Samhain                                                            Winter Moon

Put together a banker’s box of manuscripts used during the several revisions of Missing. That cleaned out a full shelf.  Back at Loki’s Children.  Listened to a fascinating BBC podcast on Norse mythology, organized my research.  There are these very different phases to writing a novel, for me at least.

The first involves the idea beginning to grow, like sugar crystal building a new shape on a suspended piece of string.  The shapes are not uniform and they can look sharp.  Then research begins to consume the development time.  The crystals have now begun to build one on another and the whole string has some small, sweet projection.  At some point the research seems done.  The string is pulled out of the water.

The second phase is more like a snake eating.  The research and the character ideas and the plot ideas somehow inform the fingers as they type, chewing up this piece of data, consuming that idea that seemed good, sliding the whole body around undigestable information.  This is the preliminary draft, perhaps the first draft or some less clear very early version.  It has to sit for awhile, like the snake in the sun, letting the warmth drive digestion.

After this phase or the next one, which ever produces first draft, after the drawer (shelf in my case) has made those words less familiar, more removed, a first revision can occur.  At this point the story begins to become clearer, the characters take on more life. Occasionally, there’s the happy moment.  Hey, I wrote that.  Or, more often, there’s the oh, god, I wrote that moment.  Most of it is in between.

After the rock crystal phase and the snake phase, comes the sculptural phase.  The first two phases are additive, like clay sculpture, where shape builds up on an armature or free form until the desired result.  This third phase, revision, is more like subtractive sculpture, where the artist removes wood or marble to, as Michelangelo’s cliche suggests, reveal the object already there.  It’s not exactly like subtractive sculpture because, unlike marble, a manuscript can take additions as well as subtractions, but the emphasis is usually on what’s not necessary.

This plot line doesn’t serve the story.  This character is unnecessary.  This whole chapter can go and nobody will be harmed.  Of course, there are, too, those additional descriptions, enhanced motivations, now needed scenes.  In the case of Missing I cut out 30,000 words and ended up with a word count roughly the same as the one I started with.

I’m now waiting for Bob Klein to finish and then there will be the work of assimilating his critiques and finishing a last draft before submission.  In January, Missing will start its journey into the world.