In my last post on wrapping up a story, I commented on the complexity of story wrap up. But that's hardly the only time consuming moment in the process of writing a novel. In my (admittedly limited) experience I notice four distinct periods of writing:
- Inception and research
- >60% sprint
- Story wrap-up
- Editing and publishing
In no way I'm claiming generalisity here, these are just my four phases. Anyway, the inception is clear: picking a storyline, a situation, a main character from my backstory world. Then starts a short period of research, filling a big basket (document) with concepts, ideas, situations, people, places, ships, all which might figure in the story. Sometimes you have to revisit this step halfway, to bring in more depth to the story, it's definitely a tool to use when wrapping up is hard.
The bulk of the story is written in one quick sprint, depending on the size of the book this can be done in a few weeks. The faster, the better as the ideas are still fresh and therefor have a natural flow. Biggest challenge in this period is to slow the pace of the story down enough. It's very easy to take too many shortcuts or be way to brief in situation descriptions, all because of writer enthiousiasm.
But eventually the pace runs out, it always does. And in general this happens at about two-third of the story, at the start of this wrapping up period. We already know the characters, most story arcs are in place and somewhat integrated. In some cases it's even possible to write something like a ~300 word summary of the ending. However, this is where things slow down dramatically. Life happens (=holidays, family stuff, work, busy, busy) And you're missing that starting enthiousiasm that drove the story telling. The harder to solve story arcs need solving, and it becomes hard to keep pace while necessarily deepening out stuff. We can't stay shallow the entire story, we need depth.
I've seen a near 80/20 rule here: 80% of my time is spend on that final 20% percent (=actually more of a third, but hey, who cares?)
After wrapping up the first write-through of the whole book, the slow editing phase begins. In my case I'm doing this fully on my own, where "real" writers would use external editors. Because this is a relatively non-productive period (=you're not really adding to the story, just making it more readable) it's easy to be slack and hasty with this. But how would you expect any readers to stay, if you can't be bothered to lift the level from scratchbook to actual novel? So, this should also take time and effort.
With my newest book (no. 4, yeah!) I've now officially reached that point. The story is finished, the editing begins. I expect to be adding two or three more "chapters" during that process (because something is still lacking), but the book is already on a healthy 77k words. Not bad, not bad at all.