PARALLEL PLOT LINES

The new job has interfered somewhat with my writing schedule. I find myself getting up at six and trying to put an hour in before work. Or writing for hours after I put the kids to bed. Not often though. One upside of visiting the book infrequently is that I get a clearer perspective on what's wrong with it.

One major problem, I have is that I don't spend enough time researching and planning. This week I have discovered the joy of diagrams, plot graphs and pulling apart someone else's novel (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep) to see how it ought to be done.

Something I've always wondered about is how to run two 'plotlines' parallel, then merge them. I mean, do you have alternating chapters? Do you put the same ideas in both stories, or contrasting ones? Can you have close focus POV in both, or does that make it difficult for the reader to work out whom they ought to identify with? Then how do you bring the stories together?

I can't say I found answers to all these questions. What I did do was make a list of chapters and work out which plot line they belonged to. There are twenty two chapters in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Fourteen or Fifteen belong to Richard Deckard (RD), Six/Seven to J.R. The lines are unconnected at first, except that both explore the 'world'. As the plotlines continue, it becomes clearer how the stories will merge, which they do in chapter 19, where both RD and JR appear - though they only exchange a few words. The beauty of this is that for the first time we see RD from the outside, from JR's POV.

Having two POV characters gives different points of view on the world. It isn't a bit confusing. It's brilliant.

The way Philip K. Dick does it is this:
1. RD 2. JR 3-5. RD 6-7. JR  8-12. RD 13-14 JR 15 has scenes with both JR and RD, though they don't meet. 16-17. RD  18. JR  Then in 19. told from JR's pov, RD also appears. POV shifts to RD half way through the chapter. 20-22 RD.

Principles:
It needs to be totally clear which character will be the main character. RD appears first and has 2/3 of the chapters.
POVs alternate quickly at first, then there are longer sequences to develop that character's story without interruption.
The stories' themes merge first. Then it becomes clear that the story will merge. Then it does merge. Though only briefly.
RD contemplates what will happen to JR in the future, but the author doesn't show JR's story beyond the point where he meets Richard Deckard.

Once I'd broken down Androids, I decided to rebuild my own novel on similar lines. I had made a poor choice of storytelling device to skip between plotlines. It wasn't working and I needed something better.

First problem: which character should I choose to tell the story of the secondary plotline? It needed to be someone with access to major events, but not the villain.
Second problem: in its current incarnation, my secondary plotline wasn't a line, it was more of a jumble of ideas and impressions. I had to turn it into a story.

All of this is bloody technical and probably only makes sense to me, but there it is. (There's more but I've virtually written a novel on this already. More later.)

EDITING ON PAPER

I forgot how good it is to edit on paper! I just printed the novel out for the first time in at least six months -got myself a luminous pink biro and covered the novel with pink ink. I've cut out swathes of beautiful description, phrases I loved and it feels great!

Two of the three agents who saw the complete MS of this novel have rejected it, one with detailed comments. The third, thank goodness, hasn't read it yet. I asked her to wait to read a new version and she said yes.

So here I am, editing a new, improved version. I even re-wrote the synopsis. For the billionth time. I've been working on this novel since March 2010, thought it was finished about ten times and sent the outline to almost twenty agents.

I just finished editing. I destroyed ten thousand words!

EDITING THE TONE OF THE BOOK

I decided to go back and do another edit on the novel. Yes, I know I already sent it out to agents and two of them are still considering it. But one of the agents who rejected the complete MS said she didn't like the narratorial tone.

I have been super-busy with work, but have been thinking about this. I wondered if the most recent re-write made the book quite grim. When I found time to re-read it, I realised the main character does seem to have a bit of a thing for wanting to punch his sister. It's a pretty dark book - what with it being about a post-apocalyptic landscape populated by cannibals and a Hitleresque villain. There's not a lot of joy in it.

Today I had a big chunk of free time so I decided to do something about the tone of the book. It's quite a subtle thing to change. Though doing a 'find' sweep for the word 'punch' seemed a good place to start - that and 'blood spattered', 'terrible' and 'horror'.

I put more joy into the book - in the start at least, with more of a sense of wonder at the amazing locations. I've also made my main character gentler and now he hardly ever thinks about punching his sister. I think it works well, though in my experience of my own kids it's not exactly realistic. They're mostly adorable, but do seem to spend a lot of their time punching each other.

WILFUL (STUPID?) DETERMINATION

I have my first, very polite, rejection from one of the three agents who are currently considering Out of Time. Rejection is never pleasant, though I've definitely gotten used to it by now. So at least if I do have a bruise on my head from repeatedly banging my head against a wall, I've been doing it so long now that it seems normal. Which is probably the most positive thing I can say about it!

