Winds of Change: Writing the First Draft of the Book

March 2019 to November 2019, that's how long it took me to get my book from an idea stuck in my head into the hands of a professional editor. I have no frame of reference on if that is quick, slow, normal or otherwise. But it felt kind of fast.

Now, I had actually written the majority of my book between March and June. So in reality it took me about four months to write over 100,000 words, then four months of editing before I wanted a professional to look at it.

I did not take time off to do it, I did not write during work, or during the time I got to spend with my wife and son after work. I did most of it sitting in bed for 1-3 hours every night after those two had gone to sleep. My goal was to write 1,000 words a night, which public math says would have taken me about 100 days to write. As you can tell with your own public math skills, I was pretty close. Now I didn’t keep a strict track of that writing, so some days I went way over that mark, and others I barely wrote anything. But I made a manageable schedule, and did it. Never confuse effort with results.

Now, for outlining. I have heard about these things, how critical they are to structure, so I tried.  So with my memories of college and high school English classes, I tried to outline. It wasn’t anything fancy, there were very few details and no one looking at it then would have any idea what I wanted to do with this story. Part of that (as I discussed in my post about the start of this) was because I had already come up with the concept while planning for D&D. However, even with that in mind, my inner child didn’t want to outline and I just wanted to write my book. So, I did the bare minimum and then just went for it. As I wrote, I added more to the outline, though. 

What happened in my outline, is I wrote down 3 parts, and added little narrative beats I wanted to reach. These were one or two sentences, maybe had a character name in there or a location, but usually just end states. Then I would start writing my way to that goal. Characters got created, dialogue developed naturally, and most of the time I had either come up with a better way to get to my goal, or realized the original goal was no good. That’s how I powered through the first draft.

After drafting, I took some feedback from friends and family, and then went back through to tie everything together. I left myself little hints on where I wanted to expand on some things, but the hints were not done in such a way as to hinder beta readers. After that, it was off to the editor to polish everything up. 

The main point I wanted to hit during all of my writing was, is this believable? So as I have mentioned before, for the fights I grabbed swords and went through every step. I pretended there was someone fighting me and I moved my sword against them. I questioned where every part of the body was and did it make sense to move like that. I am by no means a professional swordsman, but I am a Marine Corps martial arts instructor. I wrestled for 5 years, took some MMA classes, visited some BJJ gyms, went to a HEMA sword gym for my bachelor party, grappled a ton and sparred a bit. So again, not a professional and I know there are tons of talented people out there who have taught me, but I have certainly dabbled.

After the fight scenes I wanted to break down some tactics. As an Officer in the Marine Corps and a history major, I have studied a bit on tactics. So, some Marines might see some of the buzzwords in my writing and that's ok. The tactics aren't advanced, and you aren't going to win any battles with them, but they are based in reality. 

That’s everything I suppose. I wanted the reader to feel like it was believable, and I barely planned things out. I wanted to hit some important parts, but I let the characters tell me where they were going. It was fun, and hopefully it made a good book.