Wow. You'll probably hurt me, but I think the editing is going well if you can recognize when something doesn't fit and take it out, even if you're not sure how to salvage things right now. I look forward to reading the finished product.
Do you mind keeping some of this stuff as outtakes? (I like the trend these days for authors to put up extra material on their websites.) I've liked the stories that I've read, and I wonder if some of the difficulty you're having is that you were writing a bunch of short stories that you're trying to now turn into a novel. Neil Gaiman gave some writing advice recently about how a novel is more than a sequence of scenes.
...If you're writing a novel scene by scene, trying to get each scene perfect, you don't get to see how anything works when you put it all together, and that's important. A novel is more than just a sequence of scenes put side by side. It has its own rhythms, and you have to bow to them; a novel, or any long story, is something that has to work when you put the whole thing
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Not going to hit you - actually somewhat cheered by the thought that it might be a sign of progress. As much as I can be cheered, in the brain numb state I'm in, anyway.
Some of it will definitely be kept kicking around. At least one thing that is getting pulled is actually not terribly written, it just /won't work/ in any way. Which makes me a bit sad, because it's not badly done, considering when it was written. Neil Gaiman is totally right and that is why a lot of this is like pulling teeth. I mean, part of it is because it was written over several years, part of it is I just didn't know what I was doing, but a lot of it was because I was just writing whatever short stories without thinking much about the final product. The /last/ chunk of stuff, mostly written in the last half of last year, fits together much better and will hopefully kick my ass less. I'm pretty sure I /can/ turn it into something resembling an actual real novel, but, man, it would have been a lot easier if I'd known that when I /started/ instead of when I was
( ... )
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Do you mind keeping some of this stuff as outtakes? (I like the trend these days for authors to put up extra material on their websites.) I've liked the stories that I've read, and I wonder if some of the difficulty you're having is that you were writing a bunch of short stories that you're trying to now turn into a novel. Neil Gaiman gave some writing advice recently about how a novel is more than a sequence of scenes.
...If you're writing a novel scene by scene, trying to get each scene perfect, you don't get to see how anything works when you put it all together, and that's important. A novel is more than just a sequence of scenes put side by side. It has its own rhythms, and you have to bow to them; a novel, or any long story, is something that has to work when you put the whole thing ( ... )
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Some of it will definitely be kept kicking around. At least one thing that is getting pulled is actually not terribly written, it just /won't work/ in any way. Which makes me a bit sad, because it's not badly done, considering when it was written.
Neil Gaiman is totally right and that is why a lot of this is like pulling teeth. I mean, part of it is because it was written over several years, part of it is I just didn't know what I was doing, but a lot of it was because I was just writing whatever short stories without thinking much about the final product. The /last/ chunk of stuff, mostly written in the last half of last year, fits together much better and will hopefully kick my ass less. I'm pretty sure I /can/ turn it into something resembling an actual real novel, but, man, it would have been a lot easier if I'd known that when I /started/ instead of when I was ( ... )
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I think I would like to be making progress in the direction of 'not sucking' instead of 'seeing how obviously I suck', though. Sigh.
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