Novelist Beware
Image courtesy robertnelson.
Now that I’m nearing the end of my 90k word goal for a rough draft, I am reminded of all those lovely nasties waiting for writers “coming to the end.”
First, there is the sinking sensation that you have written a bunch of crap. There’s not enough crisis, there’s too much inner dialog, too much focus on the personal development of the main character, and not enough action.
Then there is the realization that you have, once again, fallen into the “parenting” trap of wanting your novel to reflect well on you, causing you to inject too much of yourself into it. It’s a great reminder that the novel is driven by the needs of the characters, not the needs of the author. If you are lucky and a bit experienced, you can easily locate and excise these little tidbits. I like how Howard Mittelmark and Sandra Newman said it in How Not to Write a Novel:
A humorous or ornately embroidered passage that takes the reader out of the novel to reflect on the author’s brilliance is likely to be a bug, rather than a feature. In fact, whenever you are particularly taken with a bit of your own cleverness, it is not a bad idea to stop and consider whether it serves your novel or you. Anything that draws attention to the author at the expense of the novel is bad parenting.
You ride the seesaw of “there’s too much relationship development here” to “I don’t have much relationship development at all!” You run between “this scene is not in the outline!” to “why wasn’t this scene in the outline?”
And so it goes. Of course, I try to be the type of writer that doesn’t read while I write. I believe in getting that rough draft OUT so labor can stop and I can look at what I’ve birthed after the drugs wear off. However, it is inevitable when you write both longhand and on the computer. Typing your longhand into the computer often results in small changes, questions, near panic, and sometimes passivity (just type it, don’t think about it).
These “end events” are well documented by writing books. They are not a surprise, though they are annoying, embarrassing, and sometimes so erosive to a writer’s confidence that you wonder (a lot) if you’ve just wasted 72k words on crap.
Fortunately, we survive them. Fortunately, other projects grab our attention, making us willing to see this one to the end so it can ‘rest’ for the required two to four weeks before we see it again (meantime playing with fun new characters and plot lines that, if pursued, will put us right back here in another rough draft coming to its conclusion).
As exciting as beginning a novel is, the ending of one is terrifying. All the fears of failure (and success), all the concerns about our abilities and attention to the craft, all of it is there. That’s not a bad thing. If we learn to survive the “end game” of our rough draft, we grow. When we go back to edit this child of ours, some of those feelings remain, but they mingle again with the excitement of beginning.
It’s good to be a writer, an aspiring novelist, and lover of the craft. Where else can you get such thrilling and emotional roller coaster rides in the privacy of your own mind? Write on!
Write on indeed, BJ. Congratulations with an exponent. You have smoked me all over the place.
Thanks, Sean.
And thanks for coming to visit my little corner of the blogosphere.
The jury is still out on whether I’ve produced something decent or just a bunch of crap. As you said, the child is born in the rough draft. You raise it in the revision.
Raise him well, go all to his performances, and overpay for his tuition. He’ll probably be little like you expected, but in many ways better than you imagined. Good Luck!
Let’s hope he isn’t too rebellious, lol.
Sometimes rebellion is the start of a new era.
All I can say is cleaning up the PoV and the passive voice is going to be like a day with a teenager. When you and Sean get to that point, I’ll lend you my shoulder.
My kids are now 21 and 18 but I still remember! lol.