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RE-WRITE IS WORK

6/24/2014

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I think I see what the hardest part is now. I’m working on the second novel again this week. People ask and I tell them it is written. It is, except for the re-write—now that it’s back from my friend and copy editor, and the small fixes are done.  This week I take on the big fixes.

Authors, real authors, authors with agents and publishers and all that, tell us the re-write is hard slogging. They also tell us it has to be done. After all those words, so lovingly committed to ‘paper’, become a novel, pruning is still necessary. 

There’s a perspective I discover today as I chop. In some cases whole chapters are on the cutting room floor, to be replaced by a couple paragraphs. I find that in much of the first quarter of my new novel (The Shallows of Jabbok) I wrote what I needed to write in order to bring myself into a story that I really want to tell. (I hope the novel doesn’t still have too many sentences as convoluted as that one.)

Now I have to trim to lead you into the main story—you who will read (hint, hint) the book. I have to get it down to a lead-in that will keep you reading and still understand how these people got themselves into this story.

In a nutshell – I had to write all I did in order to write the rest. It wasn’t wasted time, I remind myself. Now I have to concentrate on somebody else, someone who picks up the book. What will keep her/him engaged beginning to end?

When we get to that finished point, we’ll publish. Not before then, but pretty soon, I think.

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    I retired from active ministry in the United Methodist Church in 2012. Then I sat at my computer and wrote down the novel that had been churning in my head for many years, and published "I've Seen Dry" through my Wheatgrass Publishing imprint. Now writing had become a nice habit, so I do it every day. I completed my second novel in the spring and published in July 2014. 

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