Forward or Back?
I’ve spent the last few weeks pushing forward on The Winged Horse. My hope is to finish the rough draft by midsummer, so that I have a couple of months to fill in the missing sections and pull the plot into a single, more or less coherent thread before editing for clichés and style and all that good stuff. With luck, I’ll have the book in press by late fall, although as the days fly together and coalesce into weeks, that hope seems increasingly illusory. Still, it’s not (yet) impossible. I can dream.
But eighteen chapters in, it’s not always easy to remember exactly how I set up the story in the beginning. Did the bey join his son in drinking wine, or did he hold out for the nomadic favorite—fermented mare’s milk (koumiss)? Was the heroine present when her father stumbled? What, exactly, did they say?
Those questions sent me back to the beginning of the book looking for answers. I read it in the ePub version, as a reader would, to get the overall flow of the story—only to discover that after a rollicking if incomplete start, my hero and heroine came to a screeching halt in chapters 2, 3, and 4. I could feel my eyelids getting heavy, like the hypnosis patient in an old film. I became itchy, then annoyed, at these people who spent pages lost in thought.
I know, of course, why that happened. Nor need my readers fear that I ever intended to send the book to print with thirty-five pages of nonstop telling. My characters don’t (usually) emerge full-blown; instead, they play a kind of peekaboo, darting out to drop a line or three before ducking back behind the grilled screen, where they hover vaguely while I pound my head thinking of something for them to do that will reveal their souls to me. One option is just to let their thoughts flow, so that I can see what really moves them when they are not buffing their images for other people. Then, when I understand who they are and what they want, I can begin to write dialogue for them that both reveals their surface concerns and hints at those secrets they don’t dare share with the world because, like all of us, they fear mockery or humiliation or opposition.
After eighteen chapters, I have a good sense of Ogodai and Firuza, even Tulpar. I also have a better sense than when I started of nomadic society and how it functioned. Many things need to change in those opening chapters, some of them fundamental.
But should I go back and change them now or press on, as I originally intended, to the ending before returning to fix the beginning? It’s not as easy a question as it appears. Fundamental changes may alter the ending, so I may benefit from fixing the underlying plot line first. Yet rewriting—however necessary—can also be a form of procrastination. It’s so tempting to go back to the safe and familiar, the already written, rather than push on to a still murky future.
In the end, I went back: in part because I could see the solution and didn’t want to lose track of it; in part because my writing schedule at present, which allows about a day and a half of free-flow concentration plus whatever revisions I can cram onto my iPad in the evenings, doesn’t really provide the space for moving forward; and in part because I realized that at least one of the changes I had come up with would alter the story’s final resolution. So I will stay with revisions for a while, knowing that I still have two weeks of vacation (plus the July 4 long weekend) to push the plot to its conclusion.
What do you do, fellow writers, in the same situation?
But eighteen chapters in, it’s not always easy to remember exactly how I set up the story in the beginning. Did the bey join his son in drinking wine, or did he hold out for the nomadic favorite—fermented mare’s milk (koumiss)? Was the heroine present when her father stumbled? What, exactly, did they say?
Those questions sent me back to the beginning of the book looking for answers. I read it in the ePub version, as a reader would, to get the overall flow of the story—only to discover that after a rollicking if incomplete start, my hero and heroine came to a screeching halt in chapters 2, 3, and 4. I could feel my eyelids getting heavy, like the hypnosis patient in an old film. I became itchy, then annoyed, at these people who spent pages lost in thought.
I know, of course, why that happened. Nor need my readers fear that I ever intended to send the book to print with thirty-five pages of nonstop telling. My characters don’t (usually) emerge full-blown; instead, they play a kind of peekaboo, darting out to drop a line or three before ducking back behind the grilled screen, where they hover vaguely while I pound my head thinking of something for them to do that will reveal their souls to me. One option is just to let their thoughts flow, so that I can see what really moves them when they are not buffing their images for other people. Then, when I understand who they are and what they want, I can begin to write dialogue for them that both reveals their surface concerns and hints at those secrets they don’t dare share with the world because, like all of us, they fear mockery or humiliation or opposition.
After eighteen chapters, I have a good sense of Ogodai and Firuza, even Tulpar. I also have a better sense than when I started of nomadic society and how it functioned. Many things need to change in those opening chapters, some of them fundamental.
But should I go back and change them now or press on, as I originally intended, to the ending before returning to fix the beginning? It’s not as easy a question as it appears. Fundamental changes may alter the ending, so I may benefit from fixing the underlying plot line first. Yet rewriting—however necessary—can also be a form of procrastination. It’s so tempting to go back to the safe and familiar, the already written, rather than push on to a still murky future.
In the end, I went back: in part because I could see the solution and didn’t want to lose track of it; in part because my writing schedule at present, which allows about a day and a half of free-flow concentration plus whatever revisions I can cram onto my iPad in the evenings, doesn’t really provide the space for moving forward; and in part because I realized that at least one of the changes I had come up with would alter the story’s final resolution. So I will stay with revisions for a while, knowing that I still have two weeks of vacation (plus the July 4 long weekend) to push the plot to its conclusion.
What do you do, fellow writers, in the same situation?
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Yes, tulpars. Or, in this case, one Tulpar, the Turkic Pegasus, and his human namesake—both of them, ahem, important characters in the novel. ;-)Thanks for the answer! I tend to agree, even when I try to do otherwise, as here. I wonder how many of us there are?
Ha! sounds like where I'm at with a rough draft. I write down as much as possible - plot lines, bits of dialogue the historical background, notes to myself - in kind of stream of consciousness and then open a new doc to edit. Some writers start off with a skeleton and then put the flesh on the bones - I seem to start with an overweight heavy body of work that needs to be slimmed down. When I'm editing instead of pushing forward with the plot I reassure myself that it has to be done at some time - the danger is that what I write further on may render that wonderful piece of writing superfluous. :D
I always envy those people who start with a skeleton and go from there. I start with one, but writing is like stuffing a cat in a box: the book keeps twisting and turning, shoving out paws and flicking its tail till you'd swear it was a furry centipede instead of a cat.In short, I sympathize. I'm also glad I'm not alone. :-D
Must be the effect that reading those 'loose baggy monsters' of Russian literature has had on us! ;)
Hmm, I brought myself up on those 'loose baggy monsters' of Russians too. I still like loose baggy monsters...
The revenge of Lev and Fedya—I love it! :-D
So we're hedgehogs rather than foxes! ;)
To answer your fellow-writers question: I can't go forward when I know I have dodgy stretches behind me. That's just the way I write. I think I can't build on what's shaky and subject to change. What I build won't be right. --But then I'm Re-Writer Extraordinaire, ask my sister. :)