Here’s one of the upsides of seeing one’s style change with maturity and experience: because some tough things in life got in the way and this year’s Write-a-thon didn’t work out as I’d planned, I thought that coming back to my current WIP (the one I’d intended to try to complete in the past six weeks) might be difficult.  But I was pleasantly surprised that when I looked at it immediately after working on the earlier manuscript, it was clear that all that experience is showing; it was actually uplifting to see how much of the first draft material is quite strong already.

I could probably say I was raised to be a ‘lit snob’.  As a small child I’d look at the books my parents were reading — by authors like Virginia Woolf and Loren Eiseley — and think that that’s what you aim for: that’s how real, classy adults write.  Though I was used to almost everything I wrote receiving high praise from teachers and other adults, it was frustrating when I could see for myself that my own writing just wasn’t that sophisticated — and I really wanted to be sophisticated.

So it gives me a warm, solid feeling to have reached a level in my craft where the words that come to me naturally sound ‘grown-up’ — even by my admittedly high standards.  There may always be times when getting a particular passage to capture exactly what I’m trying to convey is a challenge — that’s part of the fun of it, after all — but there’s no doubt in my mind that I have all the tools now.  I know how to do what I’m trying to do, and as long as I put the time in, I can get it done.

Of course I’ll never stop pushing myself to write better and better.  But even if my writing isn’t as brilliant (yet!) as the work of the authors I most admire, I doubt anyone would consider me delusional for comparing myself to them.  If I’m not quite in the same league, I’ve definitely made it into the ballpark, and the work I’m producing appears to come from a writer who’s pretty skilled — perhaps even a bit sophisticated. 😉

When asked in an interview how you know when your manuscript is submission-ready, agent Eddie Schneider said, “If you’ve edited to the point where you feel like you’re just pushing words around and your eyes are going to melt out of your skull and pool between the lines, you’re getting close.”

That would be a pretty good description of the state I’m in with regards to most of the novel I’m polishing up (with the possible exception of the new material added to the last draft). There are sections of In the Shadow of the She-Wolf that I’ve poured over so many times I have them memorized.  Although of course Mr. Schneider is right about the importance of thoroughly polishing a manuscript, I would never recommend that anyone put as many hours of their life into one book as I have with this one.

This book is one of the reasons I feel strongly about the importance of writing a novel fairly rapidly — at least, getting down the entire first draft within a few months, if possible.  In fact, I might say the best scenario would be to write a complete draft in a month or so, and then to not look at it for six months, or even a year.  That way you have both the cohesiveness in the creative process and the distance to look at it with true objectivity when you’re ready to revise.

In the case of She-Wolf, the first germinal draft actually was written in about a month — and I was quite pleased with my accomplishment at the time.  I was seventeen going on eighteen, and it was my third attempt at a novel; I’d spent more than five years completing two drafts of the first one, and the second fizzled out shortly before I reached the end.  So writing an entire novel in one month — even a short novel — seemed pretty cool to me.   But after my happy little manuscript elicited some pretty strong criticism from the person who has since become my best (and pickiest) beta reader, it was obvious the book needed a lot more work to realize its potential, and the project was launched into a recurring cycle that became a drawn-out ordeal.

In short, my extensive experience with doing it ‘the wrong way’ comes from having worked on the same book on and off for a staggering number of years. One of the big problems with this, especially if you start the process at a tender age, is that your style is inevitably going to change as you mature as a writer.  So if you were to keep taking out the same manuscript every two or three years and revising it to put it into your current style, you could — theoretically — spend your entire life writing only one book.

So I’ve decided that a writer has to be like a painter who may have gone through a stage where they were influenced by Impressionism, or Cubism, or had a ‘blue phase’ or a ‘floral phase’, but then moved on to working in a different style.  That is, even if your earlier works are not the kind of thing you’d do now, you can be content with them, seeing them as representing that particular phase in your career, while going on to do something else.

And that’s what I’m trying to keep in mind as I do these final revisions — I need to think of it almost as if I were editing someone else’s book.  I can polish it and make it the best it can be, but I need to respect — and not try to change — the style itself.  If I don’t, I’ll keep rewriting it forever.

A much earlier draft of this novel was actually critiqued by Virginia Kidd (who was my dream agent when I first ventured into the world of querying, since she repped both of my favorite authors).  I was in my twenties at the time, and it’s rather embarrassing to recall some of the more adolescent elements of the plot in that version. Not surprisingly, Ms. Kidd found enough serious problems with the manuscript — such as those shaky aspects of the plot — to conclude it wasn’t ready.

