This book’s concept began in my mind a long time before I actually wrote this piece. I drafted a poor “sort-of” draft in notebooks, and periodically typed them when I felt confident that I had the basic gist of the scene the way I wanted it. Prior to that, starting around 2012 (the 100 year anniversary of the sinking) I began researching pretty heavily, mostly in books I already owned, and watching documentaries I already had.
In 2015, I got a lot of books out at my local library periodically while doing that poor first draft (notebook) and painstakingly slowly transcribing the handwritten nonsense into a semi-coherent narrative.
I rewrote the first chapter a good three times before I did anything with the rest of the draft.
And in 2016, I made the decision that the next year, I was going to rewrite the entirety of the novel. I didn’t begin it officially until September of 2017. Before that, I reread the entire novel, marked places to trim and cut… I made a scene outline/index, and I made a basic character profile.
I finished the rewrite in either late 2017 or early 2018. And I trimmed probably 100-150 pages. I worked on the first chapter and I think it’s decent… but I’m still not confident in it… and I’m not a fan of the ending. But I think I know what the problem is… I think I just need to end it at an earlier point and if I feel I need to revisit the characters, I can just add an epilogue.
The last thing I did was go through the document and do some minor edits, and fix the fonts so that the main text of the novel is all the same, and all the letters by Claire or Nathaniel have the same font across every entry.
But I will admit that I have not touched the document in a while because I think it’s as good as I’m going to get it for now. My only exception would be the first and last chapter. Or perhaps the last few chapters. I know why I did what I did, but until I have feedback from others, I’m sort of stuck.
Cindy Says: Let's Brainstorm 