119,651
(29/07/11) Today I completed the first draft of Answer. It weighs in at 119,651 words, 302 pages (12 point Calibri, 1.5 line spacing) and 33 chapters (plus epilogue) long. I estimate that thus far, it’s taken me maybe one month over a year.
Of course, despite being technically finished, it’s not actually finished finished. Not by a long shot. There’s a whole lot of editing, cutting and rewriting to be done. Firstly, it’s too long; I know for a fact there are many places where I can cut a lot of weight whilst actually improving the flow of the story. The current manuscript is flabby and uneven; over-wordy in places, and too sparse in others.
One problem is that my style of writing has changed quite a bit in the year or so since I started. When I began writing, I didn’t know how to write a novel; I just started writing the same way I’d start writing a short story, and expected the narrative to just unfold as I go.
A year on, and the bulk of one entire novel written, I now understand how to write a novel. This may sound silly and obvious, but that’s how it is. I now believe I could draft a new novel in perhaps a couple of months. The problem that leaves is that there’s a good possibility that the end of this novel, written today, reads totally differently from the start of the novel, written over a year ago.
One of the major undertakings of editing is to eradicate this unevenness, to bring the standard of the older chapters up to match that of the later ones. I’m a better writer now, which is great, but also means I have a lot of re-writing to do. To make the process a little less painful, I’ve devised a plan for the various edits I have to do.
The first thing is go back and do over the part of the story where I know plot holes have developed and changes need to be made. The shape of the story changed quite a bit as I wrote, a result of poor planning, and as a result bits of the story don’t match up. Fixing these known issues is the first priority, and should be fairly easy.
The second step is to split the manuscript up into character-specific segments and edit these individually. There are seven characters from whose viewpoint the story is told; three who bear the body of the narrative, and four more minor characters who add differing viewpoints. I need to separate these characters’ narratives and edit them as if they are each an independent story; this will make sure a characters ‘voice’ is maintained throughout, and also to make sure a character isn’t showing up somewhere they shouldn’t be.
Then I will look at each chapter individually, make sure the different segments fit together nicely, and make sure any of my editing in the previous step hasn’t buggered up the structure of the chapters.
Finally, I’ll put the whole thing back together again, and do a good old-fashioned front-to-back read-through. By now I should be tiresomely familiar with the story, and it should be pretty much error-free at this point, so any errors that might have slipped through the net should jump out here. This also serves as a point for any final fine-tuning that needs doing.
I may be a little optimistic here, but I’m aiming to have all of this done by Christmas, so I have a taut, lean, and all round fabulous manuscript ready to send to publishers in the new year. Before I do all of that, however, I’m going to shelve the damn thing for a few weeks; should give me chance to clear my mind of the writing-fog I’ve been in for the last few weeks, so I can approach the thing with a fresh mind in the coming months.
