Beginnings

 My current work-in-progress is a novella called Unscripted based on a short story I wrote some twenty years ago called Without a Cue. 

It has a cute, somewhat quirky premise: everybody in this fictional world is delivered a script each day that they then have to follow. Only, of course, something goes wrong and the main character has to go off script to their great dismay.

I'm just starting the third draft, which is when I focus in on the nitty-gritty sentence level and analyze each scene. The beginning scene is the most important one in any story as it has to introduce the character and world as well as hooking the reader. I  thought it might be interesting to show a little bit of my process so here's an annotated excerpt from the first page.

EXCERPT

Chapter One

Something about the bus driver snagged Chris’s attention as he boarded the city bus on Monday morning. It took his sleep-deprived brain a moment to realize what the oddity was: she lacked the silver R on her forehead that should have marked her as a Robot. 

[ANALYSIS: The first sentence is okay, but doesn't have as strong a hook as I  would like, only raising the minor question of What snagged his attention? It does a basic job to informing the reader who the main character is, what he's doing and when he's doing it. The second sentence is better, first raising the question of Why is Chris sleep-deprived? and then alerting the reader than this is a science fictional world in which Robots are regularly bus drivers as well as raising the question of why this bus driver isn't a Robot.]

The beige City Transit uniform and peaked cap identified her as the driver, but her hair burned a garish red and the curls brushed her shoulders. Robots had utilitarian, short haircuts. They kept silent and focused on their job, their stares vacant. This woman made eye contact and spoke to him.

“Good morning!”

She sounded so cheerful that Chris smiled back at her, though, of course, he didn’t reply.

[ANALYSIS: The second paragraph is mostly added detail, drawing a picture for the reader and explaining how the bus driver is different from a robot driver. The next two  sentences advance the plot slightly. I'm hoping the "of course he didn't reply" raises the question of why he didn't reply in the reader's mind. This is the first subtle hint to my big world-building hook that everyone is following a script. Not sure if it's too subtle, though.]

She winked. “I like you. Sit up front beside me.”

Chris blinked a little at the unexpected request, but his mind was too fuzzy to recognize the warning sign that something was wrong. Assuming that the driver must be part of a new Storyline that was starting, he collapsed onto the nearest blue vinyl seat, kitty-corner from the driver. His artist’s eye saw her as cartoon bird perched on her high seat.

[ANALYSIS: Nothing much has happened yet, but we get another big hint that something is wrong and Chris's commute to work is about to take an unexpected turn. The capitalization of Storyline is another hook to make the reader wonder about the world. Then I feed the reader a little more information about Chris: he is an artist. There's a fair amount of  information packed into the first six paragraphs, but it doesn't exactly start with a bang. Conclusion: it needs more work.]

And there you have it, a glimpse into a writer's mind during revision!

  

Switching Projects

 Like most authors, I work on more than one book in a given year. Unlike most authors, I don't proceed immediately from the first draft into revisions. I let the book "rest" while I work on another project. I'm able to do this because I don't have any contract/deadlines at the moment. I prefer writing this way so that I can come back to a project with both fresh eyes and enthusiasm. (This also allows me the option of abandoning a sub-par book--not all ideas are equal and some turn out to be ho-hum. If I'm not enthused about a project, chances are that readers won't be either.)

I  try to balance my year between first draft work (which I find more fun) and revision (which is sometimes fun and sometimes a slog).

I started off the year revising By Glamour Deceived a paranormal romance. Then I switched over to Mike & Angel 5 (working title), and finished off a first draft which I'd last worked on in 2017 when I ran out of steam on around the 30k mark. Then I wrote the first draft of Mage in Coma (working title) another paranormal romance, finishing in July. I recently spent a week doing a small but vital edit to my epic fantasy novel The Simple Queen.

Now, in August, it's time to return to Impersonating the Queen, book two in a YA fantasy series. Book one, Replacing the Princess, has been my main project for the last few years and I'm eager to finish off the story.

My first step in revision is always to reread the current draft from start to finish, jotting down chapter summaries and revision notes as I go but NOT STOPPING to fix anything. I want to see how the book stands as a whole.

According to my notes, I wrote the first draft of Impersonating the queen in Aug-Oct 2020, basically a year  ago. And yet I remembered almost nothing of the plot. 

Uh-oh, I thought, this can't be good.

With some trepidation, I started to read... and was greatly relieved when I became caught up in the story. The prose is rough, some transitions are missing, the character arcs need work and the point-of-view balance is off, etc. etc. BUT the bones are good. The diamond in the rough is there, it just needs polishing. A process which I fully expect to take me until the end of the year.

Onward! 

Shaking Off the Rust – The Perils of Reviving Trunked Novels

My particular writing process has always involved a cooling off period between the first draft and revision. 

Sometimes that’s a good thing: I get to bask in the feeling of accomplishment from writing an entire novel instead of immediately going back to the grind, when I go back to the novel I can look at it more objectively and (if I loved the first draft) spot the inevitable weaknesses or (if I thought the first draft was crap) see the places where the manuscript does shine. But far too often when I was younger, I used this period to chase shiny new ideas and instead of a few months or a year between drafts, many years passed. Even, gulp, decades.

The end result is a kind of Darwinian process: only the strong ideas survive. Those stories that never quite gelled or have some fatal flaw never make it out of the first draft. And that’s okay.

But sometimes there’s an idea or a character that I love in one of those trunked novels that I want to save. Sometimes I lift that particular element out and re-use it in a new novel. For instance, the third novel I ever wrote back in junior high was called Mirror, rorriM, which has a suspiciously similar premise (though a wildly different story) from my most recent trilogy Otherselves.

And sometimes I decide to plunge in and try to save the entire story. That’s what I’m doing right now with an adult fantasy novel called Path of Power. I wrote the first draft in Fall 2000, revised it in 2004, tried to sell it—and failed. It’s been sitting in a trunk (okay, technically on my hard drive) ever since. 

I love the story premise: a powerless young queen hides behind a façade of frivolousness in order to hunt down the traitor on her regency council who killed her family. I reread the text and judge that the basic story is good, but it needs polishing, and there are some plot flaws and sections that need to be expanded. I think it could be a good novel. But I’ve spent the last month trying to rewrite it and am still only forty pages into it. 

It’s like a vehicle that’s been sitting out in a field for a decade. The car is still there, but it’s covered in a coating of rust and the engine does NOT want to start.

I have revived trunked novels before so it can be done. Two teenage novels of mine, Frost and Dreamfire, were written in the 1980s, trunked for years, and eventually published in 2007 and 2009 respectively. With those two, my writing had changed so much that I didn’t even try to revise the early drafts, but started fresh with a blank page and wrote it again. I kept the characters and plot parts I liked and threw out the rest wholesale.

I may yet have to do that with Path of Power. I wrote it in my thirties and the basic writing is fine, but I worry that my voice has changed. I need to reconnect with my main character, Deione, to slip back under her skin, and so far I’ve only managed to do so in fits and starts.

For now I shall just keep pushing and hope that soon the engine will turn over and the story gain its own momentum.

What are your experiences with trunked novels? Should they stay trunked? Have you tried to rescue one? Did you revise or start fresh?