Writing Report May 31, 2024

I’m writing this two weeks out, so who knows what may change between now and then?

. . .

My goal is to write two book length manuscripts a year, starting one each January 1st, the other each July 1st.

It normally takes me anywhere from 2 ½ to 3 1/3 months to write each novel, which typically clock in between 85K and 124K.

I finished my 24 01 novel about a month ago as you read this and it ended up being 124K+.  Currently I’m sharing it a few chapters at a time with my local writers group, so I am trimming it back based on feedback and what I see as padding.

However, I’m not doing a full bore second draft edit yet.  I prefer to let my first drafts lay fallow for at least six months so I can approach them with fresh eyes for the second draft.

My 23 07 novel is starting its second draft phase.  It ran up to 86K+ when I finished it last year.

I edit / do my second draft by first printing the novel out then going over it with a red pen (PaperMate Flair, my favorite writing instrument) looking for errors, redundancies, over-explaining, and repetitive scenes and dialog.  That took about three days.

Then I start making the changes I marked on paper on the digital second draft. 

Pro tip:
Edit your your second draft by starting at the end of the first draft and make changes going forward.

There are a couple of reasons for this:

• You’re more likely to spot spelling / punctuation / grammatical errors by going backwards through the text.

• All changes you make are in the latter part of the book, meaning if you need to find something earlier on a specific page, the numbering on that part hasn’t changed yet.

Right now I’m roughly halfway through the 23 07 manuscript and have shaved about two thousand words off. [Added later:  Finished editing, shaved 6K+ off]

Good.

Ideally I’d like to pare it down to under 80K.

. . .

While editing the 23 07 manuscript I noticed I tended to have fewer edits in the second half of the book than in the first.

That’s because in the first half I’m still discovering who the characters are, what the story is.

I have a fairly good idea of my plot, but not more than could fit on three pages.

I have ideas for scenes and incidents, but I wait until the book tells me it’s time to put them in.

While I’ve cut two thousand words out of the second half, mostly that’s been single words and short phrases.

The more I write, the more certain I become of the story, the more focused my writing becomes.

At the midway point (where I just broke off tonight before writing this) I’m whacking out sentences / paragraphs / scenes.

I know there will be a lot more major cuts in the first half, including an entire chapter that got Xed out in red.

As noted before, it’s bee observed one needs to write a novel three times:

First to tell yourself the story.

Then to figure out what the story is about.

Finally to tell the story to the reader.

These are not necessarily three distinct separate steps, of course.  Often what the story is really about presents itself to me midway through the first draft.

But I do tend to write three drafts of my longer works, usually incorporating feedback from beta readers or my writers group.

. . .

While doing this, I’m also taking notes on what may be my 24 07 project, a historical novel set in the early part of the 20th century.

It’s an idea I came up with w-a-a-a-y back in the 1980s, but it’s been sitting in the back of my mental refrigerator until now.

My original idea had only four characters:

1. The main male protagonist (I hate the term “hero”)

2. The main antagonist (I hate the term “villain”)

3. The female protagonist

4. The comic relief

At some point in the 1990s or early 2000s a fifth character was added to the mix, starting out as a minor antagonist but soon joining the protagonists as an ally.

The project became briefly subsumed by another, far larger project I envisions, but eventually abandoned when I saw it becoming too gimmicky and unwieldly.

So now the 24 07 project is back as a standalone.

Sometime after 2010 I started looking at the project through the lens of what actually was going on in the world at the time the novel takes place.

I saw subcurrents I never considered back in the 1980s.  Those subcurrents add to the depth and complexity of the story, broadening it and its cast of characters significantly.

Looks like this is going to be another one of my multi-character epics.

Good.

The extra characters represent people who need to have their stories told.

Two soon-to-be major characters are shady businessmen -- not really crooked, not really sleazy, just…shady -- who start as rivals but find themselves forced to cooperate while still not trusting their new partner and trying to cheat them.

I knew somebody like them would need to be in the story when I first thought of it forty some years ago because my main antagonist would have a specific business-related reason to oppose them.

But as I started noodling story ideas around, I realize these two bozologists needed to do something to actually hurt the antagonist -- not physically, but emotionally.

Now the antagonist harbors a personal vendetta above and beyond his purely business reasons for going after them.

Nice.

What happens after that?

Haven’t the faintest idea at the time of this writing.

I’ve got a couple of vague ideas how to end the story, but getting to those endings is murky right now.

So says Magic 8 Ball.

But I know it will start to shape up.  By the time July 1, 2024 rolls around, I’ll have a pretty good idea what the story is.

It will still surprise me and go in unanticipated directions, but that’s all part of the fun.

. . .

One thing I do know is that my cast has grown exponentially.

I’ve got a dozen characters right now, and I know there will be more.

They’ll come from all sorts of backgrounds.

Different ethnicities / social classes / occupations.

Each with their own distinct patois.

You know what that means, don’t you?

Research!

I’m digging up slang expressions from all sorts of background of the era, and it’s a delight.

Not only have some prompted more story incidents, but a lot of it sounds extremely colorful and funny to this day.

I’m researching far more than I will actually use, but that’s par for the course.

But it is fun.

© Buzz Dixon