Once this draft is done, I’ll have a little problem on my hands. Well, it’s more of a compound problem.
This multifaceted problem will call for an algorithmic solution.
First of all, obviously I’ll have to make cuts. You always have to make cuts. I don’t have a target size in mind, or on order, so I’m really just talking about trimming and efficiency enhancement, that sort of thing. But I can tell you right now that cuts won’t get this book down by more than 100 pages, 200 at the absolute outside. We’d still be dealing with a double-size book at least.
From there, there’s the question of whether to split the book or not. This was planned as the first novel in an epic (urban/post-apocalyptic) fantasy type of series with a large cast of characters and three substantial POV characters in the first volume alone. Anything that can be split (i.e. a series split into books) can be split again, and it’s certainly possible to split this up into two or perhaps three smaller books. But there are significant problems I see with this, right off the bat.
For one thing, each book in a series is expected to have a 3-act structure with goals articulated and achieved and a big climactic set piece and all the rest. I can see opportunities to upscale lesser travails and triumphs for this purpose, but even just thinking about it, it feels a little too deliberate. Not impossible, though.
I could try to do more of a serial sort of thing (“Tune in next time!”) and just end the first (and possibly second) book with everything up in the air. I think this could be said of several of the six books in the Lord of the Rings series, so there’s precedent. If I did this, it would be purely for marketing reasons, and I can already see the hateful comments about unsatisfying, incomplete stories…but at least I wouldn’t be bending the material out of shape in the process.
There’s another problem with that kind of split, though. Without getting into too terribly spoilerish details, certain key characters don’t meet until the third act, which would mean they wouldn’t meet until the third book, unless I made drastic changes or contrived some sort of device where they have spiritual contact or something. Not entirely impossible, but it does concern me.
Look at Wool, for example. The author of that work (which I quite enjoyed, by the way) had the opposite problem: several self-contained novellas which he subsequently assembled into an omnibus edition. I’ve seen this style before; for example, the Witcher books by Andrzej Sapkowski, or my other favorite eastern European series, the Watch books (Night Watch, Day Watch, etc.) by Sergey Lukayenko. Those books were clearly written as shorter self-contained stories that were collected into novel-length works.
To be honest, though, I kind of dislike that approach to revisited-universe storytelling. I don’t mean I dislike the stories, obviously. I like all of the above, really a lot. But as a lifelong heavy reader, I’d usually rather experience the conflict and suspense and the characters’ world stretched over the arc of a full-length novel. There’s a reason novels are as long as they are. And in addition to that one, there’s a second reason a lot of tome-length books are as long as they are. I mean, I don’t know why some of Stephen King’s books need to be as long as they are; but it’s clear why a lot of epic fantasy does. It’s simple: lots of characters, multiple POV characters in particular, especially when they have their own separate stories, result in longer books. It’s just obvious. And for better or worse, that’s what this first book of mine is.
One especially odd possibility would be to split the book along POV lines. Book 1 would be the collected POV chapters of character 1; Book 2, character 2; and Book 3 would be where they come together. I hate this idea instinctively, because I like reading series and I hate it when the author makes a major change in the POV character lineup later in the series, and that’s exactly what this would feel like. Still, it’s a possibility, and even more interesting is the possibility that in an ebook you could do BOTH - some readers could choose to read the chapters as they are arranged for the larger total work; others could read the Book of Character 1 first, then the Book of Char 2, and then the Book of Both. I may look into this choose-your-own-split option regardless of how things shake out in the final arrangement.
At the moment I’m leaning toward leaving the book as it is: long. I have a lot of the next book in mind already, and I doubt it’ll be any shorter, so already we’re looking at either 4-6 installments or two tomes. And I intend to do at least three of the larger stories, so that could be up to 9 installments if I don’t rein in the splitting. I can envision getting into it with the verve of an axe-hacking psycho killer and turning it into a sheaf of magazine-sized segments, thinly sliced and bloody.
More installments might bring certain shelf space-type benefits, though pricing becomes a complex problem and a losing proposition for everyone but Amazon. As an ebook buyer, though, I think I would find any more splitting than absolutely necessary to be pretty annoying. In fact, personally I even prefer long editions with a whole series encapsulated in one giant ebook file whenever possible. Zelazny’s The Great Book of Amber would be one of many such examples; of course, it’s usually only the older finished series that are reprinted in that sort of format.
Anyway, once the first draft is done, I’ll look at these different possibilities and see what seems right.
Your ideas are welcome, always, but even more so in this case.
