Time out

Alright, I'm going to say that this section I've been laboring over is good enough for this draft and move on. I have lots of notes in it about what still needs to be fixed, but I'll save those for the next draft.

And in moving on to the next big section of the book, I'm actually pulling over to a rest stop. Today is Thursday. The rest of the week I have to devote to some paying work, which I can hopefully finish before the end of the day tomorrow. Monday is a scheduled day off for other reasons. So, hopefully, I'll be back on it by Tuesday and from there on out move at the faster pace I had up until this last section.

I'm getting to that stage where I'm losing sight of it and can't tell what's good or bad. When I finish this draft the smart thing will be to take some time away from it, though I won't want to.

Falling behind schedule

Well, now I'm thinking that it's not going to happen in 4 weeks. (End of next week.) I am working hard and making progress, but I've run into an area that is more time consuming than I calculated, and I'm hitting a point in my paying work where I'll have to take a couple days off. Plus another day I know of for personal business.

Crumb.

I'm working in this 40 page section that has so many moving parts to it and where so many elements of the story come together before launching toward the resolution. And it's like a house of cards where moving one thing requires a lot of rebuilding. It's interesting, but . . .

But I've put this totally unimportant and arbitrary timeline on myself that contributes to my sense of impatience. If I could forget that, I would be better off. I have to remind myself that there's nothing actually going wrong here. I'm working on my novel every day, just like I want. It's happening.

In the zone

Damn, I've been working hard. I've put in the equivalent of about 4 of my usual sessions since yesterday afternoon, including most of today so far. It's difficult to count, but I'm guessing I've written about 6,000 words of new material. The total length has grown by a little bit, because I'm trimming other stuff out as I write some of the new stuff.

I forget how much I rounded down the last time I settled the word count. Let's say I have about 74,000 words now. Up from whatever I said a few weeks ago.

I'm working through the problem section I mentioned yesterday and it's requiring a lot of new material. Hard to know if it's any good, but it's at least a little more active than previously. I wish I could say I had it all done, but I've run out of energy just short of the finish line. (I hope.) I have one more short scene to draft and then that should transition me out of this difficult section.

Whew. So many moving parts to keep track of in something more plot driven like this project is.

Roadblock

Well, I guess it's not as clear sailing through the rest of this draft as I thought. I've hit a section with some pretty significant structural problems that I had managed to overlook before. It's the kind of thing that in the past would stump me for a couple days then have me depressed for a couple days before I buckled down and figured out a solution, but I'm going to try and skip the first couple steps this time.

So much of this work is about psyching yourself out so you're in the mental and emotional state to keep going. For me, the timing of the pulses of intellectual energy is really important. I feel like I need to write first thing in the morning, and I feel like composing and figuring things out are two different aspects of writing that take up a lot of intellectual energy. So I've learned from experience to do my best to do the "figuring things out" work the day before so it doesn't rob me of my first pulse of intellectual energy in the morning.

So that's kind of my task this afternoon. This morning is a wash, but I can do a lot of the brainstorming and puzzling out and critical activity that's necessary for the rest of the day so that I'll have a good solution to work on tomorrow morning.

Moving scenes around

The pace has slowed, because I'm in a section needing a lot of attention, but I'm getting good work done. About 13 pp. today, plus about 5 pages or so that were cut out. 4 note cards. I'm on pg. 201 and therefore 2/3 of the way through it. After this section, the pace should pick up all the way through the end I think. I have 2 weeks left to my target deadline, and I really think 1 week should do it if I'm aggressive.

I had a very uncommon satisfying experience today of moving a scene. Sounds simple, but honestly I don't know how other writers do it so cavalierly. You read interviews with authors who talk about getting the whole plot onto note cards, stringing the note cards a clothes line and moving them around like a jigsaw puzzle. I always find that any given scene is so thick with elements key to that moment in the story's development that it is impossible to move the whole scene to someplace else.

But I did come across a situation like that today -- one whole scene that could move as-is to another spot and really ought to be in another spot for the sake of flow. It was so gratifying to do the cut and paste and see that it fit right in there and then to swivel around to my bulletin board and move the appropriate note card. It made me feel like a pulp fiction writer.

Bringing down my average

5 note cards and 17 pages this morning.

