first draft

Well, break out the bubbly – it’s done! The first draft, with all its holes and glory. Being the analytical type, I’m going to take a brief look back and see what the process so far has been all about.

So what have I done, and what have I learned?

• I’ve written 25,999 words. This is a tad short of the 40,000 that I’ve told the publisher I will deliver – but I know the story will expand. I have not yet written Chapter 8, “Travelling the Muskoka Road Today,” because I haven’t done the complete trip myself yet, and which will be about 3,000 words. Plus there is more research to do and some expansion of what I’ve written so far. I expect to come in at about 35,000 words, which is respectable for a book of this type and for what I’ve promised.
• I’ve followed the original Table of Contents pretty closely, except that I’ve turned Chapter 1 into a Preface. I fully expect to re-organize the structure somewhat for the final version. But as you’ve heard me say before, I love my outline and I love my Table of Contents – they have been the beacons that have guided my research and writing all along.
• In writing the first two chapters I found my voice and my style, and learned to read my words out loud. This took a long time – probably 3 months elapsed – but was time well spent.
• During the writing of Chapters 4 and 5  I learned that, even though this is a non-fiction book, the process of telling the story I want to tell is very organic. It’s not at all like the business reports I used to write. It sometimes seemed like I could not write one single sentence without stopping to research something for an hour or two. Very frustrating in terms of accumulating word count. But the nature of the beast.
• By Chapter 6 I had figured out how to expand my outline down a level or two, defining more specifically the flow of the topics for that chapter… and the writing went faster as a result.
• Chapter 7 was my biggest challenge; there are few people in it. Up until then, I had enough primary source material – diaries, memoirs and the like – to tell the story through the eyes of people who had actually lived it. My temptation was to rush through Chapter 7, but since the timeline is very long – from 1912 to today – that wasn’t really fair. I did the best I could to personalize the events in this chapter and to tie back to some of the people I wrote about earlier on. We’ll see if my critiquers think it works.

Speaking of critiquers, I want to acknowledge my two writer friends who have been with me every step of the way, reading every chapter as I’ve written it. Lynn and Jen are both excellent writers who have encouraged me and given me clear comments and suggestions. Neither of them have never been to Muskoka and they don’t usually read this kind of book. So if I can keep them interested – and I seem to have so far! – then I figure I’m telling the story the way I want to. Thank you, my friends – may all writers have the benefit of your kind of advice!

My next steps are:

1) Take  a week off to visit with my sister and brother-in-law who are here from Texas.

2) Review and make the recommended changes from my critiquers.

3) Go back to Muskoka to explore the original Muskoka Road further and take pictures.