The Word Cloud

... just lots of inquisitive idiots. ^^D And cowardly ones, 'cos I've written this question and deleted it about 6 times over the last couple of weeks, 'cos it kind of feels like it's a bit like admitting that whilst you love your kids, they still do stuff that irritates the hell out of you.

Any hoo - a possibly controversial question. Controversial, because I know I am going to get lots of 'if you don't believe, then it's not right!' answers - I know lots of 'I never feel like this' comments are going to spring up, but I is just bein' honest.

So, to my question. Now that the first draft honeymoon is definitely over, I am not just editing, I am full-house renovating. But, as with renovating, there are bits of it I like (planning, picking the colours, arranging the furniture, wielding my big hammer and knocking down the walls) and bits I am not so fond of (sweeping up, the mess that never goes away, stripping the wall paper).

Basically, it's the little scenes that are doing me in. Not this big set pieces - those scenes that bristle with action and characters doing uber important things - but the little scenes that link all those set pieces together. The bits where, when I wrote my first draft, desperate to get to the big fight / the first kiss / the big reveal, I kind of glossed over, thinking 'I'll fill in the gaps later'.

Well, later has come, and those gaps need filling. But it feels like stripping wallpaper - you know, when you get to those horrible little fiddly bits that you know you need to sort out or your wall is going to end up a lumpy mess? It's like that.

In the past, I've gone with my gut: 'if it feels wrong, get rid of it'. Problem is, these scenes don't feel wrong - they're needed, after all - they just aren't *whisper it* as interesting as the big scenes. They are the scenes where things are set up. The scenes that lay the ground for the big scenes. Those little essential scenes, rather like undercoating (which has to be one of the most boooooring things to do in the world), have to be done before you can splash the interesting paint around.

Am I a terrible person? Or does anyone else get this? (Please, don't let me be the only one...)

And in before 'if you don't think it is interesting, how will your reader find it interesting?' - I DO find them interesting, but because I know my story inside out, I know how it all fits together, and these little incidental scenes are ingrained in my head. I don't think 'interested' is the right word - it's more that I'm so fed up of the mess and the hoofing and shifting that I want to get to the good stuff, but until I get this ground work done, the big stuff has to wait. If that makes any sense at all. I *know* this stuff is important. They're not even big scenes - some of them probably could be summed up in a paragraph - I'm just... I dunno. Fed up with it? I've torn this tale apart so much it's all pretty much just a big mess, and whilst I do know where I am going with it, rather like renovating a house, where you're sat on garden chairs on dusty floorboards with holes in your ceiling eating microwave meals 'cos you don't have the cooker plumbed in yet, I just dream of it being finished.

And now I'm going to be petulant. Please - no 'I never feel like this' smuggery. It's wonderful if you never feel like this - I'm pleased for you, really, I am. I'm more interested in how people beat the 'meh-ness' of revising; of how you inspire yourself when half of you is saying 'you know this isn't very good, come on, sit down and re-write it, you'll be grateful later' and the other half is screaming 'But you've written this!! Come on, let's go over there and kill stuff, rescue the girl and get laid!'.

:-/

I think you take life too seriously. Your book is a product, nothing more.

Yeah, okay, your baby, and I feel your emotion. My personal opinion, for what it's worth is to write ANOTHER.

Then you won't get so hung up. Ely, I have read more or less every blog, post, whatever, you have contributed, and you are still STUCK in this timeless neverland of expectation.

In the same time period, I have written three novellas. Even if they are crap, I've moved on. So can you.

:-) Stephen - as soon as I saw you were online and had replied to this, I constructed your answer in my head. May I say 'BINGO!' ^^D. I knew you were going to say this, and I think it yet again just highlights how different two people approach their work. I can't just write 'em and leave 'em.

Thing is, I have written other stuff. I've got short stories out in the neverwhere, waiting to be rejected (or maybe published!). I've started another novel, and am halfway through a novella, too. But even with all of that, I can't leave this alone. It's not me being stubborn - I physically cannot leave it be. It's like a siren... it calls, and I have to go back to it. I've left it alone for weeks, and today I just had this overwhelming urge to work on it. So I sat down, picked the bit I wanted to revise, and got bogged down with the minutae. I even wrote myself a note: 'Stop worrying about getting it right and just WRITE', but whatever you call it - perfectionism, control freakery, obsession - it just won't let me. It's all well and good saying 'write another', but when that story calls, it will not let me do anything else. Like the renovated house, you can't just sell up halfway through... I want to see this completed. I want to get it done. I am desperate to tell this tale. And with each little thing I do, I do learn more - but the frustration is also there.

Like I said, I've been mulling over this. I kind of feel like I'm admitting to something terrible, but I figure that like everything else, letting it fester is only going to make it worse. I just wondered if anyone else has been here and how they dealt with it - how they got through it, and that there is a way through it.

