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In which I complain about editing
Good luck to all of you NaNo writers! *tips hat* I am not doing NaNoWriMo this year; it's more like NaNoEdMo, because I intend to spend my November this year dusting off my completed rough drafts (3 novels, 1 novella) and cleaning them up.
... or at least that was the idea. >_>
What I have on my editing docket is currently thus:
- an SF YA novel written in 2007/2008 (it was my 2007 NaNo, but I completed it in January of the following year, which I jokingly called JaNoWriMo)
- an SF novella written in 2008
- a fantasy YA novel started in 2006, completed in 2010
- an urban fantasy novel completed this past summer
Here is what I have discovered so far:
First of all, I really have learned to edit, or at least learned to kick my brain from "writing" to "revision" mode! And this is HUGE for me, because this is something I honestly could not do before. Oh, I could do line edits, and I could revise things a bit, but being able to take a whole manuscript, rip it apart, find the basic threads of theme and plot and figure out what I need to do in order to fix them -- I've kinda learned to do it over the last few years, and working on that long WC story this fall was my Editing 101 final exam, because I revised and rewrote the heck out of that thing. *g*
Before, I would look at a big manuscript that needed to be edited, and start poking at it on a sentence-by-sentence basis ... fix a thing here, a thing there ... maybe I'd even identify something that was structurally unsound, and attempt to fix it. But I was never able to do what I can do now, which is to look at the whole thing and go, "Oh, no wonder this feels weak, there's no character growth", or "this entire scene serves no purpose except a bit of cute character interaction; I can easily put that dialogue into this other scene and cut the deadweight". And so forth.
I was feeling on top of the world, until I realized that EVERYTHING I'VE WRITTEN now feels hideously, painfully deficient to me, and is going to require massive amounts of not just revision but wholesale rewriting. ;_;
The YA novel from 2010 I've shelved completely at this point, because it's going to take so much reworking that I may as well just take the characters (most of whom I really like) and put them in a whole new novel. The whole premise is heavily derivative, the first 20,000 words are mind-numbingly boring deadweight (which nevertheless contain seeds of important plot and character development that needs to be worked in somehow), I can't figure out what POV I want because nothing actually works right for the whole novel (so right now it switches from single-POV to multi-POV in the middle, but I need to stay in that single POV for the first half or I lose the entire element of suspense, and yet I need the multi POVs later) ... AUGH. Yeah. This one's probably never going to see the light of day.
The NaNo from 2007 I still really like, but I now realize that the basic premise for the entire plot doesn't make ANY SENSE AT ALL; it requires human beings to behave in a completely unhumanlike way -- that is, to do something which is nonsensical and completely counter to their own interests for no reason at all other than to kick off the events of the story. I can think of a different plot that would probably work, and I can keep the first half of the novel mostly intact, but the last half is going to need to be completely tossed and rewritten from scratch. Also, there is a metric buttload of research to be done before I can even outline it.
The novella - I took one look at that and went "Wow, there is no character growth at all in this". However, I can see exactly where a thread of character growth and development should go (no wonder the whole thing feels flat and a bit juvenile to me). I also found myself wanting to hard SF-ify it - take out the random space-opera-ish references to things like stunners and the implication that they have FTL, and replace it by seriously figuring out how their society and technology works. Which will probably require as much research and effort as just writing something fresh from scratch...
It's like fractal editing! I started off thinking that I had a manageable amount of work to do, but I look at it more closely and discover that each subtask has just expanded out to the size of the original task. AND IT JUST KEEPS HAPPENING. *sobs*
It's partly a side effect of having waited so long to edit these stories, too. I've changed a lot, and grown a lot as a writer since 2007. I have different priorities now than I did then -- I'm a lot more interested in my characters' inner lives, for one thing. I can recognize weaknesses in my own plotting skills that I never would have seen four or five years ago, so what seemed like a perfectly sound, sensible story to me then seems like a hopelessly deficient collection of plot holes now. Or else it isn't what I want to write anymore -- I think that's what's happening with the one that I want to turn from space opera into hard(er) SF: there's nothing inherently wrong with the handwavy science in the original, but now I want it to make scientific sense, which means tossing some of the less plausible plot devices and coming up with new ways to accomplish the same thing. (This is something of a problem since the whole story is based on an implausible plot device -- flying horses -- but I think I can make it plausible by giving them much lighter gravity; it is an alien planet, after all.)
All in all, I think I'm starting to see why a lot of pro writers recommend that you'll get a lot farther a lot faster if you write something new rather than continuing to rework your older stories. I'm not ready to drop any of these except that one YA (I really think it's unsalvageable, though I may change my mind later) but I'm starting to see how you could conceivably spend ten years rewriting the same novel over and over, never really getting anywhere.
