The Word Cloud

OK so you've written 150,000 (+) words. They are the best you've ever written - because they are the only ones you've ever written. You join a writing class/ writer's forum / read how-to books and suddenly you are learning stuff you didn't know. You write some more. The more you practice the more your writing improves.
Then one day you go back to your first love but it doesn't live upto your new standard. You start a rewite but as you are in the process you continue to learn the craft and what you've rewitten soon needs rewiting again.

So what should you do?
Put the baby in a drawer until you have finished your professional development (not that we ever stop learning or improving) or keep at it, changing it by the minute. How can a writer determine when to lay a project to rest and move on?

No Idea. Personally I have two entire novels stored on my computer (each 100,000 words) that I have no intent of revisiting. I wrote them. I learned a hell of a lot from writing them, and they are quiet terrible. I have no more love for the characters, the story or the world.

If the story was good, I'd never let go.

I'm doing this right now, Nashelle - I wrote a novel years ago and loved it at the time, took it out of a drawer at the beginning of the year after learning loads more about writing and decided to rewrite it (the prose is crap, but I like the central themes still). I puffed and struggled and cried and beat myself up about how I couldn't do the story justice, how I was useless, how this was never going to work... and then I just snapped. WHO CARES that the first draft (rewrite first draft in my case) is rubbish? WHO CARES that it's going to have to be edited and revised (repeatedly, I expect) at a later date? It doesn't matter! So now I am happily scribbling / typing away, taking out the bits of the old story I like and moulding them to fit my updated plot, creating new characters and getting rid of obsolete ones, printing off chapters and then scrawling notes all over them, reminding me of bits I might like to add in / change when I come to revise again. Is it prose worthy of Dickens meets Steinbeck? Bugger off - it's melodramatic crap by way of adverb abuse, but it doesn't matter because I'll go back and chip away at that later. And after that, I'll go back again. And then, as I learn more, I'll go back again. And again. And again, until it's ready to be sent out.

I think it was one of the links you provided where someone said 'don't try to get it perfect the first time. Madness lies that way'. I really took that to heart. I now think that also applies to second and even third drafts.

So... I suppose it depends on how strongly you feel about your story, really - do you want to let it go? If you're sick to the sight of it and the thought of working in it makes you want to stick forks in your eyes, then I would leave it until you're ready to tackle it. But if you still love it and love revisiting it, then stick at it - give it a polish and then go off and do something else. Go back later and see if you're still happy - if you're not, shine it up some more :)

"How can a writer determine when to lay a project to rest and move on?"

Always difficult. One one hand, there's always more you can do. On the other hand, any given story and set of characters will have its limits - things you can never do with it. And at any given moment, you have your limits (because we all do, always) in your technical capacity to do things.

One thing to remember: 'lay it to rest' in this context, is NOT a euphemism for burying it for ever. It really is putting it aside, like the sunday roast, to relax and even out. That novel that's in your drawer isn't going anywhere: the characters and story will still be there when you come back to it, but you'll have a whole toolkit more of ways to deal with it.

I do know is that fiddling is disastrous, for reasons I went into here. In your position I'd ask myself what the big project is, with my work on this material. What's the overall purpose of the day's work? The week's work? Where are you trying to get to? Do you know? Or are you just picking at a paragraph here, a character there? What's your plan for what you're doing?

And then I'd ask myself if all those purposes would be better served by waiting until all my new knowledge has integrated itself better. In my experience, learning a craft happens not in a steady upward slope, but in a series of steep slopes followed by plateaus where everything shakes down into place.

And another thought: given the rough stone, gem-cutters don't cut slice off, have a think, cut a bit more, and neither do hairdressers. They stand back, look at the hair or the stone, and envisage the whole thing - the whole project - before they start. Where their professional craft skills come in is that they can then close in, and chop and snip individual bits, and all those individual cuts will add up to making the new shape.

I think what I'm saying is that I'd go on working at the material if I had a clear vision of the new way it's meant to be. But if I hadn't - if I was just muddling around trying to make it 'better' in a series of small or unspecified ways - I'd stop, and put it away. Otherwise I'd end up like the child who decides to trim the poodle - some here, then the other side but it goes shorter, back to the first side, that goes too short in its turn, on and on... and ends up with a bald and slightly mangy-looking dog.

