Perhaps that splatter graphic will explain how my rewrite goes. And why I've been a bit of a stranger, blog-wise.

Still, it's necessary. One of my characters *had* to change motivation. She goes from hanging on in the periphery to being right up front in the action. She has good reasons to show up where and when she does. To do the things I wanted her to.

Of course, she also has good reasons to go off the reservation on me. Her acting in her own best interests is having bigger consequences than I thought. Oddly, she gets more and more with the rest of the program in the second half of Act II. But changing this one subplot turns out to be a bigger deal than I thought.

While looking for that bloody splatter, I found this little gem:

Enjoy!

Pencils Down

That time again, at last. A *very* important day here in the Full Throttle Household: printing off my latest for First True Reading.

One of the great true stories of Kiwi ingenuity is the bloke who built the world's fastest four-stroke motorbike, the Britten V-1000, in his shed. Lacking a wind tunnel or fancy computer modeling, he built a mock-up out of styrofoam and car-body filler and tested it using soap flakes and an electric fan. Wherever the soap flakes stuck, John Britten shaved down the mock-up. When he shaved too deep, he spackled in more Bondo. When the soap finally streamed past, he was satisfied.

For the past couple months, I've been doing just that: writing draft after draft. Shaving, polishing, playing with emphasis and theme. Making this bit of symbolism more obscure and that one more clear. You know, revising.

After seven (Lucky Seven!) full reworkings and many, many, many smaller fiddles, fudges and getting-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night-to-make-one-little-changes, it's time. Pencils down, step away from the work.

Let the Tiny Dynamo at it.

This is not, repeat NOT, for the faint at heart. The Dynamo has a keen eye for detail, and she can spot a plot hole a mile off. She puts up with me 'always writing' for months on end. Once or twice a year, she gets to sit down and read my work. There's a certain amount of frustration built in, and she comes at my work with a fierce and critical eye.

She's the reason only one person read my second novel. She had a lot of harsh things to say about it, and they were all correct.

This, folks, is the kind of reader you want to have. A lot of my friends enjoy my work. They'll like pretty much whatever I write, and that makes it hard to improve. When I win the Tiny Dynamo over, I know I've done something right.

So far, she's found a few punctuation errors and a couple of bonehead gaffs. And made an important suggestion. Still on Chapter Two...

Fan Factor

This is one of those best/worst days: four, five drafts down the road, sitting down with a printed copy of the new manuscript and actually reading the damn thing.

Sure, I make notes here and there. I'm still trying to iron out the weather and make sure nobody's name changes too much, but that's all little stuff. The literary equivalent of 'mom-cleaning', the saliva-drenched thumb scrubbing vigorously across the child's face in the moments before they're turned loose.

The big stuff is Suction. Does the story draw me in? Can I forget that I wrote this story and just enjoy it? Would I feel good about buying this book? Does this story make me a fan?

You see, I'm my hardest reader. I always see something I might have done differently, maybe a little better. Same with paintings, drawing, everything. Sooner or later you have to let go and move on, but the urge remains. And the urge is to fix those 'horrible' mistakes.

So far, this one is pretty promising. I keep finding myself worried less about my own techniques and more about what's going on with these people, all of them on the cusp of the worst day of their lives.

But rest assured, there's still plenty of technique to worry about...

Little more on that next time!

PS. As always, I have that odd sense of amused wonder: I *know* there were days I HATED writing and was sure I sucked. And days where I LOVED writing and was sure I ROCKED. But reading through the manuscript. I can't find those spots!

Feelings about work are impostors. The work itself is true.

A Strong Spine

I'm hard at work on the third pass for Crossroad Blues. The second pass went well: the spine of the story showed through, nice and strong.

What's the story's spine, you ask? In the Full Throttle toolbox, the spine of the story is that sentence or two that forms the essence of the story, its core.

The spine of Double Indemnity is two shiftless lovers plotting to get away with the murder of her husband. The spine of American Gods is Shadow's deepening relationship with his father in the face of the coming war. The spine of Crossroad Blues is a decent man thrown into a nest of human vipers.

This first draft was hard. There was a lot of flab and dead tissue before I got both hands wrapped around that spine. And as often happens, by the time I wrote 'the end' I knew I needed to change a few things at the beginning. And a few more. next thing I knew, I was deep in the second pass.

And of course, by the time the second pass was done, I could see that I had to get back in for a third.

My second draft was relatively minor. There were hours spent looking up facts I glossed over in the heat of the first draft: which private jet does the rich guy use? What's its range/how many refueling stops/what kind of time does he need? What breed of horse works best in this terrain? What would this expert actually know, and how would he say it? The usual.

Also, I'm shocking for changing the names of minor characters mid-book. Lots of search 'n replacing there.

Third run at the material, now I'm grappling with structure. I need to add some new material to set up more of the end of the story. Certain scenes, I need to change the viewpoint characters. Which means changing the voice of the narration, sure, but also, the information one character takes from a scene will be different from another. (Example: a sixteen year old girl and a middle-aged auto mechanic will see wildly different things when they look at a car.)

As I move through this stage, I keep one question at the front of my mind: Is this true to the spine? Because you can monkey with a lot of things in a story, but you touch that spine, you may very well kill your story.

