:: I finished typing the initial draft of my Snow White story yesterday, and it came in at 7700 words, the shortest rough draft I have yet produced. Weird -- maybe I'm finally learning how to tell stories with less verbosity. I'm letting that story sit for a day or two before I edit it. I usually let stories sit fallow for a week or two before editing, so as to come back to it with less of a feeling of "immediacy", which I hope translates into a heightened ability to wield the red pen. In this case, though, I'm so enamored of the tale that I want to get it out to market sooner than later. So tomorrow or Tuesday I'll probably do the editing.
:: I'm already onto the next story, which is about a homeless person who experiences a peculiar turn of luck. In fact, I wrote three pages of it over the last few days, but this morning I scrapped those pages and started over, in less meandering fashion. I've long believed that a main reason many people who could write don't is because they're scared of what happens if they produce some work and then realize it's not going anywhere. The answer is, of course, "Toss it and start over". That old stereotypical image of a writer tossing crumpled sheets of typing into the garbage is somewhat romanticized, but it's also somewhat rooted in reality. There is a lot of stopping and going back, sometimes even all the way to the beginning. But in my experience it isn't as tortured as it's usually depicted, as if the writer is trying to produce Prose of Perfection on the first try. With me, it's a vague sense that something's awry which grows until I can no longer ignore it; and then I go back and figure out, as best I can, where things went wrong and I go back to that point.
So my answer to the "What if I produce crap?" conundrum is this: You will produce crap. So get it out of your system. (But what if what's left after that act of exorcism is crap, too? Well, that's the risk we all take, isn't it?)
:: Editing the novel proceeds, although I slacked off a little bit this week. As of this writing, I am a bit less than halfway through the manuscript -- call it four-ninths of the way through -- and have excised 7,422 words. I've noticed that a lot of what I'm cutting consists of lengthy passages where I describe my heroine's responses to and impressions of, well, everything. Stuff kind of like this:
Bob walked through downtown Des Moines and gazed wonderingly up at the tall buildings -- both of them -- and tried to envision the men who had built them. How had it been, to walk on those girders twenty stories up, weighted down with hammers and nails and bolts and saws and stuff? And what had they done when the realization struck them that they had gone all the way up there but forgotten their tape measure? It must have been terrible for them. And what if they had come to work after a fight with their wives? Did they ever have the temptation to jump? Bob imagined them leaping from the top of those buildings and....
I came to the realization that, if I don't care what my heroine thinks of these things, then my readers sure as hell are unlikely to care about them. So out come those passages, except for a few key ones that I think work to better effect because I took out all the other ones.
(And some of this new attitude of mine reflects advice once given to me by Mola Ram, but I'm choosing to view that as a coincidence. Yeah, that's it....coincidence....)
:: In Stephen King's book On Writing, there is a short appendix in which King presents the first few pages of a short story rough draft he wrote, followed by his revised version of that draft, with explanations of the various edits given. The complete version of that story, "1408", appears in his recent collection, Everything's Eventual. I read it this morning. In the little introductory blurb about the story, King says that that "Every writer of shock/suspense tales should write at least one story about the Ghostly Room At The Inn." Well, damned if I didn't think of just such a story within minutes of reading that. (It's a good story, too.)
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