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Well, I've done it. As you may have seen on Facebook, yesterday I completed the first draft of the novel I've been working on, converting the story from my "Adonis" screenplay into a full-length prose form.
Artist's dramatization of actual scene from novel
I got very close last week, and completing it had started to obsess me. I had managed to get it down to one remaining scene, so yesterday I locked myself in my room and didn't let myself leave until I had it finished. My goal was one continuous story, not necessarily a good one, but a technically "complete" one, that flowed from beginning to middle to end. It came out to just barely under 43,000 words, in thirteen chapters plus a prologue. Not a very long novel— probably will ultimately need to be longer —but I think it's the longest continuous thing I've ever written.
Word count is a weird metric of length to me, as a dramatist. Drama never has a fraction of the word count prose does, and doesn't correspond to runtime nearly as much. In screenwriting, there's a rough one to one ratio of page count to minutes it takes to play out. Plays don't have standard formatting; you kind of have to work it out for yourself. But the sheer volume of words required for a full-length novel was pretty staggering to me. By contrast, all five Mrs. Hawking plays together total about 63,000 words— much smaller on average given the amount of work they represent.
Writing the book was very much not easy for me. As I've been complaining, I find prose to be incredibly difficult. Describing what happens in a way that doesn't feel overwrought, excessive, and awkward is much harder to me than designing the action (like one does for any sort of story) then expressing it in dialogue and a few stage directions to be built upon by performers. My first drafts tend to be wordy at the best of times, but I often felt unable to convey what was going on in a manner that didn't seem overexplained, or execessively formal. I tried not to worry about that too much at this stage, as too much attempt to edit as you go gets in the way of completing a first draft, but as a result the prose goes off the rails in a lot of places.
This is all to say I am very much not happy with the book right now. It's not representing the story the way I want, and the level of the writing is not up to the standard I want to put forward. It's the worst example to date of the problem I feel like I struggle with most frequently in my writing, that I did really great work building the story, but the words I used to express it are bad and wrong.
I can do pretty solid dialogue at this point, as drama has honed my ability for it through practice. But for someone as thoroughly verbal as I am, I find word use to be ABSOLUTELY THE MOST DIFFICULT PART of writing. Coming up with the ideas, what happens, the mechanical functionality of how the tools of narrative work? I'm awesome at that. Picking the right words that are pretty and expressive enough for narration? That's a brutal struggle.
I know this is part of the process. Drafting has allowed me to make good work time and again, and I know myself well enough to know that I'm better off having a finished first draft that I can iterate on than trying to edit everything until it's perfect before moving on. I never fucking finish anything if I try to work the second way. So history suggests that even just getting to this point is a HUGE step forward in ultimately making a good piece.
Right now, though, all I want to do is pick at it. I am keenly aware of its shortcomings in its current state, and I have a hard time leaving a project alone if I know it still needs work. But I have to get some distance from it, or I'll never be able to effectively think of new ways to convey my ideas where it's needed. So what I have resolved to do is not even LOOK at it again for at least two weeks. I put the first allowable date to return to it on my calendar. Hopefully in that time I'll forget what I was trying to do and be able to evaluate what I did do.
What has worked well for me in the past in writing plays and screenplays is to puke out a first draft, take some time away from it, then attempt a second draft on my own before I show it to anyone. I am definitely going to need outside feedback on this, and I've even got a few very generous people in mind. But I'd be embarrassed to show it to anyone in its current form, so I absolutely want to see if I can improve the quality of the prose before I do that. "The writing is bloated and awkward," is not feedback I'm looking for, 'CAUSE I ALREADY KNOW IT IS.
But I do need help to see if I've really used the novel form to its fullest. The overall story is one Bernie and I labored over when we were writing the screenplay and I'm very proud of that part of it. But it is very lean and focused, in the manner that stories for the screen must be, and it probably requires more expansion and fleshing out to really take advantage of the novel form. And I'm not a hundred percent sure I paced it in the manner a novel should be— the screen must move fast, and it may still feel too rushed. Still, I feel far and away the biggest problem is the quality of the prose.
It's also got sex scenes, which I feel... some type of way about. I really do feel like, given the subject matter, they need to be in there. But they're certainly not my forte, as they don't require a lot of specifics in drama. In this case, my trouble is compounded by two issues. The first I wrote about back in 2014 and unfortunately not much has changed— I'm a big child about sex scenes and feel embarrassed, like somebody's going to judge or laugh at me for how I conceive of them. I worry about this even when I choreograph intimacy on stage, that somebody will find something I designed to seem sexy to be weird, silly, or even creepy. The second issue is that the setting of this piece in particular in an alternate-world ancient matriarchy, with entirely different power dynamics between the genders. Any sex scene I write in that world is going to have to meaningfully incorporate that difference in dynamics— but it's still got to take into account my audience's frame of reference comes from being socialized in patriarchy. I mused on this issue in 2015— I need my story's interactions to feel like they're from the different world, while STILL communicating in a way my audience can understand if I want them to get the right impression. THAT'S HARD.
I am trying to keep sight of the fact that it's an accomplishment that I finished. It was a lot of work, it was hard for me, and I finished. That's a big deal. I have always had a hard time celebrating accomplishments like that if I'm still not feeling good about the product's quality. But, one step at a time. I made something new, from an idea that is important to me, in a form I've never worked in before. And I am that much closer to making it something special.