Well, I take back what I said about it being comparatively easy in the remainder of the draft. I've hit a section that needs a lot of thinking. That will bring my average down, but I still think my revised goal of 4 weeks for this draft is doable. It depends on how much I get bogged down in this section.

What I'm working on is the transition between Part I and Part II in the story at about the 60% mark, and in my first draft it's a really crummy transition. I seem to resolve everything of importance at the end of Part I and don't really have any feeling of suspense going to pull into Part II. Then the start of Part II is working in a really mechanical way to put all the pieces in place to create some suspense for the rest of the book. It all works like two different stories that are forced into partnership rather than two parts of a whole.

I'm counting on it being fixable, but I'll have to take my time, not worry about schedules, and really bear down on it. It's too easy to take shortcuts and talk yourself into the idea that it's working. That's how the first draft got written to begin with.

Same same

24 pages and 5 note cards today. In terms of page numbers, I'm now slightly over 1/2 way through in slightly over 2 weeks. Feb. 25 remains a very reasonable deadline for this draft.

More of the same

I'm plugging along with another day like the one I had yesterday. I got through the space of five note cards or 18 pages. Another two days like that, and I'll be over half way through in terms of page count. And I think the pace will only pick up, because I'm past the section the needs the kind of attention I'm giving in this draft.

Carrying on as planned

Got the week off to an okay start. I'm in one of the sections of the book where I don't have a lot of notes about changes I need to make -- not that changes aren't needed, just that there were no obvious structural flaws that I noted as I went by in the first draft. So I'm really not doing much more than reading it over and making the few small changes that I did note.

As I go along, by the way, I make notes about things I need to work on in the next draft. I could work on them now, but they really are a different category of editing, and I don't want to be working on two different tracks. It would feel like frosting the third layer of the cake before the middle layer has come out of the oven.

So, I went flying by five of my note cards today (9% of the total) and 20 pages (about 6% of the total), which moves me closer to the end at a faster clip than my original schedule. Which has been true of every day so far. Add to that the fact that I am past the section that needs the most attention, and I really think my original plan of 6 weeks is way too conservative. I'm going to knock it down to 4 weeks, which would put at me at the end of this draft at Jan. 25. That's not a prediction, but a goal. My prediction is that I'll be done even sooner than that.

Which will be satisfying. The kind of thing I'm tackling in this draft is probably the least creative and artistic and intellectually stimulating and probably does the least to make the book actually any good. It's mostly about making it intelligible enough to work on. I'm looking forward to the next draft a lot more.

Good work for a week

It's the end of Friday now, and I'm satisfied with how it's going. I don't know if I'm actually turning it into a good book, but I am getting it into shape at least.

I'm four days into my schedule, but really I have to say it's the equivalent of 6 "sessions" since I put in time in 2 afternoons. If I figure on losing a couple sessions later to errands, I'll be on my average. I'm about 90 pages in (a little less than one third) which suggests about 20 average working days, which would be lower than my original estimate by at least a week and a half. I'm through about 17 cards in my note card outline. (A little less than one third by that measure also.) I have a little post it flag on the card where I've left off so I know which scene to tackle first on Monday or the next time I return to it.

I'm most excited about the work I did this morning which was addressing the big space that I talked about yesterday. I created a new scene by writing some new bridge material and moving some material from later in the book, and that allowed me to cut out a bunch of other stuff and to remove about four note cards from that section of my outline. It makes a big beautiful blank space on the bulletin board where I have it spread out.

I'm feeling good about it. I can't wait to get through this "patch up" draft and start focusing on really trying to make it into something good.

Some difficulties with cutting scenes

I think I'm progressing according to plan, as best as I can tell. I'm working with average number of pages in a situation where some sections need a little work and some need a lot. After three days -- three sessions -- I'm through about 11 of my note cards and at pg. 60 of the typescript, which is roughly 20% of the total. So 7%/day. 18 working days total if it continues like this. (Big if.) Which would round up to 4 work weeks instead of 6 as I outlined the other day. But I don't have enough good data to really count on accelerating my schedule. I can just hope.

