The Novel Diary: Week 46

Word count: 40,082.

After being indisposed and/or busy all of last week, I finally finished the most recent line edit of “Paths,” my long essay, tonight. When I started I thought it was a disaster; I could not believe so much time and effort had been wasted on such a piece of amateurish garbage. Now, however, I believe it is fixable.

Frankly, I am going to fix it whether it can be fixed or not. As I have probably said a million times, axing entire paragraphs and relegating once precious storylines for the sake of readability and efficiency can do wonders.

That is one thing they never taught in my fiction and creative writing classes in college: how to edit. We spent weeks workshopping, but not one minute on how to use the comments and constructive criticism (sometimes outright criticism) we received or the “knowledge” dropped on us by the sometimes unwilling Workshop students who taught us. My nonfiction classes were what taught me how to craft and edit, and I owe a lot to my nonfiction TAs. They were awesome.

Speaking of fiction, though, I think I may bump my novel restart to the day after the BCS National Championship Game on January 9. (The ESPN prognosticators have Iowa playing wither Missouri or Texas A&M in the Meineke Car Care Bowl of Texas on December 31.) Unless I can polish “Paths” before then, and finish my chapter-by-chapter outline, I do not expect to be novel writing until January 10.

Which brings up a logistics quandary: will it be a restart given all the changes I want to make? How the hell will I go about that? Do I just steam ahead and leave all the rewriting for later, or do I start replacing text? I will need to give that some thought, but will do that after “Paths” has been tackled, which will hopefully be in the next week or so.

Comments

Popular Posts