If these were dollars, it wouldn't be a problem

I posted awhile back about my concerns about the length of Matashara, and how its 250,000 word count might negatively impact my chances of getting a foot in the door with an agent and thus, negatively impacting my chances of getting published. I’ve had it in my mind that I need to do some serious cutting, with a goal of trimming it down to a tight 200,000 words.

So here I am, a quarter of the chapters edited, and not only is my word count not dropping, it’s actually gone up. By about 2,000 words. Oy.

I said before that I’m not going to trim anything just for the sake of trimming it. And I have been trimming things — a word here, a phrase there, an unnecessary sentence. But those edits aren’t going to drop 50,000 words, and some of the editing has necessitated adding narrative to make things clearer. Hence the net increase.

I have an idea that the section I’m coming up on can stand some judicious editing of plot, so we’ll see how far down it gets me once I’ve worked my way through it. Even if I removed the entire section — roughly 10 chapters — it still wouldn’t trim 50,000 words, and I’m obviously not going to do that anyway. There are two other sections I think I can do some copious trimming, as well, but they’re going to be trickier, and I’m not confident that the end result is going to necessarily lessen the word count when it’s all said and done.

So it may just be that I’m going to have to steel myself for that crazy high word count showing up on the upper right corner of my ms, and hoping for the best. But what I’m more afraid of than that crazy high word count is that it really does need some serious trimming, and that I’m not able to see it, not able to identify just where those cuts can and should be made. I suppose that’s why god invented editors, but if I can’t identify where the story can stand to be tightened up, then does that mean I’m not yet ready for prime time?

The joys of editing

I’m not being facetious with that title. Editing can be tedious, it’s true, but as I undergo my final edits on this manuscript to ready it for submission, I find I’m relating to the text in an even deeper way than before. Which is difficult to believe, frankly, given the fact that I, you know, wrote it. And that I’ve reread the whole thing so many times I can quote large portions verbatim.

A couple of weeks ago, I took the train up to Seattle to visit Cat for something we called a Writing Workshop and Retreat. Cat is a technical writing editor, you see, adn while that is a whole different sort of editing from fiction editing, her eye is still incredibly helpful when it comes to tightening up the manuscript. Beyond the obvious editing of grammar and spelling, she’s terrific at helping me excise all those pesky slippages like passive voice constructions, ambiguous pronoun references, and excessive run-on sentences.

So there’s that. Which is awesome. But another facet of awesomeness is the way it’s helped me feel confident that I will know when a change is necessary, when it’s a matter of preference, when it’s a matter of style, and when it’s something I feel strongly enough about to fight for it. Not to fight with her about, you understand*, but just to defend my own choices when it comes up with a future editor. And it will, inevitably, and that’s a good thing. But I don’t want to be the kind of author who thinks that every word is precious, and who doesn’t receive editing instructions well, who argues about every comma splice and incomplete sentence. The fact is, as much as writing is a solitary creation process, good writing is a collaborative creation process, and I want to be a good writer.

*Our process is very simple: she edits ahead of me in chapters , and I come along behind considering each change, deciding whether to accept or reject each change (god bless Word’s “Track Changes” feature, btw).

Getting back to the point I originally started with…

As I go through considering each proposed change, it’s made me consider each one in a larger context. Even something as simple as an apostrophe can have implications for the whole story. For example, early on, Cat was removing all contractions, including those in dialogue, with the idea that I may want a more formal tone not just to the narrative, but to the characters’ voices.

That’s true to some degree: I don’t want the narrative to have contractions, and though I did a pretty meticulous job of removing them previously, I’m obviously not going to catch them all. Dialogue, however, is another matter. I don’t want my characters to sound stilted and unbelievable. But some characters don’t use contractions, or don’t use them as frequently as others. (Older characters vs. younger, for example.) And in the case of the mind-voices used in the story, not all. And in the case of the Big Bad, he/it not only doesn’t use contractions, his/its voice is in all caps.

Now this is something I did very intentionally throughout, and that didn’t change in this editing process. But because she had flagged every contraction, I was rereading each sentence and phrasing anew, and in some cases, hearing it a little differently. In some cases, I even decided to rearrange a sentence to avoid a contraction or spelling it out, because neither one was the right choice for that scene/character/tone.

Our Writing Workshop and Retreat was an astounding success. We got a great deal of work done and we work very well together, I’m happy to say. We had lots of fun and laughs (and chatting and eating and watching movies and fun times). I felt reinvigorated from my new view of the text, and I’m excited about forging ahead on edits. We’ll be doing it again very soon, and I can’t/cannot wait!

