Carrying on

My work on the novel was erratic this week but not totally abandoned. I think I worked on it 3, maybe 4, days. Usually I was working quickly before some other appointment so I didn't have time for my customary unwinding on this blog. I got through the rewrite of Chapter 2 and started Chapter 3 yesterday.

One hard part has been ignoring how in a very basic way the book gets worse and worse as I go along. I'm making a mess out of it. But that's necessary work to sound the depth of it. So I just try to judge it by whether or not everything necessary is in there somewhere on the theory that I'll come back later to bring the important parts into clearer relief. I'm hoping that I've fully developed Chapters 1 and 2 finally and am close to doing that for Chapter 3.

By the way, I looked at the length of those first three chapters, and they are all three times as long as they were in the first draft. That's not counting all the scraps I've already cut out, which is usually around 10 pages/chapter or more. That means I'm on track to have about a 350,000 word second draft typescript--about 650-700 pages if it were all printed. Which it wouldn't be unless some publisher loses its mind. I have it in my head that this is about a 250 page story, so I'll have a lot of cutting to do.

A discovery about reorganizing

I continued work on Chapter 2 today. This chapter has always been a clunker, though I suppose I'll think the same thing about later chapters. But it's a draft, so I'm not kicking myself. It came out the way it needed to in order to find the end.

One of the characteristics of my drafts . . . I've always had trouble putting my finger on it. But today it came to me a little. They places where they get most dull is a long series of very brief events. Like a bird skimming along and just barely touching down, one episode after another. It's like X went here and next went there and next went back here. Each of those scenes is doing a little bit of something--not enough to be interesting but enough that I hesitate to cut them. I feel like I need something in what's being established at those points.

In Chapter 2 today I was able to gather up about 4 of them and make one single episode out of them. The balance is better. It eliminates the stop and go feel. It eliminates the repeated sensation of "so what?"

Probably this isn't a replicable strategy, but if there are other places where I have a lot of that skimming I'll be able to diagnose it and use this trick.

Boy, why is it necessary to learn how to write a novel at the same time I'm writing it. It really slows things down.

A reader

I'm printing out part of a chapter and sharing it with a reader. This is impulsive and not strategic. It's not a reader who can help me get it done--in fact probably the opposite, since they are close to the story. It's not a chapter that is ripe for attention. It was simply an offer to show this particular section since something in a conversation with this person reminded me of the chapter. I thought they would be interested to see how I shaped the real (shared) experience into fiction.

So I'm going against every bit of advice writers get about when and how and with whom to share their drafts.

But there's still something powerfully clarifying about it. In getting the chapter ready--a quick read-through to cut out anything that would just be confusing at this point--I'm forced to see it through this other person's eyes. It's not the ideal other person, but still another person. And seeing the chapter that way is disruptive and illuminating.

I think I've talked in other posts about the old saw that you should write with a particular reader in mind. e.g. Picture a person and write as if you were telling the story to them. In my case, that didn't seem necessary or even possible in the first draft, but I can see how it's helpful at certain points later in the process. So far, during the rewrite I haven't done that. But this errand of getting one chapter ready to share with this one reader reminds me of the power of writing to one reader. The next time through the book (the revision of the rewerite??), I think I will use that strategy. I'll be thinking about who my ideal audience or reader is, I'll boil it down to one person, I'll get a commitment from that person to read the work, and I'll revise the book with them in mind.

Torn between two solutions

Suffering today from playing basketball--in pain and moving slow from lack of sleep.

I got about 1:15 of work in. Hard to concentrate. Chapter 2 has some serious problems with it and I'm torn between two possible solutions. It's very long with some long boring parts in it. On the one hand, I'm tempted to break into two chapters and try to develop the boring parts into something meaningful that more closely connects to the story. On the other hand, it might be better to chop it all out and try to handle that material in just a couple summary paragraphs. The problem is that within the long boring parts there are elements that I feel are important to establish. I can't lose it all. What's the best way to get them established?

Regular working day

I overslept and got in about 90-120 minutes of work this morning and then was interrupted by a phone call. I could have ignored it, but I don't have the discipline when I think it might be about my income-generating work.

