It hit me while at Phoenix Airport this week it’s been three weeks since publishing a piece: couple reasons for that. First, I’ve been traveling or have hosted travelers each of the past three weekends. As much I enjoy these experiences, they cut into the hours needed to produce quality writing. Second, and what I’ll expand upon in this piece, is the focus on completing my novel within the next two months.
Novel Update – Finally, A Title
This newly titled project – Forward, A Madison Story – is now nine months old. I finished the original manuscript in early August and have been perpetually editing it since. Each edit, of which there’ve been three, has unlocked a better story and more grammar and syntax errors than I care to mention. At the time of writing, I’m three-quarters of the way through the fourth edit, which looks like this:
Yes, those are poorly cut stacks of 8.5”x 11” sheets of paper. Yes, those are hand-written notes (see left stack, top left). For this first novel, I’ve elected to self-publish and self-edit, although I’ve sent copies to a handful of individuals for feedback. Since this project’s inception my desire has been to keep the process as organic as possible. I reflect on the many individuals I’ve studied as part of Becoming Polymathic – Leonardo DaVinci, Pierre Boulle, Charles Darwin, Benjamin Franklin – and how they managed to achieve their legacies in the absence of modern technology, aka the internet. They leveraged their immediate community and their own convictions. I plan to do the same, only leveraging modern technology when logical.
Consistency Challenges
The greatest challenge of this process has been consistency. As discussed in a past piece, I started this project with nothing except the story’s overall plot and location. Rather unsurprisingly, this meant the early parts of the novel were not as developed nor as high quality as the later ones. Again, I expected this dichotomy, but the degree of it was shocking. Several major “holes” needed filling before it was even worth critiquing Oxford commas and run-on sentences. Some of those holes I didn’t discover until I began to edit a physical copy. Bottom line: the next novel will begin with diagrams on a whiteboard.
Writer’s Block – Real, but Beatable
I did take time while drafting the original manuscript to edit previous sections to ensure consistency with later ones. After a few repetitions, however, this loop became tedious and took away from moving the story forward, the higher priority of a first draft. I also discovered within these loops the reality of writer’s block. It is real, but easily surmountable by writing through.
By that, I mean there will be instances when the story stalls and you have to decide how to move it forward. Early on, this meant letting the draft lie stagnant for a day or two while walking in circles around my apartment complex hoping for an epiphany. In later stages, it meant writing down anything that would continue the story, understanding it would likely change several times; it is a draft, after all. One of two things happened; I liked what I wrote and the story moved forward, or I didn’t like what I wrote, deleted it, then moved forward with the other direction I was pondering. In either case, I removed the anxiety surrounding the impending roadblock.
Novel Update – What’s Next?
I’ll reserve the remaining “lessons learned” until the novel is done and you’ve hopefully had a chance to read it. Right now, completing it to a high standard is my greatest priority. That’s not to say I will be taking a complete hiatus from writing these weekly pieces, but there will be weeks I won’t publish them. It would be disrespectful to you to sacrifice quality for quantity. There are enough entities who partake in this practice, especially in digital media, and we all despise them.
I don’t plan on joining this group anytime soon, and look forward to sharing my novel with you all on December 16, 2024.
Be More.
Become Polymathic.
Quote of the Week: “The first draft of anything is shit.” – Ernest Hemingway