I finally finished reformatting and doing preliminary editing and rewriting for Resolutions, and brought the word count down to a bit under 72,000. Thank God. I estimated it was somewhere around 85,000-90,000 when I first pulled the six files off of MacWriteII. At least I had an easier job of reformatting this one because the first draft was handwritten and I had the original to compare the second draft to, in case I had a hard time figuring out where a misplaced text block was or went.
All the stupid stuff that was in there for no good reason was scissored out. It feels so liberating to take out the trash, like a demonstration of the fact that you know you’re so much older and more mature now than when you wrote it. You don’t feel beholden to keep everything as it was. You know you can take out pointless, inaccurate, and embarrassing things in your first drafts. It makes the entire book stronger. Now, to later go back and see if I can take anything else out, or rework some things so some of the plotlines (esp. Elaine’s creepy, calculating step-by-step suicide plot) make better sense and seem more natural. Honestly, the way I resolved that one was straight out of a Beatrice Sparks book. Even if Elaine just got in too deep in a creepy, misguided obsession, and wasn’t suffering from real depression, you still can’t tie everything up with neat hospital corners and act like everything is instantly peachy again after someone tries to kill herself and very nearly does die!
At 15, I didn’t really understand very well the concept of having a plot. I knew the story in my head, but I didn’t get that it had to develop in a certain way. Up until I entered the second major phase of working on my Russian novel, in November ’96, I suffered not from being a bad writer but from being a less than great plotter. Even my first WTCOAC book, Proud to Be a Smart, which is never being published, isn’t badly-written so much as it’s badly-plotted. All the first drafts of the books in the WTCOAC series are like this. A lot of stuff happens, and there are stories dominating each of the (then-eight, now seven) books, but they don’t really go along according to a natural beginning, middle, and end.
At least by the time I was writing the first draft of Resolutions, I had advanced beyond my writing style of the early Nineties. A lot of the events in this book are related and lead to one another, and set up future stories for the coming books in the series. It’s not like everything just happens for its own sake. But some of the scenes were in there for no apparent reason, and didn’t advance the story one iota. I totally took out the goofy Hungarian girls coming to Elaine for help, and one of them blathering on and on about past life memories that seem more like dreams and wishful thinking than actual past life memories. I took out Cinni reciting Song of Songs in public and the whole town turning out for her recital and quizzing by all the local clergy. I took out the stupid Bible-burning, flag-burning party, because frankly, that was probably just stuck in there to try to be as controversial and offensive as possible.
I took out a lot of the dialogue in the scene where there’s a recruiting party to be WTCOAC missionaries over the summer. I mostly only left in what I added when I made the second draft, how Sparky and her brothers find the whole thing kind of creepy and silly, and then Gary getting into an argument with Quintina’s oldest sister Liylah about how he cares more about being accepted to Princeton on one of their anti-Semitic quotas than going God knows where pretending to be a missionary in what he considers a dumb game of make-believe. I took out some bizarre scene of Elaine and her friends talking in the park and on the bus during the wee hours, actually envying enslaved Europeans, being jealous because America isn’t going through the “excitement” of occupation, and blathering on about how they hate Communism and Socialism (without actually understanding what either political philosophy is all about!) and how they hate Lenin for having killed the Tsar’s family.
In the second draft, Max is continually castigating them and asking what the hell drug they were all smoking to be saying such goofy stuff, acting like the events of 25 years ago directly affect them and like they know so much about these things they’re blathering on about. But it’s still goofy period for any of them to be talking like that. They’re still only fifth and sixth graders, not the type of people to gas on and on about politics and world events. Again, forcing in my OWN views at the time, in the goofiest, most unnatural way possible.
I’ve already done some reformatting and polishing for #4 and #5, and now I can finish that up. It won’t take nearly so long or require any radical surgery, since by 1999 my writing was light years ahead of how it was in 1995. And #4 is roughly 53,000 words and #5 is about 50,000. Short and sweet, just the way the early MH books should be. Then repeat the process all over again for converting, reformatting, and polishing books six through eleven. At least the hiatused #12 is only on my old desktop and in the less-obsolete AppleWorks. I won’t have to jump through any hoops to have access to those files or get them looking the way I created them.
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