How many drafts did you write of your first book? by Kyle Phoenix

Professor Raymond Federman, who I TAed for and was one of my handful of intense mentors (for years, I went to/stayed in Buffalo to work with him and others) recommended that my novels were not novels until I had done 12 drafts.

While he was alive, I was working on what would eventually become Escapades I: A Collection of Stories. Initially it was about 20 short stories that I workshopped in his classes while I was his TA/student. There was also a 125 page long story/novella, The World Today that became the novel Hush. He had me send it to a publisher, Professor Sukenick in Boulder who ran a publishing concern and he said the novella should be broken out into a novel and printed the short stories.

I then came back to the 125 pages and it’s now blossomed into 600 pages, in it’s 11th Draft.

I’m in the middle to Final Draft of a novel Hush.

1. 1st Draft. In its’ first incarnation it was just an ensemble love story. I was really excited to try my hand at a gay love story with a large cast. I wanted to create a story where lots of people live in this building and are interconnected. That was initially about 75 pages—handwritten.
2. 2nd Draft. Typed up with edits, it grows to 125 pages. A novella. A story, yes, with characters and a structure/plot of sorts. It was kind of about childhood and sexuality and abuse and closetedness. Kinda. Sorta. There was also a murderer theme. I wanted to incorporate that there were all kinds of people in this building—-good, bad, mystical, etc.. Typed up to about 75+ pages.
3. 3rd Draft. Then I had to clean up because I had to submit it with these other short stories. Closetedness in the main character was an interesting point. Shift the focus to the closeted character. I wanted him to be confronted with love in this building he’s forced to stay in. A Love Triangle and a Class struggle about a man having to deal with working and existing beyond how money has allowed him to hide and play.
4. 4th Draft. The rejection of the manuscript and then the manuscript was subdivided and the suggestion that the typed 125 pages—-how do I expand that into a full novel?
5. 5th Draft. There was a spiritual element, a 4th element to the tale itself, so I wrote this meta-fiction piece in the middle. I had started to think about all of the intricate reality pieces and magic and such that brought all of these people together and I thought, what if I just wrote a magical, conscious, magical-spiritual reality? By this point it’s about 300 pages as I’m teasing out a fuller, deeper story.
6. 6th Draft. Now I have Distinct Realities and an end point. An ending. I ended it. I knew where I wanted to end it. Who dies, why. Still 300+ pages.

Here’s where I split into two separate novels Hush and Stay then began writing and revising them simultaneously.

