Muddling Through

Right now, I'm not writing.  This isn't a good thing.  It's been three or four days since I did anything worthwhile.  By sheer force of habit I've kept making notes, revising other things, and so on.

As predicted, it was a bad time for me to receive a new set of notes from my editor a couple of weeks back.  Nothing wrong with him doing it, of course.  I appreciate it.  The book is better for them.  I went straight at the notes, blasted through the entire manuscript (backwards, then forwards), and had it delivered back to him by the end of last week.

If circumstances were ideal, I'd have gone straight from that effort to a renewed push on my next novel.  Circs are not ideal.  So instead, I'm dog-paddling along, hoping to catch a little inspiration in the next couple of days and crank out twenty or thirty pages in a few long, productive sittings.  It's very much like surfing: even to have a shot at the best waves, you've got to be out on the water.  Much of the time, you will be sitting there watching the horizon.

So I keep sitting down to write, muck around for an hour or two, and then -- having written a couple of lines, or edited something from a previous session -- retreat to doing something else, irritable and surly.  It must be a thrill for my wife the television writer, who in addition to putting up with me, also has to spend fourteen hours a day on location while they film her final episode.  Then she's out of work, and I'm bitching about self-inflicted projects!

The situation ties back to something I wrote about earlier: one should always have at least two projects going, so if one crashes, you've got another.  The problem for me is the current novel is my second project.  I don't have another one at the present time.  So I've got to make a go of it.

Which leads me to my usual pedantic advice.  When I'm truly in a bind like this, I've found the best thing to do is exercise.

I detest exercise for its own sake.  Fiddling around with stair machines and weights is about as dull a pastime as can be devised.  I'm perfectly happy to do physical labor -- give me an acre of turnips to hoe, or something like that, and I'll do it until my limbs fall off.  But moving bits of iron up and down, running in place, pushups  -- God help me.

So I'll compromise.  The dogs are getting longer walks, for a start.  They're well pleased.  I'll ride my bicycle around in the evenings as well, a few days a week.  That's probably sufficient.  The old endorphins start to flow, fossilized lymph nodes get back into action, and the brain goes from despair to delight.

Starting tomorrow.  Tonight, I'm feeling sorry for myself.

Why I scrupulously root out typographical errors

When I was a kid, around the same year the Rolling Stones released Black and Blue, I had an ancient upright typewriter that was my pride and joy (alongside a shortwave radio and a bonsai tree).

On this instrument (the typewriter, not the bonsai tree), I wrote a report in which I substituted “farts” for “facts.” The keyboard was quite steep, and the “R” was directly above the “C,” so it was a plausible mistake.

Unfortunately, the sentence I’d intended to write was “detectives sniff out the facts and find out who did it.”

Now I am a professional writer.

Off It Goes Again

I just sent my latest draft back to editor Ed.  Picked over 20,000 words out of the manuscript, often one word at a time.  It's like eating a lobster.
Fun fact: I have never eaten a lobster.  Not because they're traif, but because I stopped eating seafood at the age of ten, and gave up meat entirely when I was eighteen.  But they sure make good metaphors.

Sometimes, when editing, part of a story will seem to be set in stone, often from the very first draft.  There's just nothing that can change.  It won't get shorter, it won't get more concise.  But I know this is some kind of a failure to see the thing properly, because everything that has ever been written could be made shorter with one more draft.
And shorter, of course, is closer to God.

So here's a writing exercise I do when this happens, whether it's an essay, a novel, or a screenplay.
I start editing from the end.  I go page by page, backwards, through the story.  Often the overlong parts, the vague passages that had to run on because I couldn't make the point briefly, will leap out on the page.

As far as I can tell, this works because it makes the story look fresh.  Reading out of order, every paragraph can be seen getting in the way of the one that follows it.  You can't edit for logic or flow in this manner, but that seems to be part of the advantage.  All there is left is the information on the page, unaffected by the pages around it.  In addition, going backwards through a story, you aren't anticipating what you know happens next. 
It is a curse writers must endure: they can never experience their own work with the eyes of a reader.

So the next best thing I've found is to experience it backwards.  Always cutting, cutting.

The Edits Of March

So far this week I have removed enough material for a novel from my novel.  Rule of thumb: if you love something, cut it.  What's left is the story.

Editing For Length

It happens with screenplays all the time: the thing runs long, and it has to be cut down.  Crucial scenes are flung out the window, subplots and characters hacked apart.  It doesn't matter that much with a script, because there are so many creative people downstream.  If something's missing, it will be replaced.

