This morning I was at war with myself. The topic? My plan of action regarding this novel. I have a whole spreadsheet set up so that I may check each chapter for its structure. I’m buying into what some writing theorist say about the structure of scenes and chapters (In a nutshell, they’re structured like a short story). Everything is set up for me to do a quality check on each chapter.
Am I doing the checking. Of course not.
Why?
Because I don’t want to take a break from the rush I get from sanding down the rough edges of the first draft. I can’t wait to get to the next chapter. And, being an optimistic writer, I always feel that the editing I do improves the book.
This means, of course, that I’ll have to do this structure check as a separate draft. I will do this draft after the second draft (the draft I’m working on now) is done. But it must be done before I let anyone read the book. Timewise, I will be preforming this structural check, if all goes to plan, in the last half of May.
One more draft. Donald Maass (pictured) suggests a number of drafts that should be done before the book goes to market. I made notes on all four of his writing books, so it should be easy to look up what he recommends. One of the drafts, he wrote, had to do with beginnings and endings of chapters. That seems very worthwhile to me. My own ideas for drafts: POV (I have a tendency to flip from 1st person present to 1st person past, and no recollection of doing it. I believe it comes from the way my relatives in Chicago tell stories: past tense, then as the tension ramps up, jump into present tense); the narrator’s interior thoughts; general description, i.e., hunt and destroy vague depictions; and continuity (that is, are things foreshadowed early to help with plausibility? Do any characters contradict themselves? Have all the names been changed from the previous 12 drafts?). And then, a draft on structure of scenes and chapters.
It'll be an interesting late May. I’ll reread the book at least 3 times, and listen to it being read by the computer, or by AI, at least once. Will I get sick of going over and over my writing? I haven’t yet. As I mentioned in a recent creative writing class, I find myself endlessly fascinating.
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This afternoon I revised the first chapter of Act 2B. New Year’s Day, and Kelsey’s Dad, learning that his daughter was almost raped last night, calls the police. I ended up rewriting the whole scene. My revision was much more visceral and laden with warning signs Kelsey should think about. As I rewrote, I definitely got the feeling that I still haven’t gotten the full story out of me. That’s not good. I cut 120 pages from the first half of the 1st draft, but I’m still running around 110,000 words—too long for a first YA novel. Unless it turns out to be damn thrilling.
As of now I’m feeling like I can’t see what the book needs and what needs to go until I finish the 2nd draft (main intension: make it so others can make sense out of it). Before I can really work on the imperfections, I need to polish it up to the point that it makes sense to some others—and me.
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