Hmmm. I guess you're emotionally attached to it. Okay, so be it. Sometimes that's how it is. There is one answer. Erase it completely. But you won't do that, would you?

Second alternative: erase it. But you won't do that, would you?

What I'm trying to tell you is to get it out of your system. But that won't work, would it? Okay, now you have this insideous monster you have created that won't go away. Alien springs to mind.

Third suggestion. Just submit it, in its unfinished form to an agent/publisher. See if you get any feedback. Anything to break the continuous cycle of revising/editing.

Ely, two things:

One. This feels very intense, like you're overwhelmed by it. Thing to do is to break it down into bite-sized pieces, them chew them up, one by one without getting distracted by all the other buns on the plate.
Make a list; do ONLY one a day (you're only allowed ONE, mind); tick them off.

Two: Learn to love your little mice. A room full of roaring lions loses impact after you've watched it for a while. You want some gentle things, some spacers, some reflective moments, a few breathers to give the big beasts room to shine, otherwise they're lost in the mayhem of the greater carnage.
The little mice serve a real purpose. They have their own charm, even if they're only turning over a leaf to see what's on the other side. OK, they may not be block-buster material, but without them, the carnivores all get a bit samey.
Did you ever watch the TV series, 'Primeval'? I liked it at first, there was plenty of light and shade with thought-provoking moments in between the excitement. The big snarling dinosaurs were OK, but the bit I loved was the little vignette of the cute little dinosaur, Rex, who hopped about, squeaking at people and playing with flowers. When they dropped him, all the big nasties lost impact because there's only so much snarling I can watch before turning over.
In the same way that a class full of extroverts would wear you out without a few shy ones to care for, a book needs those little moments; love them for what they are and they might smile right back at you.

And the third thing of the two things, is to make these little interludes do more than one job.
While they might be designed to link this scene to that, you could take the opportunity to enrich a bit of character, slot in a smidgeon of back-story if you think it matters, give an extra dimension to something else going on or flesh out the impact of the main theme.
I like details.

CW - I haven't a clue what you're talking about! I hope Ely has. Oh, sorry, she will have...
I'll shut up now...

I like details, too, Whisk... but I worry that my 'liking detail' translates to an awful lot of people as 'wittering on about nothing'. Maybe that's my problem? It's not so much not liking the little scenes as worrying I like them a little bit too much and trying to pare them back when I should just be saying 'sod it' and just writing them?

If I may, the main thing that is sticking me up is this: in my story, my MC needs to ride horses. I establish in the first chapter that she is a keen horsewoman, and later, another character offers her the chance to look after her estranged daughter's horse. I figured it was a nice 'bonding' thing for the two characters to do (since my MC is a similar age to the other woman's estranged daughter). But then, the doubts set in. Do I write the scene where she rides the horse for the first time, or do I just leave it as read that it has happened (after all, it's not all that important to the plot). So I decide to leave it and move on to the next part I want to rewrite. But then that little devil on my shoulder starts poking me. Maybe I do need that scene. Am I just being lazy? And if that scene isn't so important, maybe others aren't, too. And that character - well, he's only going to get killed anyway - do you have to wprry about him? And before I know it, an hour has passed and I've done nothing.

It doesn't help that my time to write is really limited right now, and I think that isn't helping. I'm kind of trapped in that 'need to sleep, got to get up in a few hours, whay can't I sleep?' thing, only with writing.

I think I'm going to try that 'do one thing and one thing only' idea - at least that way I am looking at what I am achieving rather than what I have left to do... :-)

Good plan, Ely. Spend some time looking at achievements, not mountains to climb.
Also, to avoid wittering, limit yourself strictly for each interlude. It may be two sentences, it may be two paragraphs. But that's it. Don't pad for the sake of it.

In the words of a long dead English Teacher, 'If you've got nothing to say, say nothing.' And I'd add, that you most certainly don't want to take pages and pages to say nothing.

In some instances, could you leave out the linking scenes all together? Readers are brighter than you think. They can make mental leaps, they can follow complex plots without having everything signposted for them. Give your readers the chance to work out the links themselves. We all like to feel smug from time to time.

And Stephen? Shurely not, me old tropical assassin? C'etait en anglais, n'est-ce pas?
Which word foxed you? :)

Must admit I hate editing. Reminds me of dusting, & I hate dusting, I'll admit I do feel a bit like that

Elysia, I think it can be really helpful to think of a novel as a very long train. The carriages are the big scenes - the main ones where Things Happen, where things are one way at the beginning, and have changed by the end.

The stuff in between is the couplings. And to some degree, the smaller they are the better, but they need to be strong: to change the metaphor, they're what move you/the reader/the characters, from the new-state-of-affairs at the end of the last Big Scene, to the beginnings of the next one.

