amwriting

Gulf City Blues Revision Planning

Sam Falco

I started revising Gulf City Blues with a hands-off read-through of the existing manuscript. It was good!

For about 180 pages. Then the whole thing goes in the crapper with a bolted-on subplot that never makes any sense and isn’t resolved before the grand finale, which connects to the first 2/3 of the story and is satisfactory. That’s what I expected; I remembered how I struggled after about 55,000 words to figure out how to get to 80,000. Next time, I will remind myself that when the story is done, wrap it up and end it rather than forcing a word count.

What I didn’t expect was how good the first 2/3 would be. It’s engaging and fun, and sometimes I even forgot I was reading my own work. Where I have room for improvement is to give Mark a harder time getting information from people. There are a few witnesses who ought to send him away so that he can take a second run at them later. Some people not only give him information too easily, but they give him too much information. Mark ought to have to search a little harder. Since I need to cut almost 25,000 words from the end, I’m glad I see how I can broaden the scope of the story that works.

I’d like to move faster, but I picked up a few classes I wasn’t expecting to teach. Since one of them was a class I haven’t taught in almost two years, I wanted to make sure I gave my students my best effort. I sacrificed a little writing time to make that happen.

I still worked a little each day, though, and I’ll continue. I’m not pushing myself to finish by a specific date. I’d rather have a good second draft than a hastily completed, shoddy one.

Gulf City Blues Revision Stage One

Sam Falco

I finished the first draft of Gulf City Blues a month ago. I set every first draft aside for a while after I complete it. For previous stories, I’ve only taken a couple of weeks before I start revising but I’ve always been too close to the story when I return to it. This time, I resolved to spend a month letting the whole thing go. It wasn’t easy. After the first week, I felt like I was wasting time. Especially since I’m unemployed right now, I felt like I should be taking action. But especially since I’m unemployed right now, I took other action—like looking for work while also trying to build my side gig up.

After two weeks, the feeling faded. By last week, I’d developed a healthy distance from the story. I have the right balance of fondness for it and its characters vs. the understanding that the narrative structure will certainly need to be adjusted. Waiting any longer means my interest will start to wane as other ideas emerge from the primordial soup of my mind.

My first step is to read the whole thing straight through, without marking anything up. I want to remember what I’ve written and evaluate it from a reader’s perspective. Then I can start working on the superstructure. Do I have the right scenes, in the right order, to tell the story I want to tell? That’s the question I want to answer in this draft. I expect that I’ll find there’s a lot to adjust. Once I complete the first read-through, I’ll go through it a second time. The second read-through is where I’ll determine what scenes I need to drop, add, or move. Those notes will guide the work of structural revision.

I have no idea how long it will take. I’m not going to push myself to complete it by a target date. That has never worked well for me. I’ll aim to write a target number of words per day, whether that’s in the form of exploratory writing in the notebook or manuscript words, or a combination. Steady pace with focus will create a healthier experience. Once I’m done, I will let it lay fallow again. I might need a second structural pass, or it might be ready for a revision that focuses on scene-level structure. I won’t know until I get there, and I won’t worry about it until I finish this draft.

I’ll keep you posted.

77,752: The End

Sam Falco

I finished the first draft of Gulf City Blues moments ago. I need to take some time to reflect on the process and so on, and I will certainly do that. Right now, I’m basking in the satisfaction of completion.

I’m especially happy that I wrote a solid ending. That’s always a challenge. I tend to describe my endings as “crash landings.” Early drafts are the worst, but I have declared project “done” even though I wasn’t happy with an ending that feels abrupt and lacking something. To finish a first draft and think, “Yeah, that has legs” feels so good.

I always take time off between drafts. At least two weeks, but preferably a month. I like to empty my mind of the whole story before I come back to it. Attention residue is proportional to the size of the project, and two weeks usually isn’t enough to stop thinking and rethinking the plot.

I had planned to use the time between to revisit world building for the novel. But I’ve changed my mind. I might waste my time on things that aren’t necessary for this story, and keeping my head in Gulf City will make it hard for me to forget the story I told. It’s time to let everything about Gulf City lay fallow in my mind while I attend to other things.

33,280 Words

Sam Falco

I am about forty percent of the way through the first draft of Gulf City Blues. It’s astonishing how quickly I’ve been adding words. It’s still not as fast as I’d like to go. I’m learning to deal with distractions.

The biggest distraction last week revolved around my search for a new job. A recruiter had a hot prospect. I had some misgivings but I agreed to a screening interview. That went well. Next step would be to get me the interview with the hiring manager. The recruiter called a couple times, updating me, asking questions. The back-and-forth disrupted my writing time. I allowed it to disrupt my writing time.

Then the job evaporated. The client wanted to hire someone so quickly that they, well, hired someone. I probably should have seen that coming. I lost two days of writing. At least another 2,600 words. Maybe more. Who can say?

I won’ make the same mistake again. I’ll set boundaries. I won’t accept calls before lunch. I won’t interview before lunch. Writing is what I want to do most. I need to protect the time when I’m at my most creative.

I need to average 1,298 words per day to finish by the end of the year. It’s an arbitrary target, but I would love to say that I wrote a whole new novel the same year that I finished revising another one.

20,000+

Sam Falco

As of this writing, the word count for Gulf City Blues is 22,971 words. I blew past 20,000 two mornings ago. My target is 80,000, so I’m more than twenty five percent done. Yay, me! The story is unfolding well. I like my protagonist more with each scene. I’m also writing chapters from the antagonist’s point of view, which is a new challenge and one I’m enjoying.

