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.
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
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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 . . .