The section I'm in right now makes it especially difficult to predict the process. There are about 4 scenes in a row that either got cut, rewritten, combined or moved someplace else. Some stuff must get cut because the material isn't relevant anymore. Some of it could stay possibly, and I have to decide if it helps. Whatever I do is going to affect the pacing. For example, if I cut a scene that comes between two big events, I might need that beat there for timing, in which case I need to write something to fill the space. Or it might be thought of as an opportunity to get in spread in some of the subplot material that might feel too rushed later on. Or it might be better without a break there and I should just keep things rolling.

Anyway, those decisions are going to bring my average down.

One of the difficult parts about cutting scenes is that there is almost always something in the scene that feels really important even if it's not the main point of the story. As I -- and the textbook I use -- discuss with my students, every line of dialogue and every detail should be doing more than one thing at once -- communicate the literal message and something else like building character or setting the scene or raising the stakes in some way. If you do that well, that makes it harder to cut something. If you cut a line of dialogue because you don't need the one thing it does, there's still the other thing it's doing. Now you need to find some other place to achieve that.

An example. I have a scene where my protagonist and her antagonist have a fight. When I drafted it, it's the first meeting between them that the reader witnesses in the present action. Because it was a draft, I didn't do a good job of making the scene serve the plot. It was really just an introduction of a character. I came up with a better way to introduce her and have them interact for the first time, earlier in the book, in a scene that also moves the plot forward. So this scene isn't necessary. Snip, snip. But it's not so easy. One, in the first draft version, that's where I put some exposition about the history of their relationship. So I have to find a way to weave that in somewhere. Two, and more complicated, I also had other characters in that scene getting in on the argument, too. That begins a process of bonding between those secondary characters and the protagonist that leads to their friendship later. If I cut this scene, the pacing of that emotional development and bonding is disrupted. It's not like exposition that I can just stuff in some place. It's woven into the tone of voice and how they talk with one another. The literal details of their dialogue isn't so important, but the other thing it is doing -- showing the kindling of their relationship at this moment -- is. If you lose that ineffable quality, you lose something in the rest of their interactions later on.

So it's difficult. I have to figure out how to hang on to what is best while I'm cutting out whole scenes.

This section, by the way, is the only one I think where there are whole scene that I know need to come out. The rest of the book is more or less laid out in the proper order after this point.

New scene and tentative schedule

I wrote a new scene today totaling 1,000 words. That's the biggest new chunk that I have planned, though I wouldn't be surprised if during the rewrite I discover problems that make me develop scenes that long. But the outline calls for smaller additions here and there from now on.

That puts me one day behind the schedule I mentioned in the middle of last week. Oh, well. We're getting record snowfalls this winter, by the way, and it's been incredibly disruptive to every kind of schedule, not to mention just plain distracting. Wild weather has a way of making you want to look at the window all day and to dig around in the cupboards for comfort food.

From this point on, I expect to be tackling issues in the typescript in order. I'll start with the first scene and move through the book. I don't have any reliable way to guess how long the first rewrite (draft 2) will take.

But I'll venture a schedule anyway using this dubious logic: the book is outlined on a total of 55 note cards representing 55 episodes or events. Let's say it averages out to 55 scenes, even though some note cards elongate the time represented, and some of the note cards foreshorten the time represented. I haven't done a real account, but let's assume that 1/2 the cards have notes about some kind of significant revision that will require me to read the scene over carefully and think about it. Let's assume that on average that will exhaust the energy of one writing session, and that I average 5 sessions a week. That's 27 working days or 5 1/2 weeks starting tomorrow. Round up to make it 6 weeks starting from today.

That makes March 11 my target date to finish the second draft.

Here's an even more tentative schedule for the step after that. I'll make the next draft a polishing draft and try to cover 30 pages per working day. Roughly 2 1/2 weeks of that would give me a target of March 31 to finish that third draft. Then I'll have to move on to the serious and difficult task of reducing the length. Let's say I finish that next pass by the end of the college semester, which is the middle of May.

In other words I'm giving myself about 15 weeks to work through it three times and make three different kinds of rewrites and revisions with the hope that it will be in excellent shape by the end of that time and ready to start sharing with readers other than my wife.

That's a hell of a plan. It makes as much sense as any other plan and has about as much chance of working, which is not much.

Renaming characters

So the main thing I'm working on today is brainstorming new names for a couple of my characters. I guess you could call one a secondary character and one a minor character. Let's call them B and C for now.

