When I write I have a set of practices that have evolved over the years, habits that are so automatic that I don’t really think about them. I just follow them. One of the simplest ones is beginning with a blank sheet without setting up a standard publishing format—double spaced, Times New Roman, 12 pt., title set one-third space down the page, and more. I just start typing regardless of what I know the manuscript should look like.
And then comes editing. I do edit as I go along, correcting misspellings, poor sentence construction, misplaced modifiers, dangling particles, incomplete thoughts, and digressions. The last are the most obvious parts to get close attention at every stage—in the first typing of every brilliant thought (that dims as I progress through the sentence) and the first read-through (which usually has me gnashing my teeth and cringing in embarrassment). When I print out a draft I’m free with my pen—crossing out long sentences, half of a series of paragraphs, all those darlings we’re supposed to kill.
But something has changed with this book. I’ve never had trouble blackening the majority of a paragraph or even a few pages and hitting delete, though I’m sad to see the fervid description of a newly arrived secondary character disappear. But I’ve always held to the belief that if it doesn’t belong there, wherever that is, it doesn’t belong anywhere. I’m not going to write a paragraph or a scene to fit it in, which in my view will just throw off another part of the story. In effect I accept that the material in question is throwing things off and it’s better to get rid of it. So I delete.
Only this time things are different. I’m copying first and saving to a separate document. Hmm. I didn’t plan to do this; I just found myself doing it. As I go along, pulling out passages that don’t really work no matter how much I like them, I’m shortening what I’ve got, but staying more tightly focused on the narrative. This isn’t a cozy or traditional mystery, so I have to pay attention to sections that are a little (or a lot) different from what I’m used to writing. And committed to this new genre, which seems like psychological suspense, I have less trouble erasing, deleting, removing. So why am I saving these rejections?
I don’t have an answer to that question, but I did have a surprise—for me at least. After several excisions of longish paragraphs, some of which I particularly liked and thought useful if not quite right where they were, I took a careful look at all of them, reading down the chunks of language written at different times and in different moods and for different purposes—description, character development, transitions, plotting. And the surprise was this—they all fit together. I don’t mean they all demonstrated my personal writing style, my quirks and particular interests in the details that reveal character. I mean in that both tone and sequence they made a single body of narrative with some of the connective tissue missing. When I returned to the main work in progress, I didn’t find anything missing. I hadn’t removed anything crucial. Yes, there are passages that need to be developed, but there are no obvious gaps. So what’s happening?
Apparently I’m writing two novels at once—two novels with the same set of characters and location, but different in tone and tension: a psychological suspense and a traditional mystery.
This is weird. The discovery suggests I have the traditional format so deep in my thinking that it’s going to pop up no matter what, and I have to learn to silence it.
This revelation has me wondering about all the passages I’ve trashed while writing, going back to the early 1990s and my efforts to write an acceptable, publishable first mystery. Murder in Mellingham began with a very different opening, and I remember writing numerous first chapters, each one affixed before the existing one until I had three opening chapters over forty pages and no idea what I was doing. Eventually I figured it out, but now I think about all those pages (and all those floppies) lost forever. I don’t know if I’m the only one who cuts and saves and discovers gold in the leavings, but now I have to push myself to focus on the main narrative—the one with bones and sinew and connective tissue and, I hope, coherence. It’s far from finished, so the struggle will continue.
Meanwhile, in the shadows (on another page on my computer) pulses a half-conscious tale that might or might not get enough connective tissue to become a finished traditional mystery. It’s weird.
