Where do I begin . . .

I keep thinking of things I should post to my blog, and then I never seem to get around to it. Then when I finally get time, I sit in front of the computer trying to remember what amazing insight I had and coming up empty.

I've been getting a lot of great revision done on Vanishing Act lately. I've crossed another milestone on the way down, and now I'm at 82,000 words. I really am finding that now, months later, it's easier for me to make some of the tough changes.

You're not supposed to blog about this, because allegedly agents and/or editor sometimes look up the blogs of people they're considering, and you don't want them to know how long you've been looking for or how many people have rejected you, but I sent out my very first query/partial for Vanishing Act Friday. (I guess if a really long time passes without a bite, I can always come back and edit this line out.)

While I was out, I also mailed off submissions for a writing contest for me and for my wife. There's kind of a funny story, there. I wanted to keep working on making my manuscript better for as long as I could, right up until the deadline. There were some specific searches I wanted to get done for junk words, passive constructions, and so forth. Like any metropolitan area I'm familiar with, we have a late night post office at the airport, where I tend to run things when I'm up against a postmark deadline. So I went into Friday night fully intending to get our submissions to the post office some time between 11 pm and midnight. I worked backward, figuring I should try to get there by eleven, to leave some cushion. I figured on a half hour of driving, so I should leave home by 10:30. I figured I'd give myself an hour to do all the printing and formatting (that may seem like a lot, but the contest had very specific guidelines. Names removed from manuscripts, a thirty word bio, a thirty word logline, three copies of the first fifty pages, and so forth. So I figured I wanted to be done trying to revise by nine or nine-thirty.

Well I'm not sure where the time went--I think putting the manuscript together took even longer than I allowed for--but I ended up leaving the house at 11:30. I got to the post office at 11:56, and ran in with my four packages. There wasn't a deadline really on the agent submission, so I did the three contest submissions first. As each postmarked stamp came out of the machine, I checked the date and did a little dance for each one that came out April 30th. When I finally did the one for the agent submission, it came out postmarked May 1.

O_O

Okay, maybe that was a bit closer than I intended to cut it.

Then again, I have friends who congratulate you if you get a tax refund of zero, because that means you avoided giving the government any more of your money than they were entitled to. I suppose you could call this a win, because I literally got every last possible second of revision in on these contest entries before I sent them out.

It's just a flesh wound . . .

The thing with knowing I'm too wordy/my stories are too long is that sometimes I find myself going through manuscripts pointing at chunks and saying, "This can go," with more regard for whether it's necessary than for whether it's good. Fair enough--the art of the short story is precisely the art of writing without a wasted word, no? But where is the point where I actively make my story worse, by chopping to the point where it gets, well, choppy? Sometimes I'm afraid I'm taking something that's basically okay and damaging it in the name of brevity.

No answers, today. Just questions.

And now you know the rest of the story

I was thinking more about last night's post this morning, and I think in my rambling and flailing around, I actually put my finger on something.

Let me tell you a bit about how story generation goes for me. I'll get the barest suggestion of an idea from whatever--a bit of nonfiction, or a dream, or a chance reverie--and I'll automatically begin to generate story elements as I see the possibilities in the premise. A scene, a complication, even just a line of dialogue. And then when I sit down to write the stories, I try to arrange the plot in such a way as to get all that good stuff in, and that's where the contrived bits come in. Because some of those ideas are like different branches of a timeline . . . the story could go this way, OR it could go that way, and I'm trying to make it go both. Is it any wonder my stories sometimes hemorrhage under the strain? It's obvious in hindsight, but I wasn't even questioning some of these ideas . . . it was all good stuff, or so it seemed, and so I wanted to include it all. Now I'm seeing that I have to make choices sometimes, include some ideas I like, and leave out some ideas that I like and wish I could have written in.

So referring to killing darlings was an apt comparison. (Or maybe everybody but me knew that killing darlings was not just about verbiage, but about plot points too, and I'm just coming to that realization late.)

