bookkeeping

[truepenny]

DL(2) Ch. 5: 74 words

Other work accomplished: Ran errands. Finally finished editing a long short-story/short novella (9k words--what the heck do I call it?) that's been sitting around not being edited for over a month, and have given it to Mirrorthaw to read. Tore "LGiA" apart and marked the salvageable bits. I know a lot of what the new stuff is, but I'm now pondering how to begin the thing.

That's one of the great things about the tear-down-and-start-again style of revising, grueling and agonizing though it is. For me anyway. It lets me back all the way out and ask myself questions like, Why did I do this? Was it really the best thing to do? Are there other, cooler things I could do instead? When I'm just editing, I tend to get locked into the structure I saddled myself with in the rough draft, so that I'll half-kill myself trying to get the prose to carry a bad structure, which is like trying to get those little birds that ride around on hippopotami to carry the hippopotamus instead. So, tear down. Start again. Think about what the story is, rather than what I've convinced myself to see it as. It's an unsettling mental space to be in, but it's also tremendously satisfying. Like (for I seem to be the Analogy Queen this evening) when you've been walking around all day with your feet hurting--walking on knives, as Hans Christian Andersen so charmingly puts it--and thinking it's because of the walking, and then realize that it's because of the shoes, and you can take those off. It's a great feeling, even if you do feel just slightly stupid for not having realized a long time ago that it was the shoes that were the problem and not your feet.

Verdict: Copacetic.

And you're stopping because ... ? Tired. Eyes starting to cross. Time for bed.

Comments

[oracne.livejournal.com]

So, tear down. Start again. Think about what the story is, rather than what I've convinced myself to see it as. It's an unsettling mental space to be in, but it's also tremendously satisfying.

I love to hear how others write.

So far, I've never had any real success with this method, but then I haven't tried it more than once or twice, either. I tend to just move onto a new project instead of reworking the old, a laziness I'd like to get rid of.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I only occasionally tear things down to redo that much, it's not something I really like. On the other hand, the last time I can recall needing to do that, it took an awful lot of smaller-scale editing to get the story to the point where I could see how and where it needed that.