Focus

What do you put on a Ninja Demon Baby's birthday cake? Ninja eyes, of course. The eyes were made of frosting and we used the picture at left for inspiration. I would show a picture of the cake, but he stick his fingers in the eyes first thing and so the cake was badly mutilated. Nonetheless, this post is about Ninja focus.

I decided, after a couple of weeks of indecision about what project to focus on, to bring out my romantic-suspense and re-envision it as a thriller. When I opened the file, I discovered I had 250 pages of the sucker, and it was highly polished . . . and then the fun began.

The central plot involves a demonic possession of an actual historical figure from the Middle Ages. To that, I added an assassination by a Serbian priest, a schizophrenic with visions, and assorted other elements. I cut the prologue and chapter one and two entirely. And then more fun began.

What I essentially discovered was that this was all about pacing. That it had "worked" before, but if this was really a race around the globe, then it damn well better be a race around the globe from Athens to Brazil to the Vatican to Connecticut to London. What I discovered was I had all those chapters in there, but I was sandwiching sidetracks into the characters' lives because, well, I find them interesting. An entire chapter depicting the decline of a young man from promising chess player to very ill schizophrenic was reduced to ONE line.

"My brother has been in that room for six years."

That's ALL you need to know. I show the current condition of the brother. I don't need to TELL you how he got that way, the slow decline, the suicide attempt, the way his sister's life became consumed with rushing home from work to care for him. You don't need any of that. An entire chapter reduced to a single sentence.

That's focus.

When you get really ruthless with a manuscript--fearlessly ruthless--it's incredibly freeing. And now, more than I ever did before, I can clearly see why some books are a "meh." I stopped at page 250 before because the theology I was creating was difficult to wade through. And the book was a hybrid. Not really a romantic-suspense, and yet not a thriller. I have found over the years when I worked on other writers' manuscripts that a sure sign of a meh was not really knowing what you have on your hands, what the genre demands. Another sign was sidetracking, meandering off to what on its own is good writing, solid, but really amounts to a back story that can be reduced to a sentence.

When writers hear that, they often say, "Not possible." Well . . . working on this, I got proof. Yeah. It is. Show the damn guy in the room, what he has become. SHOW it. Then one sentence.

You don't need even an extra COMMA in there.

So, fellow writers . . . do you have Ninja focus?