The recalcitrant scene

On and off for the past year or so, I've been wrestling with a difficult scene. It was one that initially caused me writer's block, but then I told myself to get over it -- that if I couldn't write that scene there were plenty more I could write. So I did those instead. But I kept coming back to this one.

At first, I thought it was that I didn't know what my character would do. That surprised me, because it's a character I know well. Eventually, I wrote the scene, but I wasn't happy with it. It didn't feel right, and I couldn't figure out why.

Then one day, in the shower, I had an epiphany. (And this is where I grumble about droughts that necessitate four minute showers, because I used to do some of my best thinking in the shower. These days epiphanies are fewer because I'm under the water a lot less.) The reason the scene wasn't working was that I had my character doing what the plot needed him to do, not what he would really do. I had forced his hand. In my head, where he ended up was where I'd envisaged him ending up right from the start. And the truth is -- he didn't want to go there. That's why I had so much trouble in the first place. It wasn't that I didn't know what he would do -- I did know, but it wasn't what I (or rather the plot) needed him to do.

Okay, easy enough. Scrap the second half of the scene and rewrite it. The more I looked at the scene, though, the more I liked what I had done, the emotional journey he'd gone on, the reasoning he'd used. So I put the scene aside again. I reread it. And reread it.

Then I thought that maybe I could just cut and paste some of the old scene and rewrite a new bit in the middle. I did this and now suspect I've ended up with a mishmash of what the scene had been and what it should be, but I have something I can work on now and refine. I'm excited. I love the refining process. I love writing! I'm going back to it right now.

Responding to criticism

The dynamics in class workshopping or in a writer's group's workshopping is always interesting to note. My number one rule of workshopping is that you (the writer) should only ever put up your best work. If you know it's not working, but it's as good as you can get it, then fine. But if you know there's a problem, and you know how to fix it, then you should fix it before you give it to anyone else to critique. 

If you know your punctuation has been sloppy, but your friends are ace at fixing it so you think you don't have to bother, then that's just disrespectful. Everyone's time is important. Aren't you busy? Do you have loads of time to write? Or do you squeeze your writing in around a hundred other things the way most of us do?

So, you might think you haven't got time to check the spelling of that difficult word -- and, hey, you know there is a verb "curb", and you've seen the noun "curb" in the latest book you just had sent out from the States, so it must be right, right? Not if you're living in Australia (or Britain for that matter). In Australian usage, the noun is "kerb". You mightn't have time, but if you don't do it, you're taking up your workshopping buddies' time. Some of them are going to have to look the word up. It might take you an hour to fix the punctuation, but if you have ten friends and they're all spending an hour on it, it's not very fair, is it? Trust me: their time is just as important to them as yours is to you. And, if they're not busy looking at all the stuff you know how to fix, they might just have the time to see something more in your story that they otherwise might have missed -- the forest for the trees, and all that sort of stuff!

But what about when you're in the workshop. In the typical Clarion workshop (and many other serious workshops), the person being workshopped is not allowed to speak until everyone has said their piece. There's a good reason for this. There's nothing worse than someone who argues with every point that you make. (Yes, you've swapped hats now.) If people don't want criticism, they shouldn't put up their stories for workshopping. They shouldn't feel compelled to defend every word their written. After all, it's been put up because they want feedback on how to improve it, right? Not because they want their egos stroked. Well, that's the theory. The trouble is that some people do put up their stories so they can be told how brilliant they are.

I remember spending a lot of time workshopping a story that I thought needed a lot of work, and then the author very smugly telling me and the rest of the group that the story was already published. What a waste of my time. Not just disrespectful but rude as well. Did that mean we all didn't know what we were talking about? Not at all. I'm sure we've all read published stories we thought could have been better. Perhaps the writer (who was new to our group) had no trust in our abilities as workshoppers, but from that point forward we had no trust in her as a serious writer who was making good use of our freely given time.

A good workshopper will give specific, rather than vague comments. So, not: "This sucked big time, and I hated it..." but something more along the lines of: "I thought your setting and characterisation were great, but your POV was all over the place, and all that head-hopping made me dizzy..." 

