The Forest for the Trees

Please forgive me for banging on about the joys of writing shorter novels. It's genuinely... novel... to me, and a bit of a revelation.

So, to pull the curtain back a bit, I keep a log of everything I get done in a day writing-wise. Word count, major changes, draft number, etc, and being able to see that I finished an entire editing pass in two days is crazy for me. I actually thought that I'd missed a day. It's great!

Now, editing can be difficult. There's a lot of details to keep track of, a ton of choices that have to be made, so it can take a while. But sometimes going fast helps. Reading it the way my readers read it, that is, straight through without stopping to change things, I pick up a lot of things I miss on earlier passes. Like, oh, I established that already (or forgot to), I've used that word fifty times, the tone of these two back to back scenes doesn't work at all, things like that. Sometimes you have to go fast, to keep as much of the book as possible in your head so you can see the patterns and habits you couldn't when you were lost inside individual parts.

But you're never going to get all of it, so feedback is also important. If you're writing a novel, you will not see certain things. Things you didn't know you were doing, or didn't do at all. Sure, you feel like an idiot when something obvious gets pointed out, but you swallow your pride and make the book better. That's all that matters.

It's a process, and one that I am coming to appreciate more over shorter timescales. A process that feels more like progress, and has left me feeling better than I have in months.