More: The Curse of the Underwriter

Happy New Year! Yes, we’re already into 2024. As silly as this sounds, there is one thing I really miss about using WordPress: in the winter, there was a plugin you could get that would add a snow effect to your blog. It was completely frivolous, but it always made me smile.

I really did mean to write a post before this, but schedules never work out quite like you want them to. Not to mention that I got COVID (again) mid-November. It seems to be cropping up all over the place as a few of my friends have been suffering from it. I guess it’s like the common cold now—expect to need a shot every year just to keep it at bay.

Anyway, as a result, my planning kind of went out the window and I’ve been yo-yoing between On Track and Kind Of Behind. However, if I keep at it, I should be done the major edits by end of January. I’ve made a plan to work on two chapters a week, but the ones I consider the Problem Chapters get a whole week to themselves. This doesn’t leave a whole lot of time to work on new stuff (because editing has always taken me an agonisingly long amount of time) but I kind of like being able to focus on this and don’t feel like writing anything new right now anyway.

The biggest problem I have with editing is the dreaded More. When I edit, I tend to print out the problem sections with 2.0 spacing and attack the content with a coloured pen. It helps me to pick out phrases that seem awkward or when I’ve used the same word over and over. When a section needs more work, extra description, or to be completely re-worked, I simply write More. I did exactly this in 2021 when I realised that I needed to edit the manuscript again. I read through everything and made some preliminary notes. That’s what I reviewed when I started seriously working on the draft again in November.

But the problem becomes: more what? Seriously, some of my notes are just “More”. Did I mean I need more description of what is happening? Did I mean we need to go into more detail about why this character feels this way? Does the scene just need more to feel complete? More than a year later, I really have no idea what I meant with most of my notes, so I kind of had to start the edit from the beginning.

I have always had this problem, though. While some writers write thousands and thousands of words of description and dialogue, I have the opposite problem: I tend to underwrite. This likely stems from how difficult it is for me to write productively. Sometimes, writing is fun and it’s easy for me to get through, but other times—most of the time—it’s honestly a struggle. I wrote a bit about this in one of my older entries about focus. When I hit that wall of "ughhhh do not waaaannnnt! (╯︵╰,)”, I try to get through the actual writing as quickly as possible.

This became very obvious in my earlier drafts of Keystone Calamity. My beta readers picked up on it immediately. For the first half of the book, the pacing felt fine and the story was complete enough, but right after a certain dinner party, the story zipped along at a lightning pace. A lot of important scenes and moments ended up rushed and breathless without a chance for them to sink in or hit home.

As a result, I spent the most time editing the latter half of the book. I split up whole chapters and added tons of new scenes for extra characterisation. My first draft of Keystone was 26 chapters (and an epilogue) while more recent drafts clocked in with 31 chapters (and the epilogue)—and those were all additions near the end of the book. The second half of the book feels right.

All that work to flesh out the middle and end has led to the reverse problem: the first half of the book feels far too quick and empty. Not only that, but it shows. When it comes down to it, the first half of the book isn’t as full or complete as the latter half. What does it need more of? Pretty much everything.

So that’s where I’m at right now. Thankfully it’s not as dire as previous edits; I’m mostly bolstering what is already there, with some reorganisation of information. It still takes longer than I think it would and there is a lot of me staring off into space, trying to figure out how I want to fix something.

Anyhoo, a new year brings new planners! I’m so excited about them! I think my next blog post will be less whiny and more about my favourite tools of the trade! I write by hand and on computer, so it might be fun to share some of the ways I stay organised and the pens I use. Stay tuned and thanks for reading!