Writing Spaces

Six years after starting my first novel, I’m embarking on the second. This time, I’m doing it completely differently. 

First time, passion drove me. I saw a program with a flimsy gay relationship, where one of the lovers was quickly killed off and forgotten. I promised my characters a better story and a happy ending, then sat down and put words on the page.

Six months: done. Easy! I am all that and a bag of chips.

Ahem. Cue laughter.

I learned on the job. With the comments of a dozen readers, and fifteen drafts over five years, I got a story that hung together, said some of what I wanted, had the emotional feel I was going for, and stayed within an acceptable word count for what publishers want.

Much of what I imagined for my story lies, now, in crumbs in the cloud: chunks of files removed because they seemed not to feed the whole.

I mourn those pages, as I think some of the heart of my story—and certainly some of my heart—is crumbled there with them.

Nothing’s lost, though. Those crumbs will become, or will feed, future work. And they taught me, for which I’m eternally grateful. I’m not sorry about the process I went through.

But I think I can do better.

This time, I’m starting with everything I wish I’d known in 2020.

• An identified genre.
• A one-sentence logline.
• A one-paragraph pitch.
• A three-paragraph summary.
• A one-page synopsis.
• My beginning, middle, and end roughed in.
• Clear characters with wants, needs, and stakes shining brightly from the get-go.
• Comparative titles.
• Possible agents and publishers, and what they’re looking for.
• More skill in the actual writing, too: dialogue, backstory, scenes, point of view, and voice, for example, more effective, sharp, and elegant, earlier in the process.

I expect each of these elements to evolve as I go. Yet they’ll guide me more clearly to a finished piece than did my previous stumbling around in the midnight woods with a flashlight, searching for a path.

I’m proud of my first novel. I learned oodles from writing it, and became a better human because of the story and the doing of it. I hope it will find an agent, and a publisher, and a reading public, all of whom will love it as much as I do.

I aim to be proud of the second, also, to learn and grow because of it, and to send it out to find its people—maybe in half the time it took me to get the first out the door.

I’ll let you know what happens!

~