Working the List and Finding the Joy in Writing (and Rewriting) Again

For the past couple years, I found myself telling others at work to “find the joy.”

That is, do what makes you happy. Come to work because you know that whatever the task or assignment that day, that week, find the part of it that speaks to you and use that as motivation. Fight through the other stuff because of this one bit of inspiration and happiness. And do the job well because today, this is what you were called to do.

It’s idyllic, this notion of doing what you love. It doesn’t happen nearly enough. Yet there’s almost always a kernel of satisfaction, happiness and joy in doing a job, no matter the organization.

Professional writers don’t always get to write about what they want. Sometimes they put their daytime uniform and pay the bills as technical writers, public relations writers, marketing and advertising writers while getting their happy work – creative writing – done before breakfast or after dinner.

Somewhere, find the joy. Put another way, find a way to enjoy the journey.

After many, many months, that’s finally come back to me at the keyboard. Allow me to back up.

It wasn’t until I finished the first, bloated, too-detailed first draft of Dead Odds that I heard the unvarnished message about how to turn a manuscript into a novel. “Writing is rewriting” was the message from novelist and teacher extraordinaire Reed Farrel Coleman. This was from a gathering of wannabe mystery writers at a SleuthFest from a few years back.

Writing is Rewriting

Writing is rewriting? WTF?

“You can’t be a writer if you don’t want to rewrite,” Coleman said. “You spend more time rewriting than creating.”

I didn’t doubt his message. I did underestimate the difficulty.

In phases that were alternately slow, easy, plodding, quick, fun, drudgery and always necessary, I’ve written through nearly a dozen drafts. “Only 12 more to go,” another writer said to me recently. God, I hope not.

Working the List

Because of the way my mind works, I work on my book by working the most recently list of fixes. The list gets organized by priority, based on a combination of what I can get done quickly and what has to be done now for the rest of the list to make sense.

Working these lists – and there have been multiple lists over the past couple years – pretty much sucks. First, you have to re-read the same scenes and chapters over and over. (What’s more, your eyes continue to read over multiple typos, which get caught by the next beta reader in line.)

Second, this isn’t rewriting. This is editing. This is cutting for the sake of brevity, fixing grammar, adjusting tense, ensuring proper point of view. All at once. For those of us with a full-time job, it’s damned time-consuming. For those of who get caught up in the Thousand Words A Day Syndrome, this process can crush you because you can’t measure progress by word count. You have to measure by words cut, and God that’s no fun at all.

The Process of Getting Unstuck

For months this book has been stuck, its author paralyzed by confusion.

When I wrote the first scene and chapter that I really liked, the significant editorial (and agent) feedback I received was, “You didn’t lead with your protagonist. Your readers don’t know your protagonist yet, have never heard of him, and they want to know who that is right away so they can establish a connection and like him.”

The next draft led with the protagonist. That previous opening scene was now the start of Chapter 2.

The next bit of high level feedback from that draft was this: “Your book doesn’t really begin until Chapter 2. Why not start there?”

Sigh. What’s unpublished novelist to do? This had turned into the Mystery of the First Scene.

With no agent on board and no publishing house editor standing by to render a verdict, this decision was all mine to make. The stakes, I felt, were high. The resulting manuscript, especially the first 30 pages or the first three to five chapters, determines the fate of the book. As in, whether an agent feels it’s worth representing and, if it becomes self-published, whether readers read it and enjoy it. No pressure.

I couldn’t figure a way out of this maze. I had no idea what the right answer was. I was not set on either beginning other than I wanted it to lead to a series of page turns. Gradually, the conflicting feedback sunk in. No matter what, I needed a third option. I needed to get protagonist in the first scene and either get in and out of that scene quickly with some immediate payback.

Eureka!

It turns out I had an advisor I could ask, fellow author Micki Browning. And she made a fantastic suggestion for the first scene, one that introduces the protagonist and carries some lasting emotional impact for Chapter 2, which has the trigger point for the book, a death.

This is where the joy comes in. I get to write again. I get to create again.

As you learn how to write novel, you discover that that these beasts are not as much created as much as they are engineered. Chapters don’t matter, but scenes do. And each scene has to have a reason for being. They have to enlighten character, drive plot, set up or create tension or conflict or impact pace.

I recently wrote a new scene for the middle of Dead Odds to help make the book more historically accurate and to provide details for previously unanswered questions. That was fun.

This new Scene 1? Producing this re-engineered beginning is fun, too.

It has the added bonus of resolution. With a new beginning, the end is near.

Soon it’ll be time to start something new. I can hardly wait.