Rewriting Old Manuscripts

You really should burn old manuscripts otherwise somebody might offer to publish them and then you have to rewrite. The problem with old writing is it is old and you just didn't know what you were doing. You thought you did but when you go back through that old prose you see someone who just wasn't there yet. Still, there is a story that might be worth something.

So you start hacking. And I mean hack. Like cutting the book by fifty percent and even then you aren't done Because the story is buried in seaweed and just about every other growth. You have to hack through the forest to see if there is a story worth salvaging and you wont know until you are done. And so out goes every bad metaphor you thought was brilliant and every overwritten scene and every sideshow and backstory.

Out the door one two three. And then once that is done you will have something that may or may not stand up on it's own. It is just amazing that at one time you wrote so badly. Like I said, really burning would have been much more painless.

www.williamhazelgrove.com

The Art of Rewriting

You don't learn to write until you learn how to rewrite. This is true. My first novels I did not rewrite mostly because I didn't know how. But of course that is what you learn over years and it can not be taught. You have to find out how to do it on your own because it is the million and one things that have to be addressed and yes people can critique your work but you really have to find your own tuning fork.

It really comes down to connotation and denotation. And connotation is the one that guides all rewrites. How much work is each word doing. And this is something writers know or they don't. You know the writers who have not gotten a handle on this because they are the ones that flood you with words that do nothing. And again it is nuance or instinct and you either instinctually know a sentence is not right or you don't.

The big debate in writing classes is of course can writing be taught. Not really. You can lead someone to the water but they really have to have the ability to swim. And that is something in rewriting that can not be cheated. Because the book does not come from a first draft but a careful re-imaging of each scene and then the whole movement of the book has to be evaluated at the same time.

Again these are the hard to define skills  the writer must find on their own.  That is why it is an art.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher...sometimes a dream is all you have

Cutting the First Forty Six Pages of a Novel

It happens every time. Every time I write a novel I end up cutting the first quarter of the book and I wonder why that is. When I wrote Tobacco Sticks I think I cut seventy five pages before I said that is where the novel begins. And you would think six books later I could stop this needless exercise but it happened again. I was rewriting and I realized the first forty six pages had to go. Now why is this?

Because it would seem the store is given away too early. Or maybe I cant find the characters for a while or maybe I just need to warm up for forty six pages before I can really find the book. Hard to say but there is no doubt these pages have to go. The consequence of not cutting the pages is a not only a slowed book but a flawed one. Truly less is more can be applied here.

But maybe it is just where the voice of the novel kicks in and this can take some time. Many times you start writing about one thing and end up writing about something else entirely and usually that one thing is in the first forty pages.  So you really have two different books and then it is an easy choice. If sixty thousand words are written one way and twenty thousand written another then it is very easy to know what is going under the chopping block.

The twenty thousand. 

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

Hacking Through the First Rewrite

So you finished your opus. Now you are doing your first read through. Imagine a forest that is very dense, one of those Vietnam type of jungles with vines and low hanging branches and incredible bugs and animals and creeks and rivers and a no trail at all. And all you have is a machete to make your way and you wield it like a madman hacking through crappy sentences, hulking paragraphs, ridiculous sidebars, characters that go nowhere, a plot that meanders, whole branches that make no sense at all. You hack and you hack and you hack.

And somewhere going through this jungle you create a path. It is a very rough path but one you will be able to follow back. Sometimes it becomes just a line in the forest and you are not sure the foliage wont overtake it again. But you have to get through the jungle on this first pass and so you keep your eyes straight ahead and you keep swinging your machete, hacking your way to some coherence where at times there seems none. Because there is a plot here, it is just under this overgrown thicket of life.

And finally you begin to see daylight on the other side. Your arm is tired and you have become bored with this mind numbing work of slashing sentences and paragraphs. Will there be anything left after you are done you often wonder, but of course there will, the jungle is very thick. And so you stumble ahead. Slash Slash Slash. You push ahead to the end and are appalled that your since of direction is gone and  you will have to go the rest of the way on faith.

Finally you stumble into light on the other side. You are sweating, bruised, bleeding. Beat up. You look back at the jungle hooting and hollering at your back. You take a deep breath, then turn back and begin to hack your way back through again. Except this time there is a trail.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Between Books

Nothing prepares you for life between books. You are in a void. When writing a book you occupy the very pleasant world of that particular novel. You literally live in the book and life continues outside of it in a hazy distance. But then the books ends and you wait on your publisher or agent or whoever is involved in the process and you turn to all the things you have put off. For the first week you feel free and go after those tasks like the prisoner unleashed.

