Well, the vacation is over. Time to get back to work.
Over the past week or so, I’ve reread the better part of Night and Day, and as I mentioned last time I popped in here, I wasn’t all that excited about what I was reading. There are good parts, there are bad parts, there are painfully bloated parts….
Which is okay, actually, since it is the first draft, and one kind of expects the first draft to need some work. This one definitely does….” “As I think I mentioned, the writing is a little clunky, but what’s worse is the writing is deadly flat. Just lifeless. Not all of it, mind you, just enough of it to be pretty annoying.
I also realized that the chapters are just too long. In addition to a lot of movies and TV show box sets, I’ve been doing a fair amount of reading these past few weeks. Going from some of the things I’ve been reading to my own stuff has been ugly. And one of the ugliest things has been comparing the “”got to read one more before bedtime”” chapters I’m reading with the monolithic slabs of text that are, sadly, my chapters.
I read once that you should try to keep your chapters mostly the same length. I don’t know if it’s true, but it works for me. Unfortunately, I decided that about 5000 words was a good length. And clearly it’s not. There’s just too much in each chapter, and I think it had some effect on the writing as well. Since I wanted to be close to that mark, I would wrap things up a little too quick at the end of the chapter, or I’d stretch things out. All to meet this artificial mark I’d set for myself.
So one of the first things I’m doing is cutting my chapters in half. It doesn’t look like it’s going to be much of a problem. Most of them could end halfway through, with the remainder of the chapter picking up in the next one. We’ll see how it goes.
I’m also perking up the writing – using less passive voice, more active voice. And as I mentioned in the past, I’m doing a total rewrite – for chapter one, certainly, and perhaps for the next few – until I get to an existing chapter and change it to be what I want, without having to mostly recreate it.
It means a bit more work – rewrites will probably take a little longer than I planned. But if I can get into the groove of making my writing sound like what I hear in my head, it’ll make Bleeding Sky a whole lot easier to write….