Hell is Your Unedited Manuscript
It took me over six months to bring NIGHT LIFE to its current state: 73,000 unedited words that roughly form a story. Procrastination and woe-is-me-for-I-cannot-write moods aside, six months is a decent (not great, but decent) length of time to bang out a first novel in.
I started NIGHT LIFE as a NaNoWriMo exercise, although it was actually the second novel I started that month, the first being about a genius forensic psychatrist and a serial killer and the genius forensic psychiatrist's father, who may or may not have also been a serial killer. Believe me, after getting 6,000 words into that mess it was a relief to write about werewolves and fancy shoes for a while. NIGHT LIFE does contain a serial killer, but he's way cooler than the poor schmuck from my first, forgotten NaNoWriMo novel.
After I finally type END at 2:30 a.m. on a Tuesday morning about three weeks ago, Revision Hell has firmly settled in.
The first circle of Revision Hell is more procrastination. "I have finished a manuscript, and now, because I am a Good Writer*, I will let it sit for a week and not touch it. I will not think about it. If I accidentially find myself thinking about it, I will conjure an image of a shirtless Hugh Jackman from X-Men: The Last Stand until the thoughts go away." A week can easily become months, or decades.
Fear is the second circle. I am still battling this stage even as I mercilessly shred through needless backstory and infodump to make the manuscript coherent. I worry that brilliant turns of phrase are being lost. I worry that necessary continuity is being deleted, and I will get to page 342 and realize that because I wrote out the shoe-shopping scene on page 12, the story no longer makes sense in the context of a logical universe. Eventually, you just have to accept that you are ruining the story, the revised version will be ten times more horrible than the rough, and do it any way.
The third circle is boredom and disgust with everything even remotely related to the manuscript. You want it to be done. It is a hunkered, snarling precense sitting next to your computer, daring you to come near it and read over page 1 for the fiftieth time. Pages turn up mysteriously in your bed, your briefcase, and behind cartons of leftovers in the ice box. You would be happy to take a lighter to the pile of manuscript that has grown out of control, smash your hard drive, and go back to college to become an electrical engineer.
I can offer no easy way to outwit Revision Hell. I'm not really big on rewriting. Large chunks of my published work remains exactly as it did when I first typed it out. But NIGHT LIFE needs help. It is by far the longest thing I've ever written, and it is riddled with continuity errors, inconsistent characterization and either too much or not enough exposition, depending on whether I'd decided that the world was Anita Blake-happy-slappy-everyone-and-his-dog-is-a-paranormal-creature, or whether I'd decied that werewolves-are-a-secret-society-and-no-one-believes-in-them-shhh! Plus, I could never decide where to put the chapter breaks, making the entire novel one long, schizophrenic scene.
Ray of hope: I solved the continuity/infodump issues, fleshed out my admittedly largely wooden cast of characters and I even came up with an ending that didn't want to make my Inner Reader scream and hurl the book across the room. Sadly none of this has yet made its way into the actual document.
That's Revision Hell.
*By Good Writer I mean any typical writer, who is neurotic and terrified that their manuscript will suck, so they think of excuses never to touch or look at it again, and warehouse it deep in the recesses of their hard drive much like the Ark of the Covenant.
I started NIGHT LIFE as a NaNoWriMo exercise, although it was actually the second novel I started that month, the first being about a genius forensic psychatrist and a serial killer and the genius forensic psychiatrist's father, who may or may not have also been a serial killer. Believe me, after getting 6,000 words into that mess it was a relief to write about werewolves and fancy shoes for a while. NIGHT LIFE does contain a serial killer, but he's way cooler than the poor schmuck from my first, forgotten NaNoWriMo novel.
After I finally type END at 2:30 a.m. on a Tuesday morning about three weeks ago, Revision Hell has firmly settled in.
The first circle of Revision Hell is more procrastination. "I have finished a manuscript, and now, because I am a Good Writer*, I will let it sit for a week and not touch it. I will not think about it. If I accidentially find myself thinking about it, I will conjure an image of a shirtless Hugh Jackman from X-Men: The Last Stand until the thoughts go away." A week can easily become months, or decades.
Fear is the second circle. I am still battling this stage even as I mercilessly shred through needless backstory and infodump to make the manuscript coherent. I worry that brilliant turns of phrase are being lost. I worry that necessary continuity is being deleted, and I will get to page 342 and realize that because I wrote out the shoe-shopping scene on page 12, the story no longer makes sense in the context of a logical universe. Eventually, you just have to accept that you are ruining the story, the revised version will be ten times more horrible than the rough, and do it any way.
The third circle is boredom and disgust with everything even remotely related to the manuscript. You want it to be done. It is a hunkered, snarling precense sitting next to your computer, daring you to come near it and read over page 1 for the fiftieth time. Pages turn up mysteriously in your bed, your briefcase, and behind cartons of leftovers in the ice box. You would be happy to take a lighter to the pile of manuscript that has grown out of control, smash your hard drive, and go back to college to become an electrical engineer.
I can offer no easy way to outwit Revision Hell. I'm not really big on rewriting. Large chunks of my published work remains exactly as it did when I first typed it out. But NIGHT LIFE needs help. It is by far the longest thing I've ever written, and it is riddled with continuity errors, inconsistent characterization and either too much or not enough exposition, depending on whether I'd decided that the world was Anita Blake-happy-slappy-everyone-and-his-dog-is-a-paranormal-creature, or whether I'd decied that werewolves-are-a-secret-society-and-no-one-believes-in-them-shhh! Plus, I could never decide where to put the chapter breaks, making the entire novel one long, schizophrenic scene.
Ray of hope: I solved the continuity/infodump issues, fleshed out my admittedly largely wooden cast of characters and I even came up with an ending that didn't want to make my Inner Reader scream and hurl the book across the room. Sadly none of this has yet made its way into the actual document.
That's Revision Hell.
*By Good Writer I mean any typical writer, who is neurotic and terrified that their manuscript will suck, so they think of excuses never to touch or look at it again, and warehouse it deep in the recesses of their hard drive much like the Ark of the Covenant.
