![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dr_pretentiousFinished this pass of revisions to Part 3 of the big book. Finished the markup phase of this pass for Part 4 of the big book.
I cut Part 3 back, and back, and back...and then admitted to myself that there was no way to avoid adding a chapter of warfare. There was this battle I'd carefully kept off-stage all through the first draft because I didn't trust my ability to write it. So now it's in glorious technicolor. Fortunately, I cut enough other things in Part 3 so that the word count just about breaks even. Remember that 26-page dinner party? Much, much shorter. And I used to have this annoying tic of using dialogue tags to figure out, for my own benefit, what the characters were thinking, because I didn't really know my characters yet. The reader needs a whole lot less of that than I did two years ago. Cut cut cut.
Part 4 will be harder to fix. In the first draft, the ending was in a different spot, so the current end feels middle-ish and needs a new feel to go with a knot of events that remains largely unchanged. Yet again, as in my long-ago first round of repairs to Part 1, whole scenes will be, act for act, the same, while not one single sentence can be preserved. Yet again, whole chapters are in the wrong POV, because I was writing to find out what my options were. There are new minor characters who became indispensable in my repairs to Parts 1-3 who don't exist yet in the first draft of Part 4 (ship's informer, anyone?), and who now need to be threaded forward. To my great dismay, I may have difficulty cutting the infamous 40-page parade down by half. It's doing more work than I remembered.
A couple of years ago, I was talking to a friend who'd read the whole first draft, and into the roughed-out chapters that used to belong to vol 1 and now belong to the sequel. "Nothing happens in the second half," he said, "but it's such interesting nothing, I can't put it down." Well, okay, this is a good compliment, and I've heard compliments like that applied to successful published novels, but it bewildered me, because in those chapters that gave the impression of nothing happening, there were riots, regicidal plots, industrial accidents with many dead, profanations of funeral rites, a shocking murder, etc. I said to myself, I am doing something seriously wrong if an astute reader can read those events, remember those events, and come away feeling that he has read a lot of addictive nothing.
Last week I figured out exactly what it was I'd been doing to foster that illusion of nothing. The opening paragraphs of about half of the chapters in the first drafts of Part 3 and Part 4 point to who the viewpoint character will be, and then spend a page or so talking about what everyone else who isn't on stage is doing. Weird, isn't it? Useful for me, I suppose, since I seem to have been using those paragraphs to clarify for myself the context of the actions I was about to launch into, but every one of those chapters starts, then puts the brakes on the action as the first thing it does, before gradually accelerating into an event that actually changes something.
The amazing thing is not that the writer KJ showed the first draft to stalled out at page 87. The amazing thing is that anyone, anywhere, ever made it as far as page 87 of the first draft.
I keep quoting Anne LaMott to myself, saying the first draft must be shitty, not in order to justify writing more first draft stuff, but to avoid becoming paralyzed by my own judgment of this material I haven't touched in so long. What was I thinking when I wrote X? Why did no one have the kindness to drown me in the river and spare me the mortification of having written Y--where were my friends when I needed them? How can I have thought I had any right to continue writing after making mistake Z?
But it's all reparable. Even when I'm most horrified by my own gaffes, I know that fixing them will just be work, and work that I seem now to know how to do. It's the ontological implications of the mistakes, of being capable of making those mistakes, of being the kind of person who could make them--that's what gets under my skin.
The trick is to keep working while mortified. That, at least, I get right.
I cut Part 3 back, and back, and back...and then admitted to myself that there was no way to avoid adding a chapter of warfare. There was this battle I'd carefully kept off-stage all through the first draft because I didn't trust my ability to write it. So now it's in glorious technicolor. Fortunately, I cut enough other things in Part 3 so that the word count just about breaks even. Remember that 26-page dinner party? Much, much shorter. And I used to have this annoying tic of using dialogue tags to figure out, for my own benefit, what the characters were thinking, because I didn't really know my characters yet. The reader needs a whole lot less of that than I did two years ago. Cut cut cut.
Part 4 will be harder to fix. In the first draft, the ending was in a different spot, so the current end feels middle-ish and needs a new feel to go with a knot of events that remains largely unchanged. Yet again, as in my long-ago first round of repairs to Part 1, whole scenes will be, act for act, the same, while not one single sentence can be preserved. Yet again, whole chapters are in the wrong POV, because I was writing to find out what my options were. There are new minor characters who became indispensable in my repairs to Parts 1-3 who don't exist yet in the first draft of Part 4 (ship's informer, anyone?), and who now need to be threaded forward. To my great dismay, I may have difficulty cutting the infamous 40-page parade down by half. It's doing more work than I remembered.
A couple of years ago, I was talking to a friend who'd read the whole first draft, and into the roughed-out chapters that used to belong to vol 1 and now belong to the sequel. "Nothing happens in the second half," he said, "but it's such interesting nothing, I can't put it down." Well, okay, this is a good compliment, and I've heard compliments like that applied to successful published novels, but it bewildered me, because in those chapters that gave the impression of nothing happening, there were riots, regicidal plots, industrial accidents with many dead, profanations of funeral rites, a shocking murder, etc. I said to myself, I am doing something seriously wrong if an astute reader can read those events, remember those events, and come away feeling that he has read a lot of addictive nothing.
Last week I figured out exactly what it was I'd been doing to foster that illusion of nothing. The opening paragraphs of about half of the chapters in the first drafts of Part 3 and Part 4 point to who the viewpoint character will be, and then spend a page or so talking about what everyone else who isn't on stage is doing. Weird, isn't it? Useful for me, I suppose, since I seem to have been using those paragraphs to clarify for myself the context of the actions I was about to launch into, but every one of those chapters starts, then puts the brakes on the action as the first thing it does, before gradually accelerating into an event that actually changes something.
The amazing thing is not that the writer KJ showed the first draft to stalled out at page 87. The amazing thing is that anyone, anywhere, ever made it as far as page 87 of the first draft.
I keep quoting Anne LaMott to myself, saying the first draft must be shitty, not in order to justify writing more first draft stuff, but to avoid becoming paralyzed by my own judgment of this material I haven't touched in so long. What was I thinking when I wrote X? Why did no one have the kindness to drown me in the river and spare me the mortification of having written Y--where were my friends when I needed them? How can I have thought I had any right to continue writing after making mistake Z?
But it's all reparable. Even when I'm most horrified by my own gaffes, I know that fixing them will just be work, and work that I seem now to know how to do. It's the ontological implications of the mistakes, of being capable of making those mistakes, of being the kind of person who could make them--that's what gets under my skin.
The trick is to keep working while mortified. That, at least, I get right.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-08-06 04:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-06 05:00 pm (UTC)And Mathnal is beyond creepy. He's so fucked up it's scary. And he must still die. In a really satisfying way. I trust you on this.