Good feedback will point you in the direction you need to go to get things working more effectively. Good feedback is constructive, not destructive -- with any negative comments justified and a balanced reporting of what works in the story as well. This is important, not just to help preserve the writer's faith in their story, but because someone else might have knocked the very thing that you loved, and the workshopper needs to know that you did love this aspect -- that it did work for some readers.

I'm currently going through reader comments on my novel, and trying to address a saggy middle. As I'm reading through the chapters, I keep seeing opportunities to expand, expand, expand. (Add more characterisation here, put a few more thoughts in there...) I'm working through, looking at scene purpose, commenting on how well I think the scene is working and how I can address any problems. I thought by now I'd be distant enough to be able to see these problems manifesting themselves, but I'm struggling. What should I do? Consider that I'm right and my reader is wrong? This could be the case -- it is always something you need to think about -- but sadly and happily for me, I don't think this is true. Why sadly and why happily? Sadly, because I know dealing with the problem is going to entail more work, and I'm going to have to keep wrestling with it, but happily because I also know the book will be stronger when I emerge out from under it. And really that's exactly why I asked my reader to read it.

Making the changes

I'm a bit light on blogging at the moment because I'm fully immersed in my editing pass over my manuscript. The rewriting's finished, and I'm two-thirds (three-quarters?) through the edit, and I'm loving it. The process, that is.

Some days are better than others though. A few days I got to a scene that just wasn't working for me -- too passive, too much telling of things after the event. The fix wasn't too difficult. I moved the scene backwards in time so that I could show the events as they were unravelling. It's not an action scene, but it feels a lot more active now. Of course it meant I added about 400 words, at a time I'm desperate to cut words. That said, I've eliminated nearly 3000 at about the halfway point, so I'm on target. (Well, I would've liked to get rid of 10-15k, but realistically that was never going to happen because I'm also trying to add some characterisation and some non-plot related thinking.)

The day before yesterday, though, I came across a different kind of hurdle. Let me backtrack... When I started the edit pass, I had a brainwave about how to increase one of the main character's motivations so wrote a new scene that I banged in at the start of her story, and have been editing along the way to take this into account. It was all working beautifully until I got to the midway point and realised that I'd undermined one of the basic tenets that I'd based my alien culture's society on. Oh, dear. What to do? In the end such decisions can only be made when taking into account what will most benefit the story. And this time having the stronger motivation is a definite plus, so I've had to rethink that aspect of their society. It took me most of a day to sort that out, so I felt frustrated at the end of the day with how little progress I'd made, but the main thing was that I had made progress, and that I'd ironed out what could've been a problem further down the track. And in fact it still might -- but I'll be looking for it as I continue editing and will be able to fix it as I go. Bring it on!

Writing the novel

I had a discussion with a student last week about how many projects a novelist can work on, because our students who are taking multiple classes that involve novel writing are expected to work on different projects. Of course, there's no correct answer to this question, and I've always said that you've got to find what works for you. Only this last year I've found that that's not necessarily the case.

Up until recently, I've always thought I was a one-project-at-a-time person. Even when it comes to short stories.

I get an idea and think about it, and that's where my focus is. It's one of the reasons I don't write many short stories -- because mostly I'm focused on my novel. It's a lovely, indulgent, obsessive thing, writing a novel. I don't get that same pleasure out of short stories or poetry -- but they do offer their own pleasures and satisfactions, especially the satisfaction of finishing something!

Some people have bags of projects on the go -- they swap and change depending on their mood or deadline, even working on several in the same day. My friend, Sherryl, is like this, and it's always made me shake my head in wonder. But writing our group novel this year has taught me that I can work on more than one project at a time, and the longer I've been doing both the easier it's becoming.

At the beginning, it would take me a few weeks to reacclimatise -- I'd have to sink back into the depths of whichever project I was working on. Being in the writing group and doing the plotting or reading out what we'd just written and discussing it made it easier to get back into this. But there was the unfamiliarity of what others had written -- I say unfamiliarity because clearly I had heard their portions and discussed them, but they weren't integrally part of me the way the parts I'd written were. I know the details of my character's background, for example, in far more details than I know of their characters'.

