First Draft Wrap-up, Part Two: Fun with Firsts

Petra afforded me the opportunity to try several new things.  Primary among them, of course, was the pedal-to-the-metal writing process, about which I discoursed in my first installment.  Here are a few other firsts:

Multiple POVs. 

My first two novels, while considerably longer than Petra, were told entirely from the protagonist’s point of view.  The logistics of Petra demanded a multiple POV approach.  I needed at least two viewpoint characters.  I ended up using four.  I could conceivably have used at least one more.  One of my minor characters, who started off as basically a guy with a gravelly voice, became more and more important to the story as it rolled along.

The redoubtable Elaine Isaak pointed out to me that four POVs is a lot for an 80K-word novel.  She’s quite correct.  I feared that Petra might balloon into a doorstop epic.  It didn’t, thank goodness.  I attribute this to the fact that it covers a very short span of time–only three days.

I’m not sure how successful some of these POVs were, at least at the beginning of the novel.  But toward the end, I think I started getting the hang of using them to my advantage.  For example, one scene featured two characters discussing a third, a person whose loyalty they were beginning to doubt.  In a subsequent scene, I jumped into that person’s head, showing the reader just how right/wrong they had been about him.  That was kinda cool, and factored into the third act.

Da Bad Guy.

One of my POV characters was my antagonist.  This was a very interesting experience for me.  I learned things about him I hadn’t even suspected when I started writing the novel.  I also found, as I believe I’ve mentioned, that writing from his POV was amazingly easy.  Not sure why, but there it is.  If I had to guess, I would say it’s because of the type of guy he is–long-used to being in charge, utterly lacking in self doubt.  A touch megalomaniacal.  He’s a (forgive me) Decider.

Something else that just occurred to me:  one theme I’m drawn to time and time again is the use and abuse of power.  It’s very much in evidence with Petra, and my antagonist is its living embodiment.  Maybe that’s why his parts of the novel went so smoothly.

Of course, one must be careful not to let things get too easy.  One pitfall I became wary of was the temptation to throw in some mustache twirling on his part–especially important to avoid, given that he doesn’t have a mustache.  On a couple of occasions, I had to resist having him engage in some gratuitous villainy to show, you know, that he’s a villain.  He was already enough of a bastard.  He didn’t need any of my help.

But damn, was he easy to write.

Flying Blind.

As I mentioned yesterday, and numerous times over the past several months, I started writing this novel while huge chunks of the second act were missing, and without any real idea how the story would end.  This made me quite apprehensive, as I hadn’t had much success with that kind of situation in the past.  And yet, every time I got to one of those blind spots, my muse bailed me out.  She fed me the story on a need-to-know basis only.  And you know, the plot seems to move along pretty well.  The ending seems pretty well set up by stuff that was planted earlier, as if it had been planned from the very beginning.  It wasn’t–at least, not by me.  (Time and perspective may prove otherwise, I realize–a chance I’ll have to take.)

So why did it work out this time?  I’m not sure, but I think it had to do with my characters.  I’ve always believed that the whole “plot vs. character” debate is a false choice.  The two are inextricably linked, two sides of the coin called Story.  Plot flows from characterization; characters are shaped by plot.  (The relationship strikes me as similar to the relationship between gravity and matter in General Relativity.)

Even though I knew little about what would happen next in the novel, I knew the characters well enough to ask them.  And that, I think, made all the difference.

And that’s enough for tonight.  For my final installment, I’ll hazard some guesses about what’s ahead for Petra.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Comments Off on First Draft Wrap-up, Part Two: Fun with Firsts

Prime Amazon

For those who are interested, Prime Codex is now available for pre-order via Amazon.

That is all.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Comments Off on Prime Amazon

First Draft Wrap-up, Part One: The Petra Results Show

So yesterday, I posted the news that I had finished the first draft of Petra.  I thought I’d take some time to set down a few reflections.  If the following seems overly self-congratulatory . . . well, maybe it is.

I’ll need to break this down into a couple of installments, I think.  For the first installment, let’s review.

