of Chapter 5 this morning, and nothing I said about the rate of progress yesterday is going to apply for awhile. This chapter needs a lot of work--mysterious work that intimidates me. But I've got a list and I'll start working through it, probably on Monday. I guess it will take me at least 3 days and maybe the whole week to finish the chapter.

It's intimidating, but I also am a little excited. I have an idea not just for fixing the chapter but for truly developing it into something more--quite a bit more dramatic with lots of fireworks. I don't know if it's the right thing, but it should be fun exploring it. That will make me worry about the "butterfly wings" effect though.

Meanwhile, on chapters 3 and 4 I've skipped the step where I have my wife read it and then decide it I'm ready to move on. Maybe I can get her to do that this weekend, but I'm afraid what I'll find out.

"Finished" with Chapter 2 yet again

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

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

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

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

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

Slogging through Chapter 2

I've had two good working days. About two hours each yesterday and today. I'm hoping that two more good hours tomorrow will get me through the rest of the Chapter 2, so I can give it to my wife over the weekend. That would be pushing it I think, just looking at the number of pages to go.

I actually have time today, since I got an early start, so I intended to make use of the whole morning, but at about the two hour mark I felt I couldn't get my mental energy focused on the next section that needed work. If I was ever so fortunate to be able to write full time--either through wealth or some kind of arts fellowship--I'm not sure I'd actually be able to make great use of it.

Honestly, my biggest problem is being so easily distracted by the internet. I really have to get more disciplined. It's only a mouse click away all the time that I'm working.

Back to work after a long break

I'm back to work on the novel and back to this journal after taking a full two months off.

I was out of the country for about 9 weeks, tagging along with my wife while she was on a work assignment. I had the mixed intentions of making it a writer's retreat and also taking advantage of every opportunity to fully experience my time abroad. Obviously "retreat" and "tourism" don't go together very well.

What actually ended up happening is the first two weeks looked a lot like a writer's retreat and then I put the book aside. I worked hard in our hotel room every day those first two weeks and plowed through to the complete the first rewrite of Part 2 and thus of the entire book. That was a big day and a big relief. Then I left the hotel to look around and haven't thought about the novel since.

I ought to be feeling guilty about that I know, but actually I think break's like that are appropriate and good for the book if it's not just a rationalization for procrastinating. The next batch of work--the second rewrite--should be stronger and more incisive because of the distance I've put between myself and the book.

That explains most of the break. Actually I was supposed to return to work a week ago, and since then I've been procrastinating. Partly I've been taking it slow in returning to this orbit and partly I was afraid. I have to build up the momentum and confidence again, and I didn't muster the energy for that last week. Now that I have, with about an hour of work this morning before needing to run some errands, I expect it will take awhile before the work is really going smoothly.

August 11, 2007--Aaaaalmost done

Saturday today. I haven’t regularly written on most Saturday’s and even fewer Sunday’s, but today was conducive to it. About 2200 words in two-and-a-half hours, bringing me right up to the climax of the story.

I’m nervous. I’m not sure I’ve established everything I need to rather than just announced it. I’m not even sure I’ve announced it all, because it’s a lot to keep track of. And I’m not sure how I’m going to get the characters to do what I intend for them—I’m not sure it will be credible given how I’ve developed them.

Oh well, nothing to do but tell the tale and then see what needs to be fixed in the rewrite. Or nothing productive to do. The other choices are giving up or starting over. I think I’ll go on. Probably on Monday but maybe tomorrow.