Ok, so I know this is actually the first official status of where I’m currently at in the writing process, but I wanted to give a bit of a background from where I started seeing as I’m already one draft down.
Back in January of this year (roughly January 7, to my knowledge), I decided that I wanted to cross a major milestone off my bucket list. I wanted to write a book. It’s something I’ve talked about doing since I was a little kid writing random stories in my notebook when I should have been paying attention in math class (which might explain why I’m not the best with equations).
So, I went to my list of story ideas that I’ve gradually added to for the past 10+ years and picked one that I had actually started writing back in late 2013. I had started writing this particular story and gotten roughly 18 pages in before putting it away for no particular reason. This is a typical theme with me when I try to complete tasks, especially something as daunting as writing a full novel. I had some decent notes and a good fun ending in mind, so I figured I’d just start writing to see where it took me.
I set out with a goal to write at least 5,000 words per week (usually that meant sitting down when the kids were in bed and writing 1,000 words, or around 3-5 pages, every weeknight). I had no idea exactly how many words it would take to finish the first draft and no super clear roadmap for the story, but I was determined to get something down on paper. I looked up some statistics on what an average fantasy novel would be depending on the type and figured I would shoot for roughly 85,000 words.
One thing about me, I knew that if I went back at any point and started reading what I had already written, I would be caught in the never ending loop of writing and revising. So, I just kept writing even if I knew it wasn’t great.
I missed some of those weekly word count goals, but for the most part I stuck to it pretty well. So, long story short, on June 8, 2020, at just over five months from when I started, I officially had a beginning, a middle, and an end. The final tally came in at 97,657 words by my calculation, or 360 pages. It wasn’t a great beginning, middle or end, but it was something.
To put this in to perspective with just how many words that is, let me give you this; my undergraduate senior thesis on the Daodejing and Confucian Analects was 4,746 words on 17 pages. The longest seminar paper I wrote in law school on the pros and cons of a U.S.-China bilateral investment treaty was 8,268 words on 33 pages. I was shocked when I went back to find those papers because I could have sworn they were both at least 50 pages with how long they took to write, taking months and months to finish. These papers and writing a fantasy novel are pretty vastly far apart on the writing scale, but it’s still amazing how different writing a paper for a grade can feel compared with writing something for fun.
Side tangent over. Back to the writing process.
After finishing, I was so happy and proud of what I’d done, even if it didn’t have a strictly coherent flow to the story yet. Originally, I wanted to give myself a week or two to relax and sit with what I’d written, but I couldn’t help myself.
My next step, something I believe I found on an episode of the podcast Writing Excuses (which is a FANTASTIC podcast on writing with some great author hosts, I would strongly recommend it), was to sit down and read it like a book. I put away the word doc version, loaded it up on my kindle, and read it like an actual book without line by line revisions in mind. I still had my digital notebook for taking notes, of course, but it was surreal to read a “book” that I had written.
I also gave it to a couple people to read and give me general feedback on what they thought worked and what didn’t. I mistakenly did this before reading it myself, otherwise I would have never let anyone read that first draft. I immediately wrote down a lot of things that just didn’t work and ideas on how to revise it, but luckily it seemed like the people who read it agreed with what my own conclusions had been.
This is where I’m at now. I am currently redlining the ever-loving crap out of my first draft to get a slightly better second draft. My plan moving forward will probably be to do another revision for a third draft and then I’ll possibly be ready for beta readers to give feedback. Then again, I’ve never done this before and I have no idea what to expect. Only time will tell!
So, in the long-winded answer to all the questions that nobody had, I am on my way to getting this book finished. My hope is that it won’t take another five months to get a second draft done, but I sincerely doubt it’ll take that long. I have a foundation to work from and that makes writing surprisingly easy compared to barfing out coherent words on a page and hoping they don’t make you look too stupid. Ok, maybe not that surprising, but still.
Finally, I know some of you are curious as to the plot of the story. I’m afraid of saying too little or too much at this point, so you’ll just have to be satisfied with the fact that it’s a fantasy story that deals with a magic system and a villain and a few protagonists. What I will say is that writing the dialogue for Trim, one of the main characters, has easily been my favorite part of this experience. There’s a little nugget to keep you going.
I don’t want to promise any sort of timeline for update posts as I’m never quite sure what life is going to throw my way (I don’t have to explain that to any of you, the world is kind of insane right now). However, I want to try to document any major milestones I hit with the process, whether those updates be a paragraph or two or just a simple sentence. They most definitely will not be this long, I can promise you that.
Stay tuned! And thank you for taking the time to check this out (the two or three of you that were insane enough to not only come to site, but to click on this post and read it all the way through. I applaud you.)