Any novel that's written in a month can be edited it one, too.

My plan of attack is simple: write it again. I usually have to do that with any fiction I write since the story rarely comes out the way I expect. I find writing to be a process of discovery, and the story that demands to be told is only rarely the one I want to write.

So, when I get to "The End" and read it over, I need to go back and write the whole damn thing over so that the beginning, middle, and end all point to the same thing. As an example, I had no intention to make Kicker a love story, but Nelva shows up on page two as another guy's date and, much to my surprise, and Chester ignores all my careful planning and chases after her.

Everything I write is better if I write it again. The second time through, I know what to talk about and, instead of worrying what happens next and throwing out ideas to see which get developed, I can focus on language and on making the writing enjoyable to read. The lines and sections that I like I just type back in and that takes hardly any time at all.

My way of doing this is to print out the first draft, delete it from my computer, and then read a paragraph or so and write it over.

March 1

I have notes aplenty after having read and thought about my novel. A handy thing is a calendar that I marked up with which chapters happen on which days. This will save me all that annoying "was it one or two weeks ago?" questions. I have some date-related lines in the text and it never hurts to have them accurately reflect what's going on.

The biggest problem, and I'm doing my best to avoid thinking about it, is that the story spans Thanksgiving and I never mention that at all. Worse, it falls right into a crucial (YMMV) part of the novel, when Chester's feeling ostracized by his family and is moaning about not seeing anyone for weeks. There's no way the Atkinson's would miss this holiday, so I can't just explain it away.

Anyway, that's later. Today I re-wrote Chapter 1. Notable changes from the first draft include making "usher boy," the guy whose date Chester steals, the best man, Roger. There's no reason to have two characters doing the work of one, and this makes their later meeting that much more intense.

Also, Nelva's relationship with Roger and Vince is brought up (she works with them). This makes the later chapter, when she again shows up with them, more likely.

Other than that, just wordsmithing.

March 2

If yesterday was a breeze, today was a nightmare. I got stuck on page two. I wanted to bring in four elements:

1. Nelva's job (so I could use those clever insurance fraud lines)

2. Introducing Chester's job

3. Chester's history with animal scars

4. The type of work he does

No matter how I tried, it never came out smoothly. This is what, for me, re-writing is all about and why writing is so hard. I know what I want to say, but that's entirely different from getting it on the page.

After several false-starts, I got something down, but haven't read it again. I'm sure that when I'm done with the whole thing, I'll be putting K in the margin a lot (my symbol for awkward).

I actually used one piece of advice I pass along to everyone else: The Ten Deep exercise. When stuck for a fresh way to replace a cliché, take a blank sheet of paper and begin writing new similes or metaphors. Damn if it doesn't work.

March 15

No, I haven't been keeping this up-to-date.

I was going along pretty good, pumping out about a chapter (2,000 words) a day, until I saw a link on the website to one of those "ten rules for writing" things. I checked this one out and a few of the rules were ones I'd never before heard of, including one about not using the "to be" verbs (is, was, were, am, and the like). I do that some, and I panicked. The author of the list is right, they do make for flat sentences. As she points out, they merely predicate existence, not any sort of action.

I decided to eliminate them entirely from the chapter I was working on, and it took hours and days to complete it. I'm not sure it's better, either, since I had the suspicion that the rhythm and flow of the original may have been lost in the process. It's a suspicion because I haven't yet gone back to read what I wrote, but I do know that I was working on the sentences individually, and that's always a mistake.

I wrote the author of that list, and, no, she didn't mean to get rid of them all. I thought it might be a fun challenge, along the lines of a lipogram, to attempt a novel without ever using one, except for the last line. That sounded fun, but right now I'm torn between dashing through the second half of my novel, so it's all seen at least one pass, or laboring on as I have been and getting fewer chapters completed, but perhaps done better.

So, yeah, I'm about halfway through the chapters, but not halfway through my work. Since I'm only rewriting Chester's chapters now, I'll be about two-thirds done when I get to the end.

The getting rid of the "to be" exercise may have been helpful. I'm using many more strong verbs, but I'm not sure that's how I want to write this. I liked the colloquial language before: I thought it made the world approachable. I guess I'll look at it when I'm all done and see how much different the novel reads.

March 27

Another problem has developed. In addition to that pesky tendency of mine to overuse is, was, am and similar "to be" type verbs, I've recently learned my efforts at interior monologue suck. I can't recall using much interior stuff in the past, but Kicker has a lot of it. Leaving aside the issue of "overuse," I've had to devote a lot of time to writing the passages of interior monologue correctly.

Some of it is easy. It's the work of a moment to delete the attributions and change This looks infected, I thought to This looks infected. Child's play. No problem at all for me to cast Chester's wondering about everything into questions, either (I wonder if this is infected should be written Is this infected?).

No, my problem is with all Chester's thinking that I consider "active." I'm not sure if they should be fixed, but my hunch is that I'm making excuses and rationalizations. Is I think about how she looked in the sunlight? the kind of thing I can leave alone? I have tons of lines like that, and changing them all will make writing this novel a lot like ... work.

Also, when re-writing the first half of the book I wasn't concerned with either the "to be" issue nor the "I think" one. So that will all need another pass, just to fix those weaknesses.

...sigh...

Oh, and there's no way I'll be able to rewrite the entire novel in fifty hours. I'm nearly done with Chester's chapters, but haven't done even one of Lotty's. True, his part is larger, but I'd figured on doing a chapter a day and it's taking far longer than that.