The challenge with my own novel has been different. I've been working on this book a long time, so I'm very well acquainted with it. But it's a complex story with multiple viewpoint characters, and worse than that, multiple drafts. I say worse because the problem is that when I've been out of it awhile I forget which things belong in which draft. I might remember that A does this, but it might be something that I've taken out of the current draft for whatever reason.

Paradoxically, I've found that the thing I thought I needed (time to reimmerse) has been the thing working against me. It's actually easier to work on multiple projects if they're all on the boil at once, if I'm working on both in the same week, rather than having that gap between them. This works really well in that I can do whatever the mood takes me. If I'm in a writing mood, I'll head off to the group novel. If I'm in an editing mood, I'll work on my own -- which also requires some slabs of writing as I make changes that I've decided on. This week's change, for example, is in a background scene that my main character remembers. When he was a small child, he found his sister hanged, and that change has been to make him find her a few minutes earlier, when she was dying and imploring him to help her when things went wrong (knot on the wrong side of her neck so that she was strangled slowly). This secret he has kept. Everyone else thinks he found her dead. It's all about making the worst thing possible happen to your characters. This doesn't have a great effect on the story as a whole, but does strengthen his motivation for doing the things he has to do, and is perhaps something I'm thinking more about because I'm busy writing the other novel, putting my character there through the wringer. Honestly, you have to love writing!

Draft over!

Last night I finally finished the 13th draft of my novel. Now all I have to do is save it as such -- I give my working copy a different name than the drafts, and each draft is preceded by its number. The minute I save this one as a draft, my working copy becomes part of the next drafting process (if there is one). Officially, I'm not redrafting my novel anymore. Time to work on new things. But I am going to do an editorial pass to look for typos and wordiness, and to look at characterisation, motivation, and to add some non-plot related thinking, because an editor who looked at a partial of this current draft suggested these things needed attention, and I want to submit copy that is as good as I can get it.

There's something immensely relieving about finishing a draft, an excitement. For me, it builds as I can see the end in sight, and I'm more and more motivated to work on the project. But there's also something sad about finishing a draft, especially a final draft, because it's a goodbye to characters. Though, of course, if you're working on a series the way I am, that's not necessarily the case. We spoke about it today in the SuperNOVA novel writers' group -- the what-next syndrome. If you're writing a series, do you go on with the next book and hope the first will be picked up, or do you start an entirely new project? I think that answer depends on whether you are driven to do something in particular, or whether or not you're a fast writer. Perhaps also in how much faith you have in your project. If you're a slow writer you'd better keep going because if you do get a three-book contract, and they want to see where you're up to, it's nice to have something to show them. Nice not to be put on the spot, having six months to write your next book, and, horror upon horrors, you haven't even started!

For me, the choice is easy. I'm not ready to leave my characters. And in any case I've already done 140,000 words of the second book. I'm driven. I want to write the sequel. When I did NaNo, this was the book I was working on. I have two separate storylines that run through both books, and I chose the more difficult to write for NaNo. Trouble is that I've just reworked the ending of the first book, and I have a feeling that a lot of what I've written in NaNo will now be redundant. Oh, well. I've done it before.

When I first sent out book 1 (3rd draft stage), it was a far different book to what it is now. It weighed in at a mere 120,000 words. A publishing house commissioned a reader's report, and one of the things they commented on was the structure: that it was too linear. Okay, I thought. I was about 100,000 words into book 2 at that stage, and had incorporated a second storyline, which at that stage was absent from book 1. To me it was always part of the story, but I thought it was too-ambitious a project for a first-time writer. These days, I hope I'd have more courage, more foresight. Anyway, I knew I could make the book less linear by dragging that storyline back into book 1 and weaving it through the book. I usually write sequentially so this doesn't present too much of a challenge, and though tricky at times the rewrite was an immensely rewarding and enriching experience. Trouble was, when I looked at book 2, one of my major characters was now dead. And I do mean major characters. Now I had 100,000 words in serious need of a rewrite. Which happened. But now, I may have done it again. I'm circumspect about such things: all writing is a learning experience. And enjoyable. I like the fact that there have been many incarnations of my book. I can't imagine ever finishing a book and feeling that it didn't need rewriting. I know some people do this -- more so those who labour over every sentence along the way -- but it's not for me. I love the rewrite.

