I Finished the First Draft of My Novel!

Lessons learned from my attempt to adapt one of my plays into a new form

Thanks in large part to the magic of

Jami Attenberg

’s #1000WordsOfSummer (or in the case of this weekend, the

Mini 1000

), I finally wrote my big all-caps “THE END” at the conclusion of my first draft of my novel this weekend.

Now, don’t get too excited—if you know anything about writing novels, you probably know that first drafts are quite notoriously Not Good. However, given that half my goal with this project was to prove to myself that I can still write prose, I think it’s a milestone worth celebrating. And while at just over 45,000 words, it’s not really quite long enough to be a true novel, and it’s shorter than my last aborted attempt to write one back in high school, I did in fact write all the way to the end.

Of course, it helps that this is an adaptation: I transformed my much-beloved play The Young Ladies of the Class of 1902 of Wesleyan University Present, “As You Like It” into a prose piece that’s currently going by the working title As You Like Her. Something like 20,000 of those words were pre-written dialogue from the play.

In any case, this was a fascinating learning experience, and I wanted to talk for a bit about what I learned from the process of adapting my play into this new form.

Whose point of view you write from makes a huge difference

I knew I wanted to write the novel version of this story in limited third person, meaning the narrator only knows the thoughts and feelings of one character, and then switch between various characters’ perspectives from chapter to chapter. It would be the best way to explore facets of the story that I didn’t get to in the play, following each of my young ladies to other parts of their lives.

That meant every time I had a scene with multiple POV characters, I had to decide whose perspective I would write from. Two-person scenes were often the hardest choice; would the story work better being told by the person with more information or with less? Would the reader rather hear the thoughts of the character expressing vulnerability or the one receiving it?

Dramatic irony is still a thing in fiction…kind of

Some of the funniest scenes in the original play are powered by dramatic irony: the incongruence between what some characters know compared to others and the audience. In one scene, a character tries to confess her love to another, who doesn’t understand what she’s trying to say. In the next, a group of women work up a charade in which they convince their friend that she’s the only one who can save the play from catastrophe.

Does this device work when you’re experiencing the scene from inside one character’s head? Sort of, but it’s not exactly funny in the same way when you’re hearing the anguished thoughts of the woman who can’t express herself directly.

This isn’t a problem, per se; I don’t need these moments to be humorous to tell the story. It is different, though.

The sky’s the limit when it comes to how many characters you get

When you’re writing a play, you have to deliberately decide who’s going to be in it. The more actors the piece requires, the harder it’s going to be to stage. And if you do to add another character, you want to give them enough to do for an actor to want to play the role.

In prose, on the other hand, you really can have a character show up on one page to say two lines and then never see them again. That doesn’t mean you should, however.

I decided on a cast of eight women (and one man) in the original play—despite the fact that there were a full eighteen women in their senior class, most of whom were in that As You Like It production—not just to make the piece easier to stage, but because it would have been challenging to create many more distinct, compelling characters. Now that all my “offstage” characters are suddenly becoming visible, I need to figure out when they should show up, how to make them memorable and how to keep the prose focused on the story I want to tell.

You can’t just throw in world building for the sake of world building

One of the things I was most excited about in writing the novel version of this story is how much more detail about the women’s lives I could include. This piece is based on archival materials I found, so there’s a lot more I know, from their birthdays to their daily class schedules.

The original source material, courtesy of Wesleyan’s Special Collections

But “then she went to English class, then she went to Latin class” doesn’t make for very exciting writing. For this first draft of the novel, I tried to keep all of the events and dialogue from the original play as they were and only add more to fill in the gaps…only to discover that what filled in the gaps is much less interesting than what I had originally written.

It turns out that the most compelling scenes of this piece are the ones that advance multiple plot lines simultaneously, and “let’s follow this one character to the place she said she was going” just doesn’t do that. I have some more significant restructuring to do if I want these new scenes to feel as engaging as what I put together for the play.

I have a lot more research to do

What did these women in 1902 wear? What did they eat? In the theater world, these questions would be someone else’s problem to answer.

Part of the reason I love playwriting, in fact, is because a script isn’t a complete product; it’s a blueprint for a larger creative team to work from. In novel writing, it’s just you.

Fortunately, a historical era that’s only 120 years ago is not that hard to research, and I have books on my shelves right now that can help me do that. But I’m much less into learning about how people back then lived than your average historical fiction writer. I care more about the resonance with the modern day.

Still, everyone’s gotta eat, and get dressed, and transport themselves from one place to another, and pay for all of the above. That little bit of texture really helps a fictional world come alive.

Yes, I can write prose after all

While I am definitely more comfortable writing plays than I am novels, I can do it! At 185 pages and 21 chapters, As You Like Her has some real heft to it.

And who knows, maybe in another draft or two, I’ll be willing to actually show it to someone.