Fiction Mondays: Big First Draft

Very exciting news: I finished the first draft of my novel last week. When I got to last chapters, I just couldn't stop, so one afternoon I wrote through to the end. 91,747 words. That will change as I edit; a lot will be added and subtracted, but I like that number. It seems like a good start, and it's definitely the longest thing I've ever written. And there are parts--I won't know this for sure until I start editing sometime next week, but I have a feeling--that are good. At some point in my non-editing, just-writing first draft, themes started emerging, sometimes out of necessity for the plot or the development of the characters. Things I pulled inspiration from suddenly made perfect sense. The characters got deeper and started surprising me, doing things that I didn't know they had in them. But once they did these things, it made perfect sense. It was really astounding, the way things started to line up from my refusal to step in and censor anything. I just wrote at least 1000 words every day until a first draft emerged, and soon I will edit.

I'm a little nervous for the first edit. I took a red pen to the story I posted here last week, and that took some time. Editing is much more difficult than a first draft, and there's a lot of story to get through. I can do it, but not yet. This week and next week are devoted to short stories. Making the necessary changes to "Bearing the Body," savagely editing "Appalachian Blues," and continuing "Twenty-Ten," which I want to enter in Esquire's Fiction contest. I haven't written anything about that here, but I will soon. I'm working on a story about a guy whose friend believes the world will end that year, based on something he saw on the History Channel. We'll see how it goes.