LUKE, I am your…Mother?

My second novel has an official name, and that name is LUKE.

LUKE is not the final title, it’s not even the first title, but it’s short enough to be as good as an acronym.

In case you forgot (I did), Here’s what I said last time:

I’m working on my second novel draft (gulp), and I am going to blog through the (my) process of drafting (putting together) a novel.

I’m using the blog to measure my progress week to week and also as an accountability tool for getting the stuff done.

So here we go:

I’m often tempted to feel behind, or that I haven’t spent as much time on LUKE as I should. I remember I felt this way in APRIL about the writing work I was doing then. The truth is I am far from behind and this draft is going much better than my  FIRST NOVEL, partly because this time I have a plan.

I’ve dedicated JUNE to working on LUKE, on trying to get a FIRST DRAFT done. When I say first draft, I mean something readable, something I don’t mind letting other people see. It’s actually taken me THREE drafts to get to this point and that’s where I’m going to start the month.

My progress to date:

I began the very first draft of LUKE a year ago in CAMP NANOWRIMO JULY 2019. My first step was to jot down on a piece of notebook paper a question about one of the characters. The notes about this person flowed, and I filled up both sides of the paper in no time.

From there, I plotted an outline that turned out very different from those first scribblings, but was an actual story, all told, beginning to end, if only in bullet points.

In JULY I began the hard work of sitting down to write the thing and found I had more to say than I had planned. The story and the people kept changing under my hands though I had the same distractions and tangents that happen when I sit down to write. I managed to get the whole story out, from beginning to end (though not in that order).

I let it simmer.

That’s a fancy way of saying I tried to forget about it for a year or longer, but that didn’t happen.
Some people’s stories just need to be told.

After some time, I began the business of copying and pasting a manuscript together. This is a long and boring process of combing through 20,000+ words of pure garbage to find the nuggets of gold I buried along the way. I slogged through it, and I made it.  I put those pieces in order, tried to make a hodgepodge from what I had unearthed, and completed some of my incomplete thoughts.

I found:

• a lot of repetition
• parts of the story I told myself over and over again, while other parts I changed, and still others I didn’t even remember writing (these are undoutedly the best).
• few pieces missing entirely, mostly everything I need in abundance.

Just one problem…

It doesn’t make any sense.

So, I printed it out,

read it,

and now I’m in the process of retyping it WORD FOR WORD in the right order.

I’m crafting a story that didn’t exist before anywhere but in my head.

ALL TO GET TO A FIRST DRAFT!!!

There are so many steps and so much work that is done behind the scenes. I’m not trying to get credit for how hard I work (or am I?), but I am saying it is no easy feat to put a novel together.

It’s no mystery to me why most people never finish the books they start.

Next week I’ll share some of the struggles and stages I’m working through and let you know how it’s going. Until then.

xxxlinsey