Wrinkles in the Space-Time Continuum

by Stephanie Black

I’m sitting here with huge, Disney-character-sized eyes, goggling over the fact that Jeff Savage can write a novel—and he writes fantastic novels!—in three to six months. It takes me that long to write a grocery list. Heck, I’ve been working on this blog post since I was fourteen.

OK, I’m not THAT slow. On my current work-in-progress—a sequel to my first novel, The Believer— it took me just over a year to churn out around 500 pages of first draft. I’m currently on draft three. It will take four drafts to get the book submission-ready, and if I had time, I’d love to give it five drafts, or six. Or forty. I usually don’t get tired of going through a manuscript as long as I can still see ways to improve it. In fact, I prefer rewriting to drafting (and that isn’t just a stalling mechanism to keep me from having to turn the manuscript in. Really. I swear).

Page count now stands at around 410. I overwrite like crazy on the first draft and then cut cut cut. I’m on excellent terms with the delete key. If I’m erasing whole scenes, or large chunks thereof, I’ll sometimes paste them into a rejects file. Then if the urge hits, I can go back and sigh over my beloved prose (or paste it back into the novel if I end up needing it, which happens occasionally). In addition to chucking repetitive scenes, I do a lot of trimming and tightening. When I draft, I tend to write paragraphs that make the same point six times, something like this: “Jane was scared. Her palms were sweaty. Her stomach knotted. Her knees knocked together. Her mouth was dry. Did I mention that she was scared?”

Another rewriting issue I deal with is Mutating Timeline Syndrome. I start out with a rough idea of when things are taking place but don’t worry about keeping track of every detail (sort of the way I keep track of my personal calendar, come to think of it). Then come rewriting time, I have to confront the fact that in chapter 3, I said ten days had passed, whereas in chapter 4, the same interval was two days long. Unless the story involves time travel (which it doesn’t), I’ve got a problem. Strangely enough, when I go back and read straight through a draft that took me many months to write, I find that things happen a LOT closer together than they did when I first wrote them. Weird.

I also discover that my characters seem to have gotten stupider. What seemed logical during the messy process of drafting now seems about as realistic as Scooby Doo and his gang taking on the bad guys solo and catching them in a trap using Shaggy’s train set (which is conveniently stashed in the back of the Mystery Machine.) I truly love Scooby Doo, but what worked for Shaggy and Fred doesn’t work when writing thrillers. If my characters are in a situation where the average person would have high-tailed it back to the Malt Shop and called the police, but I NEED my characters to stay put for plot purposes, I’d better give them a darn good reason for not bailing out. Rewriting is knocking out the phones and locking the doors, or tossing a hostage into a back room and setting the clock ticking so there’s no time to summon help, or giving the characters a solid reason not to trust the police. It’s also foreshadowing—planting that train set in the van and giving it a logical reason for existing. I know some authors can capture all the nuances of plotting on the first draft, but I’m not that mentally organized. I have trouble just getting my library books back on time.

Well, I’d better get to work. I told my editor I’d have the manuscript to her in April and I’ve got one and three-quarters drafts left to go. Either I’d better hope for some Star Trekkish interference with time so that somehow March lasts about 27 weeks or I’d better quit falling asleep when I’m supposed to be writing. I’m thinking the Captain Kirk option is more likely to happen.