A Tale of Two Hamlets

Pictured above is a stack of paper about a foot tall, made up of most of the versions of my novel Killing Hamlet. There have been, I think, twelve major revisions of this book since the first draft was finished, back in 2007. After revision number eight, I realized that the story just wasn't working at all and I told my agent that I was going to rewrite the whole story from scratch. And I did, and now it's drastically different and I've revised that version four times.

Originally the story was called Ophelia's Ghost. Then it was The Secret Parts of Fortune. For a while it was So Honest A Man. Now it's Killing Hamlet and I'm sticking with that because, I think, that title actually works for the book.

I'm telling you all of this because yesterday I sent the current version off to my agent so that he can (I hope) fall in love with it and start submitting it to publishers. I suppose that at a time like this it's natural to sit and reflect on the road taken to get here, so that's what I'm doing. I really don't have any specific point to this post; I just wanted to take the photo above and post it because it amuses me. The spiral notebooks on the top of the stack were used to write the two first drafts (all my drafts are done longhand) and the printouts were for revisions (because all of my rewrites/edits are done longhand).

Michelle can tell you that taking a book and rewriting the whole thing from scratch is not only a huge pain in the ass and a scary undertaking, it's also a strangely liberating activity. Once you see that none of your work is set in stone, that none of it is permanent or sacred, you're freed up to take risks and push the story into territory you'd never have considered if you were just working over the same material again. My first version of the book, for example, was essentially a prose retelling of Shakespeare's "Hamlet," with a few twists and told from the point of view of Horatio, Hamlet's best friend. I kept thinking, while working on that version, that if I were to write the book again, I'd do a bunch of stuff differently. Which is what I ended up doing. It's now no longer Shakespeare's story at all, but a new tale that winds through and around Shakespeare's Denmark, pulling the old story into new shapes and sending familiar characters into unfamiliar, uncharted areas. I think it's really cool now. But it's taken me almost three years to get here.

Anyway, there is no rest for the wicked and I have lots of other projects. I have one new novel in first draft form, and I have another novel in the planning stages, and I have at least two more that are still just ideas. I'm going to begin a serious outline of the novel currently "in planning," and then write a first draft of it. That should take me until the spring to do. I'll set that first draft aside and turn to the first draft I've already written of that other book (Cocke & Bull is its title) and see about revising the heck out of it. I've been making notes for the last seven months.

Like I said, I really have nothing useful to say in this post. I just want to give some kind of update on what I'm doing to sort of demonstrate that I'm not just some guy who writes about writing; I actually write as well. And, you know, I think it's important that people who are moving through the publication process talk about how it's going so it can be demystified.

I was tempted to write something about my agent, and how things have gone with him while working on this book, but today I'm posting about that on my own blog. So you can look here if you want to read that story.

From the Ground Up

I am working with an agent to get a novel in shape to submit to publishers. I've been working with this agent for almost a year now (in fact, I just realized that tomorrow is the anniversary of our face-to-face meeting wherein we became engaged--I mean, when he became my agent and I became his client), and I've done two major revisions to the work so far. Neither of those revisions managed to fix the problem with the second half of the book, and it was only during a phone call with my agent about a month and a half ago that I realized what the actual problem was. Some back and forth with Mr. Agent ensued at that point, and I told him that I know what the problem actually is, and that I can fix it, but it will take some time and work. (Now, you might be wondering what the agent actually liked about the novel since it's not submission ready and I'm doing major revisions to it, but honestly that's the way it works a lot of the time and when you get your own agent, be prepared to do more work on the novel; sometimes a lot of work.)

Anyway, here are the details. My protagonist is involved in a familiar story and is telling his own story as it relates to the famous story. The first half of the book explains my protagonist's growing involvement with the famous story (which is "Hamlet," by the way), and the second half of the book tells the story of "Hamlet," sort of, and my protagonist's role in those events. Or at least, that's the premise. In reality, during the second half of the book my protagonist often fades into the background and is merely a narrator of my version of Shakespeare's story. My version is significantly different from Shakespeare's (because I lean heavily on not only the sources Shakespeare stole from, but I also take the characters in new directions), but still I end up focusing not on my protagonist's tale, but on him telling the tale of "Hamlet." Which was interesting, but in the end confusing and a problem.

So I've figured out that the way to deal with this (or the way I'm going to deal with this) is to use my version of "Hamlet" as the framing story instead of the actual story, and I've come up with an original dramatic arc for my protagonist that overlays and intertwines with my version of "Hamlet" and keeps the focus on the protagonist. So cool for me and Big Win, right? Almost.