And am I happy with my new ending? Absolutely. Every draft I've looked at it and wondered what to do with it. It felt like a good ending, left the reader with the emotion I wanted them left with -- trouble was it was a little cliched. This time, because of changes I've made throughout the book in adding a new storyline, which really only minimally affects the first book but will become successively more important as each book goes on until it is the driving force behind the plot by the end of the third book. This new element really suggested a new ending for me. Out it popped as I was editing. Persistence -- that's what helped me find it. It's a long haul writing a novel, especially a big one, and you just have to be prepared to stay the distance. Believe me, the rewards (in terms of personal satisfaction) are worth it.

Towards the end

I'm getting towards the end of my current rewrite -- with less than 25,000 words to go. Now, to many writers that would be a big swag, but this is a big fantasy novel. I feel like I'm in the final stretches, and my enthusiasm to get to the end is waxing. I have found, however, I've moved more from rewrite to big edit at this point. Not quite sure why this has happened. Maybe it's because the later sections of the book were written later than the earlier sections and needed less? Maybe not.

After this comes a final editing pass -- this time on a print out, whereas at the moment I'm working on screen. What this pass is about is to make sure there are no typos, that the text is consistent (sometimes, with so many drafts still in my memory, I might insert something that relates back to something and not realise that the thing it related back to was omitted or reworked in this draft), that it all makes sense. I also want to have a quick look at a couple of particular aspects that someone mentioned may need a little attention. Easy stuff, and much quicker than a rewrite. Fun stuff. I love the editing stages, adding texture and layers and all of that. Then it's off to a couple of trusted readers for final comments and out into the wide world. Exciting stuff. And nerve-wracking. And then my dilemma is whether to hop right into the next book, or spend a couple of weeks reworking some short stories and getting them out. Might do a bit of both. And there's the group novel waiting patiently in the background too. So, plenty to go on with.

More movies and books

We seem to have set up a two-day pattern where we go to the movies every second day, which means we should've gone today. Instead, I've been writing, which is a better excuse than just about any other I could give. Or rather I've been wrestling with a draft, more than doing a straight rewrite. Today's scenes were half rewrite, half edit.

Anyway, in the meantime we've been to see National Treasure: Book of Secrets. I'll state straight out that I'm somewhat partial to Nicholas Cage, so that was a plus already. And I like Ed Harris too (have done ever since he did one of my favourite movies: The Right Stuff). This was fast-paced, car chases, excitement plus plus. I had read a review saying it had lots of plot holes, but they were more in terms of being so over-the-top they were unlikely than that something was missing or didn't make sense. Okay, this is a film very much in keeping with what I've been reading this week: Matthew Reilly's Area 7. Yeah, yeah, I know, I said I'd finished Reilly-reading, but I saw it cheap and couldn't resist. It sat in between the other two books of his that I've read recently, so it was funny thinking forward to what would happen to those characters in the next book. A bit like reading the end of a novel before I've finished -- and I know a few people who do like to do that.

One writerly thing that Reilly does that I don't like is to withhold information through the POV character (though he is using omniscient). But he'll be in someone's head and give half the information, and we know that character now has the full story and is not sharing it. I always see this as false suspense. Cheating, really. If the viewpoint character knows, then the reader should know. It leaves me feeling manipulated as a reader. Still, the book overall is another page turner. Plenty of excitement.

But the book and the film, totally unrelated to each other, both involve the kidnapping of the president. Very similar experiences overall. Fast. Exciting. And you just have to tell yourself to go along with the plot because it will be one helluva ride.

Atonement, the other film I saw, is a far different experience, but one very close to the book, which I read last summer (or the summer before?). My mother told me the film was slow-paced and confusing. I actually found the film got going a lot more quickly than the book did, but both are sumptuously rich and, oh, so tragic! My son said, after the film, "Oh, Mum, look at all the tears on your face." Indeed, it did make me cry. Not confusing at all. But it's one that does involve frequent time-shifts, and going over the same ground from a different perspective.

