Reaching The End

Sunday afternoon, I wrote the two sweetest words in the world: The End. Why are these the two sweetest words? Because I have something to work with. I actually prefer revisions over rough drafts because that's when I get to pull things together, add foreshadowing, and all that other cool stuff. I finished the rough draft of an urban fantasy, new adult novel. It's the second in a series, the second sequel I've ever written and, as with any story, I learned from the process.

One thing I did different this time around was to write down my word count every day. I didn't track the words written that particular day, but the total, so I got to see the number creep up slowly, with jumps here and there. I also wrote down when I skipped a day, and what the reason was (i.e., sick day, or brainstorming). I can seen where I dashed through from about 10K to 30K, and then slowed to a more consistent pace after that. I'm not sure how it worked, exactly, but it kept me going. Maybe it was the fact that I was holding myself accountable in this notebook and I didn't want a bunch of days when I wrote "I slacked off."

Now, I'm not much of an outliner at all. I plan ahead a bit, and then I plunge through the rough draft. The rough draft ends up being more of a really, really detailed outline, and I often surprise myself along the way, which I think is a good thing since it will (hopefully) also surprise the reader. But, during my planning for this novel I wrote out a basic summary. It was nothing major, just a few lines. I had originally intended for this to be a four book series, so I wrote out a summary for books three and four, and I discovered something really interesting. Nothing much happened in book three. So I took the wee bit from that one and tacked it onto the fourth. Now I know my series will be three books long, and I figured it out with a minimum of grief. So from now on, I'm going to outline just a teensy bit.

One last thing. I tend to come in under my target word count. Every. Single. Time. I panic, then during revisions I end up adding a lot of stuff and pretty much meet the original target word count. This time, I almost hit my word count. I like to think it's a sign of improvement.

Some Good News for Pantsers

Even with several complete novels under my belt, I still struggle with writing them. One of my biggest issues in writing fiction is making sure my characters come across as believable, as living, breathing creatures with a past, a present, and a future. I love a story where a character (or characters) takes over and comes to life, and I strive to create that kind of story, but sometimes my characters come across as flat.

This leads to some big problems when writing the rough draft of a novel. I tend to shudder when somebody mentions the word 'outline,' and immediately flash back to high school and those outlines my English teacher made me do. You know the ones, neatly laid out, with each new idea under the main idea getting its own letter or number or what-have-you, and an indentation. But writing by the seat of my pants (or pantsing, as some call it) produces an awful lot of unusable words, and I'd really like to streamline the process and get as much of it right the first time through.

This leads to my other problem, which is, when I come to something that will end up changing an earlier section of the story, I have the compulsion to go back and make that change before I can write on. I've tried following the advice of some, which is to ignore the changes and push on, but that results in a gobbledy-gook of a mess. I've given in to the compulsion and gone back to make the changes, only to lose that forward momentum and the passion that was driving me initially. What I needed was a way to barrel through the first draft without making huge changes along the way, without giving in to the need to go back and fix things, and all while breathing life into my characters. Easy, right?

This year I entered the novel contest at Codex, which is a lovely group of writers. The point of the contest is to finish a novel by December. I started in March with an initial outline of a novel. I wrote out the usual stuff, like what the characters look like, what they do for a living, blah, blah, blah. Don't get me wrong, that's important stuff, but what I end up doing during my first draft is figuring out who the characters really are, hence the need for major rewrites and revisions later. They sort of go around doing random things while I get to know them.

At any rate, I wrote a first draft and liked some parts, but really hated others, which is standard operating procedure for me. Then, I heard about the 90 day novel, a book that was supposed to get your butt in gear and produce something decent in three months. You can read more about Maya here. She talks about her own struggles with pantsing, which convinced me to try the 90 day novel.

The gist of the book is that you answer a bunch of questions about your characters before you even write the first line of the novel. These are great questions that delve into the psyches of the characters. I had tons of fun doing this even though I'd already gotten a first draft down, and came up with some amazing insights. You spend an entire 30 days getting to know your characters before you start drafting, then you have 60 days to bang out a draft.

I had addressed some of the questions already, but just a handful. I didn't follow the guidelines exactly. I didn't feel that I needed to. I spent about 3 weeks answering questions and writing out little scenes and bits of dialogue, then I plunged into a complete rewrite, saving only a few essential things from the first draft. I was initially on target to finish by mid-November, but I'm happy to say, I finished the second draft a week ago. I do have a couple of scenes to add from the atagonists' POV, but the good news is, I didn't feel the urge to go back and fix things, I came up with an outline that worked (!!!), and I kept that passion and drive the entire way through the book. I can't wait to try this from scratch with the next novel and see what happens.