NOVEL CONCEPTS

by Steven Steinbock

At the beginning of October, I had pretty well completed the first draft of the novel I’d been working on since spring. By pretty well, I admit that there were still four chapters that consisted only of bullet points, including a few questions I had yet to discover the answers to.

So in the weeks leading up to Bouchercon, I switched gears. I traded in my writer’s gear for an editor’s briefcase and set out, page by page, to do the first phase of edits. My goals were to address logical and stylistic issues. Logical include things like continuity and consistency (making sure Eva doesn’t change her hair-color midway through the book, or that her Jetta doesn’t suddenly turn into a Saab). It also involved retrofitting characters or settings.

As I was writing the first draft, a lot of things surprised me. Two significant secondary characters arrived on the scene late. I honestly didn’t know who they were before they appeared on the page, but once they showed up, they demanded bigger roles. In the case of one of them, it meant that I’d need to introduce her much earlier in the book. There was also a setting that became pivotal to the climax of the book. Rather than dropping that locale in at the eleventh hour, I wanted to introduce it in the first quarter of the novel.

Stylistic editing included fixing typos, making sure the tone and voice were consistent, and killing off a few “darlings.”

The editing process presented some unexpected results. I expected that I’d be able to plow though twenty or thirty pages of manuscript each day. Turns out I was being overly optimistic. Three to five pages has been my average.

While writing the first draft, I measured my progress by daily word count. With the editing, I measure my progress by pages.

Perhaps a product of my age, I need to do most of the editing on a hard copy with a red pen. I know there are people who can think on the screen. I’m not one of them. So I began the process with a tall stack of printouts, and have slowly been covering each page with ink. I alternate between the pen-and-hard-copy editing and the word processor. Today, for instance, I’m typing up the changes in chapter thirteen, while marking up the hard-copy of chapter fourteen.

This seems like a lot of drudgery, and for the most part, it has been. But I’ve been surprised at how exciting some of the process can be. For one thing, when writing the first draft, it’s nearly impossible to see the forest for the trees. But in this rereading, I’ve been able to look down at the whole forest and see the entire landscape.

The process of discovery has been the most exciting part of the editing process. Two of those four unfinished chapters are now complete, and writing them went fast and fun. I also began seeing the characters in a deeper way. There are two characters in the book who are about as different from each other as two characters can be. But as I watch them grow on the page, I begin noticing parallel tracks in their lives. On some subconscious level, I may have known it all along, but I think that’s giving me more credit than I deserve. The discovery of the parallels between these two characters has been staggering. Had I subjected them to Jungian analysis, I’m not sure I’d have found more profound connections.

But that’s enough with talk. I’ve got a chapter to edit.

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