D. Hart St. Martin

I make female heroes badass AND believable

rewriting

Writing’s Hard

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Photo by Oleksii Hlembotskyi on Unsplash

Life is messy, and just when you think you’ve got the clutter picked up, an earthquake shakes everything up again and leaves you crying why.

The last few weeks have thrown me up against a wall and left my head spinning. It began when I took chapter 21 of my current WIP into my writing group. I read, they told me it was great, then they calmly, somewhat kindly told me what was wrong with it. I was grateful for the critique as I’d been tossing and turning in my head over the movement of the story, how it wasn’t moving. Or maybe it was. I’ve been so caught up in the thing—what with the protagonist being closer to me than any character I’ve ever placed into fiction before—that I knew my perspective was off.

I went home that week determined to resolve the issues they’d brought up. And I thought I had when I took chapter 22 in the next week. The ending of that chapter introduced a creature into the mix that had only been hinted at up until then. I thought for sure the ending was great. So I read, sure the BAND-AIDS® I’d placed on the open plot hole wounds would cover all the problems up. I was wrong. The group eviscerated it. Okay, a bit of hyperbole, but I walked out of the class during the break and didn’t go back. I was devastated. Now, I’ve been devastated before by critique. I’ve even cried about it. But this time, I’d been hit twice in two sessions, and it took me a couple of days to pull myself out of the hole and look at the plotting honestly.

And they were right. I was right. I’d known the story wasn’t working for me, but I’d pushed on through. Which is fine in first draft. After first draft, though, I should have done all I could to find the flaws and clear them up, and I hadn’t. I’d shifted the point of view and the verb tense, both changes that strengthened the storytelling, but the story itself was lacking, and I didn’t know what to do.

The advice most writers with even the slightest amount of experience will give you is to set the manuscript aside for a bit. Let t sit. Work on something else. Go for walks. Watch movies. Binge-watch TV shows. Whatever. I, on the other hand, tend to be fairly quick about coming around. Or I don’t come around for a year or two. I’m an all-or-nothing type of gal. Lucky for me, in this case, it was the former.

Here’s what I had to do: I deleted a character which left a great hole in the entire piece, but she was more baggage than necessity. I moved the revelation of the creature mentioned above to chapter 2. Yeah, twenty chapters ahead of its previous first appearance. I added a secondary character and gave her narration rights in tiny increments. All of which have brought me to a place where finishing this thing is going to take a whole lot longer than I’d planned, but it will be better for the work, and I know it.

So if anyone tries to tell you writing’s easy, they’re either liars or they’ve never glued their butt to a chair and made themselves do it for longer than a sneeze. Writing is work. It’s work that gives me a great deal of satisfaction and keeps me sane, especially on the crazier days. I wouldn’t exchange it for any other vocation. But the last few weeks have been messy. Is the earthquake done? Maybe. But the aftershocks will live on until I put this baby to bed and call it done.

It’s the Process

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TRUST IT NO MATTER HOW &#*%ING HARD IT GETS

Chapter 7. Sounds innocuous enough, doesn’t it? Chapter 7. Somewhere close to midway or so, perhaps? It’s a chapter, simple. Nope. Chapter 7 of my current work in progress is where everything fell into a dark hole.

Into the Forsaken Forest is the first in a series of four or five books (depending on how things work out). The series will detail the adventures of a teenage girl, Mari, who is magically transported from earth to a place called Azzur on multiple occasions. I’ve been pantsing it with notes but no outline. I did, however, have a plan of sorts—thirty chapters, 60+K words.

I reached the first draft of chapter 20 near the end of July 2018 and hit a wall. I’d just brought Mari back to Azzur on her third trip and realized there was simply too much jumping back and forth for a mere 60+K words. Too much traffic between here and there. Here’s what I wrote at the top of my notes that day. → → → →

I backed up, all the way to chapter 3, and canceled Mari’s initial leave-taking from Azzur. I made her stay. This required mooshing things together. I took chapters apart and put them back together again, using the useful and discarding the rest. And when I arrived at the original chapter 12, which had been reduced to chapter 7, I decided to get the chapter breaks back in line to the original draft so I wouldn’t have to do quite so much work on transitions from that point on. But chapter 7 ended up being way too long. (Not unlike this paragraph. Sorry.)

