How Far We’ve Come

Posted by Phoebe

If you can’t tell, I’m pretty hung up on the editing thing these days. In fact, yesterday, I did three things: cleaned up cat pee (ew!), napped, and edited. It was a good day. Except for the cat pee thing, I guess.

But damn, I can’t help but feel like it makes me a boring blogger.

Oh well. You guys will just have to bear with me for a few more weeks. Gretchen McNeil has a post today on edit progressions. This made me curious about the progress on my own first page. Here’s the first page of the first draft of THE STONE SORTER, back when it had the wonderful title of sacredgrove.doc.

Chapter 1: In Which I Take a Journey

My mother dropped me off at the curb of Newark International Airport almost three hours before boarding. When I turned to her to ask her for some help with my bags, she kept chattering away on her cellphone, so I opened up the door and struggled to lift my rolling luggage from the trunk of her Toyota myself. Then I tilted my head, walked to the passenger’s side window, knocked on it with one knuckle. She held up a finger; I was supposed to wait.

I reached into my backpack and pulled out the glossy-paged brochure that I’d tucked into the front pocket. “Sacred Grove Academy,” it said on the cover in florid calligraphy. I ran my fingertip over the embossed print. I had already memorized the image there: the school building, huge like a fortress with a stonework facade, a lush green field, dotted with orange and brown trees, that rolled out from under it like a lumpy carpet. As I started to thumb through its pages—practically salivating over the images of sweater-clad students reading in the library, or sitting at the long banquet tables of the dining hall, laughing together—I heard my mother roll the window down.

“Do you have your ticket, Miranda?” she asked. I took the boarding pass out from the back pocket of my jeans, waved it at her.

“Good,” she said, and flashed a view of her very white, very straight teeth. My mother’s had a lot of dental work done. She doesn’t like people to know that, but I think it’s clear when she smiles. No one has teeth like that, not naturally.

I stuffed the brochure, and my ticket, back into my backpack. “Are you going to help me

Here is the novel’s current opening:

Prologue

The night we first tried the spell, I looked at myself in the scratched surface of my bedroom mirror. My hair was shining and straight. My eyes were dark and warm. My olive skin looked smooth between the red straps of my ceremonial garb. I tried to see myself as Mikhail might see me, as a powerful, beautiful diviner. As a stone sorter. I was the girl—no, the woman—who would help him save his mother. I was Randy.

But all I saw was regular old Miranda. Miranda, a nerdy neat freak, dressed in a ridiculous outfit, make-up smeared ludicrously across her face.

I knew then that it wouldn’t work. I knew this deeply and truly, as certainly as I knew the streets of my hometown or the way my father liked his coffee (black and sweet). We wouldn’t be saving Mikhail’s mother that night, or maybe any night. But I couldn’t go to him and tell him that—I was in too deep already; he would never be convinced; he would never forgive me if I refused to help him, if refused to at least try. We’d already shared so much—kisses, warm, and wet, and lingering, soft strains of his music in his bedroom late at night. I couldn’t let him down, not after everything we’d been through.

So I sighed, turned away from the mirror, and went to Annie’s room. What choice did I have?

So as you can see, it’s not the same at all. In fact, the airport bit now opens chapter four. And what’s left of it is much more smoothly written: I was writing this fresh off a draft with a very rough-hewn, uneducated narrator, and that comes through in Miranda’s voice in the early versions of early chapters. It’s also frankly shorter. There’s no awkward shuffling of brochures and the luggage issue is settled in a sentence. Thank goodness.

And I got rid of my cheesy chapter headings. Thank goodness for that, too–what a terrible idea that was; though it worked to boost my NaNoWriMo wordcount, by the end of the first-draft MS, I have chapter headings like “Chapter 9: In Which There Are Issues” and “Chapter 10: Denoument, In Which the Author Wishes She Hadn’t Inserted Subject Headings to Inflate her Wordcount.”

What do you guys think? Better?

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Permalink | Comments (2) | Feb 22, 2010

2 Responses to “How Far We’ve Come”

  1. michele Says:
    February 22nd, 2010 at 6:01 pm

    Yes! Good work, Phoebe! I can’t wait to read the end result.

  2. Phoebe Says:
    February 24th, 2010 at 5:31 pm

    Thanks, Michele! Expect something in a few weeks. :)

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