They come as a team. They work together and are almost always together when they do appear. But B has a bigger influence on the main characters. C is just a bit player.

So the first thing about their names is that they are a little bit "Dickensian," in the sense that I use a little bit of phonetic and lexical horseplay to make the names reflect or comment upon their personalities. Like how someone dishonest and treacherous might be named Grift. That isn't my usual style, but in this story it's more appropriate and I'm having a little fun with it.

I came up with B and C's names before I really began writing the story and certainly before I got to the scenes where they first appear. Which means I had an idea of what they would be like from the very start and the names B and C to reflect that.

But then they emerged on the paper somewhat differently from planned, so now their original names no longer suit them. Thus the need to brainstorm new names.

This is also important because for now the working title uses the names of these characters, even though they aren't the major characters. They are guardians of a central mystery. It's sort of like if Harry Potter wasn't titled Harry Potter but The Hogwarts Academy. You'd have to be sure that the name Hogwarts was what you really wanted for the academy.

That's probably not a good example, because it seems pretty dumb to name the Harry Potter story after the school he attends. It seems to miss the main point. . . . The Wizard of Oz. That's a better example. It's Dorothy's story, but the thing she is pursuing or searching for is what the story is named after. That's more like the route I'm going in my working title. And the situation I'm in is like if Baum had originally used a working title like The Wizard of Topeka before the story took off in a little bit of a different direction and he decided to rename it.

So anyway, the working title that I've been using for the last five months is now suddenly something else. Which is kind of a big deal.

Events in the news: Egypt

I have the T.V. on in the other room while I work this morning listening to live reports from events in Cairo. It reminds me of doing something similar and also blogging about it during the protests in Tehran in June 2009. It's not conducive to work, obviously, but part of the benefit of working at home is that I get to be flexible and tune into news like this when I want to. I'm not going to beat myself up about it.

Back to work, starting second draft

I'm returning to work on the novel today after about 2 1/2 weeks off.

In spirit I'm starting the second draft. Technically, there was one significant scene that I went flying by and left unwritten so that I could get into the scenes that were holding me up from the ending. So my first order of business today was writing some new material to fill in a gap. The result is 1,700 words of new material and about 8 pages. For the sake of consistency in the count, we'll just count those as part of the second draft. Emotionally or psychologically, that's where I was before today anyway.

That will probably be the biggest single new chunk added, I suspect, but I expect the typescript to grow and grow by little pieces if the experience of my first book is any guide. That went from about 135,000 words in the first draft to 225,000 words in the second draft without me having the conscious intention of adding anything. Just scene by scene as I clarified, developed and dug in deeper the material grew. I expect the same to happen here, but hopefully not to such a great extent. One, it just can't. I need this to be a much shorter book. Two, I still hope that my first draft is in much better shape than the first draft of my other book and so won't need so much digging and developing.

Still, I can't let those hopes get in the way. If it needs developing, I have to get out my own way and let it develop and worry about the page count later.

Next up . . . I have the beginnings of a to-do list here, and the next thing I need to do is to change the names of a couple of my secondary characters who lend their names to the working title of the book. They've gone in a different direction from what I originally imagined and need different names to reflect that. My plan is to read over the scenes that develop them with an eye toward renaming them and possibly the book.

After that I need to write a new scene early in the book made necessary by the direction the conclusion went. Hopefully I'll finish those two errands by the end of the week.

After that I'll start at the beginning of the typescript and start working my way through the whole thing. At that point, I think I can make reasonable prediction of the timeline.

Losing two weeks

I didn't work any last week because I was away on vacation, and I don't think I'm going to work any this week because I'll be concentrating on other personal, household and paying job issues. I hate to be away from it, but I don't really think it's a problem. I shouldn't have any trouble generating momentum again, and the break is well timed in the sense that I'm transitioning from one draft to another. It's usually a good thing to let it sit for awhile. In fact, it's probably better to let is sit a long longer than two weeks, but I'm not going to do that.

Word count revision

I forgot that for the best comparison to the previous book I need to count about 10,000 words that were written, typed up and already thrown in the scrap pile. The typescript stands at 70,000 words now, but I need to give myself credit for 80,000 words of drafting to get there.