The problem for me now is that almost none of my prose is going to be salvagable. If I can keep 20% of what I've written, I'll be very lucky. I began writing the new first chapter this week, which I had planned to create out of the existing Chapter 4, but I think that I want to essentially rewrite the whole book from the ground up. I'll keep some of the work, but I learned a huge amount while writing a different new novel this winter and my now-much-smarter-writer-brain wants to use my newfound writer smarts and not try to retread the old stuff. It looks, frankly, easier to start from scratch. I have a sort of bet with myself that I can come up with a complete draft of the new version by July. We'll see how well I do with that.

I know that Michelle has rewritten her most recent book (Monarch) from scratch, and I know that Davin is thinking about rewriting (or writing a whole new version of) his novel Rooster. I also know that the latest novel I've written, Cocke & Bull, is in some ways based on my very first (and very bad) novel from about 15 years ago. There must be other people who have scrapped entire novels and rewritten them from the ground up. I'm betting some of you have done that, and I'd like it a lot if you could share your experiences with that, and pass along any advice you might have. Also, please tell me the work was worthwhile!

Also: Happy Friday, and about time!

Telling, Not Showing

I begin this post with a bit of bragging: last night I finished revisions for my agent. I so rule. But because I do all my writing and revising longhand, I now have to type up all my changes, which will be several hellish hours of my life I'll never get back. There are worse fates, I'm sure. But I digress from the digression with which I began.

While I was revising, I noticed there are at least a couple of cases in which the old rule of Show, Don't Tell does not apply. I found myself actually deleting passages where I had dramatized the action (showing) and replacing them with summary (telling). So this is sort of a "rules? schmules?" post. Sort of.

The action of my novel comes in three strands, which unravel and intertwine as the book progresses. That's a fancy way of saying that I have a couple of major subplots as well as the main plot, and they more or less all tie together at the end. I also have a first-person narrator, who is involved in all three plots. What this means is that either:

a) my narrator has to be present for every scene in order to know what's going on (and relate it to the reader), or

b) someone has to tell my narrator whenever anything important happens off-screen.

The first option could result in some highly improbable situations, as my protagonist doesn't have access to everything everyone does. The second option could result in lots and lots of conversations like this:

"So, Feng says Amleth is dangerous."
"Really?"
"Yeah, he thinks he's going to attack Horvendil soon. They had a bitter argument last night, while you were talking to Corambis."
"What did they fight about?"
"Amleth claims Horvendil is a fraud. Feng told him he's wrong, but Amleth swears to find the truth."
"That's bad."
"Yep. Say, what did you and Corambis talk about?"
"Well, let me tell you..."

And stuff. As it happens, I found that I did have a lot of that sort of conversation in my book, where A and B have a scene and then A and C discuss that scene out of earshot of B. It made me dizzy in a couple of places, and was entirely unneccesary. What I did instead was, as I say, cut the repetitious dialogue and replaced it with summary:

I met with Fernando and told him of my conversation with Corambis. We agreed that something would have to be done about Horvendil soon.

This is much briefer, far less ridiculous to read, and also gives you a chance to interpret the earlier scenes for the reader if you're into that sort of editorializing from a narrator.

The point of all this, aside from demonstrating how unfocused I am when I've not had any coffee, is that where you find this sort of repetition in your narrative, especially if you find dialogue that repeats previous dialogue or discusses previous action, it might be a good time to tell rather than show. Yes, you have to make sure the right characters all know the requisite facts to move the plot along, but if your reader already knows those facts, don't repeat them all over again.

So my rule is: Show, don't tell, unless you have to.

Evolution of an Opening Chapter

This post is a sort of continuation of Davin's post from yesterday, about First Chapter Blues. I don't know if I have any sort of advice or wisdom to impart with what I'm going to say today, but it might be interesting to other writers. Might not; time will tell.

When I first began my book, I thought I would ease my way into the story the way a good 19th-century author would, starting at some distance from my protagonist and his tale, and gradually bringing the reader closer. This, then, is the way the first draft of the book began:

The Elbe River rises in the Giant Mountains, east of Prague in the land of the Czechs, on the frontiers of the Holy Roman Empire. The Czech realm is a barbarous place of infidels, pagans and mislaid Christians forever at war, battling to the death over land of little value to any. Here the Elbe rushes down mountain-sides and through steep valleys, past savage villages of straw and mud, under the eyes of savage villagers who cannot imagine the seven hundred miles this river courses, arcing across Europe through lands of civilized men, running beneath bridges of ancient stone, her waters reflecting here and there the spires of great palaces and cathedrals, her currents washing everything lost in her out to the cold North Sea on Germany’s coast.

