Going Deeper

Long past the first draft stage

photo taken June 7, 2023, on a hike in Kootenay Park, Alberta — an image of “going deep”

After almost six months of dedicated work, I’m nearing the end of a 300 page novel for young people. I’ve never written this much in this number of months. Along with those pages is another 30k of process journal.

I posted about how I worked quickly through to the end to have a skinny first draft. Since then I’ve added the climax, and worked with the crises of the three viewpoint characters. I’ve worked back and forth, polishing it in parts as I submit to my writing group, struggling with the three individuals’ storylines and various threads. If I were to count “drafts” in the way we used to when writers were working with typewriters, I would have long lost count. (Except there’d be three trees’ worth of manuscript piled on the desk. The advent of the personal computer has surely changed the ways we work.)

I have only to submit the last 60-70 pages to my group now. But it’s “all there.” Except what isn’t. And that’s what we’ll look at in this post.