The Process, Pt.II

Growing up, I always thought that writing was a glamorous activity, something free of structures and the rhythms of nine-to-five work. Maybe that explains why my writing process is not the best. In writing this novel, I carried with me one my A9 Bluelines, jotting down a few paragraphs at a time whenever I had the chance or a good idea. Most of these early pieces are fragments, non-linear snippets, that I worked on over the summer trying to put them in order. I think I had forty to fifty pages worth of these pieces in my notebook. I spent much of the last year just transcribing these words and editing them on the fly.

Once the summer started I settled into an early morning groove, waking up at six o'clock every morning in an attempt to write a minimum of five hundred words before the other people in my house woke up. Within a few weeks I was doing a thousand or more words and appeared well on my way to achieving my goal of finishing the novel before September 1. However, as August approached the mid-way point, I began to suspect that I wasn't going to make it. My initial guess was that 65 - 70,000 words would suffice, and I believe I crossed the 65,000 word threshold going into the Labour Day weekend. The only problem was that my novel was going to be much longer than this. It took me another two weeks before finally completing the first draft at 83,000 words.

After taking a short break, I began the process of revising, which is almost complete. In the past, I used to hate revising, preferring to move on to my next project. This time has been different, though I can't imagine that I will continue to feel this way. What made it enjoyable has been watching the core of the narrative take shape, pruning and amalgamating minor characters and subplots, streamlining and strengthening the whole.