Cold feet?
Not quite.
I was all set to post an extract of the new novel (with a new as yet unrevealed title) to my agent, but I hesitated. I listen to such hesitation. I haven’t really checked it as thoroughly as I’d like.
So the extract is sitting on my kitchen bench, waiting for me to cast a critical gaze over it. Plus I’ll be passing it to my first reader. She’s a fast reader (ridiculously fast) so I should get some efficient feedback from that.
It’s a little weird to be back here so quickly this time around. I may have mentioned the last novel Here Today took literally years to reach this juncture. So the usual doubts begin to undermine your confidence. Doubt has its purpose. At least it ensures that I won’t send out something half-baked.
At least I hope so. There’s a hideous story that Tim Winton sweated his way to the end of Dirt Music only to realise on completion that he would have to completely re-write it. From a blank page. The story may be apocryphal, but it’s the kind of thing that makes writers shudder.
Although the book that he subsequently wrote was actually pretty damn good.
Read MoreSell, sell, sell!
Okay, so here’s where strategy starts to come into play.
When I wasn’t sleeping, or moping around, or coughing yesterday, I started thinking about the next stage of this manuscript’s life: the hard sell.
This is the new reality for writers without a publishing contract in these uncertain times. We must morph into sales executives for our story. I have learned from the painfully drawn out experience of writing and hawking around my last manuscript, so the focus this time is on short, sharp jabs at the industry.
Two things I suspect this manuscript will need if it is to find a publisher: an agent and an appraisal.
Fortunately one does not have to wait for an appraisal to begin finding an agent. I’m in the fortunate position to already have an agent for my last novel, however, like all things literary, nothing is set in stone and everyone goes by their gut. This is quite a different story to Here Today and there are no guarantees that the people who liked that story will in any way like this one. All bets are indeed off.
Fortunately, prospective agents and publishers aren’t interested in seeing a complete manuscript straight away. They want to see the first fifty pages first to see if it’s any good. So the author’s job is to really hone that part of the novel first, since it’s the one that will make or break the story. The rest will follow in due course.
The other side is the appraisal. To do that, I’ll need to have a complete manuscript and have it as good as I can get it. Appraisals are a great way to get some outside perspective on whether your masterpiece is hanging together or whether it’s falling apart. I’m not great at structural editing (at least not for my own stuff), so some outside influence is welcome.
I suspect some people get appraisals so they can produce wonderful quotes on how good the story is to prospective agents and publishers. I’m not one of those people. I pay good money for an appraisal and I want an appraiser to rake my story over coals, pick it to death, and tell me what is shit and what’s alright to keep.
I had a major problem last time in that my selected appraiser fell in love with the story and produced a report consisting of two pages of praise. Wonderful for the ego (believe me), but in hindsight not a great investment. Kind words are great to keep you motivated, but they mean diddley squat to a publisher. The reason the praise was a problem is that it gave me no guidance on how to improve the manuscript so I was not prepared for the two years, three more redrafts, and a major award shortlist the manuscript required to still get rejected by everybody.
Anybody can tell you, that’s way too much time. So with this story, everything is about compressing timeframes. The first fifty pages I can handle alone and the help I need for the big picture can happen simultaneously to the first round of hawking.
First draft week is a cinch, really. Next week begins the really hard bits.
Read MoreWhat the hell is going on?
I’m going to pretend that I’ve been inundated with queries about what’s happening during first draft week and why all my promises of regular posts have amounted to squat.
My response? So sue me.
It’s already been a rollercoaster week. Monday was just about the most productive day I’ve had on record. It even beats the day I landscaped our front yard. I was barely pushing 39,000 words on Monday morning. By Monday evening that had turned into around 44,000.Even I was impressed. There was a fairly huge backlog of scenes that I simply had to string together, so it was a very successful first day and bode well for the rest of the week.
Then came yesterday.