1. 7th Draft. In Stay, the female, the woman that a closeted guy has a relationship with, she is slapped by the man he has an affair with. That was sort of her “identity” besides being the first one cheated on, later his wife. I made her aware of the affair slowly on one level and then completely within the spiritual-magical portion. The spiritual-magical portion gave me access to her anger. The other story form, the other reality, gave me access to her anger and awareness. And then I started applying Dr. Harville Hendrix’s Imago theory (that essentially our parents/caregivers teach us how to love; so we “look” for those traits in romantic partners; it’s unconscious and we’re as adults trying to adjust our behavior to meet people with those attractive traits but not react to them as we did to our parents/caregivers.) The Imago Theory opened a good can of characterization worms for Woman# 1, Man # 2 and Woman # 2 (Man 1’s wife) because it gave me an in to their personalities being similar to be attractive to Man# 1. Man # 1’s suicidal-dead mother and overbearing, grief stricken father. That gave me an in to depression, sexual abuse, identities of his girlfriend, male lover and wife which opened up dimensions to the characters.
2. 7th Draft of Hush. I had my complete novel and send it back to the publisher and the Marketing Editor does a full work up on it. He points out that several areas need enhancing, one in particular, with such a large and broad cast, he can’t tell who the protagonist is. We understand who the protagonist should be but in the reading it’s not clear to a basic reader. I then have to go back to Hush and incorporate a hundred handwritten pages about Steven the protagonist to make him the “star”. I write the 100 pages in a purple notebook, longhand first, then type it up. Of course these means I have to work on connections and other characters to support this infusion. 300+ pages becomes 450+
3. 8th Draft of Stay. I had a paragraph, a sort of poem that I’d written and won an award for years ago that listed a woman going from child to an older woman and the victories and disappointments. It’s 32 lines and her sections of reality 1.1, 2.1, 3.1, 4.1—-her arc—-I divided the lines up 8 lines and then just riffed paragraphs off the line, some are a few lines, a few paragraphs but the lines themselves gave me entrance into her, Woman 1, her life, her reality. I was worried about not capturing the woman fully in this love triangle. Sometimes I’ll rummage through old pieces, pieces that were strong for a character—-a woman—-and incorporate them. These poem lines give me jump off points for good paragraphs about the woman and the jump offs give me fuller, juicier chapters and more importantly insights into this character. I originally had her as this object that her boyfriend was either the victim of or lying about. Then she was a victim of this lovers spat/vengeance. Then she was this mystical virago. But why? I realized I was writing yes, distinct realities in differing chapters but that all of the pieces had to make sense to the reader. You read her in 4–5 realities and should be able to agree that she’s the same person, slightly different choices, but still the same person.
4. 8th Draft of Hush. Steven is clearly my protagonist and I’ve infused his shady past with some more clarity. Why is he mixed races and how does he feel about that? What were his parents like? Why does he only have this building to his name? What happened? Why is he such a mess? Then I bounce other characters off of these answers.
5. 9th Draft of Stay. I know now that there are maybe another 10–20 pages where I have a few more scenes of Man # 1 and Man # 2 and then the last 50 pages needs to be a little more in-depth, there’s some elements of what occurs when everything is good and healthy and the person has lived a dysfunctional life, had dysfunctional parents and suddenly everything is good and normal. I wanted to pierce that.
6. 9th Draft of Hush. Luckily I’ve always had the construct, from beginning to end of the whole thing, like a container. That makes it easier to inflate characters and scenes because I know where the whole thing is going, it’s ultimate parameters.

10th Draft. Stay & Hush. Right now I’m hovering between 550/650 pages as my last, Final Drafts then I’ll be able to go through and cut entire scenes, pages. Generally I have my first Proof copies with cover drafts and I go through with two different colored pens. One for layout issues—-widows and orphans, bad fonts, overlaps, etc.. And another for typos and content adjustments—-if such and such was in the kitchen at the beginning of the scene, where were they at the end? Continuity. Content. Clarification. I’ve talked before about making outline Index cards scene by scene—-I did both for Stay & Hush, which make them unique, I haven’t done that for shorter novels (S, Tranny, Puzzle, Sanction, etc.) Possibly because they were shorter, under 400 pages each, I didn’t need to control so many moving parts. But it’s a great exercise because it allows you, as the writer, to dissect the book in a new way. Each section is generally its own card.

11th Draft. Stay There’s a section about a Man# 2 as a child and he meets another child on the beach. Perhaps it’s Man # 1 or Man # 3 but only he has the memory of this little boy. I have a few pages of this inner mystery. And I have some thoughts about a few other interactions between adults and their family so that I create distinct both identities and realities in the chapters. I want the reader to be able to go from one reality to another but still recognize the people. I also felt that the mystical/sci-fi element of the book was too starkly separated by the chapter delineation. I realized I was being too subtle, that instead I needed the book itself to open up for the reader about things the characters might not be able to readily connect.

11th Draft. Hush. Ironically I finished it at my godmother’s house who was Professor Carlene Hatcher Polite’s godmother. She was another professor I TAed for years prior and had read 2 iterations of Hush and pointedly liked the character Mother Moon. In her liking I got the inspiration to cross contaminate my own work by a few dollops of Mother Moon into Stay, though Hush is really where she’s grounded. I did this because I had this mystical element running through and I wanted to keep it normal to my own little multiverse. She may or may not briefly appear in S: A Novel and definitely does so in Myriad, a 12 book series I’m working on. But when I hooked in Mother Moon to Stay from Hush and S, she re hooks back into Myriad and more importantly, a couple of characters from Stay and Myriad meet and I work out why this cross contamination of aware characters is occurring. Which was nice, and also why I merged discussing the Drafts of Hush & Stay.

