I haven’t finished my (uncontracted) second novel. I’ve written what I’m calling a third draft, but it’s actually the first complete draft, as I gave up on my second draft around 65,000 words in, after I completely lost direction. Now I have a couple of weeks to fix it up before I send it to my first editor and agent, Alexandra Nahlous. But first I need to re-read it myself and incorporate feedback from my husband and my writers’ group.

All the same, I’ve never written a second novel before, and never will again, so I thought it was worth recording something about what it was like before I forget. All the way through I was wishing that someone more experienced than me would run a course on writing a second novel. In other words I was floundering, or at least felt I was. With the benefit of hindsight I realise that this is only the second novel I’ve ever completed, and the required skills were much the same as those I drew upon to complete the first. Plus persistence.

 I began at the beginning, and discovered the story from there. At some quite early stage I knew that I liked the characters and the story idea enough to stick with them for at least a year of my life. It was a little like finding someone interesting enough to date more than once. So I liked my characters and my story idea (and the beginning of this story placed third in the Romance Writers of Australia’s Ripping Start competition, so a couple of other people liked it as well.) But a respectable beginning doesn’t mean that the rest of the book writes itself.

 It's similar to my first book in the sense that it features a love triangle. One of the men in the love triangle was so mean and nasty in my first draft that it was difficult to work out what my heroine saw in him, and he cast a pall of darkness over the whole story. I’d been perturbed at how unlikable this character was, and how unsuited to the genre I was writing in, so when my husband had a similar reaction, I realised that I needed to do some work on him. At around the same time I listened to a Writes4women podcast where Cassie Hamer interviewed Minnie Darke, one of my favourite romance writers. Minnie said that in her fictional worlds, she’d learned to approach all of her characters with compassion, even the deeply flawed ones. So, I toned down my bad guy, and gave him history, to help both me and the reader understand his behaviour better. I hope it worked.

 I can’t recall the exact quote, but Graeme Simsion, author of The Rosie Project said it’s possible to write a first novel intuitively, because the story might be bubbling away in the writer’s head for years before she actually puts it down on the page, whereas the second novel will require some knowledge of structure.

 I still struggle with the classic three-act structure. I have trouble working out what my inciting incident is, and where the second act begins. I haven’t identified the midpoint or the midpoint reversal in either of my novels to date. Perhaps it shows. But when I lost my way this time, I turned to two books about structure; Jessica Brody’s Save The Cat Writes a Novel and Gwen Hayes’ Romancing the Beat. With the assistance of those two women, I set out a series of rough chapter outlines to take me to the end of the book. One for each beat, or new action. Marian Keyes, a writer I admire, says that she alternates action chapters with reflection chapters and that’s pretty much the only structure she follows, so I tried to do that too.

 The outline served to get me writing again, but I didn’t stick to it at all. Each time I came to what was to be the plan for my next chapter, it didn’t feel quite right, so I followed my nose in a different direction. But the outline provided security, and a reminder of what I wanted to cover. It kept me from straying too far from the story I’d imagined. In romance that story is that two people should be together, despite seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Romeo and Juliet isn’t a classic romance because it lacks a happy ever after (HEA). When a romantic heroine finally gets together with her hero, the payoff needs to be massive to make the story worth reading.

I completed the draft. I was pumping out the words by the end, always thinking that I only had a couple more chapters to go, but then the characters would stumble across yet another complication. I’m over the desired word count for my genre, but I was so excited to finish that when I typed those two magic words, ‘the end,’ I stared at them for ages.

 What I’ve learned is that if I find myself meandering through a draft like I’m lost in a fog, then it helps to find a book or website or template about structure, plan a little, and then watch my plans fall away. And relentlessly nasty characters are fine for a first draft, but in my genre, the writer needs to find the bad guy’s beating and bleeding heart within his black one. That’s my method, anyway. Despite my doubts, the feedback from my writers’ group is that the second book is better than the first. And the first is soon to be published, so that gives me hope for the second.

 I also had to work out what my heroine wanted and needed, apart from love, and what was getting in the way of it. As is often the case, my hero’s motivation was clearer. I find secondary characters much easier to write than main ones.  The reason I had to do so much unravelling well into the story is that my heroine’s motivation was about as clear as mud.

 I had a lot of reflecting to do, and I find that if I focus my mind on a writing problem, sooner or later a solution comes, and it usually involves some lateral thinking. And so it was this time, although it’s possible that Alex will think otherwise.

 Last time my initial draft was too short, and I wrote the Leo chapters after I’d already outlined the story in the Claire chapters. This book also alternates point of view, but I had at least 5000 words too many, so I’ve gone through and cut out sections that aren’t relevant to the main story. Since it’s a book about the alternative funeral industry, I’ve cut a few funeral stories, but on reflection, they were really digressions from the main action, and made the plot meander too much.

 I hope your first/second/third tenth novel is going well, and you’re far more confident than I was that you know what you’re doing.

 Good luck!