I write this newsletter today aglow with the celebratory news that a milestone has been reached!
The third draft of the third Seen in Silverbridge book is now complete! 🎉🥳🙌
Scrivener screenshot of the Parts of the book. Total word count: 87,778
It’s been a long road, a much longer road than usual for me. When I compare the writing of this book to the two previous ones, I’d estimate I’ve spent an extra six months drafting this one. And it’s still not ready to publish!
I’ll likely do another two passes working on prose and readability. Then, there’ll be the usual process of getting my editor to do a pass, wading through the thousands of her suggested edits (because no matter how clean my manuscript is, her eagle eyes and smart brain are bound to find myriad improvements), and then I can begin formatting, and preparing to release.
While the process has taken longer than it has in the past, I still feel proud and excited about the book. You’d expect a writer to lose confidence in their abilities when suddenly finding themselves mired in rewriting quicksand like this. It’s not like I’ve been slacking off (well, maybe a bit). I’ve still been writing every weekday morning for at least an hour, sometimes up to three hours. It’s simply that this particular novel has presented me with more challenges than the other two.
How the drafting process usually looks to me
First of all, let me give some context. This is the process of how I’ve written the other books.
- Ideation
- Plotting and structure
- First draft
- Second draft
- Reader feedback
- Third draft and polish
- Edit and publish!
I’m sure you’ve heard of the first draft being called a ‘vomit draft’. You basically vomit everything onto the page, no matter how bad you fear the writing is. Any kind of self-editing slows down the process dramatically and risks curbing your genuine creativity. The more you ease the reins, the greater your chance of having the characters come to life. All tangents and subplots are welcomed!
The second draft is where you slice and dice, cutting any unnecessary story beats, subplots, characters, and scenes. This draft is arguably the most enjoyable part of the process, because the core story themes and character changes become apparent, and often surprise you.
At this stage, I usually have a pretty readable book that I’m happy to pass on to trusted readers. Once I’ve gathered their feedback, I’ll embark on the third draft, which is where you prettify the language and further home in on the main journeys of the characters.
Then, you’re left with a pretty decent draft, almost ready to go into the world. A fourth draft (more accurately, this is just a pass) is necessary to dig deeper into the prose. The fourth pass is where you change smaller details like the word ‘soaking’ to ‘sodden’, or ‘incensed’ to ‘angry’.
But this book has been different
You might remember a newsletter I wrote about 1.5 years ago, in which I showed off my gorgeous red-pen-scribbled scene-by-scene in Spain: Writing Abroad
I’d printed out a 51-page outline and taken the hard copy away with me to Spain where I sat by the pool and made the final changes before getting into the first draft.
If you were to read this 51-page outline, you’d have a good time. The story worked. The characters made sense. The journeys were there, well-paced, entertaining, and authentic. And yet somehow when I moved forward and wrote the first draft, something got scrambled. I followed the outline stringently, perhaps too exactly, and ended up with a 120,000-word draft.
It wasn’t until I’d got to the end of the first draft that I realised how many twists and turns, extraneous characters, and meaningless subplots had snuck into my outline. I don’t know how that’d happened, but it was clear I had a lot of work to do. So, I hunkered down and began the second draft.
In the past, writing the second draft of a project has been the most fun for me. Not so this time. It was a slog. There was just … too much story. Too many chapters. So many plot points that, were I to give them all the word count I felt they deserved, my mystery novel would turn into an epic tome. So, I was unforgiving with my first draft, and I sacrificed large swatches of my beloved story.
I ended up with a 95,000 draft that mostly made sense, but still contained scraps of half-cooked storylines and character arcs that took up space without fulfilling any purpose, like a series of third nipples or skin tags.
The third draft felt daunting. Truth be told, I was out of energy and enthusiasm for the book. Perhaps the subject matter of this specific story was weighing me down, too. In this third instalment of Seen, Luce is preparing to marry her handsome-but-ladsy football star boyfriend, which puts a strain on her relationship with Huds. Huds, after accidentally taking MDMA at Luce’s engagement party, does something with a woman that he is desperate to keep secret from the team, and when it eventually comes out, it creates a rift. Rodney is second-guessing his career decision to work with the team, and Faven is only half-engaged in the mystery because she’s distracted by a burgeoning romance of her own.
The Seen team spends a lot of the book by themselves, or arguing, or avoiding arguments with each other. It just … wasn’t fun. Which is a huge issue for me, because the main draw card of the series is the core team, and if they’re having an icky time, I suspect the reader would have an icky time.
The emotionally dark vibe of the book cast a pall over my enjoyment of writing it, so while I stuck to my methodical routine, I often found myself drained more than enlivened by the process.
Keep Keep Keep Going
I’ve made a few posts about the relentlessness necessary for authors if they want to finish anything. Writing a long-form project like a novel can be a punishing (and rewarding!) experience, and there are a thousand points along the journey where giving up is an enticing option, but you just gotta … not give up. If you keep going, you make achieving your goals inevitable.
I really had to take my own medicine during the third draft of this book, and do the work even when I didn’t feel like it. I had to silence the voice in my head that was begging me to turn off my alarm and go back to bed, and get up instead, stare at my computer screen, and push through it.
Geez, I’m making it sound like it was a drag to write this thing, when in reality it was a blast. I still got excited almost every session, and I’m fonder of the characters than ever. It’s taken a long time to get this manuscript into shape, but I feel like it’s 90% of the way there now, finally.
Here’s a snippet from my Juju app from when I finished the draft:
Onward
Next step: do a readability pass.
Then: Julia’s gonna read it.
Instead of giving her the whole book, I’ve come up with a different way to approach it. I’m going to copy-paste a few chapters into a Google Doc so she can read it on any device, even her phone. I’ve asked her to send me a voice message after she’s finished reading every chapter with her thoughts, to minimise the effort for her to give notes.
I’ll likely make changes as she’s reading it and giving feedback, then it’ll be time to send to some more beta readers to get their thoughts, too. If you’re interested in being a beta reader, let me know! I’d love to have you as part of the beta reader team moving forward.
It’s not too far away
I’ll be publishing the book in a few months. It’s almost two years since An Actress Is Missing came out, so I’m really letting the team down. But it’ll be worth it. In the meantime, you can reread Books 1 and 2, brush up on your Seen in Silverbridge knowledge.
Thank you for coming on the writer’s journey with me! Check in soon x