Yesterday, I completed the first draft of Murder on the Pitch, a novel I began on June 16. I’ve never written a first draft that quickly, nor enjoyed doing it so much. My last effort produced an unsalvageable mess after a painful, three-year slog.
I have tried a variety of ways to prepare to write, ranging from not planning at all to rigid outlines, complete with scene sketches. I always went off the rails within a few chapters. If I pushed ahead with the plan I had, the result was a disorganized mess. If I stopped to re-plan, I felt frustrated because I wanted to be writing, not planning. And a chapter or two later, I’d go off the rails again, anyway. This time, I tried Randy Ingermanson’s Snowflake Method. Obviously, it worked.
With the Snowflake method, it never felt like I was planning. Each step re-told the story in increasing detail that allowed me to uncover hidden assumptions and unforeseen contradictions that I could correct on a limited scale. Each iteration helped me discover new ways to develop character and plot and made the story better.
I made one modification to the method. After creating a four page synopsis, Ingermanson recommends making a scene list. I tried it, and it felt like previous, failed attempts to plan. Instead, I expanded the synopsis once again, doubling its length. It helped. The four page synopsis contained a few problems that would have required drastic changes and knocked me for a loop if I’d discovered them while writing the first draft. When I completed the expanded synopsis, I felt ready to write, confident that no major flaws lurked in the story.
I still discovered new things along the way, but I understood the story so deeply after so many iterations that new ideas were easy to weave into the story. Each day, before I started working on the draft, I wrote for ten minutes about what I would write that day. The draft kept chugging along. I enjoyed the work. And when life force me to step away for two or three days, getting back into it was never a problem.
Now that the first draft is done, I’m going to set it aside for a while. I’ll have a free-lance editor look it over in the mean time, and I’ll develop the foundations for a new novel. Around January, I’ll start revising Murder on the Pitch.
Statistics for those who are interested in that sort of thing:
Number of days from start to finish: 108
Number of days I actually wrote: 80
Final word count: 74,405
Average words per day, inclusive: 689
Average words per day on days I wrote: 930
Worst day: 114 words
Best day: 1825 words
Sam Falco 