National Novel Editing Month (NaNoEdMo): How many edits do you need?

To everyone still editing for NaNoEdMo - good continuance!

My favourite days were with the terrace doors open, a blanket on my knees, gloves on my hands, watching the snow drift down. Snow and editing go well together. After two months of diligence, I ran out of steam - but I hit my targets. But now I can see I have more to do than I even realised.  

You see, the size of the task multiplies. Unseen loose ends. Writing more from scratch than expected. Though I revisited that raw NaNoWriMo spirit and had a couple of highs as things fell into place. But how many edits will I need? Julia Crouch cites about five. 

Going back to it over and over, like stripping away layers of paint. 

Maybe it's good to decide what the rewrite or edit is for. 

• I think this was the Plot Edit, since you can't finesse the style when the characters' motivations are weak and the narrative doesn't make sense
• Then we might have a Character Edit where we look at motivations and emotions
• Then we might look at Style and cutting the padding and tweaking the poetry.. 

Or is it possible, for some supereditors, to do it all in one writethrough? 

I discovered some of my writing habits. 

1) I'm a denier about plot inconsistency, basically because I'm impatient to get on

2) I combine a lot of different themes. I don't know if there are too many, or if maybe a novel can support that. Somehow I'm drawn to the intricacy of it - but sometimes I read something really focused and elegant and think this intricacy masks indecision

3) I can get addicted to anything - Anything! Even decaffeinated coffee

NaNoEdMo: News from halfway through an editing process

I want to say how it is right now. Just over halfway through the editing process. Just under halfway through my material. A week into NaNoEdMo (National Novel Editing Month). Sweating, under pressure. It was sunny, now it's cloudy again.  

Character doubts

My main character suddenly looks really thin and I don't know her. I read this super inspiring thing - Occupy Steve - on the Office of Letters and Light Blog. Haven't got a hope in hell of occupying my character unless I do some development - don't really have the time to get too waylaid. 

Concept doubts

My book idea suddenly looks totally unsellable. Was I even thinking of whether it would sell? As usual, no. I don't approach ideas like that. I wish I did. I just wrote the only idea I had. I wrote a pitch for Pitchapalooza. That took about 23 hours as well! I'm not sure if it was worth it. In theory, it should help sharpen your plot ideas. I think it did ... It was sooo difficult. I couldn't work out if my idea didn't sound jazzy enough when I wrote it down, or was it just too damn complex for a 250 word pitch? Anyway, it's done now. Maybe I'll be able to pitch it better in a year's time when it's done! 

Other things in the how'm I doing section:

Keeping in touch with friends

Improving - I went into my own island there for about a month. Now I've had some health problems that have jolted me out of it, thankfully. 

Destructive writing habits

I'm alcohol-free!

Caffeine-free!

I'm working on my Toast Problem. If anyone's a specialist in this area, please refer me to them. 

Total hours spent editing since start of Feb: 80 hours

Words edited: 27,000 + pitch written + rereading twice + character work

The first wave of editing: the challenge

Now I've messed around a bit with a magenta pen and some index cards, I have the novel split into 3 parts, each around 35,000 words. It feels good this way, a bit simpler

The challenge 
Edit Part 1 into a state that I can at least share with friends/allow someone to read. Part 1 is currently in 11 chapters, and I've done the first one. 



The deadline
31 March 2013

Target hours
3 hours' editing/writing per day (there are some big gaps), 15 hours per week in Feb, and then during March 50 hours in total - I can log this as NaNoEdMo. By the end of March, starting on 11 Feb, this makes 95 hours. 

The price of failure
If I do 6 chapters or less 
A £75 donation to Manchester United (this is in nobody's interest. Not mine, my husband's, nobody)
Plus no lie-ins at weekends for 2 months
If I do 8 chapters or less
Penalty fare as above, plus no lie-ins for 1 month
If I do 10 chapters or less
Penalty fare

Things I can do to help me succeed: 

• Cooking dinners in advance. If dinner is ready, I can sneak 45 minutes just after the little one's bedtime. 
• Get up early (and therefore, I'll be in bed early too). Then I can usually sneak in an hour before the little one awakens. A breakfast tray ready the night before helps with that one. 
• Print out as I go along. Editing means a lot of rereading, where you are up to. So printing helps, as it makes this rereading quicker. 
• Plan a couple of daytime/weekend sessions to boost the hours and gather momentum

How a child can help you write a novel

Would I do NaNoWriMo again?

