Regress Report (or Why It Is Sometimes Better to Take Away than to Add)

First things first.

Judging by the lack of a phone call yesterday, I didn't final in the Emerald City Opener contest, which I entered back in June. I didn't really expect to, of course, but naturally, I hoped!

I'm still looking forward to getting my feedback sheets in the mail sometime in early September, maybe as soon as next week. Although at this point, my first seven pages probably only distantly resemble what I submitted, I'm still extremely interested to see how my story fared relative to others that were entered. And since I have learned that your first two pages are critical for convincing an editor/agent to read further (the contest entry was seven pages), I am definitely anxious to find out what I could do better in those first 400 or so words.

Now, onto the meat and potatoes.

If you've been watching my Write-O-Meter since I added it to the blog last week (this assumes you actually check in with me every few days, which is the height of conceit on my part, LOL), you may have noticed it hasn't moved much. That's partly because, sadly, I haven't written as much during the past week as I would like. I was aiming to knock off four pages (roughly 1,000 words) per day, not including weekends (when virtually no writing gets done because everything else has to get done), but it hasn't worked out that way. It seemed like a reasonable goal (and still does) because under normal conditions, I can write 1,000 words on a daily basis without a hitch. Sometimes more. But mainly, I set myself that goal because if I achieve it, I should finish the book by the end of September, and that's been my deadline for a while now.

When I started writing this thing back in February, I got to 40,000 words in something like a month. Six weeks at the most. The thing just flew off my fingers. I thought, "I can write a 100,000 word novel in three months, easy!"

And then I got critique partners. Need I say more? The project ground to a halt.

Well, that's not completely accurate. It didn't exactly grind to a halt. But I quickly discovered lots of things that were just plain wrong with the story. Things I had to fix in order to move forward. So I began to spend at least as much time revising what I'd already written as writing new stuff. And revising it again. And yet again.

Lest you think I am complaining about my wonderful critique partners and their feedback, let me assure you, I'm not. When I think about the mistakes I made writing those first 40,000 words, I want to weep. Some of what I wrote was just plain awful! Now, I suppose I could have written straight through to the end and then solicited feedback. It's possible I could have then fixed all the things that were wrong with it afterwards. And it might have been faster. But I doubt it.

The reason I don't think it would have been faster is that once my critique partners started pointing out the flaws in my writing, I started making a conscious effort to avoid them in anything new I wrote. So, while it took me longer to write the second 40,000 words than the first 40,000, the latter were just a lot better to start with than the former. Which means they need less editing and less revision, which means it shouldn't take nearly as long to polish the second half of the book as to polish the first. So it all works out in the end.

I think.

So, anyway, I haven't been writing as quickly as I'd like, but I did manage to pump out a twenty-page chapter over the past week or so, which was pretty close to my original goal. So, given that, how come my Write-O-Meter didn't move by twenty pages?

The answer is that as I have been adding, I've been cutting. At this point, I'm assuming my final word count for the first draft will be around 110,000, or roughly 440 pages. All of my projections for completing as of September 30th are based on that count. But the truth is that I'm a little worried, based on where I am in the story and where I still have to go, that it could wind up being a 500-page monster before I'm done.

Why is 500 pages bad, you ask? Well, because the standard, single-title historical romance novel is about 375-400 pages. If you happen to read them (and since you're reading my blog, I assume you do), pick up any off your shelf and look at the page count. You'll find the majority of them are right in that ballpark.

So, bottom line, it's hard to sell a 500-page historical romance novel. Not saying you can't (Diana Gabaldon has managed to sell a half a dozen of 'em! Of course, she doesn't really get pubbed under the "romance" banner, but I just looked and The Fiery Cross--which I haven't managed to read--is 978 pages in large paperback format with fairly small type. To quote Shaggy, "Zoinks!"), just that it ain't easy. If nothing else, that sort of length limits your options for publishers.

All of which means I'm going to have to come back through this manuscript on the second pass and eliminate a LOT. Forty pages worth of a lot. Yikes! Where am I going to find forty pages of material to cut? When every plot point, every scene, every paragraph, every word is absolutely essential to my story?

Okay, I lie like a rug. It's not all essential. And part of the reason my word count didn't go up by twenty pages this past week is that I cut out five. Except I didn't really cut five full pages.

See, one of the tricks I've learned is that word count for a novel isn't determined by the actual number of words (the way MS Word would count them), but by a formula. The standard manuscript format is Courier New 12-point type with one-inch margins all around and spaced so that there are roughly 25 lines per page (which is very close to double-spacing, but not exactly). The assumption is that there are roughly ten words per line, which means 250 words per page. Therefore, when an editor/agent looks at your manuscript and tries to figure out its word count, she simply multiplies the total number of pages by 250 to arrive at the word count. And this applies even if you have a page with only one or two lines of text on it!

So you can see how important it is, if you're worried about running over a certain word count, not to pad your manuscript with pages that have very little text on them. It's shooting yourself in the foot.

Going back through my manuscript this week, I discovered five chapters that ended with two to four lines of text on a page. And it turned out to be a fairly simple exercise to go back through those chapters and eliminate a word here or there to reduce a paragraph by a line, thereby cutting the whole chapter back by a page. In some cases, I think the tweaks I made even improved the text as well as making the chapter shorter. For example, I had a paragraph that wrapped over by a single word. I noticed that I'd used the word "change" twice in two sentences. I changed the second instance to "alter", and bam, the paragraph took up one less line. Coolness!

And the bonus for this is that I now can write five new pages without increasing the page count. Which, in my case, is sweet. Because at this point, I need every extra page I can get!