Wrap-Up Chapters and First Edits

Did Papa really say that?

I finished the first draft of SUNSET HILL a couple of Saturdays ago. I had originally set a goal of 100,000 words, but it came in long at 119K. I'm okay with that; CANALS was 150K, THE MIGHTY T 105K, and DEATH OF A MATADOR about 125K. As I wrote here, 125K is a good length. For comparison, King's UNDER THE DOME has about 335K words.

The word count will likely grow by the time I finish with edits. I feel like it needs a short chapter to wrap-up loose ends, but I have mixed feelings about that. I tend to overdo wrap-up chapters.

Wrap-Up Chapters

CANALS had a fairly long epitaph where I wrote a follow-up on the church the monsters had done their worst work in, and a long follow-up on Lawless and Baskill. I thought the Baskill thing worked, but some readers said it should've been left out.

In THE MIGHTY T, I wrote a lengthy follow-up on the restoration of the Hetch Hetchy Valley, or what I guessed might happen should the O'Shaughnessy Dam be removed. I received a little criticism for that, too. That novel has quite an exciting ending and some readers thought I should've left well enough alone.

DEATH OF A MATADOR originally ended with the capture of ______ (no spoilers—you'll have to read it to learn who was captured and who got away). One beta reader complained the ending was too abrupt so I wrote a few pages of wrap-up. It was brief.

I think most readers want to know what happens to at least the main characters, but in particular they want to be reassured the bad guys didn't get away with it. Even though in real life they often do.

Editing The First Draft

Most editing done on the first draft is mundane work. I like to use real street names, real business names, real landmarks, etc. Often, when I'm working on a first draft, I don't want to stop writing to look back in the text for the correct street or business name because it can break my rhythm. I'll put an *asterisk by whatever I choose to write, which lets me know it needs to be looked up when I'm editing. Or I'll put something in parentheses.

I rarely make big story changes when editing the first draft. I try and make sure I've thought through logistical issues when penning a first draft so I'm not bothered with them later.

For instance, in SUNSET HILL I've got a bad guy with a cop's iPhone. iPhones have GPS functions and are fairly easy to track, if the phone is left on. Cops would know this yet I had the cops not thinking of it. Cops wouldn't normally bother with tracking a phone that's been stolen, but they would if the thief is a cop killer. I had to rewrite several scenes where I had the bad guy actually get rid of the phone.

If I don't catch stuff like this while writing the first draft, I'll catch it during the first edit.

The first edit is done electronically, meaning I either edit on-screen or on my iPad. I have Scrivener sync the manuscript with Dropbox and use Storyist for the iPad to edit the .rtf files in the draft. Storyist doesn't save the file to the same directory in Dropbox, which gives me a layer of security.

Finished first draft of next Grant Starr thriller

No one does the happy dance better than Snoopy!

I finally finished the first draft of my next Grant Starr thriller. I wish I could tell you its title, but I don't know what it is. I began writing this book in April of 2011 and had planned on publishing it in the fall of 2011. Unfortunately, life happened and other things became more important than finishing a novel.

I was tempted to ditch the project for personal reasons, but thought it had merit and deserved to be fleshed out. It weighed in at about 45K words when I set it on the shelf last June and comes in at 131K as a first draft. CANALS ended up at 140K and the THE MIGHTY T at about 100K. I have to admit it was very difficult to complete. I have a great idea for the third Grant Starr thriller, so good it was difficult to ignore its pleas to be written.

This book begins and ends at a "bloodless" Portuguese bullfight, held in a small town about thirty miles from me. They're called bloodless because the bulls aren't killed or hurt, unless you call having to chase a horse or a skinny man dressed funny around the arena being hurt. I've attended two of these bullfights and they're some of the most exciting events I've ever attended.

I wanted to do something a little more challenging this time: I wanted to have two plots that intersected. I don't care to read overly complicated genre books, so I don't write them. As with THE MIGHTY T, the reader will now who done what to whom pretty early in the book. The suspense comes with wondering if they're gonna get away with it, or get caught. I'm not telling!

Hopefully it will be ready for publication in July.

Getting the First Draft Done

I'm writing my third novel (not counting the really bad one I almost finished back in the early 1990s), so I feel I can speak on this topic with some degree of authority. I suppose I'm directing my remarks to the new novelist, the one searching for "the best way to write a book."

I'd like to limit my remarks to the first draft, which is where all novels begin.

1. Understand that nothing matters more than getting your first draft out of your head and down on paper, or the electronic equivalent of paper. Stop thinking about your ebook and print covers, what typeface you'll publish the print book in, your likely target market, and all the other things that don't matter because YOU HAVEN'T WRITTEN THE BOOK YET.

2. I write my first draft in the Courier typeface for several reasons, the most important being it's so basic. It's not pretty and even if you italicize a word, you can hardly tell it's italic when you print out the draft. Courier, to me, represents words. Just words, nothing else. Train yourself to write with little or no italics; let the words convey the meaning, not formatting.

3. Write every day. Any writer who's written a lot will tell you that you need to write every day. You'll train your brain to think like a writer and you'll get your first draft done faster.

4. Don't show your work to anyone. If you belong to a writing group, show them your work after you've finished the first draft. You don't need to be thinking about subplots and characterization, all that stuff, until you've got the story down on paper. If you take advice from others, start on your first rewrite.

5. Get inside your head. It's your story, you're the creator. Do whatever you have to to get inside your head far enough to pull the story out. For me this means sitting by myself somewhere. I can occasionally write in public now as long as I don't know anyone around me. I can tune out their noise, with headphones if I need to. I recommend new writers find a place where there are no distractions, including no Internet connection.

6. Separate research time from writing time. Remember, your goal is to get the first draft written as quickly as possible. Stopping to look up the name of a street or how many miles out of town a character lives interrupts the flow of writing the first draft. Place an asterisk at the front of a word you need to do some research on, then come back later, during research time, and do your looking-up. Which brings me to...

7. It's okay to schedule research time. We can't be spot on with our writing day-after-day. Use the "down days" to look up stuff you didn't look up when you were really cooking and the words were flowing.

8. It's also okay to write scenes out of sequence. Say you sit down in your private place to write, and you're seeing a scene that's half a day ahead in the manuscript. But it's so vivid and you know exactly who's going to say what and what's going to happen. It's okay to give yourself permission to write that scene. This is where Scrivener is so helpful. I organize my novel by chapters and scenes; it's easy to find my way around that way.

9. Don't worry so much about things like spelling and keeping the names of minor characters straight. Get the first draft done, then iron out the inconsistencies. (Just make sure you do; I've read many complaints about authors mixing up the names of major characters, like their main characters. Very embarrassing.)

The first draft is sacrosanct: without it there is no novel, which means until you get it done you're not a novelist.

So quit reading this post and get back to writing!