Sheila Rambles

So yesterday evening, I decided to save a few ounces of gasoline and walk to the grocery store instead of driving.  It was a longish walk, but not impossible, and it gave me loads of time to think. And as I walked, I came up with two ways to rewrite two crucial scenes that made so much more sense.  I got so excited, I went ahead and plowed into one of those scenes and wound up staying well past my bedtime hashing it out. I'm still figuring it out exactly.  But one of the downsides is that all the subsequent scenes that refer back to that moment now have to be rewritten.  The little wrinkle it leaves has to be pushed all the way to the edge of the table. I think before I tackle the other rewritten scene, I should read through to keep track of what other parts refer back to it, so I'll know where I need to smooth things once I know what it's been changed to. But it's starting to get addictive again, which is a good thing at this point, I think.

Once in a while, when I mention that I've finished a manuscript and I'm in the middle of revising it with the intent to submit it for publication, someone will suggest something along the lines of "Well, if that doesn't work out, you can always self-publish, right?" I sort of smile and shake my head when people say that. I think the digital printing revolution is a marvelous thing, I truly do.  My parents actually created their own small press, using Lulu as a printer, so my mother could create a simple and inexpensive textbook for clinical nursing instruction. And, of course, my years in the poetry scene have introduced me to many a traveling poet selling self-published chapbooks in order to have enough gas money to make it to the next gig. But for novel-length fiction, self-publishing is doing the hard work from the wrong end. My intent is to do the hard work at the front end--at grinding and polishing this chunk of prose into something that makes it to #14 on...

I haven't had much time to work on the manuscript, because several other projects are demanding my attention, but the thing was in a pile on the floor for several days after the last time I did some work on it and I just tidied the stack a bit and put it in the bag I've been keeping it in. As I was going through the pages, I came across a note I'd scribbled at the bottom margin of a certain scene. Is there a point to any of this? It looks like I have many more darlings to kill. My plan of action at this point it to chop out the meandery and cringeworthy bits and then start adding all the details I glossed over in my race to the November 30 finish line.  Subtraction before addition.  We'll see how it works.

If in Act I you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act. --Anton Chekhov The term Chekhov's Gun has its own Wikipedia entry, as I discovered as I was trying to track down the exact quote. (As it turns out, there is no exact quote, since Chekhov reiterated the point in a number of places--I used the quote from the footnotes to the entry.) The point being, if you introduce an element into a story, then you need to follow up on it. I just changed two lines in the novel, simply because they hinted at something that ended up not happening. At the time I wrote it, things were still in an open-ended state of flux and it was a distinct possibility, but ultimately there was no need for it to happen and it didn't. So I cut the line, replaced it with something that emphasized what did end up happening and I could feel the whole thing weaving together a little more tightly. There are still a lot of loose spots that need to be tightened (or cut!) but I...

I just removed an extended scene from the manuscript that dropped the wordcount by some five thousand words. And you know what?  The two points between fit together seamlessly . There are some lovely bits in there, and I'll miss them, but I can always go back to the raw draft and revisit them if I really feel the need to.  But when I read over the pages, I realized that as much fun as it was to write and as clever as some of the lines were, the entire sequence served no purpose except to kill time.  Which is great when you're trying to hit the 50,000 mark by the end of November, but not so great when you're trying to shape it into something compelling. There's one bit I may have to extract and insert elsewhere.  I haven't decided yet. Right now, a lot of my energies are being taken up with some other projects of mine, but it felt good to sneak in and do that one simple thing.

I just spent two hours with my manuscript and a pink pen, marking inconsistencies and designating entire scenes for the writerly equivalent of the cutting room floor. It felt great .

I've decided that what I really need to do is print this baby out so I can see it tangibly and scribble on it where I need to.  So I figured I'd get a bloggy posty thing in while I'm waiting for the pages to grind out of my little ink-jet printer. The critique group at Orbital was extremely helpful and quite encouraging.  And it gave me a certain insight into how to take constructive criticism that I wish to all heaven I had figured out ages ago. In my younger days as a writer, I dutifully took the short stories I wrote and ran them past a certain circle of writerly types in my acquaintance.  Some of them had actually been published and I made the fundamental error of assuming that since they had ascended to the ranks of the published, they knew more than I did about how I needed to be writing. I think part of the problem was, they were perfectly good writers, but not terribly good critiquers.  One in particular (won't name names) had a tendency to suggest things that w...