But she did something wonderful that agents rarely do today — she wrote a detailed summary of the entire novel, explaining what she did and didn’t like.  And my embarrassment over the awkward bits in the manuscript was tempered by the fact that she practically gushed over the writing, and asked to see either a revision or my next work.  (I suppose my greatest claim to fame is being able to say that Virginia Kidd said I was “very talented”.  The underlining is hers, too.  Thinking of that still gives me the warm fuzzies.)

Regrettably, though I had a lot of other things in progress, I had nothing else completed — and it was a couple of years later when I had the epiphany for how to completely rewrite the book.  I’d like to think that Ms. Kidd would have liked the novel it eventually evolved into, as I believe I thoroughly addressed all the weaknesses she had concerns with, and the writing, being that much more mature, is even better.

The difficulty is that the big rewrite, which essentially changed it into a different book, added a significant over-arching plotline that gave the story far more depth — and length.  By the time my most demanding beta said that it ‘felt like a real book’, it was more than twice the length preferred by most publishers today.

Splitting the novel into three volumes necessitated making additions to the first part — hence the new material that hasn’t been poured over countless times like the rest of it.  As it’s a three-part novel, not a series, I would never use the boilerplate phrase ‘stand-alone book with series potential’, but volume one ends at a significant turning point in the protagonist’s life, with a corresponding sense of resolution; there’s clearly more to come, but no one’s left dangling from a cliff.  And although I’m aware of the challenges of selling a three-volume novel, I think I have a lot of reasons to be proud of this book — in spite of its agonizingly long history.  (Not to mention all those pages where my eyes have pooled between the lines . . . )

Though it’s especially disappointing when I was so excited about my chosen project for the Write-a-thon this year, I’ve realized it’s just not a good time to work on something so demanding.  To make sure I accomplish something meaningful during the remainder of the six weeks, I’ve decided only to focus on doing the final edits of the novel I’m about to start querying, In the Shadow of the She-Wolf.  (More specifically, the first volume of that novel, since I split the book into three parts last year.)  My father (retired English prof), is proofreading the manuscript, and I’m very close to the end now.

This is the book that acquired the infamous title of ‘NFH’ (Novel from Hell), because it’s been through so many drafts–both drastic rewrites and the kind that mostly involve nitpicking and polishing the language–over so many years.  So I find it quite curious that I’m actually finding typographical errors in the manuscript, if only very occasionally.  And I would describe myself as a pretty good proofreader.  (When Virginia Kidd reviewed a much earlier incarnation of this novel many years ago, one of the things she complimented me on was how clean the manuscript was, and I did the final polish on that version entirely on my own.)

Since there was new material added to the first volume, it doesn’t surprise me when my father or I find errors in those sections, but the rest of it has been combed through multiple times by three beta readers, and countless times by myself.  Clearly this is exactly why some people recommend reading backwards when proofreading; the human brain will often ‘auto-correct’, filling in what it knows should be in a sentence or phrase when something is missing or incorrect.

I think we’d all like to believe that when we set a goal that’s truly important to us, we’ll be able to stick with it no matter what life throws at us.  But when the difficulties are serious, there comes a point when you have to recognize that you’re not superhuman and something has to give.

Since it certainly doesn’t help to have something else to feel bad about at a difficult time, I’d hate to give up on the Write-a-thon entirely. To accomplish at least a little bit this week, I’ve tried to take advantage of the fact that the ‘editor’ can function under duress much better than the ‘muse’.  I took the only section of the original half-written manuscript of this novel that had been saved in a document (the rest was done on a typewriter), transferred it into my new working draft, and started doing a few revisions.  For what it’s worth, that resulted in a substantial increase in the word count–although it also highlighted the extent of the editing I’ll need to do to in those chapters to make them fit with the new material.

This week I finished the prologue and got a start on the first chapter.  Unless I were able to work on this project full time, it looks like there’s no getting around the fact that it’s going to take longer than I’d hoped; I know I can make this novel into just what I’ve envisioned from the beginning, but it’s simply going to take a lot of work.  On the plus side, I’m in the honeymoon phase with the prologue right now, as it feels very strong.  After I got it all down, I spent some time tweaking and polishing it.  The more I worked on it, the more it made me cry–and since it relates a devastating, tragic incident, it would seem that I’ve done something right.

What’s making the first chapter go slowly is that I’m pulling in material from the original draft that was written a gazillion years ago, as I mentioned last week.  Though I rarely have the kind of self-doubts some writers seem to be plagued with, sometimes I have whimsical little worries that amuse as much as worry me, and after I got everything in place on the opening page, I had a bit of a laugh when I reread it.

It popped into my head that someone might say it was ‘boring’ to open the first chapter of a novel with a description of a sunset and the thoughts of a young man who’s experiencing anxiety about his new wife, while his new wife is pulling spring vegetables in a garden . . .  Then it struck me as funny, because boy, does that sound ‘literary’.  (I guess I’m not kidding when I say I write literary fiction that also happens to be speculative fiction!)

