Wednesday, February 7, 2018

Theme Party: The Rewriting of a Novel

About 1/3 through with revisions, trying to stay on pace. Or, get back on it. After letting it sit for several months, it's a challenge to immerse back into my story and characters, because it's really about waking them up, not me. But I've found the cooling off period in fact indispensable: the editing is easier, the flaws stand out more readily, this far removed from the blinders conferred  by familiarity and pride.

Really appreciating the power of purging--not just total words, but the right words--well, scrapping the right "wrong" words, and preserving the right "right" words(hmm, there were probably better words for that). Wondrous, though, how much more lustrous those words we retain can be, unencumbered by those superfluous ones we'd once been so sure of.

And, of course, it's never just about the words: character, story, theme, are paramount. Cucariva is literary-suspense, a pretty dark(but hopeful, hopefully) tale. A few overarching themes: human nature(what is is that, when all luxury and pretense are stripped away, truly authors our lives?), redemption, perseverance, and lost love. Imperative when rewriting, to ensure the themes are credibly, and impactfully conveyed.

A snippet:

A sensibility cellular in nature: she was the love of his life, this he knew in his blood and in his bones. The one person for whom he’d been procreated into existence—blood and bones and organs and musculature and tissue—his, in its precise assembling—that he might those decades hence meet and love this woman. Who until recently had professed a devotion no less profound. And so he brimmed with this imperative and wanted to tell her he loved her, for so he did. Not to persuade her toward some starry end, but simply, because it was truth, of the most unassailable type.  And truth had become an inestimable, if faltering beacon, upon the fringe of this fathomless sea.


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