Birth of a novel, or Why Rewriting Sucks

Today is another installment of Birth of a Novel. If you haven't heard of this, hop on over to Charity's Blog, and sign up on the linky. 

I try not to talk about my troubles, but let’s face it, I’m TMI waiting to happen. So when I found myself full of free time I thought, “Oh hey, I’ll crank out the rest of this novel in like a week.” That was pretty much three weeks ago now. Yeah. That’s not really going the way I’d planned.

At first I thought, Oh, this is just the usual writer anxiety, it comes and it goes. In the mean time, I’ll just watch Dance Academy (a surprisingly good Australian Ballet drama). And when I’d plowed through those, I thought, “Oh, well, I’m just redefining myself as a person rather than a job.” That’s when I started watching Glee.

And still, no writing. I blogged. I talked with people, I cleaned house, anything to not write. What was killing my words?

Then it hit me, I was avoiding my novel.

Writing a novel is full of ups and downs. The ups sound like “Oh my galena, this is the greatest story, and I wish I could ship it off to agents Right NOW so it can hit the New York Times bestseller list sooner.” The downs: “Well, that was a complete waste of time. I wonder if I should even finish drafting it. I mean really, who’s ever going to pay money for this trite POS?”

But when you’re rewriting, it’s worse. With a rewrite, there are no really big surprises, you’ve already done that. You’ve already been there. You’ve already explored all the original (well, original to you) points that made you think you had the novel of pure awesome. In a rewrite, you see that not only has it been done before (by you) it’s been done before by like fifty other people over the last ten years. Yikes. It seems old, worn out, and you start to doubt.

Why am I even rewriting this novel? It wasn’t that good to begin with, and now that I’m rewriting, I know that it sucks. I’ve had vacuums with less suction than this novel.

And it’s not nearly as exciting because you’ve already done it.

So I started writing again. I gave myself permission to suck, because even though this is a rewrite, so much has changed that it’s back to a first draft. And first drafts suck. Sure this first draft might be a little more focused, you know, with the whole actually knowing the plot and the point of view (both aspects I’d screwed up the first time).

Now if I can just keep that Shiny New Idea at bay and finish...

So what about you, do you hate rewriting as much as I do? Or do you view rewriting as an opportunity to sweep all those mistakes under the revision rug?

Goals:

* Finish the rewrite of PRINCESS SINGULARITY by next week (this should be less than 10,000 words, so this shouldn’t be a problem).

* Make a decision about revising the super hero novel

* Draw more maps for the Shiny New Idea, more on that one later

The problem with Glee

I’ve been pretty disconnected from the rest of the world, particularly pop culture, so I’ve taking some time to catch up on the rest of the world.

During my absence from the real world some really great TV shows have cropped up, notably So You Think You Can Dance, and Glee. But there’s a problem with Glee.

Before I watched Glee, I could walk through the aisles of the grocery store in relative peace. Now, I have to resist the urge to belt out a song. **Sigh** Am I the only one? Does Glee have this affect on everyone?

Regardless, recharging is important, and sometimes, even I need a break. What do you do to recharge?

My precious.

Oh, and since some people asked, here’s a picture of those black pearl earrings.

Tales from ancient history: Magic is real

I’ve been lucky enough to go to Hawaii a couple times. On the first trip, I spent some time in Oahu. If you’ve never been to Hawaii, I can warn you, Oahu can seem like any other big city with one extra feature: miles of beach. Having lived in or around a number of cities with beaches attached, I didn’t swoon over Oahu, and I was starting to wish we hadn’t booked time there. The locals scowled, and we were solicited at every opportunity. I wanted to move on, get to the big island and see a real, breathing volcano. I wanted to go to Kauai so I could hike the Nepali coast, I wanted more than the tourist trap in a beautiful land. I’d already done that.

But being stuck in a city, we made the most of it. We walked the streets, poked our heads in the shops, and, of course, we found ourselves walking along a street where people were selling their wares from carts. One stall was a pick-a-pearl shop. If you’ve never encountered one of these, let me warn you, they are interesting, addictive, and anyone working such a stall will try to upsell you. They make their money selling jewelry for pearls that are really fake pearls shoved into a real oyster long enough to get a real pearl layer. Sometimes the pearls are nice, sometimes… not so much.

