Project Update: Oh, You Thought You Were Done?
I was so excited about being “done” with my first book back in April, and now I look back on that and I laugh and laugh.
After I “finished,” I sent the book to beta readers. Then I did another round of editing to address their feedback, which swelled my novel from 110,000 to 129,000 words. Once I finished that up in September, I wrote my query letter and synopsis and paid an editor to review them for me.
The good news: In addition to giving me some extremely helpful feedback and insight, the editor I hired, who is also an agent, said she’d be interested in seeing pages from me should I wish to query her.
It was so encouraging to have a professional go out of their way to express interest in seeing more of my book. I don’t have any illusions that the first agent I query will be interested in taking the book on, but that tiny dose of validation meant the world to me as a new writer.
The interesting catch: I need to get my novel below 100,000 words first.
Who saw that one coming? To be fair, I kind of knew that, I just didn’t know how hard and fast that rule was. Turns out, for a debut author, it’s very both of those.
Pictured: the stark realization that you’re trapped on the Merry-Go-Round. You are the Merry-Go-Round!
Well, what’s one more circle around the Merry-Go-Round? I believe in the power of editing (if you want to hear a really specific, probably baffling rant, ask me how I feel about the uncut LOTR trilogy), and it’s only going to make the book stronger – 129,000 words is too long for what this is. It’s a daunting challenge to cut so much, but a good one.
I took the “eating the elephant one bite at a time” approach (can we collectively agree to switch this metaphor to something more appetizing?). Because I’m a big nerd with weird adaptive mechanisms, I made an Excel spreadsheet of all my chapters, their word counts, whose POV, a short summary, and my initial ideas of what could be cut or reduced. I added a formula to show how many words to cut from each chapter if I reduced it evenly by 22%.
And did I add another column to record my new word counts and another to show me exactly how much I exceeded or fell short on for each chapter?
And another formula at the top to show how much extra I have to work with from chapters where I exceeded the goal?
You bet I did.
Every time the sum total over “Extra Reclaim” goes up, I get a little shiver
I don’t like nebulous goal-setting as I said in a prior post, but results in front of me in numbers is an embarrassingly compelling incentive for me. More practically, it is essential to help me manage trade-offs effectively – some chapters simply can’t be cut down by 22% while others are bloated and need to be cut more.
Honestly, so far, most of what I’ve cut was truly extraneous. I’m shocked at how often I meet my goal just by getting rid of redundancies or unnecessary detail.
One of my beta readers said she loved a specific scene for how I “said a lot with a little,” and I’ve been keeping that in my head each time I sit down to edit. As I was new at this when I started, there are some places where my narrative got a little tortured simply because I was unsure how to transition scenes, or was still developing the character in question, or I didn’t have a strong understanding of my purpose for a chapter (I largely pantsed this book for 2022 NaNoWriMo). In one chapter, I had laboriously described a character’s entire day. It dragged. I made a list of what I wanted the reader to understand about that character, decided the most interesting way to show those things, and cut that chapter in half. It’s so much better than it was before.
My current count is 113,000 words, and I’m just about halfway through the book. I don’t regret my previous round of editing which caused me to add so much content – developmentally, it needed to happen and much of what I wrote is staying while the earliest stuff is cut or reduced.
Did I take the extra, extra long way to finish this book? Undoubtably. But I’ve had to learn along the way, and I’ll be able to implement those things to make the next one go more smoothly:
More planning and outlining upfront. I don’t plan to abandon pantsing entirely, but an outline (knowing I can deviate from it) would have helped me keep my chapters focused.
Set and monitor word count goals. I think I’ll try to have word count goals per arc next time. Not as a strict rule for the first draft, but just to keep it within reason.
Consider the purpose of each chapter before starting in terms of plot and character development and how to accomplish that purpose by “saying a lot with a little.”
I’m so grateful for this experience, and I’m excited to put what I’ve learned to work for NaNoWriMo 2023.
By the way, regarding pantsing, does anyone else’s brain stubbornly picture sneaking up behind your book and pulling its pants down like a playground bully?
No? Just me?