Recently in Books - Hi From College Category

Simple solution: I cut pages 1-12 and am heavily editing what is now the first six pages. Problem solved. Ship it.

Okay, so last time I blogged about the Gold Star Method. Now I have actually gone through and marked up my first 57 pages (six chapters) with stars. When I bought the packs of stars, they actually had gold, silver, blue, red, and green stars. So I used them as follows:

• Gold - Major good bit
• Silver - Minor good bit
• Blue - Eating disorder (theme)
• Red - Setting/Florida (theme)
• Green - Psychological problems (theme) [aka 'mental problems' for my short story readers]

I put the gold and silver stars in the left margin of the paper, and the other three (the themes) on the right. This took a while. Fortunately, I recently read the whole thing aloud to myself, so I was pretty familiar with it. I could recognize bits that I thought of as gold/silver stars easily -- and those are the most important. The others were sort of incidental, since I happened to have extra colored stars hanging around.

First lesson: it takes a lot of gold stars to mark up six chapters. I used a whole pack of 440 labels (stars provided by Avery), using up all the gold and silver stars, and about a quarter/third of the others.

Then I went through and plugged in all the star counts into a spreadsheet. This also took a while.

Second lesson: because of the way the document is formatted, a few pages are extra short. These are pages right before a chapter break. So they'll have artificially few stars. I added a column to my spreadsheet to note these, and ended up using that column to also track notes about particular pages -- explanations for why particular pages had lots of stars.

Third lesson: when you are tracking five data elements on the same image (see above), it's really hard to see what the hell is going on. So here is one with JUST the gold/silver (major/minor) stars:

Some Analysis of the Gold/Silver Stars

Fourth lesson: I don't see any clear relationship between gold and silver stars. They are not linked. So there are some pages with more silver stars than gold stars, and some the reverse. Sometimes there are none of one or the other.

Fifth lesson: Silver stars are more stable (in terms of number of stars per page) than gold stars. For most the period, you see one to three silver stars per page. This deviates in parts, but it's a pretty okay trend.

Sixth lesson: Something weird is happening between pages 1-12 in terms of gold stars, and 11-18 in terms of silver stars. This likely means that I should focus on these pages to spice them up.

Seventh lesson: What's happening on pages 29, 31, and 45? Those are all points where either gold or silver stars crash. Answer: 31 and 45 are both "short" pages before a chapter break, so we can ignore them. Page 29 is not a short page, but it has a healthy number of silver stars. Maybe figure out a way to cram a gold star onto this one.

Eighth lesson: overall star counts appear to go up as we get further into the story. I don't know what this means. Perhaps it means I had more to drink when I scored the later pages. Perhaps it means the later pages are better. If we assume drinking is not a factor in this equation, I think it means that the first 20 or so pages need attention.

So the whole point of this was to quantify the relative goodness of various pages. The logic is that pages with few/no gold/silver stars are not as good, and they need to be punched up. By punched up, I mean they need to be rewritten, as that is my current method of punching. I could have told you before this analysis that the first chapter (pages 1-12) had problems, but I didn't know the second chapter was also weak (it ends on page 19). HMM. Another interesting lesson is that parts of the story I used to think were pure gold are now just kinda meh. This keeps happening. Either this means that I'm getting better at this, or I just get sick of things I wrote a long time ago. Probably some of both.

Procedural note on the length of a page: for this analysis, we are talking about single-spaced pages with 1" margins, 12pt Times font. I gather that in The Industry one generally refers to One Page as a double-spaced page. So anyway, for whatever that's worth. I guess the point was that this is the first half of the book, as it represents 114 pages double-spaced, which is pretty close to half of the manuscript.

Ninth lesson: if we assume gold stars are the major indicator, page 22 is the best. This would make sense, as it's the page where we introduce Amry, the third main character, who is the focus of the following fifteen pages or so. Also, pages 33 and 37 seem pretty good. Page 33 is where we find out that Maggie (the fourth main character) has had a serious life event (ahem), and page 37 is in the middle of Amry's monologue about her past. So I knew before this that all of these were strong points, but it's interesting to see evidence of this on the chart.

Tenth lesson: it's hard to draw many conclusions about the other three colored stars. Looking at the combined chart (above, top), the only thing I can clearly see is that the "psychological problems" theme shows up pretty regularly. The others seem to come and go, and the eating disorder thing clearly spikes at one point. That makes sense. I think the good news is that the psych theme is indeed showing up consistently. In previous drafts, this wasn't the case -- I think I dropped this shoe way too late, without it being a part of the narrative. So that's good. I don't know what conclusions I can reach about the other themes...I think they're okay, since they're things that naturally come and go based on the action. So, like, whatever.

Question: did anybody read this far? If so, I am amazed at your interest in my work, and you deserve a free soda.

UPDATE: okay, after hearing from everybody and his mother, I realize that people did indeed read this far. Sodas all around.

So -- long-time visitors will likely know that I am working on a couple of novels now. Others may find this a stunning surprise. If you fall into the latter category, you should probably leave a comment, as I clearly need to talk to you more.

I have long debated whether to talk about the writing process in my blog. This is an issue for me only because I don't want to look like a loser, talking about my writing process when I'm not even published. (Well -- not lately, anyway.) But at the end of the day, I figure there are more people who give a shit than might think I'm lame, so here we go.

