Draft 3, here I come!

November 2009, I sat down at my computer thinking "Okay, I can do this: I can write a novel." As the months wore on, I started to question the validity of that statement. Could I really write a full novel? I knew I could start one, I'd done that dozens of times before, but could I actually finish one? Most days, I wasn't so sure, but I kept at it anyway. Then in February 2010, I did it: I finished...the first draft.

Then a few months later, the second. In July, I sent out copies of my manuscript to a few willing participants who had promised me feedback. One of them responded with notes on the entire novel, another on the first twelve chapters, still another on the first chapter (though, to be fair, this was all she had received).

And now, in November of 2010, a little over a year after I first began this project, I am beginning work on the third draft of Zenith.

I once compared rewriting to surgery:

For years I have heard authors toss around this phrase, that all writing is rewriting. I want to tell them they've got it backwards, that all rewriting is writing. You have a fully formed first draft and suddenly, you are starting from scratch. There is no such thing as a minor edit at this point, this is not plastic surgery. This is orthopedics, the breaking and reforming and placement of bones, the bare skeleton of what you wish to create. This is heart surgery and brain surgery, this is fixing the insides of a story so that it can live and breathe and speak on its own someday. You recreate the story, instead of making it look better. You rewrite it. Re-write. Write again. You essentially write a second novel, by fixing up that first draft. 

 I stand by everything I said then and I am happy to say that my patient is out of the woods and stable these days. No more trauma surgery, no more heart or brain surgery. I now get to move on to the less threatening issues. I can focus on the lacerations and bruises, make sure everything is okay and stable. I get to comb my novel for inconsistencies, make sure my characters and my story get across well enough, and destroy all evidence of typos and grammar faux-pas. This is plastic surgery, the surface reformations and beautification stage. I hope it comes out pretty enough, in the end.

There are No Vacations from Being a Writer

On Wednesday night I completed my edits/rewrite of Zenith, packaged it up pretty & sent it off to be printed. What I didn't know is that CreateSpace, the website I had a free code for, requires 1-2 days processing, so it looks like I'll be paying for my copy after all. It only costs about $5, so I don't mind, I suppose. After all that work, I plan on rewarding myself with a copy.

Additionally, because I finished my edits, I also sent off a PDF of my novel to seven willing volunteers for beta-reading. I haven't received anything definite from anyone yet––it's only been two days––but so far the feedback has been good. However, none of them have reached the completely sucky last few chapters, so I'm not holding my breath.

Yesterday I could have relaxed from writing (and probably should have, considering I work a 12 hour split shift), but I couldn't. I've mentioned it before, but writing is not a job you drive to, clock in, do your work, clock out, go home, & forget about until the next morning; writing is a whole life process. Even as I drove to work yesterday, my mind was already trying to choose which project to begin on next. I wanted to do something with time travel that reflects my personal beliefs about the way time travel should be; I wanted a character with a particularly nice moustache; I wanted to try romance, since I've never successfully pulled that off. Before bed I ended up writing a 500 word drabble about two characters for a friend, just so I could write something (a need I rarely have when a deadline approaches, sadly). There are just no vacation time available for a writer.

This morning I woke up from a strange dream that ended up being the inspiration for my next project and immediately I began brainstorming and researching, picking out names. I need an androgynous name that can be mistaken as a male name, but is also not uncommon for females, but cannot be a diminutive of a different name. Currently I am leaning towards Sky with Cameron as my backup. This idea differs entirely from anything I've ever written and I am so excited about it.

Which brings me to my last topic of the day: all writers are lunatics. I've told you all this before and it's the title of my blog, so this really shouldn't be much of a surprise. After I created my list of possible character names I asked twitter & some friends which androgynous names they could think of, to gauge the connotations of each name. I received a lot of responses, for which I am thankful, but no one asked what the names were for. Even after I started hinting that I had a new story, no one asked what it was about. Like the lunatic writer I am, I went into this whiny state of Nobody Loves Me before finally texting Secret Agent Casye my idea. I could have just told everybody, I know, but I'm a lunatic, remember?

