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.

The Monsters of Writing

We as writers risk our lives every day, trying to give the public what they want. We are like gladiators, facing terrible monsters and opponents all for the sake of entertaining others. Writers are no strangers to fear and frustration, believe you me.

The Biggest Monsters You Will Be Asked to Face as a Writer

• Research - after coming up with an idea and forming a rough plot, you might be asked to face Research, one of the biggest monsters of the Writing World and one that will pop up again and again. You cannot ever truly defeat this beast, it is immortal. When you face this creature, keep that in mind; you are not fighting to kill, you are fighting to survive. Still, facing Research is essential in your quest as a writer and each time you face it, you will grow stronger, gain knowledge, and be able to face your novel with more courage and confidence than ever before.
• Doubt - This is another creature that will spring up time and time again, generally when you least want it to. It's always hard to beat and afterwards your confidence is shaken and you constantly question your ability to complete your Journey. Doubt generally coincides with other challenges, such as The Wall and The Unmarked Path. Sometimes the best defense against this monster is to simply ignore it. Embrace that 5-year-old mentality that if you don't acknowledge its existence, it can't truly exist.
• Revision - This beast often attacks at the same time as Doubt on the second leg of your Journey to Publication. You've acquired your basic skills and materials and you've finished the first draft of your Novel, but now it's time to revise. Don't be afraid to really fight this monster, cutting out words, sentences, chapters, and limbs. Don't hold back, because if you do, you'll only have to face it again later. Each time you face this dreadful foe, it's harder and harder to put up a fight, as it wears you down. You thought you were done and Revision rears its ugly head to remind you that you aren't. It's like starting over, but it is survivable.
• Querying - This is the true test of your strength and skills. Your Novel has to be the Best in Show, able to blow away any obstacles and impress the judges like no one ever has before. This is not quite the final battle in your Journey, but it is the turning point. Every foe you've faced up until now has been in preparation for this terrifying beast. Luckily, there are many guides that can help you train for such a match scattered about on the internet. I urge you to study them before you charge into battle.

That said, know that I am facing the first Monster on this list with my next project, as I've defeated the somewhat lesser foe of Lack of Inspiration, a close cousin to Doubt.

If you have any other Monsters you feel should be included in this Survival Guide, or any additional notes on how to defeat the ones above, please leave them in the comments.

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!

The New Order

This morning I emailed off my last paper for my summer course, which means I am now free to spend any time outside of work editing my novel. That's...a little scary, honestly, but it's okay. I had a migraine earlier, but once the excedrin kicked in I thought I might go read and I decided "No, I'm going to try to do some edits. If it doesn't work, I'll go read some Fitzgerald, but I at least need to try." Because that's my thing, I don't always try, I put it off, because "don't feel like it," or some other crap excuse. Today I tried--and turns out, I actually was able to do something with this MS.

When I am writing and especially when I am editing, I sometimes look at what I've written and think "Wow. I wrote this? Seriously, I did? This is actually really good." I might even realize deeper meanings in the prose that I hadn't consciously placed there originally, but is just so gosh-darned good. I amaze myself, sometimes.

Other times I look at the page and wonder how I even managed to get this far. I should have stopped ages ago, because obviously, I suck. I really suck. And I make really stupid mistakes, like using the wrong name for a character or have a seriously huge error in continuity or something like that.

But, it's edits, these moments are supposed to happen, right? (Oh God, I hope that's right.) I'm supposed to realize that I actually can make something out of what I've got so far and see the potential in my own work; realize that I have talent and build up my self-esteem to get me through to the end. I'm also supposed to find all those really stupid mistakes so that I can fix them—that's what editing is all about, really. I'm supposed to take something that pretty much sucks, but has potential, and turn that piece of coal into a shiny new diamond, ready to be cut and placed on a ring that I can later use to propose a marriage between myself and an agent.

So, bad news: The entire first half of my novel needs some serious work and the second half has a lot of errors with names and places.
Good news: I think I figured out how to fix it all, by rearranging some of the chapters in the first half. What was once chapter 1 is now chapter 4, and the prologue is gone completely (for now?). What was once chapter 15 is now chapter 5, and the end of chapter 4 will have to be rewritten to reflect the changes. Well, a lot of things will have to be rewritten to reflect these changes. All writing is rewriting, after all.

"All Writing is Rewriting"

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.

So how can they say that all writing is rewriting? That first draft wasn't rewriting, there was nothing to repeat. But here's the thing, only the first draft is ever truly written, without being rewritten, and the first draft never makes it to publication. First drafts are monsters, hidden deep in our closets, that we hope will never be viewed by any eyes other than our own. True writing, the stuff that fills the pages of a book, that's rewriting. All real writing, all commendable writing, is rewriting. So all rewriting is writing and, to a point, all writing is rewriting, no matter how impossible that sounds. It's almost a paradox, yet we authors achieve it. Or we try to, in my case, at least.

So today I truly begin the process of writing something that I hope someday one other than myself will read. Or maybe two, or two hundred, or two thousand, who can be sure? Today I begin setting bones and sewing up hearts and stopping bleeds so that my creation can stand up straight and walk out of my door, to no longer have to hide in the shadows. Today I begin--officially--rewrites. I've got 33 days before my finished second draft is due if I want the hard copy that I won from NaNoWriMo. 33 days, 4 of which will be spent in the classroom, and 15 of which will be spent at work. But I wrote a novel, a full first draft, in 30, while going to school 5 days a week, working 3-4 days a week. So I can do this, I believe I can. I work best under a deadline.

And I'm going to try to post everyday again, to help me stay on track. I don't have to submit my daily word count to the NaNo site anymore, so I'm going to do it here. If I don't post, I know I didn't write, and then all of you know I didn't write. Hold me accountable, while I try to discover what Richard North Patterson meant when he first said that all writing is rewriting.

"Writing is rewriting. A writer must learn to deepen characters, trim writing, intensify scenes. To fall in love with the first draft to the point where one cannot change it is to greatly enhance the prospects of never publishing." Richard North Patterson