I’m sitting at my desk in the early AM at a total loss.
I wrote at least 200 words every morning for the past 2(!) years. Good, bad, or indifferent, I could count them and call it progress. Now I’m sitting on a 110,508 words/446 page first draft (!) and I don’t know what to do next.
Mark Tompkins, my mentor at the HNS conference, made excellent suggestions for the opening scene (start with black magic) and POV (I can have more than two and they don’t need equal time). I’m tempted to start rewriting now, but I read Alison Morton’s advice and wonder if I should read the whole thing through first.
Vanity isn’t holding me up. My comments so far include repeated “show, don’t tell”, “subtext this” and “backstory, delete”. Nor do rewrites intimidate – if anything I had to throttle my tail-chasing impulses to get to the end.
Fifty pages at a time is all I can manage – beyond that I’m overwhelmed.
How do you break your rewriting process into manageable chunks?
I normally do my re-writing chapter by chapter. I take all the feedback, collate it, and decide which pieces I intend to take. Then I’ll sort that out into specific feedback (i.e., regarding particular scenes/events) and general feedback (e.g., POV issues, “add more description”, that sort of thing). The specific feedback gets annotated into the text it’s commenting on. The general feedback goes into a spreadsheet, laid out by chapters. Then one chapter at a time, I do the major content re-writes, then go through each general-issue ticky-box one at a time and address it in that specific chapter. Then I move on to the next chapter and do the same thing.
As an example, the general-review ticky-boxes for Daughter of Mystery included the following (covering both basic formatting and substantive themes):
Sentence spacing (i.e., make sure there are no double-spaces)
God/Jesus (I know longer remember exactly what this meant, but I think it was a reminder that not enough of my religious references were to the Trinity in it unity or component parts)
Saints details (make sure I include *why* specific saints were being mentioned/used, especially since the familiar names might not be easily recognizable form the Alpennian forms)
Romance movement (i.e., every chapter should have *something* happening to advance the relationship between Barbara and Margerit)
POV (i.e., make sure the POV is consistent, with several sub-items to check for)
Visual description (ADD MORE VISUALS!!!)
Sensory description (add more non-visual description)
Punctuation (misc. details: proper use of m-dashes, adhering to Bella’s comma rules, consistent hyphenation of compounds)
Title capitalization (make sure I’m consistent in how titles of rank are capitalized)
Spelling consistency for names/Alpennian words (the obvious)
I’d have had a harder time if I’d either tried to do each of these for the whole manuscript at once, or if I’d tried to do them all simultaneously. But on a chapter by chapter basis, I could easily make the multiple passes necessary to do them all justice.
This is probably more information that you were looking for. 🙂
Thank you for commenting!
This is actually FABULOUS! It sounds as though you have your editing process carefully laid out and documented so you know exactly what to look for and that you’ve done so.
Chapters seldom exceed 10 pages in my manuscript – this might be a better way of breaking it up.
Keep in mind that all chapters are important, its just some are more important than others. While a sentence is gold in chapter 10 (or 30), it is diamond in chapter one and two. Now that you have a draft of the whole thing, focus on the opening. Nail it. Don’t worry about the rest for now. Once you have that done, it will lead you naturally to polishing up the middle (informed by the opening), then the end.
Writers are like Dr. Frankenstein, we take inanimate objects (leters, words) and infuse life into them. Once your first few chapters have their own breath, and can go off and terrorize the villagers without you, then you can follow your monster and move on to the the next few.
Mark
Oooo! Elephant sashimi! Needs a bit of garnish to pretty it up, though. And I suspect it’s gonna wriggle like crazy when you start to slice it up. 😉
My practice has always been (and bear in mind that such writing as I do is nonfiction) to read out loud to myself. That dates back to my high school essay-writing days and I still do it now. Words flow differently when they’re spoken … a sentence or phrase that looks technically okay on paper might be next to impossible to actually say and thus may be just as impossible to process inside somebody else’s head. The “somebody else’s head” being the key part of that. Because you wrote it your own head has insider knowledge and may be skimming or filling in blanks without you beiing aware of it; reading aloud to yourself might feel really weird but it does force you to truly “see” every word and punctuation mark.
C.J. Cherryh has mentioned more than once in her blog that she and Jane Fancher go on long drives whenever one of them finishes some writing (to some landmark or attraction they enjoy that’s at least 2-3 hours away from home) … whoever is the writer that day sits in the passenger seat and reads their work out loud to the driver who gives back verbal feedback on both wording and plot. Says they both troubleshoot and tighten things up a lot this way.
So two variations on the same theme that work well in the opinion of the practitioners.
Hey – thanks for commenting!
I am struggling with the new beginning. I have the luxury of writing another first draft and get to give into my impulse to edit immediately but it’s still lacking….something.
So I write, rewrite, and comment, go work on something else and then hammer on it again. It WILL happen, if I don’t give up!
I like your writer = Frankenstein comparison; when I get something really GOOD on the page it does feel like a living thing. Maybe Alan Moore had it right when he compared writers to magicians: creating worlds out of nothing.
Hey there!
The limited amount of public reading I’ve done convinces me that there’s something to what you say here. Things “flowed” differently out loud to the point that I had to resist the urge to improvise changes as I went along. CherryH and Fancher sound like they have a good practice going. I imagine errors become more obvious in someone else’s voice simply because they’re not familiar with it and can resist this urge to “fix it” as they go.