The Calamity of Novel Revision

August 8, 2020

Each piece in the first section of Renee Gladman’s Calamities begins with the phrase I began the day. In one calamity, she writes about her novel in progress.

“I began the day looking into the infinity of the revision of my novel in progress. In fact, I had just exclaimed, ‘I’m afraid I’ll have to start over,’ into a pre-dawn morning, when space expanded and I found myself in this infinitude. The novel, it was a wreck. I would have to begin again. I said this and looked at the screen for affirmation. ‘I have written sixty pages,’ I said, exasperated. ‘Houses of Ravicka, are you there?’ It was hard to call the book out in this way, as it wasn’t too long ago that I’d called the name of another book — asked it to step out of its hiding place, its refusal place, and come to me — and not only did that book never appear but I’d already written another book about its not appearing. I couldn’t even call for Houses without it feeling like a rerun, and it was this — not being able to call its name but still looking at it, waiting for it — that gave shape to the infinitude, which was ultimately something beyond shape, which couldn’t possibly have a shape and also be infinite. And yet, I clearly sat in a vastness (arguably a kind of shape), my pages blowing about, but never blowing about so much that I lost sight of them (they seemed to go no farther than the horizon: another shape). For months I ran after them, but pages floating so far away just begin to look like sky (infinity).”

I read Calamities near the end of a lengthy revision process guided by The Last Draft by Sandra Scofield, which I found incredibly helpful. After writing another draft at warp speed in April, I printed out the manuscript on actual paper (finally grasping the notion of pages, not just word count!) and spent May and most of June reading it, marking it up in pencil, making a list of things to work on and think about, and keeping a revision journal.

At the end of June I made a fresh outline and pasted it and the bits of the novel I wanted to keep into Scrivener, feeling good about tackling the next draft. It was such a productive spring, mostly thanks to The Last Draft, but also because my view of what the novel is about was sharpened by the way the coronavirus was changing the world. It became easier to see what it was really all about.

Then I spent July working so much at my job that I had no energy to spare for writing, and I haven’t touched the novel since.

“Could it be that every ten years you simply started something that couldn’t be finished, that was impossible to finish because the person you needed to be to write the book never settled into form, or the form came and went while you were off teaching or buying furniture in a little city that stayed little the whole time you were there?”

I don’t know when I’ll get back to it. Maybe not until September. I was about to type when things calm down, but that sounds ridiculous when my life is, in fact, as calm as can be. Steady job, no kids, a safe home, a great partner, no systemic oppression or violence.

I could be working on the novel instead of this or instead of the newsletter or instead of reading five books at a time. (If I didn’t make time for reading, I would never write.) But it doesn’t feel like the right time. I’m too angry and aggrieved, too fixated on the problems I need to solve at work and the problems of our ever-wretched world which I can never solve. But maybe the problems of a novel are in fact exactly what I need.

August 8, 2020

Another Draft, Courtesy of National Novel Writing Month

December 3, 2019

At the end of October, inspired by some fellow writers, I decided to use NaNoWriMo — National Novel Writing Month: a challenge wherein writers the world over attempt to complete a 50,000 word novel in 30 days — to rewrite the novel I’ve been working on for a while now. I’d made very little progress in months, so the idea was that NaNo would get me back into it and, just as importantly, get me back to writing every day.

And it worked, because now I have a new draft. I ended up writing an average of 1800 words a day, anywhere between 300 and 800 words in the morning and then another 1000 to 1400 words in the evening. On my best day, I wrote just under 2200 words.

A challenge like this is really useful to get quickly back into the habit of writing. The momentum of something new and yet familiar (since I already knew something about my story and characters) helped get me over that initial hump of getting started, and then the rest was simply stubbornness (and a constant awareness of my word count) to make sure I got my words in for the day.

The daily word count goal was exactly the kind of motivation I needed. When I used to write every day in a single morning session, I could maybe write 1000 words, but usually less, so I didn’t think it was going to be easy. (Unlike lots of people, though, most of my non-working time is my own, so I have it much easier than most.) But I found that most days it didn’t take much to get there — mostly just sitting down with my laptop, opening the document, and continuing where I left off, no matter how unequal I felt to getting down what was supposed to happen next. Near the end of the month, there were a few days where I had the fleeting thought about not bothering to get to 1667 that day because I was tired and just wanted to go to bed (at, you know, 8pm) and was ahead of my overall goal anyway, but then I would look at the little graph of my daily progress on the NaNo Stats page and power through.

I wrote this entirely as a fresh draft and only went back to my old drafts and notes to remind myself of the names of minor characters. I kept a small list of scenes at the end of the document that outlined where I still had to go. It was helpful to see where I was heading next and steer myself in that direction. The story went to a few unexpected places, but I think what this draft did more than anything else was narrow the timeline (from a whole summer down to one week) as well as the setting and story enough to spend more time with the (many!) characters themselves and figure out what was going on with them.

One of the best things I did with this draft was not write about anything from the perspective of the character who appears at the centre of the story. Previously he’d gotten quite a bit of his own page time, but I could never settle on how to portray him. For this round, I decided I wasn’t going to get into his head at all. I like that it forced me to figure out how to show who he is from the perspective of other characters. I didn’t get it right, but I liked the path it started me down, narrowing my focus a bit and letting me spend more time with other characters.