By the second week you hit the wall. You don't quite know what to do. You can't start another book because thee current one could come back with revisions. Some authors like to work on several books at once. I am not one of them. So you try and structure your day to make sense and get all those life things accomplished. But without the framework of the novel to order your day, you simply have lost your raison detre and you drift.

It is noon and you have cut the grass. Or spackled a hole. Or chalked the bathroom. That's it. Financial matters yawn before you that are immense. These require time and sitting in front of the computer. You go back to spackiling the hole in the ceiling. These tasks lose their manual labor appeal. A rodent is lose in the basement. You and the dog go down to hunt for the elusive chipmunk for several hours. The dog is interested but then finds old cookie crumbs and becomes sidetracked. The chipmunk is nowhere to be found. It is now late afternoon.

Dinner and the kids appear on the horizon. You should read something but reading has lost it's appeal without the novel to back it up. You don't feel like you will ever write again. Your mind just isn't there anymore. It's amazing you ever wrote anything. How did you do that? Tomorrow you will get a jump on the day. You will get up early and attack financial matters, clean the office, clean the garage, and then....then...

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The thousand and one things of rewriting

There has to be a thousand and one things you do in rewriting and more. Thank God you don't have to do them twice. But it is all those changes that comprise the final draft that hopefully will not come back to you again. And it is the tweeks that change the work. The big work is mostly done but then comes all the nuances that make a novel a novel. The minor changes of one word for another or the addition of a paragraph setting the stage or just the breaking down of dialogue and exposition all change the novel in ways that are immeasurable.

It is really at the end that the glaring moments taunt you. After rewriting something ten times or more you think you have caught the big inconsistencies or mistakes but of course they are the ones that are embedded in the text and your eye has become used to them. When they do make themselves known it is amazing because you have read that passage so many times and never have seen it.

Then you start back through swapping out words deleting sentences, breaking up chapters, combining chapters, fleshing out characters. It is amazing how some scenes stay so thin, so under imagined. So you go back at it and basically rewrite those scenes from the beginning to the end. And then of course you have to read it again to get out all the fat again. Fat is a big one. A paragraph bunches up and literally doesn't look right. Crowded. It looks crowded.

So you thin you fatten. The book is an accordion you expand and contract expand and contract. This goes on for months. This goes on for years. And finally you reach a point where you have completed the thousand and one things and you think that is it. No more. I am finished. Until you discover the one thousand and second.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man...the American Dream gone bad

A Clean Well Lighted Coffee House to Write In

Rewriting is mind numbing. The same thing over and over and over. Four hundred some plus pages you climb over like a runner who just keeps going around the same track trying to improve their time just a little. Each time you start again you hope this might be the final lap, but there is always that nagging suspicion that one more time might be the charm. To pull this off without losing your mind requires boat loads of coffee, sweets, and lots of company and spurious noise. You have to trick your mind into not wandering off and never coming back. So you haunt every coffee house you can find.

The first coffee house works for a while until the Internet dies. They complain that their  WIFI has been going in and out and of course when you are there it just up and dies. You need the Internet. Not for the rewriting but for the breaks to give your mind release. You need something to distract you between chapters and after eating lunch and caramel rolls and drinking coffee you feel it is time to go find somewhere with WIFI. You run down the street to a little dark coffee house run by a tough woman who gives you a hot chocolate. You plug in and start again. That's when you hear it.

You need background noise not the greatest hits of love songs from the Seventies.  Afternoon Delight gets you off the chair to hunt down the tough Chicago woman who is reading The Inquirer behind the counter. Pardon me. But could you put on some classical music or jazz? The flat expression. NO. She goes back to the Inquirer. You sit down again to Mandy, It Don't Matter to Me, Have you Ever Been Mellow. That's it. You can't wall it out. Olivia  Newton John doesn't belong in your novel. You unplug and give the tough broad from Chicago a dirty look and head out into the snow.

Starbucks. Ah, you know the menu. A good place to plug in. Consistent. You bust in, a man on a mission. Every table is taken. Worse the one table with an outlet is taken. You stare at the lone man drinking coffee by himself. You have an hour of battery time if only the sonofabitch would leave! No, you aren't ready to order yet thank you very much. You stand around and glare and glare. Nobody cares and nobody is giving up their table. Shite! You head back out and down the street. Desperate for a clean well lighted place to write in or at least a place with an open table.

