Tomorrow is the day.
It took me six and a half months to rewrite my novel. I took a pretty good Coming-of-Age story and pulled it apart. It bears little resemblance to the original story. I modified some characters, completely changed other characters, and added a good half dozen. Some characters got chopped. Sorry, folks. But one of us had to go, and, without me, none of you would have existed at all.
Why, you may ask, did I do this? Last summer I came to believe that the Young Adult Coming-of-Age market was saturtated. I also think that the career of COA writers in YA is a short one. For every Faridah Abike-Iyimide, there are two or three others who write a book or two and disappear. Did they tire of writing? Did new contracts not get written? Did the books not sell?
I can't let that happen to a nice guy such as me.
I know well-meaning writers who simply want to get published, as if that is the be-all and end-all. It may be that one attains a boost in status if one has published a book. That doesn't interest me. I want readers! Lots of them. And book sales galore! I want to be the next Neal Shusterman! But last summer I realized that I wasn't going to get there writing about life lessons gleaned by a farm girl.
So I ditched the COA idea in favor of ... thrillers! Agents like thrillers. Fifteen-year-old boys and girls like thrillers. I've told at least a dozen people that I switched from COAs to the big "T," and no one has said I made a bad decision. In fact, most of the people I've shared this change in attitude with have responded, "Can I read it?"
Six and a half months of telling myself a story. The result? A red binder sits on my office desk chock-filled with 592 pages of raw imagination.
Now I must shape this mass of 100,000 + words into a thriller.
I am armed to the teeth. I've read every book on how to write by Donald Maass. And, I took copious notes. I just finished another excellent how-to book by Tiffany Yates Martin, editor extraordinaire. Intuitive Editing makes many good points about what writers need to do when we edit. I have three different Save The Cat! books (they all say the same thing, as they should). A year ago I took a cruise across the Gulf of Mexico (I hope we're still calling it that next week) with lawyer-mystery-writer William Bernhardt and his WriterCon bunch. The notes from his suggestions are in the editing binder! My writers group, Feedback Hour, is just a text away.
How will I go about shaping this tale that only I understand into a YA thriller?
Tomorrow it's back to the hurricane.
Stop by this website on Friday. I'll tell you all about how I started chisling away at it.
