Editing is Hard

When I wrote the first version of my novel, the main difficulty of getting the words on the page was being able to find the time to write. Once I had the time, it was always fairly easy to sit down and let the story flow out.

Editing that version was perfectly straightforward as well. I had a sheet of paper where I had each chapter written along with a short description, and as I wrote the story, I would jot down by a certain chapter something that needed to be added or changed as the story developed. I didn't have any major points that needed to be changed, and a good deal of my editing was noticing that I used the one word too frequently in such and such a paragraph and changing it so it was no longer repetitive.

Now I'm doing a major, enormous edit. Creating my novel 2.0 is a lot harder than making it the first time.

I'm changing it from being a dual perspective book to being only from the grown-up's point of view. It makes for a much better book.

I am still including a good chunk of the other perspective, at least that was my plan. Yet I just finished writing the first chapter incorporating that perspective and I've been mulling it over ever since.

I have an entire half a book's worth of writing from this other point of view, and I had been aware that I would of course have to cut out parts of it to make it work. But now that I've written this one chapter incorporating the previous story line, it just isn't going to work. I don't mean the entire notion, but how I had pictured it.

If I include as much from this point of view as I had planned to, it is going to be too much. There won't be enough time for the main character to figure things out without it weighing down the plot.

So I'm going to have to really sit down and figure out how to do this. I'm going to have to cut out a lot of things I had planned to include, and I'm going to have to find a way for it to flow well with this new change. A lot more is going to have to change than the half a story I had originally thought.

And I'm not sure where it'll end up. I don't know how this book is going to end, now. The last chapter was from the child's perspective, and I can't find a good way to wrap that up. Not that I'm anywhere near the end of the story.

Editing is a lot harder when it's a huge shift like this. I just need to remember that this will make my book so much better. It may be a struggle to work though it at times, but this new version will be a great improvement on the old.

It's just hard to throw out so much that I've put my heart into, even with the knowledge that I'm making it better.

Forced Writing

I've been making a point at trying to write my book, even at times when I'm not feeling it. I took my car in to get some button fixed so it wouldn't randomly start a fire, and I brought my laptop along. I sat in the waiting area, writing my book, only to come home and delete everything I had written. Once I was actually in the frame of mind where writing came easily, the writing I had tried to force wasn't what I wanted on the page.

I know that even trying to get the scenes out when they don't want to come is a good thing, and that sometimes I can get where I need to go, even if I need to go back though it completely redo scenes when I'm editing it. It just makes it hard to feel like trying to write if the words are struggling to come.

Still, I think trying to find the words and think about the story, even if it ends up being redone later, is a good thing because it's making me continue to think about my book. I have weeks when I don't sit down to write because my mind is busy on other things, and at least when I'm writing sub par things, I'm still writing and thinking about the story.

So I'm going to consider it a success, and accept that some things will need to be thrown out when my mind is in proper writing mode.

A New Year

I haven't blogged for quite some time. My eldest started school, I've been sick with a constant cycle of colds, and I've been watching two of my nephews during the week. So my life has become very busy with non-writing things.

However, writing things are happening as well.

So back in October, I read what little response I got from the people who agreed to read through my book (I gave them a month and one hadn't even looked at it and the other two had read only a small portion). In the future, I may try to find less busy people to give me feedback, although the feedback I did get was greatly appreciated.

Anyway, in October I finished my edits, wrote my query, and emailed a bunch of agents. A week after sending them all out, I had an epiphany about how to make my book a thousand times better.

Which is good, since I've received lots of polite rejections as the months have gone by.

I'm drastically changing my novel. It used to be a two perspective story, and now it is only from one point of view. I think it will work a lot better, and hopefully agents will think so too when I'm ready to query them all once more.

I now have three solid book ideas outside of what I'm working on, so that's exciting. And frustrating, since I'll be doing some mundane task like taking a shower or folding laundry, and I'll picture an entire, wonderful scene in my head for one of these books that I'm not currently working on. But I'm forcing myself to simply outline the ideas, and stay on task with writing the one I've started.

I got stuck at the beginning of December. I knew I wanted this chapter from the previous version, and I had added it into the book and it just wasn't sitting right. I finally figured out what was wrong and have added two chapters before it, and now all is well again. I'm about to begin the chapters that are incorporating the point of view I've eliminated from this version, so that will be fun. Although I expect it will be difficult to eliminate so much of what I had written, but I recognize that I need to cut it down significantly for it to work from the other character's point of view.

I wrote the first version of this book from October 2013 until October 2014. So I'm hoping to complete this version at the same rate, and hopefully have the first draft and perhaps some other drafts finished by the time 2015 ends.

I'm looking forward to another year of writing!