I have done some new writing lately, though not much on this blog. In the new novel, I've got 22,000 words beautifully polished, so far. The quality degenerates through the current 52,000 word total into segments that I hacked out of a previous version and shovelled into a heap ready for editing. This book, I should say, has seen forty agents (at least) in its previous incarnations. Two agents requested the full MS and in both instances rejected it - one within two days, the other in two weeks. The lesson I think is that in writing, patience, optimism and maybe a bit of wilful stupid determination is required.

WHAT NOT TO DO

Over the years I’ve written novels with no plot and done no research whatsoever. I’ve mixed romance with thriller with satire with sub-lit-fic with kitchen sink. I’ve planned sequels on top of novels that couldn’t even support their own weight.

My advice to you is simple. Do not under any circumstances do any of these things. Certainly do not do all of them in the same novel. It’s a recipe for disaster – aka, the first novel I ever wrote. This is the one I’m editing at the moment.

I spent five years editing Bad Romance – and having kids, which added to the confusion. Each edit added more layers of wrongness. The final draft was a gnarled mass of words that looked like it ought to make sense but didn’t. In the course of time and hundreds of revisions, I must have sent this novel to about forty plus agents. All of them rejected it. Two, in the later stages of editing, asked to see the complete MS – which was exciting – until they too rejected it.

When I’ve finished editing Bad Romance this time, I already know one of the problems I’m going to have. I discovered this recently when reading Miss Snark’s blog. And thank goodness I did. Miss Snark writes that although agents are sent thousands of manuscripts each year, they will remember if you send them the same manuscript twice. And if you do, they will hunt you down and kill you.

WORK / WRITING

Today was my first day at work. It's a proper job - full time and everything. Before this, I stayed at home to look after my kids, and spent some time writing. Once they were all at school full time, I spent a lot of time writing - but only in the day - almost like a proper job in fact, but with no pay and more biscuits and cake.

So two interesting things happened today. I have a day job to bring in actual money, while I pursue my mad hobby. And now my hobby feels like a hobby rather than a job. And I have a lot less time to do it in.

I do think I realised this would happen. I made sure to finish all the novels I'm writing before I started work, as detailed in the blog. Now, I'm sitting on a lot of finished projects (mostly in submission) and nothing to do but wait to hear back. It ought to be relaxing. Certainly it gives me the space to enjoy my new job. It was great today to remember how much fun teaching can be.

But then last night, I just couldn't help myself. I pulled out an old, terrible, tangled novel and now I'm thinking... it could be really great, if only I edited it.

STILL EDITING

I can't believe I'm still editing. I could feel my mind going numb half way through so I took a break and created a contents page. After all that editing, putting my chapters into a list felt like the peak of fun. I got even more excited (relatively speaking) when the new material I'd written meant I had to create a new chapter. The new chapter three is now called 'Heaven'. The last chapter, in case you're curious, is called 'The End'.

I'm not that great at names. In all but the most recent versions of the novel, Frank's dad was called, simply, 'dad'. I think I used up most of my creative energy coming up with the bizarre locations and plot.

LAST GASP

Today, with the last bit of energy and willpower I could summon up, I tried to write my plot outline. It's only supposed to be a page long - which is where the problems begin.

The book I just wrote is full of alternative future and past civilizations, and shifts between different kinds of reality. Getting all that boiled down into 700 words that make sense is unbelievably difficult. Each new version seems to reach whole new levels of of incomprehensible gibberish.

I didn't finish the outline in the end. But I did manage to squeeze out a blurb. But that's probably because blurbs don't generally make much sense anyway.

QUANTUM FLUX

I can't work out whether I'm finished or not. I think I am. Or at least, I've decided to stop writing. I've been hard at work editing for three days solid. This probably doesn't sound like much but editing at this level of detail is one of the hardest parts of writing.

It started when I got comments back from the editor. In essence, this is a list of problems. So far so clear. It's working out what the solutions are that causes the trouble. Then I have to work out where and how to introduce these solutions.

One solution I came up with was:
'demonstrate that the main character is in a state of quantum flux'

This is kind of tricky to do. The novel is (now) 57,000 words long. I have to weave this idea through the entire novel - slotting it into the appropriate places. This wouldn't be too difficult except quantum flux is a tricky idea to convey and I have to do it seamlessly in a text which is already surface polished.

I worked out that I had about seventeen editing problems in total (including quantum flux). Some of them were interlinked. Most of them were concentrated in the ending: but I couldn't only make changes at the end. They all had to be prefigured earlier in the text.

It was impossible to tackle the seventeen problems simultaneously, working from the beginning to the end of the text. I had to do each one separately: starting at the beginning of the novel and working through to the end seventeen times. To make sense of the scale of the task, seventeen times fifty seven thousand words is almost a million (969,000).

So right now, I don't care if I've finished. I don't care if it makes sense. At this stage of editing, it's impossible to 'read' the text. The words are so familiar they don't 'go in'. I'm dropping changes into the text without even reading it. It's kind of terrifying. I have no idea if the changes work. Though I'm really, really hoping they do.