Some Thoughts on Revising
Aug. 29th, 2009 08:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unforthI started revising the novel about two days after I finished it, which means I've been working on it for a couple of weeks now. I've done editing before, including damn serious revision, but it's always been for work, and I've never tackled anything quite like this before. I've done about a quarter of the novel already, and I'm especially editing for length - pretty successfully so far, I've cut just under 7,000 words, including pretty much one entire chapter, and I've moved around some other chapters.
I just realized...that I should be careful about spoilers, since I really do intend to try to publish this damn thing someday, which means some of you might actually end up reading it...so be warned, some of the mystery might go out if you read things like this post... :)
Yesterday, I started paging ahead so I could begin to think about what other big changes like that might be in the cards, and it got my brain thinking over time about larger scale alterations in the narrative as well - to the extent that I had a lot of trouble falling asleep, and when I woke up stupidly early this morning (6 AM) I it took me an hour to fall back asleep. While I do know which thing specifically prompted this problem, that's not really the problem. I'm mostly just fascinated by how this process could have even driven my brain to that point.
Editing, for all that it goes considerably faster than writing, is NOT easy. I already know that I'm going to have to edit the whole thing again, if only because there are places where what I've added is probably not very good, and there are other places where I suspect I've taken away so much that what I've left has ceased to have meaning - which is something I've had happen when editing grants, too. On the plus side, editing primarily for length is something I am VERY used to doing. I don't consider a first draft of a grant "successful" unless it's at least 10 pages over the limit (usually my first drafts are 35 - 40 pages over a 25 page limit). It's in the cutting down process that I end up with a high-quality product.
The choices are much harder when I have so much freedom, though. If I cut X, and add Y, that has repercussions for later in the novel. I've now twice had to put big flagged "notes to self" on the tops of pages, because something I changed MUST have an impact on the narrative down the line. And something like this is also what prompted my minor insomnia - I ended up reading a paragraph most of the way into my novel, and it was so good (not beyond needing some changes, but good!) that it sent a shiver down my spine. It was one that alluded to the main villain's end game, and reading it, I just knew - my ending hadn't done justice to that shiver - and so my brain started attempting to process just what I'd have to do to the ending to make that one paragraph be as awesome as it deserved to be. (it's just my luck that my eyes would stumble on one of the most important paragraphs in the book while I was randomly flipping through...)
Meanwhile, it also started to chug through the over all structure - I have a few chapters that don't directly relate to the main plot, or tie in to it only tangentially; I have one chapter that mostly just sets up the beginnings of a currently non-existent sequel...I was already planning to trim it down a lot, though it just occurred to me now that maybe I should just cut most of it, and include it in the next book (I'm really, really not interested in just deleting that chapter, I put a LOT of work into it and a ton of research and I think it's a very good chapter, just maybe not one that belongs in this book). This chapter leads into an incredibly important part of the novel, though - so if I remove it, I'll have to find some other way to segue.
Another interesting thing I've learned through this process is just what words I shamelessly over use.
The biggest offender is "though." Read through this post, and you'll start to notice all of the places where I use "though" where it's not really needed (I've left this post stream of thought for me just so that this will be evident). While I was finishing the novel and wrote 27k words in two days, it became evident to me that I abuse that word, and so I thought it would be funny if I kept track of just how many times I removed it as I edited. So far, I've removed it an average of more than once per page; a page I did yesterday I removed it a terrifying 6 times. In ONE PAGE (okay, sure, my pages are pretty compressed, but still!!). Other offenders include "just," "vaguely," "slightly," "maybe," "seems," ""somehow," "even," "very," "appeared," "pretty," "really," and "apparently." There are plenty more, but those are some that spring to mind. Pretty much anything that can slip in and vague up a sentence which should be definitive - almost all sentences should be definitive. I had first draft lines that said things like, "From where Marie stood, it almost appeared as if they might be trying to make an attempt to do something about it." (okay, I made that one up, and it's a little bit of an exaggeration...but not much of one!) I take a perverse pleasure in identifying and demolishing the sentences like that.
