Novel 1st Draft Completed

Today, I am so pleased with myself. I have finally completed the first draft of a novel. It’s taken a while, well years in fact. On and off but more off than on. 97,000 words and a start, middle and an end. Yes, the end was the hardest part.

It was a totally unplanned piece which started out as a germ of an idea, propagated by a news event. Excited in the beginning, I wrote day and night the ideas flowing and characters taking on a life of their own. Midway it began to slow a bit and so I put it down for days, weeks even whilst I busied myself with other things. Anything but not that. One day I read what I had written thus far and a few ideas let me go back and add some new scenes which, I felt, would hook the reader into the story more. By the time I had 60,000 words plus I was beginning to run out of steam. Emails, social media and news pages became more important than writing my way out of the middle towards the end.

That was my problem, I didn’t know how to end it. I have read so many novels which are suddenly ended and felt cheated because I, the reader, had been manipulated. That was not going to happen to my masterpiece. Never. So I needed to get to the end in logical steps and, hopefully, leave the reader surprised but happy. How could I get from here to there without cutting corners? So I tried a new tactic, I wrote the end or what I thought the end should be. All I needed then was a believable way to get from the middle to that end.

Then one morning, early (I get up early usually) it came to me whilst I was in the shower and it all became so much easier. So that’s it, the first draft done. So now I have set a note on my calendar to begin the editing process. 1st October it is then.

I don’t know what will happen to it. It may well be so bad that it remains stored in Dropbox forever, never to see the light of day. Or I might send it to some agents or publishers or I might try my hand at self-publishing.

All that doesn’t really matter, what matters to me at the moment is that I’ve completed it. I know there is still lots of work to be done but I have the frame, the structure to add to or take things out. It feels good today.