The first draft of anything is shit

Someone asked me the other day why I’m planning several drafts of my novel before letting people have a read. Aside from the obvious reply of ‘no-one gets it right first time, least of all me’ there’s another answer that springs to mind, and that is ‘I write too fast’.
On good days, I write waaaay too fast - some days I’ve written ten pages (3k words) in a few hours, one day I remember writing a twenty page short story in a single session. If I know exactly what’s going to happen in the story and it’s one of the more action-orientated or dialogue-led chapters, I write rapidly. It’s not always good (that short story is nothing I’m proud of) but sometimes that initial burst is pretty solid and only needs minor tweaks. It’s a surprising process, but never a predictable one. Somedays I write and write and write and it’s all destined for the bin. The great thing is that I can do it again - no-one’s being disappointed except me if I have a stinker. It can get frustrating but writing without external pressure is a huge advantage I have at present.
Re-writing the end of the novel in the second draft has been essential because I changed completely many elements of the story. I’ve also re-written the last quarter of it entirely because it will be (hopefully) exciting to read so it has also proven exciting to write, which means it will need careful review otherwise I’ll be cheating my readers. The various storylines have to be tidied up and characters' journeys completed.
The first draft was me finding my feet, discovering my characters and working on the framework of a story. When I read it through I found the pacing off (too slow to start, too fast to finish) and the story confused, exposition either too apparent or, conversely, completely absent. I have attempted to address these failings with the second draft and at the moment, with three chapters to finish, it feels good. But it still won't be 100% right, and with the third draft, the last I hope before I test it with a couple of early readers, I will look at ensuring each word, sentence, paragraph and chapter is the best I can do and that I’m telling the story as best I can, as consistently as I can.
Each draft is a layering process, peeling an onion in reverse if you like, each layer adding (or, just as important, subtracting) words and refining what, ultimately, will be a satisfying whole.
And the only thing I know for certain is that my first novel will be okay but nowhere near as good as my second. Whatever that may be.

'A fourth ending??'

My mate Mr Stanley asked me at the weekend how many drafts there would be on my first novel. Bloody good question, and my answer, ‘I have absolutely no idea’, was probably not what he was expecting.
I finished the second draft on Friday, April 15th. Some chapters survived from the first draft with just minor edits, but I made major changes to the central story and altered one character completely. This resulted in the last quarter of the book being a complete re-write with very little remaining intact. (I am actually now on my fourth ending, the earlier ones all disappointing me in how they turned out. Hopefully this one’s the one.)
I will embark on a third draft in a few weeks. Although I have had a few ideas to shake up the opening chapters, I’m looking to resist the temptation of any major rewrites now - this draft will be improving the way in which I’m telling the story, not the story itself.
After that I will send it to a few friends who have volunteered as ‘early readers’ and get their feedback. That will lead to a fourth draft, hopefully not a massive piece of work on my part unless I’ve really been deluding myself, and then it will be available as an e-Book and submitted to Agents.
Unless I feel the need for a fifth draft, that is...

One step forward, two steps back

I’m definitely going through a one step forward, two steps back period with my efforts. Making the most of some fine spring weather I spent a few days in the garden reading my latest manuscript, pen in hand, pouring over the second draft’s opening scenes for the first time in a couple of months.
Uh oh. Not good. Chapters and dialogue I had considered snappy and witty now feel laboured and flat, characters I thought I’d clearly defined seem confused and even shallow. Even my main man Barclay isn’t sparkling like I’d hoped, and Claire’s fascination with him doesn’t feel natural - she’s telling the reader how intriguing Barclay is but I’m not showing it. And after my prologue there’s little action to drive the story forward, which made me feel impatient (as a reader) for something to happen; the pacing is still a considerable distance from what I need to keep the pages turning.
I’m not sure how I’ll fix it. I know (hope? My confidence is taking a hammering at the moment with every page I read) that the rest of the story is told more consistently and at some speed, but this all-important opening needs a lot more work.
I may look to introduce Barclay’s sister earlier to add more life to these pages. I may have to add another ‘event’ to spark things along. I’m even considering changing the whole opening gambit of Claire finding Barclay’s bag, or at least make it a more exciting event. That would mean losing much of the work I’ve incorporated from my Random House Creative Writing course, but I’m starting to think that is a big part of the problem with the book’s opening - patching the course work into this story has resulted in the opening reading like an ill-fitting jigsaw. There’s some of my more accomplished writing there, but if it doesn’t fit it needs to be cut out.
I think that I need to attempt a rewrite of the first part of the book with the third draft, much like I rewrote the later chapters in my second draft. That may just work. Fingers crossed.
I will continue with my current review - let’s call it draft “2.5”- and then do more work on the Third Draft which I’ll share with a few First Readers. I’ll keep you posted.

