Writing > Editing

I'm in a tough spot. I did something that few people have done. In the space of three months, and spending no more than an hour a day, I completed a first draft of a novel. It is by no means complete and ready for gift-wrapping but it does not present any noticeable holes like (INSERT CHAPTER THREE HERE). My issue now is with the first edit. I don't know what to do with myself.

I don't think I have the 30 pages needed to contact an agent. The main reason for that is I want to show the first 30 pages. That presents an issue because my fourth chapter, which starts around page 10, is 60 pages. Each chapter of the manuscript is an episode, generally happening in no more than a couple of days. The majority of them are in the 10-15 page range, which I think is good and there are breaks in the middle for people who like that sort of thing. This chapter probably took more than a month to write. It's the tale of a guy who has to arrange a funeral of a man that he doesn't know very well. I don't consider every word of the chapter to be golden but if I'm honest with myself and cut back some of the fat it's probably still going to be around 50 pages.

I had an idea. I decided to chop this chapter down to normal chapter size, normal being normal for this book. I ended up either summarizing what I wrote in a longer form or doing shortcuts like having my 12 main characters explain something that happens (yes, I have 12 main characters) in the form of a text message or an Internet message board post. That's telling, not showing. I want to show.

I'm not going to say that it's easy to produce what could someday be a novel. I'm going to say that it's hard to know when to stop. I literally wrote a "14th anniversary director's cut" of a manuscript I wrote in college, almost half a lifetime ago. I know that an author can tinker until the end of time. I'm not going to do that in this case. I just don't know if I'm in trim the fat mode or liposuction mode.