Editing ~ Phase One

While I'm still feeling ambivalent about editing my novel, yesterday I took a stab at starting. (Starting is inevitable, right?) My first editing task was not difficult. I went with my initial idea of pasting one chapter at a time into a new document and only focusing my editing on that particular chapter. One may think, well, that's easy enough, except I'd never broken my manuscript into chapters when I was writing it, so decisions had to be made. 

I kept the average word count for chapters in mind, but also looked for "endings" and "beginnings" when deciding how to break the chapters down. One can't be a slave to word counts; one of my chapters is only about seven hundred words, but it felt right. If I change my mind later, fine. Nothing can't be undone.

My novel's opening is still not perfect. I tried everything to make it right, beginning with ditching the very long back story, although it wasn't truly back story, but more of a chronological telling of the tale. Except it wasn't intriguing. When a reader is just settling into a story and they don't even know the characters yet, a whole long narrative about the indignities a band suffers isn't going to resonate. While it's important to show why my main character quit her band, maybe readers would like to get to know her first. So, I've started with her pulling into a truck stop in the middle of nowhere. That action is now interspersed with brief snippets of what came before, as she thinks about what landed her in that particular spot. Not ideal, but it's now at least more interesting. It still hurts to have trashed a whole scene, which was quite entertaining, but ruthlessness is the name of the game.

Aside from reworking the opening, I found that the first few chapters were a breeze to edit. There's a reason for that ~ those are the remainders of the novella I'd previously written, and I'd already edited that to death. So, while I was tempted to pat myself on the back, the truth is, I barely had to edit those sections because I'd already done it.  (Idiot.)

It's easy (for me) to tell where I picked up the story, because everything after that point is kind of a mess. Leah has not even left Chance yet, but things have grown muddled. Not muddled in that the events don't make sense, but because the writing is far less polished. This is where it gets tricky. This is where the real editing begins.

The few notes I bothered to take when I was listening to the novel's readback all pertain to issues that are about to arise. 

A big issue I've yet to resolve occurs while she's still living in Chance. And it's dumb and inexplicable that I chose to write it this way. So, she's offered a label deal by a man who happens to be on vacation in the area and sees her band perform. Here's how her thinking goes:

• She decides she'll accept.
• She is getting ready to tell her mom about the offer, because she thinks it's always been her mom's fondest wish.
• She learns in a roundabout way that, no, it's not her mom's fondest wish.
• She then decides to turn down the offer.
• She sees something in town that upsets her.
• She accepts the offer.

This wouldn't be so bad if she was weighing whether to accept or not, but she turns on a dime. There has to be a better way to show her ambivalence. The strange thing is, I knew she was always going to accept, because her move to Nashville comprises the bulk of the story.

Then there's the fifth bullet point to contend with. What she sees in town that upsets her so much that she rushes to her phone to accept the offer is her former flame moving into a new house with another woman. Except she already knew their relationship was over; she'd even gone to see him at his shop and his reaction was less than welcoming. Is it simply seeing the "new woman" that sets her off? Was she still holding out hope? No one (meaning me) knows. If she was still holding out hope, it might have been nice of me to mention that earlier.

It boggles my mind why I wrote it the way I did. 

So, as you can see, my first shot of editing optimism is about to vanish. And I know what else is coming. 

I suppose it is good to get the easy part out of the way, though.