When I first committed to this project in January, I set a very manageable (read:  easy) goal–to finish a first draft by the end of the year.  Then I decided to step it up a bit, and finish by September.  I had projected a length of 80K (and, for a wonder, said projection was actually accurate), and allowed myself a month for preparatory notes and outlining.  That meant I needed to do 10K a month, or 2500 words a week.

Real writers may be excused for reading the preceding paragraph and shaking their heads, saying, “Slacker.”

One must understand, however, that I have never been a fast writer.  One must also understand that over the past several years, my production has been dowright abysmal.  I began taking steps to right the ship last year, and Petra was to be a continuation of that reclamation project.

So.  80K by September.  I suspected I could do more, but anything better than that would simply be icing on the metaphorical cake.

Then my man 

 inadvertently gave me a kick in the ass, completing the first draft of his first novel in a matter of weeks.  Now, I know it’s silly to compare myself to another writer.  Ken’s process is his process; what works for him won’t necessarily work for me.  I get it.  But the thing is, I know Ken had some serious doubts about whether he could even write a novel.  Having already written two, I had no such doubts about myself (nor about Ken, for that matter).  Damn it, I figured, if he can churn out a first draft that quickly, despite all his misgivings, I could . . . well, I went from suspecting I could do better than 10K a month to knowing it.

So just before beginning chapter one, I took a deep breath, and committed to a new stretch goal:  20K a month, doubling my projected output.

To meet that goal, I knew I had to make some changes to my process.  Normally, even while writing a first draft, I would sweat over word choices and line edits.  My typical writing session began by rereading the previous day’s work and making corrections, tweaks, and sometimes spending the entire session fixing a scene that I was convinced just wasn’t working.  Yeah, it was slow going, maddeningly so at times, but it was also a good way to get myself focused each writing session, and it resulted in pretty clean first drafts.  And it only took half a lifetime or so. 

OK.  I realized that method had to go.  No looking back, not until the first draft was done.  Just sit down at the keyboard and go.  I wasn’t at all sure I could do it, but I was excited at the prospect.  If it worked, I could conceivably have a first draft finished by my 40th birthday, on June 2nd.

I also need to stress that much of the novel was unformed at the time I started typing.  My attempts at outlining had netted me my characters, and much of my first act–but the second act was fuzzy at best, and the ending was almost a total mystery.  But the deadlines had been set.  It was time to get moving, whether I knew the ending or not.  This, too, was a radical departure for me.  My past attempts at writing without a clear ending in mind had been disastrous.  I long ago resolved not to do it again.  Circumstances forced me into giving it another try, and hoping for a better outcome.

And so I began.  My weekly struggles with the process have already been documented.  It’s time to review the results:

I started writing Petra on February 1.  I finished the first draft on May 20, two weeks before my birthday.  That’s 80K words in 16 weeks.  After the first couple of weeks, I never wrote less 5K a week, with peak output of 6K in week 5.  Man, I didn’t just meet my initial goals, I annihilated them. 

We’re only 5 months into the year, and I’ve already topped my total output for 2006–first drafts, rewrites, and non-fiction combined.  And let’s compare Petra to my previous two novels, shall we?  The first draft of The Lonely Stars, at 120K, took a year and a half.  The first draft of The Watermasters, at 165K (long-winded, I know), took two years.  (BTW, both of those novels were written in a vacuum.  I had no writing group, no contacts in the field, and really, no basis for comparison.)

The numbers so far point to unqualified success.  But I need to emphasize that these are just numbers.  They tell me nothing about the quality of the work–something I won’t have a handle on for a few months, at least.  This experiment of mine is only a success if the novel is at least as good as something I would have produced using the old process.  And if I spend a year revising Petra, well, I haven’t really gained anything.

I suspect the novel is not a steaming pile of warm monkey vomit.  Neither do I feel it’s singularly brilliant.  There are parts that are probably pretty decent, and parts that need some serious fixing.  But you know, that’s pretty much how I feel after every first draft.

In the next exciting installment, I’ll discuss the “firsts” I attempted with this novel, and what I’ve learned from them, if anything.  Then I’ll cast an eye toward the future.

Till then . . .

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Comments Off on First Draft Wrap-up, Part One: The Petra Results Show