In that time, I went through about 14 pages of Chapter 2, which is very long, so figure at least three days of work at best.

I didn't end up making a lot of changes, which makes me a little uncomfortable. Am I having trouble seeing the forest again?

It could be the necessary emphasis for this chapter won't be added so much as brought into relief by editing out what isn't necessary. There is certainly a lot of that to do.

To that end, I struck a compromise between, on the one hand, digging into the shuffling and cutting of big sections and, on the other hand, ignoring all that and staying focused on developing the work, which I promised myself yesterday that I would do. My compromise was the to start using the "add comment" feature of word and making e-notes in the margin about the shuffling and cutting that occurs to me now but that I will work on later.

I'm also indulging a preoccupation with continuity errors that is better left to later edits. e.g. I have a lot of extra characters who might be referred to as ____, as X, as Smith, as Jones or as one of a few different names I tried out for them. Those will need to be straightened out, and I've started to keep an index as I go through to track them later. Same for exposition of the geography . . . at times I have my character's house on the east side of town and at times on the north.

Done with Chapter 1 again

I don't know what to call it--the rewrite of my rewrite--but I finished going over Chapter 1 after the major rethinking I've been doing. I took my focus questions, applied them to this material, and rewrote or developed a few scenes to make it all more closely align with (or set up, actually) the rest of the story. That was a bout three days of work. So maybe I can do the same with chapters 2-4 in the next couple weeks and get myself back to the point in the rewrite where I've been stalled since early January.

In reality I think where I am with Chapter 1 is finally having finished what anyone would call a strong first draft. I say this because my first draft didn't amount to much to more than a scaffold with no real movement or development and what I've been working on is developing it all.

I also say that because I am suddenly very preoccupied with problems of shape, organization and flow. When I notice things that don't work about chapter 1, it's less about where the story doesn't make sense or feels dead than it is about where it slows down or has unnecessary detail or doesn't have the impact I want because things are presented in the wrong order. My creative energies are drifting toward how I can move things around to bring out what I really want to emphasize.

I started to do that a little, but I'm trying to be disciplined about moving forward with the rewrite work in the rest of the book. I'm leaving Chapter 1 behind in a mess that can be fixed later. Part of the theory is that I'll fix it more effectively after I've done all of the rewrite. (I suppose an opposite argument could be made that I'll do the rewrite much more effectively if I've established the opening as well as possible.)

Anyway, for now my mantra is "just keep developing it." Go deeper.

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.

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.

Focusing questions and progress

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

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

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

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

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

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

A single powerful metaphor

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

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

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

Being true to the heart of the book

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forest for the trees

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

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

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

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

Crisis of confidence

I "worked" about an hour this morning. It was about the skimpiest kind of work--mostly just sitting around daydreaming about the book. The little I did write was to no real purpose.

I'm having a plain vanilla crisis. I'm not sure that the book has an interesting story, and I can't figure a way to make it interesting. And I'm afraid to think about that too hard, because I know whatever solution I come up with is going to mean a ton of work on material I want to be behind me.

Mostly drafting

I wrote about 1,200 new words today, so it was like old time a little bit. But in a way that feels like part of the problem. It feels like I keep writing the same scene over and over. It's in different settings, and it's fun to come up with the details, but I don't feel like I'm advancing my characters. They just keep having the same fights. That's the problem with the existing draft, and when I do some new writing I just seem to keep layering on more of the same.

I'm getting this sensation more and more that I need a really big rethink of the book and how it develops. It's a dreadful feeling.

Radical changes

About 90 minutes at the desk this morning, and it was a slog. Easily distracted. What I ended up doing was rethinking what happens in Chapter 5. I keep coming to the conclusion that the chapter needs to be cut out because it now seems to repeat what has been established in previous chapters since I rewrote those. Continuing to work on it today led me into that territory again.

I'm trying to find a way to work with it. One, because I don't want to get rid of it. It's my precious baby. Two, if it was gone entirely, it effects some other later chapters--something has to be going on at this point in the story for the sake of transitions and build up.

So, I've been trying to think of it this way--the scenario and setting can work even if the specific things that play out and the tone don't work anymore. I ask myself, what my character (who I understand very differently now than when I originally drafted and who is at a different place now anyway as a consequence of the rewriting in previous chapters) do in this situation?