-o-

It's been a hell of a summer, hasn't it? I think it will go down in my mind as the summer of death. It seems like a disproportionate number of national news stories in the last month or so have been about high profile deaths. One of them touched me personally.

You probably know about the monorail crash at Disney early July 5th that killed one driver. That driver was a former student of mine. In fact, I taught him for three years, and was also the sponsor of the FIRST Robotics Team, which he was an integral part of, for another year. America knows him, if they know him at all, as someone who was proud to be a monorail driver and loved his job. That's all true, but I also knew him as a genius, and a generous, funny kid. Monorail driving was a job he was pleased to have, but it wasn't going to be his career. He was a senior in college, and he had a very bright future.

My thoughts and feelings about this go far beyond this little banality I'm about to share here, but I try to focus on writing in this blog, and here's the connection I'm seeing between Austin's death and the writing ambitions I and my handful of regular readers share. A couple of posts back I talked about why some talented, even brilliant, people with artistic ambitions achieve them and some don't. I was talking about perseverance, basically, but now I'm also thinking about not wasting time. Austin was brilliant, but he didn't live long enough to put in his ten thousand hours. I'm sure he would have accomplished amazing things; he was just that special. It's unusual to die so young, but even those of us who live long enough to have a career and a family don't know if we'll make it to eighty, sixty-five, or just into our forties. So the thought I'm taking away from this right now is to make the most of your time, because you don't know how much of it you have.

Breakthroughs and too much to think about

I often find myself thinking, in the course of a day or week, "Gee, I should blog about that." Then the next time I'm getting ready to post an entry I feel like I've had so many of those moments they've either jostled each other out of my head, or I feel too fatigued to even do them justice. My blog posts tend to be long anyway . . . I don't want to make them longer!

I just finished the first draft of a short story I've been wrestling with, it seems, forever. I--seriously--began and abandoned it four separate times before I finally got a story I could live with. The first time I got 542 words in before I figured out it was crap. The second time, 3694. Third attempt: 430. Fourth attempt, a whopping 4672 before I figured out it was going nowhere. And finally, over the course of just three days, I pulled together a draft I'm happy with at 5132. Hopefully when I revise I'll get it under that magic 5000 barrier.

But first, 9338 words of crap.

You don't go through that much failure without learning a thing or two. At least, I hope not. Let's see if I can articulate what I did learn. I set out with the hope of taking some of the lessons I'd been learning over the past year and coming up with something shiny and new that showcased my progress. Despite that, I found myself writing dull stories about unlikeable people. (Part of my problem is that I think stories should be entertaining first, but I also want mine to be meaningful. It's challenging to pull off both.)

Then I came up with a premise that had a lot more potential, but my next attempt suffered, I eventually concluded, from being too contrived.

I think this is a new realization for me. I tend to have a pretty good idea of where I want a story to start and where I want it to end, and sometimes I abuse the crap out of it to get it from point A to point B. It was as though I were working with a living thing that was resisting the contortions I was trying to put it through. I've talked about killing darlings in the forms of phrases and scenes, and yeah, that's hard for me, but one of the lessons I think I needed to learn here was to kill my darlings among the plot points too. There were some arbitrary things I was cramming in my story that were making it not work, and I was getting writer's block trying to force myself to write something broken.

When I finally threw my story away for the fourth time, kept the premise I liked, but totally reimagined what I was going to do with it, I immediately came up with something more streamlined. For anybody into Swain, I wrote it in scenes, and pretty much glossed over the sequels to keep it short. I had the disaster at the end of each scene immediately pose the new goal, and no angsty deliberation on what to do next. Maybe it's just a fluke, but I've read successful short story writers talk about the point where they got it, where they figured out what kinds of ideas could be fleshed out in five thousand words and which could not. When I came up with that sequence of scenes, I knew I had it. I knew I could write it, and I knew I could write it in about twenty pages. Nothing seemed too contrived, and I was eager to sit down and get it all down. All that trying and failing, and the final story took three days to type.

