Donna Maree Hanson, Author, Phd in Creative Writing

I had a interesting day yesterday. I did not read an MS, or start to read an MS. I feel like I’m shirking but not reading is certainly allowing my mind to recharge. I’ll start full MS number 31 tonight.

So I continued with snipping away at Dragon Wine. This morning I start with 152,342 words (actually I already cut something this morning but I’ll talk about that). That is approximately 15,000 words less that the original word count (167,200). I’m aiming for 130,000 words but I’d be happy with 140,000.

I’m now starting on part two and the introduction of a new set of characters. This is a bit refreshing to start with this new lot of characters.

Last night as I tried to sleep I thought about a scene that I identified yesterday as not doing it’s job. I cut it back substantially, but kept its backbone. Then I thought about it some more. You know this scene has the best descriptive writing in the book. I love it. People who have read that bit have gone wow. I added this scene during a revision a while back, back when I was looking to flesh out the world, ensure I had the detail and to make it sound more real. Originally I had this group of characters get to a point, suggest they are going somewhere else and then pick up their thread then. You know when they are already there and it’s in the middle of the action. The scene I added was how they got from there to there. I might have had some plot discussion points in there, but basically nothing happens. They move through an amazing geothermal landscape, scale a gorge, confirm their thoughts that the garrison was attacked and who their opponents are and think about where the thing they are following went. That’s it. Very pretty, some character insights, but nothing important happens. So this morning I gritted my teeth and cut it all. Phew! It was hard. I thought about restructuring so I could keep that one paragraph of description but didn’t. I cut it.

I have writer friends who do up spread sheets and work how who has the point of view in which chapters and change it if it isn’t balanced, work out the percentage of action and narrative etc. This type of detail analysis I don’t usually do. I sort of play it by ear. However, I can see now that this sort of micro examination of a novel can help to refine it to its lovely bones. After I’ve done this cut back and see what word count I’ll end up with. I’ll go back to the start and then look at it at sentence level to see if I can write a few things more succinctly. I’m doing that at the moment on this pass through but I think it will be worth doing again, to tighten the prose. Then there will be another read through and maybe a pass by unsuspecting beta readers. It’s time to kick this baby out of the door. Revising Dragon Wine was one of my goals for the year. I think I can see me doing it now. As for drafting another novel, well my day job is going to impact on that. I’ll be report writing right up to Christmas. That is very draining. However, I do have a writers’ retreat planned for January, where I am hoping to achieve another 80,000 words. (I touch type btw). Report writing at work usually sets me up for critical thinking though which is good for editing.

Yesterday while playing with my ipad I found a tutorial on WordPress. So you will see I have a contact form now. I believe that will email me.