Another Draft Bites the Dust

A month ago, I finished the third draft of what I’m calling my “teen epic.” Between December 2023 and the end of April 2024, I cut 175,817 words (or 11.4%) from the 1.5 million-word manuscript, trimming it down to 1,365,148 words. The epic novel is now actually 10 novels, and my aim is to cut the gargantuan series by another 10 to 15% during the fourth draft, which I’ll start on Tuesday after Memorial Day.

All of this talk about numbers might make it seem like I’ve been doing nothing but cutting words, but I assure you there’s a lot more to it than that. I’m pleased with the finished third draft because over the past six months I really refined the story and accentuated the storylines that I want to be a part of the finished book and cut a lot of extraneous material that doesn’t drive the story forward to the conclusion I’ve envisioned for nine years now.

That’s another thing: it struck me recently that I first started this series nine years ago, in the summer of 2015, when I made some initial notes on what I envisioned as a straightforward novel about teen experience in the 1980s. What started in the first draft as a partially autobiographical story has since developed into a 10-volume “teen epic” about a group of fictional teens in the years 1985-87.

Recently I did all of my ’80s fact-checking for the fourth draft, and in addition to correcting matters of fact in the next draft I’ll be shaping the elephantine manuscript (now 4000 letter-sized pages) into 10 distinct novels.

Novel-writing is about drafts. Most readers know nothing about how novels are actually put together and therefore think that the novelist simply sits down and types out a story that’s in his head, and the result is printed and bound and sold in bookstores. If only it were that easy. The reality is that writing a novel is a constant flux of building up and tearing down. You might spend weeks or months writing a section of a novel only to discover later on that the section is merely scrollwork or a preamble to the real story.

You then spend days, weeks or months cutting the parts that don’t fit and writing new material that improves on the previous draft or goes in a new direction altogether. The point is, while the reader gets to experience the finished, polished product (without the stops and starts of construction), as the builder, the novelist has to keep building and tearing down while constantly revising and refining (and compromising on) his vision for the finished product.

The process reminds me a little bit of Thomas Jefferson’s home, Monticello, in Charlottesville, Virginia. Today when visitors to Monticello see the house and surrounding plantation, they’re seeing the finished product: a beautiful Neoclassical (style) mansion with Jefferson’s “gadgety” architectural touches (like the dumbwaiter that brought food upstairs from the kitchens to the dining room).

What visitors don’t see is the half dozen iterations that the main house went through. In fact, if you read a biography of Jefferson about his architectural ambitions, you’ll see that his original vision for the mansion bears no resemblance whatsoever to the finished one, the one we see today. It took Jefferson multiple “drafts” until he finally figured out his ultimate vision for the place, and, sadly (for him and his slaves that built it), Monticello wasn’t completed in his lifetime.

When I’m in the middle of a draft, I don’t do much reading of other writers; I usually don’t have time. During the third draft, for example, in order to cut 175,817 words from the second draft in 152 days (an average of 1,157 words cut per day), I had to work between 10 and 14 hours per day every day. The point is, I barely have enough time to read and revise my own work, so I’m not able to do any pleasure reading during a draft, and instead have to cram in all my reading between drafts.

During this most recent break, I’ve reread a number of books including John Irving’s The World According to Garp, Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage (about the expedition of Lewis and Clark), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley. The aim is always to read (or reread) work that is different from what I’ve been immersed in for the previous months so I can forget my own writing. I need to forget my own work so when I return to it, it will be fresh, and the bad stuff will stick out.

During this break, I’ve also refilled the well by watching the entire TV series, Columbo. What a magnificent mystery series, and what a great character Peter Falk created! As a longtime aficionado of Sherlock Holmes, I can state with authority that Detective Lieutenant Columbo (we never learn his first name) is the second-best fictional detective.

What started out as a brief, clear report on my progress on the third draft has meandered into irrelevant territory. What was it that I originally wanted to say?

I guess the impetus for me writing this blog/journal entry in the first place was to document the feelings of doubt during the third draft, and the questions I’ve had about my own sanity. I can’t tell you, for example, how many days I’ve woken up and wondered if I was crazy to continue working on a 10-novel “teen epic” that takes place in the mid 1980s. Almost daily at the breakfast table, I’ve moaned to my wife and muse, “Who the hell is going to want to read this stuff?”

“A lot of people,” she replies. “There are millions of people our age and older who want to go back to a simpler time, before social media and the internet, before all of these wars and mass shootings and political unrest. There’s a readership out there that is starving for nostalgia, to be taken back to when they had very few responsibilities, and the world just made sense. You’re going to be giving readers a time machine back to the 1980s, and at ten dollars per novel it’s going to be the cheapest time machine they’ll ever find. You have to keep going, Chris. Your books are going to scratch an itch they didn’t even know they had.”

She’s right of course. So, on Tuesday, May 28—the day after Memorial Day—my submarine, the U.S.S. Bodacious, will submerge again for 218 days—until end of business on December 31. That is the amount of time I’m giving myself to finish the fourth draft.

I have several aims for the fourth draft. The prime directive is to shape each of the 10 episodes into a novel that can stand on its own, with its own plot and character arcs, climax and denouement. The second goal for the fourth draft is to cut away irrelevant characters and material—any stuff that leads away from what the series is ultimately about. Third, I need to refine the novel and chapter openings. Fourth, I need to more skillfully weave in mentions of current events and make corrections to matters of fact. And finally, this is the draft in which I want to make the language really sing.

While I’m submerged, I’ll see a handful of people very seldom, I’ll go on a couple working vacations (meaning I travel someplace, like to a cabin on a lake in the Adirondacks, and keep working), and I won’t watch or listen to any news about what’s going on in the world. Because this is a Presidential election year, invariably there will be a lot of social unrest, protests, riots, etc., but to complete my epic series, I have to block all of that out and focus exclusively on the events, music, TV, movies, and culture of 1985-1987.

You’ll hear from me again in January 2025, when I resurface briefly before the fifth and final draft. I’m setting a publication date of January 2026, which means that pre-orders for the epic series will start in November of next year, and I’ll actually be starting advance publicity for the series this winter.

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