I'm fascinated by the process of revisions and editing. I don't know if I'm simply an exceptionally bad writer and editor, or if this is how it happens for everyone. But I don't want to believe it gets this way for everyone. How would anyone ever get anything finished?
The problem is that I have been going through the finished manuscript with a very strict electronic red pen, which in reality is the "delete" button. It was going pretty well and I thought that finishing the second draft would take a week tops. Then, before I moved on to the next chapters I decided to re-read what I'd edited to see if it makes any sense at all. I had that intention today. And yesterday. And the day before that. For chapter 1.
I just finished going through the chapter the tenth time and I'm still changing things. How is that possible? I've gotten rid of almost 2,000 words in one chapter alone, cut two minor characters along with their respective minor storylines in that chapter, arranged and rearranged the order of certain sentences, then cut some of them altogether and changing everything still.
The odds are that tomorrow I'll come home from school and drastically change the manuscript for an eleventh time. I don't know how many more things I can cut without intending to. At first I was really trying to cut anything that wasn't absolutely needed because I had to cut 8,000 words out of the manuscript and I couldn't think of cutting that much. I knew I wasn't going to cut any scenes, only alter them a little bit. The process changed in a matter of a day. Now I'm just looking for something that doesn't feel right. And it's seriously lowering my self-esteem to find that there is a lot of that.
Sigh.
And here I thought I was going to get through the whole novel in a week. That was Sunday. Today is Wednesday. And I'm not even sure that I'm done with chapter 1.
Jane
P.S. I see two good things here. Or perhaps three. First, perhaps I'm working on #1 so hard because it's the beginning and it has to be properly portrayed. Maybe the others won't take so much time. Second, I really feel like with each time I go through it, the thing keeps getting better. Who would have thought, right? And third, I might just be growing artistically as an editor. And you know what that means... growing pains. I certainly hope that is the case. Hopefully I'll be able to do all this in two or three edits next time.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Monday, September 28, 2009
The Changing Cloak 1st/2nd draft
So, the first draft of The Changing Cloak was finished two days ago. It's the second draft of the novel overall, but the novel was previously named Ever-patient Angel and with the title change came a lot of other changes. I have started to edit it very seriously, changing every other sentence and hurting inside because some of the things I fell in love with when writing them aren't really necessary. I'm sure I'm going to be hurting a lot the next few days because I need to cut approximately 8,000 words out of my novel and that's more than a chapter in my writing style. The good news is that I have already cut almost 1,400 words from the first three chapters and I may be able to cut the desired amount if this rate keeps up. Then again, it's sad to know that I've put so many unnecessary things in my novel. No matter which way you look at it, I'm still hurting. Well, I'll get over it. It's not like I lost my sense of sound and couldn't hear music anymore. That would be devestating (speaking of which, perhaps I should get my ears checked...). Anyway, I have to get back to it and I hope the finished thing is worth reading!
Jane
P.S. It's so weird how my opinion of my novel changes every other moment. One minute I think the plot is original, that it's definitely worth at least looking at, then I'll fuss over how I don't know if the first chapter is captivating enough to make anyone continue reading, the next I'm sure it'll be fine, the next I think the plot has been done before and is a rip-off of Charmed (not that my book is anything like Charmed, there are simply certain elements that are similar), and then I decide I need to get back to editing. Crazy! (I guess my main concern is that a foreign, barely sixteen year old author-without-any-sort-of-degree-in-English's literary language just isn't publishing material. I'm off to change that!)
Jane
P.S. It's so weird how my opinion of my novel changes every other moment. One minute I think the plot is original, that it's definitely worth at least looking at, then I'll fuss over how I don't know if the first chapter is captivating enough to make anyone continue reading, the next I'm sure it'll be fine, the next I think the plot has been done before and is a rip-off of Charmed (not that my book is anything like Charmed, there are simply certain elements that are similar), and then I decide I need to get back to editing. Crazy! (I guess my main concern is that a foreign, barely sixteen year old author-without-any-sort-of-degree-in-English's literary language just isn't publishing material. I'm off to change that!)
Introduction to The Changing Cloak
Well, it's a longshot that anyone will ever read this, but in case The Changing Cloak ever becomes a bestseller or something, it might be interesting for someone to look at the early days of the novel (although they are far from early). Or perhaps it will only be interesting to me to view this as a sort of journal about my daily writing problems.