The Elbe is fed at first by the lesser waters of the Labe and the Sazaba, then by the Ohre between Prague and Dresden; the Mulde joins her at Desau, the Saale near Schoenebeck, the Havel a hundred miles north of Magdeburg, and the Elde a hunded miles further on, before the great river forces her way through the canals of Hamburg and rushes home to the ocean.

Midway along her journey, between the savage Czech headwaters and the chaos of the North Sea, the river runs for a time directly westward through Saxony, a land of civilized men; there the course of the Elbe cuts the Duchy in half, north and south. On the north bank of the river, in a region of low forested hills which rise to a plateau further north near Berlin, sits Wittenberg. Named for the white sand found in the soil of those hills, this is the city where I would have remained forever had not I become involved in the history I will unfold.

I like the writing here and I like the image of the river cutting across time and geography, but this doesn't work as an opening to the story. There is too much emphasis on the river, and the river does not return as a setting of any importance in the novel. Gunter Grass could make the river into a character, a personality of its own that interacts with the story, but that's not what I did with my book. So I decided that the river as focal point was out, and I wanted instead to begin with the protagonist himself, his social and historical situation, and some conflict. Here is how the second, third and fourth drafts all began (notice that I still begin at the river):

When I was a lad, I would sometimes steal away from my father's house and follow the sandy banks of the Elbe to a small backwater a mile east of town, there to settle among mounds of wildflowers in the shade under the many trees growing along the water’s edge, and watch a man fish for eels in the shallows. I do not know the man's name, nor did I ever; all I did know was that he was one of the royal fishers in the employ of the Duke. The Duke had an insatiable taste for the shimmering green eels: boiled into soups, soused in brine and served with lemons, breaded and fried, smoked, jellied, grilled over open flames, or diced and baked inside game birds; there were few ways to prepare them that did not please the Duke's palate.

During the cold months, the eels would burrow into the mud and the fisher would use a long, barbed spear to bring them up, knocking them off the tines into a wooden box where they wriggled and fought in sawdust and salt. In the spring a net was used, thrown out into the water near the strong river current, then hauled back to check the catch. On hot summer days, when the fisher was too lazy to work for the eels, he would open a filthy oilskin sack he'd brought from town and pull out the head of a horse which he'd gotten from a stableman or butcher, knot a rope through the horse's mouth and throat, then weight the head down with an iron bar. This he'd throw out into the river, tying the other end of the rope to a tree on the bank. The fisher settled down to wait then, eating his breakfast, drinking the wine he'd brought along, often sleeping for an hour or so. When he'd grown impatient enough, or if the day was too hot for him, the horse’s head would be dragged back to shore, filled with dozens of voracious eels, writhing in the air, their sinuous bodies glistening green. The fisher pulled the eels from the head on which they'd been feeding, dropped them into his wooden box, and after untying his rope and setting aside the iron weight, cast the bit of horse back into the river for the other eels.

The eel man and I did not speak much. He didn't mind my company, and sometimes when he drank more than he was used to, he would tell me stories of taking his eels back to the ducal residence, rubbing their bodies with salt to clean off the slime, cutting long slits in their backs to pull out guts and spines. He did never once give me any eels to take home, as all the eels coming from that particular spot along the Elbe belonged to the Duke, who was a powerful man, jealous of his property. Nor did afternoons spent in his company fill me with any desire to fish for eels myself. Though they have beautiful skins, fine shirts crafted of a million flecks of emerald, eels have wicked faces and eyes like snakes, and I did not like to touch them.

“Wherefrom have you taken the horse?” I asked him once.

“This fellow,” he answered, looping his rope through the mouth and throat of the immense brown head, “Were the proud mount of a noble. Broke his leg two days past; the gentleman shot a pistol ball in its brain--see this hole, right here by the eye? Sold the horse to a butcher, an' he sold me the head. A fine head, too. Marry, I'll have twoscore eels eating his brains in an hour or two, lad.”

I must have looked greatly sad, as the fisher eyed me with some kindness. “Mourn not for this dead horse,” he said. “He served his master well enough, I warrant, and now his head does service for the Duke and the great ones the Duke will feast with the eels I'll bring home. We all serve our masters, lad. This horse yet does honorable duty.”

“I'd sooner be the Duke than the horse,” I said.

