Saturday afternoon I started on the edits, implementing this round of revisions and it brought me back to a recurring question I’ve had through this entire process of writing the book. How do the big time authors handle rewriting? Do they do their own revisions? Is there a round table deal between them and the editor, where they toss ideas back and forth? Are screaming matches involved when they have opposing opinions? Who pays for lunch? The editor person tells me it’s a little bit of all three, and lunch is up for grabs.

At the start of this, I didn’t like rewriting very much at all. Yeah, I knew there were issues with the book. In the state it was unreadable, and by extension, unsellable. I could be wrong, but my high level assessment of the first and second drafts were; good idea, absolutely miserable execution. There were serious structural problems that needed addressing. The longer I looked at it the worse it seemed. There were more things wrong than there were things right. Where should I begin? Should I begin at all? Perhaps there were irreconcilable differences between myself and the manuscript. Could I sue for divorce?

There was a point I was convinced that the sum of the problems were so severe, that it was better to forget about the book altogether. I thought about lighting the manuscript up and chucking the whole thing in the nearest river. Play a little Mahler on a portable turntable while I fired up the pages at the shore of the Navesink, then chuck six months of my life into the murky, muddy water. Drinking as a hobby started to look like a good idea.

Instead of going Hemingway, I decided I needed to give myself a little time away from the problem and write something else. I put the draft aside and wrote a screenplay with the proviso that it must have nothing to do with the book whatsoever. I’ll blog about that whole experience sometime. Writing that screenplay gave me some perspective on the novel, and got my mind off the overwhelming task waiting for me. And it gave me time. I needed time to make a decision. Should I be using my time to write? Was writing even something I was any good at?

Somehow from the moment I sat down, everything about that screenplay just clicked. The best way I can think of to describe it is that it was like I was watching the movie, and was writing down the scenes as I saw them play before me. I wrote it in 21 days, 23 if you count the outline and character sketches. By the end I was smiling again and I had a screenplay. I had solid characters and real conflict that crackled on the page. And I was ready to battle the novel again. I wanted to rewrite, and was ready to make it work.

So maybe the answer to many of my writing problems, like not liking to revise, is just more writing. Even if it’s writing about things that aren’t driving me crazy. And when I get stuck, it’s OK to to give myself time to think them through.

Just got back from working with the editor person. On the whole it went very well. They gave this go round a B+. Not too shabby. Not where I want it to be in the final product, but very close to a solid draft, something that I can shop around, without worrying about the manuscript getting tossed for grammar or technical glitches. More importantly I feel it’s worth paying for. I would buy it, if I didn’t write it myself. After implementing these changes I’m going to be able to hold up the book and say, yeah, this is mine. This is what I can do. It’s not all I can do, or all I ever will do, but this is something. With the time I had to work with, I gave it everything I had. I didn’t hold back.

Holding back has been a long standing problem for me. Back in high school I ran cross country, and it took me two years of never finishing better than the middle of the pack before I realized where I went wrong. I was a strong runner, but I was afraid to break hard off the starting line and run with the guys who took off so much faster. I reasoned that they would fall off later in the race and I could pass them.

My strategy was all kinds of messed up. Sure, some guys did start too fast and flame out. But many of the guys who went out full tilt, finished a lot better than I did. Lots of them seemed to finish in the top ten. In junior year, I tore off the line just like the fatest sprinters, throwing caution to the wind. Much to my surprise it was a lot easier to keep the momentum going. When you start strong, it’s a lot easier to finish strong. And there’s a lot less people nipping at your heels. Suddenly I was finishing in the top ten.

I’ll post more about the editing session tomorrow.

I wrote a novel last year. Then I rewrote it. Since that worked so well, I did it twice more. Right now I’m waiting for comments on the fourth draft from my editor person. I’m not paying the editor person at present and they have a great day job, so reading my stuff falls somewhere between changing the cat box and taking a vacation. Except they don’t have a cat, and they only vacation once a year.

But this editor person has been incredibly helpful in transforming my writing into something readable and provided lots of great feedback. When I sell the book, they’re the first one I’m thanking in the acknowledgments.

We work together every Wednesday evening, going over about a chapter a week. Sometimes its a bit more, but usually it works out to between 10-15 pages a session. With the holidays everything got pushed off for a bit, but we’re almost back on track.

The book started out as an attempt to out do Silence of the Lambs. My reasoning was simple. I figured, go after one of the best of the best in fiction. With 5 million copies sold, I figured it was a meaningful slot to aim for.

And aim for it I did. I spent nine months talking like Hannibal Lecter every time I answered the phone. I read the book. Twice. I dissected and analyzed. I watched the movie repeatedly, trying to understand what made it so good and why it it worked. And I wrote. Every day for 5 to 6 hours, I wrote. When I wasn’t writing, I kept working, bouncing ideas off anyone who would listen. I worked out every detail of my story, talking it through until my wife told me to stop or she was going to start sleeping on the couch.

I wanted to create a heavy like Lecter, evil and dark, and a hero that was every bit as compelling as the villain. Another requirement was that the story ooze conflict, the sort that hooked people right from page one. It was a pretty tall order.

After 9 months of wrestling with mangled prose that kept falling short, I realized the hero in my book didn’t want his story told in third person. Maybe I wanted to write my own Hannibal, but my hero, my hero had other plans for me. He was no Lecter any more than he was Clarice Starling. He was something different altogether. He was in those pages, just beneath the surface, right in front of me from the beginning, trying to break out. I could sense it, but couldn’t connect the dots.

So with some begging from the editor person, I rewrote a chapter in the first person. Just to try it out and see what it would feel like. Suddenly, the book stopped sucking, and it got a hell of lot easier to write. And then the story started to tell itself, rather than me trying to tell the story. It became fun to see what would happen next and not an exercise in discipline.

Tomorrow the editor person and I will meet and go over the entire fourth draft. At this point it should be just fine tuning. Or so I’m hoping…