Novel Ideas: Your Novel's Revision Stage

Last time we chatted, I'd finished my first draft of SILENT CITY and was riding the wave of joy that comes with such an accomplishment. I was prepping for The League to look over the draft and taking a moment to bask in the glow that comes with finishing a project.

But then reality set in.

The book isn't done. Far from it. I realized a little while after writing the last post that finishing the first draft of a novel is only a part of the ongoing process of writing one. Next comes arguably the most challenging and perhaps longest step: Revisions.

My initial plan was simple: Submit the draft to The League, make the required changes and start querying agents. But nothing in life is that easy. The League was already well-stocked with stuff in the queue and, unlike my colleagues who mostly deal in 100-125 page screenplays, a 220-page novel is a more daunting task, and not something I can expect my fellow Leaguers to read through and properly digest in a few days. So, SILENT CITY will be analyzed at our next meeting, ideally sometime toward the end of this month. In the meantime, I was left with a shiny new draft and no one to read it.

This is where good friends become a great benefit. I sent a few polite emails to people I knew, both in and out of publishing but mainly people I knew were readers and most importantly, people who I trusted to be honest with me and cut the bullshit. Some of these people include novelists, editors, newspaper writers and copy editors, etc. Mainly, I wanted an honest opinion from a wide swath of people -- some well-versed in the crime fiction genre, others just coming to it as a new reader would, in addition to the comments I knew I was going to get from The League.

So far, I've built a pretty solid list. I've handed the first draft to a colleague of mine who has a ton of experience reading manuscripts in general and crime novels specifically. So, I'm waiting on his comments before I send the draft to a wider list, mainly because I expect his notes to be the most detailed and effective. I'm pretty sure that the second draft of SILENT CITY will be significantly different from the first, so I don't want to bog the rest of my list down with reading it twice. Also, I'm well aware this is the kind of favor you can't really call people on more than once every few years, so I have to make sure each "read" I'm getting doesn't just get done, but also gets done at the right time. For example, I have another close friend back home who's an ace copy editor and also a very smart reader, period. But having her read my first draft, especially when I know I'll be getting copious notes from someone else, doesn't work if what I'm looking for from her is more of a general "This didn't work for me/This was good" analysis, coupled with a very detailed copy edit. Maybe I'm being a tad OCD about it, but it makes sense to me on paper.

Now, while all this planning and list-building sounds good, it doesn't equate to much writing. So, I decided to start outlining the next novel while I waited for people to get back to me and between revisions (which have yet to begin). This was a fun exercise because it allowed me to work on something new while still keeping a hand in SILENT CITY. I've got a very basic breakdown of Pete's next adventure, which involves a change of scenery, a new villain and some other surprises I'm hesitant to get into just yet. I've read a few books as research and I'm excited to work on something new but also familiar, as it's a continuation of SILENT CITY.

More as it happens...

Facing reality: Re-working your outline for the greater good of your novel

With any new year, most people take a moment to come up with resolutions for the next twelve months. Lose weight, find a new job, travel, etc. I'm usually hesitant to tack on life-changing edicts to a kind of pointless holiday, but I did find myself coming up with a rather long list of overall 2009 "to-dos," which I won't get into here in detail. But, thinking over things I want to accomplish in the next year really brought to the forefront something I haven't dealt with in my head over the last few months.

I don't really like the book I'm writing.

Some background, for those of you new to the adventures of King Suckerman (me): I've been working on my first novel for about six months now. It's titled SILENT CITY and is set in Miami. It tells the tale of Pete Fernandez, a burnt out journalist working a dead-end copy editing job for The Miami News after the death of his father and the subsequent flaming out of his once-promising sports writing career. Pete's basically a wreck, drinking his life away and meandering through what little he has to be awake for. He gets a call out of the blue from the father of one of his formerly close friends, Kathy, asking him to check in on her. What Pete discovers leads him into a story of murder, intrigue, backroom drug deals and the realization that while you may never be able to reclaim the life you once lead, you can always move forward to create a new one.

I saw the book as part crime novel in the vein of Pelecanos' A Firing Offense and Lehane's A Drink Before the War and, later, to some degree, Ellroy's The Black Dahlia. A nice, short (200-250 pages) detective story that would (ideally) set the stage for more adventures with Pete but also be the story of how a person who has no desire or inclination to be a private eye at page one ends up realizing it's in many ways his salvation. On a secondary, but arguably more important level, it would also show how friendships can evolve and die over time, specifically the dissolution of Pete's circle of friends and how, as we get older, we deal with more and more people but find that we are only close to a small handful, only interacting with people we know because we know them, and not so much because we like them. So, part crime book, part Rick Moody/The Ice Storm with a dash of Miami flavor to set the scene.

I started off sprinting -- 50 pages in the first few months. Most were written in jags of 10-15 pages, usually on Saturday mornings with jazz playing and coffee brewing. I got into a good routine. But there was a problem -- I had a general idea of where I wanted the story to go (Pete gets call, Pete searches for friend, hilarity ensues...), but the minor plot points that make a good detective novel -- the clues planted early on, the friendly character who turns out to be not-so-good later on, etc. Not cliches, per se, but things that you would be able to generate with more planning and a better sense (detail-wise) as to where the story was heading. And, more importantly, how it was going to get there.