So maybe I've had my a ha moment, at least in that regard. Only time will tell.

I also found, as I wrote this story, that each time I started to go off in a boring or meandering direction, I figured it out within a paragraph or too. It may be that I've written so much crap that I've finally become attuned to what JoeCrap smells like, and I'm getting better at recognizing it before I generate too much of it. God I hope so.

My wife doesn't understand why I've been focusing on short stories, when I have a completed novel ms, and when there's no money in short stories. Here's why: my biggest problem as a writer, I think, is my verbosity. I need to learn to write tighter, not for the sake of my shorts, but for the sake of my novels. Just because you've got a hundred thousand words or more to play with doesn't mean anybody wants to read a bunch of stuff that doesn't move the story, that you were too undisciplined as a writer to leave out. I'm focusing on short stories because if I can master the art of getting a complete, engaging tale told in 5,000 words, my novels will get better.

So I've got this story. I'm just happy it's done, and I'm happy it's not overlong. I like to think it's good, but flush from writing the thing, who am I to say?

I'll put it up here in a day or so, encrypted, when I've had a chance to clean it up. If I know you--that includes people whose blogs I've commented on and people who've commented on mine before--then you're welcome to read it and give me your thoughts. Just drop me a line when the time comes and ask me for the key. Then you can tell me if it's any good or not.

Getting back to the idea in my first paragraph . . . that's not all I wanted to talk about in this post, but I'm going to stop here for now anyway, because if not it will be too rambly.

Follow no rule off a cliff

That's what Linnea Sinclair always says. Actually, as I recall she says she got it from C.J. Cherryh.

I ran across this old blog entry today on the oft-repeated advice to "kill your darlings." Diana Peterfreund quotes Karen Hawkins, who recasts that advice as "Love the book, not the scene."

Now I've killed so many darlings in the last six months that I have a tag just for that. But those were things that needed to be cut. My protagonist playing a video game because I thought it might be fun to write about an old game I loved. Getting from point A to point B, because I'd done the research--I'd suffered for my art, and damnit, now it was your turn, dear reader. Scenes that weren't furthering the story--or that weren't furthering it enough to carry their weight in wordcount. The advice to cut things that are only in there because you wanted to put them there is good advice.

Love the book, not the scene.

I like it.

Love the story, not the phrase.

I have a tendency to write too long, so I'm always looking for things to cut. In Vanishing Act I resisted the temptation to take killing your darlings too far, mostly because I knew I needed to cut a lot more wordcount than I could by removing a phrase here and a phrase there. But in the past I've followed this advice off a cliff, and cut bits that weren't detracting from the story, that were actually good. I mean, come on, if writers cut out every turn of phrase they recognize as apt, poetic, clever, artistic, what have you, how does any great turn of phrase ever end up in a story?

Jesus, sometimes it feels like we need permission to use common sense.

It's probably just a phase

First I wrote the thing. Next my wife, my alpha reader, read it and pointed out the worst of the suck, which I then removed. Then I went through and chopped a third of my wordcount off--first by pulling out scenes and finding ways to make other scenes do their work, and then by going through and looking for sentences or paragraphs full of self-indulgent or boring writing I could cut. (I've got a blog for boring and self-indulgent writing; it doesn't need to go in my book!) Then I went through looking for amateurish writing. Over-reliance on the verb to be, overuse of the gerund form, overuse of my protagonist's name, overuse of garbage words like just and garbage constructions like he found himself . . . . And then I went through looking of ways not to take the suck out, but to put some good stuff in: more sensory details (but not in overwhelming quantities), the occasional bit of figurative language, and so forth.

And you know what? I'm starting to like this thing.

I'm starting to like it a lot.

