Or rather, still editing, just limping along a little faster than I have over the past few months. I manage to hammer out a chapter or two a week and if I can get out of my own way I can probably (probably!) finish this fourth draft by fall.
About that getting out of my own way thing.
I could pretend it’s just lack of energy that’s been holding me up, but at least part of it is fear. If I finish the draft, then I’ll have no excuse but to start querying again and I fear wasting the one pitch I get to every agent on my list with a manuscript that is less than perfect.
How I imagine agents reacting to my manuscript.
In short, it’s not being told “no” that I fear. It’s running out of opportunities to ask for a “yes”. As long as I don’t query I can luxuriate in possibility. And yes, typing it out makes it sound just as nail-bitey and tail-chasey as it is.
So I’m going to keep propping up the novel’s saggy middle so I get it back out in the world.
I’m trying to get back into a regular practice of writing. It’s been a depressingly easy habit to break so I’m pursuing almost anything that catches my fancy just to keep the momentum going. To those ends I’ve got several different writing and writing-related things going on:
Researching:
1970s glam rock fandom in America
19th-century underworld/alternative history (listened to Stephen Fry’s Victorian Secrets and compiling a list of sources he used)
“discovery writing” characters for both book ideas
this blog post
Though I didn’t get a mentor through PitchWars I found some pre-revision “homework” that I’m applying to Fool’s Gold to uncover any glaring failings I missed because I didn’t know any better a year ago.
Regarding the next book: I’m going to have to pick one eventually as I find that I do my best work if I focus on one thing at a time. I don’t know what I’ll do with the short story – maybe just post it as a download on the blog because I can’t imagine where I’d submit it.
Oh, I can do it when I have to, of course, but it’s always an aggravating extra step. I’m not a natural list maker. My clean laundry can stay on the guest bed for weeks. But some jobs are so large that the imposition of a defined order is required. And it’s maddening.
As a newbie writer I’m still working out the best way to collect all critique/beta reader feedback in one place so I can easily refer to it while editing the current* draft.
Some is digital and some is paper. I’ve tried volleying back and forth between 3 hard copies (so far) and multiple Word windows and it’s too confusing.
I’ve handwritten everything on my own printed version and while I have everything in one place I still have to drag a phone-book sized binder around with my laptop. The only places big enough to spread everything are my dining room table and the public library.
So as a last resort I’m going to try adding it all to the current Word** draft as comments. Best of both digital and print.
I hope.
*I hesitate to say “third”. Some parts have had more drafts/are more “done” than others.
**The last draft was restructuring, and Scrivener’s “index cards” functionality was great for moving scenes around easily. Now that I’ve solidified the sequence I want to view it as a whole. That, and a single Word doc is just easier to send to people.
True to my promise I’ve been critiquing/beta reading online and off during my break from the second draft. I’m grateful to the writers who are letting me read their works in progress. It takes nerve to share one’s writing and even more when it’s still in draft form.
After a month or so I started to notice patterns. It seems* that some errors happen across the board, regardless of genre or the writer’s experience. Seeing them elsewhere only highlights them in my own work:
No one cares about my research/”inside baseball”. I suspect histfic is more vulnerable to this because of the research needed** to understand the time period, but it’s easy to go overboard with tiny details that don’t contribute to the story. Readers aren’t interested in a room-by-room description of Dee’s home Mortlake and its number and type of servants; they’ll care that Jane Dee has problems keeping the ancient pile in good repair and getting the servants to behave.
Avoid jargon/specialized language unless I define it up front. Or at least give massive hints in context. Do you know what an athanors, pelicans, or bain maries are? I don’t want my readers to have to keep referring to Google to figure out what an alchemy lab looks like.
A story isn’t a just a blow-by-blow of activity. The séances might be line-by-line accurate to Dee’s diaries but that means nothing if I don’t show Edward Kelley’s extreme stress in making up everything on the fly. Readers won’t care – hell, I won’t care – unless he reflects, panics, and schemes over his flagrant BSing.
Select words with care to avoid repetition/adverb overload. Too often I lean on either restating or on my character doing something quickly, stupidly, angrily, etc. when if I just use better words the mood will come across. This is why my next step is reading the whole thing out loud, with red pen at the ready to strike through any unnecessary -lys.
Actual footage of a -ly hunt. Via Giphy.
*No hedging: get on with it already! See, I did it right there! Seems, appears, starting to, about to, thinking about, almost did: these slow things down when the all the reader wants is for characters to do things and stuff to happen. Except for rare exceptions of hesitation or second guessing (and gads, Edward has enough of those) these have no place in my prose.
