03.24.08
A Hundred Pictures
Setting aside the fact that I did pretty much none of what I planned to during this past weekend, I still feel more or less good about the time spent. I do wish I had had the chance to head home for Easter, but there were good reasons why that was not to be. More to the point, they’re boring reasons, so I’ll skip them and just move on to what did get done.
I just finished getting the outline loaded into StoryMill; over the weekend I had the scene count up to 85, but now it’s at 101 (with maybe three or four of those either being melded together or ‘off-camera’ notes for myself). If I estimate that each scene will run around a thousand words, that’s another 100K words easily, not counting over- or underflow. Since I’m not taking a single sentence from the first draft– not copy-and-paste, at any rate; there’re a handful of good lines I want to reuse– that’s a huge chunk of rewriting to do. But, then again, I’m glad I’m doing this. It’s not nearly as bad as I’m making this sound with all these arguably big numbers.
I was talking with Rick the other day, and he seemed a bit surprised that I would be disparaging my first draft. The fact of the matter is, though, I went through the first draft in much the same way the writers of Lost went through the first couple seasons– just throwing whatever they thought of into the mix, and hoping it makes sense later on when they try to wrap it up. It works great for a television show that now has a following greater than the evening news, but not so much for a novel that’s supposedly going for some degree of plausibility. I fell into the trap that I always fall into– focusing on the protagonists too much, and not letting myself plot out how the antagonist did what the heroes have to undo. This draft is an excellent way for me to look at it from that angle, now, and to shore that up. Because the first draft worked absolutely well until we got to the ending, when I went for the cheap thrills and failed to realize that how I saw it being planned out just plain didn’t work– it could be seen through by a child. And not the mind-reading children of the story, either.
So, rather than the visceral blood-and-grossness ending I’d written back in December, I’ve got a more subtle antagonist now. Still prone to the acts of violence that prompt the story’s climax, but far more clever about how he’s made it to that point of control. And it’s this subtlety that works so well in the story’s favor. I set out in October to write the “anti-’psychic kids’ story”, and to do this meant forsaking a lot of conventions of the genre. By the time the story was wrapping up, I’d thrown away those principled beginnings and went for the cheap and easy route. That disheartened me quite a bit, because it took me away from the conflict I’d wanted to be the focus, and moved it into a more stock version. I’m hoping I can avoid this with this draft, and at the very least write the story I set out to.
All that stuff up there is mostly just drivel. The point is that I feel much more confident about this draft because I’ve already got the crap out of my system, I have the story solidly set out, and I know the characters better now and don’t have to worry about them wandering away from me again. Depending on how the rest of this week goes, I might actually start the draft writing before the weekend… probably not. We’ll see– I’m looking to try to finish watching through Kiddy Grade, or at least watch more of it, but I have some errands to take care of early this week as well, and other personal boring stuff. I’ll update as time permits, but one way or another Friday night begins “I Should Be Writing: The Next Gigaloquation”. Catch you all tomorrow.