Write On: The Hard Part

Previously on the House of Nolahn, I talked about the actual sitting down and writing part of writing my novel. I had some fun at the expense of Earnest “Dr. Giggles” Hemingway in the process, referring to the actual writing as “the fun part.”

I should give this more clarification than I did in that last post. When I talk about “the fun part,” I’m talking specifically about the first draft. When it comes to the first draft, I just sit down and write and write and write until I get to a good breaking point or I’m too tired to keep going (I do most of my writing late at night). I don’t spend too much time sweating about “crafting” or “wordsmithing”; I just tell the story. If I can get myself in the groove – which I usually can – it all comes together pretty easily.

And it still took me nearly a year to get through the first draft, mostly because I worked in fits and starts.

That took me to the second draft, a.k.a. the draft where I actually work at making it good. First I re-read the entire thing from start to finish, making notes along the way about aspects I wanted to add or revise. Usually I’d give myself some pretty definitive direction (“add a sequence about X,” “introduce this sooner”), but other times I’d just leave notes like “make this suck less” or simply “do better.” Harsh? Maybe, but we are our own worst critics.

Then, starting at the beginning again, making the changes I called out and revising my manuscript paragraph by paragraph, line by line. This is the part where I do sweat all that “crafting” and “wordsmithing.” Or, as Dr. Giggles said:

"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." -- Earnest "Dr. Giggles" Hemingway

Yeah, the first round of revisions is a bit like that. 

And then, because this endeavor has been all about the extra degree of difficulty, I had a second issue to address during this round of revisions: My story was too damn short.

If you’ve ever participated in National Novel Writing Month, the goal is to have written 50,000 words by the end of November. The typical length of a fiction novel is 60,000 words, though stories in the mystery genre typical clock in around 80,000 words. My first draft only hit 45,000 words. Or, to illustrate it in a snazzy bar chart...

Snazzy! And problematic!

For those of you reading this and thinking that 45,000 words could be rightly considered a “buttload,” there are two issues:

1. I’m ultimately looking to shop this to agents and publishers, and they may have a set word count for works they’re considering. Not hitting that word count would be a quick and easy way to dismiss my story, and no one is going to have a word count that short.
2. As is the case with many things in life, it’s much easier to cut back than to add.

This round of revisions was tedious and slow-going and very necessary. There were plenty of times where an entire evening of work would have advanced me only a page or two, adding maybe a couple hundred words – and I had to remind myself that this was still progress. 

It took just over a year to get through this round of revisions, but my manuscript was finally ready. Not to shop it around, not yet, but to let it see the light of day. That’s a post for another day.