The Axe
I talk a lot about how the process of writing Summerhill has been a difficult one. I'd like to go into some more detail as to why it's been such a rough road (and moreover, why the road has since smoothed out considerably).
First, a brief history for the uninitiated: "Summerhill" started as a short story that I wrote in the late autumn of 2009. As I recall, the draft was somewhere around 15,000 words, so it was sticking its toes into novella territory, though I think the plot (such as it was) was simplistic enough to warrant it just being a long short story.
I sent this story out to a small stable of my trusted readers, and the consensus was that I had a lot of neat ideas that never really came into fruition. One of these readers suggested that what I had was the scaffolding for a novel. I cursed his name upon realizing that he was probably right.
It bears mentioning that, in its original form, "Summerhill" was a very surreal story without a traditional narrative to it. It was pretty much an exercise in surreality, in some sense, deliberately very whimsical and bizarre. On its own, however, this doesn't make for a great story.
So, "Summerhill" became Summerhill, and I expanded this short story into a 65,000-word novel. I took the basic structure of what the story had been, fleshed it out, added a lot of new elements, and tried to make it a more traditional narrative. The result was a marked improvement over the jumble of scenes I'd had before, but to be honest, it still wasn't a very good novel.
This is where I had to make a very hard decision: in order to do justice to the story I wanted to tell, I had to start from scratch.
Deciding to toss out 65,000 words that you spent nearly a year reworking isn't really something to do lightly, but my experience with writing told me that it was the right move to make. I'd edited and revised and reworked my own stories enough in the past to know that what I had on the page wasn't good enough, and that to tell the story I wanted, no amount of tweaking the existing manuscript would suffice.
I'm currently 42,000 words or so into my new manuscript, and if I had to hazard a guess, I'd say I'm a little more than a third of the way through the story. The premise of the original story is still the same was it was back in November 2009, but after having essentially written a short novella and a short novel already, I have a much better handle on how the story needs to be told, and what will make it an engaging read instead of just an exercise in weirdness.
So, the question is: how do you know when to throw something out and start over as opposed to just reworking what you already have?
Honestly, in most cases, you can probably go with the latter. I don't think I'd ever ditch an entire short story draft, for instance (in the cases where I've gotten out a first draft that didn't click, it's been because the story turned out to be not worth telling). With longer works, even the decision to cut out longer scenes can be hard (which I discussed in my previous entry), but that's almost a separate thing from active revision.
Much of the time, when rewriting things after an initial draft, what you'll end up doing is "overwriting" parts you already have, with the end result being that a bunch of what you used to have is gone, replaced by something totally different. So, in that sense, you've tossed it out, but it happened as part of the revision process and not prior to it. This is honestly probably how most of your revision will (and probably should) go. It's organic and it's tangible and probably feels 'right.'
So, why make the decision to toss out an entire novel draft from the outset? Well, after having gotten it all written down, I looked at it, went over story, figured out what elements needed changing in order to make the story what I wanted it to be, and to paraphrase Mr. Plinkett of RedLetterMedia, "basically the answer involves every single thing in the film book".
This doesn't mean that what I'd written already was entirely without merit, but trying to fix it would probably take way more time and effort than just redoing it from scratch, and in the end probably wouldn't even be as good. Imagine if you're putting together a piece of furniture you bought from IKEA, and halfway through the process, you fuck it up. Sure, you can probably break it back down and try to reassamble it, but you're probably going to end up with a jumbled mess that wouldn't look as good as if you just threw it away and bought a new kit (and since this is IKEA furniture, you're not looking at a huge investment).
Anyway, I guess the point is that being able to look objectively at your own work takes practice, and being able to tell yourself that your own work isn't good enough takes some courage. As a writer, you definitely need to teach yourself how to do the first thing, and brace yourself for the possibility that you may end up having to do the second thing sometimes.
It's all part of the process, and it isn't easy, but in the end, hopefully, things will be better for it. And, hopefully, once all this is done for Summerhill, you guys will have a better book to read than you would have if I'd just try to push through on a draft that wasn't up to the task.
