Dispatch #1 from the Revision Trenches
For the past week or so I felt like I was hacking away with a machete at my book, as I started making my judicious cuts. It’s going well for the most part. A few changes I made, such as culling characters and tweaking some others helped me get pretty close to the goals I sent. These change allowed me to refocus scenes - I even took a scene from the latter end of the book to replace a similar scene with the same beats earlier on. And just last night I started reworking one of my “darlings”, a scene that until now I’ve been so convinced I needed to keep in the book, until I realized it wasn’t as crucial as I thought and the changes I could make with it will be better all around.
But the most interesting thing I found so far is that most of my cuts have been coming from the middle.
Interesting, but not surprising.
I call the middle of the book while drafting, the muddled middle. The middle is where writers meet despair and the first real walls that keep them from progressing a story appear. It the part where a writer is most tempted to give up and throw their computer into the ocean. Starting a book is often easy, you have the energy of the new idea and a lot of things to set up that require lots and lots of words. Endings are much the same. You usually have a vague idea of where the story needs to end (or stop if writing a series). But the middle is different.
The middle can be a quagmire for the unprepared.
A middle is there you have to keep the journey going from A to Z, and keep it well paced, engaging, and do about a dozen things at once. Sometimes you have ideas. Sometimes you have no ideas. Sometimes you have too many. While an outline can help, there’s a deeper reason that it causes so much up trouble.
Writing is hard overall because in there was numerous of possibilities to take a story. Yes, you have genre conventions to follow if you like, but largely as a writer you are in control about how the story progresses. And sometimes that leads to the paradox of choice. The gist of it is that having all the options available to you is actually a bad thing. Having all the options at your fingertips cause you to stress too much about making the right choice. It’s why you spend 20 minutes trying to find a movie to watch of your streaming service of choice, or why you get overwhelmed at a large menu at a restaurant. And it’s why I think writers get struck with writer’s block. It’s not that you don’t know how to move forward, you don’t know what path to take. And when you have to forward due to a deadline or a schedule, you take a stab in the dark and try to see how it goes. Sometimes it works and you get to the other side as planned. Other times, you find yourself deleting scene after scene.
They’re not all bad though. The muddle middle could be a very active brainstorm in a sense, and that by working your way through you can find out what works and what doesn’t. For me muddled middles is about my thought process while drafting, weighing all the choices as I weave my story together. Ultimately it’s more important to me to go forward even if the scene is less than ideal. And even if in the revisions I end cutting up scene (or many scenes), I still retain just enough that I can rework into something even better. Because by going through the muddle I’m more certain about what to do next.
Some things of note:
I recently dropped by the Between the Reads podcast for a lovely chat about my books and other related topics. Check it out on most places you listen to your podcast or head directly to the website: https://www.betweenthereads.com/nicole-glover/
I finally got a chance to watch the new the D&D movie. A very good time all around and it was also especially nice to have a fantasy property that leaned more on the lighter side! There’s been many fantasy adaptions lately, but nearly all of them are super serious and without the whimsy. It was nice to watch something that embraced all the reasons why I love stories about magic and wasn’t afraid to get silly.