Writing My First Book

My first book Prometheus Blue now complete and ready for submission, with book two Prometheus Red in final draft form. Now it’s time to embark on the journey to getting published. Just remember, I’m not an expert on this. As I described in an earlier blog entry, I’m just a learning aspiring author going about the business of figuring out how I can get my best work published. But it has to start with actually writing my first book.

First, I’ll tell you a little bit about how I got to where I am now. The idea for the series came to me many years ago and I’ve been making notes about how I want it to work for over a decade. But the actual work of writing my first book has taken about a year.

Types of Writers

I understand that there are primarily two kinds of novelists out there – Plotters and Pantsters. Here’s a really good article about the pros and cons of these two types by Cindi Myers. But essentially, at the extremes, plotters write out an outline of their story from beginning to end and follow it slavishly. They know exactly how the story will unfold before they begin to write the opening chapter. Pantsters, on the other hand, write by the seat of their pants, letting the story flow from the situations or characterizations they have created. Stephen King is a famous pantster. He establishes his characters and their traits, puts them into an incredibly weird situation and sees how they do. He lets his characters figure out what happens. And when things get slow, he throws a right angle at them and sees how they react. He may have a general idea of how the story should end, but he has no idea how it will get there.

I like to think that very few people are the extreme of either style. How many people are truly talented enough to fly from beginning to end by the seat of their pants? Even Stephen King isn’t perfect. You have to admit that some of his books do tend to lag in the middle. Maybe he just waited a little too long to throw in that curve ball…

But at the same time, plotters who are so rigid in the application of their plans, who are not open or self-aware enough to see possibilities open up as the story really gets going, I think are missing out on bringing emotion and spontaneity into their writing.

Remember, I’m just a dumb shit about this stuff. I’m learning too. So do your own research and decide what’s right for you. But I have lived and experienced enough to realize that extremes on either end of a spectrum are missing out on what the other side has to offer. And so in the process of writing my first book, and being the engineer that I am, I lean towards Plotting, but I definitely want to let my characters and events shape the future.

My Writing Process

So I lean towards being a plotter. I started out writing my first book with a general outline of how I wanted it to flow:

1. • I had my opening concept: a rogue star is discovered in our near future and it is heading for our sun to obliterate it and all the inner planets in 700 years. Yeah;
   • Realizing that if I were to describe all the main events over a 700 arc, and further realizing that as a debut author I had to keep my word count down to the 100,000 or so, there was no way that I could build my worlds, establish great characters and describe every important event in a single book. So I decided that it had to be a series;
   • I further decided that there were likely three time periods that would best facilitate the story: the near future when the discovery is made, thereby setting the stage for the centuries to come; the middle period, 350 years into the future so we can explore how humanity is doing, knowing their home planet will be destroyed; and the events leading up to the final cataclysmic event of the collision between the star fragment and the sun;
   • Next I did a broad outline of how my near future story arc would go. I had the inciting event, I had a strong concept of how I wanted the arc to end, e. the stage I wanted to establish for future generations. I then decided that I wanted to have a couple of mini-climaxes in the middle sections to keep the story moving. I had a strong concept of my biggest characters;
   • Then I did something that I’m pretty proud of. Something that took a lot of patience but paid off hugely in the writing of my first book: I spent several days writing backstory for each of my big characters. For a couple of them, I went all the way back to childhood. I wrote about important events that shaped them, I wrote about how they responded, how they grew, how they learned. Two of my characters got more than 20 pages each. Why did I do this? It gave my characters depth and I could insert references to inciting events in their past with consistent accuracy, whetting the reader’s appetite to learn more. But most importantly, it brought out a bit of the pantster in me. Now that I knew my character, I could let her decide how she would react to a given situation. For example, I couldn’t very well have Maddy figure out some complex mathematical algorithm right out of the blue, but I sure could summon the courage she would need to make her story sing in book two.

   This last is what surprised me the most. Believe it or not, when I started my near future timeline, when I actually started writing my first book, I had a hero in mind. Someone who was really going to shine and be the star. But my characters surprised me. The hero turned out to be someone else, and I didn’t see that coming. It was remarkable realization for me.

   • I then laid out my big ideas. What do my main characters want? What is stopping them from getting what they want? What are they willing to do to overcome those obstacles? (hello, character profiles!). What was my main theme – the anchor for the story. I decided that my theme would be the battle between two philosophies – should we expend blood, treasure, our environment, our very quality of life today, for the benefit of future generations who even our grandchildren’s grandchildren will never know? Or is it OK to kick the can down the road and let future generations worry about their survival? It’s a reasonable debate and one that I think could chew through more than one beer night.
   • Now I had to decide how to build conflict and tension. For each character, I wrote out their 1) goals; 2) consequences of not achieving their goals; 3) their requirements: what they need to accomplish to meet their goals; 4) events to show that the consequences are getting stronger and more threatening; 5) costs or sacrifices the character must make to reach their goal; 6) benefits that come out of making good choices along the way; 7) events that must happen before the requirements are met, showing progress towards their goal; and 8) conflicts and impediments that make it difficult for them to reach their goals. These are not successive elements – they don’t happen one after the other. They are interwoven throughout the scenes.

