Traveller's Tales

So the Big Edit is… done!

Sort of.

What I mean is, everything I wanted to get done, is done.  But there are other things that I’ve discovered, in the process of getting the things that needed to get done, done, that now also need to get done.

For one, the manuscript bloated.  Predictable, and something a more experienced writer would have known intuitively would happen as a result of an edit that deep, but I hadn’t thought about it along those lines, so I need to do a third pass, to trim the bloat.

There’s more, of course — a lot of little things that I found while I was digging around in there.  I won’t go into the gory details, but it’s going to put a few more days on the edit schedule.  Definitely not weeks, and the worst, I think, is over.  Very much thinking it’ll be DONE done by end of the holiday weekend.

And at least it won’t depend on bus drivers knowing how to not drive like a piston, or seatmates oozing over into my side of the seat, or the fans not being on — I’m off starting Thursday, and that’s all edit time, baby!

(well, not ALL edit time, there’ll be fun and OMGWTFBBQ to be had, considering it’s the 4th… but that’s a lot of good time for writing, and my new writer’s hideaway beckons!)

I’m editing.  I like what the results look like, and I think I’ll be very, very pleased with the end result.

But I am fighting a pitched battle with one of my lead characters, and he’s not giving an inch without inflicting pain or drawing blood.

This is the guy I had originally written in first person, present tense, as a way to make his thinking more accessible to the reader   (this was my theory, and my thought experiment has officially backfired and gone horribly wrong; lesson learned, mea culpa, see my other post about that).  Now I’m wrangling him into third person past, like the rest of the narrative.  What’s coming out, I like — but Oh My Freaking God he’s taking For Bloody Ever to make the transformation.

I keep re-reading the chapters I think I’ve just wrangled, only to find massive errors in tense and in person, even in the brand new stuff that’s gone in to replace the first-person ruminations.  Beyond that, I have to write, put it away, and re-read it fresh the next day because I’m not sure it’s reading true until well after I’ve written it.  The shift in POV is so jarring to me, after living with this character for so long in first person, that it’s even tough to be certain I’m writing well, and that’s not something I usually worry too much about.

I’m finding myself very interested in this phenomenon.  I’m fascinated that a mental construct like a character can associate itself so strongly with linguistic concepts (tense, point of view) that the process of revising those concepts can so thoroughly screw with my head.  It’s a serious crash course in pragmatics (not pragmatism), which I may have to dig into a bit deeper after this edit is done.

Wacky stuff.

With all due apologies to JRRT, it was too appropriate not to use as today’s subject.

I’m back into The Grey Knight, the first book.  I’m executing some structural changes primarily based on good thinking from my kick-ass agent, who may have hit the nail on the head with a fascinating bit of counterintuitive, er, intuition.

I don’t want to gush too much just yet, mainly because there’s no guarantee that this change will result in a sale — but I do like what it’s doing to the story, and her fresh perspective has absolutely helped make things gel.

Basically, the critiques I’d been getting had been about pacing (of the ‘builds too slow’ variety).  My agent’s advice was to make the chapters longer.  I gave that a little WTF at first myself, and then I went back and re-read the first few chapters.

And you know what I found?  Holy shit, they’re too short.

The Grey Knight’s story is a whirlpool, not a straight line; there are three primary stories that begin separate and unconnected, and then slowly come together until they smack head-on into each other with a bang near the end.  Practically, that means a lot of scene switching, and, logically, I need to really get a reader invested in each primary character, to make them interested enough in each to want to go back to them after a scene switches to a different primary POV.

Short chapters, clearly, would not facilitate this reader-character bonding process, and as I re-read those early chapters, I’m forced to agree with her analysis: the early ride is way too bouncy.  Later on, I think it works just fine, first, because the reader is familiar with the characters now, and second, because the pace of the chapters speeding up as they near the conclusion makes perfect sense.  But early on… man, really bad idea.

I’m midly surprised I didn’t see it myself, but focusing so much on keeping things fast-paced, I wasn’t looking at the manuscript with the right set of eyes.  It’s a great bit of Craft wisdom to pick up, and already the story reads MUCH better as a result of the change, even to me.  I do hope it’s not just me, but I really think we’ve got something here.

