The two parts of writing that are fun

Lately I've been thinking that there are two parts of the novel writing process that I really enjoy. The first is the absolute beginning - when it's all nebulous. It's not a novel, it's a project - it doesn't have a name or a plot or fully-formed characters. What it probably does have, at least for me, is a voice.

So I get these little snatches of ideas. A sentence or two, an image. Someone says something that triggers a scene. I begin to write these snippets down, helter-skelter, and throw them into a folder. I love this part, the very beginning, when it's all embriotic and unformed.

The other part that's fun is the ending. You basically have the book and the structure and now you're tweaking. Going in to expand a scene that has more possibility than you've truly realized, looking for places where you've repeated words, making sure your verb tenses agree, pruning out the extraneous line or word.

But between these two lies the actual writing, especially the dreaded First Draft.

Which is where I stand now with Ballroom. My agent David feels that the hopping around scenes don't give him a strong enough sense of who the main character is and that any future possible one-chance-in-a-hundred buyers, i.e., editors, will want to see that one solid viewpoint character. So I'm back to the drawing board, trying to get three or four chapters in a row at the beginning, from Abby's point of view. And that feels dangerously like writing a first draft.

Yikes. I have a goal. I'm going to NYC sometime in late Feb or early March and I'd like to have the four chapters to him by then. Selling off a partial is a long shot in this environment, especially with my first book not yet out, but I feel I have to try. Otherwise I'm going to end up behind the counter at McDonalds. Or in the loony bin.