It’s always humbling to walk into any book store, let alone five Chapters stores in a row. The first Chapters I visited was in the Chinook Centre and I had to navigate my way around a massive circular table adorned with the biggest stack of books I’ve ever seen. It must have been piled as tall as a person could reach, and all by one writer: Suzanne Collins, author of the Hunger Games trilogy.

She also got her own section. Similar piles of that same book greeted me in the other Chapters.

More than just that display of marketing power, the thing that really humbles me when I walk into a Chapters is the sheer volume of titles vying for the consumer’s eye. There are tens of thousands of books on their shelves. And that’s just a drop in the bucket of what is being published each year. Ten times that number are being published as e-books. It’s good to keep perspective.

I dutifully sought out copies of The Vanishing Track and the End of the Line, my two most recent books, on the store’s shelves and signed them and introduced myself to store staff and asked for “signed by the author” stickers. I don’t really know if this helps book sales. I don’t think it hurts, and I suppose if a reader has to choose between two books, a scrawled personalization might tip the scale in my favour.

I did have two really positive experiences. The first was visiting Owl’s Nest Books, one of my two favourite book sellers in Calgary, the other being Pages on Kensington (who I visited last week). They had lots of my books on their shelves, including copies of The Darkening Archipelago, a previous Cole Blackwater title. Owl’s Nest, like other independent stores, is not so easily influenced by mass hysteria around books like The Hunger Games. I’m sure they had copies in the store, but nothing that threatened to bury a customer if they inadvertently knocked the display table.

The End of the Line, Darkening Archipelago and The Vanishing Track at Owl's Nest Books. You can just see Stieg Larsson being crowded to the side by my titles.

The other really positive experience was in the Dalhousie Chapters. They were short on staff, so I just grabbed copies of my books off the shelves and took them to the checkout counter where I signed them and handed them to the clerk for stickers and re-shelving. The people in line behind me had a small armload of mystery titles and they asked me about my books and then happily added copies of The End of the Line and the Vanishing Track to their purchases. Connecting with readers is one of the best parts about being a writer.

In the end, I don’t know if driving all over Calgary and signing books will help sell a few more. But it was good to meet more book sellers and a few readers. And my message is that, as a writer, I’m willing to go the extra mile to make a success of my books.

One day isn’t a big deal, but I suspect that this will last a few days. The problem isn’t a lack of passion for this book. On the contrary, I am really enjoying this story. Nor is it that this book is particularly hard to write. It isn’t. Compared to my recent foray into the morass of Canadian history in The Third Riel Conspiracy, this is easy. Unlike with the Durrant Wallace series, where I have to remain true to historical events, characters and timelines, with the Cole Blackwater series I can make just about everything up. It’s simple, easy writing that flows and as I’ve said elsewhere, I am really enjoying visiting with Cole again after so long apart.

The problem is that I’m out of my element. I’m writing this update from a hotel in East Glacier Montana. In the last week I’ve been in Nanaimo and Comox, BC; Pincher Creek and Calgary, AB, back home for a single night, and now back on the road. (There is a Doberman pincher with a shot gun guarding my house; don’t get any ideas).

I need habit to write well. I get up at 4:45 or so, drink a cup of strong tea, listen to the 5am news, and then write for two hours straight. On the weeks when the kids are with us, I break for breakfast and to walk them to school, and then come home to my day job. Weeks when they are not I can usually stretch my writing time until 8am. Sometimes in the evening I get a little editing in.

But life is busy and these are trying times, and so I’ve been on the road this week.

It’s not a big deal. In another week or so and I can resume my pattern. The book will get written. That’s not my concern. But I miss it. I love the feeling that comes with churning out three or four thousand words in the morning. It feels as if I’ve accomplished something of value.

The wind will be back in my sails soon enough. I won’t throw any horses overboard (oblique reference to the Horse Latitudes). And sometimes a break is what is needed to allow the story to congeal a little during my traditionally spastic episodes of first draft mania. What I’ve learned is that the pause is often as necessary as the activity in creating something of worth.

Jack Cornfield, one of my favorite Buddhist authors book After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, comes to mind once more.

When I started this project on August 4^th I had a clear vision that I wanted to be done this draft before leaving on a business trip to Polson, Montana on the 21^st. That I’m writing this post from the KwaTaqNuk Lodge on Flathead Lake doesn’t escape notice.

This brings to mind one of key lesson’s I learned when writing this first draft:

1) Deadlines are important. Create realistic deadlines for yourself and work hard to meet them.