The fisher cuffed me hard, on the ear. “Watch your tongue, that I don't use it for bait,” he said. “Your lot is to obey your masters. Learn a trade, and mind your place in the world. Remember you this: you are the horse, not the rider. If the Duke cuts off your head and feed it to the fishes, that's his godly right.”

I was quite pleased with this opening gambit, and the beginning of the book stayed this way for some time. This is how the narrative began when I found an agent; these are the first pages he read. But my agent asked me if I could do anything to deepen the protagonist's character, to sharpen the conflict. He didn't specifically ask that I do anything with the opening, but I wanted to somehow have conflict in every scene so I took the passages I had above and forced some conflict into it:

On the day that my wife Astrid gave birth to our daughter, I carried our son Justus, who was but a year old, down to the banks of the Elbe. We followed the river to a small backwater a mile east of town and I found the very spot where, when I was a lad, I had often settled among mounds of wildflowers under the trees along the water’s edge. Many a day had I spent there, watching a man fish for eels in the shallows. I do not know the man’s name, nor did I ever. All I did know was that he was one of the royal fishers in the employ of the Duke, who had an insatiable taste for eels.
[...]
As the eel fisher so wisely noted, I was of no importance; the poor never are. I sat on the river’s north bank and held my young boy to my breast, promising him that I would not let our little family live and die in poverty. Justus smiled to hear me speak but understood nothing of my promise. He knew nothing yet of poverty, neither of despair nor fear. I had long since passed such innocence, and I knew that after I carried Justus home and fed him his gruel, after I kissed his mother and newborn sister as they slept, I would commit an act that would change the fortunes of many men, for both good and ill. My name is Horatio Johannes Andersmann, and I was born on December 27 in the year of our Lord 1571 in the city of Wittenberg, in Saxony. I would have remained in Wittenberg forever had I not done terrible things to protect my Astrid and our children. I shall reveal everything.

This does not work. It's a cheat, announcing to the reader that there is drama to come if you'll just bear with me. It's the same sort of cheap trick a lot of prologues play, and I never did like it. It says, "I don't so much have compelling characters or a great premise to draw you in, so here's a bit of a mystery that will remain unresolved for a couple hundred pages." Like I say, that's just cheating the reader. Which is why it's been cut, all of it. My current rewrite begins with the action of the story itself, my character in the situation lamely hinted at above, in real conflict in the "story present." I am opening, this time around, in medias res, with the action already underway. My plan is to take all the backstory I have cut and, if I think I really need it (and likely I don't need most of it), work it back in around page 100 or 150 or so.

My agent, by the way, likes the eels. But he's wrong, and I'm no longer starting with them.

While I feel confident that I am right in changing the way my book begins, I make no claims that a book shouldn't begin with back-story. I have read (and continue to read) a lot of classic literature which does not obey the currently popular ideas of structure and story-telling, and these classics have aged well. This is just the choice I have made, and I thought it might be fun to share the evolution of my book's opening.

You Will Be Edited

As some of you already know, I have an agent with whom I'm working to get my book (current working title, "Horatio") published. My agent first read the ms in early March, and he came back to me with a suggested major change to the way I was telling the story. It was a good suggestion, and even though I thought I was finished writing the book, I revised for three months and at the end of May sent the much-longer ms back to my agent for his opinion.

Naturally, I assumed that the next time I heard from him, it would be a message saying something like, "This is amazing, and I've just sold it at auction in a significant deal and where should I mail the check?" Naturally, when I heard back from him on Sunday evening, that's not the message I got.

Mr. Agent, who has a well-earned reputation as a "hands-on" sort of guy, asks that I make further changes to the book. These will be pretty major structural changes and will take me about two months, I estimate, to complete. Darn, I say. I was hoping to get a decent start on my next book. But no.

The point is, even after I revise the novel again, I know I won't have seen the last of the revisions. Once it gets picked up by a publisher, an editor will go through it and make a list of suggested changes I'll be expected to do. Every published author gets this "revision letter" from their editor. Yes, even your favorite author, although they may claim otherwise.

So the moral of this little tale is that you should get used to revising. I don't mean the kind of revisions Davin was talking about in yesterday's post. What you'll likely see from agents and publishers are bigger, story-level things that will make you annoyed and wonder at what point your beloved novel became someone else's artistic property. The upside is that my agent is not telling me what story to tell, but is trying his best to help me tell that story in the best way possible. Still, it irks because I am a Creative Genius and blah blah blah. But that's part of this business, and you should be prepared for it.