Writing on Wednesday: My Abused Novel

(Pretend it's not Thursday.  Ready...go.)

You might remember a few months ago that I decided to revamp my completed novel into a YA fantasy, for a list of reasons that all seemed very good at the time.  A few days into rewriting, I realized that doing this was feedudging up the central conflict AND creating a situation in which the love interest drama became the idea around which the entire novel revolved.  This made me increasingly uncomfortable, to the point where I finally just gave it up as a bad job and walked away, presumably to make a cup of tea and ponder the unfairness of having a muse with ADD.

The day before yesterday, I sat down at my desk for the afternoon writing hour and found myself opening up whichever version of the novel was the last version I was messing with before I decided to drag poor Mira back a few years into high school, bless her heart.  I had forgotten some of the edits I had made to correct timing issues that had lead the first agent I sent it to to pass after nibbling.  And as I sat there reading, I thought:  This isn't bad.

I know that how that sounds.  But I didn't mean it like, "It won't kill anybody to read this."  I meant it like, "There is good stuff here."  Recognizing the good stuff made me wonder why I'd ever abandoned this almost 87,000 word completed novel.  COMPLETED.  Not sitting around waiting for the character to get out of the garden.  Not being stalled by an info dump that requires major digging.  Not listing around in my brain trying to decide if having to write sex scenes (don't even ask) is worth it.  No.  None of that.  This baby is done.

Well, not DONE.  I'm realizing now as I edit it that there is a lot that needs to be reworked.  I mean, I started this thing when I was in college...ya know, before cell phones.  Ain't nobody got a cell phone in my novel, the little Luddites.  My main character goes to the library to do research for a presentation and for the life of me, I'm not sure if people still GO to libraries to do research.  I haven't done research like that in...uh...twelve years?  A loooong time, my friends.

And there is still a lot of ME to be weeded out:  pet phrases, pet memories, pet pets that don't belong or strike a note of discord in the telling of the story of a woman who became NOT me as I was writing it over the course of a few years.  I started it when I thought that "write what you know" meant "put yourself in your novel and hope that it all works out."  As I found out, it rarely does.

AND there are awkward phrasings, situations that go nowhere, connections that don't meet prettily, et cetera that have to be rewritten, redirected, or reconnected so that reading them doesn't make me want to hide my face in the couch cushions at the silliness of it all.

But after all of that, I think I might have something that is submission-worthy.  I don't know that it will win a Pulitzer (in fact, I know that it WON'T), but I'm not aiming for that.  Yet.

It's tedious to go page by page, shoring up sentences, rewriting chunks of scenery that are a little too close to a favorite memory or, Blanche forbid, a favorite book.  It's slow-going and irritating and occasionally so frustrating that I want to get up from the desk and stomp away in a huff.  But then I think:  almost 87,000 words in need of a direction.  And I sit back down and delete an adverb or seven.

I'm avoiding looking up agents who are accepting fantasy submissions.  I really WANT to do this, but I've realized that thinking ahead like that is, for me, a surefire way to derail the process.  Instead, I'm focusing on the story.  On the chapter.  On the page, the paragraph, the sentence, the word.  The idea.  The potential of it.

And while I know that sounds all writerly and deep, realize that I am also busy shoving Blanche off my lap while she demands I write something else.  I know I'm risking writer's block in the future, but my Muse has got to respect the fact that I have a finished project here to polish up before I can deal with Caroline's garden, Aleah's hag problems, or my unnamed character's unresolved high school crush.  I mean, she shouldn't REALLY get all huffy about it.  After all, I'm assuming she's the one who was so imperious about me including a scene about potato salad in a fantasy novel.

(Don't tell her, but I think the potato salad is gonna have to go.  I mean, potato salad and DWARVES?  Come on, now.)