Last November, I completed National Novel Writing Month by reaching 50,000 words on my fantasy-scifi adventure “Cloudgazer”. To say I was pleased is an understatement; to say I spent most of December 1st with a big grin on my face would be more accurate. Finally, I felt as though I had something complete, something to be proud of.
A colleague of mine was also a ‘Wrimo’, and completed ’09 successfully. When I asked him how it went, I was somewhat startled when he declared he was going to have to just bin it and rewrite the whole thing. Surely, I thought, that is some sort of kneejerk reaction that should be resisted. There must be something of merit in there. I knew mine certainly had.
And yet, when I got stuck into my editing over the past four weeks, I started to see why one might draw such a conclusion. I love what I have written. There’s parts that shine, snippets of dialogue and lines of prose that I might even go as far as to say are brilliance. But it’s awkward, terribly so. There is a lot that doesn’t make sense or doesn’t fit, and I have considered that their only fix may lie in a fundamental re-writing of the background history, and by extension, the entire plot.
But I’ve been warned about this sort of thing, and I’m prepared. When editing, it is a little like tidying up. You usually have to mess things up worse before they become neat again. In an ideal world, I would be concentrating on this, but at the moment that simply isn’t possible. Too much to do. But interesting things to follow soon.