Wrestling with my novel

Grrr…writing was so hard today.

It probably didn’t help that I was operating on only four hours of sleep, or recovering from a sickness, or constantly allowing myself to be distracted, but for some combination of these and other reasons, it was just really hard to write today.

I usually love revising.  I think it comes naturally to me, in some ways.  However, I’m well past the beginning of Phoenix and just starting to get to the part where I got muddled the first time I wrote it

Last year, I started to stall and sputter at this point because I had followed several of my initial ideas from the beginning to their preliminary conclusions and had to start adding new ideas to enrich the main story.  I still didn’t know the ending, so I was basically throwing all sorts of ideas in at random and waiting for the magical reaction to happen.

That reaction did happen, but it didn’t really take off until around page 300.  By that point, I’d thrown in enough random story elements that I had the start of a causal chain that would carry the story to an ending that excited me.  I let things take off and rode the story to its conclusion, having a wonderful adventure right up to the last page.

Trouble is, now I have to clean up the mess I left behind–all those other random elements I threw in that never really mixed well with the others.  Loose and frayed ends that I need to cut out or tie back in.  At the same time, I need to isolate and strengthen the elements that ended up being important.  That involves restructuring sections within chapters as well as paragraphs within sections, and it is bloody annoying.

It’s more than cutting and strengthening existing narrative.  It’s cutting and pasting from multiple places, reorganizing it, and then throwing it all out and totally rewriting it in a way that actually works.  It is so difficult, I’m probably going to get it wrong and have to rewrite the whole novel again to get it right.

(If I hadn’t taken a step back a few days ago and started outlining each section and chapter from a more macro view, I wouldn’t know what I need to do to fix this story.  I’d see the problems and know that they exist, but I wouldn’t know how to restructure things so that the novel works together as a whole.  So thanks, Reigheena, for helping me to step back and look at the wider picture.)

The most frustrating thing about this process, by far, is the choppiness.

When you have a blank page in front of you and you’re forging ahead with the first draft, it’s difficult but fairly linear.  Everything flows out in a relatively streamlined progression.  When you’re fixing the relatively minor details, it’s deliciously linear because you’re going going from paragraph to paragraph.

But when you’re revising the novel on a more macro level, overhauling the major story elements, you have to look at the story as a whole, transforming stuff on page 120 and introducing it in its new form on page 90, or adding new stuff between pages 80 and 100 to make the stuff before and after flow more smoothly from one to the other.  You get a whole section full of dialogue and you realize it’s not working, because you’ve developed your character deeper than you had at this point in the original draft, and so you end up throwing out and rewriting everything.

Because the process is so choppy, I find it really easy to be distracted.  I’ll have the exact sentence in my mind that I want to say, but the urge to get just a few moments of relief will be so strong that I’ll switch over and check my email, or check Facebook chat, or check my blog aggregator, or play a game for a little while, etc etc.  So then, when I get back to work, it takes time to readjust, and that sentence that I had will be buried under half a dozen other ideas, so then I have to dig it out.  Grrrr…

I’m tired, it’s late, I’ve had a miserable time wrestling with this novel today, and I’m going to bed.  But before I do, I want to link to this highly interesting and well written blog post I saw on A Motley Vision, a Mormon arts and culture blog.   The blogger tells the story of how she picked a controversial LDS fiction novel by Virginia Sorenson for her ward’s book club.  Both her reactions and her friends’ reactions to the novel were really interesting, especially because they were so different.  The ensuing discussion on the blog is really interesting because it’s all about the pros and cons of controversial, edgy LDS fiction, both to the readers as well as to the LDS publishing industry and LDS society in general.  At least, I found it interesting.  You can check it out and see for yourself.

I am so going to be in bed twenty seconds after I finish this sentence!  Gnight!