You head into Cozi Cafe and find a corner table with an outlet.  You plug in, order some really bad coffee. Sit down and begin again. Wifi works. There are sweet rolls. There are no people. It's as cold as a morgue, but you can work here. At least for a little while.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January

Faulkner and Rewriting

How many rewrites? Hard to say. My early novels were rewritten fifty times. No exaggeration. Part of that was because I couldn't get them published and so I just kept rewriting. Another reason I rewrote so much was that I was learning and every time I hit a new level I had to go back and rewrite the novel to match what I had learned. With my second novel, it became really schizophrenic because of the length (700 pages) and I would have to run around to the beginning to get it to match the end.

Faulker brought it all home. I was on about my tenth rewrite of Tobacco Sticks when I started reading Faulkner. The level of Bill Faulkner is so deep that it broke the ice I had been gliding on. Every sentence had to be destroyed to match this new level. Much like breaking glass. The new sentences just pushed the old writing aside. That was when I truly began to rewrite and I dug in for years of rewriting. Seven in all.

Now it is much more predictable. The first five rewrites are mostly killing off scenes, repetition, bad sentences, unnecessary exposition. There is expansion of characters and possibly elimination in this phase. The next five rewrites are polishing up the novel and looking at it as a whole. Does it really work? A very hard question after all those hours of rewriting. The next two or three rewrites are tweaking and then finally the final one or two rewrites are looking for anything I missed. And then the novel is as good as it is going to get. Give or take a few rewrites.

William Hazelgrove's latest novel is Rocket Man due out in the fall.
www.billhazelgrove.com

Revising Fiction by David Madden

There are a few books you stumble over when you are trying to bust words into fiction. One of them is John Gardner's The Art of Fiction and the other is David Madden's Revising Fiction. Both books are a must for the writer of fiction. What happens is you go along discovering all the secrets from other writers but then there comes a point where you are ready to accelerate your learning curve. You join writing groups and read your stories or novel partials to anyone you can find and then you find a book that puts it all together...for me that book was David Madden's Revising Fiction.

Revising fiction is where you learn to write. First drafts are glorious adrenalin rides that get you to the end of your book much like a sprinter, exhausted, gasping, glad you finished the race. But the draft is finished and now you must go back and run again or revise. Tough grinding revision yawns before you and each reading of your work in progress moves you along. Then you pick up Madden's book and there are the rules you have been discovering as you work along.

Use active verbs. Implication is much stronger than literally stating something. A simple style or a middle style. A literary first person..what is that anyway? Are you using dialogue effectively? Are you showing less and telling more? Is your work plagued by diminutives? Are you using stereotypes? Do you have too many characters? Can one character be done away with? Can  dialogue take the place of exposition? Do you use surprise in your fiction. No tears for the writer no tears for reader. Too many words for the writer are too many words for the reader. Do you intrude as the author on your story? Should you consider a different point of view? It goes on and on.

This book is known of course to many writers of fiction. Mine is full of yellow highlights where I picked out rules that I wanted to remember. Many times before rewriting I would go through the book and read the highlights. Then I would sit down, have a sip of coffee, and start revising. Again and again and again.

William Hazelgrove's latest novel is Rocket Man due out in the fall.
www.billhazelgrove.com

Stuck in a Rewrite Again

Someone once said that you don't become a writer until you learn to rewrite. For most writers rewriting is drudgery. When I first started out I had a bad habit of writing first drafts and then leaving them to sit. Sometimes I went back and other times I didn't. The truth was I didn't want to go back after the thrill ride of the first draft. I felt in some sense I was finished with my novel and that it's merit would shine through to editors. Right.

A hundred rejection letters later I started to buckle down and rewrite. But of course I didn't really know what I was doing. F. Scott Fitzgerald said you don't rewrite to achieve a smooth surface, you rewrite to discover the inner truth of your characters. So I  bought a book called Revising Fiction  and went to work highlighting all the rules. This began a process that lasted for years. For most writers the rewrite is a long arduous process of cutting, condensing, revising, rewriting. The hard part is to re-imagine your book. In a sense you are starting over, but this time you have a road map.

The terror of the first draft is you have no map and have to hack one out through uncharted territory. The terror of the rewrite is there is a road and you are essentially stuck on it for possibly years. Boredom can become an enemy. In my second novel Tobacco Sticks I rewrote for seven years! Of course, I was learning as I went so it became a crazy process of reaching the end and then realizing the beginning now needed to be brought up to the level of the end. This went on for years.

But there does come a point where you know the book is basically finished. You could tweak your work  forever, but that is when you have to know that you are essentially rewriting for yourself. So you finish your rewrite and are free once again to pursue a new first draft. Of course then you will be stuck in another rewrite. 

William Hazelgrove's latest novel Rocket Man is due out in September. www.billhazelgrove.com