For what it's worth, one reason I can never easily answer the question of how many novels I've written is that most of them are partly or even largely another go at a subject or character I've tackled before. Three was a re-go at One, TMOL (which is Seven) has huge elements of Four, Five and Two, ASA (Eight) is basically Five and Six melded, and so on. But what you might notice is that I'm never re-working the novel's immediate predecessor: they leapfrog each other. It was the work I did on Six, which made me understand what Five needed, to become Seven, and how to do it. And so on. And I (almost) never go back and get out the old files: I bring my greater technical understanding (though it's never great enough, of course) to the old ideas and situations and characters.

One last thought: while you're learning so much, there's absolutely nothing to stop you thinking about the project that's currently in the drawer, and making notes about what you might do to it, whenever they occur to you or something you've read or experienced or some discussion on the Cloud prompts it. Just don't actually get it out (or start a Version Two on a blank sheet) until you've got a properly defined purpose.

I was being hypothetical guys. My 150,000 MS was never completed and was put aside long ago. And my last novel of 90,000 has just been sent to my computer archives. I'm now on something completely new. The reason for asking the question is I have a friend (I name no names) who is determined to rewrite a first ever novel and I think they have grown too much as a writer to go back to that materail. Just my opinion, which may not be right!

I agree Emma that you should take your knowledge forward otherwise progression will be slow. I notice that I only creep back to old manuscripts when I'm stuck for something meaningful to do in the present. Like lookign back on your first love with rose-tinted specs!

I am so totally at this point for this discussion, gives me hope! Is there any unset time line to finishing a novel? I know it's an impossible question, but I need to work towards something and maybe I am setting an impossible time line for myself, doomed for disaster.

There is no set time - you could carry on writing for years! I read somewhere that you know when a novel is finished when you can't look at it without wanting to throw up!

There is such a thing as WIP (work in progress) syndrome where a writer keeps writing but never finishes the MS - probably becasue the are a) too afraid of letting go b) scared of what will come next c) scared of the void the finished novel will leave... and probably countless more reasons!

Thanks Emma for you wise words. I agree that messing around with an already finishied article is a recipe for disaster - One too many brush strokes on the canvas, if you will.

Having finished the somethingtieth 'draft' of a screenplay a year or so ago and having run out of ideas on how to 'improve' it further, it was put to bed . (Looking back, I was merely too chicken to submit at that stage. )

It was dusted off about three months ago.

Having re-visited the theme, plot and characters and spent countless hours tweeking merely this word and that, and having read this article, it has recently occured to me that the story has nowhere else to go; the characters have said it all, given of their best and I am physically incapable of making it any better. In short, the screenplay and I have both reached our limit. ...Oh and yes, Nashelle, I feel like throwing up.

Guess it's finished.

...Thanks for the heads up.

*Gulp*

Nashelle, you're so right about WIP syndrome.

The other thing to look out for is if you're messing around with small stuff, as a way of feeling like you're working on it, when actually you're avoiding contemplating the big stuff. It's like carefully cleaning the inside and the outside of the Orient Express, when you haven't actually got an engine strong enough to pull the damn thing through the Alps in the first place

I love the express train image, Emma. I may be suffering from WIP syndrome myself, but it doesn't feel like it. There's a strong engine in there, all right, and I believe in it. The trouble is, the train looks more like the happy-go-lucky-local (any Ellington fans around?) than the Orient express. It's a matter of giving people a way in to the story - 'I want to take this ride' - and I'm working away at that. I often fiddle with a word or two here and there, especially in the opening chapters, because one of my narrators can (purposely) become incoherent and the other is unreliable - and not obviously so to start with.

There's an old WIP that won't leave me alone and every few months, I dust it off and tinker. Yes, I accept all the reasons not to, but I don't feel able or skilled enough to tackle the bigger picture as yet, and the little twiddles at least get the crud out of the way so that I hope I'll be able to see the wood for the trees when the time comes to get out the chainsaw.
Sometimes, you need to tidy the room before you can see the walls falling down, don't you?

It seems almost prehistoric - many years BC (Before Cloud) I penned three novels - (alas all unpublished but I now write 100 page screenplays on their rejection letters so you can't say I don't recycle) before turning my attention to a different writing style. Many many of the 'unused' ideas have crept into other projects (can you plaigarise yourself ??!) and there are finished projects that I revisit mainly to further edit (on a yearly basis) so as to end up with the best distillation possible.
One of these projects was originally co-written and maybe my hesitation with this SP is that there's only 1 percent of my co-writer left in it !
I believe you'll know when the work is actually finished. Certainly it has to rest, be reviewed and then polished (it's not the writing that's hard - it's the rewriting) but you'll know when you've got it to the best that you can do.
Then it's time to send the work out but place carefully and with the best people.
Personnel can quickly change so phone first. Good Luck.