SHE WROTE: Back At The End Again

And here we are moving toward the end again.

We've been collaborating for so long, two years now, that I think we've both forgotten this is only our second book. So when we hit the end again, we were surprised all over at the shift from Bob to me.

Bob drives in the beginning. I flail around, I write scenes out of order, I'm slow, I cogitate, I look for patterns, I try to pick the flowers and buy the clams playing poker, Bob drives down the highway, eyes on his GPS, and slaps my hand and makes me stay the course.

And then we get close to the end and I look at the pages and pages and pages he's driven us through, at the thousands and thousands of words, and I say, "Wait a minute." And he pulls off the road, exhausted, and goes into a diner to get a cup of coffee, and I put on my glasses and say, "Hoo, boy, there are patterns here, but there's too much STUFF," and I get out my knife and I start to do my thing.

I'm doing my thing. Bob's screaming. We've been here before. Remember "In the darkness there is death"?

Our first act ran 44,000 words. A first act is set-up, introducing everybody in their worlds, then getting them in trouble, building the tension, sliding in the back story as quietly as possible, and then, at the turning point, spinning the whole thing around and propelling the protags and the antag forcefully into real action. Ideally it should take no more than the first quarter of the book because you don't want your reader sitting around waiting for the good stuff to start (and of course you put a lot of good stuff in the set-up, too). My books are always huge with characters, I love community, so my set-ups are closer to a third of the book, which is pushing my luck.

If our set-up is 44K, our book would have to run 132K. No. That’s just too damn much to read before Agnes picks up her meat fork and Shane drops his cell phone and runs like hell toward disaster. So I took Act One apart. I looked for repetition—we had a lot of it—I looked for back story—we were in love with it—I looked for plot threads that we were spending too much time with. We have our A plot—that’s Agnes’s save-the-house plot—we have our B plot—that’s Shane’s kill-Casey-Dean plot—we have our C plot—that’s the romance plot—we have our D plot—that’s Joey’s hide the old train robbery plot--we have our E plot—that’s the Xavier plot. Here’s a clue: if you have an E plot, you’ve probably overplotted your book. And we’re spending a lot of time on that E plot. It’s either got to move up and become more important, or we’ve got to cut it. Except Bob loves the E plot. In the darkness there is Xavier. We can’t move it up to A, B, or C, they’re set in stone. We can’t replace D; it’s integral to A, B, and C. So I get out my knife . . .

Bob will undoubtedly be in later this week to complain about Xavier. Right now, he’s sick. We’re both sick. But it’s my turn on the book. He works the up front stuff, carrying me while I whine. I work the back end, cutting and shaping while he screams. I just sent him the cut version of Act One. It’s 37K. I think we have to cut at least another 2K (even I can’t get it shorter than that). He’s getting sicker.

He’s just going to have to lie down in the back seat. It's my turn to drive for awhile.

Poor baby.