Currently reading: The Monkey's Mask by Dorothy Porter, which is diametrically opposed to Reilly, in that it's a verse novel (and a crime novel at the same time). Very interesting so far. I'm enjoying it.

Also currently reading The Stars My Destination, which I know I blogged about earlier. I was quite happy to reread the first half to reacquaint myself with the story -- that's always a good sign.

Currently writing: my novel, of course. Working now on Chapter 40 -- and a change I made in Chapter 2 is now having quite an impact on character relationships. It's always good in a rewrite to change things around a little so it still feels fresh to me. I'm not sure another reader who'd read an earlier draft would notice, but because I'm so close to it, I know. (The worst part is that sometimes I'm not sure what's in what draft. Can get confusing. Anyway, back to it . . .)

Changes late in the draft

I love the shower as a thinking place, but of course these days with drought and water restrictions, standing under the warm water to think is a luxury I can't really afford. However, this morning, I had a little extra time because I'd been scrubbing out the mould that had begun sprouting in the grouting (dreaded internal rhyme!) and was washing off the bleach, and thinking about my novel. Most times when I'm doing menial tasks, or just sitting about daydreaming, this is where my mind wanders. I call it working on my novel. If I daydreaming, my family call it slacking. We have to agree to disagree on that one.

Today, I had an idea for a character change for one of my major characters. Trouble is I'm late in a draft, so do I go with it? In truth, it probably doesn't make much difference to how her character acts because it's something that she keeps secret, but it does make a difference to her internal landscape, most particularly in matters like self-esteem. A major pro is that it's an issue I haven't seen dealt with in a fantasy book before, but the con is that it's an issue usually dealt with in YA, not adult books. Should that matter? Probably not. Will I implement the change? I'm not sure.

When I have an idea for a radical change, I usually like to sit on it a few days, mull over it, turn it over more in my head. Change is what keeps a redraft refreshing, keeps me interested as a writer. Change usually sees a deepening of the characterisation, and that's always a good thing.

Getting closer

Today, I've been doing some workshopping of student stories, and I noticed one who has been struggling to write from inside her character's head has finally brought the action that little bit closer by using thoughts. In the group novel we're doing, I'd been given instructions that I was to deliver some of the back story, which largely had to be done by thoughts. I did feel, anyway, that my character didn't spend nearly as much time ruminating as some of the others. I think I'm always a bit wary of overdoing it, because I've read that direct thoughts can annoy readers, and I know I am rather fond of writing direct thoughts; therefore, I hold back.

Trying something new can be quite liberating. It's not that I've never tried to deliver backstory before, but rather that working on a new project can make you appreciate things in a different light. For me there was a minor lightbulb moment (or perhaps the turning on of a low wattage light!) that I don't deliver that much backstory throughout my novel. It's something I could bear to do a little more of.

I am currently approaching the end of my thirteenth draft. At least I'm calling it my thirteenth, but there are some that are labelled something like "draft 12.5", which means it started as the thirteenth incarnation, but was abandoned for various reasons halfway through, so never became a complete draft. On the other hand, some drafts are really just editing passes. I have long ago determined that this will be my last draft (unless an editor takes it of course and wants me to redraft, which I am perfectly happy to do). This is the first draft I have been happy with, and that is an important milestone for me. I can't control whether it's ever published or not -- not beyond making it as good as it can be. The rest, then, is up to my agent, and even then I know it involves a modicum of luck.

I have determined though that I will do an editorial pass at the end of this draft. It was just to be a quick read over, but since my new discovery about my own writing will play in nicely with what the last editor who read it has said, I will pay attention to this as I go through. (For comparison, a quick read would take me a couple of days; an editing pass a couple of weeks; a full rewrite, considerably longer.) Of course my one problem is that I will again be adding words when I need to cut, cut, cut. Oh, for a publisher who loves a truly fat fantasty book!