Two caveats here. I’ve spent a lot of time obsessing over word counts. I don’t want to give the wrong impression here. Word counts are fairly immaterial. My estimate word counts are more like guesstimates and are based on how many words I think it will take to cover what I’ve written in the notes. Really, as long as you’re up around that 50 – 60,000 plus range, you’ve got a novel. We’re not all writing J K Rowling doorstops. The other caveat is that, Murphy’s Law and all, firs draft week happens to have coincided with catching an irritating cold from my two-year-old. Best laid plans, blah blah, blah.
So I’m using both these points to defend my poor performance volume-wise yesterday. Monday was a five thousand page turner. Tuesday was a sluggish 1,500.Bugger.Part of the problem was I fell asleep. Another part of the problem is that I’d reached the end of my notes. In fact I’d actually hit the story’s climax on Monday, hence the rush. The tidy up at the end is never as exciting.Now, I’d just finished saying that a novel sits above 50,000 and here I am languishing a good 5,000 words off the mark. Well, welcome to my style of writing.
Climaxes bring with them a whole lot of baggage that I hadn’t thought to include in the lead up. In a lot of ways I never actually know my characters properly until that climax, regardless of how much time and energy I’ve put into them previously. A whole bunch of new facts come to light. My main character suddenly has a whole new past. Another character now sports a fairly large scar on her face. Yet another character has harboured a secret desire all the way through the novel. All this is stuff I have to go back and weave into the text.
Other things also come to light when you finish the climax. The narcolepsy stuff hasn’t been properly integrated into the story yet. Each of the sections that deal with the main character’s narcolepsy are kind of hanging out there on their own with no proper reference to anything else. This again is quite a common thing for me because those bits are actually hived off from a short story.
It’s funny that on day two of first draft week, I’ve actually completed what might be considered a first draft, since my job now is to go back through the existing text and add in all the bits I’ve missed. Personally I don’t consider it complete yet, but things are looking good for a complete manuscript by Friday.
Maybe.
The job now is to do a quick run through of the manuscript with my new notes of all the story strands that need more work, with particular emphasis on the firs fifty pages.
Why the first fifty? I’ll add another post here that begins the discussion of what I want to do with the manuscript next week, since this is probably as important as the actual writing of the story.
Read MoreHere we go
The time for procrastination is over. It’s now park your arse or fail time. Ahead of me: one week of nothing but writing. Thanks to a concerted effort in preparation the word count has dropped to just 20,000. It’s still a hard task, but a much more manageable 500 words per hour (for an eight hour day). The other thing this week has going for it is the bit to be written is the final third of the novel. The final downhill third of the novel where all those disparate fragments start coming together and you get that tingle of excitement that things are working and you’re not such a lazy idiot after all.
We’ll see.
Suffice to say, every time I get bored, I’ll throw some kind of random observation up on this blog. Here’s hoping I won’t suddenly turn this into a sixteen updates a day kind of blog.
Read MoreProductivity
Well what do you know? In preparation for next week’s first draft onslaught, I had the opportunity today to do nothing but writing for a good solid few hours. The result? We’re now comfortably over the 38,000 word mark and heading well towards the final downhill run of the story’s final third.
Those of you familiar with writing theory will know that practically all stories can be divided into three major bits: establishment, problem two-step, and climax/resolution. The first two thirds I find a complete drag to write, but the final third is a load of fun
Already I’m starting to get a sense of the big picture in a much more concrete way than before. Links are starting to come together between some of that random stuff early in the manuscript and major plot developments later. And my characters are getting a bit more meat around them too, in particular the more minor characters that looked a little hazy (or perhaps flimsy) on my planning notes.
Oh, and I haven’t abandoned those notes yet, despite my confidence that I would. I have, however, messed around with their order, but again all of that is starting to take better shape now. It’s nice to see a single word from the notes like polysomnogram actually turn into 3,000 words in the manuscript.
Anyway, may yet get a few more words in before sleep kicks in. First draft week is looking better all the time.
Read MoreThe Books