I'll just start with the basics. I'm currently a sixteen year old girl from Latvia who people may know as Jane Alith Knight someday. Writing is my passion and has been ever since I can remember, even though I didn't put anything on paper until I was fifteen. Who said you can't write in your head? I don't think I've forgotten a single story I've created, dialogues and everything, and maybe someday I'll write all of them.
So, when inspiration struck me like lightning, I decided to act on it. I remember that day very clearly. It was June 11th, 2009, a Thursday and I was making dinner after a long day and a particularly brutal session at the dentist. I was working on another story that I will definitely write someday, tentatively titled Shards of Glass. I was trying to think it through as I peeled potatoes, but another idea that had come to me few days prior kept intruding my head like the Russian Army. It wouldn't let me concentrate, so I figured I could afford to waste half an hour thinking about it and then turn back to Lucy Lee (the lead of Shards of Glass). About five minutes into the half-hour I realized that I had come up with four characteristics for the character I was thinking about and that they didn't really fit well together. For example, one quality was "dead" and another "alive". You can see where I had a problem. Not that they cannot coexist peacefully in my world, but at the time I didn't know anything about that world.
So I figured I'd divide the four in half - "dead" and "stalker" becoming one person, "alive" and "depressed" the other. Thus, Carter and Blake were born. Now I'm assuming that anyone who reads this will have read the book first, so I'm not worrying about minor spoilers like the fact that Carter is supposed to be alive at the start of the book.
Two minutes after I'd realized who Blake was I was already typing. I didn't know what would come next and I didn't care. Something was pouring out of me and I couldn't let the floor flood.
I wrote three pages that evening. And three the next. And six the day after that. Three was a lot for me then, not to mention six. Imagine how surprised I was when I began to write ten pages a day!
The ideas kept flowing out of me so swiftly I should have been drained in a few days, but I lasted more than a month. I didn't think, I didn't plot, I let the story take me where it wanted to. And, surprisingly, everything clicked into place without me worrying about it. I'm thinking my subconscious had figured out where the story was going to lead long before I consciously did. All the clues were there, I just hadn't figured out what they meant yet. And every now and then I'd get a "boom!" kind of shock and realize that something was utterly right and I wondered how I had missed that before. All the signs that pointed to it were already written!
Anyway, when the novel was 4/5 finished I had to take a hiatus for personal reasons and personal disasters, as in my computer crashing several times in a month in various ways, one of which was the audio system fail. Obviously, I couldn't write without music, so I... didn't.
I don't agree with people who say that if you're passionate about your work it should always come first. There are lots of things to be passionate about, but that wasn't my point. Just think about what makes you want to work. What gives you inspiration? Would you be able to do your job without it? Some people will probably say yes. I won't. Everything I do comes from music and if I don't have it in my life there's no reason for anything. So, automatically no music equals no creativity.
Back to the story (and if you haven't stopped reading by now, huge props for you). I caught a cold and had to skip school for a week. That week may be the single most important week of my life, because it was then that I re-discovered my passion for writing and realized that I might be able to do something after all. If it hadn't been for that cold, The Changing Cloak might have waited months to be finished and turned out completely differently. But, thankfully, I went back to reading what I'd written on September 20th, 2009 and on September 24th I went back to writing. On September 26th, precisely three and a half months after I'd typed the words "Philosophy. Ugh." into my computer, I had finished the first thing I'd ever worked so hard for. The first thing I ever finished. It was a huge moment for me and I couldn't stop jumping up and down for an hour. I'll never forget it.
It's two days later now and I'm getting the manuscript ready for its first-ever full reading. Can't wait to get people's opinions on it. What if it sucks? I'll worry about it later. For now I'm editing one of the things I love the most in the whole world, thinking about what to write on my query for Agent Kristin Nelson (http://www.pubrants.blogspot.com/) who is my first choice of agents, and thinking about the next novels in the series (at the moment I have planned seven books in total, I know, ambitious, right? Keep in mind, though, the number may and probably will go up since eighteen hours ago there were only four sequels planned).
So I guess that's the very long description of how The Changing Cloak (originally Ever-patient Angel, but the angel thing and the hyphen didn't really work for a book title) came to be and will hopefully come to be published. Cross your fingers!
And, trust me, I know that it's almost impossible to get published at sixteen, let alone in this crisis and from a different country three thousand miles away. Or more. I haven't measured. But I just want to do the best job I can and hope for the best! Who knows, maybe inspiration will strike me again, I'll write a great query and Kristin, the superb agent that she is, will make my dreams happen.
