Rewriting at this late date is very hard. Akin to torture. The book seems like a cohesive mass and any change feel like it’s breaking the bubble. Very difficult to stay seated and continue, especially since this will be a 12 hour day today and I expect for the weekend as well. Wish my “editor” had caught these things sooner. We were supposed to be done three months ago and I sent it to her six months ago! Changing back to first-person is difficult because I don’t hear the voice anymore. The spell seems to be gone. Though I can see how characters tend to talk (like us) in the second person a lot so having the narrative in that form can be tiresome as well. Still, it makes the narrator feel too close to me, and I don’t like it. I don’t imagine him much like me at all.
This feels tedious, like writing papers way back in University, when the house got super clean - I am ready for any distraction!
Archive for March, 2009
Enhanced Interrogation Techniques
Friday, March 27th, 2009The Fear of Another Draft
Tuesday, March 24th, 2009I’m in the edits from the publisher – the supposed final stage before reaching a final draft. The manuscript is complete but they want me to address some final comments from the editor and the publisher to clarify language and climbing terminology. This is going to take the rest of the week (writing at about six hours a day).
The terminology is the hard part: I decided not to use anything that didn’t appear in Into Thin Air as I figured that was public knowledge, but there is so much climber lingo that is used in conversation and I can’t just drop out of the narrative like you can in non-fiction, and the publisher (in Victoria) says she can’t understand it all. I have to go back through and look at all the climbing scenes and try to ensure that it is all clear to the non-climber, but it is hard to remember what I thought about climbing before I started. Especially since I grew up near the mountains.
The other edit pass is for language clarity and flow, and this is easier but still is taking time. Two days so far and I am ¾ of the way through.
I’ve marked many sections to go back a rewrite. That’s what the rest of the week is for. (I booked it off work, though I will do that outside of the six to eight hours of writing – when my brain is creatively frazzled).
Work is such a different track that it feels easy.
I worry about things:
Will they change the title. But I met with Don Gorman of Rocky Mountain Books and he said that would have come up by now and he was hoping to keep that title, even though I joked that it may be misconstrued as an exposé of Hugh Grant’s Indiscretions. That was so long ago that I think it is not even funny anymore.
God, this has been a 14 year journey and I feel so close.
I guess worry is normal.
I wonder about how much to push back against the editorial advise. Some of the comments I know will not work: I’ve tried them. I have written this book in so many different ways to finally find the perfect way to tell the story that I feel very confident that I have it correct. But then I get edits back and I question myself. Maybe that’s normal too. But I want to make the best story and I do respect the great experience of the Publisher. I have taken short-stories from start to publication, but never a novel, and a novel is not just that many more words. A short story for a magazine is 2000 words or less. Easy to rewrite in a day if you need to.
But the Publisher is wondering about my choice to rewrite the 7th draft into second-person present-tense (from first-person past-tense which was very wordy and slow – too much filtering). If she says go back to first, how much to I push back? I’ve already sent her several scenes written in both, and the first person was agonizing to write. I know that second person is rare and can be gimmicky, but I think it really works in this context.
Hopefully I will hear tomorrow, and that will set the course for the next few weeks. If I have to rewrite, I fear it will change the voice and the whole novel will suffer.
Here’s hoping.