NaNoWriMo: Editing

I seem to be very unusual as a novelist.

From everything I hear and read about other novelists, it seems that people have a hard time writing briefly. Most commonly people write many, many extra words and need to trim dramatically.  A complete draft is 100, 000 words for them!

I am exactly the opposite.  My natural style is extremely brief: short sentences, to the point, nothing flowery.  What this means is that I am able to take a huge idea and write a complete draft that’s 40,000 words.  It’s ridiculous.  That draft isn’t any good and most of what’s wrong with it is that the pacing is far too fast, important concepts and moments are not given enough weight, and there is more telling than showing.

For those who don’t know, the “Show, don’t tell” writing adage means that certain parts of a book are just summary of something that happened and other parts are a scene playing out exactly as happened. You need a balance in your book, but much, much more scene showing than telling.  Reading a whole book in narrative summary would be torture!  So the difference is:

Telling: Catherine introduced her nephew to Kyle and the two really got along well.

 

Showing: Before Catherine could even finish opening the door, her nephew was darting past her into the house, looking for the box of toys she kept for him.  Kyle was waiting nearby and Jimmy stopped short seeing the strange man.  The two examined each other for a moment, then Kyle said, “Do you like trucks?” and Jimmy nodded cautiously.

Anyway, that’s awful, but you can see the difference! Clearly from this example, showing takes up a lot more words than telling does.

The prevailing wisdom of NaNoWriMo is not to do any editing.  Because taking the time to edit is a waste, but also because if you’re editing the theory is that you’re losing word count. For most people that would be true, but not for me.

I usually have a first draft of around 40,000 words and then I expand it during editing to 65,000 words or so.  That’s the longest book I’ve written yet, but I’m looking forward to breaking that with Parallel Loves and getting at least 80,000, maybe more. Since Parallel Loves is told from four different points of view, there’s more room for words than in a story about just one person.

The first book I ever tried to write (I wrote it between the ages of 16 and 18) ended up very short in the first draft.  I actually went through it and added a complete sentence in between every single sentence in the draft and it still read too fast!

So for me, I will probably be editing during NaNo.  I will start out writing something for each of the scenes of my outline, then I’ll go back through each one and try to expand and explore and describe more.

Here’s an example:

Original as written on the first pass last week…
Trent tried to keep his head down at work. All the other men had served in wars, but when Trent had gone to sign up with his brother when they were teenagers, he was deemed too small. Even his ability to study hadn’t counted for anything. Technically his job involved moving papers around, making sure the correct supplies got to the right army base.
Though few, there were jobs that weren’t connected to the military. The kinds of jobs Reece had been trying to get for the last ten years. Trent chose to work in an office where he was regularly ridiculed so that he had access to the army libraries. In some other worlds he had seen open, public libraries and research was available to everyone. He had seen so many interesting and amazing things in his illegal travels to other Earths.
No one watched him too closely, since they all did more interesting jobs and didn’t have any desire to find out what he did. He stood up from his desk, put a pencil and piece of paper into one pocket and walked as casually as he could towards the stairs. The further down he went, the fewer people he passed. Deep in the dim basement, the books were stored. Very few people ever consulted them.
Before even beginning to look for the subject that brought him down here, he spent several minutes just running his fingers lightly over the spines of books. He breathed deeply of the dust, paper, and glue. He walked through the stacks, eyeing the numbers on the spines. Though he had been using the parallel universe device for months, there was still a lot he didn’t know or understand about travelling between these dimensions.
One thing he knew for sure, no one from Talia’s world should have been able to see him.

What’s wrong with it?  Well, the most obvious thing is that it’s almost all telling.  If the men ridicule him at work, why don’t we see it? Watch some examples of how they treat him?  I can edit this to get more word count.

Then again, there’s this perspective on it: Kristen Lamb

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