And the answer is that he would do very very different things, which means pretty radical changes in the chapter. It's really starting all over with it. I can hardly do any copying and pasting, because even the details that might be useful are set up in the wrong tone.

The whole prospect is pretty daunting.

I'm starting to regret that I didn't use my month off from the book better by at least keeping it in my mind and stewing on some of these problems.

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.

I'm back

Today is President's Day, and I haven't worked at all on my book since around Martin Luther King Day. Just about 4 weeks exactly. I regretted it the whole time and worried about what it meant--if I was committed, if I would ever return.

But I'm back now. I put in about an hour this morning, mostly just going over familiar territory, but I got myself up to a point where I'll be working on the rewrite tomorrow from where I left off.

The break was the result of having a lot of other work to do. I think it was the right decision. I wasn't procrastinating. I wasn't inflating the other work. I really did need the time to concentrate on that work. It was enough that I've actually been pretty exhausted the last week.

I still have a lot of other work going on, but I'm past a bunch of deadlines (though with more coming up), but I'm hopeful that it's on a more manageable schedule. And I think the end result is that I've established things financially that will be good for the novel in the long run. So, I wish I hadn't had to be away from the book, but no regrets. As long as I'm able to maintain my morning routine now.

Long interruption of work

Except for my two-week road trip last summer, this is the longest interruption in my work, and it will go on a few more days at least. I haven't been working on my book at all since, I think, the Tuesday before last.

The reason is that my freelance writing assignments have gotten out of hand. Organizing my life to allow for writing a novel depends on my protecting my mornings from appointments -- protecting it like a fierce mama duck. But that hasn't been possible. Some days I've been taking appointments that I could never have gotten otherwise and other days I was so busy with appointments in the afternoon that I had to spend the mornings writing my assignments to meet the deadlines. Worked over the weekend too.

My hope is that the assignments just happened to be piled up a little right now and when I knock off a couple I can manage the pace of them a little better so that I just stay busy in the afternoons only.

Back to teaching since last week too.

Well, I'm inclined to guilt about not prioritizing my novel, but I try to think of it this way -- one of the ways I am prioritizing my novel is to seize this opportunity to lock in some clients so that I can depend on that income over the long term.

Time constraints on my writing

Didn't work any over the long weekend and not much this morning. I had intended to write yesterday but I ended up taking a morning meeting that had been rescheduled several times. I try to treat that writing period as sacred, but I can see it getting infringed on a lot as I get busier with my freelance writing business. It was my choice to go ahead the accept that proposed meeting time, but I felt like I wasn't going to be able to juggle things if I postponed it again.

A similar thing this morning. I had only worked about 40 minutes, I was at a natural break in the work and was trying to psyche myself up for another push in a new section, and my phone rang. I ought to have ignored it, but my work involves so much phone tag I couldn't resist the opportunity to finally scratch off my list one of the several people I was waiting on to hear from.

I'm going to have to learn to be hardcore about it or . . . I don't know what. In general I have to figure out how to control the rhythm of mental and emotional energy I put into my freelance writing assignments. I'm not billing for all the time that I'm obsessing about things--just for the time I actually work--so I have to try my mind to compartmentalize a lot better.

Finished Chapter 4

Less than an hour work this morning, but I "finished" Chapter 4 I think. By "finished" I mean I did all the excavation and development work that I can think of and I'm ready to show it to my wife, which has become the routine. With the first two chapters, I still wasn't finished at this point because her feedback sent me to working on those chapters for a couple more days. With Chapter 3 I just took notes on her comments to circle back to in the next rewrite, which is what I hope happens here so I can push on to Chapter 5.

Like I said at the beginning, Chapter 4 is one of the strongest, which is why I got through it relatively quickly. Chapter 5 is also strong, but it is more profoundly affected by the changes in the early chapters, so the material that's there--no matter how strong it is--may not fit so much and I'm in a position of drafting new material. The whole idea of what Chapter 5 is there for--how it serves the story--is up in the air. I think it's going to be more and more like that for the rest of the book as I'm doing this rewrite. So I don't anticipate a lot of speedy work.