For me the challenge was timing. Jenn and I had a trip planned in the middle of the period of time I’d set out to pen this draft, and I knew that would interrupt my momentum. It’s important not to abandon all semblance of normalcy when trying to write a book, but it’s also important to make writing a high enough priority that you can capture the natural momentum that comes while writing.

2) Momentum is everything when writing a first draft. It’s the wind at your back. Once you’ve got momentum, do everything in your power not to lose it.

Momentum was hard to capture, and hard to hold during much of the writing of this draft. The trip was great, but cost me two weeks of writing (one for the trip itself, and one for the time it took to get back into the story) The next challenge was that I had done the research for, and written the storyboard of this book almost a year ago. Between now and then I had written two other books, each with three or four drafts, moved from BC to Alberta, and started a full time job. I simply forgot a lot of the details of how the plot was supposed to unfold. In the future I will:

3) Do the research for, and write the first draft, as one continual process.

That stalled momentum as I had to read my notes over and over to try and implant the trajectory of the plot back into my brain-like mass. Another challenge was that the book is set in several diffident locations and while I knew one like the back of my hand, others were less clear for me. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, the “set” remained the same for much of the first 45,000 words: the battlefield of Batoche. But once my main characters parted ways, and my protagonist left to track down leads, I felt the momentum wane. Frankly, I got a little bored, and a little frustrated by my lack of clarity around details and the direction of the plot. But I remembered:

4) No matter what happens, write through it. Just keep writing, even if you KNOW what you are writing will end up in the shredder or set on fire during the penning of the second draft.

If something feels hard, if it feels as if it’s stuck, sitting back and having a good long think or stepping away from the project for a protracted period of time isn’t going to get it unstuck. When your truck is stuck in the muck, does stepping away from it get it unstuck? No: pushing and pulling does. I’ve written elsewhere that sometimes the best thing to do when faced with a problem is to do nothing. The Tao te Ching counsels that sometimes the write action to take is no action. That’s true for just about everything except first drafts. With a first draft, writing is the ‘nothing’ that will lead to a solution. If you just keep writing, you keep your momentum, and that unlocks the extraordinary potential for your brain to tap into vast unexplored stores of creativity.

Part of my challenge, as I said, was that there were parts of the story that I wasn’t really into. I looked at them as bits I had to write to get to the good stuff.

5) If I don’t like what I’m writing, nobody who is reading it will like it either.

When I realized this, it made it easy to just stop and move onto the next scene. I realized that whatever I thought was so important about what I was writing likely wasn’t and that the story wouldn’t be served by my labouring over it. If it’s important enough to the plot I can fix it during the next draft.

The challenge here – and every piece of advice on writing I’ve ever read says this, so this is by no means original –  is to not be attached to writing a good first draft. In the case of the Third Riel Conspiracy, even with a couple of days now between me and the end of the spastic vomiting of words on the page that is my writing process, I can see gaping holes in the plot, massive fissures in the development of the characters and an utter lack of texture when it comes to describing the settings for the book.

6) Trust that in subsequent drafts, the writing will get better. It almost always does.

For many writers – or maybe it’s just me – there is a sort of first draft amnesia that takes hold when we are going through this process. I forget that the other books that I’ve written all started this way: just plain bad. Some of them got better; most often after I enlisted the help of an editor.

Finally, and I can’t emphasis this enough: I would not say that every word was written in bliss during the development of the first draft. On the contrary, some sections, scenes and chapters were a labour. That’s why it’s called work. And that’s what it is: good, plain honest work. There’s nothing to say that writing can’t be the kind of work that Kalil Gibran talks about when he says that “work is love made visible.” It is for me. But it’s also hard sometimes, and it takes discipline to keep your ass in your chair for five weeks, every morning, and on weekends, in order to accomplish something. But it feels good when you do.

7) Writing is hard work that requires discipline. But it is also blissful, and one of the surest routes to connecting with our own, and the universes creative potential, and that makes it worth the effort.

So now what? What happens now? Well, the novel stands at 80,000 words, which is short by my standards. It needs some meat on its bones, and I have several pages of notes with questions like, what exactly did Regina look like in 1885? And could Sam Steele or Leif Crozier have been in Fort Battleford on such and such a date? I need to answer those questions, and then, in a few weeks or maybe a month, sit down and start again.

In the next draft I’ll add words, and in the third draft I’ll start the process of shaving them off, layer by layer, like some kind of reductionist sculpture project, until what remains looks something like a novel.

