by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I’m just about to enter the second half of this first draft of my first novel. I’ve repeatedly gotten to this point in the past, only for something to go wrong and the whole thing fall apart. But I’m hoping that I can get to the end of this first draft without too much trouble.
The second half of the second act, called “the bad guys closing in” part of the story is when the stakes and the tension are supposed to get amped up. I have a few interesting situations concocted for this portion of the novel that I think will keep people reading. I’m doing all of this in a vacuum, so, lulz, I honestly have no idea if any of this is any good.
All I have is my gut.
And I’m really pleased with what I’ve come up with for the third and final act. As I keep saying, however, there is a potentially existential problem with the novel — it’s just too many words.
But I’ve vowed to myself that with this first novel that I’m not going to worry about length. The point is to just get the story down and once I start to work on the second draft — the one that beta readers will actually read — THEN I can start to worry about word count.
If I manage to cut this novel down to about 100,000 words, then it really is going to go by at a pretty fast clip. There’s not going to be much fat on it, that’s for sure. But I’ve given this whole thing a lot of thought and I don’t really have any extra characters — any paring back of wordcount will probably come from combining and compressing scenes with the general structure staying in tact.
At least, that’s what I hope.
Anyway, at the moment, absolutely no one believes in me or this project. I can’t even pay people to help me with this novel. It will be interesting to see how bumpy the beta reader process will be because everyone apparently thinks I’m a drunk crank.
