Big Mac Wednesday

Warning: I don’t often write blogs about writing, and this one is full of anal details and stuff that will make no sense unless you’re me. Buy yourself a Big Mac and get over it.

I’m editing something that I began writing in September 2006, gave up after 50,000 words and went back to 4 months later after my trip to Japan, where I finally figured out how to save it. There were a number of problems I faced during the early stages of writing. I was desperate to write something, anything, and began with the opening of a book that had no real direction or idea. The next day, the beast that I’m now working on began, based on an idea I took from one episode of a tv show that I had thought about during film school (Big Mac time). I wanted this one to be a short story because I had a lot of energy and it wasn’t all sucked up by the other story, which was going quite slow. A week later I discovered that I was writing 2 books simultaneously, each at 2,000 words a day. After a month that burnt me out, and I had to give up on one of them. I didn’t like it, it wasn’t going anywhere, but I somehow managed to rescue it.

The first real attempt at editing was during my 7 week stint in Melbourne in early 2008, but I didn’t get very far. I hate editing. I either obsess over trying to find the right way to say something or completely miss the point of what is important and what isn’t. I think the real problem is that I’ve had 20 years of writing experience and almost none with editing.

What’s just surprised me now is that I found an old document I had written up chronicling the editing process. I began with 147k words, had edited chapters 1 – 14 (out of 34) and from those had cut 20%. I then gave up editing for some reason and *completely forgot that I had even started*. There was always this nagging feeling as though I’ve read through this before, but surprised myself just now. I’ve gone through the first 20 chapters and have hacked away another 17% on stuff that was mostly polished in the first place. Furthermore, I have notes written to work on chapters 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 and 20 again, which I find interesting because those are the first-time edited chapters. By the look of things, I may end up cutting 35,000 words from something that was just 147,000. It’s not exactly like the abridged version of the Count of Monte Cristo, but I found it interesting to go over what I had noted before. Obviously I didn’t do a very good job on the first go, which is making me paranoid this time around.

The aim is to have this mess finished by Sunday, but it won’t happen. I’m probably out tomorow, will meet up with my aunt this weekend, have to clean up before Andy’s arrival, so it’d be rough to get it all done in time. Still, could happen. And yet, I still feel as though I need to polish it again to punch up the dialogue and wording. I won’t be surprised if the first draft is simply getting the whole story onto paper, the 2nd a hack and slash for the sake of moving things along quickly, the 3rd to make it snappy, and maybe even another. And chances are I’ll go over the first 3 and last 3 chapters when it’s all done to get them pretty damn good (I hope that a good opening will let the reader forgive me for a crappy middle, and a good ending should make them forget about the messy stuff that had just happened). PLUS I expect to go through the first 3 and last 2 paragraphs in every chapter (see the aforementioned reason).

If Andy asks why we aren’t travelling in March, this is why.