Posted by Jim at January 3rd, 2006

I’ve been rereading my novel lately. It’s not a published novel. It’s the novel I started near the end of college, but never quite brought to a publishable state. I stopped near the beginning of draft three due to a combination of work, children and multiple graduate programs.

You might wonder why I would be looking it over now instead of working on my master’s project. Honestly, I need a break. For the last year, I’ve been either working on my master’s project or avoiding working on my master’s project. I need more variety in what I think about. Also, I think I’m just happier when I’m involved in telling some kind of story.

I’m not going to go into details about the plot. Part of that’s because there are a lot of unsettled details. Part of it’s because I feel uncomfortable describing a work in progress.

I am comfortable mentioning that it’s a contemporary fantasy that makes use of local, West Michigan history. Among other things, I mess around with time travel and the alternate histories that come about when people make choices. That’s really just the tip of the iceberg, though.

If I had to describe it in a sentence, I’d describe it as a cross between the Godfather and Back to the Future.

Of course, I’d only describe it that way to someone more familiar with movies than science fiction. If the person were familiar with science fiction, I’d describe it as a cross between Kim Stanley Robinson’s Orange County trilogy and Roger Zelazny’s novel Roadmarks.

Anyway, I’ve been reading over my second draft and meditating on all the things that have to be fixed in the third draft. I’d probably be going over my first draft too but unfortunately that’s lost to time. I wrote the first draft on an Amiga using Word Perfect 4.2. Needless to say, I can’t open those files anymore (but I’ve still got the disks!).

Whatever the case, the laundry list of stuff that must be changed is very long indeed. Much of the writing in the second draft really stinks–clunky dialogue, scenes that go nowhere, scenes that must be shortened, word choices that make me wince. The only really good thing about the draft is that around two-thirds in, it tightens up.

Suddenly the overlong descriptions disappear, scenes get directly to the point, and the dialogue is okay. I don’t remember when I suddenly figured out where I was going with that draft, but apparently it happened.

Now I’ve just got to rework the preceding two-thirds of the story.

In some ways this fits with my normal way of writing. During the first draft, I tend to have very low standards. Whatever comes out, comes out. I build on that, deleting and rearranging as necessary. With a poem or an essay it’s a lot easier to keep in my head what I’m trying to say. A novel includes so many things that it takes a while for me to understand what I’m doing and figure out which details are important, which aren’t, and how they fit with the overall structure of the story.

I’m thinking that this time around, I’m actually going to outline the various key story arcs. I may also go back and fix things that I think are screwed up before moving on to the next section. I’ve been avoiding that in the past because getting a particular scene right didn’t seem worth it when I didn’t understand the overall shape of the story.

Now I think that I do.