And no, you're not being lazy to think that the learning-to-ride scene doesn't need to be there.

As Whisks says, there's the jump-cut option. Readers are very experienced - they'll hardly even notice that you didn't mention exactly when she learnt to ride.

Or this can be just the place for a nippy bit of telling. You could just say "By January, she had learnt to ride pretty well, although jumping still frightened her". When it comes to good, quick Telling, you might find this post useful. It starts by being about how Showing can be too long, but at heart, it's about how to make your Telling Showy and vivid, without it taking up tons of real-time space.

http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/2011/10/are-you-showing-too-much.html

More broadly I would put the learning-to-ride scene in if you feel that it's doing something else as well:

giving you the chance to establish (say) where the friction point will be, later, in this nice relationship.

Establishing geography for a chase scene that's coming later - you don't want to have to be saying "the little stream flanked the mill, and just below the wheel broadened out to a pond which emptied into the river a few feet below" when the pursuers are in hot pursuit and hoping to corner the hero.

start the relationship with the horse for later, again, when he's going to show his sagacity and protectiveness...

or something else.

Thanks, Emma - sage advice as always! I think you've hit the crux of my issues (just had a shower - funny how things begin to make more sense under the hot water), and that is how Show, Don't Tell is a mantra that has really become ingrained in my head, to the point where I've lost a bit of confidence in when to abandon it. For example, I need two characters to be alone, and they do it by way of walking a drunk friend home. I was getting so het up writing the entire 'drunk' scene because I was so worried about just saying 'they walked him home' (paraphrased, of course!) that it became this huge, monstrous thing. Stupid thing is, in my first draft, I instinctively just wrote the equivalent of 'they walked him home', and it did the job fine - it was after I put my 'rules' hat on that I panicked. The same applies for the horse scene - in the original draft, I started writing it, thought 'this is way too much time to spend on this, when it effectively does nothing' - it was nice to be with Alicia the first time she rode Anise, but it was hardly plot important stuff - and so left it, with the intention of writing a small linking scene to just get the job done. But today, on went the Rules hat, and LO! there was fretting.

Seriously, I need to employ someone simply to sit there and smack me in the face each time I start this fretting thing. STOP WORRYING AND JUST WRITE IT. Maybe I should get it tattooed on to the back of my hand...

'and that is how Show, Don't Tell is a mantra that has really become ingrained in my head,'

What?! What I meant to say is that the Show, Don't Tell mantra has really become ingrained in my head. Forget the nonsense. Showerd good for sorting stuff out. Showers obviously not good for coherency...

*Showers.

Dammit!

(Maybe it's time to go to bed...)

SHOW, DON'T TELL is BOLLOCKS as it's usually said and understood.

Elysia, I am beaming re-programming at you. It's especially efficacious when taken just after a hot shower. The REAL mantra should be:

Understand Showing, and Telling, and learn to use each of them for good.

If you show everything, you won't be able to pick the manuscript up afterwards...

Lol - true dat, Barb!

Funny how that whole 'show, don't tell' mantra is the most common piece of critique out there, isn't it? It's definitely got me thinking - in the context of a novel, can anyone with any degree of confidence actually say 'show, don't tell' when they critique what is but a tiny snippet? Because Barb is right - if you show everything, you'd have something you could bludgeon sharks to death with. I suppose this is when the old self confidence comes in... knowing when you're right as well as when you're wrong. Silly thing is, I am fine when it comes to the destructive stuff - if tearing lumps out of your fledgeling novel was an Olympic sport, I'd win every gold out there - but when it comes to trusting myself that something is actually fine as it is... that's hard.

Maybe I need to find myself some kind of partner in crime... :-/

Telling is a important tool, and not something to get hung up on. If a story is going to be realistic, there will be times when stuff has to happen which won't be entertaining to read about, so why bore the reader with it? tell the necessary details in as short and efficient way possible, then get back to the fun stuff! Why would anyone think that's a problem?

Frinstance, I wrote a story (Dendrophobia) where the MC is terrfied into moving out of his house, and into a new place. I simply said (telled, heehee) that he'd bought and moved into a new place. Should I have described the tedious business of looking for a new home, dealing with estate agents, surveyors, removals etc? Everyone knows how all that works anyway. One reviewer did object to me 'jumping' from one scene (MC terrified in old house) to the other (arriving at new place), but he's a reviewer who never seems to have anything positive to say about anyone's work, and his own isn't that great, so fuck what he thinks!

Totally write your story the way that feels right to you - you're talented, and should trust your instincts! You are SO entitled to have your own style - which I absolutely love, by the way!

After much thinking and 3am soul searching (melodrama is just a free added extra I provide ^^D) I've come to realise my main problem can be boiled down to three chapters around the half way mark. the stuff that comes before and the stuff that comes afterwards? Largely happy with that lot - it's in need of some serious editing, but on the whole, it's okay. But this cluster of chapters in the middle... nope I'm not happy with them.