Another thing that’s kind of funny is that I was tempted to say here that I think the prologue is beautiful, but decided not to risk sounding too immodest.  I’ve noticed it seems to be unfashionable in writers’ forums to say you’re very happy with your own work.  I do get the impression, however, that although there are some very experienced pros who frequent those forums, the majority of the folks who are most active on those sites are young and inexperienced–or they’re spending time there specifically because they are frustrated with their writing and are seeking others to commiserate with.

I’ve been reading Gene Wolfe’s On Blue’s Waters, and I couldn’t help thinking that, based on the critiques I’ve seen on my favorite writers’ forum, the vast majority of the members would tear the opening chapter of that novel to shreds.  The narrative path is very organic–you might say its circular.  But by the time you reach the end of the chapter, you know exactly what the situation is, you know a great deal about the narrator’s relationship with his family and community, and you know what the narrator has to do and why.

So even though he makes the reader ‘work for it’, all the information is given just as if it had been a straightforward, conventional narrative.  And in the long run the way he does it makes it a very rewarding read.  Thinking of that as an example of how to construct a brilliant first chapter, I’ve decided I’m probably going to move some of the explanatory details so they come later in the book, and try to do something more along those lines–something that makes the reader use their head right from the beginning.

Though the first priority has to be keeping true to the story itself and making the world and the people I’m so passionate about come alive, whenever we write with the intention that the book will be read and enjoyed by others, the issue of audience is always there.  I think most of us would love to write something ‘everyone likes’, but in reality that’s like Aesop’s fable about the old man, the boy, and the donkey, which ends badly for all concerned because they keep trying to please everyone they encounter.

Most people agree that the best way to write a good book is to write one you would love to read yourself.  With this novel, that means accepting that I’m not writing it for those who would find the opening of On Blue’s Waters frustrating or uninteresting; my audience is those who adore Wolfe’s work as much as I do.

And I’ll stick to being unfashionable and confess that I always enjoy reading my own work.  Sometimes it’s a bit frustrating when I find something that just isn’t working right, but I truly enjoy the challenge of fixing it.  Whether it takes a few hours or a few weeks of pushing the pieces around, I know that in the end I’ll figure out how to create something that accomplishes just what I was going for.  And when things are working well, I’m not ashamed to say it feels wonderful.  The moments when you think, ‘Wow, that’s gorgeous–did I write that?’ make all the hard work worthwhile.

The bad news is that I haven’t done any actual writing on my chosen project, and here it is the end of the first week of the Write-a-thon . . .  The good news (although that may be subject to debate) is that after spending some time reading the original half-finished draft of this novel, I think I’ll be using quite a bit more of it than I had thought I would.  And it’s certainly interesting to be reminded of all the work I put into it, much of which I don’t remember all that well.

The reason this might not be such good news is that it may make the process much more difficult.  Trying to decide what to keep and what not to keep–and, especially, integrating the old material in with the new material–can make putting together a solid draft far more complicated.  And after my experience with what my sister and I call the ‘Novel from Hell’, (a.k.a. the ‘NFH’), which was written and rewritten repeatedly over a shocking number of years, that’s not a situation I want to put myself in again.  It’s far easier to work with something that’s been written all at one time, because even if the material is rough and needs a lot of editing it’s going to be much more cohesive that way.  (This is one of the reasons I advocate using ‘the fast method’, as discussed in my post about “The Muse and the Editor.”)

But I can see that scratching my head about this–not to mention endlessly fiddling around with the enormous file full of outlines and notes for this project–isn’t going to get the book written.  The only thing to do is to dive in and start writing it, ignoring the clutter and confusion.  The complexities will just have to be dealt with as they come along.  (‘Damn the torpedoes’ and all that . . . )

Also, I did get some ‘fine-tuning’ done on the manuscript I’m about to start querying (which is actually the final incarnation of the infamous ‘NFH’, though, thankfully, I believe it bears little evidence of its torturous birth).  Since editing also counts as writing work accomplished for the Write-a-thon, I suppose the first week wasn’t too shabby after all. 😉

I’m gearing up for the Clarion West Write-a-thon again, but I’m afraid it’s kind of snuck up on me–a lot like Christmas always does!  It seemed like I had plenty of time–and I was planning to get the word out early–and it’s starting just next week.

The project I’ve chosen is pretty ambitious, but also something I’m so excited about that in many ways it’s better than Christmas!  I’m going to try to complete a draft of a novel I started many years ago and, as I mention on my Write-a-thon page, it’s set in what may very well be my favorite world.  Spending a lot of time there is something I’ve been looking forward to for ages.  But precisely because I know this world and these people so well, one of the challenges will be that there’s even more pressure when it comes to ‘getting it right’ and finding the words that will do them justice.