The next stage is a bit of a black hole, of course, because I’m terrible at revising. So far I plan to write out the outline of what I have, compare it to the outlines from my last couple of drafts, and try to create a bit more structure on which to hang the material I have spread out over some 150,000 words. There are elements I can bring together, and there’s a lot to throw away. And then, maybe, in bits and pieces, I’ll get some other eyeballs on it? I’m thinking a lot about why I’m still reluctant to let other people read it and trying to put into words what I want (and don’t want) from early readers. It’s scary but it’s good.

Some additional reading about NaNoWriMo to get thinking about next year: 20 years of NaNoWriMo, two vital reminders for writing a novel, why word count matters, and the best writing advice for NaNoWriMo.

December 3, 2019

Another Thousand Words

July 1, 2019

The second year of #1000wordsofsummer ended this weekend. Although I got a lot of value out of it last year, I didn’t participate this year. Well, I sort of participated, for three days. But I’m not currently at the stage in my novel writing saga where churning out a thousand words a day is important. I have plenty of words already. It would be all too easy to strike down some new path and allow myself to get distracted from the revision process. At this stage I don’t need to be creating new content as much as I need to be figuring out what to do with what I already have.

At the beginning of May I started assembling the second draft. I say assembling because the second draft didn’t begin as a copy of the first draft. I started a new document entirely and wrote up a sort of dramatis personae and then started copying over chapters from the first draft. I moved pieces around, added new pieces, then divided the document into three main sections to organize the writing better, although all three sections will be interwoven later. I did a good chunk of new writing, then copied more over from the first draft, rearranging and rewriting a bit as I went, but not letting myself get too far into the weeds at this point. I wanted to assemble something that I could go over with more attention later, when I have more of a structure in place, more scaffolding which I can remove later, as Zadie Smith might say.

Over the first week I got together about 12,000 words, took a break for a work trip, then added 7,500 words. I skipped a few days, then added another 16,000 words. Then I didn’t touch it again for sixteen days (oof) between our 11-day vacation and the week of recovery afterward. I opened the document most mornings during that week, but didn’t have the time or energy to give it the attention it needed.

Finally last Tuesday I sat down with the seeds of a new scene in mind and plowed out a thousand words. It felt so good that I did it again for another two days. Now I’m back to assembling words from the first draft, reorganizing groups of paragraphs, making little edits as I read through the scenes. I’m okay with that.

Although I didn’t join #1000daysofsummer, I loved getting the daily emails. Here’s a great passage from the email on Day 10: “We create a space for one idea to live next to another, so that our ideas will have a big home together. But writing is also about reaching out beyond yourself and offering up your best thoughts and connecting them with the world. Everyone gathers together on the shelf in one way or another.”

And some words from Alexander Chee on Day 3: “The legal pad and pen is like a change in the wind in my heart, the new idea raising its hand. The notebook makes room for it and the pen is the door it opens to walk out. A tiny door the size of where the ink comes out. And it cost me less than ten bucks for the pens and the notebook.”

I wonder where I’ll be this time next year, if the challenge repeats in 2020. New novel? Still editing this one? Done forever with writing? Ha. We’ll see.

July 1, 2019

First Drafts Forever

April 17, 2019

I’m beginning to think I might write first drafts for the rest of time. When I last checked in about my writing, I was just about ready to begin revising. That was last October. I spent November putting 25,000 words into a second draft, and then I read The Westing Game and My Sister, the Serial Killer and How Fiction Works and realized that I wanted to try something else.

So I started again. Another first draft. (Hm, does this sound familiar yet?) A fresh take on the central idea I’ve been working on for my last several first drafts. And I’ve been working on that for months now, since December. I’m nearly 80,000 words in and still going, not quite sure how to finish. One day I’ll call it done, and — then what’ll I do?

For a while it felt ridiculous that, after all the build-up to the second draft, I started something new. And I wondered if I’d ever get to the next stage. But then I read Joseph Scapellato wondering what a draft is anyway.

“Every writer is going to have their own approach (or set of approaches) to the question of what constitutes a draft. These approaches might change with every phase of every project; the way that you wander through your first draft could be quite different from the way that you wander through your final. The hope, of course, is that your conception of drafting, whatever it is, can serve as a perch — a perception-changing post, slightly above the page, from which you’re better able to see your work and your process in a useful way.”

I considered my progress over the last two years or so as work on several separate first drafts, new project after new project that never got done, but maybe I can think of them as several successive drafts of the same work. The stories all have a similar context, a few characters in common here and there. Each draft is a new experiment, a way of playing with different types and forms of relationships, different configurations and perspectives and voices. Perhaps they’ve each been a way of finding my way to whatever it is I’m trying to write about. So maybe I shouldn’t think of the latest draft as its own thing. Maybe it’s really the fifth or sixth iteration of what all along has been the same novel.

