writer
Rewriting is fun. I’m re-using a lot from the last version, so the words are piling up quick, giving me a cheap sense of accomplishment.
I’ve also left out one of the red herrings — the one that was causing me major gnashing on the last draft — and I already feel like the story is cooking better. Of course, I’ve only just gotten to the end of chapter 2. I can practically guarantee that the gnashing will resume as I get closer to the end.
I am not a details person. Ask anyone who knows me. I remember nebulous information with personally relevant content, not facts. Yet I make my living, via my Day Job ™, in a field RIFE with prickly little details that are very important to know and remember. Thus, I screw up on a fairly regular basis.
I am also a Highly Sensitive Person ™, and making anyone unhappy — even people I barely fucking know — absolutely kills me. You can see where I’m going with this. Hell. That’s where I’m going.
Today’s one of those days I feel like I should pay my clients for the inconvenience of having me as their designated professional. Then get in bed and stay there.
Fortunately, I had a pretty good day with The Book yesterday — I realized that I need to write away from all distractions; in bed in the afternoon with my laptop works well. Here at my desk with the internet on and the phone ringing does not. That’s why things were moving so slow a few days ago. I was attempting to multi-task, which is not only ineffective, it annoys the shit out of me when I try to do it. So we’ll have no more of that.
Gah. SO SLOW. It’s like cold butter.
If you’re a writer, and you haven’t discovered the motherlode of Timothy Hallinan’s writer’s pages, go there now and bookmark it. His wise cousel has brought me back in from the ledge more than once, and I think he’s done it again.
What I’m currently struggling with in The Edit appears to be an architectural problem. When my protag encounters her first ‘crisis,’ she does the wrong thing — ‘wrong’ in the sense that she spends a lot of energy on one small part of the problem and ignores the rest of it. You know, the kind of thing that makes you scoff out loud when you’re reading a crime novel or watching a crime program and go ‘Why the hell didn’t she (insert sane response here).’
The rest of the story builds from that mistake. So…yeah.
There’s a lot I can salvage, so I don’t think I’m looking at a starting from blank page one, but it’s going to be foundation work: expensive, messy, and painful. And you lucky dogs will get to read all about it! Have you thanked the gods of blogs yet today, for sending me to you?
Just to reiterate, both for myself and any poor bastard who may be reading this, I started writing this novel purely for my own entertainment, and I swore to stop when it stopped being fun. It hasn’t stopped being fun; in fact, maybe I’m nuts, but the prospect of another re-write is actually making me sort of happy. Now if I could just quit my Day Job and do this full-time. Imagine the exponential increase in fun! And blog rants! It would be spectacular.
OK. It’s not that it’s awful — well, yes, it is awful, but there’s a reason: IT’S NOT FINISHED.
Right now all I’m trying to do is get the story untangled. I’m not paying much attention to style or character development; that is, I’m not putting in a lot of what I know about the characters now, because I need to get the plot firing on all cylinders before I can know what the characters will do in response to the story and events. I understand from many many books about writing that this is ALL WRONG and that I should let the story ‘evolve’ from the characters, but this is a murder mystery with a complex plot (shut up), and things in the story have to line up correctly or the book will have no reason to exist.
So, no bullets in the head today. Maybe tomorrow.
It’s Dark Night of the Soul time over here in novel-editing land — the thing reads like something you’d find pasted up on a telephone pole in the Land of Idiots. It’s just awful.
Awful or not, I’m going to finish it. I’m just worried I’m ‘overwriting’ it, although I’m not really sure what that means. It just seems to get worse the more I work on it. Tonight. Tomorrow it may not look so bad. I certainly hope that’s the case, so I won’t have to put a bullet in my head.
I’ve said this before, but now I can’t find the post, so I’m going to say it again. There are loads — LOADS — of tropes in the crime genre that drive me nuts, but one in particular is really toasting my muffins, lately.
It’s the one-line paragraph.
Writers everywhere seem to be breaking up their paragraphs into single lines, in the desperate hope of injecting some sort of gravitas, I guess.
STOP IT.
IT’S ANNOYING.
It does nothing for your writing except undermine any real gravitas your story may develop later on. It also makes the manuscript practically unreadable. Whoever told you otherwise is an idiot.
I keep getting caught up in reading my own book while editing, which is slowing things down considerably. It’s fun to read, for me, at least. Does that say anything about the quality of my writing? Or do all writers like their own stuff?
Took a short vacation from editing The Book to write a short story today. Let me know what you think.
In October, Jessica Mann, an award-winning crime novelist and Literary Review critic, decided that “I’ve had enough torture-porn…and won’t review that any more.”
Of course, it went out on the airwaves as ‘Book Reviewer Quits Over ‘Increasing Sexist Violence’,’ because I’m sure that raked in way more site hits than her more moderate actual stance would have.
After the Telegraph article came out (before Mann’s clarification), I participated in a couple of on-line discussions about the issues it raised, most of which petered out into a kind of ’so what?’ resolution. The overwhelming opinion seemed to be ‘it’s crime fiction, what does she expect?’
Oddly enough, I haven’t been much bothered by sexist violence in current crime fiction, but this may be simply because I put a book down at the first sign of misogyny. What I have noticed is that I’m putting more and more books down. While I’m glad that I’m doing so before I get to the ‘torture porn’ sections, I find it troublesome that even good writers are still leaning on tired old sexist tropes, to wit:
