On Editing a Novel-Length Manuscript

As I mentioned yesterday, I am within days of e-publishing a novel. It’s about the decline and fall of the Inca Empire from 1470 to 1540, told from the perspective of one of the last survivors of the Inca nobility. I’ll be blogging about this quite a bit for the foreseeable future, and today I thought I’d talk about what it’s like to edit something of the length and complexity of a novel-length manuscript.

There’s an excellent quote by James Michener that I came across the other day. “I’m not a very good writer, but I’m an excellent rewriter.” For me, that’s the whole thing in a nutshell. People think finishing a manuscript means you have written a book, but nothing could be further from the truth. Completing a first draft is like having a baby, but you still need to bring that kid up right before you trust it to interact with the wider world outside of your supervision. If writing is procreation –with all the fun and pain that goes along with that– then editing is the long and tedious but ultimately rewarding process of parenting.

First, a Hard Truth

Let’s start with the complete first draft. You have hundreds of pages on a computer or on a stack on your desk, and there is a powerful temptation to call that ready to go. You are already so far ahead of the people who dabble and daydream about achieving what you have just accomplished. After all, it has characters, conflicts, memorable scenes of triumph and tragedy, and a satisfying heft to it. What more do you need? Well, for a start, I guarantee you it should be at least ten percent shorter. Twenty percent would be even better.

“Ouch!” I can hear you protest. “This is a finished work! Everything I’ve written is there for a reason, Geoff, and wait until you read this part about–”

Nonsense. The sooner you accept the fact that a first draft is an overwritten, meandering, amateurish piece of sputum –as Nabokov so graphically called it– the sooner you can roll up your sleeves and get ready to untangle the spaghetti-esque plotting and bleach out all that purple prose. You have to throw it into a pot and boil out all the sap. William Faulkner told you to, “Kill your darlings,” and it is going to be a long and bloody process. Somewhere buried under all that copy there is a story about people suffering, and it needs to be excavated out from under all that unnecessary dross you piled on top when you had to cover the blank page with all that ink so it would stop staring at you.

Okay, I’ll stop belabouring the point. Let’s get into specifics…

I will be e-publishing my first novel, Inca, within the next few days

Hello everyone,

As I mentioned back in January, I’ve been researching how to go about e-publishing my manuscripts. I’ve been writing seriously for more than eleven years now, and it is long past time my efforts find an audience beyond a small circle of friends and family. I’ve fought the good fight to find a home with a traditional publisher. I even had a literary agent for a couple of years, but prospects are bleak for new authors who hope to see their efforts sit upon a bookstore shelf next to their heroes.

I have a dozen flattering rejection letters admitting that my work has a readable quality, but economic reality has tied the hands of acquisition editors.  The Jersey Shore’s Snooki can make the New York Times bestsellers’ list, but I am not as safe a bet. So be it. Rather than bemoan the barriers facing my work in the twilight of the old way of doing things, it’s time to embrace the coming dawn. The future is e-publishing, and I’m ready to take the plunge. My first book will be available on Amazon for $.299 within the next few days.

How much do you know about the Inca? Everyone has heard of them, but a sad truth is that most people can do little more than mention them in the same breath as the Aztecs and the Maya. A South American civilization every bit as impressive as the Romans disappeared less than five hundred years ago, and today the true story is all but lost to us: In just three generations the Inca built an empire three thousand miles long and five hundred wide across the second highest mountain range in the world; within forty years of their beginning, rebellions, smallpox, political purges, a civil war, and finally the arrival of the Spaniards left so few of the Inca nobility alive that very little unbiased and coherent information was ever told to their conquerors and recorded for posterity. While working my way through the conflicting histories I found myself wishing that someone had written about the decline and fall of the Inca from their own perspective, as Gary Jennings did in his masterpiece Aztec. After a great deal of research I have written the book I wanted to read.

Inca is the life story of Haylli Yupanki, a man who served three generations of emperors only to watch his whole world shatter and shatter again, leaving nothing behind but his memories and his pride. Hiding in the jungle with the last of the unsubjugated Inca, Haylli transcribes his memoirs from quipus –the Inca’s writing system of knotted string– into Spanish with the help of a captured priest. Beginning with a childhood of privilege and a youth spent as a fugitive from Imperial justice, through a successful career as the Inca’s most powerful bureaucrat, to an old age spent in the ruin of his life’s work, Haylli was present at all the important moments of his people. Through his words he hopes their story will be remembered.

Fans of historical fiction will not be disappointed with this book: It’s a sprawling tale covering more than seventy years to include almost everything we know happened between the zenith and nadir of Inca power. More than two-thirds of the characters are based on real people, and every corner of the empire is visited over the course of the narrator’s life: The plot has court intrigue, forbidden loves, triumphs, tragedies, rivalries, heroes, monsters, coups, prophecies, plagues, treasures, sex and violence –all before the conquistadors arrive to change everything forevermore.

You’re going to be hearing a lot about this in the weeks and months to come. I’ll keep you updated.

Best regards,

–Geoff

Now Available at Amazon.com and Smashwords.com!

Update on NaNoWriMo 2010: My First Two Chapters

Hello everyone,

As I mentioned back in November, I gave NaNoWriMo a try for the first time in 2010. I didn’t hit 50,000 words in 30 days, but I had a lot of fun trying. I posted regular updates to my friend’s blog at the time, and now I’d like to bring some of what I produced to Faceintheblue.

By no stretch of the imagination is this a finished work. I tried to merge my love of historical fiction with my recent appreciation for Kurt Vonnegut’s style, and I ended up with something in dire need of revision. That’s not to say I’m not happy with what I produced.

My concept was a simple one: What if someone had lived for ten thousand years and knew he was about to die. What would he have to say? What if his death was facilitated by a physical incarnation of death, and the protagonist came to love the harbinger of the end before the end of his life’s story? What would that look like?

It was too ambitious a project for thirty days. Maybe I’ll continue it as an ongoing project. I am resolved that this will never be something I formally seek to publish. In the meantime, here are the first couple of chapters of my work. I plan to publish more in the near future.

Enjoy!

On E-Publishing

A friend of mine recently sent me a link to this blog, which makes a powerful contribution towards the ongoing argument that self-publishing –e-publishing– is not only the easy way to put my work in front of readers, but also the better way to do it. It’s a seductive siren song, but does that analogy extend to include to tempting me onto the rocks?

I’m going to be honest, I am slowly coming around to the idea that this might be a direction I have to explore. Not anytime soon, mind you, but that’s because of my stubbornness. It’s the way the world seems to be going, and even someone who writes historical fiction can only ignore the prevailing winds for so long before he thinks about adjusting his sails accordingly.

Pyrrhus and Hannibal: What Great Enemies Taught Rome

I’ve had a lot of fun reworking two of my old university essays so far on this blog, one on the South African War and one on the foreign policy of John Diefenbaker. I’m pleased to say they are among my most popular posts so far, and so I’d like to continue posting content like this from time to time.

As I’ve mentioned before, I know anything I put up on the internet is free for someone to use for their own devices, so I’ve taken out the footnotes and bibliography, rendering my essay much less useful to anyone looking for a quick copy and paste. My old homework really isn’t meant to be an academic shortcut for today’s students, but if anyone wants to use it as a good introduction to the subject material available at your library, I’m happy to help.

Today’s essay is about the greatest non-barbarian enemies of the Roman Republic, and what they contributed to the eventual success of the state they sought and failed to subdue through force of arms. If memory serves, it received a very high grade indeed. I also had a lot of fun writing it. Enjoy!

Pyrrhus and Hannibal

What Great Enemies Taught Rome

Pyrrhus and Hannibal were the two single greatest threats to the Free Republic of Rome. They invaded Italy, smashed consular armies, turned vassal city-states against their Roman overlords, and killed thousands of legionnaires in the service of the Senate and People of Rome. Despite victory after devastating victory, they accomplished nothing. They could not defeat Rome, nor even leave her humbled. These two men whose aim was to destroy Rome became some of her greatest builders; they taught the Romans that even a total tactical defeat meant nothing strategically as long as Rome was prepared to endure.

My Top 10 Twitter Tweets of 2010

Hello everyone!

I wish I had posted more this month: I’m afraid between my recent move into a glorious new apartment and killing my last netbook with a careless spill, this hasn’t been a blog-friendly December. Still, I have recently joined the 21st Century in acquiring a smartphone and creating a Twitter account. This foray into microblogging has been even more fun than I was told, so I thought I might mark the last day of 2010 with my Top 10 Tweets, out of a total of 260 so far.

To qualify, a post has to not be a retweet and not directed at any particular individual. I also narrowed down the finalists to cover all four months of my participation. I imagine this will be a much more difficult process in the future, and so you can look forward to a ‘Top 11 of 2011′ and a ‘Top 12 of 2012′ and so on until either this blog or my involvement in Twitter dies out.

Enjoy!

Update on my quest for a new literary agent

Hello everyone,

As I mentioned in my earlier post, my quest to replace my last literary agent continues. I just received another lovely personalized rejection letter. Far from being discouraged, I have to take this as the compliment it is meant to be. The publishing industry was never an easy one to break into, and modern economics have not been kind to lengthy first novels. Getting a personalized rejection letter like this –and this time the agent specializes in historical fiction– is both rare and flattering. I’ll keep plugging away, but in the meantime I wanted to share.