I've certainly gone through periods of hating it. Times when I felt sure this was an unbelievably stupid story, that nobody would want to publish--let alone read--it, and that it would just become another trunk novel. And I've read enough writers' blogs to know that loving and hating your MS are just phases you go through. But I don't want to hear that. Right now I feel like I've got something people will enjoy. I feel like I've got something sellable. I feel like all the time I've put in revising and revising and revising are paying off.

I didn't do anything like this for Prototype. I finished my first draft, looked at my wife's comments, maybe did another read-through and touch-up myself, and sent it on its merry way.

Chump.

I've posted before about my feeling that I'm pretty proficient with the nuts and bolts of the language, but that I was frustrated at still detecting something amateurish in my writing that I couldn't quite put my finger on. I wasn't finding that level of polish I see in the books I like to read. Well I may be delusional, but I'm starting to see it.

(Yes, this is a terribly self-congratulatory post. That's why it's my blog. Read until you find you nausea point and then feel free to stop. This is where I put all those natterings I don't want to inflict on any unwilling victims.)

All my MS needed was a little lot of work.

Go figure.

(Say, anybody wanna beta-read?)

Ever notice that your odometer doesn't change when you drive in reverse?

The rest of my darlings are safe . . . I'm done cutting for now.

I've gone from 120,084 words to 84,210, for a decrease of 35,874 words. Of course, the word count will continue to change as I continue to revise, but this is a good point to stop and take stock.

It took me about six months to write 120,000 words. It took four or five months to cut 35,000. The implication would seem to be that cutting is a lot harder than creating. I'll tell you what--it's a hell of a lot less fun. What's frustrating is that everyone focuses on how many words you've written as a way of measuring your accomplishment. Clarke said you had, what, 500,000 words of crap in you? What about the words you excise--don't those count toward your growth?A lot of people have a hard time grasping that I've been productive at all for the last five months, since my word count hasn't increased.

On the other hand, it really is a lot better now. So much of the stuff I cut was just crap. Stuff that, in hindsight, I'm not entirely sure why I wrote in the first place. Details, details, details. I am a detail-oriented person, but one thing I've learned is the difference between the telling detail and overwhelming the reader with minutae. Writing clichés be damned: sometimes you need to tell and not show.

I don't imagine I'm done by any stretch, but I'm finally down to a wordcount that is not totally unreasonable for YA, and that's something to celebrate.

Tomorrow, I hope to polish off my synopsis. I've got the bones of it done, but right now it's just a dry plot summary. I need to have it capture the feel of the book. After that, I'll focus on the material that agents are going to want to see in their partials. First thirty pages, first three chapters, whatever. I've got a week off coming up, so I should be in good shape to get that done. I'll also be trolling for beta readers, hopefully in the next week or so.

Weird milestones

I just crossed 90,000 words.

On my way *down*.

If you've been following this blog you know I've been struggling to chop down my bloated MS, but to anybody else, the idea of milestones that are *lower* than your current wordcount must seem odd at the least. F'rinstance, I can't help but notice that Writertopia doesn't have any counter doodads for *reducing* wordcounts.

80,000 may not be reachable, but for now, I'll take a moment to enjoy the accomplishment of deleting 25% of a draft.

It was somewhere around chapter eight or nine that I learned to write

I finally got through shortening that monstrous chapter seven. If it isn't tight yet, then at least it's tighter. It took a couple of passes or so and at least a week of work, though.

Then I looked through the next couple of chapters, and found some stuff that actually seems pretty good to me. I've felt for some time that my writing by the end of the book was tons better than it was at the beginning, but it was still nice to come to some prose and think, you know, I'm not particularly ashamed of any of this.

Who stuffed all this CRAP into my book?!

Seeing what's got to go and what can stay is a lot like looking at one of those gestalt pictures, or maybe one of those 3-D stereograms. I've been struggling with one of my chapters in particular for several days now--originally a 7,000-word beast of a chapter, now down a couple thousand words or so. So I made a sweep, looking for stuff I thought was boring or self-indulgent and pulling it, and shortened it by a fair bit, but I thought it was still too long, so I decided to look again. Now I see all sorts of stuff that really isn't moving the story forward that somehow I missed before. And it's weird, because I read the stuff a couple of times just looking for junk to cut, and somehow thought, "this is okay . . . this is okay" and then had a moment of "What the hell?! Am I seriously spending three paragraphs talking about this?!"

