A little more than a year ago, I sat down and said, “Ho hum. I shall write a book.” And since everyone up until that point agreed I was a pretty good writer, this seemed like a fantastic idea to me. I mean, if I can put words on a page in a fashion that sounds pretty decent, all I had to do was put a lot of them on a lot of pages. Right? Right?Heh. Yeah, I know.
My first book–that would be Ornithology I–I learned how to write a scene. You can actually see it in the progression of the draft. I have a couple hundred pages of people sitting around and talking and dancing and stuff on a page and at the end I get to pages that start from a hook, go through a major event, and end on a hook. Yay, me!
Of course, you notice there’s that problem of the first 300 pages where nothing happens. Oops….
My second book–that would be Legalese–I learned how to write conflict and plot. I had to do some of those scenes over and over again to make them work, and it’s still far from perfect (I haven’t even thought about revising it yet!). “Ha ha,” I said. “I am a genius! Now I know how to write a book, and nothing will stop me, ever!”
That faint snorting sound you hear is me. Because I turned back to book #1. Now, I have to tell you. There is basically no way I should have revised Book #1. Nothing happened for 300 pages. There was little external conflict, and not a lot of internal conflict. This was a book that should have been kicked under the bed and chalked up to a learning experience. But I didn’t want to do it. I liked my hero. (Heroine, I realized–not so much. Note to self: “clever” is a character trait, not a character.) I really liked my heroine’s brother. And I wasn’t ready to give up this story.
I really should have given up. Last May, I wrote an intro that totally changed my heroine. It was fantabulous. It was perfect. It was something I sat on for two months before coming back to it and realizing that it sucked, too. I tried again in June. And September. By the time October had rolled around, I’d written maybe 30,000 words, here and there. New intros. Scenes in the middle. Just testing out ideas. None of them worked.
In mid-November, I got the idea. The perfect idea. I wrote five pages. They were the first five pages I sent to my critique partners, who said, “I love it!” I did, too. And so I started rewriting.
Of course I deleted those five pages, in case you were wondering. I kept . . . um . . . 300 words from the original version.
And rewriting this book was a huge breakthrough for me, too. Because I was forcing myself to do it fast enough that I could really feel the pace of the book. When it dragged, I dragged. And I finally figured out that pacing is not a rheostat, to be turned up and down by adding or removing words. Pacing is about connecting with the reader. Those first 300 pages I’d written in the first draft? The pace was slow, sure. But I couldn’t have deleted words to make it better. No way. Without fierce conflict, it’s hard to pace well. And if you have a section of your book where the conflict is slow, you need to either (a) punch it up significantly, or (b) drop in a paragraph of tell and move on, because nobody cares.
And sometimes, the way to make a scene pace faster is to slow it down. The conversation that’s critical to your black moment isn’t going to mean a damned thing to the reader if you delete all your heroine’s emotions to make it read faster.
Sure, words can slow you down. But as a general rule, if your words aren’t doing work, you delete them. Words are not a speed bump, put in to make your reader get to the story slower.
All this makes me wonder what I’m going to figure out on writing my next book.
Does anyone have any startling breakthroughs they’ve made? I’d love to hear them!