But in the mean time, there are other projects. The Vanishing Track is overdue for a review of the copy edit. That better get done soon or my publisher will put the leaches to me.  And The Slickrock Paradox is almost ready for its first story edit. None of these are complaints: this is exactly the sort of opportunity I’ve been dreaming about for two decades.

Now it’s over to you. Do you have your own thoughts on writing a first draft? Post them here. And follow the progress of these novels on Twitter @stephenlegault.

Right now I know that The Third Riel Conspiracy sucks. What I simply can’t remember is how badly it sucks in comparison with other first drafts that I have written, several which have become books, with covers and ISBN numbers and the faint promise that someday there might be a royalty cheque. Maybe.

Before The Third Riel, I’ve written eight other complete first drafts. Three of these are now books. Two more will be books in the next year. Two more just might be books sometime, somehow. The final one is a yet a dream. I think that’s eight. Yes, eight. I know that the first draft of The Vanishing Track, which will be released by Touchwood Editions in the spring of 2012, sucked pretty badly. It went eleven drafts before someone had finally had enough and gave in. So too The Cardinal Divide, and the Darkening Archipelago. I can’t even remember how many drafts each of them went, but it was at least eight or nine each.

The trouble right now is that I’m so deep inside the narrative arc of the Third Riel that all I can think about is plot. I really couldn’t care less about anything else, and it’s the anything else, at the end of the day, that makes a book worth reading. And that’s why I’m feeling as if the novel is really just a load of rot. It isn’t, but because there’s little else to it but action and dialog – no tone, no texture – I’m getting worried.

What I need is a suck-o-meter with a built in memory function so I can measure, and remember, how each book stacks up. It might be cold comfort I realize.

I know that what makes a book worth reading – the shadows, the way light falls across the scene, the variances in a characters voice – all will come in time. There are still so many drafts to pass through before the suck-o-meter registers something near 0.

Each morning when I sit down to write I remind myself that I don’t have to write all of the elements of the book at once. I can write it in layers. In the past I’ve known this instinctively, but now, with so many opportunities to write stacking up on each other, I fear I may run out of time.

But it doesn’t work that way. It can’t. The plot has enough complexity that to try and write it all at once would be a stagnating impediment. I’d grind to a halt trying to tell the convoluted take of Canada’s religious and political entanglement with the North West rebellion, its myriad causes, and the trial of Lois Riel, while simultaneously map out and keep track of the movements of the Alberta Field Force, Sam Steele, Lief Croizer and others.

So I’m writing in layers. I’ve started to think of the story as a human body.

Right now, I’m building the skeleton onto which everything can hang: the plot, the main events of the story, and of course the intrigue around the murder mystery itself. As I’m reminded (often) by my story editor Frances Thorsen, despite the historical or environmental themes of my novels, the books I write are mysteries. Stay focused.

Next will come the connective tissue: the muscles and assorted viscera. This is where I’ll build the story of the politics and religious bigotry that was so integral to the North West Rebellion and the execution of Riel.

Then will come the tendons, and the various joints, cartilage, etc, that give the body form and allow it to move. Here the story of the protagonist must be “fleshed out.” I can’t speak for others, but when I read a mystery series, it’s as much to see how the central character develops as for the mystery.

Then the skin: the whole story has to get wrapped in language that flows; that is evocative and crisp. The country that this story takes place in – the Saskatchewan River, the plains surrounding Fort Calgary, and the foothills and river breaks around Fort Benton and Sun River Montana – have to transport the reader. So do the physical settings: the battlefields of Batoche, and the Courthouse in Regina.

Then maybe we’ll work on the hair; give the whole story a nice bouffant – or more appropriately a crew cut – by trimming out all of the excesses that creep in while writing.

The skeleton is taking shape. And I can’t wait to put some meat on the bones.

“The beginning’s easy because it’s like — BOOM, some shit just happened. The ending’s easy because — POW, all the shit that happened just lead to this. The middle is where it gets all gooshy, like wet bread or a sloppy pile of viscera.”

Chucks advice, crudely put: keep the interesting shit happening.

The middle of the Third Riel Conspiracy involves a major scene shift, from the battlefields of Batoche, Saskatchewan, to well…somewhere else. Everywhere else. Fort Calgary, Fort Benton, Sun River….Christ, Legault, make up your mind! The protagonist rides off in search of clues to unravel a mystery, but because of my insistence on holding the narrative tightly against the facts of history, I have a lot more research to do to make sure that what I want to have happen could have happened. In this case, the conversations with people that I want my protagonist to have can’t happen if he’s in the wrong place at the wrong time. Fort Battleford or Fort Pitt? Could Sam Steele have been there?

