![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I've been writing books since 1983. I actually started knocking out little stories in 1976, but books really were my first love (and in fact the first thing I wrote, A Trip to the Museum, penned at the curious age of five, was a "book"). Yet right from the very beginning and on to this day, the one problem I've consistently had is overwriting. It's a twice-over condition: I want to throw everything in, and then I can't figure out what might need to get tossed after the first draft is done.
After not quite 29 years of this, something so obvious struck me the other day that it's a wonder it occurred to me at all: I write the way I think.
Most every thought I have is a big brainstorm balloon. If I discover something interesting, I go seeking all the information about it that I can. If I think of someone, a half-dozen or more things about them simultaneously spring to mind. As I'm having a conversation, my brain plots several possible ways that it could go and prepares potential conversations for those directions.
The problem is that a book is too linear for this sort of business. But even now, having been floored by that realization (which was so stunning I physically stopped walking and froze in place for a moment), I'm at a loss as to what to do about it.
I don't think an overwritten first draft is that big a deal (though I'd like to cut back on that to save myself work later), but an overwritten final draft certainly is a wee bit of a stinky issue. Yet much of the time I can't even follow the 10% rule. When friends have offered the occasional recommendation of a book that they consider similar to mine to show me an example of someone else's overwritten work, I (usually) find out that I like the book quite a lot. I can't seem to sift out what's important from what's not because in the kaleidoscope that is my thought process, everything that went in seems important.
I'm thinking about this all over again because I was going over Shenandoah once more in preparation for Laurie's editing. This is a book I finished three years ago, so there's a fair distance between execution and now. This is a book I've also tried editing from cover to cover three times. My gut tells me that it's still too long (118,000 words if you want a number, though I'm more concerned with text than quantity), and yet in starting to review it a fourth time since yesterday, I probably haven't chopped 100 words out of it.
Maybe it's fine. Maybe my bizarre thought process hasn't affected it the way that, say, I think it's barreling through Arizona. But I should be able to think of at least a few more pieces here and there that could get a haircut--shouldn't I?
But yeah, in the meantime, realizing what's going on doesn't do a lot to help with the literary translation. I doubt I could change my thought process if I wanted to; even if I could I'm not sure I'd want to, since it can be bloody entertaining...And really, it's actually the mechanism that helps me think up these books and plot them in the first place. I don't know if I'd want to risk eliminating something so fundamental.
So for now it looks like I'm going to keep right on writing long novels.
After not quite 29 years of this, something so obvious struck me the other day that it's a wonder it occurred to me at all: I write the way I think.
Most every thought I have is a big brainstorm balloon. If I discover something interesting, I go seeking all the information about it that I can. If I think of someone, a half-dozen or more things about them simultaneously spring to mind. As I'm having a conversation, my brain plots several possible ways that it could go and prepares potential conversations for those directions.
The problem is that a book is too linear for this sort of business. But even now, having been floored by that realization (which was so stunning I physically stopped walking and froze in place for a moment), I'm at a loss as to what to do about it.
I don't think an overwritten first draft is that big a deal (though I'd like to cut back on that to save myself work later), but an overwritten final draft certainly is a wee bit of a stinky issue. Yet much of the time I can't even follow the 10% rule. When friends have offered the occasional recommendation of a book that they consider similar to mine to show me an example of someone else's overwritten work, I (usually) find out that I like the book quite a lot. I can't seem to sift out what's important from what's not because in the kaleidoscope that is my thought process, everything that went in seems important.
I'm thinking about this all over again because I was going over Shenandoah once more in preparation for Laurie's editing. This is a book I finished three years ago, so there's a fair distance between execution and now. This is a book I've also tried editing from cover to cover three times. My gut tells me that it's still too long (118,000 words if you want a number, though I'm more concerned with text than quantity), and yet in starting to review it a fourth time since yesterday, I probably haven't chopped 100 words out of it.
Maybe it's fine. Maybe my bizarre thought process hasn't affected it the way that, say, I think it's barreling through Arizona. But I should be able to think of at least a few more pieces here and there that could get a haircut--shouldn't I?
But yeah, in the meantime, realizing what's going on doesn't do a lot to help with the literary translation. I doubt I could change my thought process if I wanted to; even if I could I'm not sure I'd want to, since it can be bloody entertaining...And really, it's actually the mechanism that helps me think up these books and plot them in the first place. I don't know if I'd want to risk eliminating something so fundamental.
So for now it looks like I'm going to keep right on writing long novels.
