Revising Lexeon

Steve Mancino, an agent who works at Jabberwocky Literary Agency, recommended the book Writing to Sell by Scott Meredith (of the Scott Meredith Agency). The author discusses constructing a story in today's literary environment. One of the key components is The Question.

The Question is the central problem the character has to resolve. Will Scarlett O'Hare find love? Will Mike Hammer catch the bad guys? Will Frodo throw the Ring into Mount Doom? This is what the story is about. If it isn't, you have a problem that needs to be fixed.

Now one of the things any author will experience is that you will put far more in a story than belongs there. This isn't that much of a problem in a short story, but there's plenty of room in a novel. And if you read Russian 19th Century literature when you were at an impressionable stage in your development of a writer, you won't think anything of it.

When I first wrote Counterfeit Line the main problem that prevented the character from resolving the murder mystery didn't happen until the end of the fourth chapter. This was far too late. I described the scene before the crime (chapter 1). I described the crime scene (chapter 2). I described the evidence and the preliminary investigation (chapter 3). I described the investigation as it began to focus on the suspect (chapter 4). And at the end of chapter 4 the detective was thrown through a mysterious gateway into an alternate history.

Way too slow. Way too much that didn't get into the meat and bones of the story. I took it to the Maui Writer's Conference Panama Canal Cruise (a 10-day floating writer's conference). The editor liked the beginning as it set the stage. She was a 'literary fiction' editor who liked style over plot. The author I showed it to shredded my first four chapters. He has published 15 novels of science fiction. I decided he had a point, and began cutting.

Counterfeit Line eventually went from 21 chapters to 16. The first four chapters dropped to two. I rewrote the beginning several times. And I accomplished a lot of the other shrinkage by focusing on what was important to the story. Thus a very nice scene aboard the Royal Yacht went away, as did the essentials of the garment industry in the 1890s.

Now I didn't just up and delete those scenes. I copied them out and rewrote the sections. Don't ever throw things out. First, it helps establish your original version (which may be important in copyright cases). Second, you might need it elsewhere (which is how the third Gina Stone story Body of Evidence led to Cross Time Cop (by the way, I hate that title and would welcome a new one). The scenes deleted from Counterfeit Line (which title could be improved as well) probably will appear in bits and pieces of other Gina Stone stories.

I submitted Counterfeit Line to Steve Mancino, and after some rewriting and tightening, he passed on it. I queried him about Firestar, and he now is looking at that. But he was the one who suggested Scott Meredith's book. I got it, I read it, and it helped open my eyes and change my stories.

Lexeon is the third of the Families War series. The others are Firestar and Setosha, which detail the Families War with the Colandran Empire, and a parallel story Boabdil. The latter was extracted from Lexeon.

Of the three principle books, Lexeon was the most complex with no less than six sub-plots and a main plot. It came in at well over 500,000 words in 38 chapters. Firestar is around 120,000 and Setosha is a bit higher. I was told by a couple of readers that it was like there was a whole second book in there (and maybe even a third). I kept chewing it over, and as Firestar is out to two different agents, I thought it a good idea to see if they were right.

Lexeon starts off with a naval battle in space, but then immediately switches to the planet Boabdil, and an attack on horseback against some people tilling a field. It goes back and forth like this for a while. Eventually it resolves all of the sub-plots, including the one on Boabdil. 500,000 words later.

I asked myself how much of that mass of verbiage was actually connected to the main character, Corey Andersen, and her attempt to defeat the Empire and get the Families kin back. Quite a bit, actually, but some parts were a completely different story (thanks, Colin, Jeff and Mitch). So out came the spreadsheet, out came the whole book, and out came the scissors (the latter being merely a metaphor).

I removed the parts with Boabdil in it, and that amounted to 120,000 words! I have now have the rough draft of a 12-chapter novel named Boabdil. And the story seemed to read without much disjointing. So far, so good.

Then I went through it again, and removed about half of the efforts of a Families secret agent (she'll probably disappear from Setosha, too, and a new book will be born). Right now I am of two minds about whether to remove Edita Macquarrie's attack on an Idenux transfer station and the last fight of Liz Ellia. I probably will, but if anyone had some advice about that to offer I would certainly listen.

Of course I'll have to reorganize Lexeon somewhat, and I have a couple of scenes in mind where Corey gets tempted to 'set things right', the same problems the Romans faced after Sulla, an arc that led to the Principate.

I'm not trying to get the story under 250,000 words just for the fun of it. It's easier to sell slightly shorter stories. We can't all be Tolstoy or Robert Jordan, and have an unlimited word count. To be fair to Tolstoy, one of his characters was Russia, and that country is a big place. Lexeon, being the third of three, might sell just for being a conclusion. I kind of hope so.

So how do I go about cutting from a story? It's a three-step process. First I identify the places. I did this by producing a scene chart. This is a listing of the scenes in each chapter. It contains the chapter number, the scene number within the chapter, where the scene takes place, the principle character in the scene, and a brief description of what happened. Here is an example:
Chapter 5, Scene 1, Boabdil, Corinn & others, Start of The Endless Ride
Step two follows where I find those scenes I want to excise in the main body of the novel and do a cut and paste to a separate file. And step three is where I rewrite the transitions between scenes and look for any odd details I need to clean up.

The latter is more critical than people think. There will be things you left in the main body of the text, information that the characters will have learned that you now have to delete. And then it all has to be smoothed over with a rewrite. And then it has to be run past those people in your writing group, who can bring a fresh eye to things and maybe find where you missed something.

The latter does bring up a question. Is a story ever really finished, at least in the author's eyes? The answer is, no, not really. The author of First Blood commented recently how he saw it on a shelf at the bookstore, opened it at random, and felt the urge to make changes. But you have to learn when to say "Enough!" and decide a story is finished. That's when you've revised it half to death. That's when you send it to an agent in hopes that they'll agree to represent it.

And that's when you move on to the next story, just as I will move on to another subject...tomorrow.