I don't know whether to be pleased or troubled. On the one hand, I'm finding this crap and removing it. On the other, the way I can miss it and then just have it snap into view later worries me. How much writing that bogs the plot down instead of advancing it am I not seeing? If I didn't have this pressure to get under a certain wordcount, would I just be blithely sending this off to agents and stuff?

As with staring at stereograms, looking for pointless prose to prune gives me a headache.

They say that after you kill for the first time, it gets easier and easier . . .

So pretty much as soon as I decided that was it, I'd cut all I could, I needed to shift my focus from reducing wordcount to actively making the words that remain better . . . it got easier.

I knew from past experience that I couldn't cut substantially by going word by word. I've already learned that doing so just kills any nice turns of phrases or metaphors I might have while doing almost nothing for my word count. So I figured the thing to do was to cut scenes that weren't moving the story forward very much, and make some other scene accomplish whatever those scenes *were* doing for me. And this worked. I cut about 20,000 words this way. Unfortunately, this left me still pretty far from where the industry says a YA novel from a new author should be, but I couldn't cut any more scenes, so I decided to just go with what I had and hope for the best.

I did have a few little things I thought I could look at, though. Parts within important scenes where I was perhaps a little self-indulgent. Having Chris do or think about something just because *I* wanted to write about it. I also think I tended to spew more earlier in the book, because I wanted to make sure it wasn't too short. (Hah freaking hah.)

So I decided to take one last look, and cut . . . and cut . . . and cut. I've cut another six thousand words or so just this week and, what's more, I'm feeling that what's left behind is starting to take shape. It's starting to look halfway good to me again, and I'm regaining my enthusiasm. I actually got up at 5:30 this morning to work on my novel. And I'm really just getting started . . . I've only looked at the first five or six chapters this way. I might not make it down to my wordcount goal, but I'm starting to think I'll make it to within shouting distance of it.

It's funny.

Character Voice

Chris's father is a man of few words. Or at least, he was. Now I'm cutting scenes but trying to make sure the necessary information is still there, and he's having to say more and more at any one time, and I'm finding myself struggling to keep his voice. I guess I'll have to put it all down first, and then work on making it sound like him. It's frustrating, though, because his uniqueness of voice was one of the things I was proud of. Not having all my characters just sound sort of like me, you know?

Anyway, that's just something I'll have to work through, but I found it interesting, and what's a blog for if not for that?

Effect without cause, sub-atomic laws, scientific pause

I've been getting increasingly uncomfortable with the fact that I haven't made a backup of my novel since mid-August or so. I've since rectified that.

I think I can realistically cut another eight or nine-thousand words. Beyond that, I just don't know how to do it without making the story suffer. So I'm going to cut what I think I can but start moving away from cutting to more active suck-vacuuming. (i.e., concentrating on the quality of what remains, rather than on what to take out.)

In other news, I sure can be an insufferable prig sometimes.

Hey, I see that I got my 666th visitor. Greetings, satanic portent from Arkansas!

3.0

I've finished a round of cutting/editing/tightening up. I'm down to 103,219 words, which is still much too long. I have one or two people that I know would be interested in seeing it now, at this length, but If I'm going to have to cut another 20,000 or so words anyhow, it seems to make more sense to do that cutting before I submit to anyone. I'm going to take another look at my outline tonight and see what else I can find that could go.

On another note, I just realized that I never heard back on a story I submitted back in April. That's one frustrating thing with not doing simultaneous submissions. It takes so long for markets to get back to you that you forget all about your works that are out there. And this is at least the third story I can think of that I've never gotten a response back on. (Though at five months, it's not yet out of the question that I could get a response back before too long. I've got others that dropped off the face of the earth years ago. Including one agent's request for the full MS of Prototype. Dang it, when I spend the money to print and ship a 90,000 word MS, I'd at least like to hear back from people.)