But with books, the writer is the last word on everything in the manuscript.  What's on the page is what the reader will see, not something interpreted by 200 other people into a completely different medium.  So when I wrote my first novel, I went ahead and wrote everything I could come up with.  Every detail, every conversation -- if I thought of it, I added it.

And ended up with a gigantic manuscript.

To Simon & Schuster's credit, they bought the entire thing.  But the cows have come home to roost among the chickens.  I have to make the manuscript shorter... by 30,000 words.

To put that in perspective, the novel Fahrenheit 451 runs around 46,000 words.

First, there are entire scenes and situations I can cut out.  I spent the day doing this.  Massive chunks of material removed in this way.  So the cast of characters goes from point A to point C -- if I don't mention there was ever a point B, nobody's the wiser.  I'll miss the material, but the audience won't.

Second, there are story beats that can be condensed.  I shortened an entire chapter into a single sentence today.  The material needs to be there for the rest of the story to make sense, but it doesn't require anything more than the most basic exposition.  I liked the stuff I cut.  But I didn't need it.

Finally, there's whittling.  I've gone through the manuscript looking for description I could shorten and dialogue I could trim.  I cut down a description of an outboard motor, for example.  Nobody cares if it's Chinese, or if it runs rich, or if it's a fast engine.  There just needs to be a motor.  In many ways this category is the most satisfying.  I can imagine Melville doing it:


If I'd had any friends, they would have called me Ishmael Horowitz, or just Ishmael for short. 

Hi!  My name is Ishmael Horowitz.

Call me Ishmael.

However, when the problem runs to 30,000 words, the only way to get through the undergrowth is with a machete, not a scalpel.  Back to the jungle.

On Writing Fast

The faster a fellow can get the first draft written, the sooner he has something to write.

Right When You're Getting Rolling

My editor on Rise Again sent me a note last night: "... I've been going over your revisions and (don't get an ulcer) have come to the conclusion that it still needs to be cut down some more as it's running long...thoughts?"

I'm perfectly sympathetic.  The book is one hella thick document.  I came up with half a dozen places I can remove entire passages, compress time, delete incidents.  This doesn't make me happy.  I wouldn't have written the damn things if I didn't think they had a place in the story.  But I get it.

700 page first-time novels are a faithier than a wiser thing to attempt.  And I'm not delusional -- unless you're Tolstoy, you can cut any book down and make it better.  Think of audiobooks -- they often abridge those to make the reading smoother, and several authors have remarked upon how much better the book is without the excised material.

So no worries at all.  I can work on that.  But -- I'm in the throes of getting my next book started.  This is a miserable time to get derailed by another project, even if it's the one I'm getting paid for.

So there you have it, gang.  Another example of why there's no substitute for developing the ability to work on more than one thing at a time.  It's like this: 9 hours per day for the day job.  4 hours for the new novel.  3 hours to edit the previous novel.  The rest is free time.

Which is why I don't take anything for the insomnia.  

That All-Important Third Book

I'm in the fast and furious writing mode now, racing to get my first 80-100 pages written.  I find the way to get anything done is to treat the first draft as so much dirty paper: get a hundred pages inked up, regardless of the quality of the writing.  

My first draft is always like that, regardless of medium -- screenplays, essays, and the rest.  Just hammer something out, get it to about the right length, and make it unsuck later.  There's something terribly daunting about the absence of written pages, far more so than the challenges posed by having written a ream of tendentious, poorly conceived rubbish. 

At least once I've written something, it looks like a novel from ten feet away.  That's why I think it's a good idea to print as you write, too.  Get that artifact going.  See the pages pile up.  For that matter, I often design the cover before the book is finished.  Same reason.  It helps me imagine the thing in its finished form.

First drafts, I'm the sorcerer's apprentice, raising hell with powers I scarcely comprehend.  The second draft is when the adult enters the room and sorts things out. 

Research For The Next One

I'm amassing notes: Iowa corn- and soybean-growing data, economic charts on farming; horticulture, Midwestern farm architecture... And of course alien abduction stories.  Information on cows, autism, plastic surgery, and evangelical Christian dogma.  Once I have enough stuff gathered together, I fill in the outline, take a deep breath, and write like hell.

This one is based on a screenplay, as was my first novel.  So I already have a 95-page outline with action and dialogue.  But screenplays are amazingly spare -- there's almost nothing in them, like haiku.  You get brief strokes of information, as if glimpsed in fragments of a broken mirror -- enough to tell the story, with voids all around them.  It's the many other artists, the actors, directors, production designers, composers, special effects people, and so forth,  that fill those voids to make a film script into the movie, fully realized. 

