It's a long way to the Outerlands, but I have a map - Part 2 of 2

(continued from Part 1)

I revised The Outerlands again. This time, I went through every chapter, every scene, every sentence, picking everything apart, editing and polishing word by word. I’d never scrutinized my writing so closely before. By this time I had lost count of how many revisions the book had been through, so I referred to what I was doing as the “final polish”. Then I went to the Surrey International Writers’ Conference. There, I once again had the opportunity to pitch to an agent, and this got me a request for the first three chapters of my book. Hours later, my critique group buddies and I went to one of the scheduled workshops, where we had our minds blown by Donald Maass. “Tension on every page” was only the beginning. There was tension, and there was microtension, ratcheting up the conflict line by line. Polishing one’s prose was one thing — changing the fundamental character and power of each sentence was quite another. Equally mind-blowing was the workshop by his wife, Lisa Rector-Maass, which focused on questioning your story and your characters in startling and challenging ways, with the goal of taking the story to a new level.

I came to a realization: all my polishing of sentences was like vaccuuming the carpet and washing the sheets, when what I really needed to do was get rid of that old ratty carpet and that saggy mattress — no, I needed to start ripping out walls and pulling up floorboards. I never sent my three chapters to the agent I met at SIWC. Instead I bought the Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook — we all did — and started flogging the hell out of The Outerlands again.

I made significant progress on the Breakout Novel workbook, but I didn’t finish it, because I was interrupted by a large, time-consuming, work-related project which took months to complete. During that time, I did very little writing. When I resurfaced, I had another realization: “Dude, novel-writing takes a lot of time and work, and there’s no guarantee of any reward at the end. I’d better write some short stories too, instead of just continuing to put all my eggs in the novel basket.”

I put the The Outerlands away, and didn’t touch it for an entire year. Instead, I worked on a short story — flogging it, polishing it, and eventually successfully submitting it. I also wrote a couple more new stories, set in a completely new and fresh universe with brand new characters, and fell in love with those for a while. I felt like writing was becoming, well, not exactly easier — but that my writing chops were becoming more equal to the tasks I set myself. I felt a growing ability to form my stories into desired shapes, to see and create patterns and themes, to push characters hard and make them suffer and change, to look inside myself and see the fear and force myself to “go there”.

The next time I looked at The Outerlands, it was like looking at it with a whole new pair of eyes. I did need to rip out those walls and pull up those floorboards, but it wasn’t just that. There were words, phrases, sentences, events and ideas in there that dated back to the story’s first iteration. Somehow, despite repeated revisions, some of those relict features had continued to be exempt, regardless of whether or not they were pulling their weight. The entire house was a disorganized patchwork of cobbled-together elements — old crap from the past, middle-aged crap from two years ago, and newish, somewhat-better-but-still-not-great stuff pasted bandaid-like on top of it to try to hold it together.

The important thing was, it couldn’t be fixed in situ. It had to be destroyed and rebuilt. The other important thing was that the foundation was still sound. There was a female protagonist who was more or less a version of me that had grown up in a repressive near-future, and her brother who was smart but self-destructively crazy. They weren’t like everybody else in the conformist society they lived in, and they knew it, and so they decided to run away. That was still the story I had to tell, and I still felt the compulsion to tell it. That made it worth destroying and rebuilding. And that’s what I’m doing.

So do I believe that I now know everything, and I’ve reached the peak of my writing powers? Of course not. Sure, I know more than I used to. I know just enough to realize that I still have plenty to learn. This learning process is like a logarithmic curve — it leaps up and covers a ton of ground very quickly and then starts getting steeper and steeper, approaching the Y-axis but never, ever reaching it. I don’t know precisely where I’d place myself on that curve, but at least I know that I won’t be languishing at point zero, in dead end spiral notebook land, ever again. The Outerlands is my first novel, and I’ll never again have to go through that first novel learning curve.

So anyway, enough blathering. Time to go nuke and pave. Progress reports forthcoming!