I also - unsurprising to anyone who reads my LJ regularly, I suspect - found that I have a tendency to over use dashes; semi-colons are also a problem (occasionally, parentheses are too.)
(Yes, I wrote the last sentence like that entirely on purpose. ;) )
Other changes are more solid than that. For example, noting that my book is about super heroes, my main character has only pretty paltry powers - she can see the future (okay, not so paltry I guess, but not all that useful in a lot of ways, since she can't control it), her intuition is right about 90% of the time, and she can see glowing auras around people that gives her an idea what they are thinking. Her main power, though, is her strong will. Figuring out how to convey this to the reader is surprisingly difficult. My character doesn't know that this is her power, and it's not until pretty late in the book that any of the other characters figure it out. I worry that the times when she isn't afraid of things that are scary will come off as bad writing instead of as a deliberate omission because SHE ISN'T AFRAID - even though she SHOULD be. In truth, despite everything I can do, I'm pretty much positive that there's no way I can communicate this - I think it's just too subtle, by necessity, and that instead it would have to be a second reading that would reveal that sure enough, she'd exhibited this power all along. Counting on people reading your book twice? Already a very bad policy. :( Anyway, I was so worried about this when I was writing it originally that early in the book, I allowed myself to lose track of this power and so I frequently have her afraid or nervous about things that would make normal people afraid or nervous. But ya know? She isn't a normal person! She's a super hero, with a super power, and she shouldn't be afraid or nervous. It should be that by the time SHE'S afraid, everyone else would have run to the hills long since. So I've decided in this run through to take the chance and give her the power that she's entitled to, and hope that the fact that she doesn't ever get scared is noticeable enough that it bugs the reader a little, such that when they get to the point that my other main character figures out what her power is, it has some actual impact - I'm suddenly reminded of Bink in Spell for Chameleon, maybe I should re-read it and see how Anthony handled a similar problem - but my memory is that because Xanth has SO much magic around, Bink ended up in situations where his bizarre and subtle "magic" could turn up as weird - yet I also remember it being pretty puzzling on my first read through. Hard to separate for me, it was one of my fav books as a kid, I've read it easily over a hundred times...(should I admit that?? :) )
Right. So there are issues like that - I have problems with characterization in general (creating and maintaining a definite and distinct personality for each character) and so I've just been trying to kind of beef up my characters view points (to put it in simplest terms, Marie's the sort to stub her toe and exclaim "Damn," and John's the sort who'd exclaim "Fuck," and I've actually found places where I screwed that up on both sides...)
I guess I'm just growing nervous about the changes I foresee in the future, the kinds of stuff that won't fit in 1/2" margins (which, after all, is why I didn't print it double sided...).
I've been trying to pay a lot of attention to how my novel is structured, and it's a surprisingly difficult enterprise. Right now, I've edited the Introduction (it might be a Prologue; it used to be Chapter 1, but that's not right), and the first four chapters. Over all, my novel has a kind of strange structure. It tells two stories simultaneously, one that takes place in 1940, and the other of which occurs in 1942. It's divided into three parts, and it has an Introduction, an Intermission between each part, and an Epilogue, all of which take place in 1956.
The Introduction raises the phantom of a plot (when I printed the novel, I printed the first page as a test page, and ended up handing it to my mom to read. Afterwards, she gave me some feedback, among them that I'd been far to heavy handed with something I said, to introduce the main villain on the first page! I got a laugh out of that, since I'd done it on purpose...and that's not the main villain...) and finish with an important piece of the plot that I don't follow up on until a chapter I haven't gotten to yet (which I think is the second chapter in the second part...)
Chapter 1 is pretty much entirely devoted to introducing Marie. (this is a 1942 chapter)
Chapter 2 introduces John. (those are my two point of view characters) It also launches the first of the two intertwined plot threads, and introduces the villain of this plot line (this is a secondary plot line). (this is a 1940 chapter)
Chapter 3 is pretty much entirely devoted to introducing Marie and John to each other. (1942)
Chapter 4 is a whole lot of apparently random narrative that includes a rather subtle introduction to my actual main villain (Marie's main opponent) and a considerably less subtle introduction to the main plot's secondary villain (who ends up as Johns main opponent) - and this secondary villain is pretty much the worst integrated part of my entire novel, and I need to fix that. :( (1942)
Chapter 5 (which I'm working now) tells Marie's part of the 1940 plot line. (the 1940 plot line resolves by the end of the second part of the novel - the third part relates entirely to the 1942 plot line)...
