Revision Season #6: Halfway There
Crying in desk chairs > crying on the floor. Reports from the edit-despair-edit cycle & the Minnesota State Fair. Plus: student subscriptions! Free coaching! Peaches! Self-congratulatory checkmarks!
Hi Friends!
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I’m fried from a family trip to the Minnesota State Fair so this will be a short(er) one. I didn’t realize what I did there till I’d done it so there you have it, in bold. Having celiac means my fried food options at the fair were fewer but I did have a gluten free corn dog and cheese curds, don’t you worry1. Those two were consumed at 10:30 am. There are no meal times on fair days. There are very cute bunnies raised by 4-H kids and a lot of chocolate chip cookies smashed into the ground and cotton candy atop lemonade and a man yo-yoing to Holding Out For A Hero and so much more. It’s a genuine delight.
Meanwhile, back in revision land…
What I’ve Done
Edited chapter 4 and 5. My novel has 10 chapters and so this means I am HALFWAY DONE. Reaching this point feels a bit like this ride which no one in my crew went on (this year; my cousin Justin2 did last year, the brave soul). This year, Justin and my sister-in-law Jodi and I watched it from below, each of us marveling at the combination of screams: joyful, terrified, and the impossibility of distinguishing one from another; I like to think it was a mix in every body up there. I did not go on any fair rides—my stomach cannot take it, though I have always loved a midway; see this short story of mine from a while back that features one—but I find it moving that people seek these experiences of flying and soaring and tumbling, that rides exist simply to defy the limits of our gravity-bound bodies for a bit of fun, even if your idea of fun is terror.
Annotated chapter 6, on an airplane. The combination of landing turbulence and racing to get it done before I touched down in Minneapolis nearly made me puke (see above), but all good.
Changed a few names! One is an easter egg related to source material, the nature of which I can’t share just yet, but definitely made me cackle when I figured it out.
Wrote a new section. As I’ve mentioned before (?have I?), each chapter contains 4 sections. Three are from the main characters, and the fourth one is told by characters mostly external to the main action of the story. These sections are usually around 1000 words and are written like flash fiction, a contained very short even for short stories story, like this. Despite this brevity, these sections give me a lot of room in the novel to go wider than the deliberately tight setting of the three main characters’ lives and worlds. I’d been bummed to discover the one I had set in place for this chapter (5) didn’t work at all in the novel but wow was it fun to write a new one. These sections always overlap with a main character, so they give me a lot of insight into who those characters are outside of their points of view. It’s been too long since I’ve written anything totally new. It felt invigorating. And then…
I struggled, again. Chapter 5, which I had thought a section of was, in my notes PRETTY SOLID OVERALL was not pretty solid overall, and especially not in the opening movements. When I sat down to the actual edits, I had one of those why am I doing this at all moments. I did some editing, then despairing, then more editing, envisioned the kindness of the readers I was giving it over to. Tried to move through and move on. I told you we’d reach the point where I didn’t love my book so much. Here we are. Well, I love it still, as a whole, I just don’t love how it makes me feel right now, and don’t particularly like some of its parts. I did not magically solve it, I just let it be kind of meh, again. It’s hard to see problems and not know how to fix them, and to have a crisis of confidence in my ability to fix them on top of one about whether it’s worth fixing at all, which sounds dramatic but can take me out on any given day. I suspect there is something here in my fear of getting to the “finished” stage of this book, even if that is still far off. As I’ve said here before, I’ve let go of selling that last novel, but the closer I get to the reality of selling this one, the more I understand I have not let go of the pretty shitty process of not selling that one and the accompanying crippling fear of a repeat performance.
Cried about the above, in my desk chair one afternoon. When I cry on the floor, things are really bad. Yay for still being in the chair while crying, I guess?
What I’m Doing Now/What’s Ahead
After I send this, I’m staring down the barrel of the opening section of chapter 6, and like the cursed section of chapter 5, it’s not pretty. I strongly suspect solving this section will take a lot of time and throw off my schedule, and that’s okay, a thing I’m saying to me as much as I am saying it to you. I last looked at it on the plane, and it makes me feel like the hour we spent at Hunt and Gather, a very fun and chaotic vintage store in Minneapolis, as if I have to build something coherent out of puppets and sign lettering and antique china while avoiding creepy dolls and taxidermied animals and haunted clothes. I believe in me?
Since folks have been asking, what’s ahead ahead: finishing the next 5 chapters. Sending to my first readers (my agent Barbara + two friends). Taking their notes, which will result in at least one other round of revision, probably more, including sending to other readers. After however many rounds it takes to be “done” as determined by me and my agent (mostly my agent, who are we kidding), the book goes to market aka out to editors to read and hopefully buy. This is where the last book got stuck. If this one makes it past that stage, it’s a solid 18 months-2 years till it’s out in the world. Have I mentioned this is a long process? Have I mentioned you can support me in this process by buying a subscription to the newsletter?
What I’ve Learned
I have a whole other set of annotation language for edits, different than for my first set of reads (detailed here). Some highlights of my margin notes, with their usual punctuation and capitalization.
THIS✓✓ (never one checkmark, always two; forever so damn proud of myself)
YES ✓✓ (see above re checkmarks, and these are really fun to write)
integrate: Typically this means work backstory into scene, usually the one that comes before. A weaving process, essentially.
earlier? : Nothing ever seems to need to come later.
[need?]: I feel like these particular brackets indicate a certain shame that I left whatever it is in the draft, even as I believe deeply in shameless scaffolding for drafts. And no, I never ever need the thing in the brackets.
TIGHTEN: Stop rambling, woman. The short story writer in me lives to compress a few paragraphs into a single perfect-ish one.
What I’m Afraid Of
Crying on the floor.
Religion of Office Supplies Report
PSA: Don’t take Optiflows on airplanes.
Where to Find Me
Opening my books for September for coaching, manuscript reads, MFA applications. Details here.
Working on my thank yous to paying subscribers. They’re pretty special this year if I do say so myself.
Digging to the bottom of my suitcase to unpack Jamel Brinkley’s new story collection, Witness, which I bought at Minneapolis’s Birchbark Books owned by none other than Louise Erdrich. Minneapolis has excellent bookstores.
Eating vegetables, rehydrating.
Seek the thrills your stomach can handle.
Talk Soon,
Danielle
In case you’re wondering, my favorite thing to eat at the fair is oddly a grilled peach with yogurt and pie crumble. I think about it in the in between times.
I told Justin I was gonna talk about him a bit in the newsletter and he sent me this text which made me very happy; great minds, etc.: Also fun story, I used to end my Tumblr music blog posts with “Talk Soon”