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truepennyAfter you have admitted that the book is currently a plate of dingoes' kidneys (which is apparently the step in my process after "finish the book"), the next thing you have to do is find the things you did right.
These are your bones, your bedrock. These are the things you're going to stand on while you try to figure out why the rest of the book has wobbled and capsized and is now collapsing like a flan in a cupboard.
In the particular case of Corambis, I know the ending is right. No, sorry. I know the climax is right. The ending is still very much a case of Magic Eight-Ball Says Ask Again Later. But I know the solution to my protagonists' several dilemmas is the right one, even though I now have to go back and set up the dilemmas properly. That's okay. It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards. And the middle of the book has good stuff in it; whether it's right or not depends on what happens to the beginning and the end, but any scene with bog bodies is a good scene to have, just on general principles.
But the beginning. I've made a list of the things I know are right, and there are five of them. Only three of them are actual scenes; the other two are things that I know happen, but right now they're not happening the right way. The rest of it--and this is the first six or seven chapters--inspires in me a vague, squeamish embarrassment, which is the feeling you get when you know that what you've written is wrong, that you've only been faking the story. (Notice that shift from first person to second, even though I'm obviously still talking about me and my writing and mypromise process. [Huh. Would you look at that? Freudian slip.] That would be a distancing technique, and it is another sign that several levels of my brain are very unhappy with the current draft.) So now I take those five things and I stare at them and spin them around and have them do handstands and try to see what the shape is of the story they're giving off. Not the story I've crowbarred them out of, but the story they belong in. The story I'm only now beginning to see, like knocking a hole in a plaster cast (with your crowbar, right?) and seeing the gleam of a bronze elbow.
These are your bones, your bedrock. These are the things you're going to stand on while you try to figure out why the rest of the book has wobbled and capsized and is now collapsing like a flan in a cupboard.
In the particular case of Corambis, I know the ending is right. No, sorry. I know the climax is right. The ending is still very much a case of Magic Eight-Ball Says Ask Again Later. But I know the solution to my protagonists' several dilemmas is the right one, even though I now have to go back and set up the dilemmas properly. That's okay. It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards. And the middle of the book has good stuff in it; whether it's right or not depends on what happens to the beginning and the end, but any scene with bog bodies is a good scene to have, just on general principles.
But the beginning. I've made a list of the things I know are right, and there are five of them. Only three of them are actual scenes; the other two are things that I know happen, but right now they're not happening the right way. The rest of it--and this is the first six or seven chapters--inspires in me a vague, squeamish embarrassment, which is the feeling you get when you know that what you've written is wrong, that you've only been faking the story. (Notice that shift from first person to second, even though I'm obviously still talking about me and my writing and my