...all in all, that's actually not as much filler as it's felt like while reading it. I don't know. I'm just worried that I'm moving too slowly, and that surely there should be a way of doing Chapter 1 and Chapter 3 that integrates my plots better, yet when I read them, I did decide to keep them more or less as they were (and by more or less...well, I cut more than 2000 words from Chapter 3, and a thousand from chapter 1...) ...I'm just not as happy as I want to be about it, but I've come to the conclusion that I can only try to solve so many problems in the first revision.
As I see it, the future of this project is as follows...
1. Finish this revision.
2. Let it sit for a least a little while - a few weeks - and ponder the key issue: just what would need to change to publish it as it is now, without converting it into a young adult novel? The more I work on it, the more I find...that I really don't want to do that. But I'm going to have to rip it's guts out to make some parts of it work for an actual publishable novel.
2a. The biggest issue that I need to tackle is one I've been thinking about for no less than a year now. This novel is about a game that I played. Marie is my character, and John is![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
xaniquens, and it was run by Kreiner. Many of the characters mentioned were other people's PCs - me and JD spent a fair amount of time getting peoples permission, in fact. Still, there are two issues that derive directly from this.
2a(i). Portrayal of other peoples characters. There is one character in particular that I do not portray kindly. He was a PC, and the scene which looks bad for him actually did happen, and he really did say those things to my character, but even so - he loved his PC as much as I loved mine, and I don't want to make him feel bad, yet it's an important scene. As such, I think I'll probably be removing/replacing at least a couple of the parts currently played by actual PCs with characters that I invent. This won't be so hard, once I've decided to do it.
2a(ii). This is the doozy. Kreiner is a fan of Lovecraft, and a lot of Lovecraftian elements permeated the game. Not a problem so far - Lovecraft stuff permeates a lot of the genre. The problem is the Dreamlands. This doesn't just permeate the game, it was actually literally lifted and transported, and beyond that, is a CRITICAL part of the plot - like, one of the two plot lines takes place primarily there. To make the book saleable, I'll have to rip this apart and rebuild it as something new. This is what I've been thinking about for a year, and so far I've only come up with a couple of viable options, and I'm very worried that they'll all seem derivative...because, well, THEY ARE. It doesn't make any sense at all to transport these events into the real world - indeed, I think doing so would more or less demolish my primary plot line - though I'll admit I've yet to sit down and really play out what moving it into the normal world would do. This leaves me with a few choices:
-an alternate dimension of some kind (some kind different than it already is, maybe a "dimensional intersect" or some such)
-an astral plane (a mirror of reality that has taken on a life of its own - basically, for Changeling folks, a variation on the Dreaming)
-a consensus reality (a plane spawned by some kind of meta-consciousness which reflects the emotions of all of the people whose brains feed into it - thus, for example, during WW2 it would be a pretty damn dark place, but during good times, it wouldn't be - this is basically a suggestion Kreiner made to me on the phone the other day).
Thus far, I've mostly been wrestling with the middle idea. I have to say, the dimensional intersect idea is one that came to me while I was writing this post...and I rather like the sound of it. It might be my favorite idea thus far, in fact. It's pretty close to what it already is, but I can make it substantially different in appearance, at least. It's been done before - but all of those options have been done before - and it fits into the overarching structure of this universe pretty well, because time travel and dimensional jumping are both inextricably part of the novel (Marie is a traveler in the Dreamlands, and John is a world jumper....why'd we have to make characters with such stupid-ass powers? I'd have been able to avoid so many problems if we'd just played a brick and an energy manipulator...)
