Crossing the Chasm (or, Staring into the Abyss)

So, I’m stuck.

As I’ve mentioned before, my first draft is finished, more or less. More or less means that technically some of what I add from here on out could be considered first draft itself—bits of continuity, character/setting description changes, small but key scenes I may find I’ve forgotten—but most of what I’ll do from now on can only be considered rewrites, and that’s second-draft-land. Doesn’t matter; whatever we call it, there’s plenty more to do.

If only I could get some momentum on it.

I’ve written about certain walls I’ve hit at different times, walls I think most writers hit, sometimes over and over. Now, though, this doesn’t feel like a wall. It feels like a chasm, a big rift between first and second drafts, between writing and rewriting.

So what’s making it such a big deal? Well, for one thing, I hate everything I’ve written. OK, that’s not true. Not quite everything. But I can see a huge number of places that would benefit from improvements. I’ve decided to forego any notion of firm deadline and instead work to make this first novel the absolute best that I can. That means wherever I’m pretty sure I need to insert/change an improvement, I really need to do it. And that’s a lot of changes.

I spent two of the last few months on 14,000 miles of road trips across the US. I found myself totally unable to write on these trips, for reasons both logical and lame. However, I did manage to accumulate a fair number of ideas for improvements, and took decent notes about them. (“Notes” in the Hollywood sense: otherwise known as “aggressive and expansive plans for improvement.) Since I’ve been back, I’ve added even more notes, and I’ve compiled most of them (except the last few days’ worth) into my Scrivener project. It’s exciting in the sense that I know a lot of neat stuff to add/change in the story, but it’s also very daunting.

So what’s scaring me? Well, for one thing there’s a ton of work to be done, and that’s tough enough, but life is work. What’s bugging me more is that I’ve gone and implemented some small percentage of these changes, and I find that there’s a price to every change. It has to do with the way I write in the first place. Back when I was writing articles, it was the same. I would write at the paragraph level: sentence 2 would tie in with what sentence 1 had to say, and so forth, in a chain. So I have to break and reforge those chains to insert and remove things from them, and sometimes I don’t like the resulting flow. Imagine trying to insert lines into a rhyming poem with lovely imagery and haunting language. I don’t claim to be turning out choice poetry here, but whatever I’ve managed to do in that vein is severely slapped around by subsequent changes.

“You’re doing it wrong,” you say. I know. A first draft is supposed to be quick and dirty. But I just have trouble doing that. I tried it in some parts of the first draft, and it just wasn’t enjoyable to me, though it was a lot quicker. All I can say is, it really does seem like every writer writes differently, and this is just how i do it. My style of first draft composition is more like second or third draft writing should be. Only…this is the result: rewrites shred that flow.

The solution is obvious but even more terrifying. I might have to do what some of the more extreme writers do, which is to rewrite from complete scratch. More than anything else, that scares the hell out of me, because it’s a huge amount of work and there’s no reason to believe the next iteration will be any different. Thinking about a total rewrite is sort of like looking into the deep black abyss of despair. You know there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, but all you can see is black right now.

So, like any good abyss-starer, I’m doing the only thing I can do: procrastinating.

Well, that’s a little unkind. What I’m doing now is actually more productive than your average procrastination. It’s something I should have done earlier, though if I had, I might not have gotten nearly as far as I have. Sometimes you have to just go for it, free-write. Other times you need to plan and fill in the details, and that’s what I’m doing now. I’m doing up full character sheets, thinking out the details of each setting (location), working on the structure and metadata of my Scrivener template, and some other things I’m thinking about blogging on later.

Honestly, I’m glad I’m getting this stuff done, because nothing less than an abyss would have made it look like fun by comparison. I figure that if I get all my notes into the right places in the documents and get all my reference material laid out and sorted, it will make the rewrite go more smoothly. Will it really? I guess I’ll let you know.