[Next up, research! I'm heading to the library later today to pick up some books, including Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness.]

Writing, Like Maths

Secret Agent Casye says maybe it will be a comfortable black hole. Oh God, I hope that's true.

So when you're coming up against a deadline and you know it's impossible at some point you're going to want to say "forget it, I'll just copy-paste the whole damn thing and leave it alone." Actually, you'll want this at many points. And that's nice, but then what's the point of edits at all? You know there are all kinds of mistakes throughout the novel and you could probably even pick out the chapters that need the most work and hope the others are clean, but they won't be, not completely. That copy-paste thing, though, there's something to be said about that.

When working with a very complex equation in maths you can stare at it until your eyes bleed, but the answer won't come to you by looking at the whole problem, you have to break it down into smaller, workable parts. Use the order of operations, PEMDAS, and figure out the parenthesis first, then the exponents and so on and so forth until finally, you have a small equation that you can answer easily. In mechanics you do the same thing when approaching a new machine that you don't understand: you pick a small part and understand that, then work your way into the part connected to it, until you understand the rest.

The same idea of breaking down a problem into workable parts can be applied to writing as well. I prefer to type out everything again by hand, to effectively rewrite the novel, but when there's no time for that, copy-pasting will have to do. So instead of copy-pasting the entire novel and trying to comb through for mistakes, I copy a small portion, just a few paragraphs at a time, and work through those. That way I don't get overwhelmed by the bigness of everything and get too distracted from the finer details. I tend to miss things when I have too much to look at, so I limit the scope a little by zooming in on a particular set of words and fix them up, then move on to the next part attached to it. Copy-pasting saves me time, but I still manage to work through it all.

With that, I'm off to finish up my 4th chapter of the day. Hopefully I can still manage to pull off seven. Luckily, I have the day off tomorrow.

Tip #1: Break down the problem into something you can work with.

Second Chances as a Science

It's summer for me now and honestly I have no idea what to do with myself. I don't miss classes or a hundred papers a week (well, maybe just ten), but I do need the structure and schedule that came along with school. My sleep schedule is screwed up--which is really bad, considering I'm an insomniac (I'm on hour 30 of no sleep right now!)--and so is my writing. I have 18 days left and I'm really not much further than I was a week ago, it's sad and scary. This whole writing thing was a lot easier in November.

The thing with edits is that you have a chance to make things better than they first were before anyone else sees them. It's your chance to polish up your novel and get rid of all the things you wouldn't want to get out into the world. At this point, if you're like me, you might discover that your story doesn't make as much sense as it should in the order it was written in, so you'll start moving things around. This can be good, this can be great! Or this could be a bad idea.

Sometimes, after you've rearranged things in all these new ways you look back at it and realize you only made it worse. Maybe what needed to be moved wasn't a chapter, but a scene, a paragraph, a sentence. Chapters can be broken down into smaller units and exchanged, they don't always have to move in giant blocks. I thought I had done so well with my new order of chapters, til I realized that Rob could talk with his mother about Risty, but it would make sense to wait until he knew Risty better. The part I had pushed behind this section hinged on a paragraph, not a chapter, and I shouldn't have moved everything to accommodate that small section.

Edits are for second chances, but also for experimentation. Edits are chemistry, essentially. You take different elements of the novel and combine them in new or unexpected ways, just to see what will happen. Sometimes you'll be granted with something fantastically superior to your original, sometimes it will blow up in your face. Your second chance experiments can make your novel better, but every now and again, you realize that what you started with is what was best, after all. My beginning outranks what I currently have, but I'm going to continue experimenting and hopefully find something that works. (Before my friend Casye throws me in a black hole like she's threatened if I don't meet my deadline).

EDIT: I lied, it really was better the new way. Or is it? I don't really know!