I've been trying to decided where to pick things up again on this blog. Over the last few months there have been a lot of changes in my life. Moving to another state, adjusting to living with new people. And if I tried to encompass all the new stuff I've learned since December this would be an encyclopedia not a blog (That old adage 'Write What You Know' makes much more sense to me now, but more on that later.). But one subject in particular has been weighing on my mind.
This last November I participated in NaNoWriMo for the first time. I didn't think I would hit the goal of 50K words, but damned if I wasn't going to give it my best.
Plunking my ass down in front of the HAL (My laptop, don't ask.) I ended up cranking out over 20K words and adding three chapters to my book. For me this was a huge deal. As of late I had been lucky to put out a chapter a month, much less three. I also hit a point where on a few occasions I spit out around 3K words a day.
And the work was good. My Alpha reader dug the new material, and in an even rarer event I was happy with it. Being a writer I often think a meth-addled Howler Monkey would do a better job, so being satisfied with my own work was a treat.
After moving back to Arizona, I sat down with my editor and we finally discussed what I had been eagerly waiting for.
The first thing she told me was the new material had to go.
This was not the response I had expected.
It wasn't that she said, "It's crap, cut it." or told me the material had to go and left it at that. She liked what was there, the problem was that it did not work. She saw right through what I was trying to do in those chapters and pointed out why it didn't work. The material itself, though good, was transparent and obvious.
Fortunately I went into this with the mindset of rewrites make the world go 'round. To my greater fortune my editor did not leave me hanging, but pointed me in the right direction with how she thought the scene might go.
Even with the mentality of 'rewrites good' it was more than a bit of a struggle. Characters that had died were now alive, and the entire timeline of my story now ceased to exist. I think the biggest hurdle though was getting over the NaNoWriMo thing. I had not truly expected to hit 50K, so getting as close as I did, I was awfully damn proud of myself.
A habit I have yet to break myself of (And from what I've read online, one I share with many others.) is seeing someone else's daily word count and feeling bad that my own is nowhere near it. Of the authors I follow on various social media sites, the lowest daily word count I saw was 1K. Some were hitting 5-10K.
Putting out over three thousands words on my own, and doing over 20K in one month made me feel for a time that I really had what it took to be an author. My own word counts were still nowhere near those numbers, but like seeing a difference in your body after busting your ass working out, I felt that I was on my way.
Easy as it would have been to dismiss my editor's opinion (Much, much, much easier.) it also would have been fucking stupid (Very, very, very, fucking stupid.). I didn't ask her to be my editor to dismiss what she had to say. So I forced myself to start thinking in new directions and one word, one paragraph at a time, moved forward.
It has taken me nearly three months to get back to where I was before the cut and I am happy to say that while I still maintain the old work was good; the new material is much better. Even my Alpha reader who liked the old stuff, has told me how much he enjoys where it is going now, and how much of an improvement he has seen in the book itself.
I'm going places with the story that never would have occurred to me otherwise. And while I had to cut over 20K words, not all of it went to waste. I at least had the sense to save everything I cut (For my fellow newbs out there, a good piece of advice is NEVER just delete what you cut. Make another file and save it, you never know when it may be used or in what way.). It was usually a sentence here or paragraph there, but I found myself dipping into that material on several occasions and it not only saved me time, but made it feel like less of a waste.
In the end the book is better for this deep cut, and I (As a writer.) am better for it as well. I've experienced other rewrite moments, ones that seemed much larger than they really were at the time, but none as visceral as this one ended up being. Author Jim Butcher once wrote in his blog that it was much easier to cut 20K words than to add 20K. I now know this to be true. Cutting that material felt like I had been set back months and the road in front of me now seemed much longer.
But if you are lucky enough to have a good editor (Or in my case lucky enough to have good enough friend/editor.), you will at least have someone there to walk that road with you, and thwap you upside the head when you try to make a wrong turn.
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