Finish the Book

I was single and covering cops in a small gritty Massachusetts city when I wrote my first book.  My guy lived 100-plus miles away – first in the basement apartment of an 18th century house on Nantucket and then in a half-basement of a beach front house on Cape Cod Bay.  We got together on weekends at his place.  To tame my raging libido on the four nights a week I spent alone and to escape the seamy criminal world of my day job, I read historical romances.  This was 1977, the birth of the current incarnation of the genre. Eventually I had the obligatory epiphany:  “Hey, I could write one of these!”  And so I bought a cheap electric typewriter and a ream of paper and got to work.  I had not yet heard that aphorism so beloved by all writers:  Well-stolen is half-written.  But I took a whole bunch of elements that most appealed to me from other books  – feisty but innocent girl, taciturn but passionate rake, mistaken identity, freedom fighting, windswept headlands, a voyage at sea, beautiful horses – and some months later typed the final page of the 500-page manuscript I called Brenna.  You won’t find it on any bookshelf because all known copies reside in a couple of boxes in my basement.  I never sold Brenna, but it was probably the most important book I’ll ever write because it taught me how to write a novel.  That’s the basis of my bottom-line advice to all wannabe novelists:  Finish The Book.  The last chapter was a bazillion times better than the first – tighter, vivid, engaging.  Along the way I confronted and overcame a bunch of obstacles –  how to move characters through a scene without writing every damned step, creating memorable characters of those who appear in only single paragraph, structuring and restructuring moments and scenes and whole chapters.  I shipped that manuscript off to a literary agent who turned down the story but signed on the writer.  Because I’d gone the distance on Brenna, she knew I could finish a book and that my writing could – and would – keep getting better.  The final proof of the wisdom of finishing that first book?  I sold the next one with the first three chapters and an outline of the rest.

Copyright 2008 © by Beth Quinn Barnard of text and photos.  All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.