Editing. What Larks!

So, yesterday I spent most of the day picking my way through ‘Emmeline’ with a fine-tooth comb, searching for inconsistencies and errors and repetition (boy, do I repeat myself, a lot), misplaced punctuation, frankly stupid conversations between characters (there were a few), scenes which were more ‘filler’ than ‘vital’ – there were a few of these, too, probably because the book began life as a NaNoWriMo project – and clumsy description. I’ve realised when I’m writing under pressure that I can be a huge fan of the old dangling modifier, and that my powers of description go out the window. Stupid metaphors and ridiculous similes abound, and I remind myself of Bambi on the frozen lake, skidding around doing my best to write something right, and succeeding only in ending up on my behind.

Image: myglassesandme.co.uk

I didn’t get through the whole book, of course. Between Friday’s efforts and yesterday’s, I’m probably just over halfway, now. I’ve trimmed over 5,000 words from the total wordcount, which means the book is still far too long – but it’s an improving situation.

Image; aplusadminservices.com

Strangely, I’ve discovered that the bits of the book which I thought would give the most trouble actually turned out to be the smoothest, and the parts I thought I’d be able to gloss over are the ones which have caused me the most eyebrow-raising difficulty. It’s funny how your memory works; I remembered certain parts of the book as being particularly thorny and challenging, and so I figured editing those bits would be a major hassle. Perhaps, however, the harder the scene is to write, the easier the edit – at least, that’s how it seems so far. Lots of ‘Emmeline’ just flowed out of my brain and onto the page, which felt great at the time, but it means that, on re-reading it, I’m left a bit stumped by my plot choices, or word choices, or character motivations. Nothing so far has been a deal-breaker, or a book-destroyer, and I’m hoping it carries on that way, but I’m a bit bemused by my own memory nonetheless.

One of my major fears with this book was that the central third – the ‘sagging middle’ – would be too flabby and over-written and unnecessarily long. So far, I’m finding that it’s not as bad as I thought. That’s not to say whole chunks of text haven’t been excised – with plenty more lining up for their turn under the scalpel – but the plot moves along faster than I remembered, which is good. At this point in the book both Emmeline and Thing are on their own, separate, quests, and – when writing it – this was difficult. I was constantly switching between their viewpoints, writing one section in Emmeline’s world and another in Thing’s, trying to keep a certain balance between them and always thinking of ways in which their journeys could be linked or even contrasted, and – to me – it seemed to go on forever.

Luckily, however, it doesn’t really read that way. It seems that the harder a scene, or even an entire section, is to write the longer and more turgid it feels in your memory. This can be a surprise, come editing time.

I’ve also realised that I always, always write linearly. I know there are writers who write scenes separately from the parts that come before and after them, much like a filmmaker puts a movie together; a scene from the book’s opening can be written right at the end, and perhaps the author will write the middle third first, perhaps in an attempt to ensure it doesn’t get overblown and out of control. I admire this sort of technique, but it just struck me the other day that I have never used it myself.

Image: mathgoodies.com

The above isn’t a map of my writing process, but it could easily be. I don’t think I could function writing a scene from the end of a book before the beginning – my brain just isn’t flexible enough for that. I also edit the same way – from the beginning, straight through to the end. Once a square, always a square, I guess.

I’m beginning to wonder, though, if I should shake things up a bit and start editing non-linearly. Perhaps it would make things easier to see if I’m reading sections out of sequence, and it might make the book seem fresher and more surprising if I edited backwards, or from the middle out, or something like that. Anything which makes mistakes and excess and injudicious word choice stand out more clearly is a good thing when you’re hovering over your work with your editing hat on. Sometimes, other writers read their sentences backwards to check for spelling mistakes – as your eye is less inclined to see what it wants to see when the sentence is out of order – and so it makes sense that shaking things up when it comes to your editing habits can bring benefits. So, I think at least one of my runs of edits, this time, will be a non-linear one – and let’s hope I don’t end up like this in the process:

Image: menagerieofminds.wordpress.com

I also hope I’ll be able to bring the wordcount down to where it should be without causing myself, or the book, too much pain. Soon, it will be time to start printing out whole chunks of text and going at them with a pen, a process I always enjoy – I guess there’s a hint of a masochist in me, somewhere.

Stay tuned for updates from the editing coal face, and the results of my non-linear experiment (that sounds pleasingly scientific! *polishes spectacles*) – and, with any luck, the good news that ‘Emmeline’ is ready for querying, just as soon as possible.

 

Friday! At Last…

I don’t know about you guys, but I’m definitely in agreement with Katniss and crew.

Image: summersolsticemusings.wordpress.com

This week has seemed like at least three weeks, all sort of glued together in a tangle of multi-jointed megadays. I’m guessing this is because I was sick for most of it, and when you’re sick everything seems boring and slow. It’s like being a teenager again, in a lot of ways – including the crankiness.

But, in any case, today is Friday and the week is finally over. This is a good thing. I’m starting to feel a little better, which is another good thing. But the best thing of all is that yesterday, I managed to finish Draft 2 of ‘Eldritch’, a little ahead of schedule. This means that today I’ll be off printing it, and then finding a nice quiet corner somewhere to sit and scribble all over it with a red pen. I can’t quite believe I’m at this stage already with this book; I’ve said before how easy it was to write in comparison to ‘Tider’, and that observation still stands. It was easy to write, and easy to edit, and easy to read. I reckon this means that all I’ve done is shove all the problems off into the sequels, instead of dealing with them at the outset.

Actually, that’s a pretty terrifying thing to say. I wrote it in jest, but now that I think about it, I really hope it’s not the truth.