Lately I have been facing a problem: when I rewrite a section of the current novel (currently entitled Hi From College), I find that the rewritten part is much better than the original. The reason this is a problem is that I'm working on a set of five chapters (or so) to send to my editor, to demonstrate a nice thorough rewrite to her. Okay, so the reason this is a problem is that it's a lot of work. I had hoped I could kind of pick through the existing work and change a few sentences, and that would suffice for the rewrite. The reality appears to be that when I rewrite a whole chapter, it gets way better. This means maybe I should rewrite all the chapters. I don't feel like rewriting all the chapters, as I have already rewritten several of them multiple times already, and I want pizza from my toaster NOW. (That's an amusing reference to a particular TV advertisement from the late 90's). However, here is the data: it gets better when I rewrite it. So I should do that, regardless of how long it takes.

So I have been avoiding just flat-out rewriting whole chapters, except for Chapter Five, which deals with my roommate "Rob" at school, who is going downhill during the chapter. I decided that the original chapter was so atrocious (really, kind of mean-spirited and just shitty) that it required a rewrite, and the new version is much more subtle and smart. Okay, so that's done. But what about the other four chapters?

So for some weeks, I sat here, kind of paralyzed. What should I do? Should I suck it up and rewrite the whole book? That would take a long time, and would actually obliterate a lot of what I think of as pretty good writing. On the other hand, it would likely fix parts that are boring or poorly-written, and introduce brand new awesome parts. Clearly the right long-term answer would just be to rewrite the whole damn thing, though that would take another year.

So this week, I decided upon a solution: the gold-star method.

Here's the idea: print out the pertinent bits, then read through them (out loud). When I come across a part that is very memorable, mark that part of the page with a gold star. When I come across a part that is just "pretty good," mark it with a silver star. The idea here is to mark up a big body of work (say fifty pages), then measure it to get an idea of what a typical value per page is for gold and silver stars. Then go through and rewrite the pages that don't have enough gold and silver stars (on a page by page basis, rather than a chapter basis). Ideally, this means that I keep the good writing (the gold and silver bits), and rewrite the parts that need rewriting. Aren't I clever?

Erin suggested that I should market the Gold Star Method. I will set up a series of seminars after I get famous. You just wait.

Several people have asked me lately about the book, so I guess it's time to start blogging about it. I have avoided this for a long time, for fear that if the book is not published, I will be an obvious victim of Blogosis (best explained: just because it happened to you doesn't make it interesting). It's a fear of failure, which is sort of lame by definition, so here goes.

For the two of you who haven't talked to me about it, I've been working on a Young Adult novel called HI FROM COLLEGE for some time now. I actually started a second YA book, tentatively entitled THE MURDER GAME (which has nothing to do with actual murder) in April, and that has been going pretty well -- I'm at 80 pages of first draft now. They're different, but follow the same narrator at different points in his late adolescence. HFC is about the first year at college, and starts the summer before college at FSU in 1996. TMG rewinds two years to show the summer of 1994, when the narrator is sixteen and at smart-kid camp (shout out to John Green's AN ABUNDANCE OF KATHERINES for the succinct naming of said camp).

I started on HFC in 1998 as a therapy exercise. I was in talk therapy at FSU, and found myself telling some stories that seemed to have value outside of the room. I think I started with the Sandy Shores material (which actually occurred during my first summer -- between first and second semesters at school), then moved on to telling the story of my first semester. Those of you who have read the recent drafts should be familiar with this; if you haven't read a draft, email me and I'll send you something soon. I am running low on first-time readers, though, so am hoarding them for after this next revision.

Anyway, so HFC became a series of short stories over about nine months of work, back in the Nineties. I spent the winter after school (1999-2000) working on it (among other things, like Robofilms.com) in an attic in West Virginia. I ended up with a pretty complete (but out-of-order) draft, which I proceeded to put on the shelf and stop working on for five years.

In 2005, a friend-of-a-friend asked to read it, and I sent it to him. After he read it, he sent it on to his editor at a real live publisher. Since that time, I've been working loosely with this editor on revisions to the manuscript. I feel really privileged to be working with real people in the real industry on this, and I work hard to bring the quality of the work to that level.

I spent a good eight months or so (2005-2006) working on a complete revision of the manuscript, primarily making it linear, but also expanding several major story lines, and fixing a bunch of broken or incomplete plots. It became a completely linear book, with a beginning, middle, and end. Prior to this, it was totally out of order -- and not in a good way. It was just kind of chopped up.

While I was waiting for feedback on this revision, I first took a month off, then began working on my second book, the aforementioned THE MURDER GAME. I'll post some samples when I'm closer to a first draft. Basically it's smart-kid camp in high school. There is a single, strong love interest in this story (markedly different from HFC in this regard) who is based on a great friend of mine, a great poet. You'll hear more about her and the story in due time. There's lots there, I'm just telling you now.

Last week, I went to New York for work -- my cool job, which I shall not link for fear of getting Googled inappropriately, but anyway -- to consult with potential clients. While I was there, I met with the aforementioned editor for the first time -- previous contact was just over email. I got a bunch of feedback about where to take the next revision. The gist of it was that it's now WAY TOO LINEAR, and I have lost the sense of reader bewilderment that was good in the original draft. In the original draft, the out-of-order bits had an effect of confusing the reader, and in a way that was a really positive effect. I need to reproduce that feeling, without re-chopping the story (well -- let's say I want to keep the good things about the new draft, but I need to add back this other thing; I can't just go back to the original draft, since so much is better now). So I have a plan, and am working to edit the whole thing to bring back more of the crazy and reduce the passages of explanation that make it too comfortable and "normal."

If any of my dear blog readers have more questions about the book(s), please post them or email me, or invite me to Club 21 for a drink. I have a lot to say about this stuff.