The Devil in the Details
Last week was spent writing wholesale new scenes for Book IV, just straight-up word vomit to get out what needed getting out, adding what was missing, you get the picture. This week was spent revising old ones, and it took exactly the same amount of time.
Why? Mostly emotion. Searching for nuance and trying to get a subtle point across is a lot harder than 'she did the thing.' Trying to find the little gradations that add up to an overall arc is more finicky than an action scene or even a big revelation. One is overturning a bucket of sand, the other is moving the same sand grain-by-grain, but only the pretty ones, while also throwing out all the ones that have crab poop on them. How can you tell? Exactly. You have to look really hard.
It involves a lot of thinking and a lot of feeling, and is a lot more tiring, even though you end up with a fraction of the (new) word count. And in the first half, it's more important to get right. Setting things up, giving them a shape and trajectory, setting the tone and where the characters are emotionally takes a lot of work, much more so than all the fun payoffs at the end, which seem to just snowball into each other and write themselves.
I think it was Neil Gaiman who said something like 'The second draft is where you make it look like you know what you're doing.' And it's true. There are good days and bad days, even good bad days (not a lot done, but maybe a big breakthrough idea) and bad good days (like when you write 2,000 words and then end up having to chuck them because you went down a tangent that ended in a brick wall), but they add up and even out in the end.
Why? Mostly emotion. Searching for nuance and trying to get a subtle point across is a lot harder than 'she did the thing.' Trying to find the little gradations that add up to an overall arc is more finicky than an action scene or even a big revelation. One is overturning a bucket of sand, the other is moving the same sand grain-by-grain, but only the pretty ones, while also throwing out all the ones that have crab poop on them. How can you tell? Exactly. You have to look really hard.
It involves a lot of thinking and a lot of feeling, and is a lot more tiring, even though you end up with a fraction of the (new) word count. And in the first half, it's more important to get right. Setting things up, giving them a shape and trajectory, setting the tone and where the characters are emotionally takes a lot of work, much more so than all the fun payoffs at the end, which seem to just snowball into each other and write themselves.
I think it was Neil Gaiman who said something like 'The second draft is where you make it look like you know what you're doing.' And it's true. There are good days and bad days, even good bad days (not a lot done, but maybe a big breakthrough idea) and bad good days (like when you write 2,000 words and then end up having to chuck them because you went down a tangent that ended in a brick wall), but they add up and even out in the end.
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