Third Draft

Well the good news is that I’m in a better place now than I was when I wrote last.
I’m just starting my third draft this week and I’ve worked out what I need to do with the opening and I’ll get to it later this week.
My second draft proved to be an odd beast; after the zippy prologue the pace slows too much but from around page 50 it bursts back into life and I’m much happier with it, making fewer notes on each page as the story progresses. In summary, there’s an early chapter that needs a complete rewrite and there’s a later chapter that needs some editing/rewriting to address a pacing issue, but for the most part it’s reading better than I had feared it would and I’m very pleased with the final half of the book that builds nicely to an exciting climax.
It’s been interesting that my writing reads much better once I reached the chapters that didn’t include the writing I produced on the Random House Creative Writing course I did in the autumn. It proved a useful starting point but I don’t think there’ll be too many of the course exercises’ words left by the final draft.

Anxious times

Good news: I finished the latest draft of When She Was Bad this week and I’ve decided that it’s about time I let a few other people read it and give me their feedback. I thought that this would feel like a huge, liberating achievement but it’s actually quite a nerve wracking one; up until now, I’m the only person who has read the 300+ pages (aside from a few short pieces I completed on my Random House course last year) so this is its first time out in the wild on its own.

And that’s a wee bit scary. As my wife will tell anyone who will listen, I don’t take criticism particularly well, so I’m going to have to listen and learn what people think if I’m going grow as a writer before publishing this for real.
It’s gone out to four people who I hope can give me the constructive feedback I need to finish it.  I’ve asked them for feedback on the overall impression it leaves - does the story make sense? Is there anything that reads poorly? Are the characters clear and consistently portrayed? Do their motivations and actions ring true? Are there any howling plot holes? Where (and how) can it be improved?
That kind of thing. Anything they can think of. Oh, and did they enjoy it? That’s probably the one that matters most to me.
It’ll be interesting to see what comes back. It will be a somewhat anxious time waiting to find out. It’s a bit like sending your child off to school for their first day then sitting nervously watching the clock until it’s time to find out how they cope on their own.

A short story about a teacup in Argentina in 1932

My daughter Ellie bought me a wonderful book to inspire my writing: 642 Things To Write About and, when I’ve not been working on a draft of the novel, I’ve started a few of the exercises. Here’s the beginning of one that I’m going to complete as a full short story this month (and I’ll then publish here when I’m happy with it):

Write a short story that is set in Argentina in 1932, in which a teacup plays a crucial role. 

At night I would lie restless on my filthy bed, a single worn blanket pulled tight against the bitter winter’s cold, and listen to him pacing on the creaking floorboards of the room above. My father was a poor sleeper and that made him a poor, tired farmer, and us a poor, tired family. Even before the sudden death of mother he had found sleep difficult and would often complain loudly at breakfast of his tiredness and aching back and the worries that had tormented him through the long night hours.
How I missed those days.
After we buried mother in the shallow grave in the backyard father wrapped himself in his remorse at her murder, and sleep became an even blacker stranger to us all. He forbade us talking about the events leading to her death, hoping to shoulder alone the suffering of our combined guilt, as if he could protect my sisters and me from the pain and regret at our actions. He was a good father, but a bad man, and he paid for that badness in his torment.
His insomnia was contagious and our home became an exhausted, joyless and wearying place, the darkest secret within its walls weighing heavily on us, shared but unspoken.
But he couldn’t protect us. And I cannot forget.

(It will have a teacup in it later. Honest.)

Self-publish or go traditional?