That's something.
I got very close last week, and completing it had started to obsess me. I had managed to get it down to one remaining scene, so yesterday I locked myself in my room and didn't let myself leave until I had it finished. My goal was one continuous story, not necessarily a good one, but a technically "complete" one, that flowed from beginning to middle to end. It came out to just barely under 43,000 words, in thirteen chapters plus a prologue. Not a very long novel— probably will ultimately need to be longer —but I think it's the longest continuous thing I've ever written.
Word count is a weird metric of length to me, as a dramatist. Drama never has a fraction of the word count prose does, and doesn't correspond to runtime nearly as much. In screenwriting, there's a rough one to one ratio of page count to minutes it takes to play out. Plays don't have standard formatting; you kind of have to work it out for yourself. But the sheer volume of words required for a full-length novel was pretty staggering to me. By contrast, all five Mrs. Hawking plays together total about 63,000 words— much smaller on average given the amount of work they represent.
Writing the book was very much not easy for me. As I've been complaining, I find prose to be incredibly difficult. Describing what happens in a way that doesn't feel overwrought, excessive, and awkward is much harder to me than designing the action (like one does for any sort of story) then expressing it in dialogue and a few stage directions to be built upon by performers. My first drafts tend to be wordy at the best of times, but I often felt unable to convey what was going on in a manner that didn't seem overexplained, or execessively formal. I tried not to worry about that too much at this stage, as too much attempt to edit as you go gets in the way of completing a first draft, but as a result the prose goes off the rails in a lot of places.
This is all to say I am very much not happy with the book right now. It's not representing the story the way I want, and the level of the writing is not up to the standard I want to put forward. It's the worst example to date of the problem I feel like I struggle with most frequently in my writing, that I did really great work building the story, but the words I used to express it are bad and wrong.
I can do pretty solid dialogue at this point, as drama has honed my ability for it through practice. But for someone as thoroughly verbal as I am, I find word use to be ABSOLUTELY THE MOST DIFFICULT PART of writing. Coming up with the ideas, what happens, the mechanical functionality of how the tools of narrative work? I'm awesome at that. Picking the right words that are pretty and expressive enough for narration? That's a brutal struggle.
I know this is part of the process. Drafting has allowed me to make good work time and again, and I know myself well enough to know that I'm better off having a finished first draft that I can iterate on than trying to edit everything until it's perfect before moving on. I never fucking finish anything if I try to work the second way. So history suggests that even just getting to this point is a HUGE step forward in ultimately making a good piece.
Right now, though, all I want to do is pick at it. I am keenly aware of its shortcomings in its current state, and I have a hard time leaving a project alone if I know it still needs work. But I have to get some distance from it, or I'll never be able to effectively think of new ways to convey my ideas where it's needed. So what I have resolved to do is not even LOOK at it again for at least two weeks. I put the first allowable date to return to it on my calendar. Hopefully in that time I'll forget what I was trying to do and be able to evaluate what I did do.
What has worked well for me in the past in writing plays and screenplays is to puke out a first draft, take some time away from it, then attempt a second draft on my own before I show it to anyone. I am definitely going to need outside feedback on this, and I've even got a few very generous people in mind. But I'd be embarrassed to show it to anyone in its current form, so I absolutely want to see if I can improve the quality of the prose before I do that. "The writing is bloated and awkward," is not feedback I'm looking for, 'CAUSE I ALREADY KNOW IT IS.
But I do need help to see if I've really used the novel form to its fullest. The overall story is one Bernie and I labored over when we were writing the screenplay and I'm very proud of that part of it. But it is very lean and focused, in the manner that stories for the screen must be, and it probably requires more expansion and fleshing out to really take advantage of the novel form. And I'm not a hundred percent sure I paced it in the manner a novel should be— the screen must move fast, and it may still feel too rushed. Still, I feel far and away the biggest problem is the quality of the prose.
It's also got sex scenes, which I feel... some type of way about. I really do feel like, given the subject matter, they need to be in there. But they're certainly not my forte, as they don't require a lot of specifics in drama. In this case, my trouble is compounded by two issues. The first I wrote about back in 2014 and unfortunately not much has changed— I'm a big child about sex scenes and feel embarrassed, like somebody's going to judge or laugh at me for how I conceive of them. I worry about this even when I choreograph intimacy on stage, that somebody will find something I designed to seem sexy to be weird, silly, or even creepy. The second issue is that the setting of this piece in particular in an alternate-world ancient matriarchy, with entirely different power dynamics between the genders. Any sex scene I write in that world is going to have to meaningfully incorporate that difference in dynamics— but it's still got to take into account my audience's frame of reference comes from being socialized in patriarchy. I mused on this issue in 2015— I need my story's interactions to feel like they're from the different world, while STILL communicating in a way my audience can understand if I want them to get the right impression. THAT'S HARD.
I am trying to keep sight of the fact that it's an accomplishment that I finished. It was a lot of work, it was hard for me, and I finished. That's a big deal. I have always had a hard time celebrating accomplishments like that if I'm still not feeling good about the product's quality. But, one step at a time. I made something new, from an idea that is important to me, in a form I've never worked in before. And I am that much closer to making it something special.
That's something.
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