Well, today, as part of Camp NaNoWriMo for April 2023, I started work on the fourth draft of Still Life. I was kind of hoping that the 3rd would be the final one, but some of the feedback that I have been given by people who have read the 3rd draft made it inevitable.
Not that it was bad. I was absolutely thrilled with the comments I got about the book from several people. A few of them basically said they read it really quickly because they needed to know what happened. And the feedback that I have had that is making me do the extra draft is purely to make it ever so slightly better. Kind of dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s.
The main thing that concerned me about the whole project was that it would be hard to empathise with the main character, Sayward. What I realised from working on the 3rd draft – and especially the final read-through of it – was that she spent a whole lot of her time angry, or crying, or both. I did reduce the number of tears in the 3rd draft but that inevitable led to more anger, so one of the things that I asked my readers was about whether she was too pissed off and too often. However, everyone said that they understood her anger, that it made sense. One of the themes of book 2 will be Sayward brining her anger under control. I even toyed with the idea of calling book 2 “Anger Management” but on reflection it will stay as “Self Portrait.”
The other thing I asked for feedback on was the female characters. There are lots in this book – in fact with two exceptions, all of the main characters are female, so I wanted some feedback from female readers about their believability and characterisation. Again, it seems I need not have worried.
Some of the other feedback was about specific moments in the book, so I won’t go into detail here but again I was exceptionally happy with the comments.
I wrote about 12,000 words of “Self Portrait” in November, and since then I have refined my chapter breakdown, changed a few things, and started to work on the details of book 3, which will be called “Blank Canvas”. My intention is to write both books as the same time – they effectively tell one story anyway, and what I decide do to in book three may impact upon what I need to set up in book two, so treating them as single project, at least in terms of the first draft, makes sense.
But as for this month, I hope so sign off “Still Life” so I had better get on with it!
Happy writing,
Richard xxx
Richard Writes... 