So that averages out to about 1,600 words per weekday over 10 weeks.

Celebrating

Still on a high from passing this milestone. I can see a dozen ways to discount it -- that's my superpower, actually -- but I'm concentrating on giving myself credit and enjoying it.

Let's tally it up . . .

First of all, comparing this to writing my first book is has some apples to oranges conversion problems. In this case, the first draft is in much better shape I believe. More objectively, the first draft is completely typed, whereas in the last book I called the manuscript the first draft and the process of typing it in (and revising some as I went along) the second draft. That typing took probably about two months, so this is comparing two different kinds of time lines.

Another way I'm better set up this time is my outline. I had put it all on note cards when I got stuck a few months ago, and I've been updating them as I went along. I spent this morning getting them in shape. There are about 60 of them with good descriptions of each scene and lots of good notes about what needs to be revised. They should help a lot in the next draft. I had a less focused and helpful outline for my first book. (Still do, actually. Maybe that's what I need to fix to get that book back on track again.)

So, in terms of time line . . . I'm calling the official start date Sept. 1, 2010. (I actually didn't do a good job dating my notes and manuscript the first couple weeks, but that's close.) The official end date is January 6, 2011. That's just about exactly 18 weeks including pauses and interruptions. Figure a week off for Christmas and another for Thanksgiving. I'll put about two weeks of planned pauses for paying work in the same category -- let's call those pauses -- to get 14 weeks intended to be devoted to this. Everything else -- dealing with plumber, oversleeping, morning meetings that couldn't be avoided -- we'll call an interruption to the plan and just part of what you have to expect during the writing process. I'll guess there were about 2 weeks worth of those. Figure another 2 weeks of fear, boredom, self-doubt and generalized terror of the blank page where I didn't make any progress. That leaves an estimated 10 weeks of actual writing. I count a week as M - F. In reality I sometimes caught up with some work on the weekends.

My first book book took about 22 weeks before the subtractions, including a 2 week vacation in the middle of it. (Again that's without counting the time to type it in after the first draft was written.)

Length . . . this one is much shorter. The document with everything in it and in order is 300 pages exactly and just over 71,000 words. (My goal was to keep it under 65,000 words.) That includes a few pages at least of editing notes, though, so I'm going to round down the word count to 70,000 exactly and call it 295 pages. That doesn't count all the brainstorming, notetaking, character sketching and discarded material not worth typing in.

The first book was 135,000 words in the first draft. (And I was trying to keep it under 100,000.) It now stands at about 95,000 I think.

So, in terms of pace, it's not super great when I figure it up. It's about 777 words per week day over 18 weeks. 1,400 words per weekday over 10 weeks. Really I should add back in my freakout days, which would make it 1,166 words per weekday over 12 weeks. So the average is somewhere between 45 minutes and 90 minutes of good writing on a typical working day. Which sounds slower than I remember the first book being, but, again, this first draft is in better shape at the end than in that case.

Well, this is what counts as celebrating for me. Pretty dorky. But I am reading the new autobiography of Mark Twain that was just published, which has a lot of discussion of working process and page counts and word counts, and it confirms for me, not for the first time, that other writers have this same kind of obsession.

I could make other comparisons to our working processes, but I better stop there before I embarrass myself.

Oh, by the way, no one is supposed to read this until a hundred years after my death.

FIRST DRAFT COMPLETED!!

I can't believe it.

It feels good.

I don't know what else to say.

Getting very close to the end of the first draft

I've lost track of what counts as new material and what's already been counted, but I can add in at least 1,500 words -- handwritten yesterday and typed in today.

That was key bridge material on the part that I've been struggling with, which feels good. It went a little more low key a direction than I wanted, and it creates some awkward seams that will take a lot of work to smooth out, but it gets me off the dime.

That puts me very close to calling my first draft done. I want to take care of those seams before I say I'm done with this section. And I need to draft the first half of the final scene. (The very very end of that scene and of the book I already wrote, but I skipped over the build up.)

I really want to finish by the end of this week, since I'm not going to be able to work on it at all next week and part of the following week. It would great to go into that break having passed this milestone. And I should be able to if I was focused, but there are some distractions around the house that are making it difficult the last couple weeks.

We'll see.