... or at least that was the idea. >_>
What I have on my editing docket is currently thus:
- an SF YA novel written in 2007/2008 (it was my 2007 NaNo, but I completed it in January of the following year, which I jokingly called JaNoWriMo)
- an SF novella written in 2008
- a fantasy YA novel started in 2006, completed in 2010
- an urban fantasy novel completed this past summer
Here is what I have discovered so far:
First of all, I really have learned to edit, or at least learned to kick my brain from "writing" to "revision" mode! And this is HUGE for me, because this is something I honestly could not do before. Oh, I could do line edits, and I could revise things a bit, but being able to take a whole manuscript, rip it apart, find the basic threads of theme and plot and figure out what I need to do in order to fix them -- I've kinda learned to do it over the last few years, and working on that long WC story this fall was my Editing 101 final exam, because I revised and rewrote the heck out of that thing. *g*
Before, I would look at a big manuscript that needed to be edited, and start poking at it on a sentence-by-sentence basis ... fix a thing here, a thing there ... maybe I'd even identify something that was structurally unsound, and attempt to fix it. But I was never able to do what I can do now, which is to look at the whole thing and go, "Oh, no wonder this feels weak, there's no character growth", or "this entire scene serves no purpose except a bit of cute character interaction; I can easily put that dialogue into this other scene and cut the deadweight". And so forth.
I was feeling on top of the world, until I realized that EVERYTHING I'VE WRITTEN now feels hideously, painfully deficient to me, and is going to require massive amounts of not just revision but wholesale rewriting. ;_;
The YA novel from 2010 I've shelved completely at this point, because it's going to take so much reworking that I may as well just take the characters (most of whom I really like) and put them in a whole new novel. The whole premise is heavily derivative, the first 20,000 words are mind-numbingly boring deadweight (which nevertheless contain seeds of important plot and character development that needs to be worked in somehow), I can't figure out what POV I want because nothing actually works right for the whole novel (so right now it switches from single-POV to multi-POV in the middle, but I need to stay in that single POV for the first half or I lose the entire element of suspense, and yet I need the multi POVs later) ... AUGH. Yeah. This one's probably never going to see the light of day.
The NaNo from 2007 I still really like, but I now realize that the basic premise for the entire plot doesn't make ANY SENSE AT ALL; it requires human beings to behave in a completely unhumanlike way -- that is, to do something which is nonsensical and completely counter to their own interests for no reason at all other than to kick off the events of the story. I can think of a different plot that would probably work, and I can keep the first half of the novel mostly intact, but the last half is going to need to be completely tossed and rewritten from scratch. Also, there is a metric buttload of research to be done before I can even outline it.
The novella - I took one look at that and went "Wow, there is no character growth at all in this". However, I can see exactly where a thread of character growth and development should go (no wonder the whole thing feels flat and a bit juvenile to me). I also found myself wanting to hard SF-ify it - take out the random space-opera-ish references to things like stunners and the implication that they have FTL, and replace it by seriously figuring out how their society and technology works. Which will probably require as much research and effort as just writing something fresh from scratch...
It's like fractal editing! I started off thinking that I had a manageable amount of work to do, but I look at it more closely and discover that each subtask has just expanded out to the size of the original task. AND IT JUST KEEPS HAPPENING. *sobs*
It's partly a side effect of having waited so long to edit these stories, too. I've changed a lot, and grown a lot as a writer since 2007. I have different priorities now than I did then -- I'm a lot more interested in my characters' inner lives, for one thing. I can recognize weaknesses in my own plotting skills that I never would have seen four or five years ago, so what seemed like a perfectly sound, sensible story to me then seems like a hopelessly deficient collection of plot holes now. Or else it isn't what I want to write anymore -- I think that's what's happening with the one that I want to turn from space opera into hard(er) SF: there's nothing inherently wrong with the handwavy science in the original, but now I want it to make scientific sense, which means tossing some of the less plausible plot devices and coming up with new ways to accomplish the same thing. (This is something of a problem since the whole story is based on an implausible plot device -- flying horses -- but I think I can make it plausible by giving them much lighter gravity; it is an alien planet, after all.)
All in all, I think I'm starting to see why a lot of pro writers recommend that you'll get a lot farther a lot faster if you write something new rather than continuing to rework your older stories. I'm not ready to drop any of these except that one YA (I really think it's unsalvageable, though I may change my mind later) but I'm starting to see how you could conceivably spend ten years rewriting the same novel over and over, never really getting anywhere.