On the horns of a metaphor of some sort…

So I’m watching Mildred Pierce with Kate Winslet on HBO. I had originally skipped the first two (of five) episodes, because the critics were unanimous that they draaaaaagged. The last three episodes were great. Evan Rachel Wood is amazing. All that quality personal time spent with Marilyn Manson has not gone to waste on her art.

The last few episodes were so good, I decided to go ahead and watch the first couple anyhow. Man, am I glad I did. The pace isn’t slow or leisurely, but deliberate. Every moment is a telling one. Every detail, down to the smallest one, informs the story.

Example: I just watched a scene where a broke, desperate Mildred Pierce gets off a bus during the Depression, while on a job hunt, and in the background is another woman wearing the exact same drab, faded print dress as Kate Winslet. It’s such a small moment it probably went right by most viewers, but to me it said volumes about Depression-era America.

It was otherwise definitely a scene—the protagonist walking down a street—the critics would have trimmed to get to Wood’s big nude scene in episode five, and the quality of the film as a whole would have suffered for it.

Why do I bring this up? Why has it crawled under my skin and hung out its shingle?

On account of I have my own piece of long-form fiction in the can, and the one thing everyone who’s taken a look at it agrees on is that it draaaaaags in the beginning. One told me, “I’m 80 pages in and nothing has happened.”

The first 80 pages establishes an alternative timeline where Christ didn’t die on Golgotha; the villains—complete with metahuman abilities—are introduced; the Shroud of Turin is vandalized; and one main character meets his Love Interest while another main character is murdered.

Come on—that’s a lot of story for 80 pages!

[Full disclosure: I also got called on a horrible cliché in the second paragraph of chapter one. For years, the offending sentence ended thusly: “…like a metaphor of some sort.” Unfortunately, what I came up with to replace the placeholder line wasn’t even that good, but I have since corrected it to my critic’s satisfaction.]

So now I don’t know what to do. I’m under no illusions that my little alternative-history thriller is on a par with Todd Holland’s magnificent Mildred Pierce, but in my opinion, all the critics bellyaching about how long it took Pierce to get going got it wrong. Every “draaaaagging” moment is rich in period, plot and/or character detail.

And I think my epic is, too, but I’m way to close to it to tell.

In the end, I agree with the criticism of my story in that a lot of the first part of the narrative is filled up with characters whom I do not particularly like, who are not there to be liked. I’m trying to think of a way to consolidate their scenes, or streamline them, but I can’t figure out how to eliminate them entirely or move them from the front of the book without cutting the story off at the knees. Everything that happens later in the story hangs on what happens in the beginning.

Just like Mildred Pierce.

So I’ve fixed the opening cliché. I’m gonna print out about the first ten chapters, paper-clip them by chapter, and see if there isn’t stuff that can be consolidated or cut without rendering the story incomprehensible. I think graphically, and maybe having the pages laid out in front of me instead of filed away on my computer will make things clearer.

I think I’ve got one last edit in me. New goal is the same as the old one; make it the best story it can be, and if at all possible, get to the action a little quicker. But watching Mildred Pierce turn down one shitty, demeaning job after another—and discovering that the first couple hours of Mildred Pierce do not suck at all, in spite of critical consensus to the contrary—has re-remotivated me.

I’m gonna drive a stake through the heart of this manuscript. I’m gonna tighten the beginning, polish it to my satisfaction free of commercial considerations, then move on to something else. Like a… like a… you know, a metaphor of some sort.

It’s gonna be great. I can’t wait to be done with the fucking thing.