This week, the official rewrite of the first draft with the above changes brought me back to chapter 7 (née 12). As I worked on it, I felt like I was riding a bicycle on a cobblestone road. The damn thing was bumpy, no flow at all. There’s a significant conversation in this chapter, and it had to roll, not jostle.

I’d also pulled the last 300 or so words from the chapter and repositioned them at the top of chapter 8 in order to shorten 7. But on reading the chapter aloud, I realized it simply wasn’t working without the original neat cut-off. So I edited some words out and returned the original ending to where it had begun.

If you’re still following me here, thank you. I will continue.

I took chapter 7 into my writing workshop this week, thinking they’d rip it apart and give me guidance on how to turn this bumpy thoroughfare into something workable. They didn’t. They praised it, said the conversation was great, that it gave the reader a break from the previous action while not feeling like an info dump. The chapter read smooth and worked for them. (And trust me, they would have told me if it hadn’t.)

So next week I take in chapter 8. Let’s see what they think of that one.

Shut up and Write

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I made a significant decision today about how I’ve been approaching the writing/rewriting of book 2 (Tainted) in my trilogy (Lisen of Solsta).  I’m going to let the forest be.

As those few who frequent my blog know, I’m writing a trilogy about a young woman named Lisen who believes she was born on Earth but discovers within a few pages of the beginning of book 1 (Fractured) that she is not human, and Earth is not her home.

What are now books 1 and 2 were once book 1 of a slightly different trilogy in which Lisen never spent any time on Earth.  I invested a couple of years into pulling that book together.  A couple of drafts made their way through my writing group.  And then I changed everything.

The short of it is—Lisen went to Earth and then came back, and I broke up the big book into two books with a concluding volume still in the imagining process at the moment (though my notes are quite detailed and I do know how it ends).  I worked on Fractured for a couple more years, continually refining until I was satisfied.  Then I independently published it, both in paper and electronically, and entered it in a couple of contests, the results of which are still pending.

Although I have tackled (and achieved) perfecting the electronic version over the last several months, I’ve also had pressure from my solid block of a dozen or so fans who continue to clamor for Tainted.  So I’ve kept at the reworking of the draft which, when I began, lacked any reference to Lisen’s Earth experiences and contained references to plot points which I chose to eliminate in order to make room for new, more productive twists and turns.

(It is truly amazing how many little tiny changes must be made in order to accommodate one added character.  And the choices I’d made proved more complicated to incorporate than I’d imagined.  Not complaining, mind.  They’re good, and they’re worth it, but here’s where the aforementioned decision comes in.  Are you still with me?)

Part of my process includes what I’ve come to call the read-aloud.  (I recommend that all writers read their work out loud to themselves in a quiet room with no interruptions.  Read it more than once.  And perhaps more importantly—LISTEN as you read.)  For some reason, in this mightily modified draft, I’ve done whatever I can to avoid the read-aloud.  I put off writing for days because I have a scene awaiting that step.

Today I realized that I’m working with a draft that I’ve already vocalized multiple times.  Yeah, I’m adding stuff and taking stuff out, but who cares in this draft.  I’m going to be back to work on it at least once more (two or three times more for the newly added scenes), so why stress over it now?

Because right now I’m clearing my forest of old branches and laying down new seed.  Which means when I’m done, the forest will have altered in ways I can’t see now.  I’ll only be able to see the damn forest once the trees have settled into place.  So tonight, three scenes went to the printer in one day (rather than the usual one scene in three or four days), and now I’m more than two-thirds of the way through.  How’s that for progress.