Keen-eyed readers of my facebook page will have noticed the word count ticking upwards on my new thriller codenamed “NRT”. Draft 3 is only a few words short of the 80,000 mark and more or less done. I call Draft 3 “Animate”. By the end of Draft 2 I had a beginning, middle and an end. I had a full set of major characters, a fully functioning plot and a fair number of twists. Draft 3 is where I flesh it all out, developing the scenes, planting the clues and turning loose ends into blind alleys. The last remnants of Draft 1’s flow of consciousness have been tidied up and I’m working on the English, the grammar and the action sequences. There’s no point in writing a nail-biting chase scene in Draft 1 if your plot turns out not to need it.
Up to Draft 3 I stay excited, as my original ideas are changing and characters start to drive the story themselves. I know them by now, pretty certain how they will react to a crisis and what they will do next. Draft 4 signals the start of the polishing process, craft takes over from inspiration.
Draft 4 is the ‘Character Edit’, which aims to turn them from cyphers to people; someone you might have met at work, chatted to at a party or overheard on the train. Someone you will feel for when they bleed and miss (if) they die. I step back and decide how many key characters I have. ‘Glint’ had three viewpoint characters, and everyone else made up the supporting cast. George, Edith and Artie needed deep back stories and a definite arc, but everyone else was merely passing through and their details would be polished in the ‘Continuity Edit’.
NRT presents a different challenge. There are five main characters, but the timeframe of the story is the shortest I’ve ever attempted. This leaves relatively little space for developing the backstory without resorting to ‘rubber duck’ speeches (“the reason I hate men is because my Daddy threw away my rubber duck”). It also compresses that character arc. If there is no time to ‘develop’, can they at least ‘learn lessons fast’? There’s no mucking about. We meet H at the top of page 1 and by the end of the second paragraph we know her problem. J is introduced a paragraph later and we immediately learn who C and D are too. Four of five key players are on the pitch before the reader turns the first page.
Starting Thursday I’m going to read through NRT taking just the scenes of one character, as if this were a single viewpoint novel just about them. This way I achieve continuity of dialogue, action, emotions, motivation and indeed clothing. The character’s viewpoint must also be heard – it can’t all be about her, what about my problems? Imagine NRT is a film script, and woman A is being played by a major star. Her agent is standing next to me saying ‘Give her more lines. Give her that joke.’ Or indeed ‘She’s not taking her clothes off for no good reason.’ For the next two weeks I’ll be an advocate for each of my five leads. The word count may pump up a little more as I flesh them out, but that’s not the prime objective. Five strong but fallible people are ready to be launched into the mayhem I have prepared.
After that, it’s off to my editor for her initial thoughts. More drafts will surely follow.
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