2b. I just need to sit back and reflect: which of the things in my novel are there because they happened in the game and I have fond memories of them, and which are there because they are actually, truly integral to my plot? I've already spent a LOT of time thinking about this. I outlined the novel when I first started, and refined that outline the whole time I worked on it. I omitted a ton that happened and focused on the individual sessions that related to my plot, and - given that these games happened 7 and 8 years ago, I made up pretty much every detail, I only really recalled the shape of things. (For example, in summer or fall 2001, can't recall which now, JD and I had a session where our characters were driving from Texas to New York, and we ended up just wandering off and having a roughly two hour in character conversation. This is one of the most important conversations we had in four and a half years of game play, and yet the only thing either of us specifically remembers is one sentence he said, and my reply to it. Sure, it was - from my point of view, anyway - the most important two lines of the scene, but that leaves a lot of dialog completely up in the air, with only the guiding memory that it was all mightily important somehow...). Scenes like that example aren't the problem, but there are others that I have to look at and think...is this really necessary? What does this add?
3. Revise it again. The second revision is when these and other overarching changes will be made, and will probably take longer and will certainly involve more work than the current revision.
4. Edit the result. If I'm adding great big swathes of scenes, all of that will need editing. I've probably put myself in to 2010 by now...
5. ...but if that's successful, I'll hopefully have something I can shop around and actually try to get published.
That'd be...kinda wow. :)
Well, the above ended up being a long, rambling, mostly for my own benefit description of the challenges and concerns I've been wrestling with in my book. I've probably bored anyone who has bothered to read it to tears by now, but if it's any comfort, I've found the writing of it to actually be really helpful in some important ways. The key thing I've learned about revision:- keeping all of the different things that are important in the novel in my head is really, really hard, and putting some of it down in writing...helps. I'll have to keep doing this. Sorry in advance, everyone. ;)
I just realized...that I should be careful about spoilers, since I really do intend to try to publish this damn thing someday, which means some of you might actually end up reading it...so be warned, some of the mystery might go out if you read things like this post... :)
Yesterday, I started paging ahead so I could begin to think about what other big changes like that might be in the cards, and it got my brain thinking over time about larger scale alterations in the narrative as well - to the extent that I had a lot of trouble falling asleep, and when I woke up stupidly early this morning (6 AM) I it took me an hour to fall back asleep. While I do know which thing specifically prompted this problem, that's not really the problem. I'm mostly just fascinated by how this process could have even driven my brain to that point.
Editing, for all that it goes considerably faster than writing, is NOT easy. I already know that I'm going to have to edit the whole thing again, if only because there are places where what I've added is probably not very good, and there are other places where I suspect I've taken away so much that what I've left has ceased to have meaning - which is something I've had happen when editing grants, too. On the plus side, editing primarily for length is something I am VERY used to doing. I don't consider a first draft of a grant "successful" unless it's at least 10 pages over the limit (usually my first drafts are 35 - 40 pages over a 25 page limit). It's in the cutting down process that I end up with a high-quality product.
The choices are much harder when I have so much freedom, though. If I cut X, and add Y, that has repercussions for later in the novel. I've now twice had to put big flagged "notes to self" on the tops of pages, because something I changed MUST have an impact on the narrative down the line. And something like this is also what prompted my minor insomnia - I ended up reading a paragraph most of the way into my novel, and it was so good (not beyond needing some changes, but good!) that it sent a shiver down my spine. It was one that alluded to the main villain's end game, and reading it, I just knew - my ending hadn't done justice to that shiver - and so my brain started attempting to process just what I'd have to do to the ending to make that one paragraph be as awesome as it deserved to be. (it's just my luck that my eyes would stumble on one of the most important paragraphs in the book while I was randomly flipping through...)
Meanwhile, it also started to chug through the over all structure - I have a few chapters that don't directly relate to the main plot, or tie in to it only tangentially; I have one chapter that mostly just sets up the beginnings of a currently non-existent sequel...I was already planning to trim it down a lot, though it just occurred to me now that maybe I should just cut most of it, and include it in the next book (I'm really, really not interested in just deleting that chapter, I put a LOT of work into it and a ton of research and I think it's a very good chapter, just maybe not one that belongs in this book). This chapter leads into an incredibly important part of the novel, though - so if I remove it, I'll have to find some other way to segue.
