With that preliminary out of the way I want to showcase an interesting lesson I learned in creating these two works of fiction. The lesson has to do with where you think you are going to end it. And then discovering that to earn that ending you either need to scrap the book entirely or re think what the book is really trying to do.
In exploring this idea I will not be spoiling either of these stories. I will illustrate this with a writer's process on how to solve a problem. In both of these cases I only had to get to the point where I felt comfortable handing the book over to a reader to find out if I had something worth sharing. All this work to get to draft 1 in other words.
First, let's look at Pray For You, the supernatural title. I have lived with this story the longest. In terms of evolution of this tale it took me eight drafts to get to the 1.0 version. That was the version where I first handed it to a reader. It was a kind of urban fantasy version with these characters. My reader thought it didn't work at all. They were not wrong. The characters worked and the ending I had in mind was more or less there but it wasn't earned. To fix it I did something unusual with the story. I applied surgery. I took the broad beats and cool lines and non cringy dialogue and kept that. Then I jettisoned the rest. I was even more ruthless as I invented scenes and dialogue to bridge gaps and make it work. The characters stayed the same but the genre completely changed. Gradually I got to version 2.0 and that's the version you will read. I finally felt I had an ending that was earned.
The bottom line for this book is that I trusted the characters I created to save the story. This helped me with the courage to cut the lines that I wrote and rework the book to the story it was meant to be.
Knight Errant, the Western, has a different genesis. I believe I came up with the plot and characters for a screenplay that I never fully drafted. I had a very specific ending in mind while it was still at the screenplay phase. But something funny happened when I got to that scene in the novel. I was only about half done. As written it was a long story, not a novel. I put the thing away for about a week and didn't touch it. Then I realized I needed to address the consequences of this chase that drives this story. Addressing those consequences forces me to find nuances in the characters and maybe get at the heart of what really drives them. And I feel I got a better ending out of it than where I initially had thought.
For this book, I once again trusted the characters. This one didn't require the kind of surgery that Pray For You did but it did force me to wrestle with consequences of something set in motion in the story. In addressing the consequences I think the story is better for it.
I will leave you with a final thought about the writing process. You'll know in your gut when the work is ready for another set of eyes. No time before the keyboard is ever wasted.
