The Slow Ride

I might be very slow. I’m not sure. It took me about 8 months of waking up early and writing for about 2 hours every weekday morning before I had a 350 page first draft of a mystery novel. Then it took another two months of reading it with a pen in hand. Then another few months to make those changes on the computer. Then the draft went to a few trusted friends and family members. Then I made some more changes. All said and done, it has been about a year and a half since I started.

I say I’m slow partially because I am truly impatient. I’ve heard that great art takes time and Rome wasn’t built in a day, but I believe that I should be able to get it done faster. I also started thinking about speedy writing after reading an interview with Alexander McCall Smith. In this interview, McCall Smith said that when he writes, very little is changed or edited ( see http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/books/qa-alexander-mccall-smith/article1975514/singlepage/#articlecontent). He writes his stories perfectly the first time. This might be the reason why he publishes a book each year. 

I say I’m slow because the process of writing takes a while. Even in university I started weeks in advance. The most important thing for me was getting something down on the page. I could always work with something once it was there—even if it was only a paragraph and it was full of swear words temporarily substituting for actual words I couldn’t remember or ideas I knew I needed to include. Once I had that, I could expand, revise, cut the cussing, and produce a respectable piece of work.

The same pattern applied when I wrote my mystery. I started by knowing that a young man would be killed. At the time of death he would be wearing a bathing suit, and the killer would have poured water over the body. I knew this much and then I began to figure out who this victim was. Then I wondered who would have found him, and who would have cared.

Everything was in point form. I started to write little chunks of dialogue. Then I wrote a few more characters and a few more scenes. I only wrote the scenes that felt easy to write—I didn’t force myself to write the next chronological scene or to stick with only one character . I did this until I couldn’t think of anything else to write—it took 121 pages. All that was done by hand: ink on sketchbook paper. 

Next I tackled the process of putting the scribbles onto the computer screen. As I transcribed, the scenes filled out. I filled in the unaccounted hours between scenes and the little clues that would make the revelations credible. Characters solidified. Dialogue became more natural. Small jokes were inserted as were the tiny details that would add life to the page. When I got feedback, I made those changes too. I improved my grammar. I switched phrasing to make sentences sound better. I connected characters, I deleted repeated words. And for the most part I reall enjoyed it. 

Now I’m contemplating writing another mystery; a second story in the lives of my characters. I’ve got my sketchbook ready and I’ll go shopping to get the right type of pen. I forget who said it, but I read once that writing is like driving in the fog: you can only see as far as your headlights. This image fits my own writing process very well. My own, individual, wildly curving, multi-layered, drive-off-a-cliff process. But I’ve done it before, so this time I just have to remember the basic direction of my route.