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Chabon Signed

March 11th, 2010 admin No comments

Chabon Signed

How to Tame an Out-OF-Control Writing Project in 20 Steps

A writer friend of mine recently had a dilemma about a novel she has been working on for quite awhile. She’d written close to 700 pages of material and felt the story was bogged down but had some great scenes and parts. She wasn’t sure if she should abandon it and begin again. I could sense the pain her thought of abandoning this project was causing her. Giving birth to a novel has been described as similar to giving birth to a child, after all. And, as she’s said, the novel contained some really good stuff. Because we’ve all been there to a greater or lesser degree, I suggested a step-by-step strategy to perform some dramatic surgery on her unwieldy novel. Some other writers appreciated my response, so here it is. If it helps, fantastic… if not, there is always the Michael Chabon solution.

Dear Joyce, Michael Chabon had over 15,000 pages of his follow up novel to” Mysteries of Pittsburgh” that he tossed because he got similarly bogged down with no sign of the novel ever ending. His unpublished behemoth is called “Fountain City”, by the way. Chabon was loathe to stop, but he set his novel aside and wrote the bestseller, “Wonder Boys” in a relative short time. The moral: Maybe setting an unwieldy novel aside isn’t always a bad thing. However, there is another option where you may be able to salvage the “good stuff” in a different form. It won’t be easy, but here is a systematic approach to perform major surgery on your manuscript. CAUTION: This is NOT for the weak of heart!

1. Consider what you have now as not a novel, but a cauldron swirling with ideas. This is the start of finding some characters and the bare bones of a story.

2. Print out a copy of what you have with the pages numbered (regardless of how it is set up or your previous vision) just number 1-700.

3. Divide your stack into ten sections – okay, maybe 20 sections in this case (you do have 700 pages after all).

4. Tackle one section at a time and DO NOT look at them in chronological order. Repeat, DO NOT look at section 1, then 2, then 3. Do them randomly, 20, then 5, then 7….

5. Get a pack of colored highlighters (red, yellow, green, plum….)

6. Assign a color for dialogue – blue, a color for description – green, a color for just good writing, et cetera. Use whatever categories are important to you, but not Exposition, please.

7. Go through one section at a time and highlight the best bits under each category. Remember, do the sections out of order and take a good break between sections. You are looking for the best bits, not the okay bits, not the good stuff, the absolute killer dialogue and description and writing.

8. When you are done with the highlighting, re-type it from scratch under the categories (dialogue, description, good-writing, action…). Yes, I said re-type it.

9. Now, pin the pages to the wall and see what your absolute best stuff is and organize it in a fairly logical sequence. You know, Bobby meets Sarah for the first time… dialogue between Bobby and Sarah… Description of the car accident… dialogue of police officer and Sarah. This is where you will start to see gaps and connections.

10. Now, look at the wall with all this stuff in order and write an outline and a chronology of the story (these are two separate things). The outline may include what you have on the wall, and it will also have scenes to be written. The chronology will keep this all straight when you move to a first draft. (A chronology is a timeline of the whole story and will include things that are occurring “off-stage”; such as: 15 October 2009; 11:59 PM; Cole rushes to post-office to mail taxes as six-month extension expires.)

11. Now, take the bits you have on the wall, and the notes for what you need to have in between the bits and place these in the correct chronological order and make notes in the document of where you need to write a new scene or a connector between scenes.

12. Do any additional research or free writing to get down what needs to be written in the missing parts. It is okay at this point to re-imagine dialogue or description, but don’t try and do finished prose. What you have now created is what mystery writer Elizabeth George calls a “Full-Outline”.

13. Print this full-outline out.

14. Go drink a margarita and have a spa day.

15. Sit down.

16. Open a new document. Yes, I said a new document.

17. Pin the first five or six pages of the full-outline on the wall in front of you and have the proposed chronology within arms reach. (The chronology will help when you have to recall where your characters are and what they are doing at any given time.)

18. In the new document start writing your draft from start to finish using the full-outline and the chronology as a guide. DO NOT REWRITE. Just write from start to finish with the full-outline as a guide, incorporating your previously written best stuff in the draft.

19. When you finish this draft you will be about at third draft stage.

20. Refine this, publish it, become famous, and mention me in the credits.

About the Author

Rocky Cole is a professional counselor and freelance writer. More information on freelance and creative writing can be found at http://www.ColeWriting.com.