What am I thinking about?

Well, it's not the economy. I suppose I could be obsessing over it (I mean: I was, back in February) but I'm over that, now. What I've been doing is trying to finish the story I've been writing, A Far Sun. For what seems like a very long time. More than a year, and about 6 months too long by my initial estimate.

I was up to about 195K words when I took a look at where I was and how many more pages would be required to get to the end, and decided it wasn't progressing quickly enough. I had introduced too many subplots and other things and it was going to take many, many more pages to write my way out of it. It wasn't that I couldn't, it was that I realized it wasn't where I wanted the story to go. Bad juju.

So I cut the last 55K+ words off the end and started back up. I figured out where I went awry and how, and now I'm giving the ending another try.

I know I'm a perfectionist. Whether I'm "too much" of a perfectionist, or not, remains to be seen. Something bothered me about where I'd gone in the story, and it took a lot of thinking and rethinking to figure out exactly what was wrong. I think I've figured it out, now.

Of course I have the remainder of the story plotted out. There are only a handful of "really big" plot points yet to come, including the story's climactic scene. Frankly, I really want to get to that scene, because I've been visualizing it for more than a year.

Something I've discovered during this project, as well: Rewriting is something you just do. A lot. I'm learning how to let go of the words, my golden dewdrops of prose, and not be too much in love with what I've written. Sure, I come up with good ideas and construct well-written scenes. Over and over again. No reason to think I won't be able to do it again. So, throw away what doesn't fit or isn't working. Save it (maybe) in case you find a place for it, later, but for now, cut and rewrite. Oh, and keep doing that until you get what you want.

And less can really be more. I'm starting to trim down words (and recognize some of my own bad habits when I'm writing draft copy--which I don't try to fix in the first writing). The technique I've been using lately involves the following:

1. Just write the scene. Don't do too much editing or wasting time looking for the exact right word. Get it down as best you can. Try to say what you're trying to say, in whatever words that seem to convey your intent. (You'll fix it later.)
   
2. Keep writing until you feel like you've reached a good stopping point. It could be the end of a lengthy scene, or it could be the end of a chapter. It could even be the end of the page, if you're called to dinner.
3. Take a break. Eat dinner, watch TV.
   
4. Now, go back one or two chapters before your most recent starting point. Read from there, mostly to get back into the flow of the narrative.
   
5. Edit as required, but of course you will begin editing a lot when you reach the newest part. Don't fix everything now, you will go back over it, again.
   
6. If you get to the end, go back to step 1 and start writing, again. This is important, to keep progress going. Start writing even if you only write one paragraph.
   
7. Of course, stopping at any point may be necessary, since life sometimes must intrude. If this is the case, start working again at step 4.

I've also found that if I can't seem to go further in a given scene, I just stop there and start the next scene. On the go-back I usually figure out what was stopping/blocking me, and fill in and fix. I don't do this much, but rather than spend all day stuck somewhere, I'd rather forge ahead. The "go-back" is becoming a routine way to work through the story, though I don't necessarily reread every scene. Sometimes I've read (and edited) the same scene so many times that I'm getting bored of it. That's fine; there's always another edit in the future. Always.

As a wannabe writer I read and listen to a lot of writing advice. Michael Stackpole recommended not editing what you've written. He says you should make notes (handwritten notes, even!) and rewrite/edit on the second draft. If it works for him, then that's fine. As I gain more experience I may even start working more like he does, but for now I'm very comfortable with my overlapping write-edit-write-edit technique. I didn't recognize it before, but it's basically been working for me throughout this whole project. It's true--I'm not done, but I have written quite a bit and I'm making progress, and more importantly I'm happier with what I've got.

Here's a test I use in my story. The universe of choices for the writing is quite large. There are so many aspects of the story you could write about, and so many plot points you could hit, and these are even the ones that still tend toward your eventual ending. With this many choices it's easy to get sidetracked or lost. Since I'm a "discovery writer" I never really know what's going to happen before I write it, so every page is an adventure. Unintended consequences are always biting me. So the difficulty is figuring out what can happen that doesn't push your characters off into some unanticipated direction. That would screw up the whole thing. (And then you trash 50,000 words and rewrite, for example.)

With respect to deciding whether or not I have included all the sufficient and necessary things in my story, I do this: I take a particular plot point. A particular necessary plot point, one I would not change or remove. Then I look back over everything leading up to that point. If anything seems excessive, or doesn't fit, or makes me uncomfortable--then that's what I fix. It sounds simple, but ...

This is one of the things that convinced me to cut 25% of what I'd written and retell it. Well, it's worse than that: I couldn't even get to the next big plot point and that was beginning to frustrate me. I just knew there was a way to tell the story that would get me to the ending more quickly, so now I'm exploring the second try.

So that's what I'm thinking about.