Christmas is now out. Replace with Kyle’s BlueBoy scene. “Christmas, and blah blah blah current beginning.”
Also, when he sneaks out, make sure he makes note of dad’s absence.
It was a little harder than I expected to get back into the writing habit. But get back into it I did and am making real progress.
Step one in the process, write the scenes that were too hard or too remote in the first (or half-) draft:
-– no, just explain that what’s the conflict has done to him, the worry and strife about the restaurant
I’m not sure how many of the remaining scenes I’ll have to write. After going back through, I realized several sections of the novel are fine the way they are, that too much explanation would ruin the pace and damage the characters.
Copernicus notes
In the tree tops next to Mallot Hall, a green leaf twists in the autumn wind and blinks under the blue bowl of Kansas sky, dark then light. From behind double-paned office windows Boone Kokerson watches the leaf, watches the wind turn in the trees, leaves like schools of frightened fish flashing in the sun. He breathes deep the stale office air, sets fingertips to windowpane then turns to his desk. Notes in piles, fake parchment stacks. Nicolas Copernicus’ tight script hugging close the illustrated orbits of planets. Heavenly spheres disproved. The retrograde motion of Mars.
He sits at his desk and clatters a few words on his computer, thick fingers unused to frail keys. Until the budget cuts he had scribbled all things longhand, collected the yellow notepads and carried them with some ceremony to one of two secretaries down the hall. Now he types all things himself, the sighs and eyerolls of student assistants not worth the trouble.
He shuffles through some of the Copernicus notes, semicircles and ellipses jotted on old parchment. Since his graduate days Boone has been fascinated by the astronomer and once penned a brief book to some acclaim. A slip of a thing, a gesture that explained Copernicus’ fascination with the red planet’s wonky orbit and why that, above all else, had placed the sun in the center of the solar system. He’s published nothing since.
Professional advice on self editing from author/screenwriter/editor John Robert Marlow.
As I wrote, the last thing I wanted to was lose momentum. If a scene seemed to stall, or if it required research or forced me to delve into minutiae that seemed too tedious at the time, I decided to go on, to leave it and come back once I finished.
My mission on the first read-through was to examine those abandoned scenes and to look for places that needed a little filling in. In William Burrough’s Naked Lunch, there is a chapter near the end of the book that explains how he removed all travel from the novel. There is no mention of people getting on planes or into taxis or cars. For much of the novel, people seem to disappear and appear at random, which contributes to the book’s overall hallucinatory effect. However, once the reader happens upon this chapter, much of the preceding events fall into place, and the remainder of the book makes sense, for the most part.
I don’t want my readers to wait until the end to figure out these in-between moments, so I’ll have to go back through and write them. Some will be more involved, more work-intensive than others. Some will be simple. Several instances are mere mentions in the text, probably no more than a couple sentences. Others will take longer, but I hope they won’t be too hard. I now know the characters and how they behave moment to moment. Also, the style of the piece is second-nature. I can slip into the prose style pretty easily, close my eyes and let my fingers wander the keyboard. Some I won’t use at all.
So here’s the list transcribed directly from my notes:
Each note is written on a page from a pocket-sized notebook and corresponds to a number scrawled on the hard-copy manuscript. This will enable me to keep things straight as I go back into Scrivener and write, write write.
Dear god, the awkward
Skip right ahead to 0:45 so you don’t have to see me getting used to myself. Also, I had just finished two hours of lecture and breathing chalk dust. My throat was a little dry.
Oh, and the herky-jerk edit about 16:45? The lights went out because I wasn’t moving around enough. Clearly I am not an Internet professional.
Still, some people had mentioned hearing some, and the scene is complete and I think hangs together pretty well. I’m pretty proud of it, too, coming straight out as it did. I haven’t changed a thing from when I first wrote it, and it doesn’t need much changing from a large-concerns standpoint—not too much to take out, nothing to add. It sits in its proper place in the novel, too, though I might move it a bit later. Either way, I don’t have to worry too much about steps one and two of the process with this scene.