Yes. I'd recommend National Novel Writing Month - even those looking after a child. It's a free-flowing writing experience. And you end up with a novel - almost.

What's the advantage of working fast?

• Your Inner Editor can't keep up. That proved to be true. When I knew I was writing tosh, I told myself I wasn't in any state to judge it.
• Best of all, your characters start misbehaving and creating plot for you. Working fast, the writing has a mind of its own.

How did my child help me out? (She's 14 months)

• By being asleep! Ha! I only wrote when she slept, and she kept her routine. (I got up at 6am sometimes too, to get an hour under my belt before she woke up).
• She prevented late-night working. That would have been killer come the next day. In the past, I've always burnt the candle at both ends. Not any more.
• By taking me out for fresh air. She forced me out the house in the afternoons!
• By stopping me straying outside allocated writing times. I wrote in one-and-a-half-hour bursts, which was probably a good thing. With kids, if you have 45 minutes to spare, you don't dick around!
• By making me want to take the weekend off writing and play instead. (I did also do two day-long stints though when C took our daughter out - one the first weekend, which was good to get ahead wordcountwise, and one towards the end when I had too much plot and too little time).
• By forcing me not to work in pig stye. Weirdly, perhaps, to the non-childrearing among you, my main worry before I started was about keeping mess and housework under control. If you're a NaNoWriMo signup, you can read this great post by Tupelo Hassman about mess. I don't really enjoy trying to be creative in a tip so this was a real concern. I cooked meals for the freezer, and ran around tidying and hanging up washing while my husband did our daughter's bath at the end of the day. Had a separate space for writing so I wasn't distracted by it. 

How did I make sure it was a successful attempt?

• This was a real learning curve about setting something up to work out. Chris Baty's book No Plot No Problem was right about absolutely everything. (You can buy it as an ebook too). It followed it to the letter! Hilarious. I'm a nerd, I know. But I wrote a draft of a novel!
• I did quite a few of his suggested preparations, like setting myself penalties for failure, and getting my family primed and ready to support.
• Got myself in a few tidy-up habits to try to make house jobs automatic.
• Reduced my caffeine intake to one large coffee in the morning and a cup of tea after lunch. Sounds trivial but avoiding burn-out and anxiety was crucial to sidestep my usual sabotage.

Is there a downside to working so intensely?

• Apart from needing to seriously edit all that low-rent prose, you mean? Ha ha. Quantity over quality...
• 
  
• I'm always worried that creativity, especially the single-minded obsessional kind (my favourite) can be bad for the health... I'm talking about becoming isolated from the ones you love (hold on minute, aren't people what life is for? Abandoning your social life doesn't make sense); sleep-deprived; cheese-snorting; early-hours wine-drinking; heart-thumpingly caffeinated; self-doubting; nail-bitten; indoors; sedentary. I nearly went down that route. About three times - and that was even after preparing a month beforehand not to drink too much coffee (which, for me, is usually the start of the whole perilous spiral). My husband really helped, suggesting that we put a stop on mid-week drinking too.

It turns out that I still have some work to do on the caffeine front - it'll take as long as it takes. Here are two more things that are helping with that: Self-hypnosis for Dummies and the tips listed here: http://www.wikihow.com/Quit-Caffeine. You can work fast and be alert naturally, I want to believe that.

What do I do now that I've written tons of unreadable prose?

Julia Crouch, lead the way.I'm not going to look at it until after Christmas, but no doubt I'll be a nerd about editing it too!

I'm Laura Eades. Drawing, writing, and sometimes speaking words out loud are my passions. I began my company, The Honourable Society of Faster Craftswomen, to collaborate with brilliant artists to make theatre, audio, and other artworks.

The 'society' is me. It's  also all of the collaborators I'm lucky enough to stay up late with. And it's you, when you are our audience, or because you are reading this now.

Thanks for joining us. Scream if you wanna go faster!