Revision Diary: Zeno’s Paradox
So, funny story: back in late April, I threw out the two months of work I’d done on Burned and Buried and pretty much started over.
I’d been making progress on the new draft, but I was frustrated with it. It felt like the story was somehow becoming LESS mine as I rewrote it. More boring, more conservative, less surprising, less layered. There had always been aspects of the original draft that didn’t work, and the solutions were all paper thin and not fit for a publication. I could tell there was a good story in it, but I didn’t have the skill to fix them; just paper over them and misdirect attention elsewhere.
(A writing mentor once commented that my writing style is generally so clean that it’s easy to not notice how I use it to cover over structural issues, and WHEW. I felt that one in my bone marrow.)
The problems in Burned and Buried went all the way down into the roots of the story, to the structure and some of the basic elements of plot and character. The solutions both of us proposed weren’t working for me either: getting rid of this character or that arc, simplifying or fleshing out certain aspects of the worldbuilding. The revising process felt like I was playing Jenga, and the whole novel was teetering on the brink of collapse.
So I did something that was probably not super smart, and knocked it over myself.
“WHAT IF I MADE THIS A ROADTRIP NOVEL?” I shouted to Nibs at one point.
She gave me a look and said, “Talk to your editor.”
“Or I could make it a horror-comedy.”
The look got...lookier. “Talk. To. Your editor.”
And my editor—both incredibly smart and probably very experienced in working with drama-llama writer types—gave me a few pointers and then gave me her blessing. So out the window that story went, and I started my rewrite from the beginning.
(Well, almost the beginning. The first chapter has somehow barely changed at all since I first wrote it.)
This revision is not any easier than the first attempt, but it’s so much more interesting. It won't be a roadtrip novel, but it does have a cool, old, slightly magical car in it. It’s definitely weirder, and more trans, and the character arcs are more defined and more compelling. It’s just HARD. And it feels like I’ve spent nearly five months working as hard as possible, and not really moving forward at all.
Zeno’s Paradoxes are recounted in Aristotle’s Physics, a couple of mildly mind-bending propositions about the nature of motion and stillness, and how inextricable the two states can seem from each other. I think they’re more the territory of metaphysics than math these days, at least from what I can gather, but they also make for great allegories for the frustrations of the creative process. The arrow’s paradox states that motion (or progress) is an illusion: in each instant of time, it’s at a standstill. Similarly, progress along any linear path is always divisible; before you can get halfway somewhere, you must get halfway to halfway, and so on and so on. (“This description requires one to complete an infinite number of tasks,” Wikipedia helpfully points out, which makes it possibly the BEST description of the revision process.)
The experience of working on a long project is frustrating, because it’s hard to measure progress in linear increments. It’s often a process of adding more and more layers rather than moving down a path, going back over the same territory again and again. Am I moving? Am I standing still? Writing one scene uncovers information I know I’ll have to write into earlier scenes, which might necessitate rewriting THIS scene eventually. Have I even gotten halfway to the halfway point? How can I tell? Where even am I? Why would a loving god create such misery?
News
I’m taking a break from Twitter for my mental health and so I have less distractions while on deadline. Is that news? It feels startlingly novel for me. But I am a little more active on Instagram as a result, where 95% of my feed is cat pictures.
I’m currently taking freelance editing for short projects (<25,000 words for now, open to longer projects in August. Hit me up via my website’s contact page if you or someone you know is interested!
What I’m watching/reading/playing:
I’ve been helping a family member move for the past ten days, and said family member tends to run true crime shows as background noise. So I’ve spent a lot of time yelling at the TV about rhetoric and framing and narrative. The one exception I found has been A Crime to Remember, which leans all the way into dramatic re-enactments, providing a narrator through which the story is focused. It’s still an awful lot of cop-aganda (LOVE when a story in which the Chicago Police torture two suspects becomes a focus on how THE MEDIA is at fault), but it’s slightly less garbage than Murder Comes to Town or Wicked Attraction.
I also spent two months playing the Mass Effect trilogy, and I just wish to romance ALL the aliens. It’s frankly unfair that I can only woo one at a time.
KJ Charles just finished up her excellent Will Darling series with Subtle Blood. If you've ever wanted to mush together the aesthetics of Jeeves and Wooster with the class consciousness of Chandler and ALSO make it gay? You would probably dig this book. (Yes, I know that J&W parodizes the British upper class, but you know what I mean. Read KJ Charles, is the point.)
That's it from me this week (probably this month). As always, if you like my work and want to support me, the best way to do that is by buying, borrowing, or reviewing my books, or tossing a couple bucks at me on Patreon or Ko-fi.
Be good to yourselves, and be good to each other. <3