Editing

I'm having a few days off the rewrite to edit some of the chapters I've been rewriting. I love editing. Trouble is that I just want to flesh and flesh and flesh when, really, word counts dictate I must pare and pare and pare. And it's not like there are that many adjectives and adverbs to pare. When I was at Clarion, Jack Dann told me my style was much closer to Hemingway's than Faulkner's. So the dilemma is what to cut. Sometimes it's a bit of setting, or a bit of action that is incidental to the plot. I have to be careful that I'm not cutting characterisation, because more than anything I want a sense of fully rounded characters -- I want readers to care for my characters and empathise with their struggles.

So, I was very happy today when I found a paragraph that repeated something I'd said in an earlier chapter, and I was able to nuke the whole para. I liked the writing, but repetition is deadly for a reader. They're left thinking, I got this already -- why are you telling me again? Kristin Nelson, the agent, recently blogged about repeating dialogue in the narrative (or vice versa), and I must admit it's one of my pet hates. Some of my students do it too. It drives me nuts. They only do it once or twice, and then it becomes obvious to them. I can't remember ever repeating anything so blantant, but perhaps I did in my earlier days. When I'm being repetitious, it's usually because I'm worried that the reader isn't going to remember something, but it's better to trust the reader. Don't speak (or write) down to them. Anyway, time to get back to the editing. I love the way I can blog as a break from writing!

Progress

Well, today I've officially passed the halfway mark with the rewrite of my novel, which is exciting. This is the last rewrite I'll do (unless some editor signs me on and wants me to do more, of course!). I love rewriting. I love fleshing things out, tightening up phrasing, making the dialogue more oblique, honing images, adding texture. But I'm conscious with this draft that I have to cut words. This draft started at about 193,000 words, which is too long for a first novel. Too big a risk for a publisher to take. So I'm aiming to finish with 170,000. I'm down to 188,000 so far so have got a fair bit of cutting to do yet.

What worries me is I've removed whole chapters from the first half and cut a few POV characters, and all I've lost is 5,000 words. Still, when I've finished I'll do a final editing pass -- in the past I've done the cut-ten-words-out-of-every-page approach, and that's helpful too. With the novel at well over 600 pages, that's 6000 words straightaway. And really, I've reworked the beginning more recently than the end -- I abandoned an earlier draft that was a tightening draft because I decided the whole thing needed rewriting, which is what I'm doing now. So, the words should come out of the second half more easily than the first. At least that's what I'm hoping. If not it will be tighten, tighten, tighten.

Many of my students come into Novel 2 having done short story writing as well. They all know that in a short story every word has to count. But I tell them that every word has to count in a novel as well. There's no room for padding, for flab. We all want to write the best novels we can -- novels that make the readers stay up well past when they want to go to bed, and flabbiness is a surefire way to put them right off. So I'm going to relish my cutting -- that's what editing is about: taking a rough stone and polishing it until it becomes a gem.

Rewriting

I'm currently in the middle of a major rewrite of my first novel. I call it a major rewrite because I am retyping the text -- it's not just an edit where I fiddle with the language or add a bit more setting here or sharpen an image there. I talk to my students about the importance of re-vision, as opposed to just revision, the act of re-seeing the novel, reimagining it.

The way I approach this is to have a quick reread over what I've already written, and then think about what I was trying to achieve in that scene, and whether the scene is as effective as it can be. Then I have to put the old scene aside and have another go at it, without looking at what I've written. I can't look over it again, or I find I'm just copying the same sentences, perhaps with a few minor changes. Totally pointless.

It's easy to re-vision a scene that feels flabby or that isn't working as hard as it can. It's the scenes I'm really happy with that I find the hardest, because there's always that temptation to go with what's already down. But the rewritten scenes are invariably stronger than the original, so I have to resist that urge. When I'm finished, I can always compare the two and take back anything that seems absolutely fabulous that has now been omitted. Occasionally, I do take a sentence or two, but often these are moved to someplace new.

The draft is chugging along nicely, and it's the first draft I've been really happy with, so now I just have to make sure I keep my bum on my seat and keep at it.