So they're going. I'm going to delete them and re-write the middle chapters from scratch. Just shuffling stuff around and trying to stitch the holes back together isn't working - it's time to buy a new pair of socks and be done with it. I shall darn no more!

Now I have some big decisions to make in terms of who and what survives. This should be, uh, amusing... :-S

Saying that, I am excited by the whole deal. After my big think, I realised I don't have to keep things the way they are at all. I am allowed to completely change the middle if I like. So yay! Maybe. I might be thinking differently in a week's time.

Thanks, everyone, for yet again listening to my paranoid ramblings. I know it sounds weird, but talking to people here is like getting permission to do these things. Dunno why it works like that, but it does... (I definitely got a gremlin in me works somewhere... got to work on kicking that little bastard out!)

xx

Bit late joining the conversation...so glad to see from Emma that shoe AND tell have their places.
And now to go back to your original question...
YES I DO THE SAME! I write a scene...very wordily...edit for show and tell (badly). Edit again, slightly better? Repeat as many times as necessary before giving up, 'cos I can't make it say what I want it to. Add a sentence, highlighted, saying something like 'What does he feel here?' or 'check if there is a desk in this room' or 'how does he know that?' Then I leave it for ages, dreading going back to the highlighted bit 'cos I know I've got to sort it out. Some days it feels like I've highlighted most of what I've written - so what was the point of writing it? But somewhere in there is the nub of what I want to get across to the reader...And yes, sometimes it's possible by tweaking and stitching, and sometimes I cut it and take a different approach.
Glad you found where you think your sticking point is; hope you can sort it. I shall now take a hot shower whist reciting Emma's mantra and hope it works on the bit I'm stuck on too!

Er - that would be SHOW and tell...unless anyone's got any really fancy stilettos they want to tell us about?!

Elysia,
3am soul searching / melodrama / kicking bastards / paranoid / weird / kicking / darning socks / boiled
Oh, dear, oh dear.
Do you need to re-discover the joy of writing?

Squidge - oh, how familiar that all sounds... does your manuscript look like it was attacked by a rainbow graffiti artist, too? ^^D

Half the problem is I have so many ideas that I try to cram them all in - during the heat of the first draft, it all makes sense, but then when I come back to revise it, I realise I have about 23 million plot threads that I haven't either tied up, appear out of nowhere (because I haven't given them a proper beginning), or surface and disappear, only to resurface again later without any explanation as to where they have been. Then comes the big job of trimming away all that fat, getting rid of the extra stuff that adds nothing, realising there's a huge bit that doesn't make sense and so needs re-writing from scratch... and by that point, my head is spinning and I start panicking. So I wrestle with it for a while - and then come the needy, paranoid nonsense posts here. Then the likes of Emma or Debi say 'do this + helpful link' and voila! Off I toddle again. Until the next time, of course... ^^D

Alanboy - not so much the joy of writing, but the joy of trusting yourself enough to be able to enjoy what you've accomplished. Writing is fine. That is, dare I say it, the easy part. It's the tarting it up so that it is socially acceptable when the etiquette rules are so damn complicated that does me in.

Well, I'm re-mapping my middle section, and already the fretting has set in. Joy!

Don't fret!
If you can't write the section yet, don't work on the MS...I find a scrap bit of paper and literally ask myself the questions about what isn't working; a bit like an internal monologue I suppose, and I thrash it out roughly before trying it out 'for real'. I've got scraps with things like 'if Rurik feels the power, what can he find that convinces X that he can?' followed by a list of items, a big ring round one of them with 'YES!' at the side and a scribbled note as to where the item fits in. It seems to work for me and stops me from cutting bits out of the MS too early. And if I am tempted to wield the scissors, I have a page right at the end of the MS which has 'Extra bits to reuse' on it, so I don't lose anything before I'm absolutely sure I don't want it any more! (And I sometimes sneakily re-use a bit I've cut in a totally different context!)

In a quote from wot I wrote yesterday...my MS often looks 'like it had been daubed by the brush of a manic artist with a new box of paints'!!

I wish I could show you my MS - I also have a section at the back where I put all my old drafts of chapters that have been re-written, and have a whole file on my computer dedicated to bits I've deleted / re-written / revised. I never get rid of the old stuff completely... you never know when it'll come in handy!

At this point in, the fretting is 'good' fretting - in re-writing these chapters, I have a klot of characters I need to look at and decide whether I want to keep them or not, and then I need to decide if they stay the way they are or does that need to change as well... it having the courage to make that final decision, really. One of the scenes I am potentially cutting went down well with the pupils in my tutor group. They say you have to murder your darlings - well, I'm now a serial killer!! XD