I’ve had a 50,000 word novel* hanging around a while. One of my editors got back to me with great feedback, and the other has been drafted into the armies of the damned, and they don’t have cell phones. I’m sure he’ll get back to me with edits on my draft just as soon as their campaign against the Falkland Islands wraps up.
* There is actually great debate in the NaNoWriMo community with regard to the definition of “novel,” especially since, by “modern” publishing standards, 50k words tends to be a bit on the short side. However, I side with the NaNo philosophy on this issue: “If you think you’re writing a novel, you’re writing a novel.”
That little snafu not withstanding, I’ve been attempting to transform my “first draft created in a blur throughout the month of November for my first ever NaNoWriMo win” into a “second draft that isn’t quite so horribly crafted and might have a semblance of value.” The eventual plan is to have a draft that someone wants to pay me some sort of sum of money for the publishing rights, after which I can be those filler books in the bookstore that serve to fill the small niches of the shelves not covered by books dealing with Star Wars, Twilight, Harry Potter, or Saint Louis Cardinals fans.
This is turning out to be harder than I thought.
When you’re writing a first draft, everything is new and exciting. Every word you put down on the page — in addition to getting you closer to the glorious goal of 50k for NaNoWriMo — is the next flick of a wrist, move of a hand, word of a mouth in your characters’ universe. Everything drives the story forward, by definition. Symbolism be damned. Foreshadowing be damned. Coherent clothing for your characters be damned. (Seriously, I had a character spontaneously change from jeans to a dress between lines of a conversation. Oops.)
Rewrites? Those are hard. First, there’s a lack of motivation. I had made the mistake of advertising my NaNoWriMo participation to my general [Facebook] public, and there was a screaming banshee of [Facebook] public humiliation and [Facebook] public scorn should I fail. She was always there, hovering over my shoulder, reminding me that while Caribou Coffee was usually terribly busy on a Thursday night and I was tired from a whole day of not doing anything, I had to go there. If I didn’t put 1500 more words to paper before I passed out from exhaustion tonight, I’d be behind the curve, and the banshee would get closer.
Second, there’s the operation inside the established framework. You’ve already written the scene, but now you’re rewriting it. There are even two distinct classes of the rewrite, and I’ve found both to be handcuffing. Handcuffing not in a sensual, “Oh, this is going to be a great Friday night,” sort of way, and not in a frustrating, “This is impossible, this is going to be a terrible Friday night,” sort of way, but in a way that erodes your
- The Perspective Change: Writing a scene from a different perspective. I’ve already had to do this three times (more or less), since my reviewer (rightfully) found the first draft’s structure confusing and stupid and, I quote, “not worth the virtual paper Adobe PDF is putting it on.” Okay, some of that’s hyperbole. But sitting down and rewriting from a different (and in this case, less-informed) perspective makes things harder than I’d like them.
- The Actor Change: This one’s even harder. Rewriting a scene without a character being present, because you’ve decided not to introduce him until a bit later, makes for tedious work. In practice, I just scrapped the original scene altogether, but the chicken-and-bailing wire construction of the first is still present in my brain, so I continue to drift toward the (now-(sometimes)-nonsensical) original flow of action.
Therein lies my biggest hurdle, then. Where the original novel was a flurry of words appearing in FrameMaker (fist bump to my large document management brosefs) and steadily driving the word count higher and higher, the rewrite is harder to measure that elusive beast of “progress.” A few nights ago, I had the opportunity to make “good progress on my novel.” And in retrospect, I did.
Even if the end result was only one page of rewrites completed. “Progress” is funny sometimes.