constantly learning

I’ve been writing with intent to publish for over 30 years, but I’m still learning how I work. That might seem daunting or frustrating, but I find it fascinating. There’s always something new.

In the lead-up to ReaderCon, I busted my ass to finish the novella revision. If I had a chance to pitch it, I wanted to know the draft was complete and ready to go. And for the most part, I knew what to expect: I knew the first two chapters needed a complete rewrite and I had a page of notes to myself from my reading pass for the rest. Everything was going smoothly, I was sure I’d have it done in time, then I stumbled over a chapter just past the midpoint and everything came to a screeching halt.

On my read-through, I’d noted a few places where the sentences were needlessly complicated. It should have been simple enough to just clean those up and move on. Except when I got there, my attempts to polish the sections kept flopping. The sentences did not noticeably improve.

It turned out that I didn’t actually know what I wanted to say. So much of the chapter wasn’t working, and I didn’t believe what was happening on the page. So I kept drilling into intentions–mine, the plot’s, and the characters’–until I figured out what was wrong, why it was wrong, and what I need to do to fix it.

The fix necessitated rewriting most of the chapter and returning to a couple earlier chapters to correct or add details. It was a major change, the ripple effects making it a bigger change than the first chapters. And now the novella as a whole is so much stronger.

My point is, I didn’t know anything was wrong. If not for those awkward sentences tripping me up, this change wouldn’t have happened. (And I did manage to complete the draft before leaving for ReaderCon, which turned out to be a very, very good thing.)

My initial drafts have what feels like an absurd amount of overly convoluted sentences. They are artifacts of my discovery writing, figuring out the story as I go, but I get rid of most of them after a revision or two. This is either my fourth or fifth draft.

So now I’ve learned that clusters of sentences like that in later drafts are a cue I’ll need to do more work and pay more attention to those parts. As I said earlier: fascinating.

But learning is one thing and applying it is another. Now we’ll just have to wait an see if I remember this for the next time…