(Before anybody mentions it, yes, I've queried the market. And on the other, older ones, yes I've long ago assumed the worst and moved on.)

Why can't I just be brilliant?

I have pretty well suck-vacuumed chapter one. (I totally stole that phrase from Elizabeth Bear, but it's so dang apt!) It took two rewrites to do it. I'm not talking about mere editing or cleaning up, but substantial rewriting of pages of stuff. And hey, now I have a tight little seven-page chapter where Chris's voice comes through loud and clear. I have felt a vague reluctance to show my work before, but I feel nothing like that with this chapter now.

But Lord, I hope the rest of it's easier.

Sadly, though, this brings me to the conclusion that I am not one of those lucky few who can turn out final draft quality prose on the first run-through. I had thought perhaps I was. I mean, my first drafts are pretty clean when it comes to grammar and spelling, and I do a decent job of varying sentence structure without needing to think about it too much. I have a writing style that's natural and that I like. But that's where we get to the difference I have mentioned before between merely competent prose and, you know, writing that sings, that doesn't sound amateurish. Apparently that takes actual work.

Drat.

Killing my darlings

I learned a new phrase this week. ::points up:: That's what I'm doing right now. Well, actually, right now I'm blogging about killing my darlings, because actually doing it is too hard.

And of course, my productivity has plummeted since school began. Hopefully I will reach some sort of equilibrium with that soon, and be able to be at least as productive as I was last spring. I've got too much interest in this book for me to fall off the face of the earth now.

I'm contemplating doing one of those dreaded mirror-gazing scenes. Mine would be different, of course. I'm not doing it as a cheap way of giving you a full visual without breaking POV. Nothing like, "She gazed in the mirror on her way out the door. Her long, brown hair framed her green eyes and freckled skin, and rested on the shoulders of her green turtleneck. 'Too fat,' she thought disapprovingly, despite the fact that she weighed barely over a hundred pounds." But I've killed the scene in which I established that Chris looks young for his age, and that's a fairly important plot point. So I'm thinking that he can be annoyed over a scene offstage, just before this scene, in which someone told him he looked like he was X years old, where he briefly examines his reflection in a car window, wondering if it's really true, and when it'll stop being true. That doesn't seem quite as egregious to me.

On the other hand, in a prepublished author, I'm not sure it's a good idea to even skirt by a cliché. Will editors and such be paying attention to the nuance, or will they say, "Ugh, a mirror scene. How trite!" and toss it?

Cutting: Icarus's Labyrinth goes emo on you

I needed an impartial person to help me go through my MS and find scenes I could cut. This week, my brilliant wife helped me do just that. There were some tough decisions. Some scenes I love that aren't strictly necessary. Scenes that serve a purpose, but where the purpose can be served by another scene. A whole freaking character. Luís, who went from being a very important character to being a minor character to being left out altogether. Sorry bro. I like to try to work at least one Latino character into everything I write, but now this story's just about all white.

But still, it wasn't too hard to make the cuts--on my outline.

Now I'm trying to implement those decisions. And it's not as easy as highlighting scenes and pressing the delete key. Scene one established my protagonist's age and physical appearance, and some sense of what the chip on his shoulder is. But it's too similar to scene eleven, really, and scene two has some nice, tense action that will make a good opening hook. But now I've got to find a way to convey the information that used to be in scene one. I've got to look closely at the good stuff I'm taking out and think about making the story work without any obvious gaps. Sorry for going gruesome on you, but it's the difference between having your dog put down and doing it yourself.

And now I'm back to getting up at six every morning, and staying up late grading and lesson-planning. It's finally Friday . . . and I'm exhausted.

(Say, why do places like Writertopia only make counters for counting up to a certain goal? What about those of us trying to make works shorter?)