Moving on
Posted: August 18th, 2010, 9:29 pm
No, not from here. (I just joined here. Too soon for that.)
Anyways.
The love of my writing life, the darling words of my creation, has been the novel that I started developing and writing when I was in high school. (I'm in my 20s so it's not been terribly long.) Through high school and much of college I didn't write consistently, if at all. I set it aside because it felt too derivative. But then I hit on an idea to get rid of the worst offenders. I set out to re-do the mythology, and bits of world-building. Then I began a fresh from scratch rewrite. At last, after 8 years, I wrote "The End."
And then I started trying to revise. And I realized how much work it would take to make the book saleable. I wasn't scared of the work. I mean, I'd written a novel in the intervening years. (Granted a not very good one.) I had a master's degree. I knew work and I could handle it.
What I was afraid of was losing my favorite characters. Despite a propensity for reading almost exclusively YA books, my voice and the stories and characters that become most real to me when I write is not YA. To make the book YA would mean losing all the characters that I adored most.
My heart was no longer in the story. I couldn't lose the spirit of my book. (At least as I saw it.)
So I put it away and focused on the next book. It was tough. But I did it. For a while, as I was writing my third novel, my mind would stray to that last book. I had to force myself to lock the thoughts away. And yet my mind would not let me accept the fact that the world might not ever get to know these characters I had lovingly toiled over for so many years.
Then a couple months ago, I got an idea that might be the saving grace for that second book. It was going to take a lot of work, but if it meant saving my darlings it was worth it. I put off enacting my plan until I finished the third manuscript.
Yesterday, I finished the outline of the written first draft. I'd worked on it for weeks and it was finally done. Each scene painstakingly delineated and laid out by setting, characters, and events.
95 pages in all.
I had it printed and bound, complete with a spiffy cover page on green cardstock. After picking it up from the printer's, I spent last night and today going through it, slashing through the unnecessary fluff, and color-coding the important bits from the cut scenes that might need to be incorporated elsewhere. (Or highlighting the bits that could be turned into their own plots or developed further in any way.)
And now, I'm not so sure that the work is worth it. I don't know that I'll come out with a better manuscript that will be any closer to a sellable point. I knew going into it that it might not work. But I was never fully prepared to deal with that reality. Part of that included never calling this project what it really was. I called it my "top secret project," never its title that people I knew had known it by. I never talked details. Just that I was outlining. I knew that if I'd been too open about it, it would just make the heartache more acute if the project never proved to be more than a last-ditch effort to save a floundering story.
How do you decide when it's time to move on? How do you tell when a manuscript just isn't worth it, no matter how in love with the characters or other elements you might be? How do you definitively shut that lock on the door to that world, that story?
Because I'm not seeing the light at the end of the long, long revision/rewrite tunnel.
Anyways.
The love of my writing life, the darling words of my creation, has been the novel that I started developing and writing when I was in high school. (I'm in my 20s so it's not been terribly long.) Through high school and much of college I didn't write consistently, if at all. I set it aside because it felt too derivative. But then I hit on an idea to get rid of the worst offenders. I set out to re-do the mythology, and bits of world-building. Then I began a fresh from scratch rewrite. At last, after 8 years, I wrote "The End."
And then I started trying to revise. And I realized how much work it would take to make the book saleable. I wasn't scared of the work. I mean, I'd written a novel in the intervening years. (Granted a not very good one.) I had a master's degree. I knew work and I could handle it.
What I was afraid of was losing my favorite characters. Despite a propensity for reading almost exclusively YA books, my voice and the stories and characters that become most real to me when I write is not YA. To make the book YA would mean losing all the characters that I adored most.
My heart was no longer in the story. I couldn't lose the spirit of my book. (At least as I saw it.)
So I put it away and focused on the next book. It was tough. But I did it. For a while, as I was writing my third novel, my mind would stray to that last book. I had to force myself to lock the thoughts away. And yet my mind would not let me accept the fact that the world might not ever get to know these characters I had lovingly toiled over for so many years.
Then a couple months ago, I got an idea that might be the saving grace for that second book. It was going to take a lot of work, but if it meant saving my darlings it was worth it. I put off enacting my plan until I finished the third manuscript.
Yesterday, I finished the outline of the written first draft. I'd worked on it for weeks and it was finally done. Each scene painstakingly delineated and laid out by setting, characters, and events.
95 pages in all.
I had it printed and bound, complete with a spiffy cover page on green cardstock. After picking it up from the printer's, I spent last night and today going through it, slashing through the unnecessary fluff, and color-coding the important bits from the cut scenes that might need to be incorporated elsewhere. (Or highlighting the bits that could be turned into their own plots or developed further in any way.)
And now, I'm not so sure that the work is worth it. I don't know that I'll come out with a better manuscript that will be any closer to a sellable point. I knew going into it that it might not work. But I was never fully prepared to deal with that reality. Part of that included never calling this project what it really was. I called it my "top secret project," never its title that people I knew had known it by. I never talked details. Just that I was outlining. I knew that if I'd been too open about it, it would just make the heartache more acute if the project never proved to be more than a last-ditch effort to save a floundering story.
How do you decide when it's time to move on? How do you tell when a manuscript just isn't worth it, no matter how in love with the characters or other elements you might be? How do you definitively shut that lock on the door to that world, that story?
Because I'm not seeing the light at the end of the long, long revision/rewrite tunnel.