The last few days have been the fun sort. After breaking the increasingly-drafted primary story arc into the traditional three acts, the connections between scenes were clarified. Previously, I’d been working with a long list of scenes, which was making it tough to track where I was in the story and keep the connections straight. A little online reading confirmed that writers of the professional sort often follow conventions like the 3 Act Structure, so I did so myself.
That facilitated a few days of the best part of the writing process: the writing itself. I reached the 60,000 word threshold earlier in the week and sit at 67,000 this morning. There’s a light at the end of the first draft tunnel, but I now see that the post-first draft steps may be the more time consuming. Unlike some authors who produce brilliant fiction via a direct link between their minds and the pages of the book, I require a great deal of editing to get a hair past the awful threshold. Too much of what emerges from me is either unnecessarily verbose or too generic. A little tightening here, a little cutting there, and I have something superior to that produced by a precocious sixth grader.
So, if I finish my first draft of the manuscript sometime in the next 10 days, it will have been approximately 9 weeks of effort to get there. My plan is to do a complete edit immediately before combining the story arcs into a single story. That will likely take a couple weeks. Then I’ll do a second edit after combining the story arcs, which should help identify gaps in the story or pacing problems. Let’s say that, together, those two edits take me a month. That puts me at the end of March with a reasonably complete first draft. Time for a break.
Even in my business writing, I take breaks to let a proposal or presentation marinate. It really helps to get some separation from the content for awhile. My plan with this novel is to take 4-6 weeks away while I work on something new. During that time I will upload the novel to the local FedEx Office and print a bound version of the novel for manual edit.
Then the real fun begins.