   Here I had to dig deep. I had to lay out my characters’ inner conflicts. 1) What inner problems do they face (self-doubt, handicap, relationships, weakness, uncertainty, history), then 2) how can these inner conflicts lead to an Impossible Choice for my main character(s)? How will my character be forever changed after making this choice?; 3) How do my main character’s inner problems oppose the achievement of their goals? and 4) what is it about their character that makes their choices difficult?

   Yeah. Conflict. Pressure. Self-doubt. Impossible choices. What is an Impossible Choice? Well, think of it this way: the protagonist is led to being forced to choose between two things – each path leads to unbearable consequences. How does she do it?

   This is where I discovered that writing my first book wasn’t actually going to be easy. I had to dig deep.

   • Then I began to plot. I had the beginning and end of the near future timeline and I had a couple of really strong middle climaxes. These were my anchor points. All I had to do was fill in between. Simple, right? So I set up an Excel spreadsheet and began to lay it all out. One line per scene. My columns were Scene #, Scene Title, Brief description of Events, Date and Time, Status (Not started, Complete, draft), and Thread Reference. The thread reference is something I decided to do to help me keep track of the 4 or 5 different plot threads that I was weaving into the story. It helped in a number of ways: I could filter the spreadsheet for each thread to make sure its continuity was good. I could also make sure that the intervals between thread updates were logical and kept the pace moving, and it helped me to ensure that no threads were left dangling or unresolved.

   Then I began to lay out my scenes on the spreadsheet. That actually took about 3 weeks. It was careful work and it took as long as it did because there is a lot of science and engineering in my stories and I needed to do a lot of fact checking along the way to be sure the scene made sense. I also had to pay a lot of attention to developing conflict and thwarting of goals as per 7) above. I had about 90 scenes in total.

   Five months in and I still actually hadn’t started writing my first book!

   • Finally, I began to actually write. It took a lot of patience and resolve to not just jump in and start writing. But here’s the thing: it made the process of writing my first book really kind of easy. My characters were established, my outline was complete and my research was mostly done. I could really move now. I set my goal as 10,000 words a week, so the plan was 10 weeks to write it. By and large, I did exactly that. I had a completed “vomit draft” in 10 weeks. Wow. Who knew? That was an amazing feeling of accomplishment. Holy shit, I’ve just achieved a life goal of writing my first book.

   The thing was though, that within 5 weeks or so, I realized that there was no way I was getting 90 scenes in under 100,000 words. OK I get it, you may say that 1,000 words per scene should be enough, but it just wasn’t. I had too much story to tell.

   It was at that point that I decided to break the near future timeline into 2 books. It made a lot of sense. There was a natural break in the timeline and the events anyway, and so my 10 weeks gave my book one. Book two was still inside me.

   • Next came revisions. I discovered that my vomit draft was pretty bad. My process during the writing phase was to review yesterday’s work and revise it carefully before moving on to this day’s writing. And so I had this illusion that my first draft was actually going to be pretty refined, because, you know, I’d actually kind of revised it once already.

   Nope. It was full of grammatical errors, missing references, badly written prose, excess words everywhere (I mean a lot of excess words). You get the picture. So I revised. And revised. And revised.

Book Two

• Do you know what I did next? I wrote my second book. Yes! Remember it was all plotted out. It was there, waiting to come out. So I did it. Another 10 weeks and I had written by second book. And you know what? It’s at least as good as the first one.The main reason I decided to write book two now was because I thought that I might need to make some changes in book one to provide foreshadowing, warnings, threats, characterizations, etc. that would better set the reader up for book two. And I was right. Writing book two resulted in a MAJOR redraft of book one! Boy that sure taught me a lesson. I always knew that writing my first book would not be easy. But this was crazy.
• Beta readers. I had a number of folks do some reading for me at this point. All people whose opinion I would respect and who I knew would give me honest feedback. I even turned down a couple of people because I believed the only feedback I would get from them would be positive. I actually wanted feedback that would cause me to look at my work critically and have to decide whether I’d made the right choices.
• Then I revised again. And then one more time. I total my so-called “submission draft” has 7 revisions behind it. Am I happy with it? Yes, but every time I read it I want to tweak it here and there. Does that mean it’s not ready? I don’t know. Part of me says it’s a mood thing. Today I don’t like that sentence. Yesterday I thought it rocked. Who’s right?

OK, “final” submission copy is done. I have completed the milestone of writing my first book. And my second. What’s next? How am I going to convince someone to look at my work?

Next time.

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