Writing work continues in fits and starts. In my last post, I mentioned that I was re-outlining my 297,000-word rough draft of “The Book of M”, an effort that in itself had ballooned into a twenty-plus page document (at the time). Well, I’m here to report that I’ve since finished that re-outlining process, which I immediately followed up by re-re-outlining in a much more abbreviated fashion, boiling all 297,000 words down to a comparatively brief seven-page outline document. All told, the full “beat” outline and the “brief” outline now comprise a 39-page document – altogether a 20,700-word document.
Why-oh-why can’t I do anything short?
I do sometimes feel like this revision process is going painfully slow. But when you consider that, technically speaking, I’ve written over 20,000 words in the past few months, it puts things in greater perspective. Yes, I know, a real novelist would easily outstrip that productivity pace. Heck, I’ve heard of some who put down, 5,000, even 10,000 words per day, and here it’s taken me two-and-a-half months to generate a 20,000-word outline. But for me, that’s a healthy clip. So I actually feel really good about that.
And why did I do this work, in the first place? It’s all in the title of this post (and I laid it out as one of my writing goals in my prior post). The entire point of all of this work has been to find a way to extract a 100,000-to-115,000-ish word novel from the pieces I’ve put in play in the whole 297,000-word manuscript. That’s a fairly draconian 61% cut in total length, best-case scenario.
The thing is, I’d decided, there’s no point in revising and cleaning up the whole 297,000-word draft into a second draft unless I could find a way to tell a complete story in 115,000-words or less. Realistically, I probably need to err more on the less side of that equation in the current traditional publishing market, even for an Epic Fantasy. (Which I’d always thought runs longer than other genres… but even so, apparently the tolerance for long works has declined significantly in recent years. Or so I’ve been told.)
Be that as it may, there was no way I would be able to reduce the sum total of “The Book of M” into a second draft that short. Instead, I’ve opted for a more creative (and less destructive) approach: splitting “The Book of M” into three parts.
Yet this decision brought with it a fresh set of challenges that, since completing my re-outline, I’ve been attempting to tackle. Because maybe in total length “The Book of M” kinda-sorta looks like a trilogy, the fact remains that a first novel – both a debut novel and the first novel in a trilogy – needs to be able to stand on its own as a complete, self-contained story. And the first third of my manuscript… decidedly did not stand on its own.
All of which to say, I had to go back to the proverbial drawing board. I drew a metaphorical line through my manuscript, picking a point just shy of one-third of the way through that could conceivably be an ending, of sorts. I sat down and started thinking. What would need to happen to make that sort-of-ending into a real ending that ticks the boxes for an “Epic Conclusion”? How could I take the basic outline, and tweak it here and there, to punch up that third-way ending?
And, lo-and-behold… I thought of something. I don’t want to get into details here, for obvious reasons, but it essentially amounted to trying to end the first third not with a whimper… but a BANG!
But a problem immediately arose. In order for this “Bang” to go off… well… other things would have to change. My main character would have to make different choices earlier in the book in order to end up in a position where this “Bang” moment makes any logical sense. And for my MC to make those choices, I’d need to give her new and different reasons to make them. Basically, to go from a small-e ending to a Big-E Ending, the changes just start to cascade through the whole first third of the book.
In fact, of the 95,500-words in the first third of the rough draft – up to the end of the scene where I drew my metaphorical line – I’m most likely keeping intact only about 79,000-words of the extant first draft (with some relatively minor clean-up and revisions, of course). The rest needs to be largely rewritten, and new material added congruent with the changes I’m making. Happily, this gives me a buffer of between 20,000 and 35,000 (max) words to produce that new material. I do believe I can make the relevant changes within that word count budget.
Of course, these new ideas have necessitated yet another revision of my outline. Which, I’m excited to report, I’ve already completed!
In fact, this weekend past, I actually, at last, began the process of writing the second draft. As I said… the writing work continues!
To commemorate this occasion, I’ve added a new progress bar to the sidebar of the blog, marking my progress toward a complete revision, the Second Draft of “The Book of M”.
The Undiscovered Author 