My solution to this problem was to just make the shit up (which is, after all, the point) and flag it so I can return to it later. It’s all about momentum.

The second problem is just as Chuck describes it. The first sixteen chapters are all set in the aftermath of the Battle of Batoche, and involve the suspects in the murder mystery retelling their perspective on the four days of fighting. When Durrant Wallace, the NWMP Sergeant who is the hero of our tale, rides off, suddenly things get eerily quiet.

I have a few tricks up my sleeve, but the main one is not lapsing into exposition – babbling on about how interesting the old McLeod Trial is, or giving a narrative history lesson on the comings and goings of Fort Benton, Montana – and keeping the story moving along. I can almost hear my editor, Frances Thorsen, saying “Keep the story moving here,” and then using her meat clever to cut the entire chapter….

Over the course of the weekend I ploughed through five or six thousand words (a few of which might endure) and have crested the hump of the mushy middle. There are no sloppy piles of viscera clinging to the manuscript, at least not that I can see. And now things are going to start picking up speed towards a series of apex moments in the story and then all the shit will lead to something happening. I think. That’s what I’m counting on.

The second sensation is apprehension. The Third Riel Conspiracy is a historic murder mystery set during the Battle of Batoche during the 1885 North West Rebellion. In preparation to write this book I read dozens of histories and biographies of that period, and last fall, rather than riding our mountain bikes in Utah or going somewhere sunny and warm and drinking fruity drinks, Jenn and I went to Saskatchewan.

It was fun, but there was no beach, no bikini and no sound of waves on a tropical shore. There were no slick-rock abrasions either, which is usually what I come back from Utah with, so I’d say things turned out even-Steven.

Anyway: I did a lot of research, and have dozens and dozens of pages of notes and charts and timelines that are supposed to help me keep the decidedly fictional events of this novel corresponding with both the people and the timeline of the Rebellion.

And then today I decided to say to hell with it, and did something that’s likely strictly taboo in historical fiction, and that someone somewhere is likely going to get rather pernickety about, but to whom I say: tough. I introduced a real historical character to the book who was never at Batoche, at least not that I can tell. But the circumstances of the story simply demanded it.

This is what happens when you let your characters run amok. They take over. They make unreasonable demands. They cause trouble.

So now I’ve got this real historical figure (other than Riel, who has a walk on cameo part in a couple of places. Hint: it doesn’t end well for him.) that has inserted himself into my well laid plan, and I like the chapter that I just wrote with him in it. I may change it later, but for now, he can have his moment in the sun. Okay, Okay: if you must know, it’s Leif Crozier, who was the Superintendent of the NWMP at the time, and a hero of the Duck Lake Massacre, but who I don’t believe made an appearance at Batoche.

But there he is. And who knows if it will last. But that was what happened today in First Draft World.

All told, two full chapters today, and 5,860 words, not including the 500 or so here. This is what happens when you get a head of steam.

Follow this novels progress on Twitter @stephenlegault.

I took the day off work, and will again tomorrow, to focus on building some momentum again. Two weeks is a long time; it puts a lot of drag on forward progress. I spent the morning reading the first eight chapters, and then this afternoon, and again this evening penned the ninth. My goal is to write two more tomorrow, and two over the weekend, while still trying to enjoy the last of summer.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t take time off from the full court press of writing a first draft; hell, when I started I knew that a little vacation would interrupt the flow. But now that I’m back at it I need to write every day and not get bogged down, waiting time re-reading old material once more.

Momentum is the key to a first draft. It’s all about building a head of steam and then getting the hell out of the way. My tomorrow I hope to be running even with the train barreling down the track; by next week I’ll jump clear.

Wait: that’s something else entirely.

But it does feel pretty damned good to hold that book in your hands. And nothing makes you want to sit back down and pound out a bunch of tripe the next morning more than seeing the fruit of your labour right there on the kitchen table.

So yes, I did happen to have this experience this week. Thank-you for asking. I got my author’s copies of The End of the Line, which is the first book in the Durrant Wallace Series. And now I’m steaming my way through the first draft of the second of the series. I’ve got two more works being published between now and when The Third Riel Conspiracy will see the light of day, but holding that book in my hands gave me some powerful motivation.

Mind, I haven’t written a word in the last two days, but did finish a couple of chapters over the weekend and on Monday morning, putting together more than 7,000 words.

And just in case you were following along from previous posts in this Deconstructing Draft One theme: Yes, I let the protagonist live. Hell, it was only Chapter 8.