Edits are in progress; my new netbook is a truly excellent technical partner, but I also have to give some credit to TextBlockWriter, which helped me visualize the structural change in the document before I started dragging chapters all over the place.  I’ve got a self-imposed completion date of 3/12 and a self-imposed delivery to my agent on 3/13.  She keeps telling me end of the month, but the writing is hot and fast, there’s some great stuff coming out in between the structural edits, and I want it out there again.

So, apologies if I’m a little scarce between now and then, but I’ve got a novel to polish.

First: apparently Shadee and I were thinking along similar lines today; she left a comment on a prior post regarding where to find good post-consumer bond paper — apparently The Green Office has a lot of good stuff along these lines. My own investigations led to a specific bond paper brand, Aspen 100, which is sold at OfficeMax by the ream, that is both 100% post-consumer content (i.e. contains no newly dead trees, only previously dead trees) and supposedly looks decent. Seems this is a more intelligent approach to eco-friendly printing than those silly “Please think of the environment before printing this email” signatures that are going around right now. OfficeMax’s online checkout and shipping fees are silly, but I’ll stop by one in NYC tomorrow and pick up a ream to give it a go.

Second: After my little episode procuring an actual printout of the current manuscript for The Grey Lord, I’ve managed to stare at it a number of times, do some line edits as I leaf through the pages and frown a bit. As I reflected on my inability to focus on the task at hand, it occurred to me that I may need to take it back yet another step; there’s too much actual detail in the manuscript now, and I need to think in less detail, not more. With that reflection, I wondered if I couldn’t use one of the tools I use in my mundane work life, OpenOffice Draw, to help with my writing life. I won’t get into specifics just yet, but if it ends up working for me I’ll post the results.

Third: I have run out of fudgesicles.

So yeah, I’m doing a lot of backstory work.  Part of my deal with myself is to do at least one entry in the Codex a day, so that way the damn thing starts taking on a bit more substance, but in honest reflection I have to wonder if I’m letting that get in the way of other writerly stuff, like, you know, the novel itself.

On the one hand, the Codex lets my rational brain take part in the creation process: it links histories, it defines technologies, it aggregates information about various bits and then spits them out in digestible chunks, which is all for the good, naturally.  I do tend to find that if I go all-out creative, doing solid writing and nothing else, I eventually sputter to a halt because part of my brain is being horribly neglected — so in that respect, the Codex is a great way to let the rational side involve itself in the creative process.

On the other hand, there’s a potentially significant logical problem that should be demanding my attention, and that’s the sneaking suspicion that the outline I’ve written for The Grey Lord is seriously flawed in parts, or at least underdeveloped.  Not in huge parts, but in significant enough parts that it probably warrants a going-over with scalpel and forceps.  And, this being the case, it’s quite possible that my current obsession with the Codex is a distraction from the elephant in the room.

I think what needs doing is for me to get an actual hard copy of the thing to review it in its current state.  I’ve been trying to review it on the PC, but screen by screen evaluation just doesn’t seem to be my bag; either I get distracted by the bits I’ve already written and like, or I skip through the problematic stuff with a little too much ease.  I need to see the thing on paper so I can scribble on it.  Apologies to the trees (I wonder if there’s a good recycled bond paper I can do this sort of thing on?), but this sounds like a good first step.

I ask because I don’t really know for sure. I’ve completed and polished several pivotal scenes from The Grey Lord, and I love how they’ve come out. I’ve added an important new character, removed a second, and re-relegated (sic) a third character I’d temporarily promoted to top-tier status to a position back amongst the strong supporting cast. Erik’s story has finally attained the crystal clarity that Anhak’s and Färus’s stories had already managed, and has in fact surpassed them in several ways.

Unfortunately, all this clarity has come at a steep price: my detailed outline is now officially screwed. I’m going to need to re-think the entire story structure with all of these revelations and changes. It’s not that the stories are changing catastrophically, but the way they interplay is definitely changing, and if I’m going to successfully weave them together the way I did in the first book I’m going to need to pull back and stare at the stories for a bit before I can move ahead.

The delay isn’t all a bad thing. There were definitely parts of the outline that were weaker than I wanted them to be, and with the new characters firmly in place it lets me create some compelling scenes between characters that otherwise would not have interacted, or who would have interacted in a much less interesting capacity. But it definitely requires a halt to forward momentum and a regroup as I work out how the new stuff changes the way the story gets told.

So yeah, I guess all told it’s progress. It just seems a bit counterintuitive to call it progress when it involves stopping and staring and cribbing notes instead of writing new chapters.