By accident, we’d stopped right in front of this stall while we tried to figure out where we were headed. Of course, the cute Hawaiian (and this is a guess, but he really looked Polynesian, so I’m going with native Hawaiian here) saw us, and called out to us. “Come on, pick an oyster, take a chance. There’s a pearl here with your name on it.”

Jokingly, I leaned away from the group and said, “Oh no, I couldn’t. I wouldn’t want to ruin you like that.” I’d been barked at a lot by people trying to sell me something. I wanted to turn the tables.

“How would you ruin me?” he asked. Clearly, I wasn’t playing by the script.

“If I pick out an oyster, it’ll have two perfectly matched, black pearls, and you’ll never be able to convince anyone it was true.” Now my group was interested. I didn’t normally engage the vendors in chit chat, and I never made predictions about what would happen. Who does? What was more, I knew it down to my bones. I knew I would. It was like the world had opened and I could see into the future just a short distance. It was a strange thing to know, but I had no doubt. None.

Complete madness. But I was completely willing to walk away, never having cashed in on it. Well, the vendor had other plans. I’d somehow presented him with a challenge, so he egged me on some more. I gave him one last warning. “I’m not kidding, you’ll never convince anyone this was real.”

Undaunted, he passed me the little tongs to pick an oyster out of the bucket. “This I’ve got to see.”

Now I had an audience, and everyone in my group was going to play. We all picked out our oysters, but the vendor kept a careful watch on me to see the trick. There wasn’t one. If we’d been bad people, we would have used that opportunity to maybe steal something, but we were all those goody-two-shoes types. When everyone had picked their silly oyster (at this point ensuring a pretty lucrative sale in the very near future), we all did the silly aloha welcoming for the pearl.

He took my oyster first. Can you blame him? I was a bit anxious myself. It was all bravado fuelled by a gut feeling, but my gut has led me astray before, would it this time?

He cut it open and out popped a black pearl. Then he hunted around in the oyster with his knife, and out popped a second black pearl, perfectly matching the first.

He jumped and yelled “Oh my god! How did you do that?” He shook his head in disbelief. He had watched every step of it. He’d initiated it. He’d called out to me, so how could he have been taken for a ride?

“Magic.”

I had the pearls set into earrings.

Insecure Writer's Support Group: Failure is not what you think

Today is the first Wednesday of the month which means it’s time for another installment of Insecure Writer’s Support Group. If you haven’t seen one of these in action, then hop on over to the Ninja Captain and his Co-hosts Tyrean and Jamie then hop onto Mr. Linky and read up.

I know that it’s a brand new year and all, but I’m not going to talk about the normal beginning of the year thing. I’m going to talk about failure: it’s not what you think. It’s been one full year since I joined the ISWG bloghop. My first post was about putting myself out there and trying as hard as I could. I did. I followed through, and you know what? It wasn’t enough. Feel free to go read those posts so you know what I’m talking about, but sometimes even your A+ game doesn’t cut it, and something happens: you fail.

People don’t talk about failure the same way they talk about success. When you talk about success you’re either talking about it from the standpoint of one who has just succeeded or someone who hopes to succeed. When you talk about failure, you either talk about it as one who has failed or someone who’s afraid of it. Bitterness and fear overshadow the truth: failure can be a gift. No really, hear me out.

When I failed—and I mean grade A, standing on a pile of smoking ash that had once been my dreams failure—the world became clear. I don’t know if there’s something magical in the smoke of burning dreams, but it made me fearless. It’s hard to be scared of anything when the thing you feared the most has just happened. Then it felt like every door in the universe opened up. Without the fear, I could try anything, so everything suddenly became an option, every path. That's ridiculous; my failure didn’t create new opportunities, it only let me see the ones I’d already had. But I would have never even considered those other futures if I hadn’t failed. I’d focused so hard on that one thing that I couldn’t even see all the other possibilities of the world.