Novel length

I’m working on edits, and in the back of my mind, thinking about the overall word count. Reading all kinds of industry blogs, you learn what an “acceptable” word count is — 90,000 to 150,000, roughly, depending on the type of book or genre. Romance is generally at the low end or shorter, urban/paranormal fantasy more toward the middle, historical fiction toward the end of that range. Literary fiction is somewhere in the middle. Epic fantasy is at the higher end, and often surpasses it.

Keeping in mind that 75,000 is roughly a 200 page book, when you get up toward 150,000 words, then you’ve got a meatier book on (or in?) your hands. You start moving past that, you begin to enter BFB territory: Big Fucking Brick. Which is why epic fantasy is sometimes called brick fantasy. Or doorstop fantasy.

Well, mine comes in just under 250,000 words, so it’s not just a brick, it’s a cement block. True, it’s epic fantasy, but I’m concerned about that word count, not gonna lie. Which isn’t to say I’m going to start cutting things just to cut them, but I’m trying to be judiciously ruthless as I work through drafts, seeing if there’s anything I can tighten further, or shorten, or remove entirely.

Short of cutting out entire plot lines, however, I don’t see it getting down to, say 200,000. I’ve read that agents/editors won’t reject an ms out of hand due to a high word count, that if it grabs them from the beginning then they’ll make it work (though it’ll no doubt mean some painful cutting in the editing stage), but I admit I’m nervous about that big number that’ll appear in my query letter and the top right corner of my ms. Querying is hard enough as it is, as is getting your ms noticed in the pile of submittals and slush.

There’s not a whole lot I can do about it, other than to make the story the very best I possibly can, work hard on writing an outstanding query, and try to make myself shine enough for a potential agent to look past that scary number and keep reading.

The Inevitable Inaugural Post

And so anyway. I’ve always wanted to be a writer. But it was always a dream-but-not-really sort of thing. Something I just did, not something I tried to make a go of. A writer, as in someone who writes decently enough, and hears from people — friends, family, coworkers — “you’re really good at this, you should be a writer”, and laughs at the sheer implausibility of such a thing. Not a Writer, as in someone who actually, you know, does it for a living. Or tries to.

It’s that “tries to” part that’s always been the thing. I’m not the starving artist type. Don’t have the constitution for it. As much as I’d love to call myself an artist, the sort who agonizes over every single word and sells their record collection to buy lovely handmade journals in which to write The Great American Novel, and maybe suffers from some terribly dramatic disease like turbuculosis, I am not that person. I’m far too bourgeois. I like the stability of a regular paycheck, the occassional weekend at the coast, and small luxuries like music and books and movies. Oh, and I like to eat. Not like a lot or anything, but you know, the standard three squares a day is kind of nice, and I’m used to it, and I’m just weak like that. Plus, I just really don’t go in for all that melodrama and suicidal tendency stuff. It’s too much work.

In other words: Sylvia Plath I am not.

Where were we? Oh right, writing versus Writing.

Well anyway, I was fairly content with my lowercase-writing way of doing things. I wrote short stories when the mood grabbed me, and silly little one-offs I call Snippets, the occassional email rant, blog/journal posts on all sorts of topics, and scribbled down story ideas in a journal I carried with me. I even started writing a book, a project that I’d been knocking around in my head for awhile. So it went, until about three years ago.

It was that damn book, you see. The thing simply would not die. Not even with a level of neglect that had it been a child or a dog, would’ve seen me carted off by the relevant authorities. I’ll talk more about this period, and the evolution of that story, in coming posts, but the point here is that the book forced itself to the forefront and demanded my full attention. And I finally just gave in.

Fast forward to earlier this year when, after two and a half years, I finally finished it. It was one of the single greatest things I’ve ever done. I’m still rather gobsmacked that I did it, to be honest. But what’s funny is that in the course of writing it, not only did I learn a whole lot about the story itself, and my own skills, but I realized something I didn’t know:

I really, really want to do this for a living.

Or try to. And I guess it took me fighting with this story every day like a deranged Mexican wrestler to overcome my aversion to the uncertainties of trying to build a writing career. To realize I wanted a writing career enough to fight for it, and make the sacrifices. I suppose that’s like anything else — we love most fiercely that which we have to fight the hardest for.

So the book’s done, and I’ve revised the hell out of it in the 8 months since, and I’m about to embark on the next phase: getting published. We’ll see how that goes. In the meantime, I figured I ought to plant my little flag in the virtual ground as a Writer. It’s highly likely that I won’t ever be published, and this space will never be viewed by more than my family and friends and the angry neighbor* down the street who thinks I stole his ugly-ass flamingoes. ::waves at angry neighbor:: And you know what? That’s okay. I’m willing to take the chance.

Because nobody ever became a Writer without taking the chance.

*(said neighbor may possibly be a figment of my imagination)