Ahh, the 6th rewrite. Here's how I got here, in a nutshell.
The 5th draft was at best an emaciated skeleton, and at 219 pages, it was actually a lot of bloat.
Step 1. The Chop Shop
I carefully, almost obnoxiously, sliced apart the whole draft, and put each scene into it's own word document. And then all the pages that weren't full-on scenes, just places where I scratched out notes or placeholders, they got their own separate files. This took the better part of an hour or two, mostly because I'm not as fast as I thought I was with cutting and pasting.
Step 2. The Layout
In my little red magical notebook, I started thinking of how I wanted the book to go, from concept to concept, in order. So, you meet John, then you meet Kestrel, then they go somewhere, and then this happens, and then happens...all the way through the story until the 'The End'. It's just a line per concept, across two pages in my small notebook.
Then I numbered each line, and for the first time, gave myself a sense of chapters. Initially, I just wanted to number them to see how many "things" I had, but since I was listening to some rather intensely good audiobooks at the time, it was sort of natural for me to think of each number as a chapter.
For example:
1. Meet John
2. Meet Kestrel.
3. John makes a date, with Ophelia w/ Kestrel present
That's how the first few lines read. I did this until I reached #35 which I've titled here 'Segue into Book 2'.
Step 3. The Placement
This is where things got hairy. I started putting the individual documents into a new order. And when I got to an item that I wasn't happy with, or something I hadn't written, I left a huge break and wrote myself a note in [ ] braces. (The note on page 2 was "[ track the number of people ]", for example).
So I actually had accomplished more than I realized, I had just been doing it all out of order. This is now in order. Awesome.
Step 4. The Patchwork and Rewrite
So when I get to gaps, it should be easy to just fill them in, right? NO, NOT RIGHT. It's not that simple. I mean, the act of writing is simple, I just need to put my butt in this chair, put some good writing music on in the background and kick some ass. But the quality of the writing, the ideas I want to express...oooof. Some of these existing scenes were pretty dead and flat, since I haven't really touched them in a long time (weeks or months). In going back to bridge them together, it wasn't just like snipping the ends off and smoothing the pieces together -- much of the time an existing scene got almost a total rewrite from scratch, just so that it would make sense as I got nearer to the next number/chapter.
Also I found out that many of these numbers could be collapsed into the same chapters, so I had to go back to my little magic notebook and lump a few numbers together (for example: 2 and 3 and half of 4 are one chapter)...it's a little more structure than I expected, but that's not necessarily a bad thing for me.
So...
That's where I am now...on page 76, where previously, at least in drafts 2 and 3, things were just starting up. SEVENTY-SIX PAGES, AND I WAS JUST GETTING TO THE ACTIONY GOOD BITS, WHAT WAS I THINKING.
As of the current page 76 (aka the almost-end of Chapter 6), here's the count:
Bodies found: zero
Ransom notes discovered: one
Obnoxious sort of antagonists: two
Balloons of heroin found: three
Bullet holes found: four
Now if you'll excuse me, it's time to end Chapter 6.
No comments:
Post a Comment