Killing My Darling
It’s time for a new ending, and an old beginning. I am 30,000 words into my second book. Like the first novel, it is a thriller with a female protagonist. Unlike the first, it is set in New York City, in the modern art world, and it is set in the present day. Also unlike the first novel, this time I actually have a semblance of structure as I wade through this first draft.
The first novel I wrote was an entirely different experience. I changed the genre three times mid-draft, I tossed in cliches and characters to try to reach a certain word count, I tried being a “pantser”. I began writing it out of passion, which changed to ambition and then to guilt and not a little self-flagellation. By the end of it, I had 87,000 words, a wobbly plot, and a pitch that even I struggled to remain interested in. I fell in love with the way it felt to write, but it took a year and many rejections for me to realize that I had built a body - skin and muscles and veins - and left the skeleton until the very end.
Before embarking on my second novel, I read a lot. Books on how to plot, how to develop characters, how to structure thrillers. Contemporary fiction by writers whose voices I find beautiful and brilliant. And novels that are in the thriller and drama genres, that have already nailed what I am trying to accomplish on this second round. I wrote down their sentences to study how they break down dialogue, marked how far into the book they drop each plot twist.
And I have been planning. Every. Single. Scene. Before I write it. Stacking up the bones. Asking myself with each scene: “What is this accomplishing?” and “How is it moving the story forward?”
It is humbling to query. And humbling to write. And humbling to receive rejection after rejection. Reading On Writing by Stephen King has on more than one occasion been the only thing that gets me back into the swivel chair with my hands on the keyboard.
It is familiar to begin again, back at the start. But it is so different to be doing it with a plan, and with experience. Or at the very least with a list of mistakes I am attempting not to make this time around. I do not know what will happen to the first novel I wrote. It may be that it will collect dust, living only in my mind. Maybe it has served its purpose in being one more step on the ladder toward a hopeful one-day published novel. Maybe it will be one of many novels that never see the light of day. Maybe it will be what I hope it is.
And so we press on, killing our darlings, and from the ashes growing something new.
"Many people have a book in them, but it takes a special kind of freak to leave the Land of Laziness, cross the Plains of Procrastination and Insecurity Mountain, find the Blade of No One Made You Do This, and use it to cut your chest open and yank that book out." - Gabino Iglesias