Jane
I'll just start with the basics. I'm currently a sixteen year old girl from Latvia who people may know as Jane Alith Knight someday. Writing is my passion and has been ever since I can remember, even though I didn't put anything on paper until I was fifteen. Who said you can't write in your head? I don't think I've forgotten a single story I've created, dialogues and everything, and maybe someday I'll write all of them.
So, when inspiration struck me like lightning, I decided to act on it. I remember that day very clearly. It was June 11th, 2009, a Thursday and I was making dinner after a long day and a particularly brutal session at the dentist. I was working on another story that I will definitely write someday, tentatively titled Shards of Glass. I was trying to think it through as I peeled potatoes, but another idea that had come to me few days prior kept intruding my head like the Russian Army. It wouldn't let me concentrate, so I figured I could afford to waste half an hour thinking about it and then turn back to Lucy Lee (the lead of Shards of Glass). About five minutes into the half-hour I realized that I had come up with four characteristics for the character I was thinking about and that they didn't really fit well together. For example, one quality was "dead" and another "alive". You can see where I had a problem. Not that they cannot coexist peacefully in my world, but at the time I didn't know anything about that world.
So I figured I'd divide the four in half - "dead" and "stalker" becoming one person, "alive" and "depressed" the other. Thus, Carter and Blake were born. Now I'm assuming that anyone who reads this will have read the book first, so I'm not worrying about minor spoilers like the fact that Carter is supposed to be alive at the start of the book.
Two minutes after I'd realized who Blake was I was already typing. I didn't know what would come next and I didn't care. Something was pouring out of me and I couldn't let the floor flood.
I wrote three pages that evening. And three the next. And six the day after that. Three was a lot for me then, not to mention six. Imagine how surprised I was when I began to write ten pages a day!
The ideas kept flowing out of me so swiftly I should have been drained in a few days, but I lasted more than a month. I didn't think, I didn't plot, I let the story take me where it wanted to. And, surprisingly, everything clicked into place without me worrying about it. I'm thinking my subconscious had figured out where the story was going to lead long before I consciously did. All the clues were there, I just hadn't figured out what they meant yet. And every now and then I'd get a "boom!" kind of shock and realize that something was utterly right and I wondered how I had missed that before. All the signs that pointed to it were already written!
Anyway, when the novel was 4/5 finished I had to take a hiatus for personal reasons and personal disasters, as in my computer crashing several times in a month in various ways, one of which was the audio system fail. Obviously, I couldn't write without music, so I... didn't.
I don't agree with people who say that if you're passionate about your work it should always come first. There are lots of things to be passionate about, but that wasn't my point. Just think about what makes you want to work. What gives you inspiration? Would you be able to do your job without it? Some people will probably say yes. I won't. Everything I do comes from music and if I don't have it in my life there's no reason for anything. So, automatically no music equals no creativity.
Back to the story (and if you haven't stopped reading by now, huge props for you). I caught a cold and had to skip school for a week. That week may be the single most important week of my life, because it was then that I re-discovered my passion for writing and realized that I might be able to do something after all. If it hadn't been for that cold, The Changing Cloak might have waited months to be finished and turned out completely differently. But, thankfully, I went back to reading what I'd written on September 20th, 2009 and on September 24th I went back to writing. On September 26th, precisely three and a half months after I'd typed the words "Philosophy. Ugh." into my computer, I had finished the first thing I'd ever worked so hard for. The first thing I ever finished. It was a huge moment for me and I couldn't stop jumping up and down for an hour. I'll never forget it.
It's two days later now and I'm getting the manuscript ready for its first-ever full reading. Can't wait to get people's opinions on it. What if it sucks? I'll worry about it later. For now I'm editing one of the things I love the most in the whole world, thinking about what to write on my query for Agent Kristin Nelson (http://www.pubrants.blogspot.com/) who is my first choice of agents, and thinking about the next novels in the series (at the moment I have planned seven books in total, I know, ambitious, right? Keep in mind, though, the number may and probably will go up since eighteen hours ago there were only four sequels planned).
So I guess that's the very long description of how The Changing Cloak (originally Ever-patient Angel, but the angel thing and the hyphen didn't really work for a book title) came to be and will hopefully come to be published. Cross your fingers!
And, trust me, I know that it's almost impossible to get published at sixteen, let alone in this crisis and from a different country three thousand miles away. Or more. I haven't measured. But I just want to do the best job I can and hope for the best! Who knows, maybe inspiration will strike me again, I'll write a great query and Kristin, the superb agent that she is, will make my dreams happen.
Jane
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