Under Desert Stars   Elen síla lúmenn’ omentielvo

In conversations with other writers, I often find myself in disagreement regarding a particular aspect of the writing process. Many, perhaps most, dislike the work involved with revisions and editing, seeing it as a relentless, grinding chore designed to fuel self-doubt. You see countless memes in the social media expressing, in cartoonish grotesquerie, the fear and loathing often invoked by the process of editing. For me, the very opposite is true. The hardest part of the fiction-writing process is creating the basis of the plot and the characters to start with. I don’t outline, because fiction doesn’t come to me that way. I grope my way forward, figuring things out as I go. “Pantsing,” say some, as in writing by the seat of your pants. I prefer the phrase discovery writing. Whatever you choose to call it, this phase is always hard work, and rarely easy, but it’s work that must be done to get me where I want to be.

What I most look forward to is what comes after, that process of self-editing and revision that unfolds after that rough draft has developed a beginning, a middle, and an end. There’s some discovery writing still to come, but it grows from what’s already there. Part of the joy of writing comes in those bright epiphanies that occur as I begin to realize the true potential of the tale I’ve told.

Some books take longer than others to reach this point of revision. My current work in progress took a long damn time to get there. For a while, I feared it never would.

I expected the third book of the Children of Rost’aht tetralogy (Heir to Rost’aht) to be a challenge. The story takes place at the same time as Book Two (The Best Laid Plans), and I needed to make sure certain details lined up just so. News from elsewhere (events in Book Two) needed to reach the characters in Book Three with a degree of timing that made sense. I’ve never tried such a thing before, and although the concept sounds simple enough, it didn’t prove to be as straightforward as I’d hoped. And that’s an understatement. My usual discovery writing approach to a first draft proved poorly suited to the task. It felt at times as if I were riding a bicycle over rough pavement, while always looking behind instead of ahead. Time after time I was drawn up short by the realization that something had been revealed that the current characters could not know, not at that point. Just as often, I sailed past something that they really should have been aware of, if their actions were to make any sense.

And then there were the external distractions of this past year, coming into focus while I worked on Book Three. As mentioned in the previous entry, I was puzzled by a dramatic fall-off in book sales, infuriated by the theft of several titles by trainers of chatbots, and dismayed by a stark reminder that eBook piracy is alive and well. I was riding downhill quickly, looking backward, and hitting pot holes. It’s impossible to maintain balance riding a bicycle that way. It doesn’t work any better while writing a story. Needless to say, the discovery writing phase of this book did not proceed smoothly, or without a few spectacular crashes.

It took months longer than usual, and what I finally ended up with was a mess. At some point, the usual pattern of discovery simply unraveled, and some of the “chapters” I wrote were wildly out of sequence. I did not always think of necessary plot elements until well after I passed the point where they were needed. So I just wrote what occurred, when it occurred, with the vague notion of moving bits around to correct placement, after the fact. But my first attempt to do so dissolved into chaos.

At a writer’s group meeting, a few months after the time I would normally have sent the manuscript off to the editor, I shared my tale of woe. In the conversation that followed, someone made the point that an outline at the start might have kept any of this from happening. A moot point. Any time I’ve tried to do an outline for a work of fiction, it’s automatically become discovery writing, with a fully written first draft as the result. And I did, in fact, have a draft, albeit a really bad one. But what at first seemed an entirely pointless observation turned into a true lightbulb moment. Why not turn the mess into a collection of very short chapter summaries and reorganize them into a sort of outline, after the fact? Surely it would be easier that way to see the big picture, rather than taking on the entire thing at once? This idea emerged from the group conversation, and the consensus was that it might be worth a try.

I agreed and went forward with it. Each of the so-called chapters I’d devised was given a number and a short summary. I then spent a lot of time making copy and paste maneuvers, guided by those summaries, and eventually had everything lined up properly. Heir to Rost’aht existed – sort of – its plot ordered, and missing parts glaringly obvious. And then I did the same thing for Book Two, realizing only then that an after-the-fact outline of that book would provide a useful guide to the necessary order of events. No surprise – I found mistakes in the development of Book Three’s plot through this second outline.

It all worked out in the end. I was able to take the existing material and relocate or delete anything that rendered the dual timelines contradictory. I was also able to plug some gaping plot holes. In a sense, I rewrote the rough draft into a first draft, one finally suitable for revisions. Now I can dig in to the part that makes it all worthwhile, the revisions that put life and color into the plot and characters I’ve created. For me, this truly is not the greatest chore involved with writing fiction. What I did to reach this point was the hard part, and especially so in this unusual case.

There’s a moral to this story, best expressed by nature writer Ann Haymond Zwinger, in her book The Nearsighted Naturalist: “If anybody says writing is an easy task, don’t ever buy a used car from him.”