The standard length of a middle grade novel is somewhere in the neighborhood of 50,000 words. (For anyone interested in the conversion, 50,000 words translates to a book approximately 250 pages long, depending on a lot of factors.) I reached the 40,000-word benchmark a couple weeks ago. As far as drafting goes, I’m expecting the final product to end up somewhere in the range of 60,000 to 70,000 words. This is probably too long, but something Carrie said once about drafting stuck with me: “Write more than you think you need to. It’s easier to cut things out than add them in later.” So as far as drafting does, I’m not too concerned about word count for now. I know big chunks of what I’m working on won’t make it to the final draft.
I slowed my pace once I reached that 40,000 mark, instead looking back to review things I already knew needed to be addressed: Did I have enough mentions about the house flipping storyline yet? Do I still have that one kid driving a car when I know he’s going to need a pick-up truck in chapter 15 or 16? Which pair of siblings live in the house haunted by a little girl wearing a Halloween costume? How many unnecessary paragraphs (or even pages) can be completely cut?
New ideas, or clarifying ones, always come along while drafting, so sometimes, for me at least, it’s beneficial to pause the forward progress and go back to get those details lined up correctly. There will still be more revision to do later on, but it frees up my mind to move forward if I know those things have been generally straightened out.
Discovery isn’t as big of an issue anymore since so many of the big moments in the mental routine I’m following have already been developed and connected. That outline isn’t gospel strict, though; sometimes I’ll just keep pushing forward to see what ideas might happen, especially if I can feel one about to show up.
The energy is more directed now, though. It feels like a book coming together instead of just a collection of ideas and character sketches. In fact, I’ve reached the point where this week I followed through on a ritual I seem to have with each new project; even though I have all of the work automatically backing up nightly onto an external drive, I get paranoid about losing my files and will buy a new flash drive for a secondary back-up, just to be sure. I really can’t imagine my files being any safer than in the care of this guy.
At this stage the drafting becomes more deliberate, while still allowing for flexibility and discovery. For example, I’m currently working on a chapter that started so slowly I thought about trashing it altogether; I knew if I wasn’t enjoying it, I was probably parking a big boring lull right after what was meant to be an exciting moment. I kept at it though, since I saw chances to explore some dynamics between characters, which would be a good exercise even if I didn’t end up using any of it. Plus the seed of an idea was showing up, and I wanted a crack at it since there was always the chance it could turn into something important.
It eventually became a chapter that will influence how the story will end, at least once I prune it down. However, I wasn’t even halfway finished with it before I realized the events I’d packed in there needed to happen much earlier, so the whole chapter was in the wrong place. Even if I wasn’t feeling it at first, it was a good thing I kept at it. To a large degree, for me at least, that pretty much encapsulates what the drafting process is like.
August starts tomorrow, which gives me one more month to work on this before school begins. I’m far enough into it now that I feel confident about being able to finish the draft, unless Carrie sees things in the section she’s reviewing that set off fire alarms and we have to do some re-evaluating. I know there will be a lot of revision to work on either way, but that’s okay. You need to have a draft finished before you can revise it, and I plan on reaching that point by the time I have to officially show up for the first day of the 2017-18 school year.
Then it will be time for the big revisions, and that’s when the real work starts.
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