Sometimes, when my plot has become snarled in a traffic jam, I think of Steinbeck\u2019s Of Mice and Men<\/i> with its straight-forward, train-wreck focus, where we start steadily down a track and accelerate fast toward a visible and unavoidable disaster.\u00a0 Lennie kills a mouse, then kills a puppy, then crushes a man\u2019s hand, then kills a woman, and each time we try to forgive him and search for someone else to blame because we believe he is an innocent at heart.<\/p>\n
![\"FerrisWheel\"](\"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/FerrisWheel.jpg\")
I look at this plot, this driving plot that builds on injury and dreams, and the way its simplicity releases all these complex moral problems, and then I look at my own draft.\u00a0 It is nowhere close to where it needs to be.\u00a0 I\u2019m not Steinbeck, but that doesn\u2019t excuse me from trying to learn from him.<\/p>\n
So, these days, I\u2019m looking at a 75-page section of my current novel, a piece between two major points of action, and I\u2019m stepping back to ask how the scenes in this section create or don\u2019t create a progression.\u00a0 I\u2019m finding some scenes are only a few pages long.\u00a0 The more satisfying scenes are 8+ pages long but feel like they fly.\u00a0 This reminds me I\u2019m better off stringing together a few significant scenes than many brief ones.\u00a0 I need to mindfully pick the scenes that matter, order them to build, flesh them out, cut the others or fold their dialogue into the preserved scenes, and see what else might still need to be added.<\/p>\n
This is my sixth draft.\u00a0 On one hand, I feel like ought to know what I\u2019m doing with my novel by now.\u00a0 My mess seems like evidence that I\u2019m no good at this.\u00a0 On the other hand, I am determined.\u00a0 I will invent the process I need to judge this section and revise it.\u00a0 Then I\u2019ll move on to the next.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sometimes, when my plot has become snarled in a traffic jam, I think of Steinbeck\u2019s Of Mice and Men with its straight-forward, train-wreck focus, where we start steadily down a track and accelerate fast toward a visible and unavoidable disaster.\u00a0 Lennie kills a mouse, then kills a puppy, then crushes a man\u2019s hand, then kills […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[246,326,37],"class_list":["post-2842","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing","tag-project-next","tag-revising","tag-writing-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2842","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2842"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2842\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2847,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2842\/revisions\/2847"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}