“A draft is a single step. Your steps — how they look, what they do, how you take them — don’t have to be like anybody else’s. They don’t have to be beautiful or memorable or brave. They can be awful or ridiculous. They can even be unsure. But they have to help you trick yourself into spending the time and doing the work. And you have to take them, all of them, one by one.”

I also like the idea of approaching each draft as if it’s the first, no matter how many have come before. The tiniest thing can result in the biggest changes. All the first drafts I’ve worked on have influenced this one. Not just the ones that have a little bit in common with what I’m working on now. Every draft is the first one, and the multiple novels I’ve been drafting are really just one novel. Can I have it both ways?

In the end it’s as Scapellato says — the important thing is the tenacity to keep working on it, keep putting in the time, keep putting down more words. “The secret ingredient,” he writes, “if there is one, is the willingness to spend what time you’ve got.”

April 17, 2019

Taking Notes, Wondering What Happens Next

October 26, 2018

1

I wrote last month about the first stage of my first serious attempt to revise a first draft. The plan involved reading the draft from top to bottom and taking notes along the way without making any revisions, not at the paragraph, sentence, or word level. (I confess to adding paragraph breaks where they were needed and fixing obvious word choice errors and typos; that’s it.) The point was to see where I was and try to figure out where to go before I start to rewrite.

I’m nearly done (6 pages to go) and starting to suspect that this was probably the easy part.

2

Taking notes is fun. Too fun, perhaps, because the notes are threatening to become the volume of a novel themselves. I’ve been avoiding thinking about what to do when it’s time to read them. I’ll probably end up taking notes about the notes, and then more notes about those, in a never-ending cycle of notes from which I and this manuscript will never emerge. When will I get back to writing?

3

One of the best parts of taking notes is that I get to use my editor brain. I imagine my comments to be those of a great editor, incisive and insightful. I imagine I have ideas that no one else would have, that I can find nuggets of splendour in the pile of rubble that is my first draft. But most of the notes are rambling and wondering and questioning. No great insights, nothing clever or sharp. In fact, the notes are mostly questions.

I can’t stop my writer brain from responding in questions to what my editor brain has to say. It’s eager to please, to have an array of solutions to the problems my editor brain points out, but it doesn’t know the right answer. Neither editor nor writer know the answer yet, because of course that’s not the point. The point at this point is just to ask questions. The answers will come.

4

Being consistent with this practice has been harder than the practice of writing every day. Writing first thing in the morning, especially if you’re not all the way awake, is a special kind of thing. Reading your own work and applying critical thinking skills to it and then taking notes about it is something else. Morning is perhaps not the best time.

It’s strange to think not about forming sentences and paragraphs, but to step back and think about the story. What’s really happening. What should be happening. Does what’s happening make any sense. Instead of focusing on what am I going to write today, I’m thinking how am I going to turn this into a good story.

Many mornings, I give up before I start. When I can’t summon the critical thinking skills, when I have other things to worry about, when I’m at a part of the novel I know will not survive revision. The easiest thing to do with such a mess is to ignore it.

Reading your own writing can be weirdly vulnerable and unnerving. I don’t like being exposed to scrutiny, not even my own. I want to cringe and look away. I get so ashamed of whatever idiot wrote that paragraph or thought up that plot twist a few months ago. Whoever wrote that sentence is clearly full of themselves, braindead, tone-deaf. But it’s useless to think that way. Every morning is practice for standing back and looking full-faced at what is there. Taking it for what it is and dealing with it. Doing it more often can only make it easier, right?

5

I know my story, or what my story might be, so much better now. I think I know what I want to say, but I don’t want to focus on that part. I need to focus not on what I’m saying but on what the characters are doing. What action makes sense? Where are the conflicts and how are they resolved? I think too much about what things mean. I want to focus on the concrete things that happen because of what things mean.

6

Perhaps I’ll do something like Olivia Laing’s serial killer wall or a subway map or some other method that’s probably less effective than it is evidence of an unhealthy obsession with office supplies. Something that makes me feel like a detective with some serious crimes to solve or a tourist with some serious sights to see or my mom with serious errands to run on a Saturday morning.

Before I start rewriting anything, I need to do more work. The notes aren’t enough. I need an outline. Something complicated and layered and scalable, to make sense of this jumble of ideas. I need a frame that can adapt to what I need it to be, that will remain strong enough as I build on top of it, remove pieces beneath it, and replace everything that hangs upon it.

So, index cards. Maybe another spreadsheet first. I’m not trying to do anything innovative with the story structure. The plot isn’t supposed to be complicated. But figuring out the mechanics is something I’ve never been good at, and it’s something I want to do better. I’m trying to follow the rules, but I also want to be able to feel my way through it, the way I’ve always done. It still needs to feel right.

7

I’m trying to remember that none of this writing is really me. It’s just a story, just a bunch of words I put together, and every time I look at it is an opportunity to make it better. But it’s not me that’s getting better; it’s the story getting better.

Every morning is darker than the last, and it’s only going to get worse. I’m trying to imagine how I might deal with index cards on the couch under a blanket on these dark autumnal mornings, with just the floor lamp nearby for light. Maybe it’s time to get beyond the couch. Maybe it’s time to migrate to the dining room table.

October 26, 2018