I’ve been doing basically two things for the past few days:
1) playing on the floor with cars
2) revising The Bad Twin.
The playing on the floor with cars is self-explanatory, so I’ll talk about revising The Bad Twin. I’ve deleted 55 bad pages from the beginning, and written 80 (I hope) good ones to replace them. Now, I’m going through the rest of the novel trying to backwards engineer everything so that the middle fits the new beginning. This first draft is a really rough one. It’s full of XXX’s where I’ve left out stuff, and characters suddenly change their names or totally disappear. At one point, I have part of a scene with a lovely lady in which the lady is being lovely, and then on the next page, the scene carries on without her in it—I’d decided the lady was too lovely to live, and so killed her off three years before.
I have to fix stuff like that.
I’ve got a whole plot thread to write yet—I know what happens in it and when, but I didn’t write it originally because I was concentrating on the main plotline. I also need to write the ending, because I had to take an enforced two weeks off writing at about that time, because of repetitive stress injury to my hands.
So, I’ve got a lot of work to do. But it’s very satisfying work. It feels really good to take something so messy, so creative and chaotic, and pull it together into something that makes sense and has some thematic unity and emotional arc. I like cutting great swathes of dead prose; I like moving things around so that they’ll have the best pace and impact, lining up my scenes in the correct order. In some ways, it’s a bit like playing with cars on the floor, I guess. With marginally fewer crashes.
Though come to think of it, there is a crash and a near-crash in the book, and several fires. It is called The Bad Twin, after all.
Eeek, Julie. Good luck.
Thank you Jan!
I have a feeling when I go back to the draft of Penderown I will find similiar issues…….Good luck.
lx
Thanks Liz. Dirty drafts are fine, but it does make more work at the end! Have fun with yours.