Archives for January 2004

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….

In ye olde days of typewriters, much of the rewrite process involved retyping. You’d sit yourself down, write 80-90-100,000+ words – maybe 500 or so manuscript pages, sometimes more. And then, when you were done, you’d do your edits and changes with a pen (or a blue pencil, if you were a traditionalist), and then you?d roll a piece of paper into the platen and start typing the whole damn thing again. If a third draft was warranted, guess what . . . start typing, boyo.

Computers changed this, of course. And I assure you, the first novel I typed on a computer, back in 198*cough* was wonderful, not for the writing, but for the physical process of writing it – it was 500 or so pages, and I had to type 500 or so pages once. one time. Uno. I was reborn as a writer.

Of course, there are . . . well, situations where you have to make a retrograde motion?

Yesterday and today, I printed out the first four chapters of Night and Day. Thought I’d give it a read through during my smoke breaks, get a feel for how much rewrite work was ahead of me.

A lot. Chapter one, in particular, is pretty awful. The story is good, I know what I was doing and why, but it sucks. It’s really not very well written.

Clearly I was rusty as hell.  Let’s face it, I haven’t done anything approaching serious fiction writing in what, seven or eight years. The writing is clunky, not at all smooth, rhythmic, or graceful. The dialogue isn’t bad, but even it requires some work. There’re also problems with what I’m writing about the “world” and what ultimately comes to be revealed in subsequent chapters.

In past entries here I’ve discussed things like writing without an outline, writing as though there’s a fog somewhere over the hood of the story, a fog that gradually burns off as the story rolls along. Using that analogy, it’s clear that I couldn’t see the tip of my nose when I was writing Chapter One.

And Chapter Two isn’t that much better. It’s only in the middle of Chapter Four that the writing starts to tighten up, the story begins to sharpen, and the book starts to become whole.

Normally I do all of my rewrites/edits on paper, then fire up the chapter and make the changes. In my Pollyanna-ish daze, I was thinking that I would be able to dispose of the middle step and edit right on the screen. I may be able to do that in the last three-quarters of the manuscript. Not in the first quarter.

In fact, I may have to retype the whole damn first quarter. I?m not sure it makes sense to fire up the computer and attempt to fix it on screen, nor do I think I can do the necessary repairs with pen in hand on the printed page. I think I’ll just have to use the existing Chapters One-Two-Three and some of Four as a guide, plop them down next to the keyboard, follow the story line, toss the existing writing except for the occasional phrase here and there.

The more things change, the more they stay the same, or so they tell me.

Deep Space Nine Season 7 done. X-Files Season 8 done. Now for the Indiana Jones movies…