I’m about to get my editor’s comments back on The Pattern Scars. It’s been seven years since I had professional editorial feedback on a book of mine, so I’m excited and trepidatious (used to think I’d made this word up; Microsoft spell check still does), and reflecting on the patterns and discoveries of previous edits.
Like so.
Fall 2000 – A Telling of Stars
“There’s no momentum,” First Agent Jeff says. “Jaele just wanders around, following some vague mythic route to nowhere. She needs to be following someone. Maybe one of the Sea Raiders.”
“No.” The blood is rushing to my head. I’m not sure how loudly I’m talking – not very, I hope, because I’m at work. I clutch the phone to my ear as if Jeff will feel the pressure on his end and understand how much business I mean. “No no no no NO. No way. The vagueness of her wandering is the point! I wrote this book to transcend genre stereotypes! I refuse to make it typical!”
A few days of fuming later, I start jotting down some “OK, so what if” notes. A few months of revising later, I acknowledge (both grudgingly and gratefully) that Jeff was right. The addition of the fugitive Sea Raider has given the story shape and direction; in fact, I’m not sure how anything hung together at all before him. I can’t believe I didn’t think of this.
Spring 2004 – The Silences of Home
“So,” my editor says, “I like Baldhron. I don’t think you should kill him off at the end of Book I.”
“That’s it?” I’ve been pacing; now I sit down hard on the futon couch. “That’s your only comment?”
“Well, I think you should have a very short prologue and epilogue too, just to give some context to the readers who know Telling. But yeah. That’s about it.”
No resistance from me this time. This book has been a breeze; the edits are giddy-makingly minor. Whee! All future books will surely be breezy too.
Winter 2009 – The Pattern Scars
“I think,” my sister says, “that you should get rid of all of Book III.”
I say, “Oh god.”
So much for stories wafted onto the page via zephyr. This book is a corpulent 138,000 words, and yet something’s wrong. I’m still writing on the streetcar to work, as I do every weekday, and when I type and print the words later, they read fine. But it doesn’t feel right. This is my inarticulate gut grumbling; my slightly more analytical brain tells me that the book’s various elements aren’t fitting together any more. The story’s somehow both advancing and stalled – but yes, it does come down to my gut, where something hard and heavy is sitting and not going away.
When my sister tells me to cut Book III, I know she’s right – immediately. I fight it, though not for the same reasons that I fought Jeff, years before. Now it’s mostly about the work. 38,842 words! Six months of writing – much of it good writing! But then I start jotting down some “OK, so what if” things. A few weeks later I’m writing again, and the hard, heavy feeling’s gone. A few months after that, the book’s done.
Spring 2011 – The Mountain Box (working title)
“Ariadne is just too unlikable for me to want to keep reading,” the agent writes. “For the first part of your book, she is our protagonist. I’m not sure if teenagers are going to want to read more about her.”
The words of the email blur a bit as the blood rushes to my head.
A few days of self-pitying weariness later, the “OK, so what if” notes get made. And even though I only sort-of agree with the agent, and my gut has been entirely unqueasy during the writing of these 35,000 words-so-far, I can tell right away that the addition of a more sympathetic point-of-view character will give the story shape and direction.
Spring 2011 – The Pattern Scars
Stay tuned…
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