Do You Have The Guts to Kill?....

I'm talking about killing scenes, chapters, booting characters out of the book--"Get out! I don't need you any more!"--in your WIP, of course!

Do you have a manuscript that got out of control, has copious amounts of pages, and many chapters and yet it goes nowhere?

"I know I have an 800 pound gorilla on my back! Got a shovel?"

Well, hey. It's a new year! Go ahead and shake 2013 off your back. Clean the belly button of your mouse out (seriously, mine was clogged up. I had no idea you could open it up and clean out the cakes of dust it accumulated over the years!), and get to work!

This is what I've been doing with an older manuscript of mine for the last six weeks. Some of you might be working on something more recent than mine, which I originally began in 1999, and thought was finished in 2004, but at some point was 800 pages with scenes and characters that I didn't need. I reduced it to 400 pages, and I could still write a whole new book from what I'm taking out!

I've been working on this these past few weeks we've had off--a glorious 2 weeks (no pay), and I've gotten over 72K words down in the new mss.

But how? How do you take a mss. and cut from it things you don't need?

You would ask that question, wouldn't you? It's called "tough love", or  Kill Your Darlings--and this means characters, even great chapters you're in love with, and so forth.

Ask yourself: Will anyone miss this if I chuck it? If you can take a chapter, a character or a whole thread out and it isn't missed, then you need to do that, my dears. Take those sections out [put into another file] and then put the thing back together and do a read through. If something is needed you put that something back. But if you can read through and the message/story is still there, then you've done the job! Have a beta reader read it too, someone who hasn't read it yet, to make sure you've done it right. They ask what happened here, or to such and such, then you know you need to add something back, or rewrite it.

Since my mss. (Vampire Legacy/Dhampire Legacy), was something I hadn't seen since before I had the Internet, but I did have typed copies from both a typewriter and a printer from a computer, I took it out and went through it. Although what I had wasn't like the picture above, it was close. I realized that I had many drafts/rewrites. There might be as many as 4 different versions of any one chapter, and I had to separate these versions. I used tables, chairs and a couch, and at one point the floor, to separate the chaff from the wheat--or something like that. I found chapters with people/characters who were not the main ones that carried the story. I had to chuck them.

You have to remember that in order for anyone to care about your story, and how it ends, you have to develop your characters! If you introduce new ones, somewhere late in the game, readers may become confused and slam the book shut, and might never buy your books again.

I realized had a whole other story going (which was why I set it aside and went to other things for a decade). I had scenes that prolonged the whole story, in fact, and I could see--now that my writing has matured--that the actual climax was getting bogged down, pushed back, and the middle part where there is what we call a "lull" was drawing the story into another direction. Can't have that. The plot must keep going toward the climax. The upward movement to the CRISIS has to be there and then you go for the lull, and after the lull you make things even worse for your main characters. (See below-yeah I just drew this so you guys know what I'm talking about! Hey, it's free for the grabbing, be my guest!)

Lorelei's plot graph

I knew that portions of it was salvageable. My two main characters are detective (Jan Vladislav), who is from Gypsy stock, and a man (Phil Green) who left his home town for at least three reasons to seek his fortune. They both are, or become, a vampire slayers. These are my two main guys, and one teenage girl--Lucy, the daughter of the detective--who by no real fault of her own, is snagged by the vampires. I have a romance angle, two actually, but the romance between Phil and Collette doesn't bloom right away--but the posibility is there since they once had been engaged, and she is now divorced. Problem for him is that she has come under the master vampire's thrall, and her daughter is taken by another vampire.

The town is terrorized when people go missing, a baby and its babysitter is abducted at the beginning of the story, and eventually the baby is found dead--blood drained from her--in a graveyard next to St. John's Church, which as been burned down prior to the opening of the story, and on the other side is the Lockwood Mansion, which a mysterious wealthy man has bought. I made this harder on my detective, as the baby is his sister-in-law's, and his wife died of lung cancer a year ago. So he's trying to deal with this, and has a real reason to get this murderer.

My work in going through each chapter is still underway, I've got it corralled to two tables--one holds the chapters I'm working from, the other holds future chapters. And one box has my discarded material, and one other place has chapters which I won't use in this, but could be used in some other future project.

In some cases I have to write a scene from scratch, not using any material at all. That's what I had to do yesterday and managed to spit out more than 2,000 words.

So, my dears, do you have a mss. in a bin, or are working on that needs a little help? You need to disassociate yourself from it first, and be brave. Take that editing knife and cut, cut, cut!

 Let me know how you're dealing with a wayward manuscript! I would love to hear from you!

Writing Alchemy - Resurrection of a Manuscript

Now I know what Victor Frankenstein felt like when he created his monster. Well... sort of.

