On Friday morning, I decided that, at 110,000 words, and about 80% of the chapters written, it was time to go back to the beginning of my rough draft of THE SEA QUEEN, the sequel to THE HALF-DROWNED KING. I’m a big believer in working straight forward on the first draft of a novel, using a rough outline. If I run into a snag where I realize I need to set something up that I didn’t, I usually make notes about it, write down some To Dos to handle in the next draft, and keep moving forward.

Eventually that stops working, though. In the last few chapters of a novel, all of the threads need to come together. The details that I’ve been putting off for later become too important to ignore. For instance, this book contains a blood feud between some secondary characters which needs to erupt out into the main story-line in the last five chapters. I have some pieces of that feud written, but not enough to know where all the players are when it all comes to a head, and in order to write the last pieces, I need to know those details.

Also, when I’m writing a rough draft, I tend to skimp on description in favor of dialogue and action. It’s necessary to keep moving at a good pace, but it grows tedious for me. I love writing description–good description reveals character, sets a mood, and plants thematic seeds that can develop later in the novel. I’m missing most of that right now, and therefore missing a lot of the fun of writing.

Any writing process, including banging out a rough draft as quickly as possible, should be used in the service of getting the thing written, polished, and ready to be seen by others. So while discipline is important, so is deviating from the process when it ceases to be useful.

I’ve also found this to be a pattern with my writing now–this is my third “completed” rough draft, and with each one, I’ve felt compelled to start re-writing from the beginning when I finish 70-80% of the total planned chapters.

A rough draft is all potential, sometimes a bit too much. A first editing pass can be even more exciting, though, with its balance of constraint and freedom. For instance, in the current draft, my first chapter is from the point of view of a less compelling character. I played with the idea of changing the POV, but I can also choose to make this character an interesting person. It is more work, but probably the right call. It’s not too late to make those changes. On the other hand, I know the shape of the whole story, and most of the plots, subplots, and arcs, which I didn’t when starting the rough draft. This gives me a structure to work within.

At this point, at the beginning of turning the rough draft into a real first draft, I am doing the following things:

• Re-assessing each of the characters: summarizing their arcs, major plot points, and making sure I know the answers to these questions:
  • What do they want?
  • What stands in the way of getting what they want? What is their major malfunction?
  • What is their character arc? Where do they start, where are they in the middle, and where do they end?
  • What is the arc of their major relationships?
• Re-assessing each of the chapters, and making sure I know the answer to these questions:
  • Who is in the chapter?
  • What are the major beats or scenes?
  • What is the central conflict?
  • What decisions do the characters make in this chapter? Ideally, the POV character should be making at least one decision, or they probably shouldn’t be the POV character for that chapter.
  • What is the chapter’s purpose for the plot?
  • What is the chapter’s purpose for the characters?
  • What is the chapter’s purpose for the theme?

This is the point at which I need to make sure I know the answers to those questions, rather than writing and seeing what happens. Sometimes I don’t know, and then I write about the problems longhand in a notebook, or I try writing a scene to see if it works, and if I like it, and feel like it’s working, make sure I know all of the necessary answers about it.

I predict this phase will take a couple of months. Then I will leave it alone for a month, and come back and do a final pass on it before showing it to anyone else. Or I will need to do more than one pass. I’m still learning this as I go along, but each time I do it, I know a little more, or at least I have more different ways to try solving a problem.

Here is a conversation all writers end up in, and we all dread:

Someone: I have this idea for a novel. How about you write it, and we split the profits?

Writer: Nope.

Inspiration is easy, execution is not. I have 3 more novels partially written, which I hope to complete someday, not even counting the sequels to THE HALF-DROWNED KING I am contracted to write. I have 3 or 4 more ideas that are really fleshed out in my mind, some even to the point of having outlines written. Completing those may take another 10 years of my writing life. 6 or 7 ideas isn’t very many, but I still don’t need any more right now.

Also, that first inspiration is only one of hundreds needed to complete a novel, and the others only show up with hard work. One of the reasons I try to write on my novel every day is that when my head is really in it, everything I encounter out in the world feeds into the novel.

Yesterday I was walking home from work and listening to an episode of The Rachel Maddow Show. She was talking about the ad below, in which a Republican actor talks about why he will be voting for LBJ rather than Barry Goldwater. It is a moving ad, and then Rachel had the actor from the ad on her show, and I choked up a bit.

Part of writing is paying attention to these moments. I paused the podcast and asked myself why I was choked up. It was because this man had been true to himself and his beliefs, rather than tribal loyalty, and had made a moving, honest ad about it that may have cost him in his personal life. He went against his habits and his family, and he displayed thoughtfulness, emotion, and integrity in the service of a greater good. Roger Ebert said that we are often moved less when people are sad than when they are good.

So I was moved because this man was good, and he was standing up for his principles. It ways gets me–A Man For All Seasons is one of my favorite plays, even though I know the historical Thomas More had English Protestants tortured for heresy. It is moving when people rise above themselves, when people find their truth.

I turned off the podcast, and asked myself how can I let my readers experience this emotion. My main character will probably not be in a position to make a sacrifice like this for many reasons of plot and temperament, but I can give this journey to a secondary character, and my main character can watch. He can be moved and envious of the purity of the secondary character’s convictions, and also his sacrifice.

Those are generalities though. Then I needed to figure out how each character would get there, what plot and character levers need to be pulled to make it happen. And the trajectory I decided upon links several plot elements which until now had been mostly independent of one another.

