May 15 2008

writing a book is like brushing really tangled, long hair

Here me out on this one.

You start out with this huge mess of tangled hair. I mean, it looks like hair, but its a disaster.

Each pass through with the brush makes it a little bit better, a little bit smoother. But it hurts like hell and sometimes good hair ends up getting torn out because of a tiny knot.

Even when you are all finished and the hair is nice and smooth, you still cannot really run your fingers through it without them catching on the few little knots that are still there. The average person cannot see them, but you know they are there. This applies whether its a paper for school, a report for work, fiction, whatever you are writing.

Each pass through with the brush is a draft. You are brushing your hair to leave to go out, you are trying to get through this stupid story to just finish it but there are always more drafts, more passes through with the brush than you thought there would be.

My book is like your hair after it has been teased into an updo and hairspray-ed to high hell for a formal dance. I know there are a lot of girls out there that hear me on that one.  I mean, it’s like I am trying to brush through it and there are somehow still bobby pins in there and every now and then I hit one and its like, How did this even get in here?

I sat down last night to write out an outline of the rest of my book just to see what I had left to write. After everything I wrote during NaNoWriMo and the 3 chapters I have written since then (good chapters but pathetic that I only wrote that many in 5 months), I have about 14 chapter left to go. No bad, right? Except that, in discussion with my plot assistant husband, I discovered that, in tearing ahead with writing, a large number of things that happened in the beginning of the book now need to be reworked, revamped or otherwise totally rewritten. Characters have changed names, become undead, that sort of thing. There are a few spots of exposition I am reasonably sure happen about 3 times over the course of the book.

Oddly enough, though the main structure of my book has remained the same, a lot of the key details and scenes that have been in this story since I thought of it as a child and wrote it on the bus back and forth from NYC after college up until this November are getting scrapped in the latest draft. My husband, who is the only person who knows the entire plot of the whole series, doesn’t want me to scrap all of it but I realized that the parts I spend the most time puzzling over are the weakest links. If I don’t understand them, then I sure as heck cannot make the audience understand them so they have to go. But it’s still hard to get rid of something that has been in there the whole time. Good hair gets ripped out because of a few tiny knots.

Overall, I am feeling a tad “ugh” about the whole thing. I had been telling myself that I only had a few days of work left before I could start passing the book around to my family member and friend “editors” (there is this elaborated tiered reader system, more on that later). But I realized last night that if I work my butt off night and day, much like I did during Nanowrimo, it will take me a minimum of two more months to finish this book.

Is this an impossible amount of time? No, not at all. The end is very truly in sight. But am I looking forward to going back and rewriting all 50 chapters of this monstrosity when I thought I was a few days away from done? Dear god, not at all.

But I suppose it will all be worth it when I can present to the world a whole head of smooth, shiny hair.

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