So I'll still need to flesh the story out quite a lot.  When I'm adapting a script into a novel, I have to play the role of all those other creative professions.  The writer fills in the blanks.  A great deal of that can be done in the outlining stage, by exploring what the audience needs to know to understand the story.  Some of the research is just interesting background: the specialized language of farmers, for example, or peculiar things that happen to livestock.  Some of it is for authenticity.  Some of it will help tie the story to the setting, and the characters to both.

In addition, this is intended to be a short, punchy book, not much more than 200 pages long.  Therefore I have two things to work with: the "screenplay-as-outline," and the length of the novel.  I know I can only expand on the thing a certain amount.  I'll have to choose a quick rhythm for the narration, and concentrate more on action and dialogue than detailed description.

We'll see how it goes.  Life is full of interruptions these days, so I'll have to hope the timing is right when I commence writing like mad to get those initial fourscore pages done.

Technical Difficulties

If anybody found themselves in a mysterious blank-page redirect loop on this blog, my apologies.  There was a corrupted hit counter on the page.  Many bloggers had this problem recently.

All should be well now.

Rise Again: Edits done

Golly, what a charge that was.  I spent the last couple of weeks hammering through a heap of pages four inches tall, and tonight, I finished off the last edits.

the manuscript

The pages were my editor's second-round comments, mostly looking at ways to tighten the manuscript, make it shorter and faster-moving.  There will be another round of changes, but it will be minor stuff, mostly oddments of continuity and formatting.  This one was the big bear.

My editor, by the way, is the illustrious Ed Schlesinger.  He's a super guy to work with, genuinely interested in the stories he's editing, even if they're about the zombie apocalypse.  He happens to be extremely well-versed in zombie lore.  I've never stumped him, not even with the deepest mysteries of Italian zombie cinema.  We get along.

So next come the copy editors, combing nits and arguing with me about the use of "em" (for "them") without the truncating apostrophe, and of course my pet word "fucken," which is the casually spoken, interjected version of "fucking;" I only use the traditional spelling when greater emphasis is indicated, or to describe the specific act.  They might also take issue with my obsessive use of the em-dash, but I love those things.  They whiz along.

Meanwhile, I have a terrible impasse to deal with, as predicted in an earlier post.  I flamed out entirely in the beginning stages of what was supposed to be my next novel.  I've already said the trick for me is to charge through the first hundred or so pages like a horde of satanic flaming elephants were in hot pursuit.  If I can't do this, I'm in trouble.

Circumstances arose.  I couldn't do it, and now I'm in trouble.

So what I'll probably do now is pick up my alternate project (I mention this elsewhere, too -- a second project is always a good thing to have around), and work up a detailed outline of that.  Then I'll attack that project as my primary task.

This may be fortuitous.  This alternate project is likely to be a short novel, less than 250 pages.  Ed has only one persistent complaint about my work: I write long.  He would be delighted to inherit something brief.

I'll take a couple of days to reflect on my sins, then it's off to the races again.

Deadlines And Word Counts

I'm editing for my life.  300 pages left.  Looks like I'll have to slip my deadline by a few days.  In the professional arts, nothing is worse than that.

In my life as a visual artist, deadlines are sacred and immutable.  I grew up in an art-centered household, so my entire life the deadline has been of similar potency to the Ten Commandments.  This deadline is self-imposed -- I think my editor is chuffed to have a writer that cares about these things at all -- but it's still a deadline, and it has a big impact on the velocity of the book project going forward.  If I'm not putting my back into it, why should they do so?

This is a genuine edit, by the way.  The first round of changes was a second draft, with fairly extensive chunks of rewriting.  This time the revisions are mostly tightening what's already written: a turn of phrase here, an expository line there.

But it's slow going, because another task before me is to try to cut this beast down by 50 pages, if I can.  Books aren't cheap to produce, and this thing is an epic about the end of the world, weighing in at over 170,000 words.

Word count is one of those things writers like to torture themselves with.  Screenplays aren't measured in words, but in pages, so screenwriters torture themselves about page counts, but otherwise it's the same for every branch of the scrivening arts.  Consensus is that a first novel had damn well be shorter than 80,000 words.  Nobody will even look at a story longer than 100,000 words, which makes for a book around 480 pages in length.

Um yeah.

So my book is going to be almost 800 pages long.  That's a big, expensive book to produce, and a hell of an investment for a publisher to make on a first novel by a largely unknown writer.  I'm trying to whittle it down -- 700 pages is still a massive novel.  But as these things go, it's not getting significantly shorter, no matter how much material I chop out.  This is the genius of careful outlining: you only write what you need to tell the story.

It seems I needed rather a lot, in this case.

So onward, with one deadline blown!