Musings on writing...(kind of) boring process stuff.

So, I just finished reading the first draft of "The Broken Collar", the book I wrote 50,000 words on in February. It was a National Novel Writer's Month (NaNoWriMo) adventure (rescheduled to suite my own schedule, of course), and my first experience at writing to a word count.

It's been really interesting, re-reading something I wrote in such a short time. Usually it takes me forever to reach first draft (well...okay. The LAST time it took me forever. I'm not sure once constitutes "usually", but for our purposes...), so to have written 3/4 of a book in 27 days is a really different experience.

When you're writing almost 1800 words a day, your ability to look back on the previous day's writing and tweak it is just about nil. I didn't realize how much time I spend doing that, usually. Playing with the two pages I wrote last time usually takes about half my writing time, which leaves me with less, better, new work. This draft FEELS like it was written in a rush--all it's little errors securely in place ("Did I REALLY have to use "however" FIFTEEN TIMES on this page???"), no time spent filling out the descriptions or lingering over the dialog. Consequently, the pace of the book is really FAST, in a way that makes it feel flat. Too much speed in the pacing, and it all ends up the same speed, you know?

Also, I'm using yWriter as my composing program, and (while I LOVE it) I think that writing scene by scene is making the story excessively choppy. The style I'm looking for is a little choppy, jumping from scene to scene, from past to present, but this just feels disconnected.

So, over the rest of the summer, I'm working on...editing? rewriting? revising?..."The Broken Collar", paying special attention to the following:

-Descriptions should set tone and atmosphere, and build suspense. They are not utilitarian.

-Dialog teaches us about characters. I want to linger, a little, over the dialog. Especially scenes which could be described as "gossiping" where we learn a LOT about a variety of people.

-Transitions from scene to scene, paragraph to paragraph, should be smoother. One shouldn't feel like they missed a scene in the middle.

-Paragraphs should never, EVER start with sentences like "It took a long time for them to get where they were going." It's a bad sentence, to start with, but also serves no purpose, when you're going to spend the next scene SHOWING that it took a long time to get...wherever. I read once, that when you finish a novel, you should go back, delete the first chapter, and write it again. I need to do this with all the first sentences of all my scenes.

-I want the first sentences to grab readers, pull them in to what's going to happen next. Not saying every sentence needs to be a book-opening quality hook, but a little more intriguing would be great. :-)

On the other side of the coin, I'm thrilled with the characters I've met that I didn't expect to meet. I'm excited about how much I know, now, about my main characters (and even the minor ones...who may become main in the sequel.) I think I have a really strong handful of people with a fascinating story to tell. A story that's going to be fun and intriguing and also very real.

I'm surprised at how raw the book has become. How dark. The tone is heavier than I expected, and I think it's really good. (I also think a little more dry humor would benefit...)

I'm really excited about what's going to happen next. What's building. Where the story is going. While I feel like what I ended up with, after my NaNoWriMo, is almost more of an outline than a book, I do think that I learned a LOT more about the story and characters than I could ever have learned in that amount of time any other way. So...I'm glad I did it. Will I do it again...? We'll see...

For now, I have to go figure out what the Goblin village smells like.

--Tesi, the Barefoot Author