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I'm about to crack 10,000, which puts me behind, too.
But the plot and the character relationships are unfolding fractally, leaving me constantly revising my structural and pacing plans: something I thought I'd knock off in a chapter may turn out to be the crux of the book. What I thought was a single scene reveals several storytelling "beats." The deeper I go--the closer I look--the more there is to it.
And I'm vaguely surprised at the kind of writing I'm producing in the headlong rush. It reads more like notes for a much longer novel, than the thing itself--it's practically all dialogue and action/introspection, with almost no descriptive or expository passages.
Which makes me realize something about my writing method: Usually I'll write the bare bones of a passage, the simple what happenes and what it means, then rework it to add the flesh of description before moving on to the next chunk. In this case, though, I'm blazing ahead through the mechanics of the plot, instead of tinkering as I go along.
(That's one of the peculiarities of word processing, and how it's changed writing: for shorter pieces I very rarely any longer do multiple drafts, as such, since it's so easy to revise on the fly.)
If I were to do a second draft of this steaming turd of a book (which of course I won't), it'd probably be 75,000 words: I wouldn't cut anything, but instead add all the stuff I skipped on this first run through.
The third draft would tighten it all up, leaving a taut, balanced 50,000 words, giving neither too much nor too little.
Pity I'll never do it: the story is, as promised, laughably bad.
[ 09-11-2001: Message edited by: Jack Fear ] |
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