My manuscript created in 1999-2002 "Vampire Legacy", was in a large box within an even larger bin, filled with my writings. I recall that it went well beyond manageable length.

Well over 800 pages.

WHAT!!!!??????

Yeah. I had way too many threads, too many characters, and the plot went all over the place. And I had the gall to try and interest an agent with it. When she responded to me, asking me to cut it down (in half), I was excited and went to work on it, and in a month I sent it back. She said I still didn't do it right. In the end, she rejected it, saying "Didn't you learn anything from the books I recommended?" (In other words, REJECTED)

Oh, well. Back to the drawing board...

It was shelved. For a long time, obviously.

In the meantime, I guess I learned how to plot and a few other things with my writing. You see, you have to learn how to write before you can get this shit straight. Plotting is something you need to understand before you can proceed.

"No one can teach you how to write." 

Someone somewhere said that. I think a couple of teachers. Maybe Gandhi, too.

Somewhere along the line I have figured it out, apparently, or I wouldn't have gotten a publisher (as small as he was), and my many nice reviews for Vampire Ascending, and Vampire's Trill.

So, last weekend I took out all of this manuscript, which was in more drafts than I can count. I spread it all out over a couch, a couple of tables and a few boxes, the floor, and sorted through it all trying to discover the workable parts and the not-so workable parts. Those I put off to the side. They are like mini stories, basically. I never throw out anything, if I can help it.

When I was finished, my lower back ached for days, but I had found the latest draft (because of the type-font/printing). But I kept the draft(s) before that on hand for anything I might have missed.

So, I began the typing up of the mss. in my computer. I began Chapter One using the scenes in Chapter Three. Because the original beginning was too boring. Really. It was terrible. Nothing happened, too much back-story, too much information dump--all of the no-no's I'd learned since then not to do. (God, I hope so!)

I was going along, replacing one scene for another, and then I got to my character Izora Crunch. She's a librarian. I kept vacillating as to whether or not I needed her. In my original she comes in handy, but fills two rolls, and when I came to this one spot where my second main character (Phil Green), goes to her about something, I said, "Hold on. She doesn't need to be the person in this scene." But she needed to come in to help my detectives earlier than I had her (which was way-way at the end), and I needed them to learn something very important, yet so mind-blowing that neither detective really wants to believe it--because it spells V-A-M-P-I-R-E. But Jan Vladislav, who is part Gypsy and Romanian, knows about such things, and there are things about his birth even he doesn't know about (yet).

So, when I say this is like being the creator, but taking something that already exists and making it into something new, and breathing life into it--I'm not pulling your leg. This is work. But a work of love. I absolutely love this story. If I didn't, I would have tossed it a long time ago. I merely need to cut out things that I don't need, and stitch in sections elsewhere (like that monster Frankenstein made--only this will be better, and prettier).

At this juncture, I can see what is wrong with this mss.--big and little things--and can fix. I am moving things around. I'm taking out certain character's POV because it gives away too much. I want the reader to discover the vampires along with my hero, Detective Vladislav--who, by the way has amber eyes, which he disguises with brown or blue contact lenses (I haven't decided which color, but since he's dark, maybe I should have him use brown--but his daughter's eyes are like her mothers, which are blue. And I love the contrast. But I digress). He also has a cool tattoo. And I've seen this tattoo on someone who is Romanian, and I am going to get a picture of his arm if it's the last thing I do! It's a crucifix, and there's a story behind it, and it relates to Dracula--I do not lie!

And as I went through this, and put Izora into this chapter with the detectives, I wondered where her description was. Oh... there it is, with Phil, my other vampire slayer.

This book's title was "Vampire Legacy", but since I've got a series with the word 'vampire' in the titles, I knew I needed to change this. This is where I asked myself: "What is the book was about?" Well, it's about a couple of vampire hunters--one by nature (he was born one), one by necessity.

Romanian belief is the background for the whole book. A dhampire  is someone who is born from a vampire-human mating. They have certain physical atributes that makes him stronger, more agile and more able to detect and fight a vampire. So, with this in mind, the new title is now Dhampire Legacy. It might be confusing to some people who have never seen this word, but believe me, once they get into the story, it will be explained.

So, I'm up to chapter seven or eight. I've found Mrs. Crunch's description and I'll be plopping that into the areas I need to, and re-writing this section of Phil Green's to include a priest, instead because he returns a large gold crucifix and tells his story of why he has it in the first place, and it belonged to a deacon whose neck was twisted horribly 20 years ago--and Phil actually saw the murder, but was too young and frightened to tell anyone about it.

Hmmm, since I'm not Catholic, anyone out there able to help me with a scene? Specifically with the confession scene? Let me know in the comments.

Who among you are doing this, or have gone back into an old manuscript and began to work on it?