Aiming at a moving target

Since the pandemic began, I have posted from time to time about the challenge of writing it into my current work in progress. Or not. The book, the eleventh in my Inspector Green series entitled THE DEVIL TO PAY, is due for release in October 2021. Initially we thought the pandemic would last a month or two (remember those days?), but as I continued to write the novel, I gradually realized it might last into the fall or even winter of 2020. Authors everywhere agonized about what to do, and I posed the questions a few times on social media. Some wanted to write as if life was carrying on as normal and the pandemic didn't exist. People didn't want to be reminded of these grim times, or the experience was too raw, or it interfered with their planned narrative. Others suggested the book be set in 2019 or in the near future. And still others said that the pandemic should be in the background, but merely hinted at.

This last option was the one I chose. I couldn't imagine pretending it didn't exit. It's the defining event of the century (so far). Imagine writing a book set in 1942 without mentioning the war? But surely by the fall of 2021, the pandemic would be over, and I could write as if it were in the rearview mirror. The memory and the effects on people's lives would linger, but life would be normal. But in October, when I submitted the manuscript to the publisher, we had no idea how long it was going to last. There was no vaccine, and countries were lurching from opening up and shutting down as their health officials obsessively watched the case counts. I was changing the manuscript on the fly right up until the submission date.

Fast forward four months, and I have now working through the edits and doing final rewrites. Once again, the pandemic is centre stage. It will not be over by the fall of 2021 when people will start reading the book. Furthermore, it dawned on me that the book is set in May through July, just a couple of months from now.  There is no way things will be back to the post-pandemic normal I had envisioned in my original draft.

The one good thing is that now there is a clearer picture of what pandemic life will be like in a couple of months. Vaccines will be here but may not yet be widely distributed. Many Covid restrictions and protocols will continue. So I set about making adjustments to the manuscript to reflect what I thought would be the reality in May 2021. Police officers and many other essential workers will be vaccinated, but Plexiglas dividers in restaurants and shops will likely remain. Masks will continue to be worn. So each scene had to be analyzed. Activities in the police station like briefings and meetings would not require masks but interviews with the public would. Restaurant patios could not be "packed" and streets would no longer "bustle with tourists".

When characters are wearing masks, most of the nonverbal facial cues are lost. I had to remove all the friendly smiles and tightened lips, and find other ways to convey the emotion. Scowls, furrowed brows, and blinking eyes. Those tics get tired fast! And it is so much harder to recognize suspects when half their face is hidden. Note - this can be useful.

But I still didn't want to make the pandemic too intrusive. It's a mystery story about tortured relationships and murder. I didn't want the reader to be tripping over the pandemic at every turn. It's a fine balance, and I hope by the time the book comes out it October, it won't be too far off base. Time will tell.

Why Writers Need Help

I, Donis, am currently fiddling and tweaking endlessly on my twenty-ninth draft. My books are only finished when they are finally in print and I can no longer get my hands on them. Like Barbara (see her excellent entry, below), I am also a micro self-editor. I want my manuscripts to be as good as I can make them before anyone, even my spouse, gets a look at them. The only problem with this, I find, is that after about the fifteenth draft, I completely lose any perspective I ever had and really have no idea if what I am writing is good or not. Did I make it better when I changed the word understood to comprehended? Is Character A any more convincing as a blond than he was as a redhead? Should the dog really have buried the spoon? Or should it have been the three-year-old who buried the dish. Maybe the three-year-old should have buried the dog and the dish run away with the spoon.

This is why presses have professional editors. There is no writer who does not benefit from judicious editing. Not Steven King, not Gillian Flynn, not Earnest Hemingway, not William Shakespeare. Once upon a time I saw a television interview with a Very Famous Author, several of whose books have been made into movies. This woman is big, I tell you. So big that at this point in her career, she has complete editorial control over her books. I know this because she told the interviewer, “I never let anybody edit my books.”

At the time I had just read her most recent book; a thousand-page tome that rambled around like the Mississippi River and was just as muddy. “Madam,” I said to the television, “you may wish to rethink that position.”

Practically every time I submit a manuscript, my editor points out some flaw in the story that seems so obvious to me that I slap myself on the forehead and slink away to stew in my own humiliation for a few hours. Why hadn’t I seen that gaping omission? In fact I probably created it myself when I removed an entire scene while I was working on draft number twenty.

I have never written a book that came out as well on paper as I envisioned it in my head. But once the book is published, if I put it aside for a year or two before I look at it again, I see it with new eyes. Considering how much I suffered when I wrote the dang thing, I’m amazed at how well it turned out.

Kill Your Darlings

Donis here. Two days ago I turned in my latest manuscript to my editor. I feel somewhat like I’ve been through a long trial and am now waiting for the judge to return with her verdict. I’m a little scared. Will I be sentenced to community service or hard labor? I’m not expecting the death penalty, but you never know.

The first draft of the story came in at 91,000 words! That is way long for a traditional mystery, which usually comes in at seventy to eighty thousand words. So before I sent it off, I picked up my literary axe and went to work. I was able to reduce the word count considerably just by removing unnecessary adjectives and adverbs. Then I removed repetitive descriptions of people, scenery, action. When I go back over a MS, it’s surprising to see how many times I’ll say the same thing twice. Once you’ve said a character is short and fussy, there’s no need to say it six more times. I sometimes forget that I’ve already mentioned some detail over the course of a long manuscript, and sometimes I think that I repeat details because I want to be sure the reader remembers some thing or another. Don’t do that. It’s always a mistake to underestimate your reader.

Removing the detritus and eliminating repetition was easy enough, but my manuscript was still a weighty tome which needed paring. It was time to kill my darlings.

I had to go through and remove all my beautiful, wordy description, all the lovely banter between characters, and all my clever turns of phrase that were delightful and gorgeous and I loved them so...but they didn’t advance the story. I have to tell you that the pain was acute. But the manuscript is at least twenty pages shorter and much tighter. In my heart of hearts I know it’s better, and I also know it could be tightened even further. I do not want the reader to get bogged down in extraneous detail and forget the direction of the story. Or worse, get bored and quit reading.

But I loved my darlings and I didn’t want them to die. This is why we all need a good editor who will look you right in the eye and tell you the cruel truth.

For me, rewriting is the fun part. After the very first draft, my beginnings seldom match the end. Somewhere in the middle of the writing, I changed my mind about this character, or this action, or this story line, didn’t waste time by going back to the beginning and fixing it to fit my new vision. I have gotten caught up in an endless merry-go-round of fixes and never reach the end. I have learned to just keep going until the end and repair all the inconsistencies when I’m done.

As I reread the story, it’s interesting to see how it all turned out, to remember what I originally had in mind and see how the tale changed as I moved through it.

My inner lawyer tells me that I’ll probably be given a short period of hard labor. Anyone who’s ever scribbled a page knows that writing is rewriting. At least I’ve never met a literary Mozart, whose first draft is so perfect that it doesn’t need any alteration. It’s the rewriting that makes the book.