Novel Update: Lessons from My Magician

I'm still typing away on my 2012 NaNoWriMo novel, currently called The Magician. Since November, it has grown from 50,000 to 66,000 words, and I am only now beginning to draft the peak of the action.

Here are a few things I've learned this year from my magician and his world:

Stick with Simple Edits

Once a month of 1,000- to 3,000-word days has drawn to a close, a change of pace is almost mandatory. My way of doing this is reading through the manuscript and finding all the fun little fixes. This includes a few types of errors:

• Spelling
• Homonym
• Grammar
• Wording/Style
• Continuity

Every time something catches my eye, I mark it on a printed manuscript. So many marks. Once I finish this process (some time in March this time around), I enter in all the corrections that take under a minute or two into my Scrivener project file. Any edit or gap in the prose I skip finds its way onto a sheet of lined paper.

Find the Big Edits and Put Them Aside

That piece of paper becomes the list of To-Dos for the book. It also represents a great temptation. I had made it halfway through the easier edits of the list when I realized I had fully yielded to that temptation, that is, to rework my writing before it's written.

These more structural changes are important, but they need to take a back seat to the completion of the story. Spend time understanding how they can change your plot's outcome, but don't spend all your time getting that first 50,000 words to be perfectly formed before finishing the story. Which brings me to the main lesson I've learned about writing:

Just keep writing

It always comes down to this. If you want to write a book, then write that sucker. Not only is this more productive than grappling with all the frustrating passages that just don't sound right, it's also incredibly rewarding. Maddeningly so. I never feel more alive than when I'm spinning out a scene where everything seems to be clicking and the action and characters are melding just as you wish. The intensity of this feeling makes me regret I don't spend every day writing cool stories.

This is why writers don't need drugs.

As I continue to plug away at the last chapters of my book, I've promised myself I will only go forward. No edits until the end. Until then, however, I'm turning off the internet and breaking out the coffee and tea.