When I’m really immersed in writing, this happens frequently. Sometimes I find a motivation for a big plot element, sometimes it’s just a snippet of conversation. Last week I found it in the season finale of Veronica Mars, Season 1, which never fails to move me, and which I’ve seen many times. This time, I found an idea in it. If I watch it in 3 years, when I’m writing something else, I will probably find something different in it.

I wouldn’t be open to those moments of inspiration if I wasn’t working on the novel every day, my mind always aware of its thousands of problems even when I’m not thinking about it consciously. Inspiration doesn’t strike from nowhere. This is what people mean when they say that inspiration follows the work. That if you sit down every day to write, the inspiration will come. It comes because you’re in the habit of looking for it.

For me, it’s noticing when I am moved by something, and tracing the emotion back to the things that caused it, the universals within the specifics, which I can then make specific again for my own work.

There are a huge number of books and even more blog posts about the process of writing a novel, and processes that you can use to write your novel, and they are all very helpful even when they contradict each other, and they all have the potential to be deeply unhelpful as well.

I don’t think I learned any of the below in my MFA program–that was helpful for other things, but was more focused on writing as art than as craft, and the work of planning and outlining, I think, is largely in the craft arena. I learned what I know by going through several NaNoWriMos, by reading Chuck Wendig and Film Crit Hulk, as well as too many other writing books to name, and by trying things, and when they stopped working, trying something else.

Mixed metaphor alert! Writing a novel is somewhere between turning a block of marble into a sculpture and untangling a giant snarl of many threads into a beautiful tapestry. Sometimes you’re chiseling away, sometimes you’re breaking things, sometimes you’re untangling, and sometimes you’re weaving. And that’s just the rough draft. In the next draft, the scissors and the hammer come out and it all starts again.

When I am writing a rough draft, I have four guiding principles:

1. Begin with the end in mind.
2. Try to write 2000 words every day making forward motion, and never fewer than 500.
3. Do not go back and edit earlier chapters. If you have ideas for how they should change, write them down as notes, pretend you already did them, and go forward.
4. Try to end each writing day with an idea of what to write the next day

In order to accomplish that when writing THE SEA QUEEN, the sequel to THE HALF-DROWNED KING, I started with a high level idea of where I wanted each of the next two books to end, the major historical events that needed to occur, and the major plot beats other than historical events that my characters needed to go through. I expanded this into a table that described of what was going on with my main characters through both of the next two books. This was 8 pages long, and pretty high level.

I copied the beats and their descriptions from that document into the note card view of Scrivener. (Scrivener is the application I use to write. It has some planning functions, like the ability to look at all the chapters or scenes as note cards, and it makes it very easy to rearrange things.)

Then I got writing. Occasionally I ran into snags, and went to my longhand journal to write about the problems until I had a solution. I often came up with new subplots that needed to be added back into earlier chapters, so I started a chapter summary, that listed all the chapters with a description of what happens in them and a to do list of things I need to add to them in the next draft. And I changed my mind from the original outline, and made notes about what had changed.

It’s been going pretty smoothly so far. I’ve been writing quickly, which is easy to do with good planning, and years of research behind it. But I’ve written about 85,000 words now on THE SEA QUEEN and I’ve run out of the stuff I had planned relatively thoroughly, and gotten into murkier territory, so it was time to do some serious planning. My philosophy about planning and outlining is:

1. Don’t do much more than is necessary to get moving again.
2. The use of planning and outlining is in that moment. The act of planning is the important thing, not as much the plan that comes out of it which will always change. I will play with the outline, and have new ideas, and re-outline at least into the third draft.

I think the problem that a lot of writers have with outlining is that it feels like a straitjacket, like all of the fun of discovery has gone out of the process. To bring in yet another metaphor, I view the outline or any planning document as a map for a hike in unfamiliar woods. It doesn’t mean you can’t wander, poke into things, follow a stream for a while instead of the path, but it tells you what is there broadly, and where you want to go.

So Sunday I decided that I needed to know what all my major characters were up to at all moments in the plot. I wrote out all of my characters’ names and arranged them vertically on the floor. Then I printed out my chapter summaries and arranged them horizontally. This is when it really became clear that aside from the ending and a few major beats, I really have no idea what’s happening in the back half of the novel.

I started working on a few story lines, sketching them out in a notebook, but the mess on the floor looked untenable–this was going to take more than an afternoon, and the apartment is too small for many bits of paper on the floor to be undisturbed for longer than that. So that’s when when I started looking for outlining software. And after testing and discarding 5 different timeline/post-it tools, I discovered Aeon Timeline which integrates with Scrivener, and lets you assign an Arc, Characters, and Places to each timeline event, then view the timeline by those things. So I’ll be able to see what all my characters are up to at any given time.

Sunday and Monday I spent time writing out story problems longhand in my notebook, and then translating them into timeline elements, which I then checked to make sure everyone is in the right place at the right time. I have any number of characters who all need to be present at the final battle (or dead by then, in which case their deaths need to have the right drama, witnesses, fallout), and each of whom need to get to the final battle for their own reasons and following their own paths. Which, in a novel with many characters doing many different things at cross purposes all over Norway, is challenging enough.

However, the biggest challenge is figuring out what needs to happen to put my characters through beats that are entertaining to a reader, important to their growth, and illustrative of the novel’s themes. That work is not done on the floor, or in the right software, but in thinking and writing, and making sure I really understand my characters, who they are, and how to push them. This is all logistics. The fun, and far more challenging part, is making sure that everything that happens feels organic to the characters, surprising, and yet inevitable. Hopefully this planning will help get me there.