Perseverance

My novel Garbageland has graduated from shitty first draft to crappy second draft.
 

Along the way one character was excised, two others were morphed together, and paragraphs, scenes, and chapters were slashed. Total word count dropped about 10k; I expect to add words back in the next round. And all that only took nine months.
 

One problem was the method. I read in another writer's blog how they printed out the first draft, made corrections on paper, and then re-typed the whole thing for the second draft. I decided to do the same.
 

There was some benefit. It certainly slowed me down, making me think more about the words I didn't touch. I've found it works well on short stories. Novel length works: not so much. I'd get bogged down frequently, looking at how few pages I'd gotten through in a day.
 

I must have a stubborn streak because I didn't give up on that method until September. Returning to live editing, for lack of a better term, the pages flew by. Perhaps that will require more changes in the third draft, but at least that draft will go quickly.
 

Work on the third draft starts Wednesday, or as soon as I've recovered from election night.

I've been working on a short story for about 18 months. It's been submitted and rejected several times. I put it aside, worked on it, put it aside again, worked on it. I've been procrastinating on sending it out for a few reasons.
 

First, I want to get it right. I really like the story and obviously want to see it published. Second, I get a blind spot with stories I like. It isn't just the 'darlings', sections that are oh, so clever but don't move the story. I become blind to what the reader sees because the movie in my head for the story is so complete.
 

At that point I seek out critiques. I've done that already. I think the story is ready to go, but still I hesitate. So I wondered if there were some other means to evaluate the text.
 

For novels, I use software called yWriter. It has a tool that counts words, total and unique, and number of times each word is used. If I plugged my story in, would I see anything useful? Then again, I've got a blind spot. What I need to do is compare numbers on my story to another, say by a pro writer. So I found a great story by another author and typed it in.
 

Let's start with the big numbers.
 

Unique words are those that appear once, never repeated. Scrolling through the lists I see these are good words, descriptive words, interesting words. In the two stories, my unique words are a slightly higher percentage than the pro story. I like this statistic.
 

Lesson #1: Use interesting words.
 

Besides the unique words, the rest have been used at least twice in the stories. The usual suspects have been used hundreds of times in both: the, and, of, to. I notice that my story uses "was" 59 times while the slightly shorter pro story has 89 instances. So much for active voice.
 

Lesson #2: Know how to break the rules.
 

Going down the list, it's hard to make much comparison. The words, cut out of their context, seem so ordinary. They are the lunch-pail words, working hard at their job without expectation of big rewards. I'm not seeing any pattern or useful information.
 

How about the bottom, the words that are used twice to ten times? Maybe I'll see something there. Maybe I'm overusing a lot of filler words. Below shows the number of words used for each number of times. For example, if the word "what" and "should" are both used five times then the total is two for five uses. I know, this is getting abstract, bear with me.
 

My numbers are slightly higher, but only by thousandths as a percentage of the whole. What does this mean?
 

Lesson #3: Writing is about words, not numbers.
 

Perhaps this was a futile exercise. I thought as an experiment it was interesting. I think the final lesson for me is:
 

Send the damn story out already!

The publishing business can be very slow. My latest story to be published was written a long, long time ago in a mindset far, far away.