Photo by CitySkylineSouvenir

I’ve felt a bit like the girl in the photo this week. Like I needed help, and fast.

I’m editing my first completed erotic novella, and have no idea how I’m going, and whether it’s good or bad. I let the story sit for two weeks after finishing first draft, and I’d been itching to get back into it the whole time. But now I am, it’s big and scary and painfully slow.

It will be okay, I know that. But I am still scared.

Mainly, scared the first draft will be a lot worse that I think it is. I wrote a lot of this during commutes, in twenty minute fragments on buses and trains. So it’s disjointed, there’s no flow, the characters contradict themselves from one page to the next, they act out of character. In many places, it’s so sparse it’s desert dry, just talking heads in a vacuum.

And that’s just the stuff I know about. I’m scared I’m still too close to it, that I’m not seeing a lot of the bad stuff that a reader would. Could I kill my darlings, the bits of writing I liked and was attached to but needed to cut.

Worse, I’m scared I won’t be able to fix what needs fixing. There’s so much to fix I know about. I need to strengthen the beginning and the ending. I need to plant seeds for the next story in the series. I need to fix the place where my heroine acts out of character. I need to layer in emotion and sensory descriptions and oh so much. I need to make sure the sex scenes have real feeling in them, not just body parts and mechanics.

Yep, a lot to be scared about.

The first day, I didn’t do much editing. Resistance had me by the short and curlies and I needed to work my way in slowly. I had pages of notes I’d made in another edit notes document as I drafted the story. Often, something I wrote would trigger the realisation I needed to add more about this earlier, or strengthen something, or chance something else, all earlier in the book. They all got pasted as comments in the relevant part of the story.

Then there were all those distracting things I needed to research, where I’d stuck “check this” or “research that”  notes in the draft. Fiddly little bits where I wanted to get my facts right, but it took an hour of research for something that was a throw-away one line in the story.

The second day, I decided I just needed to blast my way through the resistance and the fear and what the heck, just do the thing. If I made it worse, I had a saved back-up.

Reading this, on Chuck Wendig’s blog over breakfast helped. And this. (Potty mouth alert- he uses more swear words per page than any writer I know. But hey, you’re reading the blog of an erotic writer, so I guess you’re cool with that!). Reading this, I wasn’t so scared. I realised- this is how it’s supposed to be.

There exists this moment before I edit where I feel completely overwhelmed. This is, quite literally, part of my process. I get this sense of literary vertigo, like I’m staring over the cliff’s edge into the crashing gears of some giant malevolent machine that I cannot comprehend and that I am sure will crush me into my constituent parts. And in this moment I want to back away and say, “Fuck it, I’m not doing this, I’m done, game over, my work sucks, I’m not a writer, I’m just some asshole, I can’t hack it, I can’t–”

And then I leap over the cliff’s edge and let the gears take me.

And that’s when I find out it wasn’t as bad as I thought.

It’s never as bad as you thought.

Well, I hope that’s true.

Taking Chuck’s advice, I turned on “Track changes”, a Word feature I’d never used before.

Now my pages look like this, all red and green and crossing-outy and with comments at the side-

Okay, they aren’t so blurry on my screen. You won’t need stronger glasses to use Track changes, I did that so no-one can ever read my unedited first draft!

It’s all in there. The bits I cut, the bits I added. the notes I made about them. So many of my pages are all read I told my CP it was the writing equivalent of a chainsaw massacre. Her reply- “erotic chainsaw massacre, something NQR there”.

And I shudder to think what sort of Google searchers THAT will bring here!

The point is, it’s wonderful. Nothing is lost. If I want to change something, I just click “Reject deletion” and my words are back.

So I edited all day and added another fifteen hundred words to the first three chapters. The problem now is, it takes a long time before the actual erotic content of the story starts. I’m thinking I need to tighten the beginning up and I’m adding more!

But what I’m doing is layering in sense details, which are so necessary. I need to weave as much sensuality and eroticism into the early chapters as I can. It’s okay to do this. It’s right that this is the adding in pass. Next pass will be the taking out pass, the one to tighten up and cut for pace.

In a way too, I do want a slow languid build. This is the foreplay leading to the main event. I don’t want to just slam into it, with a wham bam thank you ma’am. This is erotica for women. It needs the slow steady burn, the layering of sensual detail on sensual detail, stopping just short of being purple. It needs to start slowly and then build both intensity and pace, until the climax. Then the aftermath. It’s gotta be exactly like good sex.

Okay, there’s the place for quickies, but for me that works better as part of an established relationship, not with strangers. With a new partner, I like us to get to know each other’s bodies, with gradual exploration and discovery, before things get fast and frantic. And my characters are strangers to the reader.

Sometimes that heated immediate coming together and release works, like in a short story, or part of a series where readers already know the characters, but not for this story. This needs a more patient unwrapping.

Though for a shortish novella, I need to have enough pace and interest to get the reader in.

The eternal balancing act of writing, walking the line between so much information so the reader can’t be bothered wading through it all to get to know the character, and too little information, so the reader can’t care about the character.

I need not to stress so much about this. I know I tend to overwrite, but I also know I want lush and sensual writing here. This is the time to add all those sensory details in and not worry about word count. Go all out, pack in as much as I can, and I can trim in the next pass through.

I don’t want sparse, cerebral, thinky and talky prose. I want to give the reader the experience, the feelings, the emotions. So I need to layer all that in there.

The bits to edit, in the next cut, are the places where there’s too much internal monologue. Where dialogue goes on that bit too long and drifts off the point. Those are the things I tend to overwrite. And yes, I’ll also need to trim anywhere where I’ve gone a bit too far with the sensory stuff and lapsed into purple.

But the story is coming together and taking shape. It’s exciting.