Editing

The last couple of days I've been whittling down a 6000 word manuscript to just under 5000 words.  5000 seems to be a sweet spot in terms of short stories; when a manuscript gets much larger, it becomes more difficult to sell -- and you have to make sure those extra words are pulling their weight.

Some of my difficulty is that I can get baroque in my writing style:  playing with the lyricism until I've passed popular taste in convolution -- or else fixating description on and getting too detailed over minutia because I like verbal eye candy.

In this particular case, I managed to squeeze out about 450 words simply by looking for some of the usual suspects -- "started to," "tried to," "only," "was," and "it was," and "began to" -- and recast various weak, passive, or convoluted phrases.   The search function helped find places where I'd strayed into using danger words.   I got fifty to a hundred words out by noticing repeated phrases (usually describing the protagonist's heart rate or breathing) and removing extraneous ones.

Probably the most difficult cut was deleting the first two pages -- the original opening scene provided some nice setting and character background, but there was enough spread throughout the rest of the manuscript that I could justify it's removal (telling myself that if the story is ever re-published, I might add the deleted scene back).

The happiest moment was discovering during a read-aloud that I'd pasted in a section twice.  When I deleted it I got about thirty words, which I used to insert a particular detail I'd liked, but didn't provide quite enough character development to justify.

I'm going back and forth a little on the voice.  On the "it's working" hand, this manuscript has been making the rounds and getting "interesting-but-no" rejections; so I think it's serviceable.   On the "needs work" hand, I wrote the original version some years ago the beginner's craftwork shows.  But back on the first hand, the voice in the original is strong, and whittling it down has blunted the voice... which might be a good thing... even if the writing feels a little formulaic.

Anyway, it's reached the point where tinkering with it any more is either going to fatigue the manuscript or push it back over the word count.

Manuscripts, Rejection, and the Trunk Process

The other day after Wordos, someone asked me what I do with manuscripts that are rejected: do I send them back out?  What if you liked it when you wrote it, but now you think it's bad?

The Rockstar Writers say, "Write the story that you'd like to read," and "Don't try to write what's 'hot.'"  And this is difficult advice to follow when (as I've been told) one has a quirky writing style, and publishing goes through trends.

When a manuscript comes back, I try to send it back out.  (I should be better at this than I am.)  I may scan through it to see if there's something stupid, like a syntax error that I've missed.   Looking at a story once the brilliance of a fresh work has been dimmed by the submission process makes it easier to see if a scene's staging has become less clear over time, or if the characters have become less clearly motivated.  But I really don't want to get stuck in over-revising a manuscript; to quote Edna Mode, "I never look back, darling. It distracts from the now."

At some point, I may look at a manuscript, say, "What was I thinking?" and pull it out of the submission process.  And then there are the battered manuscripts that have made the rounds to ten or so markets and have either garnered "Guess why we rejected your manuscript" form rejections, or else have gotten glowing rejections prominently featuring the word, "but."  The less personal feedback I've gotten, the harder it is to know what to do with them.

So, do I have stories that I've pulled from the submission process?  Yes:

• The short I wrote about a over-sexed talking teddy bear that I wrote about six months before the movie (which I haven't seen) "Ted" came out.   It's a victim of timing, and will always seem derivative.  
• The fairy tale retelling story that I couldn't sell because the market was either glutted with fairy-tale retellings or fairy tale retellings went out of fashion.   I might have found an anthology, but I ended up using this as a marketing piece.
• The high fantasy story that's at 5500 words, which puts it over the sweet spot of 4500 words for a short story.  I'm running out of professional markets to send this to.
• The quirky Christmas story that I like and think is perfectly fine, but apparently confuses or is unsatisfying -- it resonates so strongly we me that I can't see how it doesn't resonate with others.  
• The samurai story I wrote in 2003 that everyone says is funny, but now feels slightly dated.
• The madcap Superman story that one editor thought was hysterical (but didn't buy), and which another editor scorned with "is this supposed to be satire?"  

Once they're pulled, there's some triage.  The first question is: "Is this manuscript broken?"  If the answer is no, then I have to research a market that might buy it, or they go into the self-publishing pile (right, e-pub formatting...).  If the answer is yes, then the next question is, "Do I want to try to or can I fix it?"  If the answer is yes, then it goes into the "To Edit Later" pile (yes, it's a growing pile).  If the answer is no, then it goes into a trunked stories pile (yes, that's growing, too).    

