9/29/10

The Tiny Voice

(Book banning soap-box may, or may not, continue tomorrow. Depends on the mood...)

Remember those glorious 2000 words?

I liked them, a lot. Or I told myself I did. Inside, there was this little tiny voice that said, “That could be better. A lot better.”

I tried not to listen to the tiny voice, because, well, these words were one of my 'darlings.' I mean, how wonderful for her to cause a grand fire, burn down half the camp, and then get rescued by the daring and dashing Daniel? Pretty wonderful. (Yes, it gave me more plot holes than it filled, but hey!)

The tiny voice got louder yesterday when I opened the file. I was in a cozy little video editing room, surrounded by quiet only interrupted by the hum of computers, editing some video (my other...talent, I guess you would call it). I had hours of uninterrupted time on my hands. And the not-so-tiny voice said, “This is good, but it's not what you want. You want something better. No, you do not need to wait for your agent to tell you that and then work it out with them. You need to work it out now.”

Do you know how many words I was looking at cutting? Four thousand, eight hundred and nineteen.

I hemmed. I hawed. I considered how sick I was of this story and how I wished I could move on to other things. I considered how awful I would feel if I quit this story after spending ALMOST A YEAR exclusively on it.

I deleted 4819 words. :'(

And I wrote new ones. And the new ones beat the old ones BY A MILE. There's no more fire and no more rescuing. There's just a scene that I've been building towards that I assumed would be boring. But it's nowhere near boring now! Dramatic. Angsty. Sweet-and-romantic-that-quickly-turns-dark. It's beautiful. (And also fills a lot of those plot holes.)

I'm still a chapter behind where I was, but it's okay. Where I am in this story is so much better than where I was. Happiness!

Total deleted words for this draft? 14,412. Dude, that's half a novella.

1 comment:

Jessica Bell said...

I hope you saved the deleted stuff! You never know when you might be able to use them!