I’ll be trying my hand at NaNoWriMo this year

Hello everyone,

As part of my endeavours to get back into the habit of writing regularly, I’ve signed up for NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. It’s an internet community project where thousands of people around the world try to write a 50,000-word manuscript between November 1st and November 30th. Last year’s contest saw 165,000 participants, more than 30,000 of whom succeeded in crossing the word count threshold by midnight at the end of the month.

Because of the limited time frame, the emphasis is on getting words onto (virtual) paper, rather than polishing a well-rounded, carefully editing work. The idea is to inspire creativity, without worrying about the end result. I expect to write tens of thousands of words of dreck, but I’ll have fun doing it, and that’s the main thing. Normally my genre is historical fiction, but in a format like this I hope a stream-of-conscious approach inspired by Kurt Vonnegut might see me through to the end. I don’t want to give away too much at this point, but I have a hazy idea for a plot involving a man who has been alive since the last ice age meeting and falling in love with a physical incarnation of death. It will definitely be a departure from anything I’ve done before, but it should be an enjoyable experience all the same.

Wrimos, as we are apparently called, keep in touch through the website, blogs, and hopefully meet up in early December at bars all over the world to commiserate and swap war stories. In that spirit, a friend of mine has set up a blog, Stranger Than Truth, and I’ll be submitting my content there, here, and hopefully on the NaNoWriMo website as well. My profile on the site is also called Faceintheblue, so I should be easy to track down; I encourage anyone reading this who is also doing NaNoWriMo to add me as a buddy. A community is only as rich as its members, after all.

I also encourage you to follow me on twitter here, as I’m bound to complain heartily over the course of the month, and everyone likes to hear colourful rhetoric in the place of thoughtful prose from time to time.

For anyone who’s interested but not already involved, you can sign up anytime to add your name to the roster and browse the forums. Perhaps we’ll fail spectacularly together, but I suspect we’re going to have a lot of fun doing it.

Good luck to you, to me, and to all of this year’s Wrimos. Cheers!

Update on My Novels, and How to Write a Query Letter

Hello everyone,

Many of you know that I’ve written two novels, both historical fiction. One is about the decline and fall of the Inca Empire, told from their own perspective, and the second is about the Zulu Kingdom in the latter half of the 19th Century. For almost two years I have had a literary agent representing me, but in the end it didn’t amount to much: I have a number of lovely personalized rejection letters for my Inca book, but no book deal.

I rewrote my earlier Zulu book, pretty much line by line, but when I recently gave my agent the manuscript to try and sell in addition to the Inca novel, he admitted he just couldn’t get my work published: His clientele is predominately non-fiction –as is most of the publishing industry– and while he was trying to expand his still young practice into fiction through my work, in the end the combination of the poor economic climate in the publishing industry and his own lack of contacts hampered our ability to get my manuscripts into print.

I am not discouraged. Honestly, this is probably the kick in the pants I need to get my work into the right hands to move it forward. It’s true, I would have preferred to give my former agent more time to see what he could do with two very long and difficult to publish first novels instead of one, but I can see where he had run out of steam. He wasn’t ever going to make any commission from my work, so he let me go. That’s fine.

If I am to move on to greener pastures, this time I’m going to make sure my new agent deals predominately with fiction and has a special passion for historical works. I’m happy to say as of my writing this blog post that my Inca book is already under consideration by an agency representing my favourite living novelist. I’ll be sure to update you all as to how that progresses.

So how does one find an agent? Why do you even need an agent? I’m asked that a lot, and as I’m going through the process again right now, I thought I might as well blog about it.

Diefenbaker’s Foreign Policy

I enjoyed reworking one of my old university essays for publication on this blog last month, and so I’ve decided to do so again. This time my subject will be the foreign policy of former Canadian prime minister John Diefenbaker.

Oh, I know: Canadian History, what dreary stuff. Balderdash! Canadian History is boring when it’s taught in a boring way. I took a couple of courses in university that were taught with great fire and enthusiasm by a professor I deeply admire. His passion was obvious and infectious, and his memory for obscure details and stories from Canada’s past was astounding: Several years after taking his courses I ran into him in the halls one day, and he remembered I was a descendant of Empire Loyalists. Hundreds of students had come and gone through his classrooms in the interim, but he remembered that. It impresses me still.

Anyway, I wrote this essay for one of his classes, and I’ve always been fond of it. As I mentioned in April, I’m aware that anything I put up on the internet is free for someone to appropriate, so I’ve taken out the footnotes and bibliography, rendering it much less useful to anyone looking for a quick copy and paste to solve their looming deadline problem. My old homework really shouldn’t end up being someone else’s easy way out. That’s not to say any students reading this aren’t welcome to use this essay as either a source, or perhaps as a jumping off point to go to their school’s libraries and find the monographs that support my arguments. I’d be very pleased if that were to happen.

For non-student readers who feel like taking a mental stroll through one of the more interesting and convoluted ambitions of one of Canada’s most interesting and convoluted prime ministers, read on and enjoy!