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Rewrite Hell part A
Aug. 28th, 2007 02:56 pmIt took me a couple of weeks, what with interruptions and ennui, to get through my 2004 NaNo novel (all 53K words of it) during my Very Busy and Tiring Vacation. And I wrote about 500 words in rewrite on my PDA also while on this Very Busy and Tiring Vacation.
About halfway through the reading I realized how much I had truncated the story in order to fit it into the time limit imposed by NaNo, with a whole lot of notes to fill in the blanks. And yeah, it needs tons of work to make it work. The bones are fine - no worse than some novels I've been reading to my kids lately (Coraline, Changeling etc) but more complicated in structure than those books, since I've got five Bad Guys of varying degrees of threat, and five Good Guys of varying degrees of good. And I can see where I need to spread the antagonists out a bit, or slim their numbers down. Going over the Good Guys makes me wonder if I stuffed too much into the story. Yeah, that's probably it. And I need to give the main protagonist more at stake in an active way. She's the one with the need to get back to her body before she accrues really bad brain damage (about three weeks) - but she needs to be more involved with the other characters somehow.
The other weakness it has is, I tried stuffing too much about the milieu into the story - some neat ideas - but in order to use them, I had the characters travel through some weird routes, when really, some of the pitfalls they encounter (personal and terrain) are more than enough.
It doesn't help that I am brain dead from the "vacation", wonderful as it was, and still feel that way from the time difference, and brain-freezed from the terror (for me) of finding a FT job after being out of the paying job market for ten years! Must Relax.
I wish somewhere there was a class on REwriting, as opposed to spewing the story out on the page in one manner or another. Because just about every writer in print slyly points out that their work is shite before the magic of rewriting it.
About halfway through the reading I realized how much I had truncated the story in order to fit it into the time limit imposed by NaNo, with a whole lot of notes to fill in the blanks. And yeah, it needs tons of work to make it work. The bones are fine - no worse than some novels I've been reading to my kids lately (Coraline, Changeling etc) but more complicated in structure than those books, since I've got five Bad Guys of varying degrees of threat, and five Good Guys of varying degrees of good. And I can see where I need to spread the antagonists out a bit, or slim their numbers down. Going over the Good Guys makes me wonder if I stuffed too much into the story. Yeah, that's probably it. And I need to give the main protagonist more at stake in an active way. She's the one with the need to get back to her body before she accrues really bad brain damage (about three weeks) - but she needs to be more involved with the other characters somehow.
The other weakness it has is, I tried stuffing too much about the milieu into the story - some neat ideas - but in order to use them, I had the characters travel through some weird routes, when really, some of the pitfalls they encounter (personal and terrain) are more than enough.
It doesn't help that I am brain dead from the "vacation", wonderful as it was, and still feel that way from the time difference, and brain-freezed from the terror (for me) of finding a FT job after being out of the paying job market for ten years! Must Relax.
I wish somewhere there was a class on REwriting, as opposed to spewing the story out on the page in one manner or another. Because just about every writer in print slyly points out that their work is shite before the magic of rewriting it.