Take Double Indemnity. Does Walter need to be in inurance? It helps, but you could write the story differently. Does Barton need to be so tenacious, or even there at all? Not really. You could write the story with a different set of complications and pressures. Now imagine it without the adultery, or the husband, or the money. Any one of those things come out, what's left?

Or how about American Gods? Shadow could meet different gods. He could go different places in his quest. I think the decisions Neil Gaiman made are brilliant (especially Laura and the abandoned hotel at the center of the US); they contribute to and enrich that core story. But the truth is, some things could be done differently and still have a similar story. Not so with Shadow's father, or the coming war.

So I work, trying to figure out what contributes, what can come out, what needs to change and what doesn't. In all these things, I try to be faithful to that spine. I want to make it better, faster, stronger.

Because I really like this story, and I want to do it justice.

Now *That's* a Second Draft!

Other Writers, Other Methods:

Last week I mentioned Robert McKee's writing method, specifically, his practice of pitching the synopsis to friends and colleagues before he starts writing.

I've never seen anything like this before.

Check out this article on Raymond Chandler's writing process. This was a man who took my metaphor of first draft as 'rough sketch' to its farthest extreme: he read his first draft, picked the bits he liked and, get this, jettisoned the rest!

Mark Coggins even shows us sample paragraphs. Chandler underlined his most resonant phrases (or even single words). Those stayed in later drafts. All the rest of the language was subject to change. All. Of. It.

I've always approached my second drafts with an eye toward honing down the language, eliminating excess words, excess scenes, excess actions, trimming fat in every possible way. Chandler's method seems to turn the story from a draft into a sort of outline-slash-haiku/tone poem (draft 1.5?). From these bones he built the novel back up.

It's radical stuff. The very idea gave me a happy little shiver.

I've got a novel marinating right now (first draft written at full throttle, second as carefully honed as the finest razor's edge) that might be a good candidate for this method. Or, I'll end up tearing out a few dreds before deciding it's not for me!

For every artist, a method...

Once More into the Breach

(80,000 words)

I've spent this last week or two getting rid of the stuff that didn't belong. They're scratching weakly at their file right now, their pitiful screams too faint to trouble me.

I'm also writing fresh material for the stuff I skipped over. That first draft, I was sticking to the action, the high points of character development, etc. By the time I was finished, I could see some of the places where I needed to go deeper, or build slower, or just plain give the reader a rest for a minute.

The actual, -sit-down-and-read-it-with-a-blue-pencil first read won't happen for a while yet. I need time enough to come at the work fresh. These new scenes are going in now, before the characters themselves start to see foreign to me. Later, when they do seem like they were written by someone else, I'll have a third persepective about what they need.

Some writers (Tom Robbins and Donna Tartt are two of my favorites) agonize over every word, trying to craft a work a complete and perfect beauty on the first pass. I have to wade right in with both fists flying and see what I've done when the dust settles.

Hoping to have all the new writing done in the next few days or so. We're off to OZ on holiday, and I'd like to actually holiday instead of writing.

For this reason, I'm also VERY much hoping to put off starting the next book until the end of the month. The new story's pulling at me, trying to claw its way out of my skin, polluting my dreams with its foul breath and whispering in my ears in those quiet moments.

Like that dead girl in Stir of Echoes, the stories I gotta write get more and more insistent. All I can say is, "Not yet. Please, not yet."

But it itches so...

Strangle Your Darlings... Slowly

51,500 (not every day is a good one)

Murder your darlings. We've all heard the advice, but oh, nobody told us how very hard it can be. They are, after all, our darlings.

I'd say I'm a confident writer,but it's an odd kind of confidence. I can be as insecure as the next guy day to day, but I have enormous faith that I will get better with practice. When I look at my first (and now thankfully out-of-print) book, I can see it's true. I write better than that in my sleep...

And as you might have gathered from other blog entries, I'm not of the Dean Koontz/Kurt Vonnegut/Tom Robbins stripe. I don't do multiple drafts of each page as I go, until that page shines and sparkles like the gem that it is. I sketch in my first drafts, loose lines that gradually solidify, then passes and new drafts until the lines are clean.

becomes....

But sometimes a wildly wrong line needs to go. It just doesn't fit in with the rest of the picture. But, even when I know it's got to go, I look at it and think, "But it's soooo pretty..." It's hard to cut a scene or exchange or bit of description that really doesn't belong when it's well-written.

It's just a silly bit of insecurity way down at the heart of it. I wrote my darlings, and I'll write some more. In fact, every damn thing I write should be well-written. That's what I'm trying to do, after all. But we've all seen it: some of what we write is just a little... better. And those are always the bits we don't really know where they came from.

But knowing all this doesn't make the cutting any easier.

What I do is, rather than the mercy-killing of a straight razor to the carotid, I lock my darlings in a cupboard and wait for the thumping to stop.

That is to say, when something has to go and I'm still in first-pass stage, I stick it in a side file where I can retrieve it later. You know, just in case it turns out to be a mistake. I'm not sure I ever have, but I could. My latest (Poison Door: shopping at major US publishers right now!) is 90,ooo words long, but those cupboards contain 40,000 words. That's one heck of a lot of tiny fists pounding at those doors. I haven't gone back for any of them.

Leaving the possibility of opening that door makes those cuts less painful.