Between Drafts 11 and 12 are generally several iterations—-I do about 4 separate runs to include layout changes, cover choices, I then have people go over it, tel me what they like and not, get feedback. There will always be an error, an imperfection, no matter how many editors and edits it goes through. Always. It’s the universe. It’s the printer. It’s the ink. It’s the store. It’s me. It’s the editor. There’s also a small mistake. But going through 4 iterations of Draft 11 means that you not only narrow it down to sometimes just 1 or 2 but that the reader generally can’t find it.

12th Draft. There generally comes a point in a novel where it is a completed story/idea. And that Drafts becomes what gets copy edited, what goes through consistency edit, marketing edit, etc..

This is the last piece, the final product. The Cover is generally the final choice, the back cover synopsis works, the picture is good, the copy logo (more publishing insanity—-in order to be sold in major book retailers an ISBN has to appear on the back cover AND a company logo on the back cover AND a company logo on the lower bottom spine AND a company logo/stamp on the top of the spine. The spine has to be a certain amount of space so that it can be read on a store shelf—-this is generally about 140 pages plus covers, soft or hard.)

Draft 12 is often about all of those things. I’ve gone back and forth on Proofs half a dozen times because a cover pic smudges or is out of focus or isn’t over the bleed.

Or the table of contents! Another bastard and a half. When you edit it might shift a page, a page shift mean the whole bowl of jelly might shift.

Both Stay & Hush I had to re paginate in the TOC for Stay and in the Chapter Headers for Hush. also in Hush there are several forms of writing that occur from different historical points as well as different points in time—-so I experimented with color and black & white in trying to achieve some special effects.

Crossovers

Stay’s challenge was that I had to have chapter header 1.1, 1.2….., 2.1…, 3.1, 4.1, 4.4 up through iterations of four 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4 and then 2, 3,4 with yes four sub-reality chapters, coalesce it all into the final 5, 5.1, 5.2.5.3, 5.4 chapters, conclusions of those reality choices, different from each other, and then finally into 5.5.

Then inserted sections specifically concerning sex and love from one, two, three, four people’s perspectives, Un, Deux, Trois, Quartre—-in French coinciding with the amount of people sometimes in the sex.

Then a 0.0 1, 0.0 2, 0.0 3, 0.0 4 chapters outside of “reality” so that a spiritual war/fantasy can occur, but germane and finally The Crossroads—-where a chapter from the Myriad series crosses into Stay as the last chapter to explain something that occurred. To further complicate or deeply elucidate this for a Transmedia class at UNSW University of North Southern Wales I took—-my final project was using this novel and incorporating several presentational forms for readings and marketing and finally to the book itself so that eventually eBook editions will be expanded with images and videos and the 0.0 surreal chapters will be graphically rendered. It’s timely and expensive but a nice long term enhancing project.

And last but not least, because a lot of mental health issues are touched on, a brief info section for readers at the end.

All of those Chapters have to work in the TOC as well as in the reading are unified but slightly different in perspective or choice, without being to grossly obvious about reality shifting. A lot of tone matching.

Why all this meshuggas?

Eh, it’s fun to mess with your own formats and constructs and time and multiple characters.

Federman would’ve appreciated the experimentation of it.

But here’s what I’ll tell you about it as a book, two books that have a threaded relationship to each other and several others. Doing 12 Drafts of each one, carefully, methodically from pads to typing, to binders, to index cards, to Proof copies—-they are well done.

I would offer that Federman’s insight and instruction to so many drafts was that between one’ self, editors, printers, readers getting involved, even a wholesale failure creatively will still be well presented and a good read. He used to joke about different writing things I’d done as a noble attempt but a failure and that the work was to keep failing, over and over and over again. Finally he called a piece my personal Great American Novel…and that’s when he recommended it to Sukenick to publish.

I’ve started to do more writing about writing and incorporate it into the books web page release as well as podcasts and videos. A book has become so much more than what I envisioned before I met him and Carlene Hatcher Polite and others. So much more. He would’ve appreciated Stay, I know for some of the content and for the playing in French, Paris and French characters (including him as Professor Letterman—-a play on the translation of his name.) that I’ve done there.

I turn now to the dozen other novels and non-fiction books on my production slate.

We shall see how many times they fail before they fly, non?

#KylePhoenix

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