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How It's Progressing, Since You Asked
May. 13th, 2005 01:48 amProgress is not reducible to productivity. I keep having to teach myself that again and again. I love those handy little graphs some of my friends post when they want to show how far along they are toward the projected word counts of their first drafts, but I can't let the appeal of a visual aid illustrating a quantifiable measure distract me from the fact that I'm not in the first draft stage of this particular manuscript anymore. I loved the first draft stage. I pine for it. It's over.
Cutting a charming 20-page digression, popping it into a new file, and moving it to the Half-Abandoned Bits folder, perhaps never to be seen again, is progress.
Ripping out the slow, draggy barroom brawl scene and rewriting it from scratch, not once but seven (!) times to get the pace right, is progress. Each one of those seven versions, even the one with the largest concentration of frantic, bracketed [FIX THIS] comments, was progress in the moment when I wrote it.
Moving the bracketed comments in chapter X that suggest repairs to chapter Y from the wrong chapter's narrative into the relevant chapter's fix list is progress.
Catching petty continuity details in worldbuilding that only an obsessive like me would ever notice is progress.
Reading the same sentence aloud again and again while considering how changing the spelling of the character's name would affect the sentence's cadence is progress.
Writing ten longhand pages of bullet points, not one word of which will survive the transmutation from notes into narrative, is progress.
Building the brain that can do the job is progress. Four months spent writing 60 pages of naval warfare was progress, once I admitted to myself that the battle had to be on stage. Yeah, I could have written 60 pages of family dynamics, courtship, teacher-student oedipal struggles, ritual, or any combination of the above, in two weeks or less, but hey, now I might not suck at writing battles.
It may not be progress that I'm still, so slowly, filling in the last gaps in the middle. The gaps do need filling. Unfortunately, they need to be filled with words. Why couldn't I just fill the gaps with chocolate? Hardly anybody objects to more chocolate.
Cut the manuscript down to 200,000 words and we'll talk, he said, so rising word count is the one measure that definitively cannot be a measure of forward progress.
Forward progress is the kind I've got. Beyond that, I can't really say how it's going.
Cutting a charming 20-page digression, popping it into a new file, and moving it to the Half-Abandoned Bits folder, perhaps never to be seen again, is progress.
Ripping out the slow, draggy barroom brawl scene and rewriting it from scratch, not once but seven (!) times to get the pace right, is progress. Each one of those seven versions, even the one with the largest concentration of frantic, bracketed [FIX THIS] comments, was progress in the moment when I wrote it.
Moving the bracketed comments in chapter X that suggest repairs to chapter Y from the wrong chapter's narrative into the relevant chapter's fix list is progress.
Catching petty continuity details in worldbuilding that only an obsessive like me would ever notice is progress.
Reading the same sentence aloud again and again while considering how changing the spelling of the character's name would affect the sentence's cadence is progress.
Writing ten longhand pages of bullet points, not one word of which will survive the transmutation from notes into narrative, is progress.
Building the brain that can do the job is progress. Four months spent writing 60 pages of naval warfare was progress, once I admitted to myself that the battle had to be on stage. Yeah, I could have written 60 pages of family dynamics, courtship, teacher-student oedipal struggles, ritual, or any combination of the above, in two weeks or less, but hey, now I might not suck at writing battles.
It may not be progress that I'm still, so slowly, filling in the last gaps in the middle. The gaps do need filling. Unfortunately, they need to be filled with words. Why couldn't I just fill the gaps with chocolate? Hardly anybody objects to more chocolate.
Cut the manuscript down to 200,000 words and we'll talk, he said, so rising word count is the one measure that definitively cannot be a measure of forward progress.
Forward progress is the kind I've got. Beyond that, I can't really say how it's going.
