Dakota Stevens #3: Starting from Scratch

While writ­ing the first two books in the Dako­ta Stevens Mys­tery Series—A Real Piece of Work and The Rich Are Dif­fer­ent—I kept note­books of oth­er plot ideas, titles, scenes, char­ac­ters and any­thing else that occurred to me for future install­ments.

As a result of these note­books, I had begun two more Dako­ta nov­els and cre­at­ed out­lines for 3–4 oth­ers.

How­ev­er, when I opened these note­books recent­ly with the intent of con­tin­u­ing one of the sto­ries I’d start­ed, I did­n’t like what I found.

I’d writ­ten this mate­r­i­al (includ­ing the first hun­dred pages of a Dako­ta & Svet­lana pre­quel) between 5 and 7 years ago, and I’d matured as a writer since then.

I no longer liked the direc­tion I’d sketched out for the char­ac­ter and the series.

A real­iza­tion soon fol­lowed that made me sick to my stom­ach:

I need­ed to dump all of that work and start over.

When you’ve cre­at­ed a series char­ac­ter, start­ing from scratch is a scary thought. For the first time since I invent­ed Dako­ta & Svet­lana, I won’t have drafts of work to build on. I’ll be fac­ing a blank Page One and all of the par­a­lyz­ing dread that accom­pa­nies it.

But I’m doing it. I’m start­ing from scratch, main­ly because a nov­el is a hell of a lot of work, and you have to start with a sto­ry, a vision, that you real­ly want to tell. It’s the only thing that car­ries you through.

Ulti­mate­ly, the task before me now is to fig­ure out what excites me about Dako­ta & Svet­lana, and to ask myself, “What is the Dako­ta sto­ry I would most like to read?”

I know that’s the ques­tion I need to be ask­ing because it’s the same one I asked myself before writ­ing the first two nov­els, and I’m pleased with the results.

Alleged­ly, J.R.R. Tolkien was part­ly inspired to write his Lord of the Rings series for this very rea­son. He thought about the books that he would most like to read, real­ized they did­n’t exist yet, and set out to write them.

He wrote the books he most want­ed to read. This is a great les­son for all of us writ­ers.

Over the com­ing months, I’ll be writ­ing the first draft of Dako­ta 3. I have no idea what kind of sto­ry it will be or where it will take me; all I know is, I want it to be a fresh take on my vision for the series, and I want it to be as well writ­ten as I can pos­si­bly make it. We’ll see if I can pull it off.

Wish me luck, Dear Read­er. I’m going to need it.

 

By Chris Orcutt

CHRIS ORCUTT is an American novelist and fiction writer with over 30 years' writing experience and more than a dozen books in his oeuvre. Since 2015, Chris been working exclusively on his magnum opus. Bodaciously True & Totally Awesome: The Legendary Adventures of Avery “Ace” Craig is a 9-episode novel about teens in the 1980s. It’s about ’80s teens, but for adults (in other words, it’s decidedly not YA literature), and he’s applied this epic storytelling approach to the least examined, most misunderstood, most marginalized narrative space in American literature: the lives and inner worlds of teenagers.

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