In terms of trunked stories, it's helpful to remember that painters have scrapbooks filled with studies or first attempts at a subject.  It's helpful to remember the painters, composers and writers who were better known after they were dead.   And, who knows, maybe those old drafts will be the bane of English Majors in a hundred years....

Writing and Writing Fantasy

Interesting things came up after Wordos last night.

The first, most obvious was that I ran into a genre vocabulary issue.  I submitted a fantasy story to the table, and a number of people got confused by the medieval armor terms:  curias, gorget, falcshion, barbute (okay, I'd have to look that one up, too) and a few other fantasy tropes.  Once again, I had to ponder how much in-story definition I needed to do so as not to confuse the reader, and how much knowledge on the part of the reader I could assume.  

The manuscript also skirted with The Dictionary of Obscure Usage and the Twin Towers of Tolkien Sclerosis and Not Enough Detail.  

The other question that came up was 'What do you want the reader to take away when you write."  And my answer was that I wanted the reader to feel like I had after a violin loop performance, where the violinist started swaying as he played and had a fierce smile as he bowed.   I thought about it later and I wanted the reader to have the same sort of experience I remember skydiving when I jumped out of the plane and located the sun, moon, mountain and me.   I want my stories to be like good ritual.

And now, editing!

Writing Update

Whew.

The last few days have been busy ones.  I've been trying to edit down a story, and the two large chunks of time I thought I had for writing turned out not to happen.  Oh... and Easter.   Instead of blogging, I've been scowling at a mess of words to see where I've gone off on tangents or where a mess of descriptive dead wood is.

During this phase I've been editing from a paper manuscript.  The difficulty with writing in fifteen minute and half-hour bursts is that I have a lot of nice little vignettes that aren't always speaking to each other (or repeat themselves).  Despite working within an outline, the manuscript managed to balloon out, and I've been looking at bits that can be rooted out.

And now the Day Jobbe calls.

Writing with the Sphinx

The last two days, the morning sunlight has shone on our garden sphinx, turning her stoney countenance rosey. When it happened yesterday, I looked up from writing and it seemed as if a person in an Egyptian headdress crouched amidst the squill and Portuguese laurels.

I almost went out in my bathrobe with a camera. But then I decided that I would consine the vision to memory. I have pictures of the sphinx already, and they never quite turn out the way I see them in my mind's eye. Besides, sometimes Mark accuses me of living behind a camera.

And, if I was photographing the sphinx, I wouldn't be writing, which was the reason I was stumbling about before dawn in the first place.

This morning the rising sun performed its magic again. This time I noticed the cherry blossoms scattered on the lawn. I almost photographed her again. But as the shone moved and highlighted different features, I looked up at her between working on the current short story. Which was stubbornly being difficult.

The characters did something unexpected and threw my outline out, which meant I had to stop writing and try to follow where they were going. I've gotten into a bad habit of editing in my head while I write, which slows down the transcription process. And when the characters take an unexpected turn, it slows the word count further. I know several folks who just write whatever comes out and then go back and edit and revise later; supposedly this is faster than dealing with the word buffer in my head.

And now the Day Jobbe calls...

Early Morning Scrivener

It was difficult to Arise And Write this morning. Various bumps in the night interrupted my sleep. I really wanted to just go back to sleep when Vena's Dance started playing. The excuse "I'm not really awake, my quality will be low" ran through my head. But I guess a week of the morning routine helped me to actually get up and drag myself to the kitchen.

When I sat down in front of Scrivener with a mug of tea, I started typing on the scene I'd left up the night before, but then switched to editing bits together. Sometimes when I sit down at the keyboard, I know that my inspiration level is low and that I'll be more productive editing.

The story I've been working on is mostly plotted, and now I have to flesh out scenes. In some ways this is the most difficult part of writing, because I have a bunch of scenes and descriptive bits which need sewing together. And often a lot of story details that won't help the reader.

Scrivener is good for editing stories at a small chunk level, which helps to keep writing projects manageable. I can move paragraphs around in within blocks and change the block's order in a story board. Bits that don't work or are back story get demoted to a folder called research -- this pares down the story, but it doesn't feel like I am actually throwing words away.

I finalized the opening scene. Then it was time to get to other parts of my day.

Tonight's goal is to go to sleep at a reasonable hour (mostly met -- does blogging in bed count?)