Re: I can see the end!
- From: "Patricia C. Wrede" <pwrede6492@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2007 07:45:41 -0600
On Jul 14, 6:42 am, Kat R <null.sp...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
It's over that ugly hump of Chapters 21 & 22.
After knocking myself out since February in between bouts of illness,
migraine, deaths of friends and so on, I'm finally within 3 chapters of
the end of the current WIP. It's due August 1. I hate it. I don't
have time to do big revision once I'm done with the draft, just a few
tweaks and a fast spellcheck and S&R for crutch words.
I think it's the worst thing I've written since the dogawful historical
romance I bless my stars I never got published. I don't remember hating
the last one like this....
Do you suppose it's just me?
It may well be all the negative life-stuff getting attached to the book, and
nothing to do with the quality of the thing itself. I have two novels that
I don't much like, still, and in both cases they're among the ones people
seem to like the best -- and I'm quite, quite sure that the reason I don't
much like them is that there were some very negative things happening in my
life during the writing of each of them, and while it obviously didn't
affect the quality of the work, it equally obviously affected my attitude
toward them.
What worked for me was: Not ripping up anything major, no matter how badly
I thought it sucked (fortunately, I realized in time that no matter *what* I
did, I was going to feel as if it sucked, so I relied more heavily on my
beta readers than usual. If they didn't object, I didn't try to "fix" it,
and after the first thousand times or so, I even quit asking "Don't you
think this is bad?" Not before they got past "It's *fine*, Pat, just
*fine*" to "Will you cut it out, already? IT'S FINE!", though.). Slogging
along with the obvious changes, like backfilling a key character point so it
didn't come out of nowhere and making sure the color of the horses was
consistent from Ch. 2 to Ch. 13 and fixing the rambling sentences that
changed direction somewhere in the middle and so on, even when it felt like
polishing a lump of coal. Ditto for the editorial revisions. And then,
once the galleys were done, just not looking inside the covers ever again.
And, throughout the process, reminding myself occasionally that when I
thought the book up and planned it out, it had seemed just fine, and none of
my test readers had found book-wrecking plot or characterization problems,
so really, all I had to worry about was doing competent prose. It didn't
matter if I didn't do heart-stoppingly brilliant sentences, for just this
one book, as long as they were clear.
This does require that you have first readers and an editor on whose
judgement you can rely this heavily.
Patricia C. Wrede
.
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