Recently, I read a Willam Gibson novel called The Difference Engine. The premise is that computing became popular a century or so earlier, based on Babbage’s designs for, well, his difference engine. In the world of that book, hackers are called “clackers,” presumably referring the noise made by the giant steam-powered machines - or maybe specifically the punching of punch-cards.
In my world, the clacking noises are coming from the Unicomp buckling spring keyboard that I’m typing this on right now. This thing’s as freaking awesome as the original ones were, back when the PC-AT was the i7 of the day and there were four colors, including black, in the world. But I digress.
I mention this because we discussed these keyboards earlier in the blog, and I was inspired at the time to order one. But I didn’t use it much until recently. In this recliner that’s situated before one wall-mounted oracular 1080p TV, I’ve a used a Logitech wireless backlit keyboard for a long time. There were advantages to that thing, like it was was obviously better in the dark than this unlit one. When the battery felt like holding a charge, anyway.
I can live without the backlighting, though; I can type without seeing the keys. It took me a good dozen years, but I did eventually learn to touch-type. Conveniently, these buckling spring keyboards are much easier to touch-type on than any other keyboard ever invented, for a very simple reason. Two words: accurate feedback. Once your fingers have learned how hard and deep they need to mash each key, you can just let them fly without worrying about missing any keystrokes: each and every clack guarantees that the key you typed actually registered.
“Modern” keyboards, by contrast, give inconsistent feedback in the form of mushy, tentative presses and uneven returns. As a result, you never know whether you’ve actually typed what you meant to until you see it on the screen. The head-bobbing and eyeball-bouncing this engenders constitutes a sort of writers’ equivalent to digital photographers’ “chimping” phenomenon. Instead of pouring out your daydreams efficiently through confident fingertips, your focus thrashes between keyboard, screen, whatever body parts happen to itch, the 100 other distractions around you, and such bits and scraps of ideas as you can remember in between.
This tawdry little dance—which we could call, say, “chumping”—is all too familiar to me, especially lately. For the last several months I’ve done all my book writing on a mac laptop keyboard. Some people may claim to like those flat, featureless rubberized scrabble tiles…but whoever feels that way is not a fast typist, I can tell you that for free.
In a proactive effort to combat this very issue, I ordered a second Unicomp keyboard, in this case designed for a mac. I set it up neatly alongside the rest of the mac docking station type gear. Unfortunately it gets zero use, because virtually all of the writing gets done with the computer in my lap in an armchair somewhere. Maybe someday I’ll attempt creative writing in an office setting. But for now, I’ll have to remain a slave to the routines I’ve carefully cultivated to get the work done by any means necessary.
Maybe I’ll relearn how to type on a Dvorak keyboard again, while I’m at it. They make a buckling-spring Dvorak, don’t they?
I’m thinking of taking a break between first and second drafts to generate the thing into an ebook end to end and see how it reads in that form. It’s easy to do that in a basic way, but I was thinking of treating it as an educational project. I’m talking about actually preparing the necessary front matter and whatever other bits are needed to squeeze it correctly and cleanly out of Scrivener. Then, from there, possibly further, by running it through into the iBook Author program, or whatever it’s called, to add bells and whistles and spinning pinwheels.
I actually do have a few pinwheels in mind for the final draft, though I’m not sure about bothering with them on early test runs. Either way, it should be worth some bloggage later.
Anyway, I think it’ll be a good trial run of the material. Any obvious holes and errors should stand out, for one thing. Hopefully it’ll also serve the purpose of seeing the material in a different medium. Writers’ lore says to read it out loud, or have someone else do so, in order to experience the (your) same words in different ways. I think that’s interesting in principle, and I could see trying that out too. But I don’t think anyone’s going to want to read 800 pages of first draft aloud.
So, a first-draft ebook it will be. To one extent or another.
It’s like this: you’re at point A, and you need to get to point B. Full of pep, starting out, you cross the first half in no time at all. Then your pace becomes more modest, but it’s steady, and before you know it, you’ve gone half the remaining distance. You can see the finish line, but it seems to take you as long to get half of the rest of the way there as it did to cross the first half of the whole field.
And so forth. You move along by halves, more and more slowly, and it seems you’ll never get there. Then, finally, you get to the point where you can’t go halfway without some part of your body swinging over the line. And you’re there.
That’s where I am with this damn first draft.
Over the last couple of weeks, I cranked out the long, extended climax and now I’m writing what happens after it. Then I have to go back and write a couple of earlier chapters for character who’s instrumental in the big showdown, but who hasn’t had enough POV time to be ready for it. At that point it’s second draft time, and the real work begins.