Sure, this is that strange afterglow of a break up, and maybe it’ll wear off after years and years of piled on failure, but I doubt it. It was like that dying dream was an anchor, and I was swimming across the ocean of my life. When that dream died, I was cut free. I’d always feared it, thought I’d drown without it. All that time I’d been clinging to the thing that was drowning me. Failure gave me freedom.

I was too scared to see past this one thing. And I think so many writers find themselves in this place. We fall in love with a manuscript. It becomes our dreams. We put these manuscripts out into the world, and then we find ourselves having to make a decision: to trunk or not to trunk.

There’s a lot of conflicting advice on this one. Accept the failure and move on to the next project, or fight for the novel in your hands. I have no answers to this conundrum, but Miss Snark had a great set of guidelines. She said to query 100 agents before giving up on a manuscript. Which is great, but I saw someone get an offer after 127 queries for a single manuscript. Yikes! How to decide?

When a book doesn’t get you an agent, or worse, gets you an agent but doesn’t get you published it is NOT the end of the world. There are other books. Other ideas. Some of those ideas are going to be better than the one you’ve just spent the last 18 months/18 years slaving over. So if you’re on the verge of trunking a novel, it is not the end. 

I know this sounds sappy, but it's 100% true: Failure is not the end. It is the beginning of a journey you couldn’t see. All you have to do is decide what to write next.

Insecure Writer's Suport Group

It’s that time again. Time to shake out our fears, release them into the might sea of electrons and offer up some words of encouragement. Be sure to thank Ninja Captain Alex and hop on the linky: it’s another IWSG.

I’ve been struggling with an idea lately: is it worth it?

It’s a hard bridge to tackle. Every scrap of my life has been the safe road. Every choice was for the future, safe, solid, conservative. Every choice.

The act of starting a novel is complete madness. Writers start with an idea. They do all the work on the idea before anyone else sees it. They feed the idea their words. Hours and hours, gone. Housework? Nope, I’ve gotta write. A full day’s paying work followed by long nights pecking at a keyboard, and for what, a flawed first draft. The writer goes back and reads the manuscript (more hours) decides what to keep and what to toss. Then it’s back to writing. More long days, more frozen dinners for the family. Send it to beta readers: they hate it. Revise, rework, reword. Write. Betas say: better, but not enough. Rewrite. Redo. More dark lonely hours, but like a drug, the manuscript calls us back.

Then, finally a writer emerges from the writing cave blinking and holding something in their hands that represents months—sometimes years—of work. They craft a one page letter to carry the hopes of their dreams out into the morass of the query trenches. More months pass, but the writer has already fallen in love with the next idea. And the next one is The One.

I know plenty of people who’ve been on this merry-go-round for a decade with varying degrees of success. Madness. In what other profession would we tolerate so much failure? But every week I hear from those same friends about their novel, how they love this or that about it, and how they’re excited to get back to work.

Excited. Years of failure and they are still excited.

I’ve been writing like I mean it for years now. Granted, they sort of skipped by with me busy doing other stuff—notably that paying job, etc.—but I sort of look up every now and then and wonder, Holy Copernicus, how did another year slip away? Will I ever get published? What if I never get to print? Another year that just flounced by with me splitting myself into worker, mommy, writer: Is this worth it?

From a logical stand point: no. There is no way that spending hours and days and weeks and months and years could possibly work out to “worth it” for a novel that gets trunked. A touch of math will tell you it can’t be worth it in terms of lost work potential. If everything went perfectly, a novel probably takes something like 400-600 hours of work depending on length, revision, rewriting and so forth. That’s a lot of time. So logic says no. It isn’t worth it.

But logic has never dictated my actions. I’ve tried, but every logical choice I’ve made has bit me in the asterisk. Writing defies logic. For 400-600 hours, I get to live in a world filled with magic and justice, wonder and beauty. Heroic deeds well up from people who never knew they had it in them. I get to watch worlds and people unfold before my eyes, and there are so many I want to share, so many stories. The stories are boiling out of me, and if I didn’t write, I’d self destruct. That’s not hyperbole. It’s madness, yes, but it’s my madness.

So if you’re sitting at your desk today, looking at your manuscript and wondering if it’s worth it, to split your life and be an employee, and a parent, and a spouse, and a writer, just remember: writing a novel is madness, but we’re all mad here.