Whilst I’m waiting for feedback from my first test readers I’ve been exploring the different opportunities for publishing my first novel.
I had originally planned to go down the traditional agent/publisher route, a notoriously difficult and lengthy process that seems to require perseverance, patience, a strong stomach for rejection and no small amount of luck. J K Rowling’s excellent novel The Cuckoo’s Calling was rejected numerous times by literary agents when she submitted it anonymously after completing the Harry Potter books, so what chance do us mere mortals have?
I attended a Guardian Masterclass earlier this year given by agent Juliet Mushens at United Talent and what she said was inspiring but left me feeling a little bemused - does it really take up to five years for a new novelist to hit the bookshelves? I’m used to the few weeks or months of magazine schedules, but hearing of several years after a book deal is signed before publication has made me think twice.
I have decided to take a two-pronged approach: I’ll submit the first three chapters and a synopsis of my final draft to agencies to see if anyone bites, but I’ll also self-publish (mainly for friends) on the Kindle App platform this summer, probably with a CreateSpace print edition too later in the year. What is more, by going electronic I can make revisions to the book once I start to get feedback and reviews at no cost or delay - that’s a big plus for me as I’m still learning.
I’m not a huge fan of Kindles - I don’t own one and prefer to read on paper. Having said that, I do read my news, magazines and occasionally books on my iPad, so I do appreciate the advantages of e-reading and believe that the two forms are compatible rather than competitive - different people have differing requirements and have choice, which is the important thing.
Publishing via Kindle doesn’t appear to restrict opportunities with conventional publishers either: the Fifty Shades books and The Martian started off as self-published efforts and it hasn't hurt either of their sales.
So I plan to explore both routes. At least I can say with some certainty that I’ll have something out this summer for people to read and, hopefully, enjoy. Not long now.

Now available on Kindle

Kindle cover (by Jen)

I did something impetuous on Monday: I decided to publish my novel.
After a few months of tweaking this and changing that, I realised I was getting jaded with the constant tinkering and re-reading (and re-re-reading). What’s more, I heard over the weekend that two of my Early Readers were going to be unable to review their copies until later in the summer, which was understandable (given their work) but a little disappointing for me. I was getting impatient.
So I decided to just go ahead and publish, to take an iterative, ‘Agile’ approach to publishing and put it out there and then I can make any further refinements based upon some reader feedback. ‘Crowd-editing’, if you like. I didn’t do any clever promotion stuff, just told friends on Facebook that it was available - the marketing I can do later when I also have a print version to sell alongside the digital one.
I checked the Amazon Kindle guidelines on submitting amended versions and all was okay with making small changes and revisions, so if I correct stuff anyone who buys it now will get an email telling them when a revised edition is available if they want it (and at no extra cost). I can’t see a downside.
So now friends (and other Amazon customers) can buy When She Was Bad for Kindle (and Kindle Apps for other platforms) and if those guys read the book over the next month or so and send me some feedback that will be the final step in completing my first book.
Click this link if you would like to order When She Was Bad

My first week as a published author

When She Was Bad first appeared in the Kindle store on June 12th, so I’ve had a week now to learn a little more about the Kindle Direct publishing experience, good and bad. Here are a few notes on my first week as a published author:

• I decided to do a ‘soft’ launch and just announce the book’s availability to my Facebook friends and on LinkedIn. I estimated that maybe around fifty people would be interested in buying it, maybe some of them would look at the sample, and maybe a dozen or so would take the plunge and download it (a few may wait for the promised print edition). Then, maybe a handful of them would actually read it reasonably quickly and I’d get enough feedback to eliminate any “distracting errors” (as Amazon calls them) like typos or grammatical boo-boos in a free update I could publish before the end of the month. 
• “Crowd Proofreading”; maybe I should patent it now...
• I actually sold over forty copies in the first few days. Which was way beyond my expectation but hardly going to make my fortune.  Sell twenty in a day and you can break (briefly) into the Amazon top 10,000 and the Kindle top 500.
• Some of the Kindle tools are rubbish. The online Reviewer in particular I can single out as a complete waste of time as it only emulates older Kindle models and Apps. I spent a frustrating couple of hours trying to eliminate blank pages between my chapters that were showing in the Review’s Kindle DX mode. When I finally gave up and just uploaded the HTML file, they were nowhere to be seen!
• I had to strip out all comments and accept all changes to my Word document before exporting the HTML version, otherwise they appear in the book on the Kindle. Other than that I did nothing clever or particularly technical with the file. (BTW I’m glad I wrote my later drafts with Microsoft Word rather than Google Docs or Apple Pages - it’s in a different league when preparing professional documents.)
• Kindle publishing is really, really fast. I made my first sale (to Jon Fein in NY - thanks, Jon!) before I realised it was out. I had uploaded the file only thirty minutes earlier.
• The book looks best in Baskerville on the Kindles and even better on iPads and iPhones.

A number of friends have finished it already and their feedback has been hugely heartening and encouraging. I still find it humbling when I hear that anyone is willing to spend the hours to read my efforts. I also find it somewhat stunning that they say that they’ve enjoyed it so much and are recommending it to their friends, too. Hopefully the Amazon reviews are on their way.

My next step is to finish the update and make that available to all, again via the Kindle store. That will, for now, be my definitive version of the text which I’ll use for the print copies later in the summer.