Another interesting thing I've learned through this process is just what words I shamelessly over use.
The biggest offender is "though." Read through this post, and you'll start to notice all of the places where I use "though" where it's not really needed (I've left this post stream of thought for me just so that this will be evident). While I was finishing the novel and wrote 27k words in two days, it became evident to me that I abuse that word, and so I thought it would be funny if I kept track of just how many times I removed it as I edited. So far, I've removed it an average of more than once per page; a page I did yesterday I removed it a terrifying 6 times. In ONE PAGE (okay, sure, my pages are pretty compressed, but still!!). Other offenders include "just," "vaguely," "slightly," "maybe," "seems," ""somehow," "even," "very," "appeared," "pretty," "really," and "apparently." There are plenty more, but those are some that spring to mind. Pretty much anything that can slip in and vague up a sentence which should be definitive - almost all sentences should be definitive. I had first draft lines that said things like, "From where Marie stood, it almost appeared as if they might be trying to make an attempt to do something about it." (okay, I made that one up, and it's a little bit of an exaggeration...but not much of one!) I take a perverse pleasure in identifying and demolishing the sentences like that.
I also - unsurprising to anyone who reads my LJ regularly, I suspect - found that I have a tendency to over use dashes; semi-colons are also a problem (occasionally, parentheses are too.)
(Yes, I wrote the last sentence like that entirely on purpose. ;) )
Other changes are more solid than that. For example, noting that my book is about super heroes, my main character has only pretty paltry powers - she can see the future (okay, not so paltry I guess, but not all that useful in a lot of ways, since she can't control it), her intuition is right about 90% of the time, and she can see glowing auras around people that gives her an idea what they are thinking. Her main power, though, is her strong will. Figuring out how to convey this to the reader is surprisingly difficult. My character doesn't know that this is her power, and it's not until pretty late in the book that any of the other characters figure it out. I worry that the times when she isn't afraid of things that are scary will come off as bad writing instead of as a deliberate omission because SHE ISN'T AFRAID - even though she SHOULD be. In truth, despite everything I can do, I'm pretty much positive that there's no way I can communicate this - I think it's just too subtle, by necessity, and that instead it would have to be a second reading that would reveal that sure enough, she'd exhibited this power all along. Counting on people reading your book twice? Already a very bad policy. :( Anyway, I was so worried about this when I was writing it originally that early in the book, I allowed myself to lose track of this power and so I frequently have her afraid or nervous about things that would make normal people afraid or nervous. But ya know? She isn't a normal person! She's a super hero, with a super power, and she shouldn't be afraid or nervous. It should be that by the time SHE'S afraid, everyone else would have run to the hills long since. So I've decided in this run through to take the chance and give her the power that she's entitled to, and hope that the fact that she doesn't ever get scared is noticeable enough that it bugs the reader a little, such that when they get to the point that my other main character figures out what her power is, it has some actual impact - I'm suddenly reminded of Bink in Spell for Chameleon, maybe I should re-read it and see how Anthony handled a similar problem - but my memory is that because Xanth has SO much magic around, Bink ended up in situations where his bizarre and subtle "magic" could turn up as weird - yet I also remember it being pretty puzzling on my first read through. Hard to separate for me, it was one of my fav books as a kid, I've read it easily over a hundred times...(should I admit that?? :) )
Right. So there are issues like that - I have problems with characterization in general (creating and maintaining a definite and distinct personality for each character) and so I've just been trying to kind of beef up my characters view points (to put it in simplest terms, Marie's the sort to stub her toe and exclaim "Damn," and John's the sort who'd exclaim "Fuck," and I've actually found places where I screwed that up on both sides...)
I guess I'm just growing nervous about the changes I foresee in the future, the kinds of stuff that won't fit in 1/2" margins (which, after all, is why I didn't print it double sided...).
I've been trying to pay a lot of attention to how my novel is structured, and it's a surprisingly difficult enterprise. Right now, I've edited the Introduction (it might be a Prologue; it used to be Chapter 1, but that's not right), and the first four chapters. Over all, my novel has a kind of strange structure. It tells two stories simultaneously, one that takes place in 1940, and the other of which occurs in 1942. It's divided into three parts, and it has an Introduction, an Intermission between each part, and an Epilogue, all of which take place in 1956.
