“I used to tell interviewers that I wrote every day except for Christmas, the Fourth of July, and my birthday. That was a lie. The truth is that when I’m writing, I write every day, workaholic dweeb or not. That includes Christmas, the Fourth, and my birthday.” –Stephen King
Today, I’d like to take this space to talk a little bit about Charlie.
Charlie is my Middle Grade manuscript. It’s in great shape at about 76,000 words, and ready to be represented. I don’t talk about him often, but since this area of the site has been devoted to writing and editing, I think it would be foolish not to talk about how I spend a good deal of my writing time.
Charlie is my fallback. I wrote the first draft of the book as my senior thesis at UW-Madison. It took all three months of the semester, but when the final bound copy was due on my professor’s desk, I was ready with all 282 pages of it. I was surprised by my output. I’d never written anything over 15 pages before, and suddenly I was knocking off 15-20 manuscript pages per day. I’ve talked about the Myth of Inspiration in this space before, but I think that the first draft of Charlie was the first time I ever tunderstood the power of honest-to-god work while writing.
I kept a tight regimen. I wrote six days a week, starting at eight o’clock every morning. I didn’t constrain myself with any artificial time limits, but calculated early in the semester that if I were able to produce five manuscript pages per day, that I’d be able to easily knock out 300 pages through the course of the semester. So I set my goal at five pages.
At first, it took a while to get there. Charlie was in his infancy, and a lot was spent plotting out the details of my characters’ world. I didn’t concern myself with plot, which is evident re-reading the first draft. I had a general direction I wanted to take the story, and was happy to let my characters do the walking. Once the story gained momentum–and once my characters began to take on lives of their own–I found myself burning through my five page goal in my first hour at the keyboard.
So I extended it. I doubled my daily goal to ten pages, and within a week I’d extended it to fifteen. Pretty soon I’d decided that instead of setting a page limit, I would try to write an arc per day. Needless to say, the manuscript pages piled up.
Of course, most of what I wrote was useless. Not useless, useless–but a good deal of early Charlie had no business being on the page. A lot of it was great back-story. Even more of it was built of wonderful little pieces of dialog or character mannerisms that brought texture and vibrancy to Charlie’s world. But as the caretaker of Charlie’s world, I needed to be a filter. Not in the first draft, mind you.
The power and the utility of the first draft of Charlie–the power of all first drafts–is that it was written without that filter in place. The first draft of Charlie allowed me to put all of that world-building dialog and all of those humorous mannerisms down on the page. The first draft of Charlie made those things real, but as the filter between Charlie and the audience, I’m responsible for building an engaging world. That world existed in Charlie’s first draft, but Charlie wouldn’t begin to shine until editing.
Next: Editing.
