I have completed Prey for the Maltese Falcon, but I really should say “completed,” because – although the final draft has been completed, a big part of the process remains and will take me from a few days to a few weeks.
I also probably should have said “final draft,” too. The idea of multiple drafts of a novel (or a short story or a screenplay) went out the window for me, and maybe most professional fiction writers, when word-processing came along.
It would be possible, of course, to write a get-it-all-on-the-page first draft writing on a computer and not, as we once did, a typewriter. Some brave souls write a longhand draft and I can understand the benefit. For me, slowing down like that is an impossibility. I write quickly, in general, because I am chasing the story; it’s unfolding improvisationally in my mind.
This is not to say it isn’t unusual for polishing and reworking a paragraph to take an hour or longer. Even a single sentence can take, say, half-an-hour. But that tends to be scene-setting stuff, mood intertwined with presenting information about what something is, what it looks like.
But after I get a draft of a chapter – and I view each chapter as if it were a short story, with a beginning, middle and end, with something central to accomplish – I go through it at least three times rewriting, tweaking, cutting, adjusting, before I move on to the next. Does that ad up to four drafts? Not in the old sense, because before word-processing and computers, you had to retype the whole chapter on every draft. To me, I’m rewriting more now than in the typewriter days, because sometimes I’d lie to myself that it was just fine to move on.
I wrote something like thirteen drafts of the first chapter of True Detective back in the early ‘80s and that experience – which immediately became largely retyping – led to Barb and me selling our second car to buy a $5000 word-processing computer (that today couldn’t do what your phone has been able to do for decades).
My process, one I’ve been using for a long, long time, is to write a fairly detailed synopsis of what I envision the novel to be. A Nate Heller synopsis can run over twenty pages. Such a synopsis begins as one flowing document that is essentially a sales tool – a pitch to an editor about a book I want to write. If it works, I get a contract, and in this long and somewhat blessed career, it usually has.
Then I break that synopsis down into chapters. Often those chapters are just a single paragraph. I try to anticipate what locations I need so I can do the research ahead of the writing. But here’s the thing: that chapter breakdown/synopsis always changes for me. On this novel, I did something like eight revisions…of the synopsis. These revisions would begin after chapters were completed, so that the later revisions were only as long as it took to describe briefly the chapters ahead. Prey for the Maltese Falcon is eighteen chapters and the last revision of the synopsis covered only the last three chapters.
I don’t share my methods with you as a suggestion for how other writers should work. This is what works for me. It grew out of the need to have a document that was, again, my “pitch” to an editor and sometimes a publisher so that I could have a commitment before I began the real, hard, put-on-your-helmet-and-go-down-into-the-coal-mine days and weeks and months of work ahead.
On rare occasions I’ve written an entire book without a publisher lined up first. True Detective was one of those, the primary one, because it was genre-busting (private eye mystery meets historical fiction, Raymond Chandler Meets Samuel Shellabarger), far longer than a P.I. novel generally was, and could only be sold by demonstrating entirely what this mutated creature was.
I also learned early on that – again, for me – in a novel that included a mystery, I needed to know who did it and why before I took the journey. In any other direction lies madness. However…you can change your mind about the destination somewhere along the way, although if that happens to me, I have to replot the entire rest of the novel.
Now I am at a critical and somewhat frightening stage of my process. How I wrote Prey for the Maltese Falcon was typical – starting with a synopsis, then breaking it down into a chapter outline, revising that outline as I go when things have changed and discoveries have been made, but then not going back and re-reading much (other than making sure things like names and character descriptions are consistent). Why? You can find yourself constantly rewriting and never finishing a novel that way. It’s often a dead-end street.
I will be re-reading the entire manuscript – it’s fairly short, 52,000 words – over a two-day period. I tweak and refine as I go, using a red pen on the printed-out manuscript. If I run into a rough patch, I go back to the computer and work on it. Barb helps me, often, entering my tweaks and changes and minor fixes.
Each chapter is a file, and at the end I have to go through combining them into one file. My son Nate has tried without success to get me to write just one big file, but the time I took his advice the size of that file became clumsy and slow. So I do it my own stubborn way.
I have a step that is maddening but there’s no way around it. I work in WordPerfect and publishers demand I deliver in Word. That results in the need for a conversion that will have to be checked page-by-page. Sometimes the page numbering is uncooperative, but I manage. Cursing helps. (Root word “curse,” not “cursor.” I would the curser.)
I am sharing all of this because it’s what I am dealing with right now, and is why this update/blog entry is rather short – I have an important task at hand. I don’t mean it to be a lesson, because all writers have only one true teacher: themselves. I went to the University of Iowa in the early 1970s and had some great teachers, especially Richard Yates, and I got some valuable advice, which I’ve talked about elsewhere.
But the only school where you really learn is what you learn at the College of Trial-and-Error, where you teach yourself.
M.A.C.
