Fri 9 Jul 2010
The sucky chapters
Posted by PJ under novels, rewrites, venus in transit
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Revision isn’t usually painful for me. It’s a chance to make better and I actually kind of like it after the agony of the first draft. That is, until I hit the sucky chapters. Then it’s embarrassing. There are about three chapters in the middle of this book that are hellacious and need to be gutted, maybe completely redone, maybe scrapped. The information in them is conveyed through to the end of the story, but there has got to be a better, more dynamic way to get that information across to the reader. I’ve done a little of that kind of thing along the way, but these chapters will need a major overhaul, I think.
The urge to stop the read-through in its tracks and battle with these chapters is strong, very strong, but I’m going to press ahead. The purpose of this read-through is to clean up language and frayed threads and places where I decided to take the story in a slightly different direction, not to do a massive restructure. To make it readable, in other words. I want to continue on, noting stuff I think needs to be slapped silly so that when I get to the second draft after betas have given me feedback I have a clear mandate for who and what’s butt to kick.
But man, those sucky chapters…really do suck. And I really do want to fix them.
