Maunscript Diet

Have you ever had a manuscript gain an unsightly number of pages, so much so that you cringe at the cost of printing it out?

I am usually a short writer. When I started college, I trembled at the thought of ten page papers. Ten pages? Who am I, Charles Dickens?

When I wrote my dissertation and managed a whole 250 (including 25 pages of bibliography and tables), I was flabbergasted. I'd maxed out. That was for sure. Never would I write anything longer. Ever.

And I didn't.

Until...

I started my present WIP. It's about a boy and a dolphin set in late 19th century New Zealand, and I even got to go to New Zealand last November for on-sight research. At that point, the ms was still a manageable 285 pgs.

Over the last year, I think my WIP secretly gorged on adverbs, Anne of Green Gables poetical monologues, and New Zealand scenery because it grew to a whopping 420 pages. A real full figured dame.

Given another era, another economy, another stage of existence in the publishing industry, and it might have been fine. Dickensian (or Botticelli) full, but fine. But it's a hard sell in today's market.

After a lot of thought, and talking with other authors, and speaking with agents, and pretty much hashing until I had come to terms with the inevitable, I put my ms on a diet. A serious diet. No liposuction here. I mean serious, word-counting, shave-off-the-excess pagery reduction.

I started three weeks ago. Being the slightly obssessive compulsive neurotic writer that I am, I'm keeping a "diet" journal. At the end of each day of revisions, I weigh in. The rule is that the ms word count cannot be any higher than where it was at the beginning of the day. I strive to make it a lot less. So far, it's been working. I have successfully shaved 11,000 words off, and I'm only through the first 120 pages.

Oh sweet success. I can almost taste the adverbs.

No, No! Bad writer. Stay away from the adverbs!

See how hard ms reduction is?

Sigh.

Please keep your fingers crossed. Pray to any and all writing muses. Send me parsimonic vibes. My ideal ms weight: 70-75,000 words (285 ms pgs), and I want to reach that by Winter Break. Which means, no adverbs on the side. No waxing poetically about scenery. Cut. Cut. Cut. Snip. Snip. Snip.

And, every once in a while, celebrate the hard won successes.

GLEE!!!!!

Now back to counting words...

There is No Secret Handshake

The jig is up. There is no secret handshake. No magic formula. No deus ex machina for writers.

Aghast?

I was. Next thing you know, they'll be telling us there is no Santa Claus. Yeesh.

Leaving the big red guy out of it for a moment, I have to admit, when I started out writing, I was certain there was a secret formula. All I had to do was figure it out and the bestsellers would flow from my pen. I mean, honestly, it wasn't the craziest idea I've ever had (there have been crazier, like the time I decided I could prove girls are every bit as good as guys and jumped from a bridge into a river after a guy. Don't ask.) So what was it for writing? Writing for exactly two hours each day? Or writing nonstop, foregoing sleep, until I'd birthed my idea? Or if that wasn't working out, how about writing standing up, like Hemingway. Or drunk?

I will shamefacedly admit, I've tried all of these "formulas" out and then some. None of them worked. So finally, I resigned myself to the fact that I'm not clever enough to decode the secret handshake and will have to plug along writing as best I can.

It wasn't until I read Stephen King's On Writing a few weeks back (after four picture books and a middle grade novel, hundreds of school visits, and I don't know how many conference speeches) that I had my "Eureka!" moment. There is no secret formula to writing.

Not, at least, in the way I was thinking. I mean, the big secret is, to write. That's it. Everything else is fluff.

What King showed in his book was enlightening for me, or maybe I really had finally hit that "clever enough" to understand it point. His journey to authorhood, i.e. the early years of his life and what prompted him to want to write, couldn't be more different than mine, or thousands of other writers. It's eclectic, unique, what makes Stephen King, Stephen King and not Stacy Nyikos. His candid, tell all approach to describing his life as a writer made that clearer than anything I'd ever read before.

The thing that separated him from thousands of other writers is stubbornness. He plugged away at writing, day after day, year after year, rejection after rejection, until he had honed his skills - his, not Charles Dickens's or John Grisham's or anybody else's - to the point that he had mastered them.

And then he kept writing.

The best piece of advice he ever got in all those years of struggling and writing was a line scrawled at the bottom of a rejection letter from an unknown editor: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft - 10%.

Okay, so there is a formula.

But that's for revisions.

You Might Be a Writer If...

What does it mean to finish a book? Finite. Das Ende. Basta. Finish.

I've been thinking about that a lot. I just finished a major round of revisions on my WIP, and tomorrow, I finish my 30s. Endings have been up front and personal this week. I've decided, after much contemplation and sleepless nights pulling out my hair as I sweat over revisions - only to realize how much grey has snuck in at the end of my 30s - what "to finish" means depeneds very much on perspective.

Take high school for instance, finishing a book then had soooooooooo many diverse and colorful meanings. If it was Dickens, it meant finally putting myself out of my own misery and buying the Cliff Notes. Anna Karenina - longer than any stint in Purgatory should ever be - it meant realizing I was still reading and would never get the paper I had to write done before the end of the semester if I kept reading, thus coming to a screeching halt about 250 pages from the end, and - if you're reading this Ms. Yadon, I apologize but I was desperate - renting the movie. For Jane Austen, however, finishing meant reading everything the original queen of chic lit novel ever wrote from front to back, twice.

Ah, but for an author?

You might be a writer if, you don't finish books, you abandon them.

I'd love to take credit for coming up with that witty expression of a deeper truth, but it's been around longer than me, way longer. And I don't want to start plagiarizing now. That's a whole different blog. So, it is with a low nod and bow that I give credit to the great Oscar Wilde. It was he who said: "No book is ever finished. It is simply abandoned."

I did not get that as a reader. I finished books, in some way. I either read them to the end, which I did in 99% of all cases. There really are only a handful I've never read cover-to-cover. Two are mentioned above. The other one was Umberto Eco's The Island of the Day Before. There, I've outed myself as a book nerd. And through all of them, read or only partly read, I never got the impression I was abandoning anything.

Then I became a writer and Wilde's witticism took on a whole new meaning. My characters come to life for me. They follow me around. They talk to me in the car. I dream about the places I'm writing about. As I said last week, I have imaginary friends. As the creator of them all, it's hard to let them go when the story is over. Thank God for revisions!

I can stay in a story almost forever if for no other reason than revisions.

It wasn't until I completed Dragon Wishes, though, that I understood the whole abandonment issue Wilde was getting at. My books are like my children. I brought them to life, I fostered them, I made them into who they are. How can I ever let them go? With Dragon Wishes, though, I learned that there comes a point at which I am revising not to make better but just to revise, to stay in the story. That's when I know the time has come. The cord must be severed. The book let loose. Abandoned to its own fate.

The ameliorative? Plunging into another story, a new adventure.

It's the same with this decade. I'm saying goodbye to today. My 30s were good, but they've told their story. My 40s, however, they're a blank slate, a new adventure, luring me: "listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door: let's go."

I think I'll take the plunge.