About 40 or so pages in I decided it was time to write up an outline. This is where the trouble hit. I found a structure I was relatively happy with -- every third or fourth chapter would be a flashback sequence involving Pete's past: his friends, his father, his job; these flashbacks would hopefully add some perspective for the reader, showing a more jovial and human Pete and giving them a sense of why these friends were once important and how they've changed in the process. The main novel thread would follow Pete as he stumbled toward solving the main crime, which involved a number of current and former friends and the seedy Miami drug underworld.

After writing a first pass of the outline and getting some feedback from some members of the league, I realized that a) a lot of the flashback chapters were inconsequential, if not repetitive and b) Pete didn't really DO much. Most of the book, if it was going to be written based on my initial outline, dealt with Pete reacting to what others were doing. In the end you were left with the same guy, but everything was sort of resolved and things were looking rosy. Basically, the outline needed some serious work. Serious work that would probably involve going back and rewriting the 50 pages I already had in the can and was relatively happy with. You see, if the entire structure of the book is off, it doesn't matter how great the first few chapters are.

So, that brings me here. I'm not happy with the outline, but I'm procrastinating rewriting it because I know it could potentially mean tossing everything I've done or changing it significantly. When it came time to see what my goals were for the new year, finishing SILENT CITY was definitely one of them, but how to do it?

The bottom line is, I need to rework the outline. Maybe Character X shouldn't die in Chapter Y, or whatever. But I need to dive in knowing that this new outline, which ideally will be stronger, could potentially mean that the work I put into the book initially might be lost or made unrecognizable. Only now am I really coming to terms with that and feeling OK about it. It happens. You try one thing, it doesn't really work, you try again. I just need to get back on the writing horse.

Anyway, most of my posts here usually deal with stuff going on outside my laptop or movies I've seen/books I've read, but since this group is about the experience of being a writer, I thought it would be interesting to share my experiences so far. I've been researching general plot techniques to find the method that seems best suited to my writing style, but I'm open to suggestions.

Using Google Notebooks to plot your novel

A pretty Neat idea, from The Average Idea blog. I think I'll start using it myself.

Do you plot out your novels on notecards? I did too, until I stumbled across Google Notebook.

Some problems I ran into using paper notecards:

• Cards get scrambled out of order
• A pain to refer back to when I’m actually writing the book
• Don’t always have them on me in case inspiration strikes

So I decided to try out Google Notebook to plot out my current novel. It worked fantastically. Here are some tips and tricks you can use to not only plot out your own novel, but also to get the most out of Google Notebook.

Quickly Add Scenes

You can get the bare bones of your novel in place quickly by just clicking the blank space in your notebook. I rifled through all my ideas for scenes to get a rough idea for how the book would lay out.

Worth reading -- Raymond Chandler's Ten Commandments for the Detective Novel

Some words to live by, from the father of detective fiction, Raymond Chandler:

• It must be credibly motivated, both as to the original situation and the dénouement.
• It must be technically sound as to the methods of murder and detection.
• It must be realistic in character, setting and atmosphere. It must be about real people in a real world.
• It must have a sound story value apart from the mystery element: i.e., the investigation itself must be an adventure worth reading.
• It must have enough essential simplicity to be explained easily when the time comes.
• It must baffle a reasonably intelligent reader.
• The solution must seem inevitable once revealed.
• It must not try to do everything at once. If it is a puzzle story operating in a rather cool, reasonable atmosphere, it cannot also be a violent adventure or a passionate romance.
• It must punish the criminal in one way or another, not necessarily by operation of the law....If the detective fails to resolve the consequences of the crime, the story is an unresolved chord and leaves irritation behind it.
• It must be honest with the reader.

The Writing Wire for 10/28

Come and get it.

• Someone watched all the Saw movies and lived to talk about it. The Onion AV Club has the story.

• The New York Times punches holes in the painfully trite new cop movie, Pride and Glory by showcasing the worst genre cliches in the film. A sample:

The New York police story that sticks in the public consciousness usually includes some or all of these elements: THE CONFLICTED POLICE OFFICER, who is torn between enforcing the law and watching the backs of his relatives or buddies in homicide/narcotics/missing persons/the seven-six. By the way, he has “seen some things.” Not things like traffic on the Belt Parkway or a matinee performance of “Mamma Mia!” But things that he really, really doesn’t want to talk about. Just leave it alone. O.K.? Just leave it.

• Ken Levine reviews Diner.

• Guess what? Joss Whedon's Dollhouse almost did fall apart.

• Stephen King talks to Salon about The Stand, 30 years later.

• If you care, Times Online has 10 Things You Didn't Know About Pink Floyd.

• Continuing their great series on writing novels, PoeWar asks "How good is your bad guy?"

• The Corrections author Jonathan Franzen apparently hates everything.

• WTF? Led Zeppelin is getting back together? Apparently. And without Robert Plant!

• I Watch Stuff compares Star Trek promo shots, new and old. See above.

• Gawker ponders the question: Could Gus Van Sant's Milk suck?

• Film School Rejects thinks RocknRolla might be good.