writing

Since last I WroteBlogged, I’ve been editing my novel first draft in a few large sessions, along with keeping up my regular commitments. Long story short, I’m now three chapters into the edit and if I continue at this pace, I may even have something available to discuss at the next writing group meeting, after several quiet sessions while I waited to be happy with stuff.

So, in a bid to make this an interactive shared learning experience, here are my observations/thoughts/feelings from one whole week of hacking at the early parts of a rough early novel manuscript.

The Greatest Struggle Is Within

To be honest, I’ve been what some call a “churner” in my writing. Historically, I’ve enjoyed the thrill of pounding out a first draft far more than the harder labour of going back, taking a wider view of said scrawl and hammering it into something people besides my Mum might want to read. (No offence, Mum. Please don’t stop reading the blog, I need your pageviews.)

But, as I’ve mused before, I think the current book has genuine potential and is in a not-too-awful state, so I should do my best to push through that barrier. That’s one of the reasons I’m persisting in these regular blogs if we’re being really honest – if I just don’t bother finishing after talking about it so much, I’ll feel like an utter nob.

So, I’m trying to focus on the creative fun parts of editing rather than the line-by-line torture: writing new subplots and chapters, fiddling with stuff to make other stuff work. So far, this has been a moderate success – although during one afternoon in which I had to write a slightly-different version of an existing scene because the old one just wasn’t salvageable, I did find my brain wandering away a little.

Still, today was great, I really felt the parts sliding together and I wasn’t even working on fresh material. Hopefully I’m finally getting to grips with the necessary attitude, and if not, I invite you all to come round my house and beat me soundly with sticks of bamboo.

Though Cutting Good Stuff Is A Bugger Too

I did read some blog posts about the editing process and a lot of them talk about the need to Kill Your Darlings. That’s a big buzzphrase. And no, it doesn’t refer to aspiring writers getting so frustrated with slow line-edits, they end up indulging in a killing spree – instead, it’s the need to often remove scenes or story features you really like because they don’t fit in/are superfluous to the rest of the piece.

I’ve had to do this a couple of times now, and let me tell you, the fact you may not get to read the scene where one of my characters sets their entire body on fire upsets me in a primal, spiritual way. There are other parts too, which had to die due to being pointless tangents.

I live in the quiet, perhaps desperate hope that I can fit some of the excised material into future work, but a lot of it is probably good for nothing else. Which is a shame as I loved writing a lot of it, I still remember the thrill of it first coming into existence. But I also know that the resultant story reads less like an unfocused “Yeah, let’s chuck that in” ramble now, which is kinda satisfying.

All of which is to say: those bloggers may have been right. Shame, I always hoped I was the special flower the common advice didn’t apply to. Bugger.Now, I’ve got 45 minutes spare so am going to start the edits on chapter four. I’m actually excited to do it too, which is nice. Maybe I’m getting somewhere with my internal struggle after all.

As promised in the last one of these, I’ve been doing a few small projects in the buffer between finishing Part Two of my current novel last week and starting Part Three for NaNoWriMo. The main one I’ve found is submitting a few ideas for short comic stories.

In this case, they’re not looking for complete scripts, just short pitches describing your story. Now, some of you might be thinking this: “Great! Less work for you!” And although there was an element of that, it’s been harder than I expected too.

Because, to be honest, I’m pretty much used to sending in full scripts (or in prose submissions, full stories or substantial chunks of them) and knowing I’d be ultimately judged on my pacing, turn of phrase, etc – the brief description in the cover email is just there to get their attention.

Not that my story ideas suck, it’s just a different, more pressuring sensation trying to explain why your idea is brilliant in two paragraphs or less and knowing that’s all there is, rather than simply having to hook them enough to read the manuscript itself. After all, there’s not much time for immersion here – even two reasonably long paragraphs can be read in about a minute.

But it’s definitely a skill worth learning – after all, if I ever end up in the situation of trying to pitch my ideas to an editor one-to-one, I may not even get two long paragraphs worth of words to explain it in. Not to mention, I tend to be naturally over-wordy and it rarely hurts to cut down.

Mostly, I’ve ended up doing one paragraph in which I try and capture the mood of the story, then another where I explain how it unfolds. That seemed like the best use of space – we’ll see how it goes. If I can pull this off, it’s definitely going on the List Of Skills I’ve Totally Mastered.

All of which means that in the last week, I’ve spent almost a whole day on this project and produced… about seven paragraphs. By my usual standards, that isn’t much – hell, it’s probably less words than this blog post, which has taken about twenty minutes. But hopefully I’ll end up with individual paragraph-pitches that are so polished and shiny, you can see your face in them.

Should probably get back to them, really. If anyone has any time-honoured words of wisdom about the art of pitching in two paragraphs, definitely leave them in the comments.