Polishing with a crowbar

I'm gradually figuring out how to edit.

I had the (altogether unreasonable) expectation that I would go back to The Slow Palace and find some scratches that needed to be buffed out, maybe a headlight that needed replacing, but, all in all, something driveable. Turns out the frame needs realignment, I've thrown a rod, whatever it is that happens to engines — can you tell I don't drive? — all of which left me feeling pretty discouraged. It felt like I'd done a lot of work to finally arrive back at square one. I had to write the whole book over!

That's all bunk, of course. The questions I'm banging my head against now are very different than the ones I was headbanging the first time I wrote this, and that only feels like a lack of progress because the fundamental activity is still headbanging. Then, I didn't know where I was going, and now I do; I just need to figure out exactly where I need to place my feet to get there. I'm no longer trying to build the road while I'm walking on it. All the choices about theme and symbolism and background that felt so arbitrary and thin are settled now in my mind, so I can concentrate on structure.

This is the process I think I've settled on:

1. I print out a chapter and read it through, cringing frequently.


2. I retype it from the printed page, trying to knock the structure and blocking into shape without worrying too much about word choice — this is the "crowbar and sledgehammer" phase. I'm fixing inconsistencies in naming, cutting off little side-trips that I know will never go anywhere, incorporating the fixes that came to me since writing it the first time, working out the nitty-gritty choreography, making sure everything points toward the end of the book.


3. Once I have everything happening the way it needs to, I print it out again and focus on prose — word choice, pacing, flow, vividness. This is the "tweezers and scalpel" phase, and it's the part of editing I actually enjoy — partly because at the end of it I have something I can feel proud of, but partly because I like the process of closely focusing on a few paragraphs without trying to hold too much else in my mind. I'm breaking up dense descriptive blocks by interleaving them with character bits, I'm selecting better adjectives, I'm adding a comma or a paragraph break. In the process of making these fixes, I try to add as few words as I can, and delete as many as I can.


4. I move on to the next chapter.

It's a more arduous process than I was hoping it would be, but it's finally beginning to produce results I'm proud of. Now that I know what I'm doing — in particular, now that I'm no longer trying to do steps 2 and 3 at the same time, and getting frustrated because I'm failing to polish with a crowbar — I hope the pace will pick up.

I should be finished in 2033.