In 2013 I had an idea for a character and a journey, and
wrote a few pages so I wouldn’t forget it. A year later I wrote twelve more
pages, then wrote this note in my journal: This
is the point where I realize that I have a couple characters, an
emotional/intellectual journey, a compelling opening, and an epiphanic ending.
But I have no story.
I set the manuscript aside and worked on other things. Six months
after that I wrote another twenty pages, got stuck again and didn’t look at it
for another seven months, when one day I told a friend, Geoff Herbach, about
the book.
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| Invisible sequel? Not now. |
Talking about it with a fellow writer—we discussed his
nascent novel too—got me excited. I went home and wrote five more pages,
bringing it up to thirty-six pages. It was looking promising, but I was deep
into revising a middle-grade novel called Otherwood
(coming this September!), and writing a contracted sequel to my 2005 novel Invisible. so the road trip story went
back into limbo.
The novel (I was calling it a novel now) reemerged last
April, when I had the opportunity to take a solo road trip down the Mississippi
River to the state of Mississippi. Hundreds of photos and pages of notes and a
couple thousand miles later I was back at my desk. I wrote four pages and, once
again, set it aside to work on other things.
Last summer the Invisible
sequel died halfway through. I mean, that thing had been dead for months but I kept
administering CPR. It finally got to the point where it was stinking up the
house so bad I couldn’t stand it. That’s another story I may share on some dark
future day.
I returned to the road trip novel in late August, and over
the next 157 days I wrote another 244 pages. For those of you who like to count
words, that’s an average of 346 words per day. For me, that’s a reasonable
pace.
I reread the manuscript, made a bunch of deletions,
additions and edits, and yesterday called it a first draft. Now, on to a couple
beta readers and what I fear will be an arduous rewrite. That, too, is typical.
I’m still working on a title. Titles are hard, unless they
come right away. This one didn’t.
Anyway, that’s how I do it. I’m now starting work on a novel
I’ve been thinking about for twenty years, based on a recurring nightmare from
early childhood. I think it’s a horror novel but maybe not. I have three
characters, a setting, some existential dread, and a bit of dialog. No plot or story
yet, but it will come.
I hope your process is cleaner and easier. But I’ll bet it’s
not.
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