Today I finally finished the first draft of my murder mystery novel Built for Murder. It came in at 28 chapters, 86,440 words, and outputs 280 pages in PDF format. It took way longer than I originally anticipated, just over a year, and it was a total learning experience. It’s the second novel I’ve completed to first draft status and that alone makes it special. It’s also better written then the first one and a relative breeze to write.
The first draft started fast and went much easier as I didn’t have to explain every gosh darned item in the novel. I could just say phone and everyone knew what I was talking about. About 8 chapters in I started sharing them with my writing group, and they being such observant and critical readers pointed out some of my more egregious errors. In addition, they provided me with some new ideas I hadn’t previously considered. The ideas were so good I went back and started rewriting from chapter 1 to make the story stronger.
Everything went fine for the longest time until I began approaching the end, and that’s where I stalled. What happened was I had written some chapters out of sequence without having a clear idea how I’d get my characters to that point of the story. The scenes were required but just not focused as well as they should have been. I spent several weeks working my way slowly forward, putting each piece in place, closing off plots, and getting the final confrontation in place. But I stalled again trying to convert/mold/merge the previous material into my latest plot.
But then Thursday I had an epiphany, just rewrite the damn scenes. Sure, I hated to waste the previous work I’d done but they weren’t helping at this point. So I ignored the old scenes and simply rewrote them from scratch. Then I cherry picked out the great sentences, dialogue, or descriptions in the old material and pasted it into the new scene. Result was over 1700+ new words and the completion of 2 chapters that day, leaving only 2 more to go.
And today I finished those.
Now its off to my alpha-readers for feedback. I have some improvements as well that will make it a stronger story as well.
In the meantime, when I wasn’t working on a short story or the first Ramble’s novel, I’ve been plotting out the second Ramble’s mystery. This time I much more confident in writing the characters and decent plots and subplots to fill it up with some good material. I’ve been spending more time in planning to ensure everything comes to when it should and I’m more confident than ever I can be much more productive this time around.
