On 31st December 2016, I completed the first draft of Pax Caledonia<\/i>, my children’s novel set in Roman Britain in the aftermath of the battle of Mons Graupius. This was my ninth<\/i> completed novel – completed to first draft, at least.<\/p>\n
Five years ago, I’d started loads of novels, but never managed to get beyond 15,000 to 20,000 words before stalling and ultimately giving up. It was in March 2012 that I started The Chimney Rabbit<\/i>. At one point, about half-way through, I came to a complete halt and stopped writing for several months; however, I managed to get going again, and by December 2012 I’d completed the first draft.<\/p>\n
I can still remember than night. I’d opened up Scrivener on my laptop late that evening, intending to get a few words down before going to bed, but as I went on I realised I was getting closer and closer to the end. I couldn’t stop. After so many failures, after that months-long near-fatal stall, I was desperate to finish this book.<\/p>\n
So I kept going. And going. And long after midnight, I’d done it. I had completed the book, and could write those magic words:<\/p>\n
THE END<\/p>\n
It doesn’t get much better than that. And even now, several years and eight further completed novels later, I still got a massive buzz from finishing the first draft of Pax Caledonia<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Now, I mentioned that I’ve completed nine books. If you look at Amazon, you’ll see that I have only two books actually published. There’s a reason for that.<\/p>\n
With one exception, my first drafts are rubbish. Absolute bobbins.<\/p>\n
The exception is The Wreck of the Argyll<\/i> – for some reason, possibly due to a tight deadline, heavily constrained plot, and a huge amount of luck, the published version is virtually identical to the first draft, and even now, looking back on it, I can’t think of anything that I’d want to change.<\/p>\n
The Beast on the Broch<\/i>‘s first draft was awful beyond belief. It was actually written before<\/i> The Wreck of the Argyll<\/i>, but was so bad that it wasn’t worth sending anywhere. It took being put away for a year, a complete rewrite, restructure, and heavy edit before it became anything that I’d be happy to show anyone. And even now, there are things I’d consider changing in the manuscript.<\/p>\n
Since The Wreck of the Argyll<\/i>, I’ve completed four first drafts. All of them are terrible to a greater or lesser extent.<\/p>\n
Murder at Eaglecrest<\/i> is a sequel to The Wreck of the Argyll<\/i>, so as such fails through its very concept – you don’t write sequels to books that don’t sell. It also throws away the interwoven plots and rigorous historical detail of WWI Dundee of the original in favour of a country house murder investigation, which was probably a mistake.<\/p>\n
My Dragon Has No Nose<\/i> is a fantasy set in a Victorian Edinburgh where dragons are real. It doesn’t work mostly because of its failure to grasp the possibilities of the concept – instead of exploring the ramifications of a world where dragons power the fires of industry, its plot is based on putting together a show in a music hall. Also, crucially, it’s a story about a comedian that doesn’t contain any jokes<\/i>. Oh dear.<\/p>\n
Far Galactic North<\/i>, my science fiction adventure, doesn’t have enough of a high concept to it. It’s just generic sci-fi setting with nothing to distinguish it; and the plot seems to be high-paced but low-engagement.<\/p>\n
Pax Caledonia<\/i>, the latest in this long line of first drafts, seems to work OK for the first act, but the meat of the plot – the “promise of the premise” in Save the Cat terms, doesn’t really convince. I’ve got a nasty feeling this means a 60% rewrite.<\/p>\n
So, what does this mean? It means that more work is needed. Unfortunately, coming up with solutions to problems is nowhere near as easy as blasting through a first draft. With The Beast on the Broch<\/i>, it took about a year of thinking before I could start on the massive rewrite. Whether any of the above four books is salvageable, I don’t know – I certainly don’t have any solutions in mind at the moment.<\/p>\n
The other problem is that you don’t get a first-draft buzz from completing a second, third, or tenth draft. It’s just hard work. And I have a certain amount of difficulty finding the motivation and enthusiasm for such an amount of slog.<\/p>\n
I’m deliberately holding back from thinking about any new books at the moment, in the hope that what little creativity I have is directed towards my flawed first drafts – my rewrite of The Beast on the Broch<\/i> was done during a hiatus between new projects. We’ll see if it works!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On 31st December 2016, I completed the first draft of Pax Caledonia, my children’s novel set in Roman Britain in the aftermath of the battle of Mons Graupius. This was my ninth completed novel – completed to first draft, at least. Five years ago, I’d started loads of novels, but never managed to get beyond 15,000… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1185,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/img_0367-e1512156917637.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p37h7H-j8","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1186"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1186\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}