**Passivity is a penalty: In fencing as well as prose. My tendency to convey events as having no cause is due to long years writing business emails and impersonal technical instructions. There are probably a few in every one of my blog posts despite my best efforts. “Dee was fooled” must turn into “Edwardfooled Dee“ (more than once). Ditto “the money was spent” = “Dee spent it all” (all too often). I don’t even know how I’ll find all of these, let alone get rid of them.
What about you? If you write, what’s on your “search and destroy” list for your next edit? If you read, what errors make you wince if they’re not caught***?
***More passivity. Yellow card (which is fencing “inside baseball”).
As I’ve discussed before, history isn’t tidy. I made some strategic cuts to the story at the outset, mostly for my sanity. Now I’m cutting even more as they don’t add to the story I’m trying to tell, which is a damn shame as Dee and Kelley generated So. Much. Weird. that begs exploration. Just not by me:
Dee and Kelley’s sojourn in Poland courting the patronage of Stephen Bathory (yes, cousin of that Bathory). It’s not the story I’m telling and someone already has anyway.*
A series of incidents in which Kelley apparently conjures demons and poltergeists outside of his actions with Dee – and this breaks my heart because I so, so want to play with what was going on here! I found this delicious story in the footnotes of part 9 of I.R.F. Calder’s thesis but it’s so divided from the rest of the spiritual actions that I can’t justify including it.**
The possibility that Jane Dee was from a recusant family. I could only find one reference (since removed), and there’s more narrative tension if Jane is solidly Protestant in Catholic Bohemia.
And there’s probably more. What are you cutting, and why?
Hacking away. Courtesy gfycat.
*Looking forward to reading this after I finish the WIP.
**Actually, I might do a short story based on this.
Just like the fun stuff, I journal the rough stuff. Given how writers need to torment their characters I chronicle every twinge and ache. I’m currently smacking Edward around in rewrites and a reference file saves time.
I find this works for anger too. Hell, I find arguments easy to write in general, but it clears the mind enough to write it well.
And, of course, reading still feeds the muse even when I don’t have the brain power to create anything.
Illness and other downtime is inevitable. How do you make it work for you?
Strange days, the weeks around Christmas and new years. I find it difficult to keep motivated due to the disruption in schedule (and a nice cold I’m working on – achoo!) Certainly not a time to start anything new. So I thought I’d review:
Finally finished gathering comments on my first draft and started proper rewrites!
Keeping it short this week because I’m up to my knees in story slurry.
The plot fell apart once I got put everyone on a boat to the continent. Effects with nonexistent causes abound, stuff happens without consequences, and useless character tail-chasing brings the action to a crashing halt.
So many craft books talk about the pitfalls of the “mushy middle” but I honestly thought that the sheer amount of stuff I have to cram into the second act would prevent it happening to me. Yet somehow boring departures/arrivals, exposition, and wheel-spinning are all in there and I have to hack them out.
This thing may never map out to a predictable plot structure but A must lead to B because C and have D lingering effects. Trying to include all the facts only left me with enough red herrings to stock a fishery and I’m having to cut out every one to avoid confusing the reader. I’m re-outlining to clarify themes and character arcs, which probably adds as much new junk as I’m cutting out.
The book’s taking a new shape I can’t define yet, but taking this wider view has already answered some long-standing plot questions. Repeated “edit-edit-edit, walk away” cycles tend to make fixes obvious, to the point that I can almost feel when another bit is about to snap into place.
Has anyone else experienced slump in the middle of your WIP? How did you straggle through?
My old first pass rewrite/editing approach. Courtesy theravive.com
Twenty-eight pages.
That’s how many I’ve managed to get through in this first round of edits. Which sounds good until you realize I started rewriting in July.
Ahem.
I do think I’ve figured out what’s slowed me to a snail’s pace – it’s excessive perfectionism. I’m doing sentence-level polishing when I should concern myself with the broader issues of story structure: filling in scene gaps, answering research questions, and pacing.
The root cause isn’t lacking “flow” or time – it’s terror of showing my beta readers something less than perfect. But worrying over every turn of phrase at this stage probably makes nonsensical dialog worse, widens plot holes, takes vague cause/effect into “what was I thinking?” land.
My resolution for March: instead of a scene a week, a scene every 2 days, fixing the big stuff. Let’s see if I can do it.