The biggest challenge I’m having is making the city feel real. “Gulf City” is a fictional city in southwest Florida. I chose not to use a real life setting because police corruption is important to the plot. I didn’t want to have to justify my fiction vs. the state of policing in any real Florida city. I had a vague notion of what the place was like but didn’t spend any discovery writing time on it. It shows, and not in a good way.

I submitted the first chapter to my critique group earlier this month. Feedback was that Gulf City felt small, akin to a few local beach towns. Other feedback was that the place lacked any character. That’s not at all what I wanted to create. Gulf City is Florida’s sixth largest, with a population of about 250,000. Waves of new residents from all over the country have given it a hodgepodge of styles reminiscent of New England, Ohio, Michigan, etc. On top of that, some developers have built structures mimicking world heritage sites, like the municipal theater looking an awful lot like the Sydney Opera House.

I didn’t describe any of that. Setting description is often my downfall. But there’s a deeper problem. Even though I’ve imagined a few details of architectural style, I hadn’t done the same for the city’s history, geography, industry, or demographics. Mark moves through a nebulous “generic city.”

That is no bueno.

I’d love to finish the draft by the end of the year, which requires an average of around 1,300 words per day. But yesterday, I decided to carve out time to explore Gulf City. I created a history for it, beginning with its founding in 1875. I know what the original city layout was and what districts emerged. I imagined its industry. Who lived there then, who lives there now. All of this is in broad strokes, of course, but I’ve made the city more real in my mind.

I didn’t want to lose momentum on the story, so when I felt like I had enough background for now, I added the final scene of chapter ten. It was about eight hundred words, so I didn’t set my average back much. Today’s session resumed my regular pace.

It feels great to have written so much of the story in so short a time. When I look back, I feel very satisfied with my progress. When I look ahead, I’m intimidated by how much is left. That’s why I try not to spend too much time looking ahead. A quick glance up from time to time to check my progress and correct course if I need to. Then it’s eyes down, on the page, on what I need to write today to take another step in that direction.

10,000 Words

Sam Falco

Yesterday, I reached the threshold on Gulf City Blues where my thoughts shifts from, “I don’t know about this,” to, “Yeah, I’ve got something here.” It’s when I start to believe that my idea is really a story. That’s usually right around 10,000 words. I was within a few dozen of that total when I knocked off.

I wrote the first 6,500 entirely with pen and paper. I’ve been writing journals in longhand for a few years, and it has made the experience much more enjoyable. After hearing Eli Kranor talk last spring about his writing process, which begins with writing his first drafts that way, I decided to try it for my next novel. It worked, to a degree. I made steady progress but not as much as I wanted to, averaging about nine hundred words per day. On Monday, I turned to the keyboard and wrote 1,600. Yesterday, almost 2,000. This morning, I hit 1,300 before an interruption destroyed my focus.

Regardless of whether I write the draft on paper or on screen, I start each session by writing about the scene. That’s best done in longhand, because I am less likely to brainstorm myself into oblivion if I don’t have an infinite page to work on. I spend a short amount of time exploring what the scene is all about, who’s in it, and where it’s set. What complications could arise? Do I need to think about any more information, like new character or setting details? Once I understand the contours of the scene, I can keep a tight focus.

I’m aiming for 80,000 words. I’m really looking forward to seeing what happens next.

Gulf City Blues Update

Sam Falco

I started the first draft of Gulf City Blues Friday morning. I wrote about 1,000 words, and it was awful.

I expected a certain amount of awkwardness at the start. What I wrote Friday went beyond the usual authorial throat-clearing. My protagonist was OK, but his client was flat and the scene lacked tension. What happened? I’d spent over a month thinking and writing about Mark and his world. How did I run aground so quickly?

In a lecture I attended many years ago by Andre Dubus III, he made a distinction between “imagining” and “making things up.” I didn’t quite grok the difference then. But his point seemed similar to Flannery O’Connor’s complaint that in so many stories she read, the author had a plot in mind and then dragooned characters into performing it, rather than creating realistic characters and then seeing what they would do.

That’s what I’d try to do with Mark’s client. Delia Kane was a cardboard cutout. I knew what she wanted, but I didn’t give any thought to her as a fleshed-out character. I didn’t know what she looked like or how she would behave. Because I was so anxious to get started, I didn’t stop when I encountered questions I didn’t have the answers to. I made something up on the spot. No matter if it didn’t fit. I was determined to force her to act out my plot.

Once I realized the source of my problem, I stopped trying to brute-force my way into a story. Instead, I spent my weekend writing time imagining Kane. Her motivations, her thoughts, her behavior. Yesterday, I decided to throw away the 1,000 words I wrote Friday and start fresh.

Normally, I wouldn’t do that. Once I get a story under way, I leave the inconsistencies and problem spots where they are, to be remedied in the first revision pass. But this time, it felt right to start again from nothing. The existing material was too different from what I’d imagined since writing it. It would be more difficult to try to salvage any of it than to pretend it didn’t exist.

That was the right move. I’ve written 1,500 words in two days. That’s fewer words than I’d like, but I’m still building momentum. (And dealing with the aftermath of being laid off. That hasn’t done me any favors.) The new scenes work better than the original attempt. I’m headed in the right direction. I expect to pick up the pace over the next few weeks. Who knows? Maybe with extra time on my hands, I’ll finish the first draft in record time.