Writing Is Rewriting

During the Patriots/Green Bay game last night, I got back into my novel revision which during this pass is strictly cuts and fixing word usage when/where it jumps out.   With regret, I've cut several whole scenes and am contemplating cutting a semi-major character and all those references.  Ugh!  This is the part of writing that isn't much fun.  On the plus side, I must have sliced and diced several thousand words.  If I expunge the character or at least his many phone calls, I can purge a few thousand more, making the novel . . . the right length?

Do you like slim books like Dame Agatha Christie's that can be started at 9:00 p.m. and finished at 11:00?   Or do you like the big meaty novels of P.D. James or Elizabeth George?   Every reader has her faves.  I know local publishers who will not look at a book with more than 75,000 words (slim, slim, slim) which eliminates character depth, subplots, local color and really hones in one one story line.   That's not how I write, and those slim books are straight whodunnits, usually small town cozies.    Do you know what a so-called "cozy" mystery is? It's a story where "more tea is spilled than blood?"  Isn't that a great description?  Miss Marple comes to mind.  Usually a cozy has an amateur sleuth set in a small town and the murder occurs off scene, in other words, no graphic violence.  No sex and usually no bad language. Your 12 year old could read it.

The word "lite" comes to mind, but these are a beloved part of the genre, also known as "traditional" mysteries, but those can have sex and violence and a professional sleuth, think Spenser, Robert Parker's slim volumes without any "kerfluffel,"   Of course, Robert Parker wrote 3-4 books a year, so naturally they wouldn't be 125,000 word tomes.   The Boston mystery community misses him a lot.  No one can take Parker's place.

Back to rewriting.  Parker claimed he never did, that his first draft was also his last, and he wrote fast, so this is a great mystery to me how anyone would NEVER have a clunky sentence or forget the color of the car a character drove, or eye color, or all the details that make a book believable.  I genuflect before such genius.

I make my corrections in red ink.  It will be a job and a half to fix the manuscript.  Word for MAC has been throwing hissy fits lately.    Spell check aborts, losing my changes, the tool bar has to be tweaked every time a document is opened, and now the printer thinks I'm printing "small" pages and is doing something goofy to the page.  If you go to the help screens, you want to run off screaming, because the "fixes" are hideously technical and come with lots of warnings and even an old geek like me wouldn't  touch some of them with a ten foot pole. I don't know if re-installing Word for MAC would help.  Maybe for a while, but it began to crap out after just a few months.

My desktop looking neat for a change

Well, bleak thoughts that do not help the situation.   When software doesn't work as intended,  it makes life very difficult, like when the new financial software changed all my accounts to Euros during a upgrade and I couldn't change them back.  Alas, Microsoft Money, you were such  a gem, why did they get rid of you?

Enough gnashing of teeth.  It's the solstice, almost and the days will become longer and winter is truly here.  Not my favorite season, and once the holidays are over, endlessly bleak.   St. Agnes Eve and all that.  "The owl for all his feathers was acold."  How I love that poem.  Reading Proust again, too.  The favorite authors keep calling.

Back to editing and chopping out words and paragraphs.  I notice that sometimes the exact same thought is stated twice, and I can just strike out the poorest statement.   Chop those words.  Out!  Out!  Damn word.

Grapeshot

Completing a manuscript

So. . . . on Saturday around 4:30 p.m., about a month or maybe even a year late, I finished the first draft of my new manuscript, tentatively titled, In Flight, and  very tentatively, because while I was writing the book another book with that title was published.  So it goes.

Weeks ago my writing group said the thrilling conclusion was weak, which meant the main character had to get herself out of her predicament  by herself, and the only way she could do that (that I could see) was to shootl the bad guy.  Which she did.  Of course he was coming after her with a knife, yada, yada.  But that one act changed the whole tenor and feel of the story.  Which meant:

I had to create yet a third point of view to do a much darker ending

Rewrite a bunch of scenes from that point of view
Retrofit everything
Then write the ending

I was busier  than a one-armed paper hanger and I kind of felt like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.  Aren't old sayings fun?

Anyway, I persevered, and now the manuscript is ready for rewriting.  Writing is rewriting.   I have exceeded any reasonable word count and I need to cut and pare like crazy.   Started in on that last night, one day after finishing.  Found a bunch of useless words and they will soon be gone.  I usually know the beginning and ending of the book and maybe a few scenes in the middle.   Actually, with this book I winged it because the character came and sat on my shoulder and began to tell me her story.  Then she stopped, and I had to figure out the rest of it.  I only knew what she told me.  How weird is that?

So the ending was half-sad, half-happy.  There is still much work to be done. And my published novel won't be available  on Kindle for Christmas, nope that ball was dropped.   Oh well.  

Tomorrow I'll bake something and go for a walk, and post the recipe for those yummy apricot bars I've been bragging about.  There's always food to savor.  And words to pare.  What will I think of now when I awaken in the middle of the night?  For two years I been figuring out the plot.  Now?  Maybe plot points for the next book.  Become a plotter instead of a pantser (seat of the pants).   How do you like them apples?

Grapeshot