I completed my read through of the first draft of my next novel yesterday (working title: “Night of the Lonely Werewolf,” it is kind of a horror/steampunk Dirty Harry).
Before you gasp and say “499 pages?!”, keep in mind this is the printed out version–double spaced, 12 point font on normal sized pages. The total word count was somewhere in the neighborhood of 90,000. To compare, Magic of Eyri was 170,000+ words and 919 pages printed out in the same format.
Yes, I’ve killed quite a few trees lately.
Will I self-publish this one? Nope. I’ll get this baby ship-shape and start shopping it around in a few months (hopefully) to agents, etc.
My first thoughts after reading the last page and setting aside my red pen?
1. There are a few sentences I’m proud of.
2. It certainly is a first draft (as in, a good sized portion is “crap”).
3. I can see its potential.
4. I have a lot of work to do.
The most interesting thing about this novel is that I stopped writing it about halfway through and didn’t start up again until at least six months later (life happened). And it shows in some parts. Getting the story going again was rough, and in some sections it was apparent that I didn’t care how the characters got moving, as long as they were doing something.
But, towards the latter half, I found my groove once again. There are some great ideas that came to me then–ideas that will make me go back and completely change the first half of the book, for the better.
This is why, when asked for writing advice, I tell people to just finish, for better or worse (to wit, see my Ignite Lansing 3.0 presentation). I wrote scenes in the last 30 pages that I didn’t even have ideas for in the first 200 pages. I came up with a huge change for my main character in those last 30+ pages or so, and it’ll make the first part much better.
Had I stopped half-way through, I would have never come to that revelation. Better still, a few lines I wrote in the last few pages may end up going to the BEGINNING of the story. They set up my main character really well.
Sure, going back and rewriting most of the book with this new focus will be a bit of a chore, but I don’t care. It’ll make the story better and honestly, I’m not happy with how I wrote some of the early sections anyway (lots of info-dumping).
Next step: going through and taking all the notes from my marked up manuscript and putting them all in one notebook or sketch book.
