Mistakes writers make

[ksmith]

Well, I've committed a cardinal sin. I've fallen in love with a scene, which means that when the time to edit comes, I'll resist cutting it even it if it needs to go. Even if I know it needs to go.

Refusing to cut something that needed to go almost cost me a blurb from CJ Cherryh. She had been asked to give one for LAW, but the old first chapter--which contained so many images and so much dialogue I liked a *lot*--turned her off big time. She almost quit on the book--didn't like Lucien, but more importantly, didn't like Jani--but persevered. Wound up telling her editor, iirc, that the book took off after chapter two, and wondered if I would reconsider rewriting chapter one. I had about a week and a half to do it, and it cut into my go-over-the-copyedits time, but, well, sometimes you ignore comments like that and sometimes you don't. Thing is, I knew in the back of my mind that she was right. The old first chapter wasn't working. The tone was wrong--it made Jani seem the wrong sort of hard, and it didn't set the stage for the conversation with Niall and all that came after.

But in the old chapter one, Jani sees Lucien off at the train station. They don't touch. They don't kiss goodbye. As his train pulls away, he remains standing in the car entry, and they stare at one another like animals in adjacent cages.

Ok, you may not care for it, but I really, really liked it.

One of these weeks, I am going to have to post an edits page on my website. "And this section was hacked out of LAW...and this one was razored out of CI..."

Comments

[dr-scott.livejournal.com]

One's tasty bits sometimes have to go. Perhaps the nugget of feeling you love so much, that little twist that says to you, "that's art! Yes, that little frisson I feel reading that!" can go somewhere else. Or not; or to your "deleted chapters" section. Just don't start a Bloopers area.

Art? Argh!

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

Oh, Art. I really, really try to avoid thinking I've created Art. That way lies madness and really, really bad plot decisions.

What I like about the current darling is how well I *think* it illustrates the relationship between Jani and Niall, and how we're finally, *finally* able to see in black and white why Jani doesn't want to return to Shera. And there's relief that I've finally pinpointed the reason because sometimes the blasted rationale hides from you and until you find it, subsequent scenes concerning the matter just don't ring true. That makes writing them really, really difficult.

Scenes like that bear weight. They slide into place, and all of a sudden, the pressure eases as the weight of the story distributes and things slide into place and start working together to hold one another up. Cornerstones, keystones, footings, whatever. Moments that turn a collection of scenes into a story.

That scene with Jani and Lucien was the wrong scene at the wrong time, a gargoyle on the roof of a Prairie-style home. What it said was true, but at that moment it was the wrong thing to say. I knew it, too, just didn't want to admit it.

No Bloopers--we bury those in deep caverns. What I have a lot of are Scraps, notes and snatches of dialogue and such that I never used. Pages and pages. I had to write them, get them out of my system, but once I did, that was it. They primed the pump, nothing more.

Re: Art? Argh!

[dr-scott.livejournal.com]

Very interesting insight into your writing process. Re: "Art," I was thinking of the micro scale -- where you have (you think) ordered words to express an emotion that is too complex to attach any simple label to. I love it when that works. Oh, and the other thing I think of when I think "art" is John Lovitz with his "Acting!!" tagline -- you quickly end up in Bad Writer territory when you get too self-indulgent.

It would be nice if there were no wasted effort, but since it seems to be essential to work out the characters through interactions which end up on the cutting room floor, so to speak, it's not really wasted. Nobody has come up with a way of creating satisfactory hyperlinked novels -- which vary their presentation according to the needs of the reader -- so you're stuck envisioning A Typical Reader and tailoring the presentation to them. Then there's the matter of sales, and realizing that a popular work tends to be just deep enough to make said Typical Reader feel like they've accomplished something, but without actually breaking a mental sweat (exemplar, "The Da Vinci Code.") You, able to see the whole thing, knew this was a good scene to say something important about their relationship, but you as storyteller (and C. J. Cherryh as sophisticated reader) knew it was the wrong rythym -- coming before the necessary foundational work. Drat. The first constraint is that you can't lose the audience.

It would be kind of cool to have the hyperlinked effect available for second readings and the like -- some minority of your readers would be fascinated enough to continue exploring the characters. Pending e-books with special features (don't hold your breath), your web site idea is actually a good place for them. Something to do in your no-doubt-copious free time.

Re: Art? Argh!

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

The first constraint is that you can't lose the audience.

This is too very true, and surprisingly easy to forget. The one thing I recall about the LAW thing was that at that pre-pub stage, Cherryh was the only beta-reader who hadn't read the other books. She had nothing invested in Jani. No desires. No expectations. No reason to make allowances. She was the new reader that needed to be grabbed mid-series, and that first chapter did not do the job. Considering the natures and personalities of some of her characters, the fact that I presented one to her that she found unlikeable really gave me pause.

I feel that I waste a lot of effort. The first 200 pages of my draft are pretty much toast--it's happened 5 times, so I have grudgingly accepted that this is just how I work. It bugs me that it's so blasted uneconomical. But toward the end of the process, the solder scenes start popping up with greater frequency, and I start to realize that I am finally, finally getting somewhere.

[alfreda89.livejournal.com]

If you end up cutting 200 pages every time...perhaps you start writing too soon, before you have mentally discarded enough things?

I saw enough versions of the first book to know that you explore a lot of options before deciding on which way things should go.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

It's not cutting so much as *extensive* rewriting. I begin the book using one approach, and it's not until the 200-page mark that I realize that the particular approach isn't right.

This time, I'm pushing through to the end, inserting comments along the way. I won't know how the beginning needs to be set up until I reach the end of this one.

Yeah, I explore options. Except that I don't realize they're options at the time...

[alfreda89.livejournal.com]

Ah. Annoying.