The Introduction raises the phantom of a plot (when I printed the novel, I printed the first page as a test page, and ended up handing it to my mom to read. Afterwards, she gave me some feedback, among them that I'd been far to heavy handed with something I said, to introduce the main villain on the first page! I got a laugh out of that, since I'd done it on purpose...and that's not the main villain...) and finish with an important piece of the plot that I don't follow up on until a chapter I haven't gotten to yet (which I think is the second chapter in the second part...)
Chapter 1 is pretty much entirely devoted to introducing Marie. (this is a 1942 chapter)
Chapter 2 introduces John. (those are my two point of view characters) It also launches the first of the two intertwined plot threads, and introduces the villain of this plot line (this is a secondary plot line). (this is a 1940 chapter)
Chapter 3 is pretty much entirely devoted to introducing Marie and John to each other. (1942)
Chapter 4 is a whole lot of apparently random narrative that includes a rather subtle introduction to my actual main villain (Marie's main opponent) and a considerably less subtle introduction to the main plot's secondary villain (who ends up as Johns main opponent) - and this secondary villain is pretty much the worst integrated part of my entire novel, and I need to fix that. :( (1942)
Chapter 5 (which I'm working now) tells Marie's part of the 1940 plot line. (the 1940 plot line resolves by the end of the second part of the novel - the third part relates entirely to the 1942 plot line)...
...all in all, that's actually not as much filler as it's felt like while reading it. I don't know. I'm just worried that I'm moving too slowly, and that surely there should be a way of doing Chapter 1 and Chapter 3 that integrates my plots better, yet when I read them, I did decide to keep them more or less as they were (and by more or less...well, I cut more than 2000 words from Chapter 3, and a thousand from chapter 1...) ...I'm just not as happy as I want to be about it, but I've come to the conclusion that I can only try to solve so many problems in the first revision.
As I see it, the future of this project is as follows...
1. Finish this revision.
2. Let it sit for a least a little while - a few weeks - and ponder the key issue: just what would need to change to publish it as it is now, without converting it into a young adult novel? The more I work on it, the more I find...that I really don't want to do that. But I'm going to have to rip it's guts out to make some parts of it work for an actual publishable novel.
2a. The biggest issue that I need to tackle is one I've been thinking about for no less than a year now. This novel is about a game that I played. Marie is my character, and John is
xaniquens, and it was run by Kreiner. Many of the characters mentioned were other people's PCs - me and JD spent a fair amount of time getting peoples permission, in fact. Still, there are two issues that derive directly from this.2a(i). Portrayal of other peoples characters. There is one character in particular that I do not portray kindly. He was a PC, and the scene which looks bad for him actually did happen, and he really did say those things to my character, but even so - he loved his PC as much as I loved mine, and I don't want to make him feel bad, yet it's an important scene. As such, I think I'll probably be removing/replacing at least a couple of the parts currently played by actual PCs with characters that I invent. This won't be so hard, once I've decided to do it.
2a(ii). This is the doozy. Kreiner is a fan of Lovecraft, and a lot of Lovecraftian elements permeated the game. Not a problem so far - Lovecraft stuff permeates a lot of the genre. The problem is the Dreamlands. This doesn't just permeate the game, it was actually literally lifted and transported, and beyond that, is a CRITICAL part of the plot - like, one of the two plot lines takes place primarily there. To make the book saleable, I'll have to rip this apart and rebuild it as something new. This is what I've been thinking about for a year, and so far I've only come up with a couple of viable options, and I'm very worried that they'll all seem derivative...because, well, THEY ARE. It doesn't make any sense at all to transport these events into the real world - indeed, I think doing so would more or less demolish my primary plot line - though I'll admit I've yet to sit down and really play out what moving it into the normal world would do. This leaves me with a few choices:
-an alternate dimension of some kind (some kind different than it already is, maybe a "dimensional intersect" or some such)
-an astral plane (a mirror of reality that has taken on a life of its own - basically, for Changeling folks, a variation on the Dreaming)
-a consensus reality (a plane spawned by some kind of meta-consciousness which reflects the emotions of all of the people whose brains feed into it - thus, for example, during WW2 it would be a pretty damn dark place, but during good times, it wouldn't be - this is basically a suggestion Kreiner made to me on the phone the other day).
