Kill Your Darlings

It took me a year and a half to get through the first draft of my slim novel -- the one I call my novel-in-endless-progress.  What joy I felt when I wrote the final sentence!  More so because I didn't see it -- that particular sentence -- coming.  I hadn't planned it.  It's as if the book told me the ending, and one that suddenly seemed so right, so...inevitable, that I actually sat back in my chair and laughed.

Happily, one consistent comment I received from my small group of beta readers was the imperative: Don't change the ending -- I loved it!

Great, right?

Then reality set in.  Just as consistent was the consensus that the opening, the beginning, was dry, it dragged a bit, it just didn't flow like the rest of the book.

But I liked my opening!  I was totally addicted to it.  What to do?

Sigh.

And so, of course I sat on it.  I put it away.  I started another, completely different novel, one that did start with a bang.  But little by little, the old one, the one I'd worked so hard on and fretted over all those months, started calling to me, and I was forced to pull it out and give it another, harder look.

I saw that my readers were right.  The opening, previously beloved, was too timid, too tentative.  It lacked the confidence of the later prose.  It seemed as if it didn't know where it was going.

Eureka!  Of course it didn't know where it was going.  I didn't know where it was going when I started out writing it.  Well, I thought I did, but the novel changed a lot along the way as, one by one, the characters started exercising their own freewill and acting out in ways I had not intended or foreseen.  Quite simply, the draft that I finished was not the same book I set out to write in the beginning.

For a while, I tried to convince myself that the opening was justified because my protagonist also was embarking on a new experience and didn't really know where he was going.  (Self delusion at its best.)  But eventually, months later, I hit on a new idea, and one that -- so far -- seems to be working.

That original first chapter?  GONE.  The new one is tighter, more assured, and quickly sets up the main conflicts, characters, and themes -- which have only been revealed to me over time and through the actual process of writing.

But here's the thing:  I now see that this new beginning also requires additional changes -- a lot of them -- throughout the rest of the manuscript.

The saga continues...

Sound and Vision

A while back I noticed a trend among novelists -- those publicizing their recent work via social channels anyway -- of publishing a "soundtrack" or playlist of songs to accompany their book.  My first reactions included adjectives like quirky, frivolous, desperate.  But then, I have to admit that it got me thinking.

I realized that I did have a soundtrack of sorts during the writing of the first draft of my current novel-in-endless-progress.  The book in question focuses on a group of (mostly gay) friends on Fire Island over the course of a summer.  And the music I listened to while writing was mostly Pet Shop Boys -- specifically a playlist I'd compiled in my iTunes and called "Pet Shop Boys MELLOW."  It helped me out immensely during the writing, a lot of which was done at the local branch of the public library (to get away from the need for constant attention by my rather demanding French bulldog, Rocky, but that's another post).  Plugging in the earbuds helped to shut out distractions and immersed me into the world of my story.  But that was a tool to help me focus and get it done.  Would it work, or even be relevant for a reader?

I have to say, authorial suggestions of that kind generally strike me as a bit facile.  I always resist (and sometimes roll my eyes at) using real life / pop culture comparisons to a character's appearance in fiction.  It just seems too easy to say something like, "She had an ass like Kim Kardashian," unless of course it's really relevant in some way to the story.*  (I recently read a new novel by an author I rather admire that was full of this kind of celebrity comparison that I found hugely disappointing and distracting, and it made me wonder if his work had always been filled with that kind of junk and I'd just never noticed.  But again, I digress.)

Fast forward to my current draft, and the endless rewrite.

I came to the awful realization that the opening of the book needed to be thrown out and completely rewritten.  And that has further implications for the rest of the novel.  I sigh.  But it's going well.  If I can pull it all together, the book will be in a better place -- I know it.  But I guess my point here is that my playlist no longer works for me.  And I haven't found a replacement.  Even if I do ... would it really matter to anyone who happens to read my work?

What do you think?  Is publishing a companion playlist to a work of fiction fun?  Helpful?  Distracting?  Or annoying?

* Doesn't mean I haven't done it myself.