First, a brief history for the uninitiated: "Summerhill" started as a short story that I wrote in the late autumn of 2009. As I recall, the draft was somewhere around 15,000 words, so it was sticking its toes into novella territory, though I think the plot (such as it was) was simplistic enough to warrant it just being a long short story.
I sent this story out to a small stable of my trusted readers, and the consensus was that I had a lot of neat ideas that never really came into fruition. One of these readers suggested that what I had was the scaffolding for a novel. I cursed his name upon realizing that he was probably right.
It bears mentioning that, in its original form, "Summerhill" was a very surreal story without a traditional narrative to it. It was pretty much an exercise in surreality, in some sense, deliberately very whimsical and bizarre. On its own, however, this doesn't make for a great story.
So, "Summerhill" became Summerhill, and I expanded this short story into a 65,000-word novel. I took the basic structure of what the story had been, fleshed it out, added a lot of new elements, and tried to make it a more traditional narrative. The result was a marked improvement over the jumble of scenes I'd had before, but to be honest, it still wasn't a very good novel.
This is where I had to make a very hard decision: in order to do justice to the story I wanted to tell, I had to start from scratch.
Deciding to toss out 65,000 words that you spent nearly a year reworking isn't really something to do lightly, but my experience with writing told me that it was the right move to make. I'd edited and revised and reworked my own stories enough in the past to know that what I had on the page wasn't good enough, and that to tell the story I wanted, no amount of tweaking the existing manuscript would suffice.
I'm currently 42,000 words or so into my new manuscript, and if I had to hazard a guess, I'd say I'm a little more than a third of the way through the story. The premise of the original story is still the same was it was back in November 2009, but after having essentially written a short novella and a short novel already, I have a much better handle on how the story needs to be told, and what will make it an engaging read instead of just an exercise in weirdness.
So, the question is: how do you know when to throw something out and start over as opposed to just reworking what you already have?
Honestly, in most cases, you can probably go with the latter. I don't think I'd ever ditch an entire short story draft, for instance (in the cases where I've gotten out a first draft that didn't click, it's been because the story turned out to be not worth telling). With longer works, even the decision to cut out longer scenes can be hard (which I discussed in my previous entry), but that's almost a separate thing from active revision.
Much of the time, when rewriting things after an initial draft, what you'll end up doing is "overwriting" parts you already have, with the end result being that a bunch of what you used to have is gone, replaced by something totally different. So, in that sense, you've tossed it out, but it happened as part of the revision process and not prior to it. This is honestly probably how most of your revision will (and probably should) go. It's organic and it's tangible and probably feels 'right.'
So, why make the decision to toss out an entire novel draft from the outset? Well, after having gotten it all written down, I looked at it, went over story, figured out what elements needed changing in order to make the story what I wanted it to be, and to paraphrase Mr. Plinkett of RedLetterMedia, "basically the answer involves every single thing in the film book".
This doesn't mean that what I'd written already was entirely without merit, but trying to fix it would probably take way more time and effort than just redoing it from scratch, and in the end probably wouldn't even be as good. Imagine if you're putting together a piece of furniture you bought from IKEA, and halfway through the process, you fuck it up. Sure, you can probably break it back down and try to reassamble it, but you're probably going to end up with a jumbled mess that wouldn't look as good as if you just threw it away and bought a new kit (and since this is IKEA furniture, you're not looking at a huge investment).
Anyway, I guess the point is that being able to look objectively at your own work takes practice, and being able to tell yourself that your own work isn't good enough takes some courage. As a writer, you definitely need to teach yourself how to do the first thing, and brace yourself for the possibility that you may end up having to do the second thing sometimes.
It's all part of the process, and it isn't easy, but in the end, hopefully, things will be better for it. And, hopefully, once all this is done for Summerhill, you guys will have a better book to read than you would have if I'd just try to push through on a draft that wasn't up to the task.