Thus far, I've mostly been wrestling with the middle idea. I have to say, the dimensional intersect idea is one that came to me while I was writing this post...and I rather like the sound of it. It might be my favorite idea thus far, in fact. It's pretty close to what it already is, but I can make it substantially different in appearance, at least. It's been done before - but all of those options have been done before - and it fits into the overarching structure of this universe pretty well, because time travel and dimensional jumping are both inextricably part of the novel (Marie is a traveler in the Dreamlands, and John is a world jumper....why'd we have to make characters with such stupid-ass powers? I'd have been able to avoid so many problems if we'd just played a brick and an energy manipulator...)
2b. I just need to sit back and reflect: which of the things in my novel are there because they happened in the game and I have fond memories of them, and which are there because they are actually, truly integral to my plot? I've already spent a LOT of time thinking about this. I outlined the novel when I first started, and refined that outline the whole time I worked on it. I omitted a ton that happened and focused on the individual sessions that related to my plot, and - given that these games happened 7 and 8 years ago, I made up pretty much every detail, I only really recalled the shape of things. (For example, in summer or fall 2001, can't recall which now, JD and I had a session where our characters were driving from Texas to New York, and we ended up just wandering off and having a roughly two hour in character conversation. This is one of the most important conversations we had in four and a half years of game play, and yet the only thing either of us specifically remembers is one sentence he said, and my reply to it. Sure, it was - from my point of view, anyway - the most important two lines of the scene, but that leaves a lot of dialog completely up in the air, with only the guiding memory that it was all mightily important somehow...). Scenes like that example aren't the problem, but there are others that I have to look at and think...is this really necessary? What does this add?
3. Revise it again. The second revision is when these and other overarching changes will be made, and will probably take longer and will certainly involve more work than the current revision.
4. Edit the result. If I'm adding great big swathes of scenes, all of that will need editing. I've probably put myself in to 2010 by now...
5. ...but if that's successful, I'll hopefully have something I can shop around and actually try to get published.
That'd be...kinda wow. :)
Well, the above ended up being a long, rambling, mostly for my own benefit description of the challenges and concerns I've been wrestling with in my book. I've probably bored anyone who has bothered to read it to tears by now, but if it's any comfort, I've found the writing of it to actually be really helpful in some important ways. The key thing I've learned about revision:- keeping all of the different things that are important in the novel in my head is really, really hard, and putting some of it down in writing...helps. I'll have to keep doing this. Sorry in advance, everyone. ;)
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Date: 2009-08-29 06:48 pm (UTC)"Though" -- <has an epileptic fit> I've recently begun to notice my penchant for compound sentences, the second half of which contrasts with the first half, or else simple sentences contrasting with what came before. Result? "But" showing up THREE TIMES A PARAGRAPH. I restructure it to use "though" or "however" or "yet" or "still" where I can, or just to stop with that structure altogether, but (!) it's driving me batshit right now.
The willpower thing -- have you considered showing her experiencing the beginning of fear, and then having it turn off like a switch? You don't have to hit the reader over the head with the effect, but it could help them have a sense that something is happening. And Marie (okay, typing that is weird) wouldn't necessarily realize anything is going on, because for all she knows, that's just what it feels like when anybody decides to be brave.
The attachment to How It Went In The Game is the tough part of any adaptation, I think. And yeah, it's hard to be sure, sometimes, which bits serve the purpose of this telling -- with the added difficulty in your case of not wanting to offend anybody. Distance, I think, is the best weapon in that fight, because it gives you perspective. You're already pretty distant from the game, after that many years, but it will also help to take some time off after you finish this revision, to get a bit of perspective on the book itself.
(Speaking from experience -- it is nothing short of amazing, what you realize you can cut or do in 1/10 the wordage, with the distance of a few years and a few other novels . . . .)
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