That’s not say it’s not without major faults:
The weird moment where I talk about the note? Here’s what’s currently written:
Of them all, he had been the best, the most exciting. Had been the closest by far-[might need to go ahead and say it—closest by far to getting her to leave him. To leave Boonetk]-she hides the shake cup, goes to the trash in the kitchen, opens the lid and moves some stuff out of the way, a couple frozen entree boxes, a wad of paper towels.
I don’t think I’ll make direct mention that he’d been closest by far to getting her to leave Boone. As I’ve said, scene must reveal plot or character, and by NOT saying it, I think it will reveal more about Joan than saying it would. IE, she still can’t quite allow herself to think it through. That gives the whole thing a bit of hope and makes her more flawed, more aware of how dangerous things are (dangerous here being a relative term).
Here’s how it’ll probably end up, to make it a little clearer:
Of them all, he had been the best, the most exciting. Had been closest to—
She hides the shake cup, goes to the trash in the kitchen, opens the lid and moves some stuff out of the way, a couple frozen entree boxes, a wad of paper towels.
It works better on the page, lets the reader know she’s moved from dramatic past to dramatic present.
Continuity errors
Remember when I talked about writing at least 300 words every day? The technique’s major pitfall is continuity errors. Here, I wrote the section where she thinks about whiskey two days before I wrote the paragraph where she sips the whiskey. Whiskey that’s not supposed to exist in her car. And while I like the burn and burger alliteration, she doesn’t need the whiskey. That’s not part of her character, so I’ll cut the booze.
What else?
The ridiculous repetition of “so, so good.” That’s out, right off the bat.
Also, the word “delicious” doesn’t do anything. It’s an easy word. However,
since Joan isn’t a food expert and wouldn’t know how to describe things beyond
simple words like ‘fatty’ and ‘salty’ then maybe the over use of ‘delicious’
does right by Joan. It’s something I’ll have to think about, when I get to down to issues like word choice.
Finally, that end line might be a little over-written
What works?
The transitions from dramatic present to past. I think they work well, and I’m proud I was able to do it without too much effort. The dead spaces in the dramatic present are the perfect place to go back like that. As she eases forward in line at the burger joint, she allows herself to relive the day she left him. Then, throughout the piece there just seemed to come those natural breaks that enabled me to slip back into the dramatic past. I love it when things work out that way.
I also like the way Joan’s body remains centrally important, even waiting in the car she can feel herself in the driver’s seat. It developed as a recurring theme throughout and is one of the central rifts between the two main characters. Joan is centrally of body, and Boone is centrally of mind (I think). I didn’t plan it like that, but I think it’s one of the things that naturally happens when you have fully developed characters. There will be facets of their personalities that are in conflict, even if that conflict isn’t direct. The conflict creates tension, and tension moves the novel forward, develops character and creates those moments when things must break apart.
Anyway, if you made it through, awesome. If not, I understand. A full twenty minutes is a serious premium these days, and I’m just some guy revising a novel. Still, I thank you for taking the time to drop by. It means a lot.
“In writing, you must kill your darlings.” - William Faulkner
One of the first entries in a Google search for this quote is a blog post by writer Wendy Palmer. The shorter version: the quote is misdirected because an author shouldn’t delete writing just because she likes it.
The quote’s not misdirected. The analysis is.
In fiction, every scene must further develop plot or character. If it doesn’t, no matter how good the writing is, it needs to be excised.
I know how difficult this can be. Trust me. It’s one of the reasons I haven’t gone back and started rewriting my first novel. The whole middle section needs to be cut out, examined, and maybe pieces of it can be fit back into the whole. Though not likely. A tough decision? You bet. There’s a scene in a parking garage that’s some of the best writing I’ve ever done. Still, it does little in its current form to further plot. It does help some with characterization, but not enough to make it count. So it’ll have to go, or I’ll have to write it over from scratch.
That’s what it means to kill your darlings. If you’ve worked at all on the craft of writing, you can probably string some words together and make them sound good. You’ve probably developed an idea about language’s rhythm and riff well, sentence to sentence. So even if you’re blindly flinging words on the page, you’re bound to luck out from time to time and make something really excellent. The big question? Whether or not you care enough about the craft to send those bits to the recycle bin.
(though Wendy kind of misses the point)
