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.

Just Because You Have a Deadline, Doesn't Mean You Can Make It

So here's the thing, deadlines only work when you stick to them. You cannot make a deadline if you want until the last minute because having a deadline doesn't magically make your work done. I knew this in November, but I can't seem to actually apply it to my life now. I have 15 chapters done, out of 41, which means I have 26 to go...in 4 days (including the rest of today). I basically need to write 7 chapters a day and today so far I've written 2. It's 6:30 at night and I have written 2 chapters, that's not a great sign. Tuesday I work in the morning and Wednesday my siblings return from Colorado, about the same time my aunt comes to visit from Georgia. This deadline is not possible and Secret Agent Casye is totally going to throw me in a black hole. That doesn't sound very pleasant at all.

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

The Conqueror, Chapter 12; Writing Out of Order

Total word count: 16,113
Words written today: 1,030
Chapter(s): 12 (written out of order)

That's my count so far today, but I'm going to try to write more later, I just have other things to work on before I move on to chapter 14. Writing out of order can work well, like it did in this situation, but I'm not so keen on it these days. I used to always write out of order, skipping around to write whatever scene interested me that day. At the end of it all, I had these loosely associated points like a scatter plot and I had a hard time trying to find the connections between them and turn it all into a story. This is probably one of the biggest reasons why I never completely finished any novels before Zenith (which I wrote chronologically). With The Conqueror there's more leeway, because the chapters are chronologic, but told from many different perspectives. Chapters 12 and 13 begin a few minutes apart and have some overlap, so writing them in reverse order wasn't such a big deal. Still, when I finished chapter 12 I realized I needed to change something in chapter 13 so that things would make sense, because I had changed the plan as I wrote, something that always happens in my writing. So I try not to do this so often, though there are some days when I really cannot write the chapter I need to and I will jump ahead slightly just to get some words out for the day. I took a chance with it this time, banking on the fact that I could find a solution for chapter 12 later rather than sooner.

And for the record I have absolutely no idea what's happening in chapter 14 and not much else for the rest of the book, either. I really need to sit down and actually plan some of these things out. I haven't needed to do much of that before, so this is pretty rough. I am still mapless in the unknown forest.

General; The Wall

I won't normally do this, make more than one post a day, but I just had a conversation with my friend and I thought it was worth noting. Funny that this would happen just after I hit The Wall, but there you go.

He told me how when he writes he'll start, then he'll hit a wall, get discouraged, and stop. He'll go back and look at the story, but he never gets further than that wall. My advice to him was to stop planning. If it's not working, so you try something new. Push through and get past that wall, doesn't matter how you do it, so long as you get past. Only once you're on the other side do you look back and figure out what worked and what didn't. If something isn't how you like it, you change it, but first you get past that wall.

Here's what I told him:

You reach a wall, you do something to get past it. You climb, and if that doesn't work, you dig. You do not stop to look at the wall. The more you look at the wall the bigger and longer and thicker it's going to get and you'll start thinking you can't get past that wall anymore.