Here’s a cute little video. Something warm and inspirational for the holidays:
Oh, and I just finished Chapter Three and I’m on to Chapter Four (with a goodly part of Five already written).
To be fair, though, these are much shorter chapters.
Additionally, they feel much sharper and more to the point. MUCH less dilly-dallying.
I’m not 100% sure how I stumbled onto the following story from Salon.com. Nobody emailed it to me. Nothing in my broswer links to it. Same for Twitter and my IM accounts.
I guess it fell from the sky right to me. That’s cool. It’s a great, quick read and, while I’m not racing home to sell the house and move into a van, it is, at the very least, thought-provoking:
Pinched – “I live in a van down by Duke University” – Salon.com.
Just loving this so very much:
Once again, I’ve done a horrible job of keeping up with the blog. The issue — as I believe I’ve offered before by way of an excuse — is that I’ve been busy and running ragged and by the time I finish writing and what-not for the night, I tend to collapse into bed.
Last night I had to wake myself up in my desk chair to go to bed. Sigh.
But, it’s been good. I’ve been writing — I’ve actually moved on from the long-suffering First Draft and we’re now on Chapter Two of the much-anticipated Second Draft. Had a little hiccup there for a moment as I considered (foolishly) swapping from a first-person present-tense narrative to a first-person past-tense narrative.
It didn’t work. Thematically. Dramatically. Some other-ally. It wasn’t horrible, it just . . . didn’t work.
So, here we go. The original Chapter One was something idiotic like 11,000 words long. The new Chapter One is about 2,300 words long. Tight. Gets where it needs to go. Pushes perfectly (I hope) into Chapter Two.
The things I cut were superfluous to the nth degree. Well, I will clarify that: they fit into what I *thought* I was doing last January, but now that elements and plot and characters have clarified themselves and what they want to be doing, they don’t need to be there at all.
Poof. Gone.
I knew that was going to happen by about mid-way through the First Draft. What I’ve got now is a little engine that (I hope) can. Can roll. Can push. Can move.
There are other elements of the story that are going to be cut. I’ve been putting together notes for stuff I want to happen in coming chapters and my hope is it’s going to be tight and solid. One thing missing from the First Draft was a real sense of urgency. My fault entirely — I wasn’t sure how I wanted to offer danger up, either to the characters or to the reader. I wasn’t sure what direction the “threat” needed to come from, so it sort of came from all over. Too diffused.
Think I’ve got that licked.
Something else I’ve been working on is tightening up the prose. Dialog and narrative flavor. (spoiler) Galen is our narrator and I need him to have a consistent way of speaking from beginning to end. His voice needs to carry the reader, but it also needs to tell you things about him. He’s our eyes and ears, after all. We’re seeing what he’s seeing, how he’s seeing it. It’s of vital importance, then, that I be consistent in how he’s sharing, what he’s sharing and why he’s sharing it.
I don’t know how interesting it’s going to be talking about the Second Draft. The story is — mostly — all there. Start to finish, I’ve got a pretty good idea what’s going to happen. I know what Galen’s story is, what Kara’s story is, what China’s story is, what Joe’s story is and what Susan’s story is. I believe I know how they all fit together.
There’s a certain confidence I’ve got going on pushing into the Second Draft. It’s interesting but, going from scratch, there’s a lot of BS that works its way in. As a writer, you do that because you don’t know what’s going to work and what’s going to flop. You put it all in the First Draft and you tell yourself, “I can cut this later. Let’s see where it goes.”
If the First Draft was chiseling the eight foot by six foot chunk of marble into a rough approximation of a statue, what I’m doing now is refining that, bringing out the finer details, making the decisions which I hope will prove the final (or semi-final) decisions in the story.
I’m likely going to cut between 30,000 and 50,000 words, if not more (and, I’m sure, add about 10,000 to 15,000 “new” words) before I’m done. The final book should be somewhere in the neighborhood of 60,000 to 70,000 words, maybe creeping up to 75,000 words, but I don’t think more than that. There’s a lot to cut and a lot to rewrite but I think the core is there. In fact, I know the core is there — the core’s not the problem — it’s the details and the bits around the core I’m working on now.
So, Chapter One in the can. Chapter Two and maybe bits of Three for tonight. Don’t know how long this is going to take, getting to THE END, but it feels both closer than ever and more solid than ever before. I’m sure this book will need a LOT more work when the Second Draft is done, but this is really, I feel, the defining version. The first was shaping, but this is actually making the book what it’s going to be, in the end.
And, here we go.