I’ve had the story for ‘Eldritch’ in my head for many years, and I’ve gone over it and over it repeatedly during that time; so, it was easy to write. It went down pretty much exactly as I wanted it to first time, which made it easy to edit. I still really like the story, and the characters, and I’d taken a hefty break from it before going back to begin Draft 2; so, it was easy to read. But I’m still terrified that I’ve done something ‘wrong’, that the book is too simple or I’ve missed something vital, and any one of a whole list of terrors. I don’t think there’s a way of knowing, really, whether or not any of these fears have a basis in reality, or whether they only exist inside my frantic wee skull, without taking a chance on the story and sending it away to be read elsewhere.

I have a pretty clear plan for the story overall, and where I want it to end up by the conclusion of book three. I don’t have as clear a plan, i.e. what’s going to happen chapter by chapter, for the sequels as I did for ‘Eldritch’ (more an overall idea of ‘this is what I want to say in this book’), so perhaps they’ll be more challenging to write. Certainly, the first third of ‘Omphalos’, the sequel to ‘Eldritch’, which is at first draft stage, has been more difficult so far than ‘Eldritch’ was. I don’t foresee any major structural or plot problems that I’m setting myself up for down the line, but as I’ve seen time after time, when it comes to writing you’re never able to predict everything. Stories have a tendency to wriggle around and decide things for themselves, and you can’t anticipate every single problem or issue.

It feels weird to be scared by the fact that something is going well. Is it possible, when you’re writing a book, that things going smoothly means you’ve done something right instead of vastly wrong? I hope so.

I guess I’ll know more on Monday, when I’ll be finished my read-through, and hopefully I’ll have a manuscript full of handwritten edits. After that, I won’t have any excuses any more.

I’ll be starting the Query Train, and the real fun can begin.

I’ll be looking at a lot of empty inboxes for a while…
Image: andreadekker.com

Happy Friday, and happy weekend. Wish me well with editing!

A Rough Edit

I have finished my fifth (possibly sixth?) draft! Now, it’s time to collapse in a twitching heap.

This is kind of how I feel right now.

It was a really hard edit, this time. This draft, I used purple ink to distinguish my corrections from the first hard-copy edit I made, in which I used red ink. When I tell you there’s at least three times as much purple ink as red on this paper beast, I’m not telling you a word of a lie. I’m actually a bit frightened by the fact that glaring omissions, errors, downright stupidities and unfulfilled storylines were overlooked by me first time round, and the red pen passed over them, unconcerned. It took the might of the purple pen to bring them to heel. Sort of ironic, when you consider the idea that ‘purple’ is usually a term you want to avoid when you’re writing – I guess, when you’re me, it can be a good thing.

It might interest some readers to know that my prologue (to which I was deeply, emotionally and powerfully attached) has been junked. Yes, junked. It had been reduced to a blur of scribbles and tiny, scribbled mutterings, until I finally decided last night that the reason I was so unhappy with it was because it was unnecessary, stupid and not working. I loved it, though – it was the first thing I wrote, the first gentle dip into this fictive world, and I clung to it like a limpet for all these months, despite the advice of my brother, my husband and my friend Claire. They all read it and said – look, this needs to go. I snarled like a wild animal protecting its young and told them all to sod off, that it was my book and the prologue was staying. So, to them, I wish to say ‘sorry for being such a silly auteur and thank you very much for your constructive, clever and correct criticism’. It just took me a few months to let it sink in.

I’ve read so many guidelines to writing, all of which say things like ‘if there’s something about your writing that you really love or feel unaccountably attached to, it’s a sign there’s something not right with it’, or ‘if there’s something that needs to be tweaked and tucked and adjusted and stretched and which, no matter what you do to it, just doesn’t fit, get rid of it’, but I never understood those tips until now. I really loved that prologue, written in the protagonist’s voice after the events of the book have taken place; battle-worn and life-weary, she introduces us to her world and lets us know that bad things have taken place, and will take place. She alerts us to the fact that her family are not what they seem. I thought it was important, and for a long time it seemed important. Perhaps it seemed important because the book wasn’t finished, and it was only when the story had played out that I could understand the reader doesn’t need all the suspense sucked out of the plot. I’m thinking, now, that it’s better to drop the reader into the heart of this family which seems loving, if a little dysfunctional; it’s better to let them work out for themselves that what the protagonist’s family does for a living isn’t quite wholesome, instead of having it told to them in the first page or two. I wasn’t able to make the protagonist’s retelling of the mythology of her world, which had been a big part of the prologue, sit properly – it just felt clumsy, and sticky, and it bothered me. Eventually, and finally, it dawned on me that the only way to fix it was to take it away. It’s explained throughout the plot anyway, so there’s no need to introduce it at the very beginning. It was a horrible, heartbreaking decision, but I know it’s the right one – even writing this post, explaining to you (and myself) why I took the decision to change it is making sense to me.

My only regret is that I didn’t have this epiphany before I entered my work into the competition, back in October; the prologue is the first bit that the judges will read, and if it puts them off reading the rest of it, I really will kick myself.

Gah. I coulda been a contender…

Anyway. Despite the fact that I feel like Clonycavan Man (that handsome gent in the image, above), I need to keep working. Making edits with a pen onto my print-out is, of course, only the first step in a long process. Now, I have to go back through my work and make all these edits and changes, hoping that they all work and that I don’t spot any more gaping plot anomalies. I can’t promise not to weep when I highlight my beloved prologue and hit ‘delete’ – please don’t hold it against me.

Right. Time to make some coffee and get cracking. Happy Tuesday!