- by Tara Maya
Section One Finished
I completed Section One of current WiP. It’s about 18,500 words, which is right on target.
I completed Section One of current WiP. It’s about 18,500 words, which is right on target.
I’ve been editing my NaNo “novel”, which mostly consists of trimming
and tightening. I put novel in scare quotes because it’s really on the
first section of the novel.
A lot of cellulite is landing on the cutting room floor. (If only it
were as easy to shed pounds as to shed excess novel weight!) My hard-
won 50,000 words is now down to about 16,500. (This is because for
NaNo, when I re-wrote a chapter over with different scenes, I just
included all of the versions in my word count, but now I am discarding
the lame early mis-starts.)
There are also a few scenes that need filling out. (In my NaNo
original, I just wrote “Insert some sort of cool kung-fu fight here.”)
I expect the whole section to be about 18,000 words when finished.
This is good, because it’s just the first 1/5 of the book. If each
section is about 18,000 words, the final book will be about 90,000
words. I hope that’s not too long for YA novel, if indeed this book
*is* a YA novel.
An Anonymous commenter offered a suggestion on the fraternities issue. Why not look at the names of animal groups? Pack, flock, herd…. What a terrific idea! I wanted a word that suggested strength and dignity — who would willingly call themselves a flock, implying they were all a bunch of sheep? Pack is too werewolfy, so that was out, but something predator-related.
I decided to try out “pride”: they view themselves as warriors, “lions” of the human world.
Thanks, Anonymous.
Cheating paid off. I hacked out a rough draft just over 50,000 words for NaNoWriMo. Of course, it’s awful, and only the first part of the story, but I’m pretty happy. This is actually the first time I’ve won NaNo, though not the first time I’ve written 50,000 words in two weeks. Both of my romance books were written in about two weeks.
Now that I have the draft, I can see a lot room for improvement. I’m not sure it even begins in the right place.
I posed my “two many brothers” question (ha ha) on the Writing Workshop chat list and received some feedback. Of those who piped up, the general consensus seemed to be that, yeah, two pairs of half-brothers IS one pair too many and I should drop the more minor pair of characters, or steal their plot arc and use if for the hero.
Good advice, although it won’t work in this case.
Anyway, I brainstormed some more and came up with new ideas.
My character is back to being an only child. But, he is a member of a fraternity. Is there a word for fraternity which includes both boys and girls?
The Thesaurus just gives me: “Brotherhood” (obviously no improvement) and “affiliation, camaraderie, club, confederation, congress, federation, fellowship, frat, guild, house, kinship, order, sisterhood, society, sorority.”
I don’t want to use “secret society” because I use that in Dindi a thousand times. I want a word with more meat to it than “camaraderie”, less Lord of the Rings than “fellowship”, more class than “gang”, more youth than “order” and more substance than “affiliation.” “Kinship” makes no sense. “House” is weak, although perhaps it is used in English for what I have in mind. Guild isn’t quite right but I’m leaning toward it by process of elimination right now.
“Sodality” is cool, Maybe a tad too exotic?
November is never a good novel writing month for me, and having a baby hasn’t made things any easier. Nonetheless, this year, as in other years, I am driven by an absurd desire to enter NaNoWriMo. Needless to say, when one enters ten days before the end of the month, and can’t even commit those ten days to full writing, the chances of winning (writing 50,000 words of a new novel) is drastically reduced.
This year I decided to cheat. Instead of a new novel, I resolved to take the time to do a rewrite of an old one. Now, when I say re-write, I mean every single word is changed, almost every single scene is changed and just about the entire plot is changed. So in essence, it IS a new novel. One might then ask, in what sense, ISN’T it a new novel? Actually, there are two critical areas where I don’t need to start from scratch — the characters and the worldbuilding. I spent years of my youth lovingly crafting the layered histories of this world. My characters have spent years in therapy, being analyzed from every angle. That’s great, because I don’t have the time for such detailed crafting these days.
I am contemplating one major change in relationship between two of the characters. Originally, they were unrelated, and I’m thinking of making them half-brothers. This way they can have the whole sibling-rivalry thing going in addition to their other rivalry.
The only problem is that I already have a pair of sibling-rivalry-obsessed half-brothers, two minor characters. I love the story arc with those two, so I’m not going to remove it. It was the fact that their story arc was eclipsing in interest the more major story arc of the hero that alerted me I needed a stronger emotional pull for the hero.
But will that make for too much redundancy? Two sets of rival half-brothers — is that overkill? Can I use one set to contrast and highlight the problems with the other set?
***
I made one other major change to the book.
It’s more a change in how I think about it than a real change. Namely, I’ve decided I might try to sell it (both to agents and to editors) as Young Adult. Young Adult is still hot as hell right now, and the success of Twilight is likely to boost editorial enthusiasm for it in the near future. One shouldn’t slavishly follow the market, but I’m not in real danger of that. The topic of my book is quite unlike vampire-teen-noir or Harry Potter wizard-schooling or children-find-a-portal-to-a-magic-world. (All of which I’ve heard agents complain they have too many wanna-be knock-offs piling their desks). In fact, it may be too untrendy to interest either readers or agents. Then again, maybe I could start a new trend. It would make a great video game…
I’ve also contemplated doing to this book what I did to Dindi, cutting the original manuscript into pieces and flushing out the pieces into shorter books. (The original manuscript was 180 words, and even allowing for the gross over-writing of a high-school author, that’s unlikely to be thinned just by line-editing alone.)
I have to work on the age of the protagonists. It would be nice if they were more or less young adults themselves for most of the series, but in this extended/dismembered version of the story, I have them start out the first book as eight and ten, for about twelve chapters. Too young, too long? Or do they then grow up too fast if I skip them to sixteen and eighteen by the next twelve chapters?
Mainly, I still need a story arc to replace the weak one surrounding the hero. I’m hoping if something comes to me, that everything will fall into place.
I did just get an idea for the end of the first book.