Taking shape

Eleven chapters, thirteen shorter independent parts and 64 thousand words. This is where the story must have achieved a shape of its own.

I'm not talking interesting or catching. That comes a lot earlier, but when you stand there in the bookshop, paperback between your fingers and stare at the title of your newest acquisition there are a few things you take for granted.

The flipping it over and flipping it open parts are already over and done with. The blurb on the back of the cover was the second thing you checked. The front cover always comes first, but if you've read a fair share of books that isn't enough. A book's not just supposed to look pretty. So you read the blurb and you've read half the first page and you opened your wallet and bought it.

Now what? You've already made that entire chain of writer-agent-publisher a little happier, because there's one copy less to be sent back. At least that's what we're told, we as in writers.

Well, this is where I started, or almost.
Somewhere late in the start, where the distance between thumb and forefinger tells you that the story should have gained a direction, it had better, or you're going to put the book away, and you're going to tell your friends it was boring.

The part I've reached is the middle. The dead on middle of the middle -- in the middle of middledom. Where the story is balancing on the edge of first half or second half. I have come to where the story needs to be about what the story is about.

Did that sound strange? No worries. It doesn't have to sound right, because you'll instinctively know when you encounter it. If you don't here's another point when you put the book away. This time your friends are going to be told it was bad. Odd, isn't it? You read a quarter and the book is boring, but if it's good enough to keep you halfway it becomes bad.

Anyway, this is the part we don't read so much about. Especially those of us who are unpublished yet. Get that first book inside the loop no matter what! Bad idea. You see, the putting books away department of readers is something possibly even worse than never getting published. This is where a book starts tanking. Tanking happens after the writer has lost his or her publishing virginity. After the word debut can be used as an excusing factor.

In the genre I'm primarily interested in, tanking walks around like a juggernaut somewhere around book number two in a series. That is bad news for the publisher and even worse for the writer. It could even herald the end of a writing career, and so I'll spend some time on the what makes a reader put away the book, thank you very much.

For my part, I have to decide if my book has taken shape or not, and that means reading a first draft still under production, and that, quite frankly, is painful. There are continuity problems unresolved from the earlier parts, chapters that need splitting up, scenes that must move far away from where they are now, and we're talking pages here, not landscape, and scenes that simply has to go. It is, in other words, not anything a reader with his mind intact, would want to read. It is also what I need to read, because I have only written the story this far and that is by no means the same as reading it.

Ugh, yuck and blaeh.
What we do for our words.