Change of Venue

From now on, all new posts having to do with the development of Michael Drayton, Detective Guy will appear on my main blog, Next in the Series: The Blog. There are already a couple of new posts, if you were so inclined.

Shading

As winter has crossfaded into spring, a mural has taken shape on a retaining wall that holds up one corner of the track outside the athletic center at the university I'm employed by. I walk by it in the morning and evening five days-a-week, and I've watched it take shape over the course of the last several months. At first, it looked horrible and amateurish, closer to graffiti than art. However, over time, each portion has been slowly filled in and out, and the aesthetic value of the piece has increased with every change.

This is the metaphor I've hit upon for my method of working. I start out with what I call "an outline in draft form." The first version is usually weak, but I get it out. I get out what happens and who is involved. I get down the lines of it, the equivalent of an artist's rough sketch, and then go back, from the top, and fill it in and out. And that's where the interesting stuff happens.

There were those who thought, when I decided to enter the contest at gather.com, that I was making a huge mistake, but I still disagree. I needed that deadline to get me to stop diddling around with individual words and phrases and start roughing out the last quarter of the book. And I did that. Now, I can go back over each chapter that needs revision and redo it the right way, having taken some time away to give me some perspective as a whole. It brought me back to the method of working that suits me best. And I have a completed draft to shop while I'm revising.

On another topic, I worked on it on Saturday as well. The new, improved chapter 11 is coming along nicely.

How I Write

I've continued to push on, making almost no use of the previous version. I've less than 600 words so far, but I think they're good ones. They're certainly better than the ones that preceded them.

What I've been able to put together is this: The method of composition that works best for me is to blat out a draft, put it aside for awhile, and then revise from scratch. I got lucky with a couple of chapters in the first half of Drayton, and only had to do some minor polishing on the first drafts, but those proved to be the exceptions. As I look back over the 33 years I've been writing seriously, that's always been the way. At least it has for the stuff that worked the best.

I think this method allows me to deal with all the mundane stuff--what happens next and where, who's there, what do they look and sound like--so that I don't have to later. On the second draft, I can concentrate on how the words sound coming off the page and provide the depth and shading that most likely were missing from the original version.

This is a method that is not well-suited to the digital age, but that's no matter. And, at the end of the day, I have to do things in a manner that makes sense to me and not to any other.

At 47, after 33 years, I'm still learning about how I do this. Maybe that's a clue as to why I can't ever give writing up.

He's Baaaack!

Yesterday's work on Chapter 11 went well. I didn't get a lot of wordage--only about three paragraphs from yesterday morning until after 10 last night--but the quality was there. The voice of Drayton is back. After a long, lonely period, he's speaking to me again.

He went on vacation while I was writing the first draft, but is apparetly back, tanned and rested. Let me give you idea of the difference.

In the draft of Chapter 11, the first paragraph was :

I awoke the next morning to the music of someone pounding his fist on the door to my apartment. I had fallen asleep the night before in my recliner as I watched TV. The channel that had been playing “Green Acres” when I left consciousness was now showing an infomercial for exercise equipment. Times change.

That's all right, but it now reads:

I awoke the next morning to the music of someone pounding on the door of my apartment. I was asleep in the recliner in the living room when the sound stunned me awake. The TV was on. The channel that had been showing Green Acres seemingly moments before was now showing a bright, bubbly, and cheerless infomercial for a no-money-down real estate scam. A tanned man in a polo shirt and a pale woman in a sundress shilled themselves smugly in blistering seaside sunlight, and I wondered when Professor Marvel was going to appear with the patent medicine.

That's Drayton.

Revised Expectations

I've started just this morning revising the chapters of the book that didn't get a thorough going over before. I'm starting with Chapter 11 and pushing on to the end.

This is the part of the writing process in which word processing programs are supposed to be the greatest help, but I find them to be the greatest hindrance. So I am actually retyping the entire chapter, sentence-by-sentence, and reworking it as thoroughly as I can.

In other news, I'm up to my third query of an agent. How many am I willing to query before I stop sending it out? I'm not sure, but it's a lot. But lets all hope that number three turns out to be the smart one.