The hardest thing I’ve found about fiction, even harder than when someone slaps the whole manuscript back at me and hesitates before saying, with doleful gaze, “this was very hard for you to write, wasn’t it?” is knowing when it’s done.
I’m facing two levels of “done” right now. One manuscript I’m preparing either to self-publish (if once I do the pro and con list and discover that I do have the energy to hawk about 1000 copies myself, start a marketing list, call every writing contact I’ve ever made, travel to all the book stores in my area obsequiously asking for shelf space and a chance to do a reading for the one or two people who made it in from the cold and usually only for the cappuccino…) or go back to the agent route (certainly all 134 of them have all forgotten my name since I tried to push out my first ever manuscript clearly before it was ready to see the light of day…).
The other is a first draft of a new novel. (My working title of which was, for a short time, "three fairly interesting characters with potential in search of a plot.") Because of a serious injury and various other life events, I’d had to shelve this book twice: once very close to its inception and then about three-quarters of the way through the story. The first shelving was due to NaNoMo (not a Polynesian diety but a very cool and crazy event called National Novel Writing Month. Your challenge is to write an entire novel in the month of November (no previous outlining allowed!)) I made the challenge, woke up at 5 every day to put in my required words per day, then had a stress meltdown the following month. The second hiatus was unplanned and devastating, but now I’m back on a tear with it (now "three characters I’m completely smitten with and a plot that some days feels like I’ve got a tiger by the tail") I’m almost done with the first draft…I think.
The oddest thing about this novel (as if the others haven’t been odd) is that the first scene that popped into my head was the ending. The female protagonist fallen from her pedestal, and her husband, who’d wronged her six ways to Sunday all through the book, now contrite and coming back to her, under the auspices of only wanting to get his 10” Calphalon omelet pan. (you’ve had those days, haven’t you?)
But, as it usually does, in the interim, everything changed. Hence, the need for a new stopping place. My husband the artist (and sometime line editor), said that a painting requires two people to complete it: the artist, and someone to wrestle the brush out of the artist’s hand before he screws it up (this I’ve seen after countless 3 AM dashes to the studio to “just change one more thing.”)
So off I go, hoping I won’t need anyone to wrestle me off my keyboard before this becomes “Three characters who used to be interesting who are now overwritten and are dragging their feet through a plot that some agent has seen a dozen times before.”
But that’s what second drafts are for. And thirds, and fourths, and…
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4 comments:
The book sounds interesting. I wouldn't mind taking a look at a draft, if you're looking for feedback.
I did a double take when I scrolled down and saw that you hadn't activated the key-word dealie to keep spam out of your comment threads. Everyone else's blog has that automatically, it seems, these days.
Nice looking blog. But... it's a little... pink... ::grin::
Thanks for the offer, I could always use feedback. When it becomes an actual whole manuscript (instead of three fairly interesting and mostly well developed characters in search of where all of the chapters are on two different computers and the author develops an attention span) I'll let you know.
How do you activate the key-word dealie?
It's in your editing shell, under formatting, I believe... formatting comments. It's one of the things you can turn on. I don't know... I'll look when I get home and give you something more definitive.
Okay. Go into your editing shell. It's under comments, about 7 items down... 'show word verification for comments'. Check 'yes'.
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