Chapter four was being so difficult, I skipped ahead to what would happen immediately after I got through the hospital bit.  Oddly enough, considering I only vaguely knew where I was going after the hospital bit, it worked.  Now I’m back to chapter four and filling in the transition.  It reminds me of that scene in Dead Poets’ Society (won’t quote since I only ever saw the movie in the theater)–in essence, stand on the desk to get a different view of the same old scene.  Change your perspective, and suddenly, it’s all much clearer.  I don’t know why, but it works.

In very early drafts, SanClare Black was third-person omniscient.  This was entirely an accident because I didn’t have a firm grasp on my POV options at the time and hadn’t thought about what would work best for the story.  That all got sorted in subsequent drafts and it ended up very firmly third-person limited with only two POV characters.

And that was the initial plan for SanClare Scarlet, too, but after abortive first draft, I’ve realized I need more voices in this book. So it’ll still be 3rd/limited but there will be more characters doing the looking.  So far, I’ve written three.  I have at least two more in mind.  The main character will still carry the bulk of the POV as he did in SanClare Black.

Anyway, it’s fun to sort these things out in advance this time around.

Two of the things I didn’t do in first draft which I knew immediately upon realizing I’d written myself toward a cliff and therefore had to do in second draft have now been done.  I had avoided doing these obvious, character-true things for purely superficial reasons.  I didn’t want to be rid of these trappings, but the character did and to not have him take advantage of the very first opportunity to make these changes to his own life skewed everything that I’d written after.

Which gets us back to “murdering darlings.”  No matter how much I may love certain scenes or moments or trappings or notes in a story, if they overstay their welcome, even if they are small things, they can sour things.  Because then I have to rationalize why they’re still there and put those thoughts and words into the characters’ mouths, trying to explain away why the issue hasn’t been dealt with or why the thing hasn’t been discarded or why the argument hasn’t been fought.

And that’s the most useful thing I’ve found to do when plotting or writing: Just ask why.  Why is he doing that?  Why isn’t he doing that?  Why would she say that?  Why wouldn’t she just do this obvious thing?  These two little things the main character didn’t deal with in first draft turned into major roadblocks and all because I hadn’t pinned myself to the wall and demanded honest answers to “why doesn’t he do this now?” 

The answer turned out to be, “well, he does after all.”  And now the whole story is different.  And, I think, much better.

I give up on word counters.  After a good amount of progress, I had First Reader review, and I reviewed, and via her notes and my own sinking feelings, I realized the story had gone off the rails and was heading for a ditch.  Not a total loss — lots of good bits and pieces I can salvage — but the framework was just wrong, a relic of a prior draft of the story that didn’t reflect enough of the changes made in part one.  I’ve restarted and have New Chapter One almost done, and it’s very different and that sort of zingy, tingly right you get when you sing the perfect note.   It, too, will be revised and reviewed and tweaked and judged, but I know I’m on the right path now and, though that kills prior word-count, I also don’t care. 

‘Cause now I’m really excited about where this is going.

Ye Agent asked a couple of questions on his blog about process.  Here they are with my answers:

What is your favorite part of the writing process?
I don’t have a favorite part. I like pretty much every part of the process. After about the zillioneth round of editing the same thing, I can get pretty sick of it, but otherwise, I do like it all.

What do you do when you know you’ve done something wrong and haven’t yet figured out what the source of that wrongness is?
That depends on the work in progress. If it’s something I’m steeped in (such as the SanClare books), I almost never get that stuck. I go back and reread, and the bit that’s gumming up the flow usually reveals itself. With a newer piece (such as La Cause Sociériste), I generally go back to the plotting and look for the problem there. If I get really hung up (short stories — not my forte), I hand it to my First Readers to diagnose.

What would your answers be?

I reviewed my progress and read over my outline and realized I’d run through all the plot I’d worked out during my first leapfrog session (thank you, again, Linnea Sinclair), so tonight was spent working out the next hop.

I’m in the middle of chapter six, and this hop should take me to the end of the first third of the book.  I should adjust my counter as this book is much more likely to be about 120K rather than the 90K I’ve been saying on the counter [but the percentage goes up so fast when I’m only aiming at 90K].

Since there is a lot of existing content from my first draft well before I split the story into thirds (of which SanClare Scarlet is the second), reworking it is a bit tricky.  I can’t just follow it through because things have changed and need adjusted.  There’s some stuff that should just go away, no matter how I like it.  And then there’s some stuff that’s going to be even more useful this time around.

It’s funny to read through this very rough draft — there are parts of it where I had a *terrible* time maintaining POV, mostly because I wasn’t paying enough attention to that — I was just throwing all the ideas, words, etc., at the page as fast as I could type.  But it’s funny to read my usual third person limited turn into third person omniscient with no warning.  I point and laugh at myself, clean it up, and move on.

“Life!  Don’t talk to me about life!” — Marvin from Hitchhiker’s Guide

Real Life^TM has been busy and full of stuff and traveling and exhaustion, so no actual typing on books has been done since my last post (le sigh).  However, that doesn’t mean the work hasn’t been ongoing.  During my long, very damp drives through the state of Indiana, I worked on the backstory and plot of La Cause.  This idea is still new and shiny and not fully-formed, so any thinking time I get to spend on figuring out this new world and its people, I use.  The important part of writing is the putting-the-words-down part, but the percolating, thinking, planning, etc., time is essential, too.   It just can’t be all that gets done, or I’m basically a daydreamer and not a writer.

So this weekend, there will be much typing.  With La Cause it may all be notes and scribbles about the story and no actual wordage, but with Scarlet, there will be word-counter progress made!

Right after lunch…

That’s what it felt like today.  Getting through this bit at the beginning where everything for part one of the book gets set up is work, I tells ya–WORK!  But, yay! Six-percent!  And if tomorrow goes well, I’ll reach the big chunk of existing stuff at last!  *does little dance*

I keep smacking my own hand and scolding myself to not go back and futz with the rough spots right now.  I even put a note in telling myself to skip over to the next event and go back and fix the bridging scene later because it was being a major roadblock.  The minute I did that, I knew how to proceed and thus was able to delete the note.  As someone (sorry!) in that fantastic panel at WisCon said, you have to give yourself permission to suck [during first drafts].

I switched word counters because the other one is much more complicated to use *and* (important consideration) doesn’t look cute on my new blog.  Okay, this one isn’t cute, either, but it’s clean, and the faux shadow-on-white-background on the other counter was bugging me.

On one of the LJ communities to which I belong, this topic came up, and while I pondered my answer, I thought it would be worth posting what I came up with here on my Complete Fabrications site.

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