On Wednesday (March 13th, 2013, for those of you reading this IN THE FUTURE), I finished the first draft of my first full-length novel.
Well over 10 years ago I had an idea for a story. Being a geek, it was inspired in part by my gaming hobby. It was a fantasy story, about an artificial being called a construct – a sort of metal golem powered by a magical core. This construct had the ability to read the thoughts of other artificial beings, but an accident sort of hotwires his ability so that he begins receiving the memories of any construct in the vicinity who gets destroyed. Through the vision-memories he learns some startling truths about some very bad people, but the influx of new memories starts driving him insane.
Over time, the idea morphed a few times. At one point I had rejiggered the idea in order to submit it to an open call for novels at Wizards of the Coast, where the story was now set in the Eberron setting and the protagonist was a Warforged – that world’s version of the constructs I envisioned in my own story. I was only 23 at the time, and my writing was… rough, to say the least. My proposal did not get accepted.
Over the next few years, the idea just kept pounding around in my brain. No matter what else I did, at periodic intervals this idea would pop back up, and I’d just keep adding bits to the story. I knew that I wanted to write a series of stories centering around this character. I knew how the first book started, and I had a clear vision of how it ended. I knew the themes that I wanted to run through the book, and little tidbits I knew I wanted to include. The plot just kept banging around in my head.
At the end of 2010, I decided to try and write the first chapter. I knew so clearly how the story began, even though it had evolved quite a bit from my original idea. I sat down and banged out a 3,000 word opening chapter in about two hours, involving our hero’s entrance into the world, having woken up with no memories in a burning room, next to a dead man.
It was terrible. I’m sure part of that opinion is every artist’s pitfall of thinking their own art is all shit, but I mean it was really bad. I still have a copy of that version of the chapter, and I cringe when I read it. Even the current version – which you can read HERE, if you like – isn’t entirely finished. I can’t count the number of times I’ve rewritten that passage. I’m still not satisfied with it, but holy hell is it better than the very first version.
After writing that first chapter, I set it aside and didn’t touch it for several months. I picked it back up at random in March of 2011 and felt compelled to add to it. Over a couple of days I plunked in another 4,000 or so words, introducing the main antagonists of the story. That passage was wildly better, and has remained mostly unchanged. I still wasn’t really dedicated to working on it, so I unconsciously set it aside again.
I got a wild hair up my ass in October of 2011 and over two days dropped over 10,000 words into the manuscript. I furthered the journey, introduced a new main character, and felt like I really had something. It was another burst of energy though, and my discipline wasn’t really in place, so it sat for another few weeks without getting touched. I decided then and there that I needed to motivate myself into finishing the damned thing, which meant putting enough words into it that I felt I couldn’t just set it aside again (I was 25,000 words into another novel that I haven’t touched since 2003).
NaNoWriMo was the answer. If you don’t know, NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month. It’s a nifty writing exercise with a website and a community that challenges writers to write a 50,000 word novel entirely within the month of November. If you succeed, you get a certificate from the NaNoWriMo folks and a badge on their forums that identifies you as a “winner”, even though it’s not really a competition.
I didn’t really involve myself in the competition part of it, because I wasn’t really following the “rules”. I wasn’t creating a self-contained manuscript; Instead I was using the NaNoWriMo goals to add bulk to my existing novel. I set aside most everything else and proceeded to write every day in November of 2011, sticking to the running goal of 1667 words per day (which will net you just over 50k in 30 days). I didn’t quite hit 50k, but I dropped 48,000 words in that period of time, and succeeded at what I’d set out to do: I now felt entirely committed.
I mean, I now had a little under 70,000 words in the manuscript. How could I let it go now? I continued to write throughout the next several months into 2012, albeit not at quite the same pace, and then hit a wall. It wasn’t writers block so much as I’d written myself into a corner that I felt I couldn’t get out of, so the next couple of months were spent on an extensive mid-book rewrite, digging trenches and building dykes to redirect the flow of the river. It worked, but I was exhausted when I’d finished.
It almost broke me. That rewrite accomplished what I’d wanted it to, but I was amazed at the brain power it takes to rewrite my own work and still manage to maintain any sense of continuity in the prose. My life became a jumble of sticky notes and notepads and random scraps of paper where I’d jotted down the plot points I’d changed and tried to figure out their downstream effects. A lot was changing – including killing off a character I hadn’t intended to before – and keeping it all straight was daunting.
When I finished, I just… stopped. I wasn’t actively trying to not write, but I just, well, didn’t write for several months. It took some outside forces – namely a number of friends constantly asking me how I was doing on my book – to get me to bust my ass back into it.
Toward the end of 2012 I lit a fire under my own ass to finish the damned thing. I’d originally set the goal of finishing it by the end of that year, but didn’t quite make it. This time, though, it wasn’t because I wasn’t writing, it was because I kept seeing holes I needed to close before the end, which kept adding length to the overall manuscript. I quit my job at the beginning of 2013 to finish it and spent the entire month of February – a month loaded with distractions – writing.
It took longer than I expected. From first keystrokes to last, I spent roughly 27 months on the first draft. If I actually calculate real writing time, though, I’d say the book probably took about 10 months of real work to complete.
At this point I could be humble or self deprecating, but fuck that it’s not who I am. I FINISHED MY BOOK. And I’m proud of myself for it. It’s going to take a cubic-fuck-ton of editing and rewrites to shape it into